Fury Calls

by Caridad Piñeiro

  With a swell of speed, he blasted down to Columbus Circle and then along the broad width of Fifty-seventh Street, taking delight in the astonished gasps of the few pedestrians on the street as he blew past them, invisible to their gaze at this speed.

  Once on the East Side he headed beneath the FDR Drive, racing past the seamier side of the city that the tourists didn’t see. In seconds he was in the tangle of cobblestoned streets where the Blood Bank was located.

  He leapt upward, intending to scope out the place before entering. The last thing he wanted to do was to run into Meghan and the rest of them, certain that they would be on the lookout for him. He knew that the only reason they had let him go was because they thought he would lead them to whoever had given him the drug.

  To his surprise, not one of them was there. Unless they had opted to go inside and wait for him.

  He dropped to the ground below and straightened the black leather jacket on his shoulders. Sauntering to the door, he snarled at the bouncer, displaying his fangs and the vampire nodded and let him past the line of patrons waiting to get in.

  Once inside, he opened up his senses, searching the crowd for other immortals, and was rewarded by the strong hum of vampire power. A number of undead were present tonight. But he was disappointed not to sense the erratic, uneven thrum of energy he had sensed from Lee and the other kiang-shi.

  Preparing himself for a run-in with Meghan and the rest of the gang, he was actually frustrated not to find them within the club, since he had wanted to vent his hostility against them. Instead, he found Foley at the end of the bar, sipping a drink, his hands shaky and a jittery tension in his body.

  Blake slowly approached, not wanting to surprise the other vampire, who was clearly on edge. Foley must have picked up on the pulse of Blake’s power, because he turned and shot Blake a pained smile. He raised his glass in invitation and signaled for the bartender to bring another. Not that Blake was in the mood for sharing a cup.

  Still, he slipped onto a stool beside Foley, thinking that he might be able to get the information he needed without a fight. Pity that, he thought.

  “This is getting to be a habit, old man,” he said.

  “They say misery loves company.” Foley drained his glass with a quick gulp and slammed it down onto the scarred surface of the black bar.

  “Have you had company lately?” he asked, as the bartender laid two glasses of blood before them.

  “Lots of company,” Foley admitted. “Lee and his crew, minus the ladies and one smelly corpse. I’m getting a little tired of picking up after him.”

  “Drained them, did he?” Blake asked, intrigued for a run-down on Lee’s activities and hoping that something Foley said would clue him about Lee’s other endeavors.

  “Women were nearly dead once he and his friends finished with them. Luckily they survived or there would have been a real mess to deal with.” Foley grasped his new glass and cupped it with his hands, almost fondling it, as he said, “Corpse was nasty to clean up. Too many pieces for my taste.”

  “Pieces,” Blake repeated, and at Foley’s nod added, “Must have been a right mess.”

  “Definitely. Told the same thing to your friends.”

  Blake sniffed roughly and gulped down a bit of the blood. “Don’t have any friends, Foley. You should know that by now.”

  Foley shot him a half glance, his gray eyes stormy. Troubled. “Seems we’re two of a kind after all.”

  “Possibly,” Blake muttered. “So what did my ‘friends’ want?”

  Foley took a slurpy sip from his glass. Blake knew him too well not to realize he wanted to annoy him. He’d seen him use much the same tactic on the FBI agent and Ryder. Blake wasn’t going to fall for it and so he remained silent, waiting for Foley to answer.

  After another noisy taste, Foley laid the glass down and said, “They were looking for you. Asking all kinds of questions about what you’ve been up to.”

  “Hmm. Not much, I’m sorry to say.”

  Foley reached over and plucked something from Blake’s jacket, which he tossed onto the bar. A small pine twig that must have snared in his jacket during his wild race through the park. “I’m guessing that’s there because you went uptown to pay the cheerleader a visit.”

  “She wasn’t home,” he admitted since there was no sense lying to Foley. The other vampire was sure to see right through it.

  “She wasn’t with them, if you’re wondering.”

  He tried to mask his surprise. If Meghan hadn’t been with them, where was she?

  “So where are my friends now? Waiting in the shadows for me? Ready to take in Big Bad Blake?” he scoffed, and held his hands out as if to be handcuffed.

  “They left about an hour ago.”

  He failed to hide his shock this time and Foley chuckled wickedly. “Sorry, mate, but I guess they had bigger fish to fry.”

  Still smarting from Meghan and company’s earlier distrust, he clenched his hand on the glass, mindful not to break it. No sense wasting good blood, he thought as he raised the tumbler and drained it with one long swallow.

  The surge of energy raced along his body and he battled to keep the demon in check, but it was raring to go again, incited by the blood and his anger at his supposed friends and Meghan.

  He rose and gestured to the empty glass. “Thanks for the drink. I owe you.”

  “You do,” Foley said, and returned his attention to the glass in his hand, clearly uncaring of whatever was going on.

  A little later Blake made his way through the crowd in the Blood Bank, keeping his demon senses on alert for any touch of undead power. As he passed a vampire here and there, he scoped them out, alert for the wild kind of look he had seen in the dead vampiress’s face before she had ripped into her dining companion to feed.

  All that greeted him were the challenging looks he would expect to see. The vampires were on the prowl for a meal and another vampire moving in on their intended prey didn’t sit well. Unlike the human wannabes, most vampires made few friends and were fairly territorial by nature, especially at mealtime. For a long time he’d been the same way—a loner. It was only since meeting Meghan that he had changed, but he still understood what the other vampires expected, so he kept his distance as they hunted for dinner, and continued his investigation.

  He worked the crowd for at least another hour, waiting for any sign of Meghan and the others, or of Lee and his entourage. Searching for anything that would point to the presence of the sanguinarium drug amongst his undead brethren.

  But he discovered nothing that would help him clear his name.

  Realizing the futility of the night, he decided to leave but then reconsidered. He had nowhere to go, having trashed his apartment. Not to mention that he was starting to feel a might peckish. As one tasty young thing swept passed him, tossing him an inviting look, he headed in her direction, intending to grab a quick bite.

  But then his senses picked up on something off.

  It was on the periphery of his powers, but strong enough to register. Uneven undead power along with something more familiar…Meghan’s sympathetic energies calling to his own.

  He slowly pivoted on one foot, hoping to see her or one of the kiang-shi, but they were nowhere in sight. As it occurred to him how weak the force of the power was, he realized she had to be some distance away.

  But where? he wondered.

  He didn’t hesitate a second longer, racing off in search of the source of the power and the growing disturbance he had sensed.

  Chapter 21

  “You can’t do this,” Foley said, gesticulating wildly as he paced before two of Lee’s kiang-shi, who held a struggling Meghan. They were in the lair Lee kept for his infrequent visits, two stories below the Blood Bank. The lair was sumptuously appointed with a series of large beds covered with the richest of silks and plush pillows.

  Lee demanded only the best for where he would take his rest, his meals and play his games, Foley thought. He shot an uneasy glance
at Meghan as he considered Lee’s plans for her. If he had seen them enter earlier, he might have tried to warn Blake or the others, but Lee had also selected the space because of a secluded staircase that allowed them undetected entrance into the building.

  Foley had to get word to Blake, he thought, and repeated his prior plea. “Don’t do this to her, Sun Tze.”

  Lee laughed out loud, stepped forward and snared his arm, stopping him in his tracks. “Becoming the white knight, are we?”

  Foley sensed the menace beneath Lee’s words and the tight grip on his arm. Of its own volition, his body began to quiver, knowing what would follow. He forced back his distress, knowing that he had to do this not just for himself and Meghan, but for all the vampires who would remain behind long after Lee had tired of his games and left.

