by Misty Evans
Rad got out of the Land Rover, gave me a sad smile and started walking away.
So he was going to leave, just like that? Not tell me what he was referring to about Damon and his plans for me? Not even say goodbye?
I told myself it was for the best, but my heart pinched hard inside my chest. What Rad and I’d shared in the past few hours had been nice but we were enemies. Nothing good would come from us hanging out together, no matter the desires burning inside us.
Cole saw Rad walking away and shot a questioning look at me. I shrugged, and he called out softly, “Hey, Guitar Boy. Where you going?”
Rad stopped short, stuck his hands in his pockets and slowly faced us. He seemed to be fighting with himself, giving up after a few seconds. “You got a spot for me?”
Cole didn’t, but I did. “Can you take care of the humans we send out?”
He sauntered back, curiosity evident on his face. “What humans?”
Rad hadn’t heard Madison’s report. “Toel has humans stashed inside. He’s either planning to use them to make me look bad or he’s offering his friends inside a little incentive to join the coup he’s staging against me. Either way, if I don’t free those humans, they’ll be vamp food by morning.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“When we get them out, they’ll be freaked. I need you to calm them down, make sure they weren’t already bled or bitten and find them a ride home.” I handed him a stack of my Bridge business cards. “Give them one of these and tell them to contact the office if they want to file charges against any of the vamps inside.”
“In other words, I’m on coffee duty again.”
Demons and their egos. “This is far more important than getting coffee.”
“Yeah, Guitar Boy.” Cole drew an extra ear piece from his pocket, tossed it to Rad. “Besides, you got to hog all the fun with Lilith while I sat on the sidelines. Now it’s my turn to get some action.”
“Fine.” Rad fingered the equipment, gave me a guarded look. “You need any real help, say my name. I’ll be inside in a flash.”
There was heat in his eyes. Not sexual, but something that looked more like love. Which was ridiculous. But I knew this was personal, again, between him and me. “Drive us up to the entrance?”
He stuck the ear piece in his ear and nodded. “Let’s rock and roll.”
“Hey.” I punched his arm. “That’s my line.”
Cole whistled to his squad and made a circular motion in the air with his index finger. His soldiers fell into line. He handed out orders and Rad and I climbed in the Land Rover as half of Cole’s squad headed around back while the other half spread out over the front.
“Thank you,” I said.
I don’t know why I said it, the words popped out of my mouth before I could stop them. That iceberg in my chest had melted a lot in the past day, and Rad had been there for me through everything. He’d even stood up to Lilith with me.
After this job, though, I had to send him on his way. We’d crossed clearly defined lines, both personal and professional, and thrown ourselves into dangerous territory. If anyone at the Bridge Institute found out I’d knowingly slept with a Noctifector, I’d be executed before I saw another sunrise.
Hone climbed into the backseat, interrupting my thoughts. His cell phone was glued to his ear and he placed a beefy hand over the mouthpiece. “How long this gonna take, Kali? Renee wants to know when I’ll be home.”
I checked my watch. “You should be out of here before midnight.”
He relayed my message, Cole got in, and Hone tucked his phone away.
“We ready?” I asked.
Everyone nodded.
“No matter what happens between me and Toel, nobody touches him but me. Got it? I’m going to egg him on because I want to see what he’s got.”
Cole harrumphed. “Why do you get to have all the fun?”
I adjusted my cape and smiled into the night. “I’m going to give Toel Chase a dose of his own medicine. After tonight, no one in the Undead world will mess with Kali Sweet again.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
“Cali-for-ni-a,” Toel said, dragging out the syllables like he’d done at our earlier meeting. The surfer accent was absent though. He motioned at me and my two bodyguards. “Come in, come in. We’ve been expecting you.”
Eight words and not one “dude”. I liked him better this way.
Just like I’d assumed, Toel had left the front gate open, waiting for me to find him. He probably knew Madison was inside and I had over a dozen Bridge soldiers on the grounds. What was he up to?
Much like the torture chamber under the basement, Nudra’s study boasted old world amenities. Heavy on the leather, wine colored drapes and masculine furniture. Dark wood trim with Jodhpur carvings embellished the door and window frames. The desk was embellished with fat curved legs, carved elephants and palm leaves. Above the sofa, a gold leaf Budda-head sculpture looked down on all of us.
None of the vamps in the room looked like they belonged there, but I felt the pull in my blood. There were indeed seven, including Toel. He strode around the pool table, cue in hand, and took a dead ball shot at a stripe. The cue ball barely moved but sent the stripe ball into the side pocket.
