by Harper Allen
Suddenly it all seemed wrong to me—the shimmering perfection of the men on stage, the fever-pitch of desire in the audience, the cluster of waiters standing at the back of the room as if waiting for a signal. A staccato drumroll came over the sound system, a brilliant white spotlight illuminated the curtained entrance to the stage, and a woman dressed in a scanty version of a circus ringmaster’s costume walked into the spotlight, her hair rippling like living fire down her back.
At the same time, Van entered the room. As I saw his gaze sweep over the men on stage and then harden on the red-haired mistress of ceremonies, I knew my oboroten’s absence had just dropped to second place on his list of problems.
“Are we all here for good time, ladies?” Zena purred, giving the whip in her hand a playful crack! Despite the pane of glass between us, I could hear her perfectly thanks to the audio feed piped into the office. The speakers on the desk in front of me almost vibrated off as the audience’s roar of agreement surged through them, and Zena’s red lips curved cruelly. “Then let games begin!” she screamed as the pulsing beat of a rap song began booming over the sound system and the vamp strippers began to leap off the stage into the crowd.
At that point the action went split-screen. Since I wasn’t watching a movie and the events unfolding in front of me were all happening at once in a jumble of lights and bodies and movement, when I think back on that night all I see in my mind are a handful of images ripped from a larger, confusing scene. My gaze instinctively sought out Kat and I saw a flash of ice-blue move swiftly through the press of laughing women. Relief flooded me as I realized she’d recognized the strippers as vamps, even if those around her didn’t realize the danger they were in. Then my breath caught in my throat as I glimpsed Mandy Broyhill, still waving her bills in the air, leap onto a nearly naked vamp. The next moment one of her posse, a mousy-looking blond woman, wrenched Mandy off her prize and triumphantly ran her hands over the stripper’s carved abs.
I saw the vamp’s fangs lengthen. From her ignominous position on the floor where she’d fallen, Mandy’s furious expression froze and I guessed she’d glimpsed his metamorphosis, too. But the mousy blonde, unaware that the buff body she was caressing belonged to an undead creep, squealed in excitement as the stripper lowered his mouth to her neck.
Then Kat was upon him, pushing the blonde aside. Her stake sliced through the air as the snarling vampyr turned to attack her, her unerring aim plunging the yew-wood blade through his oiled pec into his heart. Kat swayed, but held her stake steady as the vampire, chiseled jaw and all, disintegrated.
“Dammit, Kat, don’t stand there waiting around for him to dust!” I tried to get closer to the window but the cuff yanked me back. “Stake in, stake out, and get ready for the next—”
As if my warning had reached her, she whirled around just in time to nail the vamp coming at her from behind. I caught a glimpse of her white face before my attention was diverted.
“Omigod, it wasn’t the Mai Tais!” Mandy bent down and wrenched off one of her shoes before facing a vampire who was attempting to seize her. As his fangs lengthened she dodged out of his way, her expression a mixture of fury and unwilling comprehension. “I did see what I just thought I saw! You’re a…you’re a…” She swallowed. Then her chin jutted out and she reared back like a Yankee pitcher and slammed her shoe against his chest. I shook my head in mingled admiration and dread.
“Kitten heels, Broyhill. Not only a cop-out fashion choice, but totally not long enough to pierce the heart,” I muttered tensely. “You should have gone with stilettos this evening.”
“Heads up, ladies, party favors coming down! Grab some and protect yourselves!”
The shrill cry cut through the pandemonium that now filled the Hot Box. I looked in the direction of the voice and saw Tash standing by the entrance to the room, her upraised arm jerking a rope that snaked up the wall to the ceiling. The net above parted and the gaily-colored balloons it had been tethering began floating down upon the crowd…along with a rain of more solid objects clattering floorward—stakes, garlic and crosses. A stake fell on the table beside Mandy just as the vamp she’d tried to dust came for her and I saw her lunge desperately for it. She retrieved it, turned to the vamp, and drove Tash’s party-favor stake hard into his chest.
