Steele City Blues: The Third Book in the Hell’s Belle Series (Hell's Belle 3)

by Karen Greco

  But first things first — getting Mia out of here.

  Frankie and I were tasked with getting Mia from the safe house to the airport. Bertrand, the demon mayor of Providence, had hooked us up with a supernatural sympathizer who worked for one of the few airlines still running out of TF Green. The plan was to smuggle Mia onto the last cargo plane flying out that night. It was departing at 11:40 p.m. sharp. Mia would fly to San Diego, where she'd be smuggled to a remote safe house just over the Mexican border. The operation was like an apocalyptic version of the Underground Railroad for witches, vampires and other supernaturals, or supernats, who wanted to live peacefully and discreetly among humans.

  As a coven elder whose magic was so strong that it rivaled pretty much all witches, Mia was an important figure among supernats, Leila included. Even when she wasn't practicing, Mia oozed magic. That kind of power put her straight into Mommy Dearest's crosshairs, a very dangerous place to be. Leila would be able to get a read on Mia easily. We needed to get to that plane.

  Nice and easy, I pressed on the brakes as the road began to bend. But instead of following my lead and slowing into the curve, Frankie flew past me.

  "What the hell are you doing?!" I screamed over the wind, knowing his sensitive vampire hearing would pick up my voice.

  Before he could respond, he lost control and his bike went into a skid. His body, still attached to the bike, slid across the asphalt roadway, spinning out of control for a solid 100 feet. The slam of bike and body against the cement barrier boomed through the quiet night.

  "Frankie!" I yelled into the wind. My instincts screamed at me to open the throttle, but I forced myself to slow down as I negotiated the dangerous roadway.

  When I got through the turn, I stopped the bike in the middle of the freeway. I yanked Mia off the back and sprinted towards Frankie, dragging her after me. If those goons caught up with us, Mia sitting alone on my bike was an easy target.

  He was in rough shape, taking a direct hit to the head that left a crack in the huge cement barrier. Blood rushed out of his skull like a geyser. The bike could go up in flames at any second and I wanted to get all of us out of the way. But Frankie’s skull was split open, his grey matter oozing onto the ground. The bones were already fusing back together. His noggin knitting shut with his brain bits still on the pavement wouldn't be a good thing. I had to get them back into his head.

  Gritting my teeth, I scooped up his brains and tried to push them back into his skull. His head was healing too fast. I couldn't get his grey matter off the pavement fast enough. I reached into my pocket and pulled out an athame. I pulled his blood-soaked hair tight, losing my fingers in its thick darkness. Then, without hesitating, I hacked at the bone to reopen his skull.

  "Mia, help me!" I called to the witch. "There, pick that up." I nodded at the brain tissue still on the ground. With one final slam, I re-cracked his cranium. Blood oozed out again. "Shove it in, fast!"

  I jammed my fingers into the crack and stretched it out. His skull popped and cracked under the pressure, but it gave way so that we could replace what was missing. Mia, without gagging (bless her witchy soul), picked up Frankie's brain matter and shoved it back into his head. I released my fingers and, quick as can be, his bones knitted back together.

  "Well done, Mia!" I said, jumping up to give that heroic witch a hug. I turned just in time to see a gunman walk up behind her and shoot her point blank in the back of the head, execution style. She crumpled to the ground. This time it was chunks of her brain, dark red blood and bits of her broken skull that landed on my booted foot. Unlike Frankie, there was no fixing this one.

  Without hesitation, I leapt at the gunman, grabbed his head and gave it a sharp twist. His neck snapped and his body crumpled. I tossed him into the middle of the highway like a rag doll. He landed right in front of two oncoming motorcycles, the remaining members of his posse. They both swerved to avoid his body and dumped their bikes in the chaos, spinning out down the highway.

  I ran after them, my living-vampire swiftness getting me there before they could register what happened. I snatched one up by the back of his leather jacket, dragging him along the ground to his buddy. That one I lifted off the ground by his throat.

  "What the hell are you, lady?"

  That was the one I had by the back of the neck. The one I had by the throat could only wheeze.

