by Izzy Shows
“Nothing you’d want to know about,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t push it farther than that. He wouldn’t want to know what I was, wouldn’t want to know about the things I’d done to his fellow vampires. “I’m more the type that wants to be here for the excitement.”
“Oh, I can give you plenty of excitement, baby.” I felt his face near my throat, and I managed not to tense. This fang was not about to sink his teeth into me. That was too far, that was something I couldn’t allow. I knew it wouldn’t be the death of me, knew I could turn my blood to poison or liquid fire and get him to leave me alone, but that would create a scene. Never mind that I would not welcome the invasion of my body, never mind that it was a huge offence on his part. I hoped that was the kind of thing one would ask about before doing, but I didn’t know what vampire etiquette was.
I should have asked Carmen before we left.
“Yeah? Am I the type of girl you go for?” A giggle bubbled up and out of me.
“Mmm, no, I just couldn’t resist you when I saw you dancing. And this,” he murmured, his fingers brushing at the edge of my crop top, “had my imagination running wild.”
My lips curled back in a snarl, and my hands jumped down with the intent of brushing his hands away, but I managed to redirect my hands to my hips instead. I wanted to punch him in the face and get away from him, my skin crawling at his every touch—he would interpret it as goosebumps from excitement, I was certain.
“Oh yeah? What’s your normal type, then?”
“Desperate, innocent, sad,” he said, brushing a kiss against my hair by my ear. “Not at all like you.”
“Aha, thank you,” I said, my voice oozing sugary sweetness. “So, I’d have to play the innocent to get you to notice me on a normal day?”
“Oh, baby, I couldn’t ever not notice you.”
“Awww.” I pushed my arse against his hips, grinding against him with feigned fervour. “Where would you find me?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t notice how many questions I was asking. I reached behind me to grasp his hips and hold him closer to me, trying to distract him.
He groaned, the action causing his lips to brush my ear. “Maybe outside a bar. You sound like you want to be picked up.”
“I told you, I’m a sucker for excitement.” I emphasised the word ‘sucker,’ giggling afterwards.
“I can see that,” he said, and he was so close to me that I could feel his smile. “Bars are my favourite, late at night, but some of us like to cruise the alleys nearby. Just about anywhere you think someone desperate is going to end up, you can find us.”
Desperate was the keyword I was getting from him, and that pissed me off. Because what constituted a desperate woman? He said that I didn’t, but was he just trying to play me? I didn’t care if someone thought I was desperate, but it irked me that it was being applied to the women that they killed. Someone had thought Jolanda was desperate because she’d wanted to be loved, wanted to be held by another human being and cherished. And why was that desperate?
I was done. He’d given me everything I’d needed to know, that I could know without asking obvious questions. Not all of it was news to me, but it helped to have it confirmed.
I stepped away from him without another word and melted into the crowd. I heard him call after me but didn’t stop to respond, putting a wall of people between us so that he couldn’t follow me, couldn’t catch me.
I disappeared into the night.
32
I hadn’t bothered to find Carmen before leaving, not wanting to spend any more time in the club and risk fending off more invasive offers, I had opted to walk home alone. Perhaps not the safest decision out there, but it’s what I had decided to do. I was only a little nervous walking down the street in my club get up, aware of the random stares I was getting as I walked, but overall I tried not to care about it. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop them from staring, so I held my head high as I walked along the street.
I was exhausted, and half naked, and felt more so with only half of my gear with me. I wished I could just teleport myself back to the house, but if that was a spell that even existed, I hadn’t heard of it. No, the only thing to do was deal with it. And put up with the intense exhaustion while I waited to get home and to my nice, warm bed.
Pain exploded across my back and I was flung several feet forward and face down into the concrete, too surprised and hurt to even scream, though my mind was doing plenty of it now that I was on the ground. Asphalt had scraped my exposed skin to hell and beyond, and I felt a hot sticky substance on my cheek that was most assuredly blood.
Fuck.
What the bloody hell had just happened?
I started to pull my battered arms under me, turning my face to the side so that my weight wasn’t on my bloody nose. I could see the soft illumination behind me, my back tattoo had activated to protect me from the attack. That didn’t tell me if it was magical or not, but I suspected the latter. There had been no explosion behind me, so it was most likely that it had been a bullet. Shotgun, perhaps, given the force it had hit me with, and close range. The pain at my back was widespread, though dulling now that time was passing and I could breathe again.
I didn’t have time for more thoughts to pass through, as pain erupted along my scalp—someone was pulling me up by my hair. I wrenched to the side, ignoring the sharp pain that followed, and kicked up toward my attacker, hoping the heeled boot would come in handy now. I heard a yelp and my hair was freed at last, the sound of feet scuffling to the side followed. I jumped up, whirling around to see my attackers.
Five burly men faced me, all carrying miniature machine guns. OK. Wow. So, someone was trying to kill me. That was good to know. They looked surprised to see me standing—made sense, normally you shoot someone with a gun like that and they don’t get back up. I drew in a deep breath, my mind racing to figure out how I was going to get out of this without my full gear and as exhausted as I was. There were not a lot of good choices.
