by Anna Windsor
“I am.” Tarek glanced at the clock over the conference room door, then noted that Griffen must have closed the room’s hall-side blinds before he arrived.
The conference room door opened, and their host, Ari Seneca, strode in reeking of confidence and spices. Modern aftershave. Tarek managed not to wrinkle his nose to close out the cloying scent. The big man, dark-haired despite the years obvious in the wrinkles at the corners of his oil-black eyes, had another underlying odor, one Tarek couldn’t identify, but he thought it might be the acidic tang of serious illness. He filed this fact for later consideration, then noted that the man’s black suit hung at the shoulders and chest, as if Seneca had recently shed weight and hadn’t yet had his clothing tailored to account for the difference.
Seneca left the door open and surveyed them, his eyes lingering on Tarek, as if surprised Griffen had only one associate in attendance. Tarek stood with Griffen and shook Seneca’s large hand, giving nothing away with his even, practiced expression and his new human name, Corst Brevin. It impressed Tarek that Seneca was willing to place himself at risk and come to this meeting alone, save for a newly hired set of allies. Ioannis Foucci, Seneca’s rival, likely would arrive armed and flanked by personal guards.
“I’m confident we can resolve this situation today,” Griffen was saying as Seneca seated himself at the head of the conference table.
“I am more concerned about the aftermath.” Seneca’s European accent was thick, and his dark eyebrows pulled together as he spoke.
Griffen’s smile seemed relaxed. “My associates are very talented, and you’ve given all the staff on this floor the afternoon off.”
Seneca leaned forward and propped one elbow on the polished table. “Foucci is no fool. He will have plenty of support. Contact times. Contingencies.”
“He’s out of his league.” Griffen’s smile stayed full even as his blue eyes took on a colder edge. Seneca made a rumbling noise deep in his throat. Not a challenge. More of a surrender. You have no idea of the power you’ve purchased, Tarek thought, studying the man who had hired them. But you’re about to understand.
From down the long hallway outside the conference room, Tarek heard the soft ring of an elevator bell.
Seneca got up from his chair, moved to the open door, then exited the conference room to allow three very large men with obvious firearm bulges under their gray suit jackets to enter. The men glanced around the room, then adopted smug expressions Tarek assumed to be related to their superior numbers. As they positioned themselves, Seneca greeted his opponent with widespread arms, a jovial smile, and much false camaraderie. Tarek glanced toward the hallway and saw his target, Foucci, familiar to him from photographs supplied by Griffen, pull back from Seneca’s embrace. A fifth bodyguard stood directly behind Foucci, this one smaller than the rest, but with more intelligent eyes. His gray jacket concealed two bulges, and Tarek saw a third at his right ankle.
Foucci had silver hair and a face lined and tanned from years of outdoor labor before he’d moved up the ranks of his crime clan. The older man was thin but fit, which made Tarek frown.
Stringy and tough. Not his favorite sort of meat.
He didn’t let this thought occupy much of his attention as Foucci, Seneca, and the fifth guard came into the room. Foucci sat while the fifth guard took a spot directly behind his chair. Seneca closed the conference room door, and by the time the heavy wood settled into place, Seneca’s expression had changed to something darker and less inviting. He came to sit on Griffen’s left, leaving Tarek with a direct line to Foucci if he stood and walked around the right side of the conference table.
Tarek gave Foucci a polite smile.
Seneca’s voice was rough and low when he spoke, gesturing to the room full of armed men arrayed around Foucci. “I’m disappointed in this show of force, my friend.”
“We are not friends.” Foucci’s thin lips pursed between statements, like he was smelling something unpleasant. “And I have no intention of surrendering any territory east of the Hudson.”
Tarek assessed Foucci, from the pace of his heart to the scent of the sweat breaking out beneath his high white collar. Nervous but determined. Definitely dangerous, as humans went. Seneca was wise not to tangle long with this one. He might have proved a menace.
Seneca waved a hand toward the covered windows, to indicate the city spreading out beneath them. “All the territory in Manhattan was mine before your arrival. I still consider it so.”
Foucci’s pulse grew louder and faster, and strips of color crept into his thin, pocked cheeks. “And you back your claim with what, fancy buildings?” His dramatic sweep of the arm indicated Tarek and Griffen. “Crooked lawyers or foolish underlings?”
“Do you believe in magic?” Seneca smiled at his fractious guest. “I speak of witches and ghosts—and let’s not forget vampires, as those legends are so uniquely our own.”
The question seemed to give Foucci momentary pause, and Tarek felt the shifting of elemental energy in the room as Griffen began to tamper with the weapons carried by Foucci’s guards. Griffen drew off the power rising from the Coven’s rituals in the basement and channeled it through himself, his fingers occasionally jittering against the table’s surface as he targeted key parts of the firearms. Ammunition. The trigger mechanisms. Chambers.
Seneca continued with his assigned task, keeping Foucci engaged until Griffen had had time to complete his work. “It’s not such a hard question, really. I’ve come to believe in a great many things since my arrival in New York City. Witches have particularly captured my interests. Perhaps I should call them sorcerers, since that’s the term some prefer when they dabble in the darker arts.”
Foucci’s guards exchanged glances. One made a strange gesture involving his finger and his temple, and Tarek assumed they were casting aspersions on Seneca’s sanity. Foucci himself could only sputter for a few moments, but at last his voice caught like a gruff engine and roared loud in the otherwise still room. “I haven’t come here to talk madness and fantasy, you bastard! Either acknowledge my rights to the territory we dispute, or fight me for it. My clan is prepared for whatever you bring to us.”
Seneca let his guest double his fists and pound them against the oak table once, then again, before answering with a clipped “I doubt that.”
Foucci shoved away from the table and stood, shaking, though Tarek couldn’t tell if it was from rage or frustrated confusion. “This was a waste of time.”
“Sit down,” Seneca said, his voice growing more deadly with each word.
Foucci remained on his feet, glaring at Seneca, ignoring Griffen and Tarek completely. “Witches. Sorcerers. If I had known you were mad, I wouldn’t have bothered with this formality.”
His guards tensed, and Tarek saw their hands slip toward the weapons Griffen was adjusting.
“I’ll ask you once more: sit down,” Seneca said, his tone positively icy now, his black eyes blazing a warning any fool would have recognized as lethal.
Griffen pressed his palms flat on the table, a prearranged message to Seneca that they had nothing left to fear from the conventional weaponry possessed by their opponents. “We are leaving.” Foucci gestured to his guards, but before he could step away from the table, Seneca got to his feet and transformed his face into a false mask of sorrow.
“Poor choice, my friend.”
“I told you, I am not—” Foucci began, but broke off, staring at Tarek.
Tarek smiled at him and let his fangs show, along with the paws and claws he had revealed only moments before. The fabric of his suit began to rip at the seams since it was actual clothing instead of aspects of his own body he had transformed into clothing-like layers.
Seneca was too focused on his opponents to look at Tarek, which was a good thing. Tarek had no doubt the man would have reacted, given that Griffen hadn’t shared this aspect of their plan.
“Holy shit,” the guard behind Foucci muttered, ripping a Colt out of one of his chest holster
s as his four companions drew a variety of automatic pistols. He pointed the weapon at Tarek and squeezed the trigger.
The weapon didn’t so much as give a click, its firing mechanism welded into place by Griffen’s targeted heat.
The guard glanced down at the weapon and cursed as his associates opened fire—or tried to.
Two of the guns backfired due to strategically plugged chambers, killing their shooters instantly. The stench of gunpowder and burned flesh rushed through the room, but the fire alarms had been disabled, and Seneca had already cautioned other workers in the building that there might be some minor bangs and loud noises as they addressed plumbing and electrical problems on the upper floor.
The other two weapons didn’t fire, but Seneca had removed two small knives from his pockets. Before the other two shooters could understand what had happened, they struck the conference room floor with blades buried in their skulls, directly between their eyes.
Foucci’s last standing guard, the smart one, had tried all of his useless pistols by then. He pitched the last one at Tarek, grabbed his charge, and thrust the old man behind him.
