Drake rolled his eyes. “No, because the Allies paid him well. Never forget, children, this family is made of mercenaries. They always have been. They always will be. They hate us, yes. But they love money almost as much.”
“Why would the Allies pay for a German defector?” Natalie asked. “They had plenty of men ready and willing to fight for the cause.”
He sighed. “Hitler loved the occult. The stories about the Ark of the Covenant and mysticism and using magic to fight were all true. The Allies feared he would make . . . or recruit . . . monsters. So they hired the great Van Helsing family to sniff our kind out. To ensure our ‘evil’ wasn’t used to Hitler’s advantage.”
“Hey!” Natalie scowled. There was monstrous, and then there was pure evil like Hitler. “No monster I know or ever knew fought on the side of the Germans. Perhaps Hyde might have wanted to, but I’m sure Jekyll wouldn’t let him.”
“Of course that’s true. But Van Helsing was more than willing to encourage the misconception of the Allies if it meant lining his pockets and getting to kill a few monsters,” Drake continued. “He had no idea that I was fighting on the Allied side, but one day we saw each other in a camp. He moved for an attack. I protected myself. And he ended up in his current state.”
Natalie was quiet for a long moment, allowing the tale to sink in. “But didn’t anyone suspect something after you injured Van Helsing? How were you not found out?”
Drake stepped closer and met her eyes. Immediately, Natalie felt the pull, the uncomfortable spiraling, of his mind control. She turned her face.
“Stop.”
“You are able to fight my mind control thanks to your hyperawareness and sensitivity brought about by your reincarnated status. Your monster skills, as you like to call them,” Drake said softly. “But humans are susceptible in different ways.”
Kai swallowed hard. “So you tricked them into believing . . . what?”
“That it was an accident. Friendly fire, I think they call it now,” Drake said with a shrug. “Ultimately, they called it a tragedy of the war. And that was true. They just didn’t know which war.”
Natalie’s eyes went wide. “Seriously? Shit, Drake.”
He lifted his eyebrows with a dismissive shrug. “It is what our war has always been. Brutal.”
“See, brutal!” Kai said, rushing back to the current subject of the murders. “This guy is brutal and you don’t think he could be responsible? Even after everything you’ve just heard?”
Natalie shut her eyes with a quiet groan. Kai was obsessed. “I’m not saying Van Helsing is incapable of attack, but I doubt he shoved a huge Blob man into a freezer and locked him in. Just saying.”
Kai’s face fell. “Maybe he hired someone.”
Drake shook his head. “No, the Van Helsings are too protective of their work to hand it over to a hireling. Aside from inciting mob violence, they do not use outside forces.”
“Like Ellis’s attack,” Kai encouraged. “That was mob violence.”
“True,” Drake said. “But if one person is responsible for all the attacks on our group, it still doesn’t fully explain our predicament.”
“He does threaten us with renewed war.” Kai hesitated and Natalie could practically see the wheels turning in her head. “Drake, are there other Van Helsings in the city?”
The vampire shrugged. “Perhaps. I haven’t kept up with the family since the old days. Once the war was over, I tried to avoid even thinking of them. There may very well be. They’re like cockroaches. They never fully die off.”
Kai nodded. “I’m going to find out. I don’t believe for a second that those killers aren’t somehow involved in what’s happening to all of us.”
“Do what you must, Mummy,” Drake said with a shrug. “But I want to eat.”
With that, he shut his eyes and poofed into a bat right there on the street.
“Goddamn it,” Natalie muttered with a quick look around to make sure he hadn’t been seen. “He’s going to be the death of us all.”
But to her surprise, Kai, who was normally the stickler for the don’t-draw-attention rule, seemed to hardly register what had happened.
“I’m going, too,” she said. “Gotta hit the books and find out if there are other Van Helsings.”
Kai turned on her heel and raced away toward the subway.
Natalie shrugged. “That’s okay, everyone. I’m good. I’ll just go back to work.”
