There was no mistaking who was in charge, although he wasn’t at all what Kevin had expected. The man sitting in the concentric circle of vampires looked like a poster of a nerd, from the cheap sports shirt and khaki high-waisted pants to the tape fixing one side of his Buddy Holly glasses. It wasn’t that the nerd sat higher than the others, but it just seemed that way; it might have been the way the others aligned themselves, half turned toward him, half away to watch the room. He was the hub at the center of the deadly, glittering wheel.
Kenya stopped at an empty stand-up table and signaled to a thinly dressed cocktail waitress; she ordered a Coke, and Kevin got a beer, because he felt like at least one of them ought to look as if they were here to party.
Then he felt like an idiot when Kenya openly ogled a passing vampire who must’ve been born of Asian heritage in his human life. The vampire noticed and gave her a bare nod, which was apparently how they expressed approval around here. Kevin heard jealous murmurs from a couple of women near him.
“What?” Kenya asked as their drinks were delivered, and he realized he was staring at her. “Got to fit in, right?”
“Right,” he said, and looked around for a woman to admire. He couldn’t find one who intrigued him half as much as the woman sipping her Coke across from him, dark eyes lively and darting from one threat to another around them.
He saw her fix on something behind him, and whatever it was, it got her unwavering attention. Her hand slid away from her drink and under her jacket, and he almost turned before she made a sign, just a little one, to stay where he was. She gave him a sudden, bright smile and leaned in close to whisper in his ear.
“Glick’s here. He’s right behind you.”
“Shit,” Kevin whispered back. “I should have brought my gun!” They’d discussed it but decided it was too big a risk to come strapped into a vampire club in a strange town. Vampires took their personal security damn seriously.
She nodded and laughed as if he’d said something hilarious, and dammit if he couldn’t help but notice how warm her cheek was as it brushed against his, and how soft. “I’ve got my baton,” she said. “Get in front of him and I’ll take him down from behind.”
He would have probably agreed to pretty much anything just then, and as he pushed away from the table and walked at an angle to cut across Glick’s path, it occurred to him he was about to put himself empty-handed in front of a man who’d ripped the limbs off somebody just a few hours before.
He was also, coincidentally, heading straight for the guards who were blocking the entrance to the velvet-roped vampire section. They might have PhDs in flexing and intimidation, but they weren’t stupid; he got their attention instantly. What was worse, though, was what was happening behind the rope . . . because all that vampire focus lasered right in on him. It was like being impaled on an icicle.
The nerd king’s pale blue eyes suddenly glowed an even colder arctic green, and Kevin shuddered because however much the costume tried to make the vampire look human and inoffensive, those eyes gave him away. What was underneath was ancient and completely ruthless.
Spotting Glick coming for him was actually kind of a relief.
The greasy, blood-spotted wild man howled, though it was drowned out in the relentless sound of the techno song that started up; the beat hammered through Kevin’s bones and made him feel as if he were about to shatter. Kenya was moving, but someone was in her way—a woman in skyscraper heels, made earthquake-unsteady by the drink in her hand.
Glick was almost on him. In the flash of the swirling lights, his eyes looked solid crimson, as if they were bleeding right out of his head.
Kevin swept a full champagne bottle out of a sweating ice bucket on a rich man’s table, dumping cold water all over a woman’s lap, and slammed it into Glick’s temple like a wrecking ball. It should have put him down. Hell, it probably should have killed him.
All it did was set him back on his heels, dazed, and make him stumble.
That was enough time for Kenya to come up behind him, snap out her extendable riot baton, and deliver surgical strikes to the bends of his knees. Strong or not, Glick went down, and Kevin hit him again with the champagne bottle. He only realized once Glick was lying still that Dom Perignon was foaming out in jets all over him, and the rich man was yelling his guts out, and the woman was shrieking about her dress, and somehow over all that chaos the nerd stood up and said one soft, precise sentence.
“Close it.”