Tarek, fully in tiger form now, approached the two men in an unhurried fashion.
“Holy God,” somebody muttered, and Tarek realized it was Seneca, moving farther back, toward Griffen, as the man finally grasped the totality of the force he had brought to bear. Griffen was using his pocket telephone—cell phone, yes, that was the term—to summon his half sister Rebecca, the Coven, and the Created from the basement. They would come by way of the stairs, to avoid distressing workers on the floors below.
Foucci lapsed into the language of his birth, using old words that Tarek recognized.
Albanian. Yes. He knew this speech.
“Djall,” the man growled in his native tongue, his dark eyes wild as he pressed himself against the conference room wall, using his guard as a shield. A painting crashed to the floor beside them.
“Djall,” Foucci said again, then in accented English, “Devil!”
“Dreqi,” Tarek corrected, preferring the Latin-influenced alternative, which formed the root for the Romanian name Dracul and conjured up all sorts of terrifying, bloody legends. “And thank you for the compliment,” he added in flawless English before he threw the guard across the conference table, seized hold of Foucci, and tore the man’s silver-haired head off his shoulders.
Blood frenzy seized Tarek as the delicious liquid filled the air, the room, his senses, his mind, his consciousness. He ate with abandon, not caring what he tore or ripped or destroyed. When he finished, the Created would feed from the carcass, and the Coven would clean away all trace of the kill, burning the room down to basics, then painting it anew. Seneca would have to deal with obtaining new carpeting, drapes, and furniture at his leisure, but Tarek assumed a Balkan crime lord could handle such minor details with ease.
He was only partly aware of Seneca’s continued expressions of shock and Griffen’s calm, soothing voice.
“You asked for a thorough job,” Griffen was telling Seneca as Tarek swallowed the last bit of stringy meat he chose to endure. “And I told you—my associates are more than capable of any task.”
“What is he?” Seneca asked, gripping Griffen’s shoulder as Griffen dragged the last living guard off the floor by his collar.
Griffen didn’t answer that question, keeping his attention on the guard. The semi-conscious man groaned as Griffen slammed him down on the conference table.
Tarek shifted back to human form, brushing off the rags of his soiled, torn clothing and altering some of his outer essence to resemble the dark suit he had just destroyed. Following Griffen’s lead, he didn’t speak to relieve Seneca’s anxiety and doubt, but instead allowed Griffen to finish the last bit of their plan.
After just seconds of persuasion, the guard started babbling to Griffen, giving him telephone numbers, names, and locations, and explaining all the contingencies Foucci had established to see to his safety or, in the event of a poor outcome, his vengeance. The key player in setting these plans in motion was Foucci’s eldest son and heir, still residing in Albania.
Griffen worked the man over with some elemental fire, then jerked him sideways on the table to get a look at his beheaded boss. Tarek leaned across the table and growled in the guard’s ear.
“You have more meat on you,” Tarek whispered. “You’ll be much more tender.”
This time when the guard started babbling, his words had little direction or purpose beyond begging, pleading, and raving.
Griffen used an untraceable, disposable cell to place a call to Foucci’s eldest son while Seneca stood beside him, still trembling and eyeing Tarek.
To the man’s credit, he said nothing as Griffen verified that he was indeed speaking to Foucci’s heir.
“We have a situation here,” Griffen told the man. “One of your employees has turned up at our place of business. He has no explanation for why Mr. Foucci has failed to keep his appointment, and Mr. Seneca is not pleased.”
Griffen glanced at Seneca, who tore his eyes away from Tarek, seemed to reach inside himself and grasp hold of his manly parts, and give himself a quick, mind-rattling jerk. He cleared his throat and took the phone from Griffen before the man on the other end of the connection even finished firing off questions.
“What is the meaning of this outrage?” Seneca demanded. “I agreed to a meeting, and I get nothing but a bloodied underling, babbling about monsters and demons?”
He held out the telephone for Foucci’s son to gain a taste of the guard’s newborn madness.
