by Sierra Dean
“There’s…” He paused, uncertain whether he ought to go on or if it was better to eat one of his own bullets. “There’s a bar. In Hell’s Kitchen. It’s called The Dirt Hog. I don’t know how many of them are still there, but that’s where they set up shop.”
“How many were there to start with?” I asked.
“Twenty-two.”
Twenty-fucking-two?
I didn’t know there were that many active necros alive in the world, let alone clustered together in one group. No wonder they’d been able to raise so many dead. I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to collect my thoughts.
“Guess there are only twenty-one now.” I sneered at Jock’s body, wanting to empty a few more clips into him. “Like to see him raise the dead now.” I spit on the concrete near his feet.
“All right, kid. Thanks.” Holden glanced at me, about to say something, and then—
Bang.
The young man fell next to the others.
I faced the rest of the group and lowered my weapon, the muzzle still smoking.
“From here on out, there’s no fucking mercy.”
Chapter Eleven
Our group settled in to grim silence as we left Chelsea.
O’Brian, who had remained remarkably calm during the entire confrontation, was the first person to speak up. “In all my goddamn years, I ain’t never seen a damn thing like this.” He shook his head in sad disbelief. “When did we become cops who did nothin’ while people get shot?”
Mercedes must have known I wasn’t in any mood to comfort him or answer questions, so she replied, “There wasn’t anything we could have done. It’s not like they would have recognized or respected our authority.”
“But we just stood there. We didn’t help. We just…we stood there.”
“If we’d fired first, more people would have died,” Tyler added. “It wasn’t a fair fight.”
It still wasn’t.
With twenty-one necromancers scattered throughout the city, I was beginning to think we were on the losing end of an unfair battle. They were mortal enough, I’d proven as much, but once they figured out I was coming for them, they would rally their troops. Things were going to get tough very quickly.
It was hard for me to think about fighting, when it all felt terribly pointless. While I knew, deep down, I would do whatever it took to protect my city, I was also seeing my worst fears realized.
I hadn’t wanted to involve my loved ones in dangerous situations because I didn’t want them to share my risk. The life I’d chosen to lead was not an easy one, and I didn’t want to risk losing the people I cared about if they became collateral damage. Slowly I’d begun to let them help. I’d allowed people in where before I would have fought alone.
Tonight, I was reminded why I’d chosen the lonely path to begin with. Keaty was dead, and it was my fault. He might have agreed to come along of his own free will, but I was the one who had put him in harm’s way, and without me, he’d still be safe in his brownstone.
I ruined lives.
The distance from Chelsea to Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t far, but we had already spent hours that night wandering from one end of the city to the other. Though New York was a pedestrian city by nature, it didn’t mean we weren’t starting to feel the exertion. My feet were sore, and I didn’t need to check the time to know we were running out of nighttime hours. I should have directed everyone to my small apartment where we could wait out the night in relative security.
The apartment was safeguarded by a number of supernatural elements, and though it wasn’t a perfect system, it would definitely keep the risen at bay. But we still had at least an hour before I had to get really worried, and the Dirt Hog Roadhouse was a mere three blocks from my house. I’d passed it before in my walks through the city and never gave it much thought.
Now it was the only thing on my mind.
Finding it turned out to not be such a difficult task at all.
We rounded the corner onto 8th Street, where the bar was located, and I stopped dead, forcing everyone behind me to halt as well. In the middle of 8th was a massive grouping of Harley Davidson motorcycles, all parked in tidy lines with their chrome accents glimmering in the light of a nearby fire.
These bikes were in such perfect condition it was clear no one had touched them during the exodus from the city or the following descent into lawlessness. Which suggested to me the folks who owned these bikes were more frightening than the other criminal elements within the city, and that meant one thing.
Necro biker gang.
I thought of Jock’s leather, and it occurred to me I hadn’t paid too much attention to it. Was he wearing colors—a sign of his gang affiliation? He might have been, but I hadn’t noticed.
As we got closer I noticed each of the bikes was marked with the Jolly Roger, a skull and crossbones. From within the bar across the street, the sound of a rowdy party echoed out into the otherwise-silent night. The lights of the roadhouse were off, but the shifting orange of fire suggested they’d found another source of illumination for their festivities.
At hearing the fun they were having, my anger returned to a rolling boil.
Who were these assholes, to be in the throes of a wild night of drinking and bad behavior, when one of their own had stolen someone precious to me? I ached to claim one of the automatic weapons we had in our possession and perforate the bar with bullet holes. But I was also a pragmatist. I needed someone in this bar to tell me where the other necros were. There was no way all twenty-one of my remaining targets were inside like sitting ducks.
“Are we planning on going in there?” Tyler asked.
“Did you have a better idea?” I checked the clip of my gun to see how many bullets I had left.
“I do,” Reggie suggested. “How about not going in there?”
“You losing your nerve?” I kept my weapon out, knowing there was no sense in holstering it if I was going into the lion’s den. “I never thought I’d see a vampire who was afraid of a few humans.”
