“This is your feeding ground,” I said.
“Best I’ve found in decades,” he replied. “Not as good as Ibiza, but the lack of sun more than makes up for it.”
“When you feed, it’s consensual?”
The vampire shrugged. “Sure, why not? If it makes you feel better to think that.”
Palm out, I jammed my extended fingers and thumb into the vampire’s stomach. I’d spent a good chunk of the last few months experimenting with converting my energy into electricity, and here I’d found the perfect test subject. I let a few volts surge into his stomach. The vampire’s muscles clenched violently in response. His body straightened, and he vibrated ever so slightly. The hand that had still been on my hip popped away from the force of what I’d nicknamed the stun gun spell, but not before it flowed through the vampire and into me with enough voltage to make me grunt in pain. In response, I pushed harder, ratcheting the energy up to a level that would have killed a normal human.
“I thought your kind weren’t allowed to feed without consent,” I growled.
Tiny sparks of electricity jumped from his body to mine. The air snapped and crackled, flickers of pain lancing the skin of my arms and my cheeks. I’d definitely have to refine this spell a bit if I was going to use it again.
The vampire looked like he was about to swallow his tongue. I eased off the spell to give him a chance to speak, leaving my fingers pressed into his stomach to remind him that I could power it up again in a heartbeat if he provoked me.
“I am so turned on right now,” he said. “Let’s get out of here and take this someplace more private. You can torture me all you want.”
Men. Doesn’t matter if they’re frat bros or undead hipsters. Everything comes back to sex.
“Stay on topic,” I told him. “Are you feeding without consent?”
“Consent is such a vague concept,” he replied. “Is there really consent when two blackout drunk strangers fuck each other? I don’t kill, and I leave my partners happier for the experience. They remain blissfully unaware that I sipped a pint or two of blood, and they retain the memory of the best night of their pathetic little lives. I’m a bloody charity worker.”
“Pun intended?”
“Always,” he said with a wink.
I glanced around the bar in an attempt to get eyes on Nicola. She wasn’t anywhere on the dance floor that I could see, and I wondered if she’d gone back to find Bedhead and his friends. If this vampire wasn’t part of the threat against her, I was wasting my time talking to him.
“To be absolutely clear,” I said to him. “You’re not here to get at Nicola Bloedermeyer?”
“What the hell is a Blow-der-mayer?”
Call me naïve, but I believed him. If it was Nicola he’d been after, he’d had several opportunities to snatch her before now. Vampires tended to be primarily interested in one thing and one thing only. Feeding. Sabotaging a developer and terrorizing his family seemed too mundane for creatures that cared only for their own pleasure. I supposed Eskola — the head of Vancouver’s biggest and scariest vampire family — could have some competing business interest that might involve sinking Bloedermeyer’s project so he could swoop in with his own, but this was too drawn out and subtle for Eskola. He wouldn’t have vampires hanging out in bars seducing people. He’d have simply sent someone in to slit Bloedermeyer and his daughter’s throats and drain them dry in the middle of the night.
“Don’t get in my way again,” I warned him as I broke away. “You wouldn’t be the first vampire I’ve killed.”
“Feisty.” The vampire mimed scratching the air with clawed fingers.
His expression hardened somewhat and his eyes flicked to the crowd and back. He still hadn’t retracted his fangs, meaning his blood lust was in full effect. In a place packed with people already largely stripped of inhibitions, his control would slip away bit by bit if he didn’t feed soon.
“I don’t know what this job is that brought you here,” he said, “but you may want to reconsider it. There’s new energy in town. It’s subtle, but I’ve felt it growing over the last several weeks. It’s malicious and dark.”
Now that got my attention.
“What can you tell me about it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “That’s it. It’s little more than background noise when I awake each night. I’m getting out of town before the sun rises. This is my last feed before I head to the city to lie low for a while. You might want to do the same.”
“Thanks for the advice, but that may be exactly the reason I’m here.” My suspicion over the sudden goodwill of a vampire got the better of me. “Why tell me this?”
He licked his lips, eyes once again drifting to the neck of a girl dancing beside us. It seemed to take him a significant effort of will to drag his attention back to me.
“I need to feed,” he said softly. I felt the pressure of his psychic seduction acting on me again. “It’s my hope that this information might buy me a little leeway to work without interruption.”
I looked at the girl in question. She was about my age, and she looked like she was deep in the throes of an extended MDMA high. Undulating and swaying in her own little bubble of bliss, she’d hardly notice a few more lost hours. The idea of consenting to a vampire feeding on her didn’t sit easy, but I had to face the facts. This guy was going to feed on someone whether I allowed him to or not. Even if it came down to me fighting him, I couldn’t afford to use lethal force in such a public place. He’d be able to slip out and grab the first person he saw out on the street.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “Do what you have to do. I’ll look the other way.”
The vampire nodded in thanks and slipped away to work his magic on the unsuspecting girl. She welcomed his advances with eagerness. Still within range of the vampire’s psychic influence, I had to once again fight down an urge to push her out of the way so I could slip into her place.