  "I am no lady," I growled. "I am your executioner."

  I tossed them both on the ground and shook out my wrists. A pair of razor sharp blades extended over each hand, my own special weaponized claws.

  "You're human, right?" I asked with a smile before plunging a blade into each of their throats simultaneously. I extracted the claws quickly and blood bubbled out of their necks. Between the blood and the expelling air, their throats made a gurgling noise.

  "Good god, woman," Frankie said, sneaking up behind me. "Must you always kill in such a vile way? That sound is atrocious."

  "How's your head?" I asked, squinting at him. He wasn't listing when he stood. That I could see, at least.

  "What are you talking about?" he puzzled. "Come on now, let's clean up your mess."

  I wiped the bloody blades against my jeans. "Leave it."

  "Are you mad? If we leave this...."

  "What? Leila will send her goons out looking for me?" I said, toeing at one of the lifeless bodies. "These were her goons, and they were after Mia, not me."

  "Mia?" Frankie looked confused for a minute. "Mia...I can't quite..." His clouded expression went bright with alarm. "Mia! Wait, where is Mia?"

  I gave my arms a quick shake. The blades retracted. "They got her, Frankie."

  "What do you mean, they got her?" he asked.

  I pointed to where Mia lay in the middle of the highway. Her grey hair was black and sticky from the blood pooled around her. "Where was I when all this was happening?"

  "You took a nasty bump on the head. You were out for the whole thing."

  "Out, like passed out? Vampires don't pass out."

  "The ones with traumatic brain injuries do."

  Frankie’s eyes went wide. "Really? I had a traumatic brain injury? And I’m not a vegetable. Extraordinary."

  I wiped my blood stained hands on my ass. "Frankie, we lost Mia. I just executed three of Leila's human henchmen. My jeans are ruined. And I need a goddamn drink. What the hell is so extraordinary about your brain injury?"

  His laugh was small and rueful. "Your dad and I used to argue about what would happen to a vampire if the brain was injured. Would we survive? Be vegetative? I figured there had to be something that kept us alive, in a manner of speaking, and there had to be neurons firing in the brain. So I said we'd be veg."

  "Well, you can give me the 50 bucks you bet then, since he's not here."

  "It wasn't a money wager."

  "Bullshit. There was no way you and my dad had this debate without some sort of monetary bet on the table.”

  Frankie raised an eyebrow.

  I was too tired to prod further. "Well, since you're not a vegetable, you can help me roll these two assholes and see exactly who the hell they are."

  "What's the point?" Frankie asked. "They are human, so most likely they’re bounty hunters."

  "Yeah and they executed Mia. She wasn't just collateral damage. She was their target."

  "Right, and they work for your mom," he said, shrugging.

  "Leila," I corrected him. That woman may have birthed me, but she was not my mother. "If they worked for Leila, I want to know who they are, where they live, where they work, who they hang out with. I am sure there are others in their posse tasked with assassinating other witches."

  "Good point," he conceded. "Should we call Max?"

  I shook my head. No reason to get the FBI involved. Or what was left of it. The Feds now worked for my mother—I mean, Leila. My team, Blood Ops, no longer had the backing of the U.S. government. We were the vigilantes.

  "Hey ho!" Frankie called out, digging through a wallet he lib
erated from one of our attackers. "Got a driver's license on him, out of Connecticut of all places. I think this may be near our roving pack of wolves."

  I sighed, remembering the werewolf pack we met just a few weeks ago. It felt like an eternity had passed since. "That's just great. I have zero interest in talking to those pricks again. Werewolves are not exactly team players."

  "Keep your friends close, Nina," Frankie reminded me. I stared while he stuffed the dead guy's money in his jacket pocket.

  "Frankie, what the hell are you doing? We're searching them, not robbing them."

  "Nina, the boys are dead. If they are dead, can I really rob them?"

  I opened my mouth to say something, but he cut me off before I took a breath.

  "Don't give me crap about dishonoring the dead and all that. It's end times, Nina. Grab the greenbacks while we can."