Then, for the listener’s benefit, Seneca said loudly to Griffen, “Relieve me of his suffering, please.”
Griffen extracted a Glock with a silencer and shot the guard once in the head, ending the man’s desperate chatter.
Seneca put the telephone back to his ear. “You find that carrion carcass you call a father, and you tell him I want payment for my wasted time—and my soiled carpet. Your clan will regret this stupidity.”
He slammed the device closed, and by the time Seneca looked at Tarek again, he seemed as collected and in control as the moment he had entered the conference room.
Tarek sensed the beginning of a long and fruitful alliance.
Elemental energy surged down the hallway as Griffen’s Coven arrived, twelve men of similar stature and ability, dressed in jeans, faces obscured by black hooded sweatshirts. The Created brushed past them, scenting a meal, fangs bared, and Tarek moved aside to allow them to enjoy the leftovers. Griffen’s sister, a strange and thin girl with very blond hair, eased into the room behind the Created, her bright blue eyes wide at the sight of Foucci’s blood sprayed on the walls and ceiling and pooling all around the dead guards. She licked her lips, and Tarek thought he caught a flash of silvery energy around the edges of her pointed face.
Just as fast, it was gone, likely some trick of the light on his meat-satiated senses.
Rebecca draped herself across a chair and watched the Created eat, a disturbing smile playing at her pale lips as the Coven used their joined energy to keep the Created calm. With quiet gestures, they directed the Created in their devouring of much of the legal evidence, simultaneously rewarding them for a week of hard training and reasserting the Coven’s dominance over their trainees.
Seneca took in the scene without shrinking from it, though he had gone pale, and Tarek heard the irregular hammer of the man’s heart as he fought to control his reactions. Tarek imagined he could also hear the man’s mind adding and subtracting possibilities, and smell the friction of his greed rubbing against his instinctive terror.
“Your organization and mine could do much together,” Seneca told Griffen.
Seneca’s gaze shifted to Tarek, and Tarek knew the man was coming to understand who held the title of culla in this room—and in New York City.
“Mr. Brevin,” Seneca said with an appropriate note of respect, “I would like an exclusive contract with Premium.”
T
arek gave the man a single nod of acknowledgment. Then he offered his response in his best human voice, with only the softest of growls. “I’ll consider your request, but I must warn you, Mr. Seneca—I demand a very, very high price.”
( 9 )
Four Bengal fighters circled John. They were half tiger, half human in form, and all fucking muscle. John kept his fists up, ready to defend like they’d been teaching him. Similar techniques to military hand-to-hand fighting, but a lot more effective. The room reeked of ammonia and sweat. The lighting sucked, but John didn’t need good light, not with his cat’s vision. When he was feeling good and sarcastic, he thought of himself like Spider-Man, bitten by something radioactive and learning to manage bizarre new powers, some of which seemed pretty stupid, at least on the surface.
“Use the demon’s strength,” the biggest one told him. The guy called himself Ben Seti, and he looked Egyptian, but not quite modern. More regal and king-like—and the asshole was big. As the commander of Elana’s private guard, he was without question the best fighter in their army. “Access Strada’s power, but do not allow it to control you.”
John gave a grunt of understanding, staying focused on Ben, because Ben was the biggest threat.
Ben charged at John. So did the other three.
John shouted and swung with both fists, with all the speed and force he could muster. Two Bengals went down. A third fighter dropped. John barely felt the impact on his knuckles. He kept his gaze locked on Ben’s smooth face, on the way his mouth had opened to show tiger fangs.
John blasted a punch at Ben’s nose.
Ben swung faster.
Pain exploded through John’s jaw and he dropped to one knee.
Strada howled in his mind. John suddenly hated Ben. He wanted to pull Ben apart, from his too-handsome smirk to his big bare feet. He wanted to rip out his organs. He wanted to bite hard through his flesh, until Ben kicked and screamed and couldn’t escape. More than ammonia and battle stink filled John’s nose. The Bengal’s blood smelled of copper and water and enemy. John heard the fluid pounding, pounding through Ben’s chest, into his vulnerable neck.