  “Just being logical,” Foley replied, trying to appear calm. “If you feed her the drug and turn her loose on the humans, you’ll expose all of us. You’ll risk our lives to the mortals who will seek to destroy us as they did millennia ago.”

  Lee scoffed at his assertion. “We are superior, Foley. It is time we stopped hiding in our own little underworld. It is time we stopped wishing to be like them.”

  With each word Lee’s voice escalated until he was nearly screaming. He punctuated each word that followed with an angry jab in Meghan’s direction. “She is a prime example of what we should not become. She is an abomination. Her kind are a blight on the vampire name. Who better to use to make our statement?”

  While Foley was no fan of Ryder and his human wannabes, he was also wise enough to realize that Lee’s bloodthirsty ways could only bring destruction to their kind. “In time they will destroy themselves with their foolishness, Sun Tze. There is no need for this type of attack.”

  Lee’s eyes slowly began to glow. When he spoke, an unearthly rattle sounded from deep in his chest and his hair bleached out to the glaring white of the kiang-shi.

  “This is not an attack, Daniel,” he said, using Foley’s given name from a lifetime ago. “This is an example for all the undead.” He pointed a finger in Foley’s direction. Long, deadly, sharp nails click-clacking together as he jabbed the air before him in emphasis.

  “Master,” Foley said, lowering his head in obedience as a way to deflect Lee’s wrath. It only seemed to infuriate Lee more, and fear made Foley’s stomach clench tightly.

  “Do you have no guts, Daniel? Will you never rise up and defend yourself?” Lee taunted.

  With those words, something finally snapped within Foley. He launched himself at Lee, aware that only he stood between this madman and the destruction of the life that he knew. The destruction of Meghan and her friends. His friends, he realized suddenly, but in that moment of epiphany came something else.

  The realization that he had acted too late.

  Foley’s hands were on Lee’s throat, the force of his grip bone-crushing, but the kiang-shi had driven those long, deadly nails deep into Foley’s abdomen. With a vicious swipe, he ripped upward, slicing through muscle and viscera.

  Foley’s grip failed and his knees gave way as his abdomen split open, spilling blood and intestine at Lee’s feet.

  Foley crumpled to the ground and tried to pull himself together, literally, hoping he had enough strength to heal, but the rush of his blood came quickly on his hands and cold immediately filled his core.

  “So you do have guts after all,” Lee said, licking the blood and gore from his nails.

  Foley’s eyesight dimmed as he struggled to stay alive, focusing all of his energy on containing the rush of blood from his body. He prayed for the first time in centuries that he could hold on long enough to warn the others.

  He had no doubt that if Lee’s plan succeeded, it would lead to the destruction of the vampire underworld they had so carefully guarded for centuries.

  “You…will…not succeed,” he rasped, each word weaker and more painful than the last.

  Lee stood directly above him, looking down at him with disgust. “My dear Daniel. The word failure is not in my vocabulary.”

  Meghan shook her head in disbelief as she met Foley’s fading gaze. His lips moved weakly, as if he were trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t hear him.

  “Foley,” she screamed. He was dying right before her eyes and she could do nothing about it. He had sacrificed himself on her account, dying as others might if she couldn’t break free.

  She renewed her struggles, but the grasps of the two kiang-shi were too strong for her in her mortal form. As much as she despised the vampire, she summoned the demon, hoping that the added strength might be enough to overpower the kiang-shi, yet knowing that even if she did get free of them, she would never be able to escape Lee.

  Still, she had to try. She had to make an attempt to warn the others about what Lee intended to do to her and she needed to get Foley some help.

  She drove her heel onto the foot of the one kiang-shi and as he grunted from the pain and bent, she drove upward with her elbow, flattening his nose.

  The sickening crack of bone was followed by a splatter of fetid-smelling blood and the release of his grip.

  The action distracted the other kiang-shi and with a dip of her hip, she tossed him up and over her, earning her freedom.