  I didn't argue, especially since I planned on making the same argument for taking their guns. Weapons were in even shorter supply than cash, which was becoming more and more useless anyway. "Find anything else?" I asked, pulling my hands clear of the pockets of the first guy I took down. "This guy was clearly the brains of the operation. He has no identification on him."

  "Let's get off the streets then," Frankie said. "Back to the bar?"

  "Let's split up though. Something doesn't feel right," I said.

  "What do you mean, love?"

  "I mean, it feels like we're being watched."

  Frankie did a 360-degree turn in the middle of the dark highway. No one seemed to be around us for miles. "That's paranoia, Nina, and they have pills for that."

  I shook my head. "I trust my gut here, Frankie. Someone's been on our tail since yesterday."

  "Your mum—" he started and I shot him a look. "Sorry. Leila. She's had trackers on us for days."

  I shivered, feeling those invisible eyes on me again. "No, it's not her. It's something else. Not sure what."

  "So it's your witchy senses tingling?"

  I looked down the interstate. The streetlights were out, and most of the houses and high-rise buildings in the distance were dark. The blinds on every window within view were closed tightly.

  I nodded. "You stay on the highway. I'll take the back roads and meet you at Babe’s."

  "Right," Frankie said. "And if one of us doesn't get there in 30 minutes, the other sends out the cavalry."

  "You mean Bertrand, don't you?" I asked, growing cold at the mention of his name.

  "He's all the cavalry we have at the moment," Frankie said.

  That was true. Bertrand was our only lifeline right then, but a demon can't be anything but a demon. That meant he was playing both sides – mine and Leila’s – so he'd end up on the winning one. But the winning side was, more often than not, the demon’s.

  Frankie picked his bike up off the ground and swore at the damage on the left side. "Bloody hell, I don't remember dumping my bike," he muttered before the roar of his engine cut his voice off.

  I straddled my bike and started her up, the rumble soothing. I glanced over at Mia, her slight body crumpled in a spreading pool of blood. One more innocent victim in a supernatural genocide. And I failed to protect her.

  I kicked my motorcycle into gear and headed to the first exit to take the back roads to Babe’s, before the cops got wind of the mess littering the highway.

  Welcome to Providence.

  2

  "Frankie here yet?" I grumbled to my best friend Darcy when I walked into Babe's on the Sunnyside. I now had sole ownership of the dive bar since Leila burned my Aunt Babe at the stake for being a witch, kicking off this entire mess.

  I tossed my road-worn, blood-spattered leather jacket on the bar, ducked under the counter and immediately reached for a bottle of whatever was closest. It happened to be tequila.

  "Maybe you should wash your hands first?" Darcy, ever the pragmatist, suggested. She tossed me a bar towel. "Face too." She made a wiping motion up her cheek.

  I caught a quick look at my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Dried blood caked my hands. Blood spatter covered my face, chest and part of my white tank top. It also coated my hair, which was hanging down in sticky clumps. Some of the dried blood looked chunky. Probably bits of brain, given the events of the evening.

  I uncorked the bottle with my teeth and took a quick pull, the cheap booze burning a line down my dry throat. I turned the tap on the sink and shoved my entire head under the cool water, washing away the evening's folly. Mia was dead and there was a pileup of bodies on the interstate. Blood and street grime puddled in the sink before swirling down the drain. I wished my memories of Mia's execution could be flushed away just as easily.

  The bar regulars — the few that were left — didn't even flinch. With an assist from Casper, the teenaged ghost-witch that inhabited my body from time to time, I had used my rudimentary magic to disguise the bar as a rundown, abandoned shack. To humans, it appeared marked for demolition. But supernats knew better. They knew Babe's as their safe haven, away from pitch-fork wielding humans.

  When Leila unmasked my aunt as a witch, she took advantage of the human population’s mass hysteria and took over the statehouse in a coup. The entire state was under Marshall Law and her human henchmen tasked with hunting down the “new breed of terrorists.”

  Blood Ops, a top-secret government task force that controlled the supernatural population, was disbanded the minute she tossed the match in Babe’s funeral pyre. The head of Blood Ops, Dr. Lachlan O'Malley, was taken into custody and was now sitting in the state’s maximum-security prison, nicknamed Steele City. Dr. O, Frankie, Darcy and I no longer had the protection of the United States government.

