by Lizzy Ford
“I don’t know. It’s just something I do,” she replied.
“Have you ever told anyone? Like a doctor or scientist or something?”
“It’s not your normal conversation starter,” she said with a small laugh. “Hi, I’m Bianca. I have magic voodoo healing powers.”
He smiled, and she gazed at him, wondering when he and her brother had grown from youths into handsome young men. His features were no longer soft and his body had filled out. She was so used to her brother that she didn’t notice him grow up, but she saw it in Kyle. Just as she saw the adult in him, she saw his tension. His knuckles were white as he clenched the steering wheel, and his tall form hunched forward.
Her unease grew as they reached a seedy neighborhood outside of Little Havana. It wasn’t somewhere she’d ever venture, even in daylight. There were thugs in the streets, bars on the windows of sagging houses, and cars on blocks.
He continued through the streets and slowed when he reached a dilapidated, boarded-up church on a corner. Light strobed through cracks in the boards, and the sidewalks teemed with shady-looking characters dressed all in black.
She heard the blaring trance music before she opened the car door and smelled the unmistakable scent of marijuana mixed with incense and body odor.
“Stay here, Kyle,” she said, looking uncertainly at the intimidating scene before her. “I’ll go get him. Do you know where he is exactly?”
He shook his head and squeezed the steering wheel until one of his fingers popped.
“Here’s my phone. If I’m not back in twenty minutes, go someplace safe and call the police, okay?” she said, placing it on the dashboard. “And I’m leaving my purse.”
“You’ll lose it if you don’t,” he said wisely, accustomed to helping Jonny help her search the house for keys, purses, and anything else she lost.
“Yep,” she agreed. “Wish me luck!”
“Wait!”
“What’s up, kid?”
“Nothing.” He looked at once panicked and guilty. He hesitated, then shook his head.
She gave his teenage temper the benefit of the doubt and patted him on the shoulder as she left the car. Her heart quickening, she started towards the entrance of the church. Several of the men in black eyed her.
The interior of the church was packed with bodies writhing to the deafening, throbbing music. At under five and a half feet, she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to find her brother among the people around her.
Most of them were men. She didn’t notice until she’d jostled her way into the center of the church. All of them wore eerie red contact lenses. A shiver of alarm went through her, but she gritted her teeth and pressed on, hoping to find her brother fast. The church was hot and loud, the scents that overwhelmed her outside stifling. She found a chair jammed against the wall and stepped on it to see the crowd.
She didn’t see her brother’s bleached hair and familiar face anywhere in the crowd. She hopped down, oblivious to the attention channeled her way by the red-eyed men around her. Light spilled across the church as a door leading to the chambers in the rear opened.
She made her way to the hallway and breathed more easily in the less crowded space. Men and women lined the walls, most making out. Several of the rooms on either side were open, revealing couples in various stages of undress, a room with junkies shooting up and potheads lighting up, and a room filled with what looked like people sleeping.
She reached the exit at the end of the hall and now faced a shorter hallway leading into what may have been a kitchen at one time. She stopped, puzzled. Where was her brother? A lot could’ve happened to him between the time Kyle left Jonny there and returned with her. Her alarm growing, she crossed her arms and climbed the stairs to the kitchen area. She froze, Kyle’s words about vampires returning to her.
A naked, unconscious woman lay atop the island in the center with five men with red eyes chewing on various parts of her body, one on each leg, one on each arm, and one at her neck. Bianca backed away, heart racing.
“What’s this?” The man who spoke snatched her arms from behind and shoved her into the kitchen. She looked away from the scene, unwilling to believe what she saw was real.
“That’s B,” Jonny answered from somewhere inside the kitchen.
“What’s a B?” someone else snickered.
One of the men drinking blood from the naked woman straightened, and she gasped.
“Jonny!”
“Hi, B,” he said, eyes glazed and blood running down his chin to his white polo.
“Jonny, what are you doing here?” she demanded, pulling away from the man behind her.
“It’s his initiation day,” the man said.
She faced the speaker and took a step back. He was large and thick with glowing eyes and teeth sharpened into fangs.
“Talon, this is B,” Jonny said in a breathless voice.
“A pleasure, B.”
She took a step back, overwhelmed by the scene before her. She stared at her brother, who seemed unaware of where he was or what he did. Talon looked her up and down in a way that made her skin crawl before he took her arm. He sliced her forearm with a knife, watching in satisfaction as it healed before his eyes.
She wrenched away.
“The kid wasn’t lying,” he said. “You and me, babe. This could be fun.”
She turned to run, panic flying through her at the feral look he gave her. He snatched her and half carried, half dragged her through the kitchen’s opposite door. She struggled, but he wrapped his arms around her in a hold she couldn’t break.
“Jonny!” she shouted.
“Do what I say, bitch, and I might not kill him!” the man named Talon snarled.
“The police are on their way!” she cried. “They’ll be-- ”
“Shut the fuck up!”
He shoved open a door to the dark night and carried her to an awaiting car. She planted her legs against the frame of the car.
“Jonny!” she screamed.
Fiery pain tore through her as he stabbed her in the neck.
