by Sara Snow
Twyla had never been very subtle. “Sure. What’ll you have?”
“Grey Goose martini. Straight up, very dry with a twist.”
Of course, she chose a top-shelf vodka since I was buying.
When her drink arrived, she eyed me over the rim of her martini glass.
“What have you been up to, Carter? Still hunting demons?”
“Well, I’m trying.”
“Good. I’ve heard there are a lot more of them out there. They’re building their forces, and they’re getting greedy with the humans. I’m having to compete with them for prey these days.”
She tossed her hair over her shoulder, letting me see the rose tattoo that marked her jugular vein. I had sipped from that rose more than once. Her blood was thick, rich. I couldn’t help licking my lips at the memory of how it had tasted.
Twyla and I used to hook up on the regular when we were both feeling weak and hadn’t fed in a few months. The problem with feeding from a vampire was that I always had to hold back, even more so than with humans. Draining another vampire was strictly forbidden, according to the unwritten code of our species. We could take and receive from each other, but never to the point that we bled each other dry.
In the heat of her sexual hunger, Twyla had come pretty close to bleeding me out a few times.
Now, she was honing in on me, her hair falling across my face as she whispered into my ear: “I’m lonely, Carter. Want to get together tonight for some vintage vampire wine?”
Her frank come-on made me laugh. Sure, she made the blood rise in my neck, and elsewhere. But I had gotten tired of Twyla’s predictable bump-and-grind a long time ago, and tonight I had work to do.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to choose business over pleasure,” I said, trying to be as polite as I could. Twyla could turn into a real harpy if she felt rejected.
“Are you serious?” she pouted. “You’re the only male in this bar, besides the gay bartender, who would turn me down.”
“Then you have lots of options. How about I buy you another martini?”
Twyla perked up. “I won’t turn that down.”
I was almost out of cash, but I bought the drink for Twyla to distract her from her failed seduction. She had said that demons were growing in number and competition; maybe she hadn’t fed in a while. If that were the case, I could understand why she was getting so pushy. I almost let myself feel sympathy for her, but sympathy could be misinterpreted as surrender.
Twyla polished off her second martini in three gulps. If she wanted to keep drinking at that rate, she’d either have to pony up the money herself or meet a guy with a credit card.
“Carter,” she began, setting down her empty glass. “I need to talk to you about something. Could we go somewhere private? And quiet?”
She flicked a meaningful look at the noisy, sweaty crowd.
“What’s it about?”
“I don’t want to tell you here. There are too many people, and non-people, who might hear me. This is very intimate information.”
Twyla’s fingernails sank into my forearm. She stood and began pulling me off the barstool. I didn’t want to indulge her needy aggression, but I also didn’t want to make a scene that might call attention to us. If the succubus was here, I needed her to believe that I was alone. Otherwise, she would have two victims to target instead of one.
“Come on, Carter,” she wheedled. “Just for a few minutes. Let’s go outside and talk.”
“Fine.” I sighed. “But only for a few minutes. And it better be important.”
Fingernails digging into my flesh, Twyla pranced toward the door. I had no choice but to follow her. Instead of stopping on the sidewalk in front of the bar as I’d expected, she pulled me further down the street and into an alley half a block from the Abyss. In the alley, she backed me against a brick wall and kissed me full on the lips. At the end of the kiss, she nipped my mouth with her fangs, then laughed when I drew back.
“What the hell, Twyla! You said you had something to tell me.”
“I do,” Twyla said, “but first you have to give me what I want.”
Her coy tone filled me with fury. Georgia was still in the bar, and I should be back there, too. We had a mission tonight, and I should be staying on top of it, not fooling around in an alley with a horny vamp.
Twyla pressed the length of her body against mine, upping her game. Her pelvis ground into my groin and I felt myself responding against my will. I tried to push her away, but she was surprisingly strong.
“You want me, Carter. I can tell.”
“No, I don’t. My dick does. I need to get back into the bar—right now.”
She backed away. Her lips curled over her sharp fangs and she hissed.
“Fine. But don’t expect any free blood donations from me next time you’re strung out and starving!”
I pushed past the vamp and ran back to the Abyss. The crowd was even thicker and more aggressive than before. Broad shoulders and wide hips blocked my path. I collided with a burly man carrying a pitcher and beer sloshed over both of us.
“Hey, fucker! Watch where you’re going! You owe me another pitcher!”
Under other circumstances, I would have apologized to the brute, but tonight all I cared about was getting back to the bar stool where I’d left Georgia.
The bar stool was occupied, but not by a gorgeous cambion with inky black hair and violet eyes. In Georgia’s place sat a sinewy woman in a plaid flannel shirt.
“Excuse me,” I shouted to her, tapping her square shoulder. “There was a woman sitting here before you. Stunning, twenty-one years old, black hair, gray hoodie?”
“Nope. But if you find her, send her my way.” The woman cackled.
I moved on, scanning the bar. No sign of a beautiful cambion. I made it to the back of the bar to check the bathrooms. There was a line about a block long outside the ladies’ room and no line whatsoever outside the men’s.
I darted into the men’s room first, just to make sure Georgia hadn’t ducked in there out of desperation. The room was empty, except for a biker pissing into one of the urinals. I went back to the ladies’ room and grabbed the first woman who came out.
“Hey, did you see a twenty-one-year-old woman in there, about five-foot-six, really pretty, black hair?”
The woman stared at me as if I was searching for a white rhinoceros.
“Pretty twenty-one-year-olds don’t hang out here, honey!” she shouted.
I left the restrooms and scanned the crowd. The woman at the restrooms had been right—there were no young, beautiful females in this crowd. The Abyss drew a much harder, tougher crowd, working-class folk, and bikers who wanted a refuge for drinking and fighting. Young people didn’t even come here when they were slumming it—the risk of getting knifed, robbed, or raped was just too high.
Then, I noticed a giant of a man clad in studded leather from head to toe guarding the back door. The way he was watching the crowd, he could only be a bouncer.
Slowly, I forged a path to the giant. Each step was like trudging through molasses. Finally, I reached him.
“Hey!” I cried. My voice was hoarse by now. “Have you seen a pretty young girl with long black hair dressed in a gray hoodie?”
Drunken shouts of mirth and rage echoed through the bar, making it impossible for me to tell whether he’d heard me or not. His full, reddish brown beard bobbed as he nodded his bald head.
“A pretty girl left here about five minutes ago.” His baritone voice was able to cut through the raucous noise. “She was in bad shape, so drunk she could barely stand. Another woman had to drag her out of here. They left in a car.”
The blood froze in my veins. Five minutes ago, I was out in the alley with Twyla. I should have been here, protecting Georgia. I had brought her here to back me up, but I’d gone AWOL when she needed me most.
I motioned for the bouncer to follow me out the back door. In the narrow passageway that led to the street, the decibel level was
slightly lower.
“Did you see what kind of car the woman was driving?”
“Green Dodge Charger. Eighties model. Held together by duct tape by the looks of it.”
“How about the driver? What did she look like?”
“That chick who played Red Sonja in the movies. The tall one with the big gazongas.” The bouncer leered as he mimed a pair of enormous breasts. “Only this broad was blonde. She had your little friend by the hair. The girl passed out before they got to the car.”
Shit. A succubus could paralyze her victim with a single bite.
“Why didn’t you stop them?” I cried. “You’re the bouncer, for god’s sake.”
He shrugged. “This is the Abyss. I break up knife fights, not kinky sex scenes. When the blonde bit your friend in the back of the neck, I figured they were just having a little fun.”
I wish I could say I was relieved to hear that someone had seen Georgia. But now that I suspected who that someone was, any hope of a quick rescue flew right out the window.
I left the bouncer to return to his post, pulled my phone out of my pocket, and called Kingston. I dreaded telling him what had happened. Georgia had been abducted by the monster we’d been waiting for, and I’d let the whole ugly scene go down while I was distracted.
Waiting for Kingston to answer his phone, I remembered the mutilated body in the park. What if that poor guy, the cambion I had known as Vince, had been another victim of the same succubus who had picked up Georgia?
17
Georgia
I woke to the sense of the night flying past me, but I could barely move my arms or legs. I was lying on my back on a hard, slick surface. My mouth was dry and sticky and filled with the sour aftertaste of tequila. I rolled back and forth, trying to sit up. Even the slightest movement felt like swimming through mud.
The hard surface was the backseat of a car.
“Hey, it’s about time you woke up!” The driver glanced at me over her shoulder. “I figured you’d had enough beauty sleep.”
I recognized the blonde from the Abyss, the one who had fed me shot after shot of Jose Cuervo. I should have been grateful to have a designated driver, but somehow that thought wasn’t very comforting.
Imogen. That was her name. How could I ever forget?
“You’re with the fucking Venandi, aren’t you?” the blonde asked accusingly. Her eyes searched mine in the rearview mirror. “I saw the way you were staring at Carter. The two of you were stalking me, weren’t you?”
If I hadn’t already been paralyzed by whatever toxin Imogen had poisoned me with, I would have been frozen with fear. I figured her question was rhetorical. She already knew why Carter and I were at the bar.
“Always trying to ruin my fun. That’s your real mission. Every time I get close to my prey, one of you is right there, breathing down my neck. I could have ripped out a few hearts tonight—had my fill of blood. But the Venandi had to screw everything up for me.”
Imogen eyed me in the mirror again. Her eyes were twin voids, black and empty.
“Then again, it’s not too late. My night hasn’t been totally wasted.”
Her mirthless laughter sickened me. With no way to move even a pinkie, I was as good as dead. This was the succubus we’d been hunting. All evening, while I worried about Carter and that redhead, the real monster had been sitting within inches of me, getting me drunk.
“Where are you taking me?” I managed to ask.
“We’re going to see a good friend of mine. He’s an incubus. Do you know what that is?”
“No.” I remembered reading about the incubi in Kingston’s books, but I wanted to hear Imogen’s definition—just in case the reality was worse.
Of course, Imogen’s reality was far worse than anything I could have imagined.
