People filled with warm, nourishing blood.
The pain in her skull and jaw returned, so strongly this time that she had to press her hand against her temple to try and soothe the ache. Then she saw the rapidly growing lights of an incoming car. It had come from out of nowhere, the vicious shriek of its tires as it barreled down the street masked by the sound of the night’s last, passing train.
Had she started crossing the street it would have hit her; the thing clearly had no intention of slowing down. The car had barely cleared her before something large and heavy cracked her across the cheek, sending her spinning. She hit the asphalt hard, head swimming. Someone was leaning out of the back seat with a baseball bat in his hand, hooting and hollering, triumphant. Exultant.
And the car wasn’t continuing on down the street; it had screeched to a halt.
Chapter Two
Red tail-lights like the eyes of an ancient beast leered from the end of the street. Pixi blinked away the daze, but her cheek burned with bright pain. She planted her palms on the ground and pushed her chest up, then cracked her neck. A hit like that could have left lasting brain damage on a human, if it didn’t outright kill him.
But Pixi wasn’t human.
“Holy shit,” a voice called out at the edge of her senses, “It’s a vamp! We got a fucking vamp!”
She spat cold blood onto the asphalt and turned to look at the car, but it was closer than it had been a moment ago. This wasn’t an illusion—it was backing up, and fast. Pixi sprang into action, rolling forward and jumping to her feet to avoid the car as it came rolling toward her, then past her. It stopped a few yards away, the brakes squeaking.
“You fucking missed, Wraith!” one of the men inside the car said.
“No shit, asshole,” Wraith said.
Pixi moved into the middle of the street, but couldn’t see the faces of the men inside the vehicle; the high-beams were on, making the windshield on the car appear to be made of obsidian instead of glass. It was a Plymouth Roadrunner—the 1970 model. Crowning the hood was a small ornament of a busty woman with both her middle fingers turned up against the world.
She heard the driver switch gears—from reverse to drive—and that was all the motivation Pixi needed. There were at least two men inside the Plymouth, and they knew she was a vampire, but that didn’t matter. Her chest was heaving, her fangs extending whether she wanted them to or not. This was her turf, and she was queen here. Like hell she was going to let these motherfuckers disrespect her in her own backyard.
The Plymouth’s engine roared, the car started toward her again, and she ran toward it. She seemed to almost fly across the asphalt, her boots barely even touching the ground as she moved with superhuman quickness. When the car was within striking distance, she leapt into the air, twirled like a cat in mid-flight, and grabbed hold of the roof, landing on top of it in a crouched stance.
Pixi flexed her fingers, stretched them wide, and a set of wickedly sharp and long claws pushed out of her fingertips, breaking the skin in a gory, but painless manner. She plunged her hand into the roof as if it were made of tin and her fingers made of steel, razor-tipped instruments of death searching for a hunk of flesh, but finding none. When she pulled her hand out, she brought a piece of the roof up with her.
“Hey, that’s my car you just fucked up, you bitch!” Wraith, the driver, said.
Pixi stared into the hole, and saw a man glaring back up at her. He had a baseball bat in his hands. “You,” she said, and she thrust her hand into the hole again, and this time she succeeded in sinking her claws into his collar. Blood erupted from the wound and the smell of it sent her mind reeling. It was sweet, and warm, and metallic, and begged to be imbibed in copious amounts.
But the smell had been so strong, and her hunger so powerful, she had forgotten to pull her hand up. Someone grabbed it, and a second later, a set of teeth sank into it. Pixi screamed and yanked her arm up. The man whose collar she had mangled grinned up at her and spat out the bloodless chunk of flesh he had just bitten off her arm.
The canines on his upper and lower jaw had elongated so they no longer sat comfortably in his mouth. His eyes were reflective, like a dog’s eyes, and bony ridges had appeared along the bridge of his abnormally large nose. He was growling, and the other man in the back seat next to him—the one Pixi couldn’t see—was growling too.