* * *
Dustin, the White God’s chief assassin and commander of the western hemisphere, awoke in a cold sweat with his heart racing. The clock blazed 3:30 in his otherwise dark condo. An hour of sleep was the longest he’d managed in over a week, and he felt more tired than when he lay down.
We’ll meet soon, brother, his long-dead sister had told him right before he awoke.
He’d dreamt many times about his sister and his family, but she’d never talked to him directly. Her soulful gaze and gentle words gave him the creeps. She appeared as he remembered her the day of her murder: a ten-year-old with long blonde hair, striking blue eyes, and golden skin. Her words fueled the sense of dread he’d felt the past two weeks, since he’d lost contact with his closest friends.
He sat as the dream faded and patted the necklace with the dangling sun-star symbol marking his demigod status. It was a comforting combination of the symbols belonging to his adopted brothers: the sun worn by Damian, the White God, and the star worn by Jule, the expelled immortal and eastern hemisphere’s commander.
His condo swayed in the harsh winds of the latest storm spawned from the massive depression in the Gulf. Rain splattered hard against his windows, drawing his gaze to the windows.
We’ll meet soon, brother, she’d said. Yeah, creepy was the right word.
Dusty rose to pull on his gym clothes. He’d never thought twice of his mortality-- he had none. Damian had granted him immortality along with his other demigod powers, plus the one authority no other immortal had: the ability to kill one of their own who got out of line or broke the divine codes. He’d been Damian’s most trusted executioner for thousands of years.
He’d also been anonymously voted least popular by a disgruntled Guardian on their online discussion boards, and he was about 99 percent sure Jule was leading the pack on that one as his latest attempt to win some bet with Damian about their diverse leadership
styles.
He rubbed his face and crossed to the bathroom. He’d lost another five pounds this month. He’d dropped twenty in the past six. He stepped off the scale, snagged a protein bar, and walked the twenty floors to the gym in the bottom of his condo building. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had a full five hours of his own, and he knew he wasn’t likely to get another break for a while.
After an hour-long attempt to expel his wired energy, he returned to his room to the sound of his cell phone ringing. A quick glance at the screen told him it was one of his most trusted Guardians, Toni. It was a call he’d been expecting but hoping not to get.
“Where, Toni?” he answered.
“Little Havana. I texted you the street address. Better hurry, boss. We gotta clean up before the cops get here.”
“On my way.” He dressed quickly and Traveled to the scene.
Dusty surveyed the blackened ruins of the church in the grainy light of dawn. The rain had quit for the day, though the tropical storm spinning around in the Gulf guaranteed another week or so of sporadic storms. Toni spotted him and trotted over.
“There are fourteen-ish bodies towards the back of the church. The fire destroyed everything else,” Toni said.
“Third flash-n-dash this week.”
“TGIF, boss,” the Guardians’ Miami Station Chief, Toni, said with cheerfulness out of place for the scene in front of them.
“If there’s nothing here linking this to otherworldly activity, we’re done here,” Dusty replied. “The city can clean it up. You get the DNA from the bodies?”
“They’re too crispy.”
Dusty glanced at his long-time Miami Station Chief, the handsome Hispanic man who looked as severe as he was lighthearted.
“We’ve got tire tracks,” one of the Guardians called, kneeling near the driveway. “Looks like an SUV of some sort.”
“I found a cell phone!” another shouted as he scoured the gutters around the church. “No battery.”
“Take it to HQ,” Toni directed.
Dusty looked around them, gaze settling on the only car on the streets that didn’t belong to him and wasn’t on blocks. It was a beat-up Camaro parked half a block down. He sensed rather than saw that someone was in it, watching them.
“Toni, send your Traveler to grab the driver in the Camaro down the street,” Dusty said, returning his gaze to the charred building in front of him. “Send me a report when you’re done.”
“You want me to call you if we see another one of these?”
“Not unless there’s something different about it. I’m going to get a pulse check from the network to see what the fuck the vamps are doing.” Dusty glanced at his watch.
“We got info on a stash house on Broad Street. I’m waiting for Jenn to confirm, and we’ll schedule to take it out tomorrow morning,” Toni said.
“Good. Have fun killing things.”
“Okay, boss. Happy Friday.”
Dusty smiled faintly as Toni walked towards the back of the church, whistling. He blinked and used his power to Travel to his study. Someone had been using his computer; he returned the mouse and computer screen to their appropriate angles before seating himself. The house was quiet, the way he preferred it. In all of thirty minutes, some sort of drama would emerge once the inhabitants awoke.
Come see me, he texted his spy chief. He sat back and waited, counting down from ten.
“Hey, boss,” Jenn purred, emerging from the shadows. One of the rare female Guardians, Jenn was tall and willowy with dark hair and green eyes, a studied air of seduction, and the ability to penetrate any group he sent her after. She didn’t try to hide her sex appeal and wore clothing tight enough to leave little to the imagination.
“Three,” he said.
“Still under five seconds,” she said with a sultry smile. She pulled up a chair across from him and straddled it, her direct gaze settling on him. “What can I do for you, boss?”
