by Declan Finn
Demons are Forever
Love at First Bite Book Two
by
Declan Finn
DEMONS ARE FOREVER
LOVE AT FIRST BITE BOOK TWO
By Declan Finn
Published by Silver Empire
https://silverempire.org/
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018, John Konecsni
All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE
April 16th, 2:15AM. Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY
Amanda Colt was dead, and Marco Catalano looked like he had been through a war.
Both were technically true. The battle for Mount Olivet and for Greenpoint had been surprisingly quick affairs, but had left hundreds if not thousands dead on the streets of New York City. It helped with the cleanup that most of those who died had already been dead – namely, vampires.
Amanda Colt was a vampire, and thus already dead – but she had looked more dead than usual when she came flying back through the air, impacting on the Brooklyn street with a sick sound that was a cross between a splat and a crunch.
Marco, despite having had his left leg and his right arm broken by Mikhail the Bear in single combat, was at least still alive. Though he hurt to look at.
Despite all of that, Amanda still felt like jumping his bones. Even while she had sunk her fangs into his body to help him heal with a small sample of the vampire virus in her saliva. It wasn't enough to turn him, but enough to heal him. Like other viruses, her virus helped keep the host alive and well by keeping her “food stock” healthy and kicking. As long as he didn't try hurling more man hole covers, he should heal quickly.
“And yes,” he said, “I'm serious. I don't care if Special Agent Mister Wizard offers to pay my entire way in San Francisco. I don't see a reason to leave here. Do you?”
Amanda winced. That is such a poor question to ask me.
Then her phone rang.
Amanda and Marco started. She pulled out her phone, looked at the number, and said, “Huh.”
“Unknown?” he asked.
“Nyet. It is the VA.”
“The Veteran’s Association?”
She shook her head. “Vampires Association. Shh.”
She put the phone on speaker, said her name, and the voice at the other end answered. “Miss Amanda Colt, this is Jagi Witzke, administrative assistant for President Bosley of the NYC-VA. Your presence is requested at our next meeting. There have been a few complaints launched against you that must be addressed.”
The two of them exchanged a look. “Such as?” she asked.
“The destruction of several pieces of vampire property, as well as assaulting other vampires. And using your minion as a weapon.”
Marco cocked his head, looking at her with amusement. He mouthed “Minion? You have a minion? Or am I it? Should I be honored or offended?”
“I’ll be there,” Amanda answered.
“Thank you. You know the time and location?”
“I do. I get the newsletter in the email.”
“Thank you. We still have members who don’t know what email is. See you there.”
Amanda hung up. Marco’s eyes narrowed. “So will the ninjas.”
She shook her head. “No reason for that.”
“We’ve blown up how many bars?”
“Only about three.”
“And how many vampires have we killed? In the last six hours alone?”
Amanda winced. “We’ll talk with Hendershot.”
“Can we talk with Bram? I like him better.”
CHAPTER 1
PHYSICAL THERAPY
April 26th, 9 PM, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Marco didn’t think about Amanda. He had to make certain he didn’t think about Amanda. Because if he did, he would probably fall into his thoughts and never fall out. After all, he wasn’t easy to love, and didn’t do much loving himself. He even surprised himself how deeply he fell into love once he was there.
And there was so much to focus on. She fought like a professional, but was as intimidating as a chipmunk. And as sexy as the one that got away only better looking. Her 5’6” height made her a perfect fit when he hugged her, and her long red-gold hair went to the small of her back in a golden fall – he just wanted to run his fingers through it.
Though with my luck, he thought, I’d find the only knots in her hair and pull them out.
And her eyes – a warm, liquid Frangelico brown with her Siberia-pale skin. Her dress was casual, covering everything, but it didn’t matter, she looked good in everything. It all seemed to be form-fitting, no matter the size. Jeans and a sweater should have covered her thoroughly, but somehow managed to be quite snug. Granted, it was a very nice form with curves that a Volvo would hug.
It gave him a warm feeling just thinking about her.
Yes, I have to stop it. Dammit.
After all, he was fully-healed, his bones knitted together, he had something else to focus on.
Staying alive in front of a half-dozen vampires.
Step one was easy. After the first three bodies were discovered around one construction site, Marco had no problem doing that math. He had contacted one of his people on the construction crew, and had them lay the groundwork for his attack.
But, hey, there are only six of them.
Marco was crouched on an I-beam twenty feet up from where he had set his trap.
This is going to be so easy.
There had been some concern about staying hidden against vampires, but apparently, vampires were just as stupid as everybody else – nobody looked up.
* * *
This is going to be so easy. No one ever looks up.
On the top floor of the unfinished building stood a short, dark man, swathed in Armani and Prada. He was slender and unthreatening… until you looked at his eyes. The eyes were the tell – they were empty. Look at them too hard and too long, one could almost swear that they were lidless eyes of fire, straight out of Lord of the Rings, but most people never held his eyes that long.
The creature that looked like a human being gave a very tiny smile as he eyed his prey, Marco Catalano. It was strange to imagine that this child, this 19-year-old, had been such a threat. He wasn’t even that big – a 5’9” blond dancer. That was it.
The creature that commonly called itself “Mister Day” chuckled to himself. Dance of death, maybe.
But now, it was time for him to die. And Marco would never see him coming.
Marco opened with a salvo of glass phials filled with holy water. As the holy water burned them like acid, Marco dropped down onto another vampire he missed, taking his head off with a knife.
Marco moved before that vampire turned to dust. He threw his entire weight into the next vampire, and slammed a stake into the vampire’s chest, like a hammer blow. The vampire disintegrated into a pile of dust and clothing.
Marco spun, took the recently emptied jacket out of the air and hurled it at the third vampire, covering his face like a net.
Marco threw the stake in his hand, and it landed, point fi
rst, in the eye of the fourth vampire. Since the stake had been soaked in holy water, it not only penetrated the back of the eye socket, it lodged in the brain and started eating away at the gray cells. Undead or not, it was hard to focus when something was eating one’s brains.
Three down in a matter of seconds, Mister Day thought. Nicely done. The creature lowered itself into a crouch, studying his prey with admiration. Marco was mostly human; the only improvement that Day could perceive was some residual after effects of a vampire’s bite, but even that seemed to be mostly for healing fractures.
Fascinating. But, sadly, time to end it.
Day dropped from the I-beam of the top floor, and landed with a hard thud right behind Marco.
* * *
Marco heard the heavy body land behind him and, despite himself, didn’t laugh. He merely gave a quick look over his shoulder, dropped his body in a bow, and shot his right foot backwards, cracking the newcomer in the sternum.
The newcomer only took a half-step back, and that was more than enough. The half-step took him onto a tarp.
This tarp, however, had nothing under it.
The newcomer fell from sight, dropping into the spikes of Marco’s tiger trap.
I’m so glad I had my guys put spikes in that this morning.
One of the vampires growled, “Allahu akbar!”
Marco blinked. “What?”
All three vampires charged.
Marco drew his dual squirt guns and fired, blasting the vampires in the face as they ran at him. They screamed and covered their eyes, but didn’t slow or stop.
Marco dove between two of the attackers, and let them keep running as they charged right into the pit with the wooden spikes.
And he never stopped smiling, even as they fell, screaming, to their deaths.
* * *
In the pit, Mister Day growled in frustration. He had been spiked enough to count as a pin cushion. The spear that nailed him through the head was particularly annoying.
A face appeared at the edge of the pit. It was the target.
“Still alive?” He cocked his head to one side, surprised. “Oh well. I can solve that.”
Day snarled, and tried to calm himself. He could be free with one good roll, breaking the spikes. Then, maybe, if he felt charitable, he would throw Marco down here.
Then he heard the truck backing up.
Day cursed, then held his breath as the cement truck started to pour down on him, burying him alive.
Aw crap, not again.
CHAPTER 2:
I’LL GET YOU MY PRETTY, AND YOUR LITTLE HUMAN, TOO
New York City, April 26th
Robert’s rules of order would frown on two disputants eating each other, but it was unlikely that the man who wrote the rules of conduct for meetings meant it to apply to vampires. (It certainly didn’t apply to werewolves, since packs were less of a democracy, and more of an enlightened dictatorship. Some charitable vampires thought that wolves invented hockey.)
These thoughts drifted through the mind of Amanda Colt as she wandered into the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall reserved for the meeting of the New York City Vampires Association. Of course, the NYC-VA didn’t have even ten percent of New York City’s vampire population. This was for the powerful, the affluent, or the really, really troublesome.
Amanda Colt didn’t know what category she fell under. She had never been invited to the NYC-VA before.
She wasn’t particularly rich. To normal people, as she lived in her Upper East Side 70th Street apartment, she was rich. To vampires, she was comfortable. It was an area where the cops had a good response time and people walked the streets at night. Really wealthy vampires (the types that lived in castles and estates, if they could) merely called her type “well invested: the nouveaux riches of the vampire world.” At the rate her investments were growing, if she broke two hundred (next century), she might be considered part of the club.
Amanda Colt wasn’t particularly powerful, either. She was as strong as the average vampire, maybe stronger (she had odd bursts of ability that surprised her, but that didn’t count). She didn’t have a nest, and her sphere of influence had only recently started. Until last year, her only power was, really, the power to turn heads.
However, Amanda Colt’s role as a troublemaker was assured, even though it wasn’t her fault. Her friend Marco Catalano was the focus of the trouble.
But these vampires thought of Marco as her human, so she was credited with his trail of destruction, including the recently re-killed, the property damage, and generally spreading so much fear through certain ranks of the vampire community that he bordered on being a terrorist.
