by June Stevens
I laughed and rolled my eyes. “For you it’s the same thing. Both of you.”
Jarrett nodded, and Fiona laughed and said, “You aren’t wrong, sister. So, Jarrett, are you in?”
“Lead on, my friend,” he said. Halfway to the door he stopped, came back and kissed me until my blood hummed. “I’ll see you later,” he whispered in my ear, turned, and followed Fiona out.
Once they were gone, River went up to the roof to work in her garden, Farrah and Pinky went in the kitchen to clean up the dinner dishes, and I started preparing to open the pub for the night’s business. Shortly before opening time, the door swung open. I turned to tell whoever it was they’d have to come back and came face-to-face with a tall, muscular man with dark, creamy skin.
“Luca, hi,” I greeted with a smile. “What are you doing here so early?”
“I just wanted to stop by and make sure your leg was doing okay. No pain or weakness?”
I hopped up and down on the leg in question. “Nope. It’s as good as new.”
“Why would your leg have pain and weakness?” Pinky’s voice sounded from behind me.
Damn vampire hearing.
I sighed and Luca grimaced.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said. Then I turned to Pinky and explained what had happened the night before. I hadn’t wanted to tell him, but I wasn’t going to lie now that he knew something was up.
I could see the silent fury in his eyes, but his voice was calm and steady when he asked Luca what the injury had been and how severe.
Luca explained about the tear and how he’d healed it. Then, at Pinky’s insistence, he checked it out again, just to make sure it was healed completely and properly. Once he’d pronounced my leg in perfect shape, he said he had to head to work and left.
The door swung shut behind him, and Pinky rounded on me.
“Damn it, Anya, we’ve discussed this.” He slammed his hand down on the bar to punctuate his words, and I was surprised it didn’t shatter. “I know you are a big girl and you can take care of yourself, but you take risks. Yes, you are an amazing fighter, but you are reckless. You were lucky it was just a torn muscle last night. One wrong move, one wrong twist or bad landing and you are either paralyzed or worse. You are strong, but your body is fragile. I wouldn’t object to you participating in the fights at Pete’s if you didn’t take so many fool chances.”
I stood there quietly for a long moment, letting him say his piece and let out his frustration, and then I said, “I know. You’re right on every count. But you don’t have to worry. I think I’m going to be fighting a lot less in the future.”
He stared at me open mouthed. “You actually sounded like you meant that. Did you finally get hurt bad enough last night to scare you?”
“Actually, no,” I answered truthfully. “After I was healed, Jarrett and I had a long talk about why I fight. And I told him about my life before you found me.”
“I’ve never known you to talk about that with anyone,” Pinky said, his expression softening.
“I haven’t. But doing so made me realize that I sometimes push boundaries when I’m fighting just to prove to myself that I can take care of myself no matter what. That no one will ever have the power to hurt me without me hurting them worse.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Pinky said, his voice sad. “I always guessed it was something like that, but I had no idea how to make you see it. I just hoped you would come to it on your own.”
I smiled at him. “I did, with Jarrett’s help. And I know I’ve said this before, but I really mean it this time. I’m not going to promise to stop fighting, because, let’s face it, I like it. It’s fun. But I really will be smarter about the opponents I choose and stop taking crazy risks.”
“If Jarrett got you to say all that and really mean it, I might need to give that man a kiss.”
“Don’t even think about it,” I said, laughing.
He gave me a pleading look. “Not even a little peck? He looks like he’d be an excellent kisser.”
“He is, and he’s off limits,” I said, unnecessarily. Pinky’s sexual appetites might be fluid, but he never hit on a man that he didn’t know would appreciate his advances, and he would never make a move on someone one of us was involved with.
He gave an over-blown sigh. “Oh, okay. I guess I’ll just have to do with a hug from my favorite middle daughter.”
“Gladly,” I said, letting him pull me into a warm, tight embrace.
After a long moment, he pulled away. “Okay, enough of that. We open the doors to the thirsty hordes in twenty minutes. Let’s finish getting set up.”
“Okay, boss,” I said and went back to stacking glasses behind the bar.
“So, what’s the plan?” Jarrett asked.
He and Fiona had left Pinky’s Pub and were strolling through the early evening crowd on Broadway towards the docks.
“We’re going to have a couple of drinks,” she told him.
He shot her a sideways look. “I’m going to take a wild guess that you didn’t fake that call and aren’t trying to sneak away from Ian for a few hours. And I know we aren’t off to have an illicit tryst. So, care to let loose a little more info?”
“Wow, you’re quick on your feet.” She muttered a couple of words that Jarrett knew were a spell that would keep anyone near them from overhearing their conversation.
“As I said, surveillance. There’s a new drug floating around. There have been two deaths in as many weeks. As far as we can tell it isn’t wide spread, yet. I have an informant who bartends at a dive bar down by the docks. A friend told him he had a line on where he could get his hands on a top-notch high. And he knew the guy was looking for local dealers.”
“Your informant is a dealer? I thought you guys were pretty good at keeping a lid on the illegal drug market inside the city.”
“We are. He got busted for selling Juice a while back.”
Jarrett made a face and shivered. “Uck. Shifter blood. That is nasty shit, but not illegal to use.”
“No, but it’s illegal to sell if it isn’t your own blood. Mostly to deter people from kidnapping shifters and draining them dry,” she said. “You know, you drink blood to live, how can you cringe at shifter blood?”
“Because, I got some by accident once. I was sick for a week. It might make mages and norms stronger and hyped up for a while, but it’s the only thing I know of that can make a vampire vomit. I hadn’t felt so bad since I had a stomach virus when I was a young boy.” Jarrett said, the memory making him a little queasy.
“Anyway, my guy tells his buddy he’s looking to make a little extra cash and asks if he can hook him up. When the buddy told him the distributor is giving away the first batch to new dealers, my guy knew something was off and called me.”
“Giving away product isn’t very profitable,” Jarrett said. “I don’t blame the guy for thinking something smelled funny. Why do you suppose someone is giving away free drugs?”
“Like I said, it’s a dive. It caters to dock workers and sailors. Not exactly a sucker hangout, but bloodsucking and drug use is overlooked. If I were a drug manufacturer and wanted to test my product, somewhere like that would be the perfect laboratory.”
“And apparently it’s not the first testing field.”
“No. Both deaths have been in similar bars around the city. The first one we didn’t catch as a drug death. There were elements of vampire saliva in the blood, but no recent bite marks. The same thing was found in the second death, but this time the boy had never been bitten. No scars. And his friend said he drank a vial of something someone had given him a little while before he freaked out and started throwing chairs, and then had a heart attack. His friends didn’t know who gave him the vial.” Fiona said, keeping her voice low as they walked.
“A drug made with vampire saliva? Could that be possible?” Jarrett asked, incredulous.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s one of the many things we
need to find out. My informant, Carl, had his buddy set up a meeting with the distributor. He’s supposed to get a sample of the goods to see if he wants to deal them in his bar.”
“So no full deal going down? You can’t arrest on a sample,” Jarrett said.
She shot him a grin. “We aren’t arresting, we’re observing. The meet will go down in public, and then we’ll trail the guy and see what we can find out. The main objective is getting a sample to analyze. If possible, trace the guy back to his base of operations. But the key is observation. We can’t make any arrests until whatever he is selling can be analyzed and classified as an illegal drug. To do that, we have to connect that drug to the substance found in our two victims.”
“Got it. So, we’re just a couple out on the town?” He looked down at his clothes, and then over at Fiona’s. They were dressed nearly identically in black leather pants and vests, and combat boots. The only difference was their shirts. “Are we going to be able to pull that off?”
“At the bar we’re going to, yeah. But, just in case, let me make an adjustment,” she said.