“Shall I make a list?” he returned. He smiled to himself, enjoying the game they always played.
“I’ll start at the top and work my way all the way down.”
“I think you’ll start all the way down.”
“For you, anything, any way you want it, anytime,” she purred.
“I love it when you say that.”
“You know what a girl likes. I don’t mind trying to make your day as good as you make mine.” She ran her fingers up his arm and back down. “How ’bout now?”
“We got real work to do,” he replied.
“Fine, boss. Work, then play. Must be serious.”
“Our vamp friends have had three flash-n-dash events this week so far,” he started.
“Toni told me,” she said. “A total of about thirty bodies.”
“We haven’t seen this anywhere else.”
“Talon’s boys are more violent than most of them. These are essentially huge orgies and feasts for initiating newbies,” she replied. “Nasty gatherings.”
“What do you have as far as sources in Talon’s gang?”
“Not much,” Jenn admitted. “The Natural I planted there called this morning and said they were waiting to burn the place until something got there. He didn’t know what it was but said it wasn’t a vamp and it wasn’t their dinner.”
Dusty was quiet, surprised. While violent, Talon wasn’t the smartest brute in the world. That he may have planned something for a reason other than to eat, fuck, or recruit was unusual.
“No word on what? Cell phone intercepts? Anything?”
“Not that I know of,” she replied. “He’s normally really loud and stupid about what he’s doing. We don’t usually have a problem tracking him, but this changed about two weeks ago. Either he got smart fast or someone tipped him off.”
“I’ll need whatever you can get me,” he said. “I have a feeling something else is going on.”
“So do I, boss,” she said pensively. “Dusty, if I didn’t think it was impossible, I’d say Talon’s gonna make a play for the Czerno’s job.”
“Talon? The Black God would slaughter him on the spot.”
“Something is just … I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a spy’s paranoia. Talon’s reckless, but he’s cunning and he’s suddenly playing very smart. We caught some of his vamps tracking Czerno’s vamps more than once, and we’ve caught them in firefights, too.”
He said nothing about the presence of one such Black God in Miami. The Black God, Czerno, had been wreaking havoc in Europe until a few days ago. He didn’t know if a two-bit thug like Talon rated the attention of the King of Darkness or if Talon was stupid enough to challenge an immortal so much more powerful. Maybe Czerno was in town for a bit of vengeance while the White God was across the ocean, or maybe he’d found out about Dusty’s wards, the White God’s mate and brother.
He didn’t know what was going on, but he felt as uneasy as his spy chief. His gaze went to his watch.
“You sure you don’t have time?” Jenn asked too casually.
“I’ve got a meeting at eight.”
“That’s enough time for me,” she whispered. She leaned over the chair and kissed him, a long, slow kiss.
Dusty rose in response, peeling off his shirt. Her eyes went to his body hungrily, and he gripped her belt, pulling her against him. He took them to his condo on the beach for privacy. He rarely turned down the offer of no-strings-attached sex, especially when his partner was so good at it. In all his years, he hadn’t found anything as soothing to his nerves as a woman’s silky skin, heady scent, and warm body.
Chapter Three
Bianca’s new world was tiny and white, the porcelain toilet the only chair and the tub the only place long enough for her to lie down. She huddled at one end of the tub, feeling as if she’d taken a shitload of drugs. She couldn’t focus on anything farther away than her hand, and looking at her hand made her cry.
She was covered in blood. Her blood. Every hour, he came back and hurt her. She traced the channel of a newly
healed scar along the inside of her forearm, where he’d split her arm almost in two in a fit of rage after she kicked him in the crotch.
She hadn’t fought him since. While she could heal, she still felt pain. That level of agony was something she never wanted to go through again. What she couldn’t heal was the exhaustion that came with each bout of healing. She was hungry and fatigued but too scared to sleep.
Light glowed through the hazy window overhead. It was her second morning in the tub. She wondered how many more there would be and doubted she’d last more than another day or two if he kept draining her blood. Her head sagged against the shower wall, and she wished she could order her body not to heal her, to let her bleed out and die so she didn’t suffer anymore.
The door opened, and she braced herself. Talon entered, followed by another man. Talon hauled her to her feet, holding her up by one arm when she wobbled. He took her other with a rough hand and nodded in approval at the healed scars.
“Impressive,” the man behind him said. “I didn’t think you had an ounce of sense, Talon.”
Talon responded by raising her arm to his mouth. He gave a cunning smile as she tensed. She whimpered at the sensation of knives going through her arm and almost fainted.
“Taste,” Talon said, handing her arm to the silver-haired man beside him.
The blurry man lifted her other arm and bit into it. She sagged. Talon let her drop. Blood trickled down both arms before her wounds healed themselves.
“Very impressive,” the stranger said, kneeling beside her to look at both of her arms. “You taste like honey, love.”
She shivered, sensing something truly evil in his monotonous voice and cold hands. She didn’t look at him, afraid of finding the devil himself in front of her.
“Your brother’s … special as well,” the man said. “He’ll make a good warrior, one I can train to kill a couple pain in the asses I can’t get rid of otherwise.”