There was an instant reaction, all over the bar—not from the patrons, who were still jerk-dancing and drinking their livers away, but from the vampires. They all stood up and moved—flowing over the velvet ropes as if gravity were just a suggestion. There were yelps of alarm from patrons, and suddenly the music cut off, leaving an aftermath of yelled, trailed-off conversations and confusion.
The vampires began shoving people toward the exits. There was resistance at first, and then willing flight, because one look at them showed that the vampires weren’t playing.
Nobody laid a hand on Kevin, or Kenya, or the man lying between them. Kenya still held her baton but he knew she wouldn’t use it; there wouldn’t be any point. Fighting a vampire under those circumstances was an instant ticket to the morgue.
The Bat’s Wing was cleared out in what seemed like seconds, and probably was; the humans were swept out like trash by the vampires’ broom, and the doors slammed and locked behind them. Without the music, and with the harsh overheads flipped on, the place looked—as all bars did—cheap and pathetically stained. Tables were littered with glasses, full and empty. Some people had even left behind coats and purses. It reminded Kevin of a disaster area, as if a random shooter had come in to pop off a few rounds and the occupants had run for cover.
He even saw one of those seven-inch high-heel shoes lying abandoned on the floor. Add in some broken glass and blood and it could have been on the six o’clock news.
When he looked up, the nerd king was standing right in front of him, and Kevin had to work to control a flinch. The man moved without a sound, an eerie inhumanity that he either cultivated or just didn’t mind displaying. Hard to say which one was worse.
“Name,” the vampire said. He had his crew arranged around them now, though Kevin hadn’t heard any orders given; maybe they communicated like ants, through some kind of chemicals. He and Kenya were really, really alone.
“Kenya Jones,” Kenya said, and gave the vampire an unexpected smile as she collapsed her baton and put it away. “This is Kevin Pryor, my partner.”
The cold stare—fading back to blue now, rather than green—transferred to her, and somehow she kept smiling. Kevin didn’t imagine it was easy. “What makes you think you can come in here and do this?” Now that he’d spoken more than two words, it became clear he had a faint trace of an accent—something muted and lost in time. Whatever it was, it didn’t fit his computer-geek disguise.
Kevin said, “We’re with the Bon Temps Police Department, sir. In pursuit of a murder suspect.” He pointed at the man on the carpet. “That’s him.”
There was an indefinable shift in the vampire, though Kevin couldn’t have named what changed; maybe it was just a fraction of a rise in an eyebrow. “Bon Temps. Louisiana. Area Five. Did Sheriff Northman send you here?”
“Our boss is Sheriff Bud Dearborn, sir,” Kenya said. “He knows where we are.”
“Your pursuit of your murder suspect is curiously backward, since you preceded him to this club,” the nerd king said. “My name is Stan Davis. I am the sheriff of Area Six. You are operating within my realm, and my establishment, without authorization from the sheriff of Area Five. I believe you would call that operating outside your jurisdiction.” His gaze flicked down for a half second to the man lying between them. “Leave him.”
“Can’t do that, sir,” Kenya said. “He’s our prisoner.”
“Do you doubt for a m
oment that you can all disappear?” said another vampire, a female one, bone white, with a feral light in her eyes. She licked her very red lips. “Let me take them.”
“I don’t want trouble with Area Five, Rachel,” Davis said. “Police officers are easy to kill but hard to explain.”
Though Rachel didn’t actually pout—her features weren’t expressive enough—Kevin got the sense of something like a toddler’s tantrum, but bottled up tight and a whole lot more homicidal.
At their feet, Quentin Glick twitched and groaned. Kenya reached behind her back under her jacket—a move that made all the vampires tense up again—and came out with a pair of handcuffs that she clicked on the man’s wrists to pin him facedown.
That was when Kevin spotted the vampire they’d talked to at Hardee’s. He was standing off to the side, half-hidden in shadows, but he was clearly part of the group, or he wouldn’t still be in the room. Stan Davis’s agent?
