Fury Calls

by Caridad Piñeiro

  “I saw something going on. Money exchanged hands between two vamps, but by the time I got there, they were long gone—only I smelled something familiar. Something I smelled the night we found the dead vampire in the alley.” He dragged a hand through his hair in frustration, wishing he could put a name to the scent, but he couldn’t. His mum had never been one for fancy fare like Meghan prepared.

  Meghan, he thought. If anyone could identify the scent, it would be her. Pleading once more, he said, “You smelled it, didn’t you? That night in the alley.”

  “I smelled blood and garbage. Nothing else,” she said. The tone of her voice sounded sad, and the grim set of her lips damned him as a liar.

  Something died inside of him. More dead than the demon within. More painful than anything he had ever experienced. Meghan believed the evidence the others had found. It had called to her doubt, the doubt that lay just below the surface, waiting for him to screw up once again. It was the excuse she needed to push him away.

  Although it was a useless protest, he repeated, “I don’t know anything about those vials.”

  “Then why were they in your locker?” Ryder asked.

  “My locker? What about the Fourth Amendment and all that? Or is it the Fifth? You law-enforcement types must know you can’t just look in someone’s locker.”

  “Is that why you had them there? Because you thought we wouldn’t look there? Because you thought we would trust you?” Meghan asked. Anger sparked in her eyes as she confronted him. Her hands were clenched at her sides, her knuckles white from the pressure of her grip.

  “After everything we’ve shared, how can you believe the worst of me so quickly?” he said testily. At the same time, he realized that only a guilty man would start quoting legalities.

  Her stance softened then, but only a bit. Lifting her glittering gaze to his, she said, “Why won’t you tell us anything that would make us think otherwise?”

  He shook his head and gave a harsh laugh. Meeting her gaze directly, he said, “Because I thought that all I’ve done for you would speak louder than words.”

  Then he shifted his gaze to the other three. “I don’t know how the drugs got in my locker. But I have my suspicions about who might be involved.”

  Surprisingly, Diana slackened her attack at his words and with that, the others seemed to lose some of their aggressiveness as well. She glanced at him and said, “Who do you think is involved?”

  “I suspect Foley might have a connection to whoever is doing this. Whatever that odor is, I’ve smelled it around Foley,” he explained.

  Diego shook his head. “Foley isn’t old enough to know about the drug.”

  “But he’s got all kinds of badass vamps hanging out at the Blood Bank,” he offered. “We’ve become friends, Foley and I. Give me a chance to talk to him and find out what he knows.”

  Diana looked to Ryder and Diego before nodding. “One chance, Blake. Convince us that we’re wrong to doubt you.”

  One chance, he thought, but as he met Meghan’s gaze and she looked away, he realized that she had already given him his one chance and found him lacking.

  Regardless, he intended to prove his innocence. To show her how wrong she had been to lose her faith in him so easily.

  Meghan watched as with a burst of vampire speed, Blake escaped from the office. After he did so, Diego came up to her and consoled her with a reassuring squeeze on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, niña.”

  She shrugged off his touch and faced the others.

  “What if he was telling the truth?” she asked, confusion and guilt tumbling together within her. She wanted to doubt him as much as she wanted to believe that Blake hadn’t been lying. He had no reason to cause them such problems, after all. No motive to want to harm them.

  “I want to give him the benefit of the doubt because of all that he’s done for us in the past,” Diana began, a chill tone coloring her words. “But if he is involved in this, he may lead us to whoever provided him with the drug. It’s why we let him go.”

  “And if he’s innocent, whoever is behind this may cap his ass if he gets too close to them,” she shot back.

  “You can still care for him even thinking that he might be behind this?” Diego asked, disdain filling his voice.

  Did she still care? Meghan wondered. Could she still feel something for him, even with the damning evidence they had discovered?

  Her confusion evaporated as she dejectedly realized the answer might be yes. Despite everything, a part of her continued to believe in him. At that, her shame rose even more sharply. When he had asked for her support, she had failed to provide it. Instead she had given in to her fears and jumped on the first thing she could to drive him away.

  “We can’t just use him as chum and hope that somehow he can survive to prove his innocence.”

  Surprisingly, it was Diana who approached her and gently laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’re worried he can’t handle whatever happens?”

  Meghan shook her head and inhaled deeply. “Foley has a lot of backup. I’m not sure Blake…I hope he can…”

  She didn’t say it, but as her gaze met the other woman’s, Diana knew. They both wanted to believe that love could make anything possible.

  With a nod, Diana said, “We’ll be ready in case anything happens.”

  “So where do we go from here?” Meghan asked.

  Chapter 19

  Disillusionment over Meghan’s lack of faith sent Blake on a wild ride over the rooftops of Manhattan. He vaulted from building to building, climbing ever higher before plummeting downward. More than once he misjudged the distance and ended up sprawled ignominiously on the ground, his body smarting from the fall. Each time he erred, he picked himself up and pushed onward until he finally set down on the patio of his apartment.

  He had thought that he had exhausted the emotion that had forced him out into the night.

  He was wrong.