From my own experience with Dean, I know there’s nothing like a girl’s first successful staking to sweep the final shreds of doubt from her mind. Mandy stared down at the pile of dust at her feet before whirling to the rest of her dumbfounded posse. “What are you all standing around for? Grab a stake!” she screamed. “And if I see anyone shirking, you’ll never eat lunch in this town again!”
Whether galvanized into action by Mandy’s threat or by their own sense of self-preservation, women all over the room started scrambling for the party favors my sister had supplied. Tash herself began laying about her with a will, her technique enthusiastic, if not as polished as Kat’s. The brat was doing her best, I thought, swallowing past the sudden lump of love and fear in my throat. Her party-favor idea had been sheer genius, but it was all too obvious she wasn’t a Daughter of Lilith. That title belonged to Kat, who never missed, never underestimated her opponents and who was even now dealing yet another of Zena’s Chippendale-wannabes a death blow.
I spared a glance at the fiery-haired queen vampyr, who was watching the action from her vantage point on the stage. She didn’t seem worried that several of her undead boy-toys had fallen in action, I noted with a stab of suspicion.
“Granddaughter!”
Darkheart’s cry of alarm broke into my worries about Zena. Kat was staggering backwards from the vampire she’d just staked as if she, not he, were the one who’d been dealt a mortal blow. Only Darkheart’s steadying arm around her shoulders kept her from losing her balance. I waited for Kat to recover, but instead she did something that turned my blood to ice.
Raising our mother’s stake high above her head, she flung it violently from her. It went flying over the crowd and hit the far wall where it splintered and broke before falling in two useless pieces onto the floor.
She collapsed into Darkheart’s arms, her eyelids fluttering closed. On the stage, Zena began screaming with laughter. And looking down on them all, I was suddenly filled with a numbing sense of shock.
By doing what no Daughter would do—destroying her stake and retreating from the fight—Kat had just proved she hadn’t inherited our mother’s title. Tash was barely holding her own. That left only one Crosse triplet who could kill vamps with a cold and efficient zeal, who felt a savage satisfaction in battle, and who was capable of going up against Zena.
I was that triplet. And I was handcuffed to half a ton of iron, with no possibility of escape.
Mikhail, I need you! The cry reverberated through my mind with the intensity of a scream as I struggled against the steel band that encircled my wrist. A wave of nausea hit me as one of my frenzied attempts came close to dislocating my left shoulder, and again I silently screamed out the psychic call—not to the man I’d fallen in love with and who had the key to the cuffs that held me, but to the shape-shifter I’d sent from my life. In desperation I bent my head and began gnawing at my wrist, hoping the slickness of my own blood would help the cuff slide free. In the part of my brain that wasn’t maddened with desperation, I knew that calling to Mikhail instead of Van didn’t make any sense.
“But neither does the fact that I’m both a vamp and the only female in this generation of my family who got some of Mom’s abilities, even though the vampness will eventually win out,” I muttered, one foot braced against the heavy bulk of the old-fashioned safe as I strained to drag my hand free. Steel slid through blood and then jammed against the trapezium bone below the first knuckle of my thumb. “And that could happen at any moment. I’m showing all the symptoms, including my inability to enter the house without an invitation. There’s just no other way to explain the changes in me.”
“I always knew we’d find something to agree on.�
� I jerked my head around to see Mikhail standing in the doorway, the partially open door obscuring his full view of me. His eyes took on a sudden lupine light. “I smell blood.”
He stepped into the room and stopped dead. Then he was at my side and shrugging out of his shirt. “Who did this to you?” he asked tightly, tearing a strip of fabric and pressing it to my ragged flesh. Instantly the white material became crimson.
“I did it to myself. I don’t have time to explain everything, but Van cuffed me at my request and now I have to get free.” I ripped off the bandage he’d just applied and leveled a flat stare at him. “I need you to kiss me.”
From his harsh intake of breath I knew he understood what was behind my request. “You wouldn’t have put yourself in this position unless you knew you were about to turn. Do you really think all you have to do is ask and I’ll set you free?”