Needing to get eyes on Nicola, I put the vampire as far out of my mind as I could, then checked the dance floor again. The music had ramped up another notch, spastic strobe lights making it nearly impossible to get a decent look at the crowd. I pushed my way to the nearest bar, and without pretense, climbed up onto it to scan the entire room.
“Fuck,” I muttered to myself.
Nicola was nowhere to be seen. First day on the job and I’d already lost my charge.
Chapter Five
“Get off the bar!”
I looked down to see an extremely annoyed bartender gesturing for me to get out of his way. Ignoring a snide comment about dumb drunk girls, I clambered down off the bar and set off in search of Nicola.
Far too late, it occurred to me that I should have asked Chase if he had any fancy tracking devices I could have stuck to her forehead so I wouldn’t lose her. Instead, I had to dive into the densely packed dance floor hoping I’d be able to find one girl in a sea of writhing dancers. I felt like a salmon trying to swim upstream. Every time I managed to squeeze past someone, I’d find myself blocked by two others. Several people mistook my attempts to get around them as invitations to dance, and each time it was more difficult to resist firing a kinetic blast into the crowd in order to part it like the Red Sea.
Instead, I tweaked the output of the stun gun spell to project the tiniest amount of electrical energy from of the skin on my arms. Faint sparks zapped the air around me, causing people to back off as though snapped by a bolt of static electricity. I still had to push and shove my way through the crowd, but people moved aside with considerably more eagerness than they had before.
None of this made it any easier to find Nicola. From my vantage point, the dance floor was little more than an ocean of shoulders and chins. I was stumbling around blindly hoping I’d bump into the girl. If I was to stand a chance of finding her, I’d have to be smarter about it.
Squeaking out to the nearest edge of the dance floor, I moved through the more open sections of the bar to where I’d last seen Bedhead and his friends.
There were two long and busy bars on either side of a large room. Along the back wall was a semi-secluded stretch of booths and tables that hadn’t been cleared away when the place had switched over into nightclub mode. Having already come from one of the bars, I made my way through the booths, scanning every face to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything.
Nicola wasn’t in any of the booths. When I’d checked that whole section, I saw that the other bar was a solid knot of people all fighting for the attention of three bartenders. It didn’t make sense for Nicola to be in the middle of all that. She was too full of herself to ever squish in with the filthy commoners like that. If she’d been at the bar, she would have been an island of calm amidst a seething mass of desperation.
When I reached the end of the bar, I realized two things.
First, I’d done a full circuit of the room and Nicola was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t be absolutely certain we weren’t circling each other without ever crossing lines of sight, but my gut told me that wasn’t the case. I’d been watching her all night, and it had always been easy to spot her on my first try. When she danced, she created a pocket of space around herself. People ogled and approached, drawn into her aura in a manner disturbingly similar to the vampire’s psychic intoxication. At the same time, she exuded a haughtiness that kept people at a distance. She believed she was better than everyone around her, and by sheer force of will, she managed to prevent anyone from getting uncomfortably close to her.
The second thing I realized was that I had to pee. The three beers I’d had while hanging back in the shadows had caught up with me, and I needed to find the toilets. It was at this point I realized Nicola was only human. With how much she’d been drinking, surely she’d eventually have to hit the little girl’s room.
I made a beeline for the restrooms, praying I’d find Nicola kneeling next to a toilet bowl or something. It wasn’t a pretty thought, but it was significantly better than the alternative. From what Bloedermeyer had told me about the harassment he’d already endured, I’d been on guard against some kind of attack. It was only after losing sight of Nicola that I understood how easy it would be for someone to snatch her and hold her hostage in order to get at her father. I’d been so caught up with the hipster vampire that I’d temporarily ignored my duty to protect Nicola. For all I knew, someone had been watching my obvious bodyguard act, waiting for just such a distraction.
I pushed the door to the restroom open and scanned the line of girls at the sink. Unable to fight the need to pee any longer, I hopped into one of the middle stalls to get it over with. I tried to lean forward to check out the shoes of the girls in the stalls next to me, but one was wearing jeans and the other had dark stockings on. Nicola had been wearing a skirt and heels despite the literal mountains of snow outside. If she wasn’t in either of these stalls, there was only one left on the far side of the room.
I finished my business as quickly as possible, then went to check the last stall only to find it empty. Nicola wasn’t in the restroom after all, and I was quickly running out of places to look.
Not wanting to waste any more time, I started working on a plan to track her down. As embarrassing as it was sure to be, the only thing I could think to do was to go to the DJ booth to tell them I’d lost my friend. With any luck, they’d make an announcement and she’d turn up somewhere. Nicola would probably be angry enough to have her father fire me as soon as we got back to the chalet, but at least she’d be safe.
The restrooms were located in the back of a small hallway that also led to an emergency exit. I yanked open the door and stepped out into this hallway only to narrowly miss colliding with two of the guys I recognized as Bedhead’s friends.
“I can’t believe Skyler’s fucking that chick in the bathroom,” one of them said in a drunken slur. “Lucky bastard.”
