“Of course not.”
Lana wondered if Vincent was actually buying the endanger his family defense. She rolled her eyes in disgust and didn’t know why Vincent was wasting time with this useless line of inquiry. She didn’t care where Camarillo slept. She just wanted to get over the wall and out of town before he realized his pet vampire was gone.
“Do you know where the señor is now, José?”
“Si. He sleeps still from siesta, but he will wake soon for the night.”
“Excellent. Take me there.”
Lana gave Vincent a sharp look. What the fuck?
“Vincent—” she started to protest, but suddenly, he was right there in front of her, looming over her with his much greater height and strength, copper-penny eyes burning bright and pinning her beneath his angry glare. But if he’d thought to intimidate her, he was out of luck. She’d been around big men all her life. She wasn’t afraid of them.
She gave him a defiant glare. “We don’t have time for this. We need to get gone. You agreed.”
“That was before I discovered the asshole was sleeping right around the fucking corner. And there is always time for this,” he snarled. “No one, and I mean . . . No. One. Gets to slice into my neck, throw me into a hot box filled with dirt, and think to bend me to his will. No one, Lana. Lessons must be taught. If you’re concerned, you can leave and I’ll—”
“Fuck you,” she said, going up on her toes to get right in his face. “I didn’t break into this place and spend the entire day in a hot box filled with dirt just so I could leave you behind.”
Vincent’s snarl turned into a grin as his arm looped around her waist, holding her in her tiptoe position, smashing her body flush against his. A rash of conflicting sensations chased themselves over her skin and jangled her nerves as her body remembered what it had been like to be crushed under the heavy weight of him, to feel the hard length of his arousal pressing into her thigh. Half of her wanted to stand up and cheer at the feel of Vincent’s hard strength holding her in place, while the other half was screaming a warning for her to get away fast.
“This won’t take long, querida,” he murmured. “You and Jerry can—”
“No,” she reiterated forcefully. “Where you go, I go. So, let’s get this over with.”
Before she could stop him, he kissed her fast and hard, then released her, making sure she was steady on her feet before he removed his arm and faced the guard again.
“Let’s go, José.”
Lana expected José to offer at least a token protest, but she’d clearly underestimated Vincent’s control. The guard gave her a knowing wink—and what the hell was that about?—and then marched off across the yard, heading toward the garage, following much the same path that Lana had taken to get to Vincent’s prison.
Jerry Moreno followed along readily, not shooting so much as a questioning glance Vincent’s way, as if this had been the plan all along. Gone was the idea of making a quick and quiet exit. Suddenly, it was all about vengeance and everyone seemed to understand that. Even Lana. She’d never admit as much to Vincent, but he was right. Camarillo had thought he could capture and enslave Vincent the way he had Jerry. But this time, he’d thought to do it on his own, to cut Enrique out of the equation. It was a power play not only against Vincent, but against Enrique, and Enrique was the face of vampires in Mexico.
Lana might not live power politics the way the vamps did, but she understood the concept well enough. If Vincent left without punishing Camarillo, the human would only try it again with another vampire. Maybe he’d learn from his mistake and take someone weaker next time, someone who couldn’t fight back. And that was unacceptable to a man like Vincent. She didn’t know him well, but she knew that much. He had that alpha male need to protect those who were weaker than he was. She’d heard the anguish in his voice when he’d recounted the story of his younger brother’s death—and Vincent’s inability to save him. She even saw it in the way he treated the women in his life. Women might not be inherently weaker, but to a man like Vincent, they would always invoke the urge to protect.
So Lana followed after José and the two vampires, feeling like the tail end of a parade. She had no idea what Vincent planned for Camarillo, and that thought made her hurry until she was walking next to him.
“There might be guards,” she said quietly and started to hand him her Sig. “You can take—”
“Keep it,” he said, touching her arm. “I won’t need a gun.”
“But—”
“Watch and learn, querida.”