I sized up each of the other vamps, assessing their threat level more than their features. Four men, three women. All three women were blonde, artificially enhanced clones. All three appeared to be stoned. None of them paid me the least bit of attention as they hung on two of the Undead males seated on a sectional leather sofa. The third male vamp stood near a window overlooking a garden outside. He was younger than the two vamps on the sectional.
The male vamps were dangerous, all of them sizing us up as fast as we did them. Vamps high up in Nudra’s hierarchy or Toel’s minions, I couldn’t be sure, but the way they’d made themselves at home suggested they’d been here before. The way their blood tugged at mine, they had to be Nudra’s. I felt nothing from Toel except the usual Undead powers combined with sexual desire and blood lust.
While staking him was preferable to playing nice, I had a different plan in mind. I strolled up to the pool table and shifted one hip so it rested against the polished wood. “What are you doing here, Toel?”
His eyes took a leisurely stroll up my boot-clad legs to the short skirt and rested there on my bare skin before he moved around the table to set up his next shot. “Doing a little business in Nudra’s place until the new king is crowned.”
I pretended interest in the shot he was lining up, casually caressing my fingers along the pool table’s edge as I walked around the corner. My new vantage point allowed me to see Hone, whose hands hung at his sides, and put me directly across from Toel’s focused attention. “What kind of business?”
Toel didn’t like the distraction of my short shirt in his line of vision. Or, rather, he liked it a little too much. The sex and power radiating off him grew thicker, heavier.
He blinked and fought it, sending another stripe in my direction. Right before the ball could drop into the pocket, I snatched it off the table. “Answer my question.”
Anger flashed in his eyes and his vampire power smacked up against my protective magical barrier.
Short temper, this one.
He straightened to full height, the cue loosely held in his right hand. “Why do you care?”
“This house is mine now.” I removed the Bridge papers from my cape, tossed them on the pool table. “Nudra’s business is also mine. You have no right to be here and no reason to undermine my authority unless you’re looking for trouble.” Toel liked playing games, so I leaned forward on the pool table and discreetly licked my lips. “And if trouble’s what you’re after, you’ve found her, buddy boy.”
A low chuckle came from his chest, sounding confident and a little intrigued, but he didn’t move. One of the women sidled up to him, molded her body against his and ran a hand over his chest while giving me a back off glare.
Toel grabbed her han
d, pushed her away none too gently. While most vampires were driven by equal amounts of lust and power, his primal supernatural magic was driven by the need for supremacy and dominance. “The vampire world is not your concern, no matter what Rafael and Juliana have led you to believe. You’re a demon, not one of us, and we don’t want you meddling in our affairs.”
He saw me as being beneath him. A lot of vamps, especially the latest generation who hadn’t been around as long as their older counterparts, viewed demons the same way. Toel had big plans and no one was going to get in his way, especially not some measly vengeance demon.
I could have cared less about Undead affairs. In fact, if I wiped the entire vamp population off the face of the planet, there wouldn’t be any affairs to worry about and my job would be a lot easier. Killing this entire room of vamps would have been a good start, but maybe the best way to bring down the vampire nation was from the inside.
And upsetting Toel was fun. “You threatened one of my employees. Were you afraid to confront me face to face?”
He stepped toward me, insouciant and sure of himself but determined to take me down a peg. Both Cole and Hone tensed so I made a small motion with the hand holding the ball to stop them. I’d warned them I was going to provoke Toel so I could see how he reacted. I wanted to know exactly what he was capable of and pushing him to the extreme was the only way to find out.
With my boots on, he was only a few inches taller than me, maybe five-six or -seven. I hadn’t realized he was so short in the conference room, but I’d been a little distracted at the time. Now he invaded my personal space and stared me down, cue stick still held nonchalantly in his hand. His eyes were cold and hard, their light blue color tinged with red.
He was hungry.
And I was about to become the meal.
Or so he thought.
“You have two choices,” he murmured. His power orbited around me, tickling my protective barrier as it searched for a way in. The sensation reminded me of poison ivy vines creeping up my legs, over my arms, encircling my neck. “Leave now and forfeit your nomination to be queen of the Central American Vampire Kingdom, or stay and prove yourself worthy to rule.”
Radison Beaumont wasn’t the only demon who liked a challenge. Purposely lowering my protective magic, I closed the few inches of distance between us and turned my face up to his like I was going to kiss him. “Oh, I’ll stay. But fair warning…I’m blistering good at pool.”
He reached up and took the end of my ponytail between his fingers, rubbed the hair. “We’re not playing pool, Cal-i-for-ni-a.”
I batted my lashes and looked innocent. “We’re not?”
“No.”
He flipped me on my back, jamming the cue stