Lovers Sacrifice

by R. A. Steffan

  He’d been absolutely right. His incandescent look of happiness, combined her satisfied, cat-with-the-cream smile, would tell anyone who saw it exactly what they needed to know.

  No question about it.

  EPILOGUE

  London, two weeks later

  XANDER’S MOBILE PHONE BUZZED in his trouser pocket, and he ignored it. Like clockwork, some thirty seconds later, it vibrated again to indicate a new voicemail. After debating with himself for the space of a few heartbeats while the pounding bass of the club’s music system throbbed through his chest, he pulled it out.

  Under the strobing blacklight, his pale skin looked even paler than usual. His hand felt pleasantly and ever so slightly disconnected from the rest of him, after the blood he’d just drunk from a random junkie who’d been skulking around the hallway in the back. He flicked a thumb across the screen lock, unsurprised to see Tré’s number at the top of the notification list.

  Tré’s smooth, Eastern European accent competed with the deep house track rumbling through the club, only vampire hearing allowing Xander to untangle his words from the din around him.

  “Xander. Pick up your damned phone. Disappearing like this is foolhardy under the present circumstances, as you well know.” A pause. “Oksana is concerned for you, tovarăş.”

  Xander ground his jaw for a moment before opening up a text window.

  Fuck off, Tré. You can give me a damned week without breathing down my neck every fifteen minutes.

  The reply came almost instantly.

  Are you in London?

  Of course I’m in bloody London. Now. Fuck. Off.

  He powered the phone off and slipped it carelessly back in his pocket. Already, his pleasant buzz was wearing off, his undead metabolism breaking down the drugs in minutes. Just another one of the many, many shitty things about vampirism.

  The atmosphere of Club Cirque wrapped around him like barbed wire dipped in anesthetic. Hidden under the rails not far off Lambeth Road, the only public access was through an unmarked railway arch that looked like nothing so much as a simple garage.

  Lambeth at large had a reputation—not undeserved—of being home to gangs, drugs, and murderers. Club Cirque had a reputation of being home to freaks—also, not undeserved. Dressed in a burgundy button-down, black tailored trousers, and polished Berluti Scritto shoes, Xander’s only real concession to the unofficial dress code had been to undo a couple of buttons at the top of his shirt, baring a triangle of pale chest and collarbone.

  By rights, this should have made him stand out like a sore thumb among the sea of tattoos, piercings, whips, chains, leather, and dyed hair. That was the thing about freaks, though—they always recognized their own.

  His black mood settled firmly back around his shoulders, and he scanned the crowd. Alcoholics weren’t going to do it for him tonight. Where was a heroin addict when you really needed one?

  A small commotion erupted at the entrance to the hallway where Xander had partaken of his second-hand coke hit a little while ago. It was a woman, maybe thirty years of age with waist-length black hair and a light brown complexion with olive undertones. Her dark eyes were wide, and more than a little frantic looking. Like him, she was not decked out for a place like this—indeed, the look she was sporting could best be described as newly homeless. Yet something about her made his intuition tingle.

  She was stopping people, talking to them urgently, but they brushed her off. She cast around, saw Xander looking, and closed the distance between them. Something odd teased his nose, but it was impossible to place it within the potent cloud of perfume, smoke, and human body odor that choked the atmosphere of the underground venue.

  “Please, I need help,” she said, a faint accent coloring the words. Indian—probably from the Kashmir region or thereabouts.

  He leaned against the bar, regarding her from his advantage of height. “Sorry, luv. I’m off the clock tonight. The bartender can call 999 for you if it’s an emergency.”

  She shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. It’s my sister. Some… thing attacked us in the alley, and she got in front of me. She’s hurt—I can’t wake her up.”

  Xander stopped himself before he could say, A mugging in Lambeth? How shocking, because there was being brusque, and then there was being unnecessarily arsehole-ish.

  “Emergency services can send an ambulance around,” he said instead, and started to raise a hand to get the barman’s attention.

  “But the thing that attacked us!” she said, her voice rising. “It wasn’t human!”

  He lowered his hand.

  Don’t get involved, counseled the truncated and badly atrophied remnants of his good sense. You need this kind of shit right now like you need eight hours inside a full-spectrum tanning booth.