Werewolves.
A large, claw-tipped hand jutted out of the roof, searching for Pixi’s neck and would have come away with a tuft of her purple hair had she not been quick enough to arch her neck up and away from the car. The daze had gone, the wound to her head had healed, and she could see clearly now; there were four of them and one of her.
Pixi let herself roll along the roof, across the boot of the car, and hit the cold, wet ground with her shoulder. The car screeched to a halt again a few feet away, only this time it didn’t back up. This time, the backdoors opened and two men stepped out into the street. They weren’t men, but rather knotty masses of flesh and muscles, their faces and arms covered in thick, bristly fur, eyes burning with a desire to inflict pain.
The car’s driver and passenger side doors opened too, and the other two men came out to play.
Pixi got up and dusted herself down. She checked the wound on her arm; the bastard had ripped out a chunk of it, and cold, dark blood was oozing from the fleshy patch. It stung, but it would heal, and it wouldn’t stop her from introducing the guy’s face to her claws if he got too close.
“That’s one hell of a swing,” Pixi said. “You learn that in soft-ball practice?”
“You want me to try again?” baseball bat asked.
“Sure, and then I can have a try.” A grin spread across Pixi’s face. “I bet I can take more hits than you can.”
Baseball bat scowled and advanced. Pixi put her hand up and wagged her clawed finger at him. “Not another step,” she warned, “I wouldn’t want to have to rearrange that gorgeous face of yours.”
“Can’t count, vamp bitch? There’s four of us and one of you.”
“Oh, well, then you better get more friends.”
Wraith, the only one Pixi knew by name, stepped to the front of the pack. The others were large, burly men who had stepped into their ass-kicking forms; all muscle, fur, and attitude. But Wraith had kept his human form, and this made him look like a skinny nerd in a lineup of lumberjacks. He had a sunken face, a jaw and neck covered in week-old bristles, and a chin that jutted out. More jackal than wolf.
He clasped his hands together in front of his stomach in an almost reverent manner. “How about you start running?” he asked. “That way, when you get back to your master, you can tell him you had the common sense to run when we showed up. We’ll even give you a head start.”
“You the alpha?” Pixi asked.
“Yeah, I’m the alpha.”
“Then how about you come over here and show your packmates you have the balls to back your threat up?”
“Is that a challenge? Are you challenging us, vamp bitch?”
Vampires and werewolves weren’t inherently predisposed toward hating each other—just different kinds of predators trying to coexist—but every race had its assholes. Wraith was starting to look like one of theirs.
“No,” Pixi said, “I’m challenging you. Then once I’m done with you, they can have a turn.”
“I like the sound of that,” one of the wolves said. “I’d have a bunch of turns on you, every way imaginable.”
Pixi didn’t let herself get psyched out and allowed the werewolf’s words fall on deaf ears. Her eyes were on Wraith, analyzing his posture, his stance. He was smaller than his friends, but that didn’t mean he was any less dangerous. Werewolves could all put on their ass-kicking hats and rip a human’s limbs from their sockets. She didn’t think she’d be able to take them all on—not even two of them—if they jumped her all at once, but she wasn’t about to back down.
Not now.
Wraith clenched his jaw. His face darke
ned and became serious. He started advancing, and the closer he got, the faster he moved. Before Pixi’s eyes, Wraith’s face began to stretch and contort, his eyebrows becoming more pronounced, his teeth starting to elongate, and ridges appearing along the bridge of his nose.
Pixi stiffened as her challenger approached, mouth wide open, eyes shining brightly beneath the full moon light. She put all her weight onto her back leg and lunged, striking at his legs with her boot and striking true. Wraith went down hard, face first into the concrete.
She didn’t give him a chance.
Before he could get up, she had grabbed a tuft of hair from the back of his head, pulled his head up, and sent it right back into the asphalt with a crack that resounded throughout the otherwise quiet street. Wraith didn’t move. She let go of his hair and removed her hand. It fell limply to the floor.