His friend said something in reply, but I didn’t stick around to hear it. I kicked open the door to the men’s room, nearly causing a heart attack for some poor guy trying to leave. He flattened himself against the door to let me pass, then he scurried off into the hallway behind me. Every other guy in the place turned his head to stare me down, most of them laughing it off and going back to pissing or washing their hands. One of them started to say something, but the look on my face silenced him before he could get himself into the kind of trouble he’d never live down. In my experience, guys didn’t take being beaten down by a girl very well. Something Bedhead was going to find out if Nicola was in the bathroom stall with him.
Only the large accessible stall was occupied. I placed my hand over the spot where the deadbolt in the women’s stall had been, reached out with my energy, and took hold of the metal lever. The bolt slid up and back with a gentle click, allowing me to kick the door open with a satisfying bang of metal on metal.
The sound didn’t even phase the two idiots inside. Skylar sat on the closed toilet seat lid, a topless Nicola perched on his lap. She was bent over sideways, chest in Skyler’s face as she leaned into the toilet paper dispenser to snort one of the four lines of coke that had been spread across the wide flat surface.
Nicola sat bolt upright, wrinkling her nose and grinding up against Skylar while she tilted her head back and let out a low moan. She leaned into Skylar, shoved her tongue into his mouth, and expressed her heartfelt thanks for what I presumed was his cocaine. It was only when he craned his neck around her to ask me if I was going to join them that Nicola seemed to notice me standing there.
She twisted around and leaned back against the stall wall. Her skirt had ridden up around her waist, flashing more than a little of the pale blue underwear she’d bought earlier that day. The only blessing there was that it gave me a view of Skyler’s still zipped up fly. I’d caught them before things had gone far enough to make this even more awkward than it was about to become.
“Oh hey, um… you,” she said, doing a poor job of stifling a giggle. “I wanna say… Albus?”
“Get off him,” I said in my sternest voice. “Now.”
“I was about to get Skylar off before you busted in here,” she said.
Skylar laughed a little too hard at this, jostling Nicola until she slumped down into the gap between the toilet and the stall wall. Folded in half with her knees pressed up against her shoulders, she erupted into a paroxysm of uncontrollable laughter.
“Oh shit!” Skylar said as he hopped to his feet.
He reached down to try to help Nicola up, but before he could, I took hold of the back of his shirt and yanked as hard as I could. I didn’t even need to tap my magic to send him sprawling backwards into the middle of the men’s room. Satisfied he’d gotten the message, I reached down to take Nicola’s hand so I could haul her upright. She wobbled a little, then immediately crouched down in an attempt to rail the second line of coke.
I grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled her back up before she could get the straw in her nose. She scowled at me, so I brushed my hand across the lines, scattering the cocaine to the floor and into the toilet bowl.
“You’re fucking done,” I said. “Put your shirt on and give me your phone.”
Nicola stuck her tongue out at me, but she plucked her phone from where it had somehow remained tucked in the waistband of her skirt. While I scrolled through her contacts looking for the number of the car service we’d need to get home, she grabbed her shirt from the back of the toilet. Grumbling something about me being a raging bitch, she fumbled her way back into her shirt and pulled the hem of her skirt down where it belonged.
“Oh my God,” she said, hand over her mouth to stop another bout of the giggles. “Dude looks pissed.”
I looked to the stall doorway and saw that Skylar had regained his feet. No longer laughing, he came at me with balled fists.
“You owe me for the coke you just wasted,” he said. “I’m going to give you a choice. You can pay with your wallet or with your mouth.”
“You don’t want to do start this,” I told him. “When I’m done with you, losing
twenty bucks worth of nose candy won’t be the worst thing that happens to you tonight.”
“LOL,” said Nicola. “Nose candy.”
Skylar didn’t think it was nearly as funny. “I’m not joking. This bitch gets me all wound up, snorts my coke, then you come in here and think you can just take off without consequences? You tried to fuck me, so now I’m going to fuck you.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
I handed the phone back to Nicola and took one step towards Skylar. He moved to grab my throat, but I’d already drawn enough energy for a significant kinetic hit. Working it into a barrier around my fist, I stepped inside his defenses and delivered a rabbit punch that resulted in the satisfying crack of at least one rib as he dropped to his knees. He gasped for air and turned an ugly shade of red. I worried I’d put a little too much force into the punch, but if he could whimper so pathetically, I doubted the bone had fractured enough to pierce any internal organs.
Nicola fell silent. Still fired up, I was fully prepared to deliver a solid smack across her face to get her to sober up enough to listen to me. Thankfully, watching me drop Skylar had resulted in a similar change of demeanor.
A rivulet of blood trickled from her nose to her lip, so I gathered up some toilet paper and wiped it clean. Then I grabbed hold of her wrist and led her out of the stall. We had to step over Skyler’s curled-up body to get out of the restroom. A handful of guys that had been watching from the entrance parted way once we got to the door. Instead of leaving through the club, I opted for the emergency exit and dragged Nicola out into the back alley.
It had started snowing. Instead of feeling painfully cold like it had before, the freezing air was a welcome relief after the oppressive heat of the bar.
“What about your hoodie?” Nicola asked as we set off in search of the car I’d messaged to come get us.
Black Ice (Black Records Book 3) Page 5