by Laken Cane
“RISC thinks it’s best not to stir up trouble. They’ll move on.”
Jeremy thinks it’s best. That all by itself set off little warning bells in her head. Jeremy didn’t need much of an excuse to harass Others. Strangers? Not long ago he’d have been all over them. “Doesn’t make sense,” she murmured.
“What else would you like to discuss, Rune?” He leaned back and folded his hands over his stomach, but to give him credit, he didn’t once glance at his watch.
“We need to talk about a decision you’ve made that I don’t agree with.”
He gave a sharp nod. “Shoot.”
“I’ve hired Alexis Love into Shiv Crew.”
“Yes, yes, poor thing. I feel sorry for the child too, Rune, but we can’t have people in law enforcement just because we pity them. Help her in some other way. She’s not suited for the job you do.”
“You know nothing about what she can do.”
“She’s blind, Rune.” He widened his eyes and looked at her like she’d suddenly gone stupid.
“She can see, just not the way you and I see. I tested her, Mitch. She’s incredible. Let us show you.” That was a reasonable request.
“Those rather large sunglasses make me uncomfortable. Could you take them off?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Light sensitivity.”
He blew air out his nose. “It’s a no on the sweet blind girl. I’m sorry.”
“You won’t even let her show you what she’s capable of.”
“It’s not just her handicap.” He held up one finger. “She’s also the daughter of a death row inmate.” Two fingers. “She’s an ex-COS member.” Three fingers. “And worst of all, she’s an Other.” He shook his extended fingers at her. “Come on, Rune. Even you know better than that.”
So that was the real problem. He had to have found out by now, the arrogant bastard, that the twins were also ex-COS members. He didn’t care about that, not enough to fire them. He cared that they weren’t Others.
“Look, Rune. I’m going to be doing a lot of publicity for SCRU—and for RISC. Do you think the public would trust us if we were hiring Others to protect them?”
“You’re worried about how it would make you look?”
“I assure you I will do what is best for this organization and for the public we are sworn to protect. You need to understand something right away, Rune. If you’re to stay on as Shiv Crew captain, you will have to play by the rules.”
There it was. The threat. She smiled, gratified when his face paled. She was, after all, part Other. Even if he didn’t realize it, he’d feel something different. And it would scare him. It should scare him.
He raised his hands. “Rune. Come on. I have to play by the rules too. If I thought the public would accept her, if I thought she wouldn’t get hurt…”
“Or is it just that you hate Others? Maybe you should join COS.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong. I most certainly do not hate Others. You and I have had our disagreements in the past, but you don’t know me.” He tugged on his stiff shirt collar. “I protect Others, Rune. I don’t hate them.”
She stood and left his office without another word.
There was nothing more to say. Maybe he didn’t hate Others, but he was being unfair about Lex.
For now her hands were tied, but she’d figure something out.
She walked back into her office. Only the twins and Lex remained. Jack, Z, and Raze shared an office—an enormous office—and Levi informed her that’s where they’d gone.
She sat down, her head pounding. Shit. She’d been back to work for less than an hour, and already things were going badly.
She could have cried when Ellis swooped into the room with a huge, hot mug of coffee. “Here you go, Rune. I figured you’d need it after your talk with the new boss.”
“You’re a lifesaver, Ellie.”
“I know,” he said, grinning.
She couldn’t miss his probing, worried glance, and she grinned up at him to let him know she was okay. Still, he dropped a tiny pill on the desk. She scooped it up and washed it down with the coffee. She’d need the pain relief out in the field.
He slapped some papers on her desk. “For today, my dear. Don’t overdo it.”
“I’ll be fine.”
It was nine fifteen in the morning. Time to get to work.
Chapter Twelve
You okay?
Rune glanced down at the text, then ignored it. Fucking Jeremy.
Usually he would have left it alone, but her phone vibrated again. I’m sorry.
She hit reply and punched in the letters, furiously. Fuck you.
Stuffing the cell in her jeans pocket, she walked to her car, Lex and the twins at her heels. Denim helped Lex into the front, and he and Levi started to climb into the back.
“Follow us,” Rune said. “I want some alone time with Lex.”
They glanced at each other, like they always did, and in that second of silent communication acknowledged and agreed. “Okay,” Levi said.
The crew was to meet her at the first stop of the day. The last stop would be after dark at Nicolas Llodra’s favorite haunt, a popular nightspot called Club Kiss. If he wasn’t there she’d leave word she was looking for him, that she wanted his side of the story.
But it was hard to believe he could be innocent. She’d seen the human body in the nest, and she knew his people would never take a human without his permission.
Rune had other things to talk to him about, though. She wanted to find her father. She needed to see him again. To talk to him. To convince him to flee his master and her city before her crew was forced to stake him.
While she’d been out of commission, Jeremy had gotten another tip. He’d sent her crew to the pretty much deserted village of Blackfire where they’d taken out another nest. Her father, Jack had assured her, was not among them.
“Am I fired?” Lex asked, startling Rune from her thoughts.
Her cell vibrated again, and she ignored it. “Yeah, I’m sorry, Lex. The new boss has forbidden me to hire you. But don’t worry. I’m far from finished with this. I’ll get you back in.”
The twins were tailgating her, probably to keep a better eye on the girl. She guessed they didn’t trust her completely. Not yet. She couldn’t blame them.
Lex shrugged. “When you need help, I’ll be there. Whether that guy says I am Shiv Crew or not.”
“I wanted to talk to you about something else.”
“What I saw when I touched you.”
Rune kept her stare on the road. “Yeah.”
For a long moment there were no sounds other than the quiet hum of the car heater. Finally Lex spoke, but her words were nothing close to what Rune expected to hear.
“I don’t trust many people,” Lex said. “I trust Levi and Denim. Now I trust you.”
Rune didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.
“No matter what you think, you’re not a monster.”
Lex’s words brought her curiously close to tears. Dammit. Lately she was an emotional mess.
They sank into silence, and neither one of them seemed inclined to break it. Rune’s headache was gone thanks to Ellis’s potent little pill.
The first item on the schedule was another quick trip to Blackfire. After her crew had staked the vampires there, the captive vampire Rune had captured told them to go back. There was another nest, he’d said, in the basement of the Blackfire high school.
Maybe they’d find vampires in the nest there, maybe not. She’d already ordered her crew to silver Llodra but not to kill him. She wanted to talk to him first.
In an addendum to this morning’s schedule, Mitch had instructed them not to try to bring Llodra in alive. There were no good reasons for it, and it was too risky. He was too powerful a vampire.
There were undertones of Jeremy in Mitch’s order. Whatever. She didn’t care.
She was going to question the master
vampire. If she didn’t find him today, she’d look for him at Club Kiss tonight. She wouldn’t give up trying to talk to him until she saw the stake in his heart and his head lying at her feet.
Maybe he’d flee the city, but she doubted it. It was too difficult for expelled vampires to find free territory. If a master entered another master’s city, he’d be torn apart.
It was not a kind world for the monsters. Not kind at all.
Fifteen minutes later she turned off the highway into Blackfire and followed the bumpy, broken streets to the old high school.
Jack and Z were already there, dragging kill kits out of their cars. The twins were right behind Rune. She spotted Raze’s truck with its overly tinted windows rolling toward the school from the opposite end of the street.
“Seven Shiv Crew members,” Z said. “Lucky number.”
“Six,” Lex pointed out. “I’m not technically Shiv Crew.”
Rune shrugged and opened the hatch to get her kit. “Fuck him. As far as we’re concerned, you are.”
Denim and Levi grinned and high-fived each other.
“You’ve got to tell me about these dance sessions between you and Ellie,” Rune said to Lex. Ellis loved to dance. He spent most of his nights at clubs getting down with his bad self.