  The irony was, supernatural creatures were perfectly happy in the closet. Witches practiced their magic, vampires found willing blood sources, werewolves whooped it up in the woods. Most of us were content to blend in with the human population. But there was always a bad apple in the bunch, and when a rogue witch caused havoc or a vampire went on a killing spree, Blood Ops was discharged to handle the situation. Whereas before we protected the humans from the likes of us, we now found ourselves protecting our kind from the humans.

  When I pulled my head up, water dripped from my hair down my shoulders, soaking my tank top. I grabbed a dry bar towel and gave it a sniff. Smelled clean. "So, Frankie here yet?" I asked again, wiping my face.

  Just as Darcy shook her head no, the door to the bar opened. I dropped the towel and reached for the shotgun stashed behind the bar, relaxing my grip when I saw that it was Frankie.

  "Hey ho! I see I made it just in time for the wet t-shirt contest."

  I scowled as his eyes lingered a second too long on my boobs. "What took you so long?" I traded the shotgun back for a towel and rubbed at my wet hair.

  He snatched the tequila bottle from where I left it on the bar. "Stop nagging, woman. I got here quick as I could. You sent me 'round the long way."

  He took a pull from the bottle and handed it to me.

  "We are taking that bottle out of commission, right?" Darcy asked, horrified by our unsanitary behavior.

  "No one gives a shit, Darce," I grumbled.

  "Is that so?"

  I waved the bottle at the three remaining drunks nursing their booze at the bar. "Am I right?"

  They slurred their agreement.

  Darcy pulled the bottle out of my vice-like grip. "You've got to snap out of this, Nina," she said. "I love you, and I know it's been really hard, but you have got to make peace with everything."

  "Really?" I spat at her. "And how does one make peace with this? You tell me how I can make peace with my aunt being burned at the goddamn stake like it's still freaking 17th-century Salem."

  "In Nina's defense," Frankie piped up, "her mum did murder her aunt in an unquestionably barbaric way. Brought me back to the witch burnings from the Middle Ages. Horrible time, that. Are we out of absinthe?"

  "And you both are drinking yourself stupid?" Darcy groused, but pulled our last b
ottle out from under the bar. She shoved it towards Frankie, then dug out a spoon and sugar cubes. "You'll have to get by with a rocks glass. The absinthe ones broke last week."

  I slumped against the bar under Darcy’s withering gaze. The absinthe glasses shattered when I threw them at a werewolf who came sniffing around at Leila's bidding. Well, at least I'm pretty sure he was sniffing around at Leila's bidding. Darcy wasn't convinced, but I wasn't about to put any faith in a wolf.

  Publicly, Leila said she wanted to eradicate the supernatural creatures. Privately, she employed the ones willing to turn on their own. Hell, Leila was passing for a human herself. She was a witch/vampire hybrid, just like me. Her genes mixed with my vampire father’s made me even more of a hybrid. But I wasn’t undead yet. Rather, I was a living vampire with some vampiric traits. I healed faster, moved faster and, lately, had a hankering for blood.

  "No matter," Frankie said, setting up his drink.

  "So, was the cargo plane comfortable enough for Mia?" Darcy asked, her attempt to change the subject backfiring spectacularly.

  "We lost Mia," Frankie said. His focus on pouring out the green liquid over the sugar cube into the rocks glass never wavered.

  "Lost?" Darcy shriveled her nose. "You mean..."

  "As in dead," I snapped. "Gun shot. Point blank. In the head."

  Darcy gasped. "What happened?"

  "I lost my focus when I had to scoop Frankie's brains up off the side of the highway."

  "Thanks for that, by the way," Frankie quipped.

  "What the hell...you mean you lost her?" Darcy started, then softened when I turned my head sharply in her direction. "I’m sorry, Nina."

  "What's one more dead witch, right?" I muttered under a sudden crack of thunder that shook the floorboards. A bit of plaster rained down from the ceiling.