Queen of the Night Time World

by Kristen Strassel

  I tried not to flinch when she stood with no regard for my personal space. I did not want to be covered in a stranger’s blood. This outfit was way too cute for that. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “We need to go to Gabriel’s Realm.” I swallowed hard, trying not to inhale. “Tonight.”

  That bitch had the nerve to laugh. “You don’t tell me when I do things, Holly. I told you the other night—now or never. And you weren’t ready.” She rolled her eyes. “I moved on without you.”

  “You did what?” I grabbed her arm, not giving a shit if I got covered in a stranger’s blood or how her eyes glowed red. “How did you get into the Realm?”

  If she stole my power and I didn’t realize it, I was so, so screwed.

  “It’s not your concern how I do anything.” She pulled her arm out of my grip and stepped closer. “We can’t talk about this here. His guys are everywhere. The only reason I drained that donor is so they thought everything was business as usual.”

  “This isn’t about Rainey anymore.” I lowered my voice, having no idea what superpowers Team Gabriel brought with them to Embrace.

  “It never was.” No big surprise there. Rachel scanned the room and shook her head at whatever she saw. The urge to turn around and see for myself was overwhelming, but I wasn’t stupid. Unaware of what we were dealing with, we didn’t need to give them more of head start than they already had.

  “So we’re on the same page.” Words I never thought I’d say. “Stop giving me shit things aren’t my concern. We agree there’s a problem. And I’m willing to help you fix it. If I can put aside what you’ve done to me in the past to save everyone else’s ass, the least you can do is stop being such a bitch.”

  Rachel raised her eyebrows and pressed her lips together. I expected her to launch into me about how stupid and ungrateful I was. It was like dealing with a younger, prettier version of Lucille. I had a lot of experience with this kind of evil.

  “Fine. Let’s go into the office. It’s soundproofed.” It was almost as good as an apology, but I didn’t relax. She could rip me to shreds and no one would know. Blade wouldn’t find me until it was too late.

  “There are portals all over the Alta Vista,” she said once the door was closed.

  “Is that why you sent me to the residence floor that night?” Instead of on a wild goose chase.

  She nodded. “The problem is they only show themselves when they want to be seen. Basically, if Gabriel wants an audience with you. He’s always had an interest in Tristan, and the Sin City Vampire Club show.”

  “Good energy.” Blurring the lines further. “To me, it sounds like he wants to create a mirror of his Realm at the Alta Vista, but he doesn’t care if everything outside the building becomes a barren wasteland.”

  “Everyone will flock to the good energy,” Rachel said, tapping her fingers against the desk. “They’ll pay any amount of money to escape the carnage. To save their own asses.”

  “Is Gabriel an investor of The Afterlife?” I asked.

  “It’s possible.” Rachel grabbed her purse. “And while we’re at it, we need to find out who’s funding Embrace, too.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I did something I swore I’d never do. I followed Rachel. Pride went out the window when survival was at stake, but it didn’t mean I trusted her. She had much more of a plan than I did. I’d take what suited me and have to deal with the consequences of the parts that didn’t. I drove behind her and Josiah on the way to the Alta Vista. That way, she couldn’t change her mind on the drive and leave me somewhere I didn’t belong.

  Seeing her as part of a happy couple was borderline unsettling. She was two completely different people: the giggling girlfriend who stole kisses in the elevator, and the shunned would-be vampire leader hell-bent on destruction. It made her even more dangerous because she hadn’t been consumed by evil, like Blade. It was a choice. I was really, really glad I took my own car.

  Music spilled from Tristan’s penthouse as soon as the elevator doors opened. There was only one stop on this floor, and nowhere else to go. I’d never noticed the piano before. It could’ve been new, or it could’ve always been there, swallowed by the party crowds. So much got lost in the noise every night.

  “Thanks for meeting with us. I know it’s your night off.” Rachel hugged Callie when she came out to greet us. The love didn’t extend to me. From those two, anyway.