So, Amanda didn’t quite know if she was supposed to be there as a member of the general assembly, or if she was there to be executed as a local troublemaker.
If it was the latter, and they tried to hold even the semblance of a trial, she was going to rip them a new one. Maybe a new three or four, while she was at it.
As she looked around the hall, she could recognize a few faces. There was a bar owner from the Blood Bank, an Upper East Side vampire bar not far from Mount Sinai Hospital; he was a gruff, burly fellow who had served as an Irish cop in the nineteenth century. Not far from him was Kalsey, a tall, well-built and well-dressed Anglo-Indian vampire who owned The Platelet.
Well, Kalsey had owned the Platelet, before Marco got there. Its replacement was still under construction.
Though it didn’t seem like losing his major source of income had hurt Kalsey all that much. He still wore Armani, carried his well-crafted sword cane, and even had a Rolex Le President, top of the line gold.
However, for all that, Kalsey didn’t seem happy.
Amanda didn’t even bother sitting, but stood off to the side. The VFW hall was lined with collapsible chairs, set up in nice neat rows. However, she didn’t expect to be sitting much, especially if she was called to defend herself—verbally or physically.
The vampires on the dais were finally starting to file in. Amanda noted them, and she swore she knew some of them, but she couldn’t remember from where. The one in the center position was female, blonde, and about Amanda’s height, dressed casually in a comfortable leather jacket and blue jeans.
However, vampires were not matriarchal. To get to a position of power, you had to be powerful, not to mention manipulative, long-sighted, and willing to stab allies in the back… or whatever angle presented itself.
The blonde thwacked the gavel down. “This is the twenty-second meeting of the 235th session of the New York City Vampires Association, President Jennifer Bosley presiding. I hereby call this meeting to order,” she said in a upper class British accent that Amanda could narrow down to London. “First order of business. Reading of the minutes from the last meeting? Is there a motion?”
One of the committee members on the dais raised his hands. “Move to waive the reading?”
Three hands went up from the crowd. Jennifer banged the gavel and said, “Moved, and seconded. Is there any old business?”
One person stood up in the back of the room…it was a male vampire in a dress. “Yes,” he said in a thick accent. “I would like to object, once again, to acknowledging New York City as it currently stands. This place belongs to the British, and—”
President Jennifer Bosley slammed down the gavel again. “Edward, I said old business, not concluded business. For the last time, I don’t care how old you are, or if you were the royal governor, the entire continent has moved on. If you bring this up again, you’ll be banned from these meetings for another decade. Are we understood?” She dismissed the three hundred year old vampire as though he was already dead and dusty. “Next?”
The meeting went on for a while, and it covered a lot of topics one would expect: border disputes, blood supplies, old grudges, territorial haggling due to the latest construction rearranging geographic markers. Vampire bureaucracy was like a regular bureaucracy, but worse, since some topics and situations could drag on fo
r decades, if not centuries.
There was even one man complaining that Little Italy should declare war on Chinatown, because Chinatown was swallowing it whole, and “Back in the days when I was a Centurion in the Roman Empire—”
That one, at least, was cut off by a dozen different groans. Even President Jennifer Bosley seemed weary. She sighed. “Giuseppe, you weren’t part of an Empire. Mussolini’s ability was never as great as him ambition. You were a Sergeant in his army, and we’re still telling jokes about that. Now, shut up and sit down before we revoke your territory… what little is left of it. As it is, you’ll be hiding in your great-grandson’s basement in Howard Beach in another two decades. I hope you don’t mind swimming when it floods. Now, if that’s enough of old business…” Jennifer gave the room a glare that told them it was, and if they didn’t like it, she had a stake in the back room with their names on it. “New business?”
Kalsey jumped up from his seat so fast, Amanda half-expected him to shoot straight up to the ceiling. “Yes!” He thrust his cane at Amanda as though he were stabbing her. “She and her pet human destroyed my bar, slaughtered my most loyal and valuable retainers, then had minions poison me with time-delay release Holy Water capsules. I demand that she, and her human, make full restitution.”
Jennifer Bosley nodded, then looked to Amanda. “We have had several notifications of this attack. Would anyone else like to add to this?”
“I would like to add something,” said Lynch, the Irish cop/bar owner. “My name is Patrick Lynch, I’m the owner of the Blood Bank.”
Amanda winced. This will not be good.
Jennifer Bosley nodded. “The chair acknowledges you, Proprietor Lynch. You have the floor.”
Lynch smiled easily. “That young lady and her man came into my pub the night before Mister Kalsey’s place had its unfortunate accident.”
Kasley whirled one Lynch. “Accident! Why you dirty Irish bastard!
Lynch ignored him. “Now, Madam President, you must understand,” he continued in a soft, gentle brogue. “Mister Kalsey and I are old competitors, going back a few decades. However, I bear the man no great animosity. When Mistress Colt and her young man came into my place, they merely wanted some information. Marco came in and—”
