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

by Karen Greco

A sheen of sweat covered his body. "Who?"

  "She let you out, released you," I said, stalking the witch in a semicircle. My nostrils flared while I scented him like my grandfather, a ginger odor growing stronger as his fear rose. "Why? What did you promise?"

  "Nina," Darcy issued a warning.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," he said. His eyes darted around the room. He was looking for a way out.

  I lunged and wrapped one hand around his throat. I lifted him up and pressed him against the wall. "Why did she send you? How does it feel to sell out your own kind?" I dipped my head towards him and flashed my razor sharp fangs.

  His eyes widened. "Oh shit. They didn’t tell me you're a vampire too," he squeaked, his eyes wide.

  And there it was, caught in a lie. He knew exactly who I was, and Leila obviously sent him. My simmering anger turned to a boil. Betrayed, by my own kind. Again. My eyes focused on his pulse moving in his neck, while my ears followed its beat. His heart rate changed from an anxiety raised 102 beats per minute to a fear-boosted 147 when my rattlesnake tattoo issued its warning. Then, I struck. Like the venomous snake that wrapped me in my magic, my fangs sunk into his skin and the warm blood, with its rich spicy flavor, sated my hunger.

  The man's heart rate slowed. When he went limp, Frankie pulled me off him. "Enough, Nina. You need to learn to feed without killing." I wiped my mouth and watched him carry my snack to the couch. "You can't leave a pile of bodies in your wake."

  "And we can't risk him running to Leila and telling him her secret," Gramps said. He was back at the counter, grinding his herbs. "Let her finish her meal."

  "I should get going," Darcy said. She had already pulled on her jacket.

  "What's the rush?" I asked. "Curfew's not lifted yet."

  Darcy didn't meet my eyes. Between that and her pallid complexion, I knew exactly why the rush. My feeding grossed her out. As a Beta-Vamp, Matty couldn't feed on living people. Their fangs weren't sharp enough to break through skin. Not only physically unable to feast, they also lacked the predator drive. So she only watched Matty get sustenance from a blood bag. That was the vampire equivalent of running through the drive-through versus actually hunting your meal.

  "It's getting light," Frankie said. "She should be fine."

  He eyed the glow from behind the window treatments. This part of the apartment wasn't light-proofed. I know he wanted to get me in the bedroom, but not for any fun reasons. With the thick black drapes hung to keep out the sunlight, the bedroom looked like we hired a goth teen as our interior decorator. All that was missing was a Vlad the Impaler poster covered with hearts.

  I hated it, but the precaution was necessary. Unlike Frankie, I didn't have the benefit of a demon curse that allowed me to walk in the daylight. The space was better than the coffin hidden behind the keg room in our musty basement.

  Darcy waved her goodbyes and fled out the door that led to the bar to keep more sunlight from filtering into the room.

  I nodded at snitch-witch on the couch. He was still unconscious from blood loss. "What are we going to do with that one?"

  "Finish him off," Gramps said, using a mortar and pestle to grind down coriander.

  "I'll compel him once he comes to," Frankie said.

  "She'll see through the compulsion," Gramps warned. "You think she didn't plan for such basic trickery?"

  "Fine," Frankie said. I lunged towards the couch, aching to drain the last of his blood. But Frankie beat me to the body, and in one quick move he twisted the man's neck until a clean snap broke the silence in the room.

  "What the hell did you do that for?" I snapped. "You said I could kill him."

  "No one ever said that," Frankie corrected me. "You need to learn control. Letting you drink him dry would give into your bloodlust."

  I opened my mouth to curse him out, but Gramps talked right over me. "We need to discuss what happens next."

  "Nina needs to get into the bedroom before any more sunlight leaks in here," Frankie said.

  "This will take just a moment," the old man said. "Kittie shared some valuable information about the prison while you were out petting the rabies brigade."

  I traced the snake tattoo's path along my arm. "You actually trust what comes out of that woman's mouth?"

  "She has no reason to lie," he said. "Leila made her what she was and then refused to save her. She feels betrayed. We can use that."

  "She feels betrayed?" I scoffed. "The only one betrayed was us. Me."

  "Let's leave this until tomorrow," Frankie warned.