Kevin nodded toward him. “He wanted to find out what we knew about Mr. Glick, here. Which means you wanted to know about him, Mr. Davis. Were you expecting him?”
Silence. Stan Davis’s stare was unnervingly precise, like an ice pick. “You need to walk away now and leave him to me,” he said.
“Sir, Glick needs to face justice,” Kenya said. “He killed a boy in Louisiana.”
Rachel laughed. It was a sound like hail on glass. “So?”
“There are matters you have no place in,” Davis said. “Go home. I said dead police officers were hard to explain. Not impossible.”
That was an order, and there didn’t seem to be much of a way to argue about it. Glick had gone still, and maybe he’d actually passed out again. Hard to tell under that mess of stringy hair.
Kevin exchanged a look with Kenya—silent partner communication, the kind of calculations and responses they did in crisis situations when there wasn’t time or strategic space to talk out loud. Go? he asked her, with a quirk of his eyebrows. He read the shift of her weight to her forward foot. Stay.
Well, crap.
Before he could start trying to negotiate their staying alive, the situation changed for all of them, because Quentin Glick wasn’t unconscious after all.
It ought to have been impossible for anyone to snap those cuffs at that angle, but a single roll of Glick’s shoulders and his hands were loose. Glick must have broken his own bones to pull his hands free of the restraints. Before Kevin could process that fact, the man was up, all teeth and crazy eyes and blood leaking down his face, and it was pretty clear that the sheriff of Area Six had decided that maybe the easiest way to handle this was to let Glick go mad-dog on them and then clear up the mess once it was over. The vampires were fast enough to have intervened, but none of them moved a muscle.
Kevin had one chance, and he took it, slamming his forehead hard into the man’s nose. It slowed Glick down, at least, and Kevin backed out of the way, grabbing up his old friend the champagne bottle.
Glick whirled. A human couldn’t move that fast, shouldn’t, but he did, and before Kenya could finish snapping out her riot baton again, he had her clutched in both hands, one at her throat, one on the side of her head. Perfect leverage to snap her neck. Sickeningly, the broken bones in his hands were sticking out, one breaking the skin in a red-filmed white spear, but the pain wasn’t stopping him.
Kenya went very still. Kevin came to a halt, bottle trembling in his hand and ice forming around his fast-beating heart. No. No, no, no . . . He carefully set the bottle down and spread his empty hands. “Let her go,” he said. “Please.”
“Don’t you beg,” Kenya said. “Don’t do it, Kevin.”
Glick snarled. If there was anything human left in him, anything rational, it was buried too deep to reach. Kevin felt a surge of rage and hopelessness, because there was nothing he could do, nothing; Kenya was going to die and he was going to have to watch it happen and he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
Glick began backing away, dragging Kevin’s partner with him. She was letting her weight sag, hoping to pull him off balance, but whatever was fueling him was letting him pull her along like she was a rag doll.
Kevin followed, keeping the distance constant between them. The vampires moved out of Glick’s way as he backed toward the door.
“Open it,” Stan Davis said. One of the vampires entered a code on the keypad next to the exit and hit the metal panic bar, and it sagged open to the night and a deserted parking lot; the patrons must have taken the hint to get way the hell out of Dodge. No sign of police, either.
Glick backed away through the door, grinning at Kevin through bloody teeth. It wasn’t imagination; his eyes weren’t just bloodshot, they were bloody. Bleeding. He was crying blood. He was hemorrhaging from his ears, too.
“My advice is to let him go,” Davis said from behind them. None of the vampires had moved again, and Davis’s tone seemed calm and disinterested. “Don’t throw your life away, Mr. Pryor. She is a lost cause.”
Fuck you, Kevin thought furiously. He hardly ever cursed, not out loud, but he wanted to yell it loud and rip the vampire’s head off in that moment. Nice idea. Impossible, but nice.