  Lennon winked at me from the couch. She wore satin leopard print pajamas and had a book in her lap. All the important women in my life loved books, and I wondered what world Lennon liked to get lost in; where she went to escape. If, like Rainey, it was one of her own creation. More than that, I hoped it was some steamy romance, where the beautiful vampire got a happily ever after. She deserved that.

  “I’ll leave you ladies alone.” She slid a bookmark between the pages and stood.

  “Please, stay.” I ignored the glares of the two vampires standing beside me. Which surprised me, because I didn’t think there were many secrets between Callie and Lennon. “You might know things that we don’t about Embrace.”

  “What does this have to do with Embrace?” Callie wrinkled her nose, and I was surprised to find that there were secrets between Rachel and Callie. “I thought this had to do with the Realms.”

  We hadn’t exactly called in the experts. “It does. We’re interested in who the investors are in Sin City Vampire Club and Embrace. To see if there’s any overlap,” Rachel said.

  “Specifically, Gabriel,” I wasn’t in the mood to mince words. Rainey wasn’t technically in the bullseye anymore, but it didn’t get us out of the danger zone. “I don’t know his last name, or if he’d use a pseudonym.”

  Callie glanced over at Tristan, who’d stopped playing. It was too quiet in here. “Do you know?” she asked.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if he was.” He tapped on the low notes, adding unnecessary drama to his statement. “Both an investor and using a fake name. He introduced himself to me as Gabriel.”

  “I don’t remember him at any of the meetings. Although, it’s a bunch of old guys in suits and none of them take me seriously, so I mostly pay attention to the presentations.” Callie folded her arms in front of her chest. I didn’t envy her. Learning on the job wasn’t an option at the top. She had nowhere to look for guidance, besides Tristan and Rachel. I wouldn’t consider either of them my go-to for business advice.

  “You’d see what you want to see.” I expected the confused looks from every vampire in the room. “That’s how that Realm works. If you expect to see a boring, middle-aged accountant, that’s what he projects. If you expect to see a fallen angel who looks like his band could open for The Afterlife, which is how I see Gabriel, that’s what you’d see, too.”

  “Interesting.” Rachel made a word out of each syllable. “Where did you come up with that theory?”

  “It’s not a theory. Rainey told me.” I was so close to asking, what does Rainey look like to you? But they already thought I wasn’t playing with a full deck. The problem with vampires, especially new ones, was that they’d been human once. A mistrust of magic had been ingrained in them from an early age, and old habits were hard to break. I’d been dealing with it my entire life. “She came to me last night.”

  Rachel narrowed her eyes at me. “When were you going to tell us that?”

  “You said we couldn’t talk at Embrace, and I wasn’t letting that slip within earshot of Gabriel’s guys.” I didn’t back down when she got in my face. Rachel was dying for a fight, and bonus points if I made myself look like a complete asshole in front of the most important vampires in the city.

  Josiah put his hand on her shoulder, and she visibly softened. He was like the antidote to her insanity. “Smart move. Plus, Holly wasn’t there long enough to give any details.”

  “We need to know everything.” Of course, Callie would take Rachel’s side.

  Where to start? I took a deep breath. I didn’t have any wiggle room, n
ot one false word. “Rainey is The Dominia, which is an enforcer. She was sent to keep balance and order in this Realm, and I was the source of volatility.” I ignored the snickers. Either they were laughing with me that I was a hot mess, or at me because it was so plain all along that The Dominia had an agenda, and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

  “Big surprise. It’s all about you.” Rachel rolled her eyes.

  “Because it is,” I said between gritted teeth. She had no idea what she was talking about, and I shouldn’t have bothered to tell her more, since she had no plans of listening to me. “Every time I have an audience with Gabriel, he tells me balance is a lie. Why would he send someone as important as Rainey to do a job she was destined to fail? He either meant to punish her, or he’s got something else up his sleeve.”

  “Or both.” Tristan had joined us in the living room. “He’s been interested in this Realm for as long as I’ve been a vampire. That’s fucking nothing compared to how long you’ve been with Rainey, I get that. But he was right there, telling Talis what to do with the band.”

  “Did she listen?” I asked. It was a moot point now, except to gauge how far we’d veered from his vision.

  Tristan shrugged. “Like I said before, if it didn’t have to do with pussy, I didn’t pay attention.”

  “Such a romantic.” Callie rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t hide her grin. “He’s probably an investor. Let me grab my laptop and we’ll compare notes. Something tells me if he’s using a pseudonym, it’s obvious. Like he wants to get caught.”

  She disappeared down the hall and Rachel and Josiah settled on the couch, too close for comfort, like they forgot they had company. She wasn’t usually this easily distracted, and it was unnerving. Our future literally hung in the balance and she could miss big details because she was too busy sucking face with a bass player.

  Tristan sprawled in a chair; nothing bothered him. Lennon sat beside me on the other end of the sectional and flashed a weary smile. I was ready to jump out of my own skin.

  “Wait a minute,” I said when Callie came back in the room with her computer in hand. “You keep information like that on your laptop?”

  She cracked it open and started clicking. “Yeah. Everyone at the board meetings uses laptops, and I don’t use it for much else. I do most things on my phone. These files were forwarded to me.”

  “Shouldn’t they be on a secure server?”

  “Security took care of everything when I first got instated to the board.” Callie shrugged. “It should be fine.”

  Should be. “Have you had it updated recently?”

  She rolled her eyes. “No.”

  “Wasn’t your old head of security working for Cash?” And either Callie or Rachel killed him for it. But having clan secrets broadcast to parts unknown wasn’t the most alarming part. “What if Cash was working for Gabriel?”

  If I hadn’t proposed the idea, I would’ve been in the chorus of gasps that filled the room. So I kept talking, trying to make sense of it all. “We’ll never know for sure; we have no way to access Cash’s assets. But he had a posse. I didn’t associate much with him, because I was so thrilled I’d found my father I didn’t care about much else. But it kind of makes sense. They were both interested in me—”

  “The balance of the Realm doesn’t hang on a flammable stripper.” Rachel was on point at the first mention of Cash.

  “I didn’t say it did.” The urge to throttle the bitch never went away. “But if Gabriel wanted to dictate the shows that had an air of danger to them, for whatever reason, it would make sense to partner with Cirque Macabre.”

  Tristan shook his head. “That’s what he wants you to think. His headquarters are here, at the Alta Vista.”

  Chapter Twenty

  That time, no one gasped but me. I was the only one not in on the joke. “What do you mean, he’s here?

  “We knew he was here, we just didn’t know what he did. His headquarters are on the twenty-fifth floor.” Which Rachel had directed me to. “There’s no access to it from the rest of the hotel. He’s obviously got carte blanche to do what he wants.”

  “But the beds...” I didn’t imagine that. “When I travelled to see him, there were beds where the casino should’ve been. And there were hundreds of people fucking out in the open. How did I see that, if everything’s tucked away on the twenty-fifth floor?”

  All this time I thought Callie’s intention was to separate me from Rainey, and all along she had me a few floors below her. My head was pounding and none of this made sense.

  “He showed you what you wanted to see, doll.” Lennon grasped my thigh, and I jumped. “If your idea of nirvana is orgy city, that’s what you saw.”

  “So this whole time, Rainey’s been on the twenty-fifth floor?” I was a fool. “Why am I finding this out now?”

  “Because you didn’t ask the right questions. You went off on your own head of steam,” Rachel said. “But it’s not as easy as going there. You know that. She answers to him, and he’s got sway. And the energy exchange breakdown is real. We’re having trouble keeping machines running at Embrace. The computers keep crashing and light bulbs explode at least once a night. Vampires are flocking there from all over, and the need for energy is overwhelming. We’re running out of donors. The next plan is to steal them from places no one will miss them. But after that, what do we do?”

  Sounded like a job all too perfect for Blade. He used to do the same thing so Cash could perform live sacrifices on stage.