They didn’t seem to want to wait for me to figure it out, as they all raised their guns and prepared to fire.
“Aegis!” I shouted, snapping my right hand out in front of me, activating one of my rings. A flat circle appeared in front of me, a line connecting back to my hand where it drew its power, about as tall as I was and reaching all the way down to the ground. The bullets flew into it, smacking against the wall and flattening there. It hurt, not to do the magic, but I still felt their impact. It would have been better to create a dome shield, so that the bullets would be redirected away from me, but I couldn’t risk that in such a public location. It was bad enough that I was being attacked out here—although it appeared that the street had cleared out at the sound of gunshots. Good.
Police wouldn’t be long.
Oh fuck, Finn was going to show up, ridicule me for my outfit and get himself killed. That was not going to be fun at all. I had to get this taken care of, and quickly.
One of the thugs dropped his gun to the ground and charged me, clearly having figured out that his bullets weren’t going to get through to me. Good. I could handle that.
I dropped the shield as soon as the sounds of bullets firing ceased, and whipped up my left hand, splaying my fingers wide.
“Ventus!” I shouted, and wind erupted from the palm of my hands, ploughing down the line of men ahead of me. I kept up the wind tunnel for several minutes, panting, sweat dripping down into my eyes so that I could barely see. It might not hurt to use the power in my foci, but Gods be damned, it was draining to keep up a spell of that magnitude for a prolonged amount of time.
Finally, I let it drop. I didn’t see any of them any longer, they had all been driven far enough back that they were out of eyesight. Good. Maybe now I could go home.
I turned and started walking again, this time more quickly. I couldn’t quite run in the heels, not without breaking an ankle, but I was going as fast as I could. I didn’t want anyone catching up to me. I turned down the first alley that presente
d itself—in the back of my mind, I heard the vampire’s words from the club.
Some of us prefer alleys. We look for the desperate ones.
I wasn’t desperate, but I might just look it, with the fear etched into my face and the clothes that I was wearing, it wasn’t inconceivable that someone would think I was an easy mark. I knew that there was a limit to the amount of magic I could do before I passed out, and I also knew that I would probably hit that point if I had to go up against a vampire right now. I had already expended a lot of energy, what with the club sapping me emotionally, and then the physical tiring of magical combat.
“Stop!” A voice shouted from behind. I whirled, and saw three of the thugs behind me. Fuck. They’d caught up to me. One of them must have seen me turn down the alley. I kept going, vainly hoping that I would be able to outpace them somehow.
I felt two more bullets smack against my back, and it started to heat from the magical energy there. Now that was a major suck of energy, it was an enormous focus that worked as a passive shield for just this purpose, and I had put a lot of magic into it so that it wouldn’t sap too much energy while out in the field, but this was more force than I’d been expecting. Luckily, the last two bullets had to have flown farther than the first attack, because they didn’t do more than cause me to stumble. Well, stumble and bite the shit out of my cheek. I tasted blood.
This was not a good evening.
I turned and braced myself for another fight, my vision wavering a bit—not a good sign.
They were all staring at me with ugly snarls on their faces, and I knew that I needed to care more about the fact that I might be about to die, but I just didn’t have the energy for it. All I could do was focus on the fight at hand.
“If you come quietly, it’ll be easier for you,” said one of them.
“That’s what they all say, but at the end of the day, you’re getting fucked,” I said cheerfully. “I’d rather everyone know how I go down, and that isn’t easy, sweet cheeks.”
He glowered at me. “You ain’t got the stuff to put up a fight. We know what you usually carry, and you ain’t got it with you tonight. You’re going to come with us, one way or another.”
“Well then let’s go with the other. What, are you going to talk my ear off all night? You know what I usually carry, so you know what I can do. It sounds like you don’t know that I can do all of that without my gear, which means you’re the one who’s going down. Is that why you’re talking so much, you scared?” I lifted an eyebrow, talking a big talk and knowing that I couldn’t walk it out. There was no way I could pull off as big of a show without my gear, but they didn’t need to know that. If I could intimidate them into leaving, like I had the three vampires, then perhaps I would get out of this alive.
He grunted and looked at his associates, nodding to them. This appeared to be some sort of predetermined cue, because they then proceeded to charge me.
I took in a deep breath, hating what I was going to have to do.
“Incendium,” I chanted as I lifted a hand casually, aiming it at them. I felt the fire pull at the pit of my stomach, racing up my torso and down my arm, burning a path of pain as it did so. I gritted my teeth against it—somehow it was worse knowing that it was going to happen. You psyche yourself up for the pain and that’s almost worse than the actual pain, although it never truly is. The pain is always horrible.
The men shouted and leapt to either side of the alley to avoid the fireball I’d thrown at them, two of them immediately turning to look at their leader in unison.
“I told you, I don’t need my gear to take care of you,” I said. “Get out while you can. I won’t tell Mummy on you.”
He snarled. “What are you looking at me for? Get her!” He pointed his finger at me, and I huffed out a sigh.