  Fury sank its vicious teeth into his belly and drove him to further violence.

  He kicked at the pots with the plants he had carefully cultivated. Soil and foliage went flying. He stomped through the tender leaves and roots on his way to the French doors of his apartment.

  He nearly unhinged the doors from the frame as he tore them open and stalked inside. For years he had painstakingly gathered these things, trying to make the small space a home. Trying to delude himself that he could have what others had. That the poor coal miner’s son might not have a lot of money but still have things he could call his own.

  Old things, he thought, as he looked around. Castoffs that no one else had wanted.

  Like no one wanted him, he thought. He grabbed a small piecrust table and flung it across the room, where it shattered against the wall. He forged onward, tossing the flotsam of his life aside. He moved closer to the bed he had so carefully restored, intending the same mayhem, but as he neared, the last of his rage faded.

  Blake fell to his knees and buried his head against the bed.

  The comforter and sheets still bore her scent and he inhaled deeply, flogging himself with the memory of her.

  With a sharp tug, he ripped the linens off the bed, wrapped them up into a ball and pitched them to the side.

  His anger spent, he rose and swiped at the moisture on his face, refusing to admit to the tears. Right then and there he swore he’d prove them wrong, and then he’d pack up his things and leave. It was time for him to find somewhere new to live. Some place where he could start over, the way he had done so many times during his long existence.

  For too long he had deluded himself that this place could hold something different for him. Could hold love for him.

  I should have known better, he thought.

  Lee gazed at the kiang-shi standing before him. The younger man visibly trembled, hands clasped before him and head downcast in a show of obedience. A living man might have been sweating, but as kiang-shi they had lost many of their human traits, unlike their European brethren. Since Euro v
amps still had some vestige of life, they retained many distasteful human attributes. Breathing, sweating, eating, if they chose to do so.

  Maybe that was the reason for the vampires’ continued misbelief that they could still experience human things. Or why the call of mortal love remained so tempting.

  The kiang-shi knew no such weaknesses. They cared nothing for love or honor because they had not concerned themselves with those things in their mortal lives.

  But as in their mortal lives, they understood the punishment for failure.

  Lee shot a glance at his two other minions as they waited by the entrance to the door of the office in the Blood Bank. Their faces were unsympathetic, stoic. Their stances were erect and unyielding, just as they had been when they had served as his trusted cadre on the battlefield.

  They would not come to the assistance of their friend.

  “Someone saw you at the restaurant?” he asked. As his lackey nodded, rage built within him.

  “You realize how dangerous you have made it for us?”

  The man’s limbs shook so much that Lee could imagine the undead flesh on those bones falling away from the continued force.

  Lee intended to put him out of his misery long before that, furious as he was with the man’s failure. No one was supposed to know that it was he and his group supplying the drug to the vampires. He had planned on casting doubt on another of the vampire elders present in the city: Stacia, Hadrian or one of the others who mingled on the fringes of the wannabes.

  Now this underling had jeopardized his plans.

  In a burst of speed, he was before the man, gripping him by the throat. The soft, decaying flesh gave easily beneath his fingers until he encountered the harder shell of cartilage and bone.

  “Please, master,” the kiang-shi choked out.

  Fury rose up stronger at the man’s entreaty. At the weakness he could not stomach in one of his warriors. “You would beg for this miserable existence to continue?”

  The kiang-shi nodded. Seeing Lee’s anger, he quickly tried to explain in the hopes of swaying him. “Only the platinum-haired one saw me, but I was able to trick him, master.”

  Lee exerted a bit more pressure and lifted the man until the tips of his toes were barely brushing the ground. The weight created a shift of bones and a series of small little pops as the kiang-shi stretched to try and counteract the traction Lee was creating with his hold.

  “Trick him? How?”

  With a wheezing sound escaping his damaged throat, the kiang-shi said, “I watched him afterward and saw where he kept his things. I snuck in and left a few vials there.”

  Brilliant, Lee thought. He had wanted to create discord amongst the wannabes and his flunky’s actions would do just that. These misguided vampires placed so much value on honor that they would never stomach one of their own betraying them.

  He released the man, who sagged with relief.

  When he smiled as he considered what the wannabes would do to the white-haired vamp in retribution, the kiang-shi took it as a sign of approval. He dropped to his knees and grabbed hold of Lee’s leg. He hugged it tight and rubbed his head along Lee’s crotch, wanting reward.

  Lee rubbed the back of the kiang-shi’s head the way he might pet a favorite dog. He whimpered with pleasure and pushed even harder against Lee’s growing erection, only Lee’s satisfaction was not coming from sexual anticipation.

  He took the man’s head in both hands, shivered as the man shifted his mouth up and down his penis.

  The kiang-shi moaned, anticipating his reward, and in that moment, Lee violently twisted the kiang-shi’s head.

  The decaying bone and flesh were easily rent and for the barest bit of time, the kiang-shi looked up at Lee, his mouth opened in a surprised O as his body fell in a heap to the ground.

  Satisfaction finally filled Lee and he tossed the kiang-shi’s head onto the floor beside the rest of his body. He looked up and stared at the two other kiang-shi bodyguards. They remained immobile by the door, faces still blank and uncaring of the fate of their friend.

  Lee jabbed his finger in the direction of the door. “Go fetch the platinum-haired vampire. Foley should know where he keeps his lair.”

  Meghan dropped down on the terrace of Blake’s apartment from the adjacent rooftop.

  She hadn’t expected his welcome, but she certainly hadn’t expected this, she thought, as she twined a path through the spilled soil and trampled remains of Blake’s garden. Fear slammed into her as she took note of the French doors that were almost hanging off their hinges.

  If Blake had been telling the truth and someone had seen him leaving Otro Mundo and coming here…

  She rushed forward, almost sickened by the thought that something might have happened to him because she had not had the strength to believe. She had been too afraid of what she was feeling for him. Too scared of where it might lead and had jumped on the opportunity to create distance between them.

  She had never expected this kind of reaction from him, and she wanted to weep as she entered his home and noted the destruction. Pieces of broken furniture and of some of the mementoes he’d collected littered the floor. The rugs, which had once been pristine, bore the remnants of soil and greenery tracked in from outside. Dropping to one knee, she glanced at the footprints on the rugs and realized there was just one set.

  Only Blake’s, she thought. She did a slow pivot to take in all the damage to his home. All the wrath he had unleashed on those things he had so lovingly collected.

  She understood that now.

  Fury had called him to obliterate all that he had once held dear. To destroy those things that he saw as the evidence of his failure.

  She plopped down on the edge of the unmade bed, sadness sapping her strength. She couldn’t leave everything like this. She had made a mistake. A big one.

  She shouldn’t have doubted him. She should have stuck up for him before the others, only she had been a coward. She had allowed herself to be ruled by her earlier feelings for him. By the anger and hatred that she had harbored toward him for turning her.

  Emotions that he had thought to change.

  Emotions that he had changed, she acknowledged. Over the last few weeks, she had come to feel differently for him. She cared for him. In fact, she loved him.

  It was her fear of loving him that had made her look for an excuse to distance herself from him.

  She swept her gaze over his place once again and felt the pull of the love he had put into it. She remembered the nights they had recently shared and the comfort of his arms.

  She couldn’t leave his home like this.

  Slowly she began gathering up those things that could be salvaged and put them to the side. Those things that were still intact she put back in their place. Finally she bagged the debris.

  The bed looked decidedly inhospitable without linens, and she searched through his drawer for more. They were filled with his clothes—modest, like the simple, uncomplicated man that he was. T-shirts and jeans, although in one drawer there was a hideous blue polyester suit that bore the distinct aroma of camphor.

  In a bottom drawer she finally found a fresh set of sheets. She pulled them out and remade the bed, running her hand lovingly to smooth the sheets before she covered them with the rich silk comforter he had crumpled in one corner of the room.

  A noise outside drew her attention and her heart sped up at the thought that it might be Blake returning home.

  She raced outdoors, and the cloying scent of cardamom overwhelmed her senses a second before someone grabbed her from behind.

  Chapter 20

  Moonlight lit the rooftops for Blake as he continued to vent his rage and frustration by extending his romp across Manhattan. From his terrace near Gramercy Park he headed uptown, leaping across the roofs of the low buildings in the Thirties until he neared the high-rises of Midtown. He detoured there toward the East Side, speeding up Second Avenue until he got to the Queens-boro Bridge.

  With a s
eries of bounding leaps, he climbed to the pinnacle of the bridge and stared at the East River below him. The water glistened with the moonlight and the reflected the lights of Manhattan.

  Turning around, he peered toward the Manhattan skyline, searching out the tip of Ryder’s building in the Sixties. He imagined Ryder and the prickly FBI agent acting out homey scenes in their chic little pied-à-terre.

  Sickening, he thought, trying to drive away the pain that would consume him if he continued with such thoughts.

  Returning to Manhattan, he fled up Second to the Seventies, where he turned westward and plunged into the thicket of Central Park, racing and swerving through the woods there on his way to the West Side. The branches lashed at him, but that was good. The pain of them flogging his flesh whipped up his ire until he was in a fine fury.

  On Central Park West he detoured back to Diego’s fancy digs, determined to give Meghan a piece of his mind, but as he reached the building, he noted the lack of any vampire power within.

  Strange, he thought. Noting the lateness of the hour, he wondered where she might be.

  Probably still plotting with Nancy Drew and the rest of the gang. Probably considering how to make sure he ceased to be a problem in their lives. Little did they know he intended to take care of that himself. By leaving. Once he cleared his name.

  He imagined the scene when he’d make that revelation. The shocked look on Meghan’s face and how she would beg for forgiveness. He smiled as he thought about turning his back on her and walking away.

  Of course, he could only do that if he got the goods on whoever had framed him and was responsible for the shit going down at Otro Mundo.

  Which meant that it was long past time that he head downtown to the Blood Bank. Foley was there and might tell him more about what was going on.

  Blake intended to drag it out of Foley, even if it meant a fight. He was up for a good fight. Maybe breaking a few bones and spilling a little blood would drive away the last of his upset.