He took another step as Glick dragged Kenya over the threshold and past the swing of the door.
“Now,” Davis said, which seemed completely out of context, until the vampire who’d opened the door slammed it shut in Kevin’s face and cut him off from Kenya and Glick. Kevin threw himself forward against the bar, but it gave only a little before a cold, inhumanly strong hand closed around the collar of his shirt and yanked him backward. Next thing he knew, he was pinned against a hard, chilly vampire body with an iron rod of a forearm across his throat to hold him still as Stan Davis glided up to face him.
“Son of a bitch,” Kevin spat, and tried to slip free. He might as well have been trying to bend stone. “Let me go!”
“If I do that, you’ll only needlessly sacrifice yourself,” Davis said. “Calm yourself. If you want to see her alive again, you need to think before you act.”
“Then help me!”
“I will,” said the sheriff of Area Six. “For a price.”
Once again, Kevin found himself sitting in a booth across from the vampire who called himself Detective Wallace. The difference this time was that next to Wallace was Stan Davis, and Stan’s vampires were ranged around the room in easy striking distance.
“He’s going to kill her,” Kevin said. Every nerve in his body was on fire with the need to do something, to charge out that door and find Glick. “I’ll give you what you want. Just help me get her back.”
The silence stretched on. He might have been sitting across from two mannequins, except for the reaction in his gut to their presence. Finally, Wallace (if that was even his name) said, “You should have just let it alone. We knew he was heading for us. We’d have taken care of him.”
“You know what’s going on with him?”
Wallace shrugged. It was such a tiny gesture that it hardly even registered as a ripple, but it conveyed the exact level of disinterest he must have felt. “He got his hands on something he shouldn’t have. We knew he’d come here for another hit when he started coming down.”
“What the hell is it?”
Silence, again. Finally, Davis said, “I thought you wished to bargain for the woman.”
As if he owned her. Kevin took a few seconds to calm himself before he said, “All right. What do you want?”
“A favor,” Stan Davis said. “It would seem having eyes in Area Five might benefit me. I don’t trust Sheriff Northman.”
“You want me to spy on vampires? On Eric Northman? How am I supposed to do that?”
“How you accomplish it is not my concern. That is what I want, or your partner dies.” There was something in Davis’s cold eyes that might have been amusement. “I think you have some attachment to her beyond only professional loyalty.”
Kevin hated that the vampires could see it in him. But he also knew that the seconds were ticking away, and he remembered Glick’s bloody mouth, that limp cat in his hands. Remembered the dead teenager lying on the concrete of the dirty parking lot, covered with a sheet.
He hated that a whole lot more.
“All right,” he said. “If I see something you need to know, I’ll tell you.”
“No,” Davis said. “You will tell me everything. Everything that Sheriff Northman does. I expect monthly reports.”
Kevin realized he was clenching his hands so hard that his fingernails were gouging half-moons in his palms. “Fine, I’ll find a way,” he said.
“One thing. If you promise and do not deliver, I will kill you and your partner. It will not be quick.”
This time, he had to swallow a mouthful of bile to get the words out. “I said yes. Now help me.”
Davis sat back and glanced at Wallace. That was apparently all the authority that was needed, because Wallace slid out of the booth, crooked a finger, and three vampires answered his summons. They headed for the door.
Kevin got up.
“Where do you think you’re going?” This time, Davis definitely sounded amused. Cat-with-a-wounded-mouse amused.
“I’m going with them,” he said. “If she dies, there’s no deal, and I’ll make it my personal mission in life to make you sorry.” He meant it. It suddenly came into focus for him that what he felt for Kenya wasn’t just a casual thing, wasn’t just attraction or simple lust or infatuation. It was something strong, and whether she felt it didn’t matter. He loved her, and he was going to see that she was all right.
He’d surprised Davis, just a little bit, which probably didn’t happen too often. “All right,” he said. “I’ll expect my payment once we save her. Don’t disappoint me, Officer Pryor.”
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