Passion Bites: Biting Love, Book 9

by Mary Hughes

  I suspected Marrone was also a vampire, so the Dracula look was probably his idea of a subtle pun.

  He smiled toothily. “How lucky I ran across you.”

  Luck’s not a lady, she’s a middle finger. Marrone had given me the subtle creeps from the night I’d met him a few months ago at a charity fundraiser in Chicago. The creeps had escalated when he showed up in Meiers Corners a week after I’d moved back, ostensibly to interview technical college graduates for his pharmaceutical companies but implying heavily he was interested in me romantically.

  Except he didn’t come right out and ask for sex. That would’ve been almost reassuring. But he kept popping up in my sphere, having inexplicably made me his special project, maybe for the same reason that made boys torture small animals.

  Problem was, he was a big benefactor for the medical community. I had to put on my playing-nice face.

  “Mr. Marrone, how delightful. I’m sorry, I’d chat, but I have patients—”

  “This won’t take long. I have news, my dear. Bad news.” He peered at me through his blue glasses, his eyes an odd avaricious shade of green.

  My nape prickled.

  “You know I have a branch of business concerned with real estate?”

  That set my arrector pili muscles trembling, raising goose bumps on my arms. Pharmaceuticals, realty…did the man have hands in all my pots? I shook my head weakly.

  “Well, I do. A title search was done on those townhouses you’re so interested in. Someone is looking to buy them out from under you.”

  Immediately the rest of my flesh rumpled in dismay. The townhouses he so blithely named were where Lizelle, her daughter and I were living, where I planned to open my shelter. They were integral to my plan.

  So integral, I’d plunked down my life’s savings on them as earnest money. But those townhouses weren’t mine yet. To clinch the deal, I needed a down payment. A mortgage.

  So I asked cautiously, “Who?”

  “My dear.” Marrone smiled all the way to the spirit gum attaching his hair. “Julian Emerson.”

  The name hit me like a fist to the gut. I breathed through it. “Julian?” I knew the lawyer from a couple visits home over the years, and of course, by reputation. He was smart and strong—and the whole reason I had to have those townhouses. The safest location in the world was tiny insular Meiers Corners, right next door to an Alliance master vampire. He’d make an excellent neighbor but a formidable foe.

  “Yes. And of course, as a lawyer, Emerson is unbeatable.”

  I pumped steel into my spine, forced myself straight and spun for the exit. As I stormed away, I stripped off my white coat like Superman did his shirt and tie. “Unbeatable? Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  “Ruthven didn’t kill my wife?” Luke felt like he’d been punched in the jaw. “But Logan positively ID’d him.”

  “Ruthven was the blade,” Thor said. “But he wasn’t the hand.”

  “Someone…” Shock paralyzed Luke. “Someone was behind him?”

  “Someone still is, according to my boss.”

  “Who?” The word exploded from more than one set of lips.

  Thor shrugged. “Her informants aren’t sure.”

  “Damn it.” Luke’s cold paralysis exploded in anger. “Ever since that day I’ve been agonizing over it. Centuries analyzing that attack, what, who, how. Then Logan took out Ruthven, and I thought it was done. My gut told me otherwise, but I ignored it. And now you’re telling me it isn’t done?”

  “Sorry,” Thor said. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I do, but why now? And who?”

  Logan tapped one thoughtful claw on the table. “It seems impossible that we don’t know. We have some of the best intel in the world.”

  “And Scary Ancient does a fair take on the omniscient thing,” Nixie said.

  Thor shrugged. “Elias doesn’t always share.”

  Nixie snorted. “Change ‘always’ to ‘nearly ever’ and I’d agree.”

  “He’d share this,” Luke snarled. “Or, Ancient One or not, he and I would have words.”

  “Look.” Thor held up both palms. “I’m not a household master, and I don’t say much because it’s not my place—but maybe Elias expects us to reason things out for ourselves.”

  “What are you talking about?” Julian said.

  “The signs have been there from the beginning. The Eastern European tech filtering into the country. The missing vampires up north. Even Dracula getting loose from his prison a few years back. That’s not local talent. Those are the long moves of someone more subtle, more cunning. Someone else is out there, pulling strings.”

  “Fuck me and my Ferrari,” Luke said. “I can’t wrap my head around it. Adelaide’s killer, the pawn of another vampire?”

  His eyes closed. He’d thought it was done. Not over, and he’d never really felt closure, but he’d always thought Adelaide had at least had justice. But now…

  Because Luke’s eyes were closed and he was centered inward, he smelled the stench first. And heard the shouting first. The screaming.

  Rogue vampires.

  “Attack. Upstairs.”

  I was about to fling the employee exit door wide when a thin pale hand like a lobster claw seized my shoulder. I spun.

  “My dear.” Giuseppe smiled, the fake mustache making it all kinds of oily. “You have another option. Hear me out. I have a proposition.”

  Everything in me shouted “No” to any suggestion of Marrone’s, especially one he’d call a proposition.

  But behind him, Dr. Haus appeared, giving me the evil eye—all the more effective with that piercing blue. Marrone is a big benefactor. You lose him for us, we lose you.

  If I lost this job, I lost easy access to Lizelle, and possibly my toehold in the city of Meiers Corners itself. There wasn’t any city residency requirement to own property or hold a job here—only decades of tradition, more rigid than any concrete or iron.

  I paused.

  “There.” A cunning glint entered Giuseppe’s gaze. “I knew you could be reasonable.”

  Implying I normally wasn’t? I rolled my eyes, the facial equivalent of giving him a polite finger.

  “Now, now, my dear. I saw that. But you require money, yes?”

  My gaze twitched away, a tacit admission.

  “Well then. I think you’ll find I can be very…accommodating.”

  I glanced back in time to see him finger the knot of his ascot, then stroke suggestively down its ruby length.

  Whoa. That went beyond suggestive into “smell my fingers” territory. Sex, all right, but not with strings attached. Dr. Haus had disappeared, but even if he’d been watching, I wouldn’t have throttled my reaction. “No fucking way—”

  “Don’t let’s be hasty.” Marrone’s smarmy smile dropped, and his hands flew from his phallic symbol. With a placating pat of the air he reached into a breast pocket and pulled out a black leather checkbook and a gold pen topped by a discreet diamond—if half a carat glinting in my eye could be called discreet. “You’re looking for a down payment on those two quaint little fourplexes on Eighth and Walnut, yes?”

  I hadn’t made a secret of it, but his casually spouting those details raised hairs on the back of my neck.

  “They’re going for $400K for both.” He peered over his glasses at me in an owlish imitation of Ms. Gelb’s matronly tsk. “That price tells you the quality of what you’re getting. Are you certain you want them?”

  I could only nod dumbly.

  “The bank will ask for five percent down, although if you’re as good as me, you could get it for as little as 1.5%…but you’re not. So twenty K down payment, plus funds for renovation…” He cut me another look over the top of his glasses. “Drastic renovation. Oh, and cleaning.” His mouth tightened with distaste as he refocused
on his checkbook. “So, say another thirty grand, for a total of fifty thousand cash.” He scrawled.

  Fifty thousand? I swallowed, hard. Fifty thousand dollars would be a huge step toward locking in those townhouses. For me, for Lizelle, for all the abused I’d help, I wanted desperately to take that check.

  He tore it from the pad and held it out to me.

  But what was the real price? I didn’t think Marrone was offering a gift. And, though fifty thousand sounded like a lot of money and the answer to all my woes, there were always hidden costs in buying a building, unplanned expenses—and planned expenses that I’d put in my spreadsheet but tended to forget in the rush to get the down payment, things like window tax and swamp insurance…or at least property taxes and homeowner’s insurance. Even after I bought the townhouses, getting this shelter off the ground would take more money. Food, clothes, even little things like letterhead and a website—the list went on.