  “If we can figure out why Gabriel is hoarding the good energy and put a stop to it...” I wriggled my eyebrows, finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Light that had blonde curls and curves for days. “And then redirect it, we might be able to save the city.”

  Callie clicked her keyboard, twisting her lips. “I’m looking at the master plan map of when this place was built. The twenty-fifth floor isn’t even listed. We take an express elevator up here; I never noticed that.”

  She hadn’t noticed a lot of things, but I couldn’t fault her. I was guilty of it, too. “We’ll have to travel.”

  “How? Can you do that, babe?” Josiah asked me, and Rachel narrowed her eyes at him.

  “I can’t take everyone.” More like, I didn’t know how and I didn’t want to. It was easier when I refused to do it. I wouldn’t let Rachel use me like she used Callie. More like the other way around.

  “I can borrow your power, but I don’t think you’d be able to come, too,” Callie said.

  “Hell no. I’m going. And whoever goes with me damn well tells me what they see there.” There had to be truth somewhere. If we compared notes, we could find it.

  “I can travel,” Lennon said. “I’ll let you borrow my power, doll.” It was jarring to hear her refer to Callie by the pet name she called me.

  “What about Rachel?” Callie asked. “I can only redirect the power. But Rachel can neutralize it.”

  “You mean steal,” I said. Rachel could potentially have as much power as Gabriel. It was a very real possibility. “Rainey left all her spell books behind. I can look through them and see if there’s any spell that deals with sharing powers.”

  I shouldn’t have said that. There was nothing for travelling, because that was the first thing I looked for when I got my hands on her grimoire. And nothing good could come from over-promising anything. Sharing the spells, Rainey’s secrets, with Rachel felt like the ultimate betrayal. Worse than getting lied to for centuries. I wondered if Rainey ever Saw in her visions that the spells she created might ultimately destroy her.

  NO WAY WAS I LETTING Rachel get her bloody mitts on Rainey’s books. Energy was a more powerful magic than held in the texts, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they spontaneously combusted on contact with the wrong person.

  The rising sun burned through the windows when I returned to my apartment. Exhausted and completely overwhelmed, my eyes crossed as I flipped through the pages. The book wasn’t easy to read under the best circumst
ances. The person who wrote this book...wasn’t Rainey. They’d occupied the same physical body, but the foreign phrases and unfamiliar intentions didn’t belong to her. And the vibration was overpowering, like she was trying to whisper instructions in my ear. I wish she’d just come back to me, but she wouldn’t make this easy.

  I smiled as I rubbed my temples, imagining Rainey throwing one of her fits over yet another of my ridiculous ideas. She’d slam down whatever was in her hand, say absolutely not, and then cross her arms while she listened to my reasoning. Eventually, she’d give in. She always did. It made me wonder what side she was really routing for.

  In a little more than a day, everything changed. All I was certain of was that I loved Rainey and I didn’t want my world to plunge into a dark, festering pit of Hell.

  To Call a Lost Witch. That sounded frightening, but Rachel was one powerful bitch, and I had a feeling she’d barely scratched the surface of what she could do. She didn’t have anyone to show her the way. She should’ve been nicer to us, and Rainey would’ve made her the most powerful vampire in the Realm.

  I flipped the page and grinned. To Separate a Witch From Her Powers. I had a plan in place, and wherever Rainey was, she was surely rolling her eyes right now. But it was so crazy, it could work. I made a list of the ingredients I needed on my phone. Some of them were pretty bizarre, like strange eggs and oils I’d never heard of. Rainey had an entire closet filled with rocks, candles, jars and bottles with ancient labels. They were probably no good anymore—or more powerful than ever. It was hard to tell, and I shouldn’t have been messing around in this playground without supervision.

  But it wouldn’t stop me from giving Rachel a taste of her own medicine. Straight, no chaser. In my excitement, I knocked my hand into a jar and the entire row went down like dominoes. With my luck, they’d mix together and...

  The apocalypse was already underway. Nothing could be worse than that.