“An incubus is a demon with an insatiable sexual appetite. Very much like me, only male. Incubi copulate with female humans, then kill them—slowly. Incubi get off on torture, mutilation, and evisceration. You can look forward to all of the above tonight.”
Great. Just another wild night in Chi-town.
“And I’ll be taking part in the fun,” Imogen went on. “You seem like the feisty type. I’ll be there to hold you down while my friend has his way with you. Incubus sex is amazing, like nothing you’ve ever had. But that will just be the appetizer. The main course will begin when I slice off your tasty parts and feed them to the incubus by hand. Then, we’ll move on to dessert, and I’ll help him slice you open. Then, we’ll feed. Oh, how we’ll feed! What do you think about that?”
I looked around wildly for something I could use to knock Imogen out, some blunt object like a tire iron or even a snow scraper. I didn’t see anything. But my terror let me focus on the one thing that could possibly save my ass.
I squeezed my eyes shut and willed the steering wheel to move.
Focus.
The car fishtailed.
Focus harder.
Imogen grunted. She was trying with all her might to control the spinning steering wheel and get the car back on the road. Too late. The car rolled once, twice, then crashed to a grinding halt.
The back door flew open on impact. My paralyzed body sailed into the night.
The pain of my collision with the ground was unbearable. I writhed, trying to gain some kind of forward momentum on the asphalt, but my body wouldn’t obey my brain’s commands.
I managed to raise my head a few inches, and saw the succubus crawling towards me. On all fours, the tall blonde had turned into a ravaging predator. Her sharp teeth were bared. She panted with rage as she advanced, dragging herself over the broken glass and blood.
“Fucking little bitch. You crashed my car!” she growled.
Then she fell on me.
18
Carter
As I waited for Kingston to answer his phone, I remembered the mutilated body in the park. What if the cambion, the one I had known as Vince, had been a victim of the same succubus who had abducted Georgia from the bar?
The thought of Georgia in the hands of a creature like that scared the shit out of me.
“Pick up, Kingston, you technophobic bastard,” I muttered.
That was the drawback of having a fallen angel as the leader of your team. It had been so long since the Fallen were separated from their divine origins that they couldn’t grasp modern technology.
Kingston knew how to answer a call on his smartphone and how to contact other people, but he didn’t appreciate the way communication had accelerated in the twenty-first century. He would leave his phone in the library to run out of power while he perused ancient texts, or forget to check his text messages and emails when members of the Venandi were desperately trying to reach him.
Finally, after six or seven attempts, I got a return call from Kingston.
“How goes the hunt?” he asked casually, as if I’d taken Georgia out for a bingo tournament.
“Not good, Kingston. Georgia and I went looking for the succubus. I left her alone at the bar so I could act as bait. I let myself get distracted by a vamp, and when I came to my senses, Georgia was gone.”
Kingston paused for a beat.
“Do you know where Georgia is now?”
“She’s in the back of a Dodge Charger, being driven to her death by the succubus we were hunting.”
“Sounds like you made a few tactical errors, Carter. Let’s get back on track. Are you following the car?” Kingston’s voice was profoundly calm.
“I’m sure as hell trying,” I said.
“Which direction are they going?”
“I think they’re headed east. Listen, Kingston, I feel like shit saying this, but I set Georgia up for trouble. I didn’t mean to, but I put her in harm’s way. I don’t know if I can live with myself now.”
“You’re an immortal, Carter. You will live whether you feel that you deserve to or not. Stop wasting time on guilt and regret, and start thinking about how we can save Georgia.”
Kingston
was right. Technophobe or not, he was a wise soul.
“So, what should I do, boss?”
“Keep following the car. I’ll have Olympia use a locating spell to find Georgia. Once we figure out where she is, I’ll drive to your location. Do you have any iron with you?”
“Yeah. I’ve got a stake in my pocket.” I touched the hard rod just to remind myself that I wasn’t as powerless as I felt in this situation.
“Good. If we can find Georgia, we’ll find the succubus, and you can kill her.”
I hesitated for a second. “I need to tell you something, Kingston. I ran into this succubus two weeks ago. Jose led me to her through one of his dreams. She’s a murderer, a monster. I almost killed her, but at the last minute, I let her live.”
“That’s the human in you. You’re compassionate. Compassion is both a strength and a weakness. Unfortunately, it doesn’t serve us well in this situation.”
“That’s not the worst of it. I was hooking up with this succubus at one time, before she committed her soul to evil. I’m afraid she’s going to kill Georgia, and not in a pretty way.”
Kingston sighed. “Why am I always the last to know?”
“Everyone in the Venandi tries to resolve problems on their own so that you don’t have to worry.”
“Look, I may be two thousand years old, but I’m not some frail old fool,” Kingston protested. “I’m still strong enough to slay demons, but I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s going on. Their forces are growing. They’re gathering their minions to defeat us. And they will win if we are not absolutely committed to destroying them.”
“I understand,” I said. “Just tell Olympia to call me when she’s found Georgia. I’ll keep driving.”
As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait for Olympia’s spell to kick in. The whirling red lights of cop cars and ambulances directed me straight to the scene of the accident. I pulled off at the side of the road and sat there for a moment, trying to remember how to breathe.