  But if not Marrone’s money, what? Because if Julian Emerson was against me, I was in trouble. He was Meiers Corners’ top attorney—actually the city’s only full-time attorney since Denny Crane had retired and Bart Bleistift had moved, but the point was, Julian was smart and savvy. I’d need every advantage I could beg, buy or steal to hold on to the properties if he’d decided to move in on them.

  Marrone smiled at me, eye teeth a bit long. He thought he had me.

  I stiffened. If I had to, I’d beg, buy or steal. Anything beat “borrowing” money from him.

  “No thanks. I have an accepted offer on the properties, and I put earnest money in. I’m not surrendering to Julian Emerson so easily. If he wants a fight, I’ll give him one.” I whipped around and charged out the door, my destination Julian’s townhouse.

  Rogue. Julian’s townhouses were under attack. Luke didn’t wait for the others to respond. He blew into vampire mist, the fastest form of travel, and shot up the stairs like a jet stream. It was impossible to hold the state for more than a second or two, but that was enough to take him to the front line.

  In the foyer, six humans piled against a vampire protector’s worst nightmare—an open front door.

  Rogue arms and legs stuck through the crack…the widening crack. Humans, huddled together, helpless…

  These humans weren’t huddling, but against a horde of vampires, they were as good as helpless.

  Another leg poked through. The vamps were winning.

  Colorful shreds of paper fluttered in the air stirred by the struggle. Now he wished Nixie Emerson really had used those titanium cables for her streamers.

  Luke’s instinct urged him to pluck up all the humans and hustle them to shelter, then return to fight. But he knew Emerson did things differently, and this was his household. Though it grated on Luke’s nerves, he pulled two women away from the door and barked at one, “You. Sound the alarm.”

  Hell. Why haven’t the automatic alarms already gone off?

  To the other woman he said, “Round up the children and residents. Get them to the vampire-safe rooms.”

  As the women scurried off, Luke pulled another human away from the door, a man. It took some effort—the guy was big, with massive shoulders, and strong for a human. “You. Get weapons.”

  The man didn’t come easily, and when he did, he spun on Luke with a snarl, a fire in his brown eyes. “My name is Owun.”

  Luke understood the man’s fury but didn’t have time for it. “Weapons, Owun. Now.”

  To the man’s credit, he snapped out a “Yes, sir”, and if the response was surly, Luke couldn’t fault the speed with which the human dashed out of the foyer.

  But the men and woman remaining at the door weren’t strong enough to hold. The door burst open. A dozen vampires flooded in, fangs dripping with hunger for violence.

  Luke grinned, eager to give them what they wanted.

  With an arm he shunted the humans out of harm’s way and met the vampires head-on. He caught the first rogue’s shaved skull and spiked it like a volleyball into the wall. Bone slammed into plaster-covered concrete. Baldy went down in a storm of paint flakes.

  Luke grabbed a second vamp and threw him into the surging pack. Rogues fell like bowling pins, buying him time to deal with Baldy when he got back up.

  Baldy didn’t.

  Even as Luke folded a third rogue in two with a kick, his brain gnawed at that. That weak? Baldy must be a youngling. The rest too, or they’d have misted inside and not bothered with the door.

  Where the fuck are Logan’s systems? Long before the rogues hit the door, the perimeter of specialized equipment should have gone off like a citywide fire.

  How had these youngsters beaten his genius brother’s best safeguards?

  A rogue tried to dart past Luke. He flashed up an arm, clothes-lining the vampire out.

  The alarm started whooping, finally. Why didn’t matter. Fight now, investigate later.

  More rogues boiled in. A pair grabbed Luke’s arms. Instead of breaking free, he used their grip, torqueing against them to raise his hips and legs in a double kick to two incoming vamps’ faces. He continued the arc, twisted loose and windmilled a couple of backfists to the skulls of the vamps who’d held him. They staggered, blood running from their ears. Luke whirled hammerfists to their crowns. They went down without a sound.

  But the rogues kept coming through the door.

  Luke slashed a glance back into the foyer, hoping for reinforcements or that at least the humans had gotten away safely.

  Instead, two humans hunkered on the foyer floor, tending the third, who’d collapsed.