“We’ve only danced twice,” Lex said, “but he was right. Expelling energy helps. Maybe I do need the outlet. Whatever, he was right.”
“He usually is,” Rune replied. “But don’t tell him I said so. Already have trouble finding him a hat that’ll fit.”
Lex smiled. “He deserves every inch of that big head.”
Raze walked up to Rune’s car, where the others had gathered. “Ready to find some monsters?”
“If they’re in there, we’ll find them,” Rune said, and slammed the hatch shut. She was a trained professional, and the edict had been sent down. Still, tremors of unease trickled through her.
She was getting soft.
“Remember,” she reiterated, “if you see my father or Llodra…”
“We got it, Rune,” Z said.
She noticed that even though he was snuggled into a warm jacket and black watch cap, he looked askance at her turtleneck and gloves.
“You know it’ll be too dark for the shades inside,” he told her.
He was suspicious. The rest of them paused at his words, picking up on his doubt. She sighed. Fine, she’d show them her battered face. She should have known it wasn’t going to be possible to hide it from them. The sunglasses were a pain in the ass, and the concealer was itching like she’d smoothed it on with poison ivy.
She’d think up a lie. Wouldn’t be hard. She’d been lying her entire life. She reached up and pulled the glasses off her face. “Fine. Look, laugh, poke fun. I was attacked by a couple of pissed off, very large ladies at a bar.” She pursed her lips, waiting.
“Hilarious,” Z said. “I just wanted to make sure you really did have a hangover and not a couple of bruises. I’d have had to kick some ass if that’d been the case.”
The rest of them laughed—except for Raze. He never laughed. He never laughed, and she never cried. Well, rarely. Her men turned away and began walking toward the school.
Confused, she opened her door, tossed the glasses onto the floor, then looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror.
What the hell? She had not a single bruise. The cut on the bridge of her nose was gone. She had no fading marks, cuts, or anything else that would suggest she’d nearly died at the hands of her lover.
She’d noticed a lack of pain but gave that credit to Ellis’s pill.
“Rune,” Z called. “You’re gorgeous. Let’s get going, sweet thing.”
She shook her head at her image, totally mystified, then jogged to catch up with her crew. “Don’t call me sweet thing,” she said to Z, and took her place at the front of the line.
Time to go in and catch some monsters.
She’d think about her monster later, when she was alone. She might hate it, but the bastard sure took care of her. Of course, it was her monster’s fault she needed to be taken care of. What a vicious cycle.
She led her crew to the basement of the school. The place had a peculiar smell. If she concentrated, she got whiffs of a particular odor only schools seem to have, but mixed in with that was a stronger odor of rot, mold, and blood.
It was not a soothing bouquet.
The deeper they went, the worse the smells became.
“If they’re not here now,” she told her crew, “they sure as hell have been. Do you guys smell that?”
“I smell mildew,” Z said. “But no dead bodies or anything. What do you smell?”
She kept her mouth shut. Her monster seemed to be getting stronger, and now it was scenting things the humans couldn’t. The bastard had remained deep inside her for most of her life, but had decided it’d been in the dark long enough.
As long as she could control it, everything would be okay. She could manage. She could live the lie.
Her monster wasn’t the only thing in darkness. She halted and slipped on her goggles, waiting for the rest of them to do the same before she continued down. Darkness was a friend of the vampire. The human? Not so much.
She almost stepped on the first vampire before she realized they’d found the nest. And it was full.
“Shit,” she hissed, and held up a hand letting the others know. Time to go quiet.
The vampires lay upon the floor in rows, and she stepped carefully between them looking for Llodra and her father. Each time she left a section and moved on, her crew stepped in to do the dirty deed.
She only realized when they were halfway finished that she hadn’t killed one monster. She looked up at a humming sound. Lex was standing right beside her.
Lex wouldn’t need goggles. She was always in the dark.