“If I wasn’t afraid of humans who could do this, I wouldn’t be very smart.” He indicated the mess around us, and I had to give him props for standing up for himself. He was right, this was the kind of messed-up situation where even the undead like Reggie, Clementine and Holden ought to be worried.
These bikers wielded a great deal of power, and that wasn’t something to mess with.
“Have you been here before?” I turned my attention to O’Brian, not wanting to debate the merits of courage versus cowardice with Reggie.
“Been a long time since I had to go out on calls, but I remember the place a little.” He scratched his mustache, something I was coming to recognize as a tick to soothe his nerves.
“Can you, Cedes and Nolan go around back? I’m assuming there’s a back?”
“There is.”
“Keep an eye on the exit. I don’t expect these guys to make a break for it. They seem more like a stand-your-ground lot to me. But who knows?”
“And if they try to run?”
I raised an eyebrow at him. He knew what I was going to say, because I’d already said it once before, and my opinion on the matter hadn’t changed. Instead of telling a cop I wanted him to kill people, I said, “If it comes to it, I want you to look around. Keep a picture of the city in your mind, and remember they are the ones who did this.”
He gave a solemn nod, though I didn’t necessarily believe he would pull the trigger if it came down to it. It didn’t matter too much. The likelihood one of the necros would try to scuttle out the back seemed minimal.
Especially given this new biker-gang revelation.
Honest to God. A necromancer biker gang?
Could this night get any worse?
I shook my head, trying to chase the thought away. It could get worse, and was likely to before it got better. I didn’t need to tempt the fates with more negative thinking, though it was hard to avoid right now.
One mountain to climb at
a time.
“Reggie, Tyler and Desmond, stay out here with Sutherland and Genie. Holden and Clementine are coming with me.” I might have spared Des’s feelings if I took a moment to explain my choices, but I was hoping he understood why I would choose Holden instead of him. The vampires could withstand more injuries, and I was going to try to keep Des from taking another bullet for me if I could.
I opted to bring Clementine because something in her attitude resonated with me. Not to mention the power of her voice, which would come in handy keeping things calm inside. It didn’t hurt having an attractive young blonde with me, either. I hoped she might distract the men inside from lashing out with violence too quickly.
Clementine was a strange mix of deadly seriousness and flippant disregard for her surroundings. I’d seen her in action as the gatekeeper of Havana, and she was a force to be reckoned with. But out in the street she had a joyful, carefree demeanor. I didn’t know what to make of her, but for some reason I trusted her at my side.
Maybe I had a soft spot for blonde vampires.
She wasn’t a substitute for Brigit, though. No one could fill the gap Bri had left behind. Now there were more holes in my heart next to hers. Places devoid of feeling that might never work properly again. I was scared to think what might happen if I lost anyone else tonight.
If Holden or Desmond were to fall, my heart would cease to function. I might as well join the ranks of the walking dead.
It was up to me to ensure that didn’t happen.
We strode towards the entrance, Clementine with an extra bounce in her step and Holden with the steely resolve of someone who knew everything was hanging in the balance.
“Be careful in there,” I warned as we reached the door.
“I’m always careful,” Clementine replied, winking.
She and I had very different ideas of what it meant to be careful.
As we stepped through the entrance I was surprised we were able to walk right in without bypassing any guards or doormen. We walked into the middle of the bar, where a raucous heavy-metal song was playing on a boom box and dozens of men in leather were shouting their conversations to one another. A bare second after we entered, everyone went dead silent, and someone killed the music on the stereo.
Now the inside of the bar sounded more like the street we’d just left.
Mixed in with the men were a few women. Most wore short denim skirts and too much makeup, but towards the back of the room was an older woman, maybe forty, with deep auburn hair and relatively conservative clothing. She was dressed more like the men than the other women. She was the one I focused my attention on. Something about her suggested she was in a position of authority, and I trusted my gut.
“Nice get-together you’re having here,” I observed. “I don’t suppose you guys noticed hell on earth has sprung up outside.”
A few of the men guffawed, and some clinked glasses. The older woman stared me down.
“I don’t think you were invited to this party,” she said, her voice raspy, but not in a bad way. She had the husky tenor of a lounge singer or a mysterious leading lady from the forties.
“My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail.”
Clementine and Holden stayed a step back from me, so I couldn’t see what they were up to, but I hoped they were keeping an eye on the increasingly restless group around us.
One of the men sitting next to the redhead leaned over and whispered something to her. She pushed him away, looking angry when she addressed me again. “You’ve brought the dead among us, little one.”
“That’s kind of the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it? I mean, you rose a legion of the dead. I just brought a couple vampires with me.”
She frowned. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?” I countered. Very original.
“My name is Marcela de la Cruz.” She said it in such a way I suspected I was supposed to be impressed. I wasn’t. I had no idea who this chick was, or who these men were, I just knew they were making a mess of my life and my city. “I’ll ask again. Who are you?”