  Memory swamped Luke, humans cowering in a corner, easy prey for the bloody vampire…

  “Damn.” Acid hit Luke’s stomach. Where were the other males? Julian and Thor, hell, even Logan was older than him. They should have misted in by now.

  He’d decided to risk closing his eyes to access his vampire blood-sense for his brother when a rogue darted past him, reaching for the woman.

  Luke snared the rogue’s shirt with one hand, with the other drawing one of his silver-lined switchblades from its hidden inner pants sheath, knife handle at beltline for easy access. A flick and chop and the rogue was more worried about his spurting neck than the woman. A second and third chop severed skin and meat. The knife wasn’t as efficient as a sword or axe but a fourth chop broke vertebrae and a fifth finally took the vampire’s head off.

  While he was hacking like a bad horror film, a half-dozen more rogues streamed in. Worse, Baldy and company were finally rousing. Chopping heads and hearts would keep them from rejoining the fight, but that would take time Luke didn’t have.

  So knock ’em all down fast and do a more thorough accounting later.

  He winged back both arms and lunged, stabbing and punching into the surging pack.

  But even as Luke took out two more rogues, another half-dozen burrowed through, and Baldy, already inside the foyer, staggered to his feet.

  In moments the foyer would be overrun—and the humans in the corner would be sitting ducks.

  Luke’s blood iced. Just like Adelaide…

  He fell back to guard the humans. “Get that man out of here.” The humans didn’t respond fast enough so he punched his voice with compulsion. “Get to safety!”

  They helped the man to stand and started hobbling away. Luke knew he wouldn’t last long, but if he could keep the vampires from the humans until they could escape…

  The thud of running feet came from behind.

  Luke’s muscles tensed like a cranked violin string. Who the hell was that? Owun, armed and running to the rescue?

  Or more rogues, breaking in through the back door?

  Chapter Four

  Memory knifed Luke—his first household, with Logan. Their humans huddled, helpless, a horrific vampire plucking his victim from them like ripe fruit. Luke’s wife. Her blonde head limp, her th
in body lying helpless in the vampire’s grip. Bloody mouth opening, fangs descending…

  Never again. Luke would die first.

  With the mass of rogues surrounding him, he probably would.

  So be it. A fight to the final death.

  Determined to take as many rogues with him into the afterlife as he could, Luke jabbed his fangs into the plump of his lip, releasing a burst of salty blood into his mouth. Rage rose hot in his veins and coiled fury into his muscles, ready to erupt into deadly violence. He shouted the warrior’s cry. “Protect!”

  “Protect!” A baritone cry joined his.

  Julian Emerson burst around the corner carrying his mate, running rather than misting to stay with her.

  Luke drew a lungful of relief. He might die, but not tonight, not with the millennium-old male at his side.

  The master vampire settled his wife on her feet. She grabbed his belt as he swung open a silver-edged switchblade and waded into the foyer slashing necks, decapitating vampires with three fierce strokes, a vicious waltz of one-two-three, hack-hack-hack, heads dropping like autumn apples. His punk mate, tethered by the hand on his belt, trotted in his wake, kicking aside heads as fast as he separated them from bodies.

  Seemingly gruesome, but that was a smart move. Heads that fell near their bodies would quickly rejoin, and the vamps continue to fight. This way the rogues would be out of the action longer.

  Thor misted in at that moment. “Logan’s with the humans in one of the electrified saferooms, and your lieutenant Nikos is gathering up strays. They’re safe.”

  Except for the three still in the foyer. But Julian and Thor’s attention were on the rogues.

  “Excellent.” Julian took off a rogue’s head with a particularly ferocious three-slash.

  Luke turned forward and grinned at the rogue before him, a big barrel of a male with a porn-star mustache. “The tide has turned. Now we mop you up.”

  “Tough talk.” Voice jarringly high, the hulk sneered through his mustache. “Three of you, dozens of us.”

  He stabbed at Luke with a pigsticker of a stiletto. Luke dodged easily.