I glanced with barely concealed impatience at the fight taking place below and then met his eyes again. “You kiss me while you begin to shape-shift. I start turning into a wolf with you, and as soon as you hear the cuff fall from my foreleg you reverse the shift and we’re human again. Yes, I think you’d do that for me.” I took a breath. “Even though there’s no longer a bond between us.”
His expression unreadable, he took me into his arms. “You broke the one that tied me to you as your oboroten, but what happened between us last night forged a new chain for me.”
“What happened between us last night was that we had incredible sex. Neither one of us saw it as a commitment.” I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth but I didn’t have time to rephrase them. I lifted my face for his kiss, relieved he wasn’t fighting me on this, at least.
“That’s all you saw it as, us having sex?” Mikhail’s hold on me tightened as if I’d just confirmed a suspicion he’d harbored for a long time. “Most of what I sensed about you the night we met was right, sweetheart. I smelled danger and pain coming off you so thickly it was as if you were surrounded by a icy fog…and at the center of that fog was an even icier core. But I made two mistakes.”
His mouth opened on mine. His lashes swept down, shuttering the gold of his eyes, and his tongue moved slowly inside me before he eased back, his breath warm on my lips. “I thought the coldness I sensed in you meant you bore Zena’s mark. I forgot that there’s one being even colder than a vampire.”
I needed to fight, I thought. Why couldn’t dual shape-shifting be a simple wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am affair instead of all this soul-sharing and intimacy? Frustration made my tone curt. “What could be colder than a vamp?”
“The Daughter who lives to kill them,” he said, his mouth moving to mine again. “You.”
This time he kissed me without holding back. Immediately I felt the wildness spilling from him into me, the powerful sensations of the shift mingling with the shock of his impossible statement. As if from a long way away I heard the clang of metal against metal. An agonizing pain lanced through me and I guessed we were reversing the change we’d half completed.
Then it was over. Mikhail’s mouth lifted from mine and involuntarily I glanced through the window at the scene below, my undamaged right hand already retrieving my stake from inside the front of my dress. I turned to him. “I’m not the Daughter, Mikhail. After arguing away all the other evidence for me being a vamp I’m still left with the fact that I couldn’t enter the house tonight. I hate knowing that I carry Zena’s mark, but since I do, I’ll use its darkness against her and her kind while I can. Let’s go.”
“I can do more damage in wolf form. I’ll join you as soon as I’ve shifted.” He looked at me, his gaze molten. “Take care the darkness doesn’t turn on you,” he added.
But I was already out the door.
Chapter 18
I love the smell of vamp-dust in the morning. After my near-shape-shift with Mikhail, my senses were still wolfishly heightened as I strode onto the Hot Box floor. I stood for a moment, feeling a Zenlike calm settle over me—which was ironic, since the situation around me was anything but.
Zena was no longer on the stage. Hoping to glimpse her, I saw instead a ferocious-looking female climb out from underneath a table, a stake in either hand and her face smeared with grime. Her outfit consisted of a string of matched pearls around her neck, a silk blouse and a pink Chanel jacket. From her waist down all she had on were a pair of beige pantyhose and kitten-heeled shoes.
“Mandy?” I murmured disbelievingly. The reason for her no-skirt look became obvious as she ran from one table to the next.
“Now I’ve seen everything,” I said under my breath, averting my gaze to the rest of the room. Overturned tables and chairs were everywhere and the floor was a minefield of broken glass, popped balloons, and fruit slices from spilled cocktails. Burly vamps had taken up positions at the exits, but instead of the usual bouncer duty of removing troublemakers from the room, they were obviously there to prevent anyone from leaving.
The confused free-for-all I’d witnessed from upstairs had evolved into several pitched battles. One was taking place in the bar area where Kat had fallen, and my breath caught in my throat as I saw Van grappling so closely with a vamp that the two of them looked as if they were engaged in a grim dance. Even as I started forward, Van made a sudden move. The next moment his dance partner was dust and no longer blocking my view.