She didn’t talk like any biker chick I’d ever encountered, though to be fair my only exposure was the occasional episode of Sons of Anarchy on Netflix. In fact, she spoke more like the sophisticates in my life than she did anything else. Marcela could have been talking to Sig or Keaty instead of a gang of street thugs. Something about this wasn’t sitting right.
“Secret McQueen,” I said at last.
Since she was human I expected her to have no interest in my name, but her eyes widened slightly when I said it. “Interesting. Have you come here to slay us, rogue hunter?”
Guess her information was somewhat outdated, but still, she knew who I was. She was also being awfully smug for someone who knew I was an assassin.
“I came to tell you your numbers are dwindling.”
Murmurs spread through the group, disrupting the silence.
“What does that mean?” This from the man beside Marcela, a fifty-something wall of muscle whose dark hair was going gray, but he still managed to project a lot of testosterone-fueled menace.
“Your buddy Jock? The necro you had out in Central Park?” I held my hand up to the side of my head and then mimed an explosion. “He went and lost his head.”
“Impossible,” Marcela snapped, her face going red with anger.
“You guys didn’t feel a disturbance in the force or something?”
A few of the younger guys had gotten to their feet, shifting edgy glances from me to the group at Marcela’s table, waiting for an indication of what they should do. I looked at the table closest to me and read the back of one dude’s cut.
Hands of Death.
Lacked a certain poetic subtlety, but it got their point across. In the middle was a patch of a laughing skull. On the front of another man’s vest was a patch reading Raising Hell.
These sons of bitches made me sick.
“Jock is dead.” I shrugged with mock apology. “That leaves, by my count, twenty-one living necros.”
A guy nearby snarled at the word. They must have thought themselves above nicknames. Like being a necromancer made them too good to be abbreviated.
“What do you want?” the man at the main table asked.
“I want you out of my city.”
Marcela and the man both laughed at this demand, as I suspected they would. “It’s our city now. Didn’t you see the welcome parade on the way in?” She smiled at me with such condescension it took an ironclad will not to blow her away then and there. “Do you think you and a couple of vampires are any match for us?”
“I think the ravages of old age have already done a number on you, sweetie,” Clementine said behind me. “We’re just here to tell you you’ve overstayed your welcome, and now it’s time to get gone.”
The guys who had so recently been desperate for a fight now smiled dreamily, and a couple of them sat down again, lovesick expressions etched on their faces.
Damn. I’d known her voice was powerful, but it was much more than that. She had the ability to enthrall victims with words alone. Typically, the thrall, a vampire’s form of hypnosis, only worked at close range and with direct eye contact. But Clementine was weaving a spell on these men just by speaking. It was incredible. I wanted to see what Holden made of it, but I didn’t dare offer my back to the room.
Not everyone was dazzled by Clementine.
Four people in the room maintained serious expressions, and if looks could kill, they would be our hit squad. But the rest were enraptured. This told me a lot more than I’d expected it to. The four who weren’t impacted by Clementine were the necros. It made sense, since they were able to control the dead, that the dead would not be able to control them.
Marcela, her male companion, and two younger men seated at the bar were my targets in the room. Everyone else was meat in the grinder as far as I was concerned. The two guys at the bar were twins, though one had short hair and the other long. They were both
blond and had piercing blue eyes. With those scowling stares and Nordic features, they might as well have been members of a Scandinavian heavy-metal band. I was betting they had names like Lars or Sven.
“Now that I have your undivided attention, I’m hoping you’ll consider answering a few questions for me.”
“I’d sooner kill my own children than answer any more of your questions,” Marcela snarled.
“Are they here? I’ll do it for you.” I withdrew my sword and held it flat against my leg, begging the universe to give me an excuse to use it. Between the gun and the sword, I was well equipped to dispatch anyone who chose to cross me.
The man beside Marcela pulled a shotgun out from beside him and thumped it down on the table, giving me his best come at me, bro glare.
“If you think a gun scares me, you’re sorely mistaken,” I said.
“You should have been scared a long time before now,” he replied.
“Let that go to show you you’ve messed with the wrong girl.”
Chapter Twelve
The sad truth of the situation was, even with Clementine holding the biker boys in check, things were less than ideal. I couldn’t kill all four necros without losing one of my vampires, and though Clementine wasn’t my new BFF, I also wasn’t willing to sacrifice her life to get my revenge. There was also no guarantee she’d be the one to die and not Holden.
I definitely wasn’t going to put his life on the line.
He could heal a bullet wound or two, but a face full of shotgun buck wasn’t going to be an easy thing to walk away from.
“I came here as a courtesy to you. You and your people have until nightfall tomorrow to set things right and get gone.”
“Or what?” Marcela scoffed. “You’ll call the police?”
I shook my head. “If you’re not gone by sunset, I will come back. I will rain down a fire on you like nothing you ever knew existed. I’ll make you wish for something as sweet and easy as death, but I won’t give it to you. I will ruin you, do you understand me? Nothing you came here for is worth the shitstorm I will unleash if you decide to cross me.” Even as I spoke, my brain was hard at work, unraveling a list of possibilities. There was so much I could do to rip a person’s life apart at the seams.