  With a surge of vamp speed, she edged to one wall of the room and stared at the door across the way from her and Lee who stood in the way. Blood and gore dripped from his one hand as Foley lay at his feet, barely moving but alive. She could still sense the weak pulse of his power, although Lee’s energy was beating against hers violently, making it hard for her to focus her vamp power on anything else.

  Lee seemed amused by her actions and as his bodyguards surged to their feet, intending to imprison her once again, Lee raised one hand and gestured to them to leave her alone.

  He then began to clap, the sound loud and hollow in the large room. He had an amused expression on his face as he approached slowly. “Quite a show, my dear, but you realize that it’s not enough to stop me.”

  She couldn’t argue with him. She didn’t have the strength to stop him, nor did most of the vampires in her group. Possibly only Stacia was strong enough, but after the other night at her apartment, the vampire elder had gone missing.

  Typical. She had gotten the sense from Stacia and the others that Stacia only did what benefited Stacia.

  Meghan realized she was on her own until the cavalry came. If the cavalry ever came.

  As Lee advanced toward her, his eerie crimson glow eating her up, she summoned all her demon power and sent out a call, hoping that someone would be close enough to pick it up.

  The summons was more faint than before, confusing him.

  Blake had thought that she was a short distance away, but this outcry was weak. Very weak. It could only mean one of two things—either Meghan was farther away than he had originally sensed, or she was injured and too powerless to put out a proper distress signal.

  He assumed it was the former because he couldn’t stomach the thought of the latter, no matter how angry he was with her.

  Nearing the hall to the back rooms, he opened himself to determine the origin of the power, but couldn’t sense it there.

  He moved onward, slipping down another hall to Foley’s office, but there was still no one there and the source of the faint call remained uncertain. He cursed beneath his breath and wondered where she was. Where Foley was, for that matter.

  He had seen Foley making his rounds after their talk, but the other vampire had been missing for some time now. That was unusual for him, since he always made a point of keeping his eye on the goings-on in the club.

  Blake pressed onward through a storage area filled with bottles of liquor to a second storeroom that contained a number of refrigerators and freezers. He skipped past the freezers, certain they would hold the food that Foley kept for the bar’s human patrons.

  Opening the door on one of the fridges, he noted the blood bags hanging from a rod. He grabbed a few of the bags,
thinking that if Meghan were injured, she would need to feed. Stuffing the bags into his jacket pockets, he slanted along the edge of the walls, hoping to feel the weak buzz of power once again.

  He finally found a doorway deep in one corner of the room and something pulled at his senses. A smell, rich and exotic, wafting from somewhere nearby.

  It was what he had smelled in the alley when he found the dead vamp, making him wonder if he might be on the right track. What had Meghan said about Foley? he thought, racking his brains and then the bits of conversation came back to him.

  Decay and…cardamom. She had said that Foley smelled like decay and cardamom. He suspected the spice was the source of the unique aroma in the alley. Certain that the smell was the clue to follow, he approached the door.

  It was locked, but with a quick twist of vampire strength, he made short work of the doorknob.

  Beyond the door was a narrow staircase leading downward. What waited for him below? Lee and his kiang-shi? Blake knew that on his own he was no match for them.

  But he was on his own. The others had abandoned him.

  With no choice but to forge ahead alone, he took the first step down the narrow staircase, certain that his life would never be the same.

  He inhaled deeply as he crept down the steps and the spicy smell grew stronger. Then he heard something from far below. The scuff of a footstep? A muted cry?

  Knowing hesitation could mean death, he threw himself down the stairs, landing roughly at the bottom. He pushed forward along a short, narrow hallway until he reached another closed door at the end of the hall.

  Blake grasped the doorknob, prepared to twist it open, but it turned easily beneath his hand. He reached out with his vampire senses but detected only the faintest hint of vampire power.

  He flung open the door.

  A few feet away, Foley lay on the ground in a large pool of blood, his hands feebly trying to keep together the tangle of guts that had oozed out of his abdomen.