As they walked, she pulled the drawstring out of her tunic and tugged the fabric so that it fell down, baring the tops of her shoulders. With another tug, the material just barely peeked out of the top of her tight leather vest, revealing an ample amount of cleavage. Then she took the ribbon out of the end of her braid and ran her fingers through her hair, shaking out the long, dark locks.
She stopped and turned to him, hands on her hips. “What do you think?”
He ran his gaze over her; she was definitely a knockout, even dressed to kick ass. With her hair wild and her cleavage popping out, she could make almost any man’s mouth water. “I think if Ian could see you right now, he’d try to kick my ass.”
She laughed. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said and resumed walking.
They walked over the bridge and to an area on the opposite side of the bridge from the market and Pete’s Fight House. The area was full of warehouses and small, dirty buildings and sat between the land dedicated to the docking platforms and the docks. It wasn’t the most desirable location in the city.
“We’re here,” Fiona said.
She pointed to a small, squat building between a busy warehouse and a rowdy fight house. It was dirty and looked as if it hadn’t been painted in a quarter century. The shabby sign on the door read ‘Wet Willy’s Bar.’
Jarrett let out a snort of laughter. “Wet Willy? Seriously?”
Fiona gave him a curious look. “What is so funny?”
“Wet Willy,” he laughed. “There are too many jokes to choose just one.”
She stared at him blankly.
He let out a sigh as his laughter faded. “And I guess every one of them is a couple of centuries past your time. Way to make me feel old, Moon.”
“Hey, don’t get mad at me because you’re ancient,” she teased. “So, you ready to go have a drink and pretend to be a couple having a good time?”
“Yeah, I suddenly need a whiskey or two,” he grumbled.
Fiona said the words to lift the no-speak spell, laughed, and slid her arm around his waist, slipping into character. “Come on, old man… I mean, sweetheart.”
The inside of the bar was as shabby as the outside, yet surprisingly clean. Jarrett and Fiona ordered a couple of drinks from Carl the Bartender and found a table in a far corner that gave them a good view of both the door and the bar.
A band played in the opposite corner, filling the smoky room with twangy music reminiscent of what could have been heard in the city long before the Cataclysm. Despite the loud music, Fiona and Jarrett were careful to keep their conversation light and flirty, like that of a couple out on a date. Even in a noisy bar, vampire hearing was excellent, and using a no-speak spell would be obvious and suspicious. It was safer not to discuss the case. Fortunately, Jarrett and Fiona had worked together in similar situations before and had no problem getting into their roles, even without any preparation.
To the casual observer, they appeared to be a couple that was in lust, if not love, and completely absorbed in each other. In reality, they were both on high alert. Very little happened in the bar that they did not take note of, which is why Jarrett noticed the all too familiar man the moment he walked through the door.
Jarrett was leaning into Fiona, as if whispering something naughty in her ear, when the bar’s door opened and three people walked in. Two walked to a table and sat down; the third, a tall, bald man, went to the bar.
The moment he had a clear view of the man, Jarrett’s blood went ice cold.
“Python,” Jarrett muttered, leaning back into his seat. His whole body on high alert. This wasn’t possible. Not possible. And if it were, did that mean…?
“What?” Fiona asked, breaking into Jarrett’s thoughts.
Jarrett motioned slightly with his head. “Over there. Talking to the bartender. His name is Python.”
Fiona looked over in that direction. “The scary looking bald dude with all the tattoos?”
“One tattoo. It’s a python. It stretches over both arms, his head, and wraps around his chest and back.”
“I’m guessing that’s how he got his name. Creative. You guys old friends?”
“Not exactly,” Jarrett grumbled. He strained to hear what was being said, but they were too far from the bar and the music was just loud enough for their words to be muffled, even for his vampiric hearing. As Jarrett was trying to figure out how to get closer without being seen, Python finished his conversation, turned, and went out the door.
Jarrett slid out of the booth and hurried after Python, not waiting to make sure Fiona followed. He wasn’t letting Python get away. The man had answers Jarrett needed.