  “What do you mean, not human?” he asked, sounding tired even to his own ears.

  “It was a child,” she said, her wide brown eyes begging him to believe her. “But he had these eerie, glowing eyes, and he moved so fast he seemed to blur. Right before he leapt at my sister, he sort of snarled at us, and I swear I saw these long, sharp teeth—like fangs!”

  Xander’s brain crashed to a standstill, thoughts piling up like derailed train cars.

  “What.” His tone was utterly flat.

  “Please—I’m not crazy! I know what I saw!” She gestured the way she’d come. “Just come back with me and help me with my sister… her neck’s all torn up and I’m afraid by the time an ambulance gets here it will be too late!”

  Had he said heroin addict? After this, he’d need to bypass heroin altogether, and go straight for meth. He pushed away from the bar. If nothing else, he could at least open a vein and heal the poor girl’s neck, assuming she wasn’t already dead.

  “Come on, then,” he said, “show me.” The implications, if this woman had actually seen what she described…

  But, no. Implications could wait until he saw the victim and the scene for himself. His companion broke into a run, and he jogged alongside her to keep up. The tradesmen’s entrance to the club consisted of a flight of stairs next to a rickety lift designed to ferry freight up and down to street level. They took the stairs two at a time, and the woman pushed through the double doors leading to the dingy alley running behind the railway arches.

  “She’s just up here,” the woman said breathlessly, gesturing toward a darker stretch of shadows that ended in a solid brick wall.

  Xander opened his mouth to ask what the hell two women had been doing walking through a dark, dead-end alley at four in the morning, but then the stench of the place assailed him and he snapped it shut again, grimacing. Piss, vomit, rotting garbage, animal droppings, and—

  “Over here.” She waved him toward a gap between a dumpster and some discarded truck tires.

  —and wet dog.

  He whirled back toward the mouth of the alley, in time to see around a dozen feral looking men and women melt out of the shadow, blocking the exit. His erstwhile damsel in distress turned and darted past him to join the group. He let her go.

  “Oh, you have got to be shitting me,” Xander said, wondering for a bare instant which god he’d managed to piss off this time, and how big of a charitable donation it would take to get back on that deity’s good side.

  “Sorry,” the dark-haired woman told him, sounding genuinely sheepish. She jerked her chin at the man next to her, who was decked out in chains and ripped camo like some sort of cut-rate Mad Max reject. “He didn’t think you’d come if you knew what we really were, vampire.”

  “Smarter than he looks, then,” Xander said blandly. “Good to know.”

  The man’s answering smile was thin and cruel. “You’d be amazed.” He cocked his head. “No doubt you’re getting ready to fly away home, little vamp, but you should hear what I have to tell you first. I’ve got something you want.”

  “You think so?” Xander asked. “What is it? Fleas? Kibbles? A squeaky toy? Maybe a nice, meaty bone?”

  That crue
l smile never wavered. “I’ve got that little baby vamp Manisha described to you, all chained up in iron shackles so he can’t get away. Interested, now?”

  “God, I fucking hate werewolves,” Xander told him, tone still conversational. “Have I mentioned that yet?”

  “Oh, well. Off you flap, then,” the leader said, making a shooing motion with one hand. “Nothing stopping you, is there? Not unless you want us to take you to see Junior first…”

  Xander gritted his teeth, wanting nothing more at that moment than the human ability to crawl into a bottle, get blind, falling-down drunk, and never crawl back out.

  “Fine, Fluffy,” he grated. “You win. Take me to see this alleged vampire, and I won’t brandish the rolled-up newspaper.”

  Fluffy’s flat, hard eyes were starting to make Xander’s skin crawl, quite honestly. But he held back any further insults as Fluffy shrugged a brawny shoulder.

  “That’s real magnanimous of you, mate,” said the werewolf. “Best follow us, in that case. Dawn’s coming soon. You wouldn’t want to get a terminal case of sunburn, now would you?”

  Actually, mate, Xander thought sourly, you might be surprised. Lately, that prospect has been growing more appealing by the day.

  finis

  The Circle of Blood series continues in Book Four: Lover’s Absolution.

  Curious about Xander’s checkered history with werewolves and voodoo? Sign up at www.rasteffan.com/circle and get the free series prequel delivered to your inbox!