A couple strolled by, dressed like they’d been to the theater. They stared at Natalie and she blushed as she began walking toward the subway stop that would take her back to the medical examiner’s office. She’d rather follow Kai, but there was no doing that when work and dead bodies called.
She pulled her phone from her bag as she approached her station and found Alec’s number in her phone book. She texted quickly:
Kai followed us. Acting weird. Any update on the mummy?
Then she snapped her phone shut, got on the train, and hoped Alec would have more answers than she had found that night.
Alec heard his phone buzzing with a text, but he ignored the sound and continued to stare at the door before him.
He had followed Kai since she’d left the meeting at Jekyll and Hyde’s apartment. She grabbed coffee . . . actually, two coffees . . . picked up dry cleaning, and eventually led him here before scurrying off to some other place. But that didn’t matter. His intuition told him this was where he was supposed to be.
The Meatpacking District had gone through several incarnations over the decades. Originally the slaughterhouses had been here. Alec had first come to this country at that time and remembered sneaking in for meat when the full moon made him itchy and hungry.
It had fallen into abandoned disrepair in the mid-twentieth century until the 1980s, when someone had gotten the bright idea to open a bunch of sex clubs in the old buildings. Alec had been less interested in those.
Now it was becoming the fashionable place to play and live. But as he stared at the cleaned-up building, Alec believed the neighborhood had been more interesting in its previous incarnations, when it was raw and animal.
This apartment was closer to the past than whatever future the posh designers were creating now. It hadn’t quite caught up to the rest of the area’s gentrification.
Most importantly, though, it wasn’t Kai’s apartment, which was a stylish, uptown loft.
Alec knocked.
There was nothing for a moment and then some shuffling. A male voice behind the door moved closer.
“What did you forget, Kai?” it asked, and then the door opened and Alec found himself face-to-face with Rehu.
Alec supposed he should have been shocked, except he wasn’t. Kai had been too freaked out by the mention of Rehu’s name for Alec not to think she would lead him exactly where she had: right back to her boyfriend.
For years Rehu had struggled to acclimate to a modern world. Clothing, accent, and mannerisms had been difficult for him to adapt, and he had spent many a meeting whining about that very subject.
But now he stood in head-to-toe Tommy Hilfiger, a cell phone on his hip. He looked every inch a young New Yorker, maybe a douchebag stockbroker or lawyer.
Except that he was just another monster.
The mummy stared at him for a fraction of a second. There was a slight flare to his lip, one that said, I’m going to kill you, and Alec pounced, hitting the other man with all his might and forcing them both into the apartment.
But Rehu was strong and once the element of surprise was gone he fought back, shoving Alec backward until both men hit the apartment door and slammed it shut with their combined weight.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Wolf?” Rehu growled as they struggled, holding each other’s lapels, pushing and shoving even though neither was making much headway in gaining control of the other.
Alec had always hated that their strength was almost evenly matched. Damn mummy.
“I’ve been looking for you, Bandag
e Boy,” Alec snarled back.
Rehu stared at him for a long moment and then shoved backward to extricate himself from Alec’s grip. Alec let him go, though he never let his guard down.
“What are you doing in the city?” Alec asked.
Rehu stepped backward until he stopped against the back of a black couch. He leaned there and folded his arms.
“What’s it to you?”
“Last I heard, you left,” Alec said. “And good riddance.”
Rehu’s jaw tightened and Alec smothered a smile. They were alpha (at least around this asshole) versus prince; oil and water. And Alec knew just how to push the other man’s buttons. It was a hobby of sorts. He’d actually missed it.
“I had matters to attend to overseas,” Rehu said with a scowl. “But you and the other freaks in that group don’t own New York City, Wolf. I will come and go as I please.”
Alec frowned. He had a sneaking suspicion that Rehu’s “matters” probably had to do with the sale of his artifacts that the other monsters had prevented in the U.S. The very motive they had guessed might make the Egyptian murder them in anger and a thirst for revenge.