He burst out the door into the dark night and saw his target only a few yards away. Jarrett reached him in seconds, grabbing his shoulder and pulling him around to smash a hard fist into his face. Dazed, Python crashed back against the building wall and Jarrett was on him in an instant. He shoved one arm against Python’s throat. With the other hand he grabbed the dagger he wore at his waist and shoved it against Python’s ribcage.
Staring into the eyes of a man who should be dead, he growled, “Where is she, Python?”
Jarrett saw the recognition in Python’s eyes, but the other man pretended ignorance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate.”
“Cora. Where is she? If you made it out of that sea alive, she did too.”
This time Python let out a snort and smirked. “You’d think so since she wasn’t the one with the knife in her heart. Well, perilously close to the heart. I should thank you for having such lousy aim, mate.”
Jarrett pressed the tip of his dagger into Python’s skin, tearing his shirt. “I won’t miss this time. Now, don’t make me ask again. Where’s Cora?”
“Dead. I pulled her from the sea, but she’d broken her neck and drowned. So I tossed her back in.”
Jarrett couldn’t read the man’s expression, couldn’t tell from his mocking tone if he was telling the truth. But something in his gut told him Python was lying.
“I don’t believe you,” Jarrett growled.
Python’s eyes hardened. “I don’t give a furry fuck what you believe, mate.”
Before Jarrett could react, he heard Fiona’s voice, “What the hell is going on here? Break it up.”
She grabbed his arm and pulled his dagger hand away from Python. Python took advantage of the moment and put a fist into Jarrett’s midsection. He stumbled back, his knife clattering to the ground. Furious, he ran at Python, taking them both to the ground.
In the background, Jarrett could vaguely hear Fiona’s voice. She was screaming something, but he couldn’t make out the words. He was too intent on beating the hell out of Python. They rolled on the ground, exchanging punches until Jarrett felt a warm burst of energy that had him flying backward and landing on his back several feet away from Python. He looked over at Fiona and knew she’d used mag
ic on them.
He stumbled to his feet, as Python did the same. Python pulled a dagger from his boot as he rose and threw it, but he was staggering and his aim was off. Instead of hitting Jarrett, the knife veered well to the left and grazed Fiona’s arm, leaving a long, thin slice in its wake.
“Son of a bitch,” Fiona screamed, shaking her arm. Then she raised both hands and sent out bursts of energy that sent both men flying into the building.
She pulled a six-inch-long, thin oak stick from inside her vest. Jarrett knew she carried it to help focus her power when she couldn’t carry her hanbo. She pointed the stick at them, alternating between them. “That is enough! You are both pending arrest under my authority as an agent of the Black Blade Guard. If either of you moves, the blast I just gave you will feel like a tickle compared to the next one.”
“You can’t arrest me,” Jarrett said, struggling to stand. Some of his fury had been knocked out of him, and he was starting to realize what a colossal mistake he’d just made.
“You wanna watch me?” She asked, narrowing her eyes at him and pointing the stick at him threateningly until he slid back down into a sitting position.
He’d never seen her quite so angry, at least not directed at him. Though he really didn’t believe she had the authority to arrest him—he did outrank her—he felt it was probably best not to test the theory right now.
She gave him one last look, daring him to move, and then walked over to Python.
“Mr… Python, was it?”
Python grunted. “Yeah, that’s my name, what’s it to ya, Blade?”
Fiona grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him up, slamming him against the building much like Jarrett had done moments before. She poked the stick under his chin. “Manners. I’m being polite to you, you be polite to me, got it?”
“Yeah, sure. My name is Python, ma’am,” he sneered the last word.
Fiona smirked. “A little better.” She patted him down, throwing away a dagger from his waist and one in his boot. “Now, can you tell me what happened?”
Python’s expression took on a false innocence. “I was minding my own business when he attacked me. I had to protect myself.”