“Some alpha,” she said.
Footsteps.
She turned her head and saw the other werewolves were running for her—sprinting—with murder in their eyes, shouting obscenities for everyone to hear. Pixi sprang up and pushed her legs as fast as they would take her, dashing down the street. But the street was empty, and the werewolves were faster than she was. On a clean stretch like this, they would catch her in no time.
Pixi made a hard left, slid across the hood of a car, and made a dash into a parking lot. Footing was precarious, the asphalt pockmarked by holes and cracks. There were cars here, many of them had lain abandoned for months, some for years. All manner of debris littered the floor, from broken glass to fallen bumpers, increasing the likelihood of a nasty fall if one wasn’t paying attention. But the werewolves persisted, howling and hooting as they followed her into the parking lot, their voices ringing out into the night causing every single dog in the vicinity to start barking in a disjointed chorus.
At the other end of the lot was a chain-link fence. Pixi angled herself toward it, leapt onto the roof of the car at the end of the line, and used the momentum to send her vaulting over the fence and onto the fire escape connected to the building on the other side of it. She almost didn’t make it, and had to reach out with one hand to stop from falling short.
Pixi hoisted herself onto the gantry and checked the parking lot. The werewolves were still coming. With no time to dwell on it, she climbed the fire escape all the way to the roof, where she had a clear view of the Crow’s Heights Projects. The werewolves would probably follow her wherever she went, so going home was out of the question. She crossed the length of the roof, reached the edge of the building, and took to the ledge like an Olympic athlete, sailing across the gap between buildings and hitting the adjacent roof in her stride.
Pixi wasn’t going to go home. If the werewolves wanted to follow her, fine. She was going to take them directly to Murdock, and let him deal with them.
Chapter Three
The werewolves stopped chasing her about three jumps after the first. Probably didn’t want to leave their unconscious alpha to bleed all over the asphalt, or let their car to get lifted by an opportunistic passerby. Just as well, too. It meant she would beat them to the bar, if that was even where they were planning on going.
Pixi let herself drop from the fire escape ladder and walked out of the alley and into the street. The buildings were spaced out more thinly out here, as if they were distrustful of one another. As she walked along, she noticed the lack of people on the street. There wasn’t a sound in the air save for the occasional call of a crow, and even they seemed to be suspiciously quiet.
A single car drifted down the street, its windows tinted and impossible to see through. The car slowed as it approached the part of the sidewalk Pixi found herself walking on. She stuck her middle finger out without looking at it, and it grumbled off into the night, a hunter that had been discovered too early to make its attack.
At the end of a desolate street, a single, baby blue building stood out among the rest for being the only ground floor establishment with no boarded-up windows. It was also the only place with the lights on. A big, red, neon sign cast its luminescent glow onto a long line of large bikes—choppers, with the long handlebars. Two bearded, burly men shared a joint on the porch. One of them wore a leather biker vest over a bare torso, proudly displaying arms and a chest all covered in tattoos. As Pixi approached, she caught the tail end of a triumphant conversation about some “big-titted bitch” one of them had nailed three ways from Sunday.
Pixi crossed the street to get to the bar, and the conversation died as soon as she began her approach. She walked as if they weren’t there, examining the lines on the cracked floor but also keeping the two men in her periphery at all times. She could hear the leather squeaking as they shuffled on the porch steps, could hear their hearts pounding loudly within their chests, like the beating of war drums.
“I thought I told you not to come back here,” one of them said, his voice gravelly and rough.
Pixi kept walking, but soon found herself in front of Mister no-shirt. She stared into his hairy chest; on it was a tattoo of a fiery pit, skeletons desperately trying to escape the flames. The words ‘Burn Them’ were inscribed above the flames. Did the skeletons have vampire fangs, or was she imagining that?
“How about you step aside, handsome?” Pixi asked as she trained her eyes on his throat.