“God, no!” As I whispered the automatic words of denial my heart contracted. The prone figure of Kat was laid out on the bar’s marble-topped counter, looking like a body on a mortuary slab. Then I saw Liz Dixon at the bar sink wringing out a damp towel. She handed it to Darkheart, who placed it on Kat’s forehead before reaching for her wrist and glancing at the bar clock on the wall beside him.
I let out a relieved breath. The fact that Kat was still unconscious was worrying, but Darkheart and Liz were monitoring her condition and Van was providing protection. As hard as it was to take my attention from her, I needed to assess the situation in the rest of the room.
The Maplesburg contingent were holding their own so far, judging from the scattered piles of vamp-ash I could see. Not only were the thirty or so vamps in the room heavily outnumbered, but Tash’s stake-drop had obviously caught them off-balance by arming the women they’d assumed would be easy prey. Some of Zena’s boys had adjusted their tactics, however. Like jackals hanging around an antelope herd, they kept to the fringes of the crowd and watched for any woman standing alone.
Which was why I hadn’t jumped into the fray as soon as I’d stepped into the room. Even before I’d seen Mandy, I’d glimpsed the five gorgeous hunks heading purposefully my way and had decided that if they wanted to save me the trouble of hunting them down individually, I’d let them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw them move apart with the obvious intention of surrounding me when they were close enough and I quickly dropped my gaze, hoping I looked like a woman paralysed with terror instead of one who was about to seriously turn the tables on their planned clustersuck of me.
My terrified act was convincing enough to fool Zena’s boy-toys. Unfortunately, it also fooled Tash.
I’d been holding my stake so that it was concealed from the approaching vamps. As I discreetly adjusted my grip and felt the leather-and-ivory handle snug into my palm, through my lowered lashes I saw a blur of apricot swing over the heads of the crowd.
“Don’t worry, Meg, I’m coming!” Tash yelled as the rope I’d seen her pull earlier to release the balloons arced closer, with her clinging to it. “Your asses are totally mine!” she added to the five undead strippers.
Okay, how do I put this in a nice way? It would be bitchy to suggest that Tash looked like an Escada-clad Tarzan as she sailed through the air on her vine, I mean, rope. So I’ll just say that I wondered what Darkheart had been thinking when he’d devoted hours of practice to teaching my sister the finer points of rope-swinging and back-flips, when what vamp-killing came down to was facing and staking the bastards. Which was what I’d been about to do before Tash threw me off m
y game, I might add.
The vamp nearest me had surfer-boy good looks enhanced by the glamyr he was projecting. His Malibu-blue gaze traveled over me in a way that was supposed to distract me with thoughts of him and me doing it on a beach, and to make sure I didn’t miss his point he slowly licked his lips. Since, in my experience, beach sex makes about as much sense as handing your partner a sandpaper condom, I decided instead to take surfer-vamp’s lip-licking as a sign that he wanted to be the first in line to taste my stake.
I started to oblige him, and of course, Tash chose that exact moment to let go of her rope.
I was halfway into my lunge at the vamp, my upper arm and shoulder locked and my backhand thrust already slicing my fisted weapon toward him, when she landed between us. I had an instant’s glimpse of her startled face and an even briefer glimpse of surfer-vamp’s as he saw the unexpected get-out-of-Hell-free card fate had just dropped on him. Pulling her to him, he aimed his fangs at her neck as she tried to shove him away. I didn’t have time to think, so I just acted.
Tash’s yell of pain mingled with surfer-vamp’s scream of rage as my stake sliced through the web of skin between her thumb and her outspread hand and buried itself in his heart. A thrill of satisfaction rushed through me with the same icy heat as a shot of vodka. In one smooth motion I wrenched my stake free from both the now-disintegrating vamp and Tash’s hand, and pivoted instantly to impale it in the chest of my next target. I was in the zone now, my mind filled with a cold clarity that shut out all distractions and focused only on the essentials—like the fact that a snarling black-and-silver wolf had just taken down one of the two nearest vampires. “Thanks, Mikhail,” I murmured, turning my full attention to the other vamp. “Stay out of my way, Tash,” I added in the same detached tone as I stiff-armed her aside and drove my stake into my current target.