  I ignored him. "I think it's curious that you make me steal her magic and then plunge a knife in my throat. You want to talk about that too?"

  The old man sighed. "I will not apologize for not allowing you to suffer."

  "None of this happened in a void," I said. As my temper flared, my hunger did as well. I eyed the dead body on the couch. Would it be gross to drink postmortem? I shook my head and refocused. "If I didn't steal Kittie's magic, I would not have gotten sick. Hence, no need to..." I drew my hand across my throat.

  "As your magic grew stronger, you were getting sicker. The headaches, they became more frequent as you came into your own as a witch, right?"

  I turned to Frankie, but he just shrugged. "Sorry, Love. I noticed it."

  I leaned against the wall, my arms crossed. "And what do you mean Leila made Kittie? Seriously, she's not my sister, right?"

  Gramps chuckled. "No, she's not your sister by blood. But your mother gave Kittie that ink. She worked spells on that poor girl to replace you." Gramps must have caught my expression softening. "Not like she missed you, let's not fool ourselves here. Leila is a selfish woman. No, she was trying to replicate you, and the power that you'd grow into as a hybrid."

  "But Kittie's not a vampire," I said.

  "Exactly," he said. "Didn't work, now did it?"

  "Why didn't she just bonk Marcello then?"

  "Because she turned, remember?" Frankie said. "Vampires can't...procreate."

  "My father was a vampire, so that shoots your theory full of holes."

  Gramps tossed his spelling tools into the sink. I noticed he didn't worry about mixing the food knives with the potion prep. "Your father had a little help."

  I looked at Frankie. "Seriously?"

  "Nina, we are dead. Dead people cannot create life. There was a spell or two involved to make this happen."

  "Bertrand?"

  Frankie nodded. "And I suppose he refused to replicate the process for Leila after everything went south. The demon is a bastard, but he was a friend to your dad."

  "Bertrand doesn't have friends," I said. Sunlight was bleeding into the apartment now and heat blisters bubbled up on my exposed skin.

  "Nina, you've got to get into the room," Frankie warned. "Like now."

  He didn't have to tell me twice. The blisters itched like crazy.

  Frankie followed me into the bedroom and closed the door behind us. "What are you doing?" I asked. "If you think you're getting lucky, that ship capsized." I opened the dresser and rooted through it for pajamas.

  "Did it now?" he asked, stretching out on the bed. I slapped his boot-covered foot off the blanket on my way to turn on a lamp at the side table. We both could see in the dark, but the night vision took some getting used to.

  "Go home," I said.

  He grimaced. "I don't have one of those, remember? Darcy and Matty took over the whole bloody factory."

  "Stay upstairs in my apartment. You don't need the vampire lair."

  "You've seen the apartment right? It's nothing but computers and monitors and walkie-talkies and all these other technological gizmos. It's her own personal Radio Shack."

  "Well, you can't stay here," I said.

  "Why not?" he asked. "The ship, as you said, capsized."

  "Go on the couch."

  He wrinkled his nose. "With Gramps out there? No thank you. The man's witchy ways makes my skin crawl. What do you think he was concocting?"

&
nbsp; "You're awfully chatty tonight," I said, yanking my t-shirt over my head. If Frankie wasn't going to leave the room, I'd make it damn uncomfortable for him to stay.

  "You think that's wise?"

  "Capsized."

  "Right," he said, looking away from me. I kicked my jeans off and they landed in his lap. He shoved them onto the floor.

  "If you're in the mood to talk, let's talk about the prison break," I said, slipping under the covers in a tank top and panties. "You can look now."

  Frankie cleared his throat and shifted towards the edge of the bed, away from me. "What about it?"

  I squinted, annoyed that he moved away. "How are we getting in? The iron will render any spells useless. And after our recon mission disaster, they’re probably expecting us."

  "We need to incapacitate the guards. Clearly," Frankie said.

  "You think the two of us and a werewolf pack can handle that?"

  "What are you, a nutter?" he asked. "And like you said, she's probably boosted patrols and has them armed to the teeth."

  "Drive a truck through the stone walls? They're old. Could crumble, right?"

  "You're daft," he said. "We're not getting in with magic or with muscle. Not unless we raise an army."

  Frankie and I were a ragtag army of two, plus four werewolves. Leila had a prison full of trained guards at her disposal. She had us beat on sheer volume. Unless...

  I gave Frankie a devious smile. "What if her army goes turncoat?"

  "Are you trying to kill me again?" Frankie asked when I scrambled out of bed and hunted around for my cellphone. "I mean, good lord, Nina. Can you at least throw on a bathrobe?"

  "I'll be two seconds," I said. "If you’re getting too hot and bothered by my walking corpse, close your damn eyes." I pulled my phone out of the back pocket of my jeans and held it up in triumph.

  "Who the hell are you calling at this hour?" he asked.

  I made a big point of crawling back under the covers. I settled back against the pillows and then swiped through my address book. "I'm calling Bobby."

  "Bobby? Who the hell is Bobby?"

  "Start spreading the news..." I sang — out of tune — to jog his memory.

  Frankie’s expression went from puzzled to disgusted. "Not that vampire we fished out of the Gowanus Canal?"

  "The very one."

  "Are you mental? He must be radioactive by now," Frankie said with a shudder. "All bloated from that water. And whatever was stagnating in it."

  "He's fine," I said.

  "And you know this how?"

  I shrugged. "We've kept in touch."

  "With Bobby, the gangster vampire? How could he possibly be of any use in all this?"

  "He knows someone who could help."

  "Help with what?"

  "Help us raise an army."

  "You know I was joking, right?" Frankie said. "We can't raise an army."

  I found the number for Lady Elaine's tea shop and hit the call button. ""Nope, but his friend can."

  A mellifluous voice picked up the phone on the fifth ring. The tone and timbre relaxed me immediately. Lady Elaine was the most popular tea leaf reader in New Orleans, but it wasn't because of her skill divining the future. It was because she possessed an uncanny ability to con any person that heard her voice. Drawn in by her musical notes, humans were too weak to resist any of her requests, which were mainly of the financial variety. She was running a solid con, but that's what happens in the front-facing, tourist-friendly part of the French Quarter.

  I needed Bobby for the spells that happened behind that front-facing façade, in the dark corners of the city, stretching out to Louisiana’s bayous.

  "Lady Elaine, it's Nina," I said, hoping she remembered me. Now that I was vampire, I was immune to her dulcet tones, sort of. I could feel my psychic armor chipping away with each syllable she uttered. It wasn't happening as fast as it did when I had human ears, but it was happening.

  "Nina, Nina, Nina..." she said, elongating the vowel at the end of my name. "Of course, Nina! The living dead girl."

  "Except now I am dead dead," I said.

  She sucked in a breath. "You mean, you...turned?"

  "Didn't you get the prayer card?" I asked.

  "No," she said, my joke going so far over her head I heard it splash in the Mississippi. "But I saw it in the tea leaves and it wasn't supposed to be this soon."

  I rolled my eyes at her lie. She was a good reader but that thing about me dying? All humans were going to die someday, right?

  "So to what do we owe the pleasure of your call?" she asked. "I assume it's not to announce your recent demise?"

  "I was wondering if Bobby was around."

  I heard a bell jingle in the background and she cooed hello to a customer before calling for Bobby to pick up the phone. "Hope you don't mind, but I have to dash, Nina. Bobby'll pick up in a minute. Good to talk to you."

  And with that, the phone dropped on a hard surface. After about a minute, footfalls plodded towards it. For a vampire, poor Bobby wasn't exactly light on his feet.

  "Nina, as I live and breathe..." He chuckled at his own joke. I wasted the prayer card line on Elaine. Clearly.

  "Bobby, good to hear your voice. How are things in the Crescent City?"

  "Can't complain," he said in his heavy New York accent. "You still running with that stuck-up Brit?"

  "Hey!" Frankie protested.

  "Hey yourself, you friggin’ aristocrat," Bobby said. "So what's up, Nina? You comin' down for a visit?"

  "Actually," I said, "I hoped you would do me a favor."

  "Anything for the pretty lady that pulled my ass out of the Gowanus," he said. "Waddaya need, girl?"

  "Bobby," I said, putting on my best Southern drawl, "we need some serious voodoo up in here."