I should care more about what was going on here, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Either I was going to make it out of this or I wasn’t, there was nothing that worrying was going to do to change that fact.
Except if I died right now, right here, then Finn would be on his own to figure out who the vampires were, how to stop them. Ah, fuck, I couldn’t let that happen. I felt the panic start to build in my chest and cursed; that was the worst thing that could have happened, because now I wasn’t going to be able to focus as well as I would have if I was dispassionate about the whole thing.
“Incendium,” I chanted again, lifting both hands up for a wide spray. I heard two of them shriek as I made contact, and the sound of bodies hitting the ground—to avoid the spray most likely, as I would think they would have screamed if the fire had met them as well.
Then all at once one of them was in front of me, and all I could think was that he must have crawled under the fire to jump up in front of me, but it didn’t matter anyway because he had clubbed me on the head and I was on the ground and seeing stars. What was even happening? How had he got around the fire?
I was wheezing, what remained of my vision was blurred beyond recognition—raw power takes a hell of a lot out of you, and I had already been wiped when I’d started. I turned my head to look in the direction of the thug, and all I saw was a boot headed towards me.
The world turned to black.
33
Gods but my head hurt. It was like a pack of angry bees were swarming around me, stinging me repeatedly and otherwise wreaking havoc on my brain. I couldn’t think, couldn’t process what had happened. Where was I and how had I got here?
And then I realised that there was more pain, and it was all around me, and I screamed from it, the pain driving out any possible thought. I could feel my skin burning, and I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, oh Gods make it stop.
I tried to breathe and failed, then forced myself to do it again. Air passed into my lungs this time, and I kicked my brain into gear again. I pushed the pain to the back of my mind so I could think, though it cost me dearly.
The last thing I could remember was the fight in the alley…going down. Fuck. I’d got my ass kicked, and apparently by a mundane. How the hell had that happened? I should have been able to do more, should have been able to fight better. I’d been so exhausted, hadn’t had my gear with me, I hadn’t been able to do anything like I normally would.
I was now aware that my face was pressed into a plush carpet, and opened my eyes to see where I was. With the carpet in my face, there was nothing to make out, so I would need to sit up. When I tried to do that, though, my shoulders screamed in excruciating pain. I was hog tied. I reached for the magic inside of me immediately, but couldn’t find it.
Panic began.
“You won’t be able to escape, Miss Sheach.” A voice sounded above me, but slightly far away. Everything was above me right now. I rolled onto my side so that I could face the voice, and found the three vampires from the other night standing in a semi-circle there. Their fangs were exposed, eyes half mad, and they were practically salivating. “That is iron binding you, to keep your magic at bay. You have been rather difficult to capture, but once we learned of your presence at Serenity, we realised that you could not possibly have gone dressed for battle. You made a mistake by going there, Miss Sheach.”
I wanted to punch the man’s teeth in for the way he said my name.
“You’re going to pay for this,” I said, and it was a promise. It was my own fuck up that had put me here, but I wasn’t going to forget who it was that had tied me up, burned my skin so that there were welts and horrific pain. I looked each of them in the eye, one by one, so that they could see the promise of death in my eyes.
They flinched in unison, and I smiled.
Fuck with me, bastards.
“I don’t see how you will accomplish that from your current state. Your world will not be around for you to save for much longer, and once that is done, you will not be around either. See, we have decided on a punishment that is fit for you. We are going to take away everything that you love, piece by piece. Starting with your friends. We shall find them and bring them
here, so that you might watch them die. You shall stand in attendance for every massacre we conduct, so that you know of the pain and destruction rained down on the world. You will watch as we destroy everything that you have ever cared about, and then you will watch the New World rise. Those of good blood will be selected as breeders, and we will cultivate a herd unlike any other before, to feed off as we see fit. We will no longer skulk about and take those that we are able, for we will be able to take whenever we want. There will be no rules other than the ones we alone create. You will watch your world rot and die,” he said, with a smug look of satisfaction on his face.
I tried not to care, I did, I tried to tell myself that I would be able to stop all of this from taking place. But all I could see was Emily in all her perfect innocence being drained by one of them, Finn being dragged in and hung up to drain while they feasted on his blood. They were all going to die, because I had meddled in this case.
Finn would have died regardless. I thought, and that didn’t do anything to help. Because of course he would have died, he was the person who had started the investigation in the first place—but, but! If it weren’t for me teaching him what to look out for, he wouldn’t have known what type of case this was. Without me to bring in, he wouldn’t have known it was vampires doing the killing. Without me, he would have been able to survive without the torture they would certainly inflict upon him, without me, perhaps everything would have been OK. Perhaps Dudley would have got to the bottom of this on his own.
Except Dudley hadn’t even known anything was going on when I went to talk to him. No one had known anything was going on, Finn was the only one to stand up and pay attention, and I was the only one in the community that had cared enough to get involved.
Like it or not, it had been necessary for me to become involved. And if I wasn’t here to do anything, they all would have died anyway, because these freaks were set on creating their New World. And Finn and Emily would never have stood idly by while it happened, they would have fought tooth and nail, and they would have been killed for it.