She tugged at Rune’s sleeve and pointed toward the far wall.
Rune hooked her hand around Lex’s neck and pulled the girl’s mouth to her ear.
“Human female,” Lex whispered. “Alive.”
Shit.
Rune waved her hand in the air, getting Jack’s attention. He went to her immediately, stepping over the vampires.
“Warm one by the wall,” she whispered, and with Jack beside her, she slipped toward the spot Lex had pointed out.
She heard the crew spreading out inside the room, the quick thwacks of the vguns, and the slicing of the big knives. Thwack! One less vampire in Spiritgrove.
Jack saw the human before she did. He nudged her and pointed his gun to where the human lay.
Lex said she was alive, and Rune had no reason to doubt her.
Carefully, she and Jack stepped over sleeping vampire after sleeping vampire until finally they stood over the girl.
Rune holstered her vgun and then in one smooth movement straddled the girl and placed her hand over her mouth.
She woke screaming and kicking as Rune had known she would. Jack lent his strength to control the girl, while Rune tried to calm her.
“It’s okay, baby. We’re here to help you.”
The girl shook her head hard, trying to dislodge Rune’s hand from her face. When that didn’t work, she managed to open her mouth and take a nice hunk out of Rune’s palm.
“Son of a bitch.” Rune jerked her hand away and stood. “Pick her up, Jack, and carry her the fuck upstairs.”
The girl screamed, and it was enough to cause some of the still-living vampires to move restlessly in their twilight sleep.
“Fuck,” Jack muttered, and strong-armed her out of there, Rune on his heels.
He dropped the wild girl on the second-floor landing beneath a dirty window, and he and Rune hunkered down on either side of her.
She wouldn’t be still. Her red-and-purple hair stood on end, and mascara smudges stained her pale face. Rune would have been surprised if she had seen her eighteenth birthday.
She wasn’t very big, but she was a handful. For some crazy reason, she kept trying to run back
down the stairs.
Finally, after she punched Jack in the throat and caught half of Rune’s face beneath her jagged nails, Rune drew back and slapped her. Hard.
“Calm the fuck down, you little idiot. We’re here to save you!”
The girl stopped struggling suddenly, Rune’s words cutting her off mid-screech. She darted her stare between Jack and Rune, her lips drawn back from white, even teeth. “Save me? Bitch, who said I needed saving?”
Rune exchanged a quick look with Jack, who raised his eyebrows. The girl hadn’t been entranced by the vampires. She was much too active and aware for that.
Rune narrowed her eyes. “So you’re here because…”
“Um, because I want to be here?”
Disgusted, Rune wished she’d slapped the silly girl harder. “You want them to turn you.” Sometimes a single exchange was enough to turn a human. The vampire would bite the human, drain at least half their blood and then open a vein for the human to drink from the vampire. This exchange of blood could—and usually did—turn the human.
But sometimes they could try for weeks and still not turn a human. Those humans seemed to have a natural immunity. Scientists were hard at work trying to isolate a gene in the DNA responsible for the protection, but so far, were having no luck.
There were a few cases where a human was turned without either party intending for it to happen. After being brutalized by a vampire, the human’s wounds were contaminated by vampire blood, causing the human to turn.
The girl shrugged. She was wearing a stained purple shirt, a torn pair of jeans, and multicolored nails on dirty, shoeless feet.
She pushed up a sleeve and showed Rune the punctures and marks on her skinny arm. Many of them. It was like she’d been kissed by a whole lot of high school boys with not one man among them who knew what he was doing.
Then she turned her face away, pushed her hair back, and pointed out the marks on her neck. “I have them all over,” she said, her eyes dark, proud. “I’d rather be undead than anything else on earth. They rock. And they live forever. Who wouldn’t want to be turned?”
Rune’s disgusted look must have egged her on. “I love their bite. Have you ever been bitten by a vampire? It’s fucking heaven. I could come just thinking about it.”