  20

  "Did you feel that?" Casper asked, his eyes flitting around the bar.

  "Feel what?" I replied, barely glancing up. I was armpit deep into a box of inventory the Clown Shoes Beer distributors sent over, courtesy of my new werewolf buddies in Massachusetts. They sent 50 cases of beer plus three kegs and an assortment of hard liquor. None of it was top-shelf, but it would make what few customers remained happy for the next few weeks.

  I liked Lincoln and his pack even more now.

  "That," Casper said. He was faux sitting at the table close to the door. "Like someone breezing past."

  "You're probably catching a draft," I said. "If you're getting cold, come sit over here." I jerked my head towards one of the empty barstools.

  Frankie came up from hauling kegs into the keg room in the basement. We both examined Casper while he slipped across the wood floor. He didn't walk, exactly. He glided, his feet hovering centimeters above the ground. Without terra firma to stand on, he had an awkward gate, not unlike a limp, barely perceptible to human eyes, but barely was the key word. Any human paying close attention could catch it. Any non-human too.

  His sitting was splendid, though. My vampire eyes didn't discern any difference between the way his ass angled onto the barstool and a corporeal one.

  "You're getting there with the walking, mate," Frankie said. "Keep practicing."

  "What was wrong with it now?" the teenaged ghost whined.

  "I know you're frustrated," I said. I gave his hand a sympathetic pat, but my own just dropped straight through it. "It just looked like there was nothing solid underfoot." His face drooped, so I was quick to add, "Regular people won't notice a thing though."

  That seemed to cheer Casper for now. "So who's the guy coming up from the Big Easy?"

  "Don't call it that," I said.

  "What? Why can't I call New Orleans the Big Easy? Everyone else does."

  "Everyone who doesn't know any better," I retorted. "Call it NOLA. Call it the Crescent City. But do not call it the Big Easy."

  Frankie chuckled. "We had a run near there once, so we took a few nights off and played tourist."

  "We did not play tourist," I corrected him. "We crashed with
a vampire we know, and he took us to all the haunts."

  "And she means haunts literally," Frankie added. "And that's also where she learned that the locals knew they were in the presence of an outlier if said outlier called their city the Big Easy. She's had a bug up her bum hole about that term ever since."

  "And I don't know who our friend is sending up," I said. "We never met him while we were down there, but Bobby said he's exactly the help we need."

  "When is this Southern gothic mystery supposed to arrive, anyway?" Frankie asked.

  I glanced at the face of my phone: 8:03 p.m. "Any minute now."

  "How's he getting here?" Casper asked.

  "Yeah, one can't exactly fly into the airport these days," Frankie said, surveying the liquor bottles lined up on the bar. "I hope he brought some good bourbon with him."

  "I mentioned that to Bobby but he said this guy had his ways around it."

  Casper shivered. "Damn, I just felt it again. You need to fix the insulation up in this place."

  "There's nothing wrong with the insulation," I said. "You're dead. Dead people get cold. That's the problem."

  "Actually..." Frankie started. He reconsidered when he looked at my face. "Never mind."

  Casper jerked, wedging his body halfway through the wooden bar. "There! There, right there! Tell me you didn't feel that."

  "Feel what?" Gramps asked, kicking the front door closed.

  Casper shook his head at me. "Oh no, that's not the draft I'm talking about."

  "Let me guess," I said. "It was a different draft." I pushed a glass of water in front of him. "Practice your grip."

  "Come on, Nina, you're worse than my mother," he whined.

  "It's like physical therapy," I said, cracking open a bottle of Clown Shoes' Tramp Stamp. I took a long pull and savored the hoppy flavor. They did make a solid brew. "You've got to keep working your muscles."

  Casper wrapped his hand around the glass, trying to keep it from slipping through. “Really? If I try hard enough?”

  “Oh honey, I have no idea,” I admitted, wanting to hug the kid when I saw his crestfallen face. “I’ve never been around a ghost with a body. But we’ll figure it out. I promise.”

  Casper nodded, resumed his attempts to defy physics. I put my bottle of beer down on the bar and began shelving the liquor bottles. Gramps dropped himself into Al's usual spot at the end of the bar.