Lana frowned, but figured he knew what he was doing. José took them all the way around the garage, past the spot where Lana had come over the wall, through the iron gate she’d noticed and into the gardens in the back of the house. The rich scent of good soil and fragrant flowers greeted her, the cool evening air moist with water from the irrigation system she could still hear running. They followed a path of stone pavers for about fifteen feet, then veered off onto a short, straight path made of something like compressed sand. It led to an ordinary wooden door that looked like it would open to a gardener’s storage closet, if not for the sophisticated lock and heavy-duty hinges. There were no windows in the door or the wall to either side of it.
José stopped a couple of feet away and pointed at the door. “This is it, jefe,” he said helpfully. “Shall I knock for—?”
“No need,” Vincent assured him, and Lana wondered how the hell he thought he was going to get through what looked to her like a high security deadbolt. But then he raised one hand palm out and shoved it forward, as if to push open the door . . . and blew it completely off its heavily-reinforced hinges.
Lana stared. She’d heard about vampire powers, but had thought they were limited to things like telepathy and persuasion. This was something else entirely. As if hearing her thoughts, Vincent looked over his shoulder and gave her a wink, then disappeared into the dark room beyond.
Moreno hesitated on the threshold, but for only a second before following Vincent inside. Not to be left behind, Lana hurried forward, careful to avoid silhouetting herself against the door. Ducking inside, she immediately put her back to the wall and waited for her eyes to adjust as a dim light clicked on.
The first thing she saw was Camarillo sitting up in bed, his hand dropping away from the bedside lamp. His mouth was stretched wide in an angry snarl, but as she watched, his eyes glazed over with terror as he belatedly recognized who the intruder was.
“Do you know who I am?” Vincent asked, his voice a drawling purr of danger.
Camarillo nodded wordlessly, his mouth hanging open. Lana didn’t know if he was too frightened to speak or if Vincent had done something to silence him.
“And yet you thought to enslave me,” Vincent remarked, as if trying to figure out why Camarillo would even consider such a thing. “Just as you enslaved Moreno here,” he added, his glittering gaze going hard and unyielding. He took a step closer to the bed and stopped, hands on his hips, head tilted, studying the terrified man. “What shall I do with you, Señor Camarillo?”
Camarillo swallowed hard, then licked his lips and found his voice enough to gasp, “Mercy.”
Vincent’s smile chilled Lana to her soul.
“Vincent,” she whispered.
His expression blanked as he turned to look at her over his shoulder. “You should wait outside,” he told her.
“He has children,” she said, her voice catching slightly.
“So did all of the men and women that he’s killed.”
“So this is revenge for them?”
His mouth lifted in a half smile. “No. This is revenge for me. It’s protection for my children, the vampires I’m responsible for, men and women like Moreno here who deserve better than to be made into killers on behalf of a fucking drug dealer.”
; “But it was a vampire who did this. Enrique is the one who enslaved Jerry.”
“I’ll deal with Enrique in due time. But tonight, here and now, I’m making a point. You do not enslave my people, and you sure as fucking hell do not think to enslave me—” There was such rage in that one word that he had to pause before finishing his thought. “—without suffering the consequences. There is a price and I’m going to collect. If you can’t handle that, then you should wait outside.”
Lana stared. He stood there so tall and strong, his power filling the room, rattling papers on the small desk, making the gauze drapes on the big four-posted bed flutter as if in a breeze. Gone was the teasing Vincent, the vampire who flirted and seduced every woman he met. This was the vampire who ruled second only to Enrique, who had the ability to take over a man’s mind in an instant, to knock a heavy door off its hinges.
And, for the first time, she wondered what he was capable of. Was he cruel? A killer? If she stayed in this room, she was going to find out. Maybe not all of it, not everything, but she knew Camarillo was going to die, and it wasn’t going to be because Vincent put a pillow over his face either.