“How did the sale go, Rehu?” he asked softly.
The corner of the other man’s mouth lifted in a slight smirk. “Better than it would have here, actually. Americans have too many laws to prevent the looting of tombs. Even one’s own. But there are other countries where they are more . . . lax on their enforcement of international treaties.”
Alec’s frown deepened. If Rehu had unloaded his items overseas and made even more money, the motive for him to kill was certainly lessened.
“And just when did you haul your sorry ass back to the city?” Alec pressed.
Rehu looked at him with distrust and hesitation. Alec almost couldn’t blame him. After all, he had just burst into the guy’s apartment, and not on a friendly welcome-home kind of call.
“How is that your business, Wolf?”
Alec glared. “Just tell me.”
“Two months,” Rehu admitted.
Alec shook his head. The timeline worked for Rehu to be their killer, plus his being out of the country explained why he hadn’t turned to his revenge earlier. So some of the story fit . . . but other parts didn’t.
Which left Alec in a bit of a quandary. Did he tell Rehu he was a suspect in the murders and hope the mummy would react? Or did he keep it to himself and try to figure out another way to wheedle the truth out of him?
“Why the fuck are you here, asshole?” Rehu growled.
Alec arched a brow. Accusation was more fun.
“I’m just here to see what a murderer of his own kind looks like.” He smiled, though he felt no warmth toward the jerk. “Asshole.”
Rehu tensed. “Murder . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do, buddy.” Alec moved toward him a couple of steps. “I mean, if you and Kai are secretly hooking up like old times, if she got you this apartment . . .”
He trailed off as Rehu flinched slightly. Alec snorted in disgust. The normally strong Kai always fell for this guy’s bullshit.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, you dried-up gigolo.” Alec shook his head. “You always knew how to push that girl’s buttons.”
“What’s it to you?” Rehu snorted. “She tells me you’re banging the Frankenstein.”
“She’s not a Frankenstein—” Alec began, then shook his head. He was getting as bad as Natalie, always correcting that assumption. “Whatever. The point is, Kai must have told you about the murders in our group, since she’s so desperate to take you off the suspect list.”
Rehu only shrugged and his expression was unreadable.
Alec shifted in annoyance. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. But you’re on it, Mummy. As far as I’m concerned, you’re at the top of the suspect pile.”
Rehu’s nostrils flared. “You had best shut it, Wolf. I had nothing to do with it.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you because a couple of millennia ago you were second or third in line for a throne in Egypt?”
“You will believe me because I’m telling the truth,” Rehu said through tightly clenched teeth.
Alec grinned. “You know Drake is way more royal than you are. At least he’s got a title.”
Rehu moved on him. “Get out.”
“I don’t think it was a mistake that you picked the weakest among us to attack,” Alec pressed, interested in Rehu’s response to his accusations, but also just because he enjoyed screwing with him. “I mean, you turned a crowd on Ellis, not exactly brave of you. And then Blob . . . a four-hundred-pound hoarder? Could that have possibly made you feel all tough, coward?”
Rehu rushed forward and swung, not with a fist but with an elbow. It slashed across Alec’s forehead, breaking the skin and sending him sprawling backward with stars flashing before his eyes.
The mummy took the opportunity and flung himself on top of Alec, swinging fists and throwing knees like he’d been watching UFC pay-per-views in his spare time.
Alec shook off his surprise and swung back, catching Rehu on his square-jawed mug a couple of times himself.
“Fuck you, asshole,” Alec grunted as he absorbed another set of punches. They hurt, but both of them knew they weren’t going to permanently injure him.
Still, his body was breakable and he could feel ribs popping and capillaries exploding.
This wasn’t going to be fun over the next few days. And with the full moon less than a week away, all his feelings and sensations were beginning to heighten. So it was going to suck even more, even if he healed all the faster.
“Enough,” Rehu grunted, and flung himself off. “I haven’t killed anyone in your pathetic group . . . yet. They’re not worth my time or my sweat.”
He reached down and caught Alec by the neckline of his T-shirt and dragged him to the door. He tossed him in the hallway.
“And neither are you.”
Rehu slammed the door, leaving Alec to lie on the dirty carpet, blood seeping from his head, his lip, even his arm, though he couldn’t remember if that was from throwing or receiving a punch.
He lay there for a long time, long enough for his body’s natural healing ability to start to go to work, then he dragged himself up and made his way back toward Natalie’s apartment.
When she got home, they had a lot to talk about. And he could only hope she would be nice enough to apply ice to his bruises while they did that.
13
Natalie checked her phone for what was probably the twentieth time in the last half hour. There were no messages. No texts. In the past, that would have been normal. Damn, in the past she wouldn’t even have checked.
But now things were different and the silence was starting to freak her out. She shoved the phone back in her purse and used her key to open the door to her apartment building. She glanced up the stairs with a frown.
It had been hours since she’d texted Alec the first time about Kai and Rehu. Then she texted again. And again. Then called his cell. Then the apartment.
Nothing. No response. In her heart she knew he was probably ignoring her, maybe even hooking up with some random chick he had met at a bar or something . . . but though she was annoyed, Natalie was also worried.
“Where are you, you stupid mutt?” she muttered as she trudged up to her floor and to her door. She knocked lightly and waited, but there was no sound from within the apartment to greet her. No dog-howling or breakfast-making today.
“The jerk isn’t even home,” she said with a sigh, and pulled out her keys to open the door. But when she turned the knob, the door opened without her clicking the lock open.
She froze out of pure instinct.
Yeah, she was a monster and that meant she had little to be afraid of in the scheme of things. But she was also a woman and a New Yorker. She did not leave her apartment unlocked. Ever.
Especially now, when someone was out there trying to figure out how to roast her alive in some
kind of monster cleanse.
“Hello?” she called into the dim apartment. Did murderers, robbers, and rapists really answer to that kind of thing? In movies . . . except she knew movies were wrong, wrong, wrong when it came to most stuff.
“Natalie?” came a weak voice from the living room.
It wasn’t the voice of a murderer or a rapist that lilted through the hallway. It was Alec.
Natalie crossed the threshold, slammed the door behind her, locked the deadbolt, and raced into the living room. She skidded to a stop and stared.
Alec was spread out across her couch, but it wasn’t a comfortable, casual sprawl. His eye was black, his lips were swollen, and blood was caked along a big gash on his forehead and dried on his white T-shirt.
“Alec?” she whispered, almost as if talking too loud would make his injuries worse. In a few slow steps she came fully into the room. “Oh my God, are you okay?”
She dropped down to her knees on the floor next to the couch and started looking at Alec’s various injuries. Gash on the forehead, cuts and bruises everywhere, maybe even a couple of broken bones.
“I’m awesome,” he groaned. “Ow, don’t poke that.”
Natalie jerked her hand away from the cut she had been examining. “I need to call nine-one-one. We have to get you to a doctor.”
Alec lifted himself slightly from the couch as she moved for the phone on the table and the movement resulted in a yelp of pain from him. But he also said, “No! No doctors, no hospitals!”
“Is this a dogs-don’t-like-veterinarians thing, Alec? Because, seriously, grow up,” she said as she started dialing, but he swatted her phone away with a growl. She stared at him. “Alec, you got the shit kicked out of you. You could have a concussion or broken ribs or something very serious. Monster healing or not, this isn’t something to fool around with.”
He shook his head and his eyes suddenly glinted bright yellow in the dim light. “No. The full moon is, like, five days away, Natalie.”
She blinked. “So?”
He growled in frustration. “Things are starting to get . . . complicated for me. A doctor would notice. They would see I’m not . . . normal.”
Club Monstrosity Page 13