“Fuck you.”
“We really don’t have time to do this dance. I want to see Murdock.”
He shoved her, and Pixi fell back a couple of steps. “Get lost, bitch. We don’t want your kind here.”
Pixi clenched her jaw. This guy was becoming a nuisance, and while that wouldn’t have bothered her on any normal night, tonight was different. She was sure the guys who had attacked her would turn up here sooner or later, and then Murdock would hear the story from them instead of from her. Not only did that kill any chance Pixi had at having Murdock settle this problem for her, it also increased the chance she would find herself alone on the wrong end of town, in tight quarters, surrounded by werewolves.
She turned around as if to leave, then shifted her body back into the two men and pushed herself through the gap between them, stepping into the bar before they had even turned around. Now, instead of having the attention of two werewolves, she had the attention of two dozen. They stared at her from across the smoky bar. Classic rock played faintly out of a well-maintained jukebox; one of the only things inside of this place that saw any kind of regular cleaning.
Pixi didn’t waste any time in walking deeper into the bar, ignoring the staring eyes. She waded around scoffed tables and sofas with pieces of upholstery torn out of them, strafing the pool table and the men standing around it; their hands more tightly gripping the pool cues they were holding. To Pixi, it was as if they weren’t there. Murdock was sitting in his booth at the back of the building, behind the pool table, and she needed to get in front of him.
Finally, the two idiots outside came barging into the bar, and their agitated state caused many of the other men inside the bar to stir. Some got up from their stools and sofas, others simply walked around Pixi, finding a good position from which to flank her. She was a jungle cat, and they were all wolves, and this was their den she had wandered into.
When she reached Murdock’s dim corner of this pit-stain of a bar, an African American man who looked like he had eaten a smaller, yet still bulky man stepped up and stood in Pixi’s way. A scar in the shape of three claw marks ran down the side of his face. No one else moved when this man stood; not even the idiots who had come running in after her.
Pixi turned her eyes up at him, the only other black person in this place besides her, and saw something from him she hadn’t seen in anyone else’s face. Solidarity. Pixi and this man were a species apart, but the color of their skin gave them common ground neither shared with the people around them. He stepped to the side and let Pixi through.
“What the fuck, man,” one of the idiots said. “You can’t let her in here.”
“Stand down,” Murdock said. His voi
ce was like ball-bearings rolling around inside a deep, empty barrel. Probably a result of one too many attempts on his esophagus from rival wolves, vampires, or any of the other dangerous entities that called Ashwood home. He had a hard face lined with scars and wrinkles displaying his age, a light goatee and moustache, and beady, but incredibly sharp eyes whose color was difficult to detect in this dim place. A frazzled mane of grey and black hair fell about his shoulders.
Many of the werewolves standing at attention around Pixi stood down. One of them tapped another with the tip of his pool cue and said “C’mon, it’s your turn.” A young waitress resumed picking empty beer bottles from tables; all fresh smiles and desperate, dreading eyes, one of them wearing a dark ring around it. The tall black man stood behind Pixi, barring anyone else from getting close while she had her audience with Murdock, the only werewolf in all of Ashwood to have given her the time of day.
The only werewolf in all of Ashwood who mattered to her.
He tipped his cowboy hat up and locked eyes with Pixi from across his table. On it were several stacks of hundred dollar bills, a pistol—desert eagle, by the length of the barrel and the size of the gun—and several lines of powder, some of which had already disappeared up someone’s nose. He gestured to a seat in the booth of which he was the only occupant, and she sat down.
“I’d offer you a drink, but we don’t serve what your kind wants in here.”
“I don’t want a drink,” she said, although between the beating and the fleeing, a mouthful or two of warm blood wouldn’t have been unwelcomed.
“Didn’t think so,” he said, then paused while he analyzed her. “You’d have to be stupid to risk that tight little ass of yours on a social call. What is it you want?”
Legends of the Damned: A Collection of Edgy Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels Page 70