“Damn it,” she muttered to herself, but Vincent heard. One eyebrow went up in a mocking question mark. She nodded sharply, then worked the slide on her 9mm and took up a position near the door.
“I’m staying,” she said defiantly.
Vincent tilted his head in acknowledgment, and she wanted to believe there was a hint of respect in there, too. He shifted his attention back to Camarillo who was whimpering unashamedly, his eyes wide with terror at whatever he was seeing in the vampire’s face.
“Pay attention, Moreno,” Vincent said without looking at his newest vampire protégé, who was glaring his hatred at the man who’d been his proclaimed master only a few hours earlier.
Vincent raised a negligent hand and the bedcovers were ripped from Camarillo’s clutching fingers, so that he knelt half-naked, wearing nothing but a pair of drawstring pajama bottoms. His eyes were rolling white with fear, and sweat glistened on his skin, stinking up the room so that even Lana could smell it with her ordinary human senses. He clasped his hands in front of him in a posture of prayer and started mumbling almost non-stop in rapid Spanish. Lana caught only a word or two. He was begging for his life, but whether he was praying to Vincent or to God, she didn’t know.
Vincent lifted his hand and curled his outstretched fingers toward his palm in a gesture that was the picture of grace . . . until Camarillo shrieked in torment, his hands clutching his chest, fingers digging into his skin so feverishly that his nails tore into his skin, leaving ragged furrows that trailed blood down onto his belly and thighs.
Lana stared, her lungs squeezed in horror. She’d seen plenty of violence in her life, she’d seen men shot and even been shot herself, but this . . . she’d never seen a man rip at himself like that.
Lana jolted as Camarillo’s mouth opened wide, and a horrific keening noise filled the room. It was inhuman, nothing but raw animal agony. And she thought surely this must be Vincent’s revenge, to leave the man crazed with pain, a drooling idiot with no thought but to suffer . . . Or maybe not. She pressed herself against the wall at her back as Vincent took that final step toward the bed, until he was right on top of Camarillo, the copper glow of his stare reflecting off the white of the drug boss’s eyes, turning them into yellowed marbles of terror. Vincent ran a tender hand along Camarillo’s sweaty jaw, trailed a long finger over the swell of the man’s jugular . . . and then his hand tightened into a claw and he ripped the man’s throat out.
He did it casually, without apparent effort. He simply closed his fingers over Camarillo’s throat, squeezed until his fingers met around the bony column of the drug lord’s esophagus, and then yanked.
Camarillo choked, a ghastly sound, as his brain begged for oxygen, as his face turned red and then blue, until finally the only thing holding him up was Vincent’s grip on his ravaged throat.
Vincent opened his hand. Camarillo collapsed onto the bed in a boneless heap, blood staining the pristine sheets beneath him.
Vincent eyed his bloodied hand in distaste, and Lana waited, half-expecting him to lick the blood away, but he didn’t. Instead he used the discarded bedcover to wipe the blood off, then stepped back from the bed and spoke to Jerry Moreno.
“Did you understand what I did?” he asked.
Moreno nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“And why?”
“Definitely, sir.”
Vincent nodded. “You’ll come with us for now. When we reach Pénjamo, I’ll have Michael, my lieutenant, fly down and take you back to my headquarters in Hermosillo.”
“You will not be returning with us?” Moreno asked.
Vincent shook his head. “Lana and I have business to finish first.”
“And what about the others?”
Vincent frowned. “What others?”
“The others like me, the other vampires Enrique indentured to drug lords.”
Vincent stared and Lana got that feeling again, as if someone was scraping a live wire just above her skin. Vincent’s fury became a living thing, swelling outward in the contained space until it became a tornado whipping around the room, pounding the heavy furniture and knocking a thick silver-framed mirror off the wall. It fell to the bare tile and shattered, sending glittering shards flying everywhere.
Lana gripped the door frame and waited to die, certain that Vincent had finally lost it. But he had better control than that. He sucked in a breath and the storm died. But she could see the effort it took. His muscles were bunched and tight, veins standing out on his bare forearms.
“Where will I find them?” Vincent asked Moreno, his voice tight with repressed anger.
“They are scattered throughout Mexico, but the nearest is Salvio Olivarez. His master lives not far from Pénjamo, just north of the city.”
“Vincent,” Lana dared to interrupt. “We have to get out of here.”
He turned a cold gaze on her, but his eyes warmed almost immediately. “Don’t worry, Lana. I can kill them all if it comes to that.”
Lana wasn’t reassured. “I’d rather it not come to that,” she explained gently, because he was clearly so far gone as to be fucking clueless. “Our escape will be ever so much easier if we leave discreetly.”
“Or if we leave no witnesses,” he countered.
“Vincent,” she warned impatiently.
He sighed and asked, “Is José still waiting out there?”
Lana stepped into the doorway and found Vincent’s loyal follower still standing guard.
“He is,” she confirmed.
“All right. Forget the front gate. We’re going back the way you came, over the hill instead of around it. Moreno, you’ll tell me everything you know on the drive to Pénjamo.”
“Yes, sir.”
Vincent cast a final loathing glance at the dead Camarillo, then strode across the room, catching Lana’s arm as he went past. “Let’s go, good girl.”
Lana scowled. She wasn’t being good, she was being smart. It was only luck, or maybe more of Vincent’s magic, that no one had come to investigate Camarillo’s screaming. But luck could only carry them so far. They had to get over that wall and on the road before anyone was aware that Camarillo was dead, and that his vampire prisoners were gone.
She kept pace with Vincent as he followed José deeper into the lush green of the garden. It was a beautiful place, full of growing, living things. It seemed wrong that it should exist in the backyard of a man who left nothing but death and destruction in his wake.
José led them to a section of wall that was covered in a thick, creeping vine. Creeping and creepy. The trailing plant had dark green, waxy leaves and was heavy with weird hanging pods. With nothing but moonlight to see it by, it looked like
an alien thing just waiting to strangle the unwary. Lana eyed it distrustfully, but José turned his head to smile broadly at Vincent and point at the wall. “This is it, jefe.”
Lana’s heart sank, convinced that José had lost it, but Vincent stepped right up to the wall and pushed aside the heavy vine to reveal an electronic keypad.
She moved up close to him. “How’d you know that was there?” she asked absently, studying the keypad and wondering what the birthdates of Camarillo’s children were. People tended to be rather predictable in their selection of passwords.
“The device emits a very high frequency noise—probably a short that should have been fixed.”
“I don’t suppose that high frequency is beeping out the passcode,” she muttered snarkily.
Predictably, Vincent was only entertained by her sarcasm. He grinned down at her, then turned his attention to José, who was standing by patiently, awaiting his next command.
“¿Sabes la contraseña, José?” Lana asked, beating Vincent to it. Unfortunately, the guard’s affections seemed to be reserved for Vincent, because he only gave her a puzzled look before transferring his attention back to the vampire.
“¿Sabes la contraseña, mi amigo?” Vincent asked. Do you know the password, my friend?
José brightened immediately, standing taller and thrusting his chest out. “Si, jefe. Es cero nueve uno dos cero seis.” Yes, jefe. It’s zero, nine, one, two, zero, six.
Vincent nudged Lana with an elbow, tapped in the key code, then stood back with a satisfied expression as the wall shifted beneath the vines, revealing a crack in the shape of a gate. It was so cleverly constructed and concealed that, even knowing it was there, Lana had to look closely to see the line of its opening. Vincent pulled it wider, then turned to José.
“This is where we part company, my friend,” he said, speaking English with almost fond regret. “Sleep now.”
Lana started to frown, then drew back when José collapsed where he stood, crumpling down as if every bone in his body had disappeared.
Vincent (Vampires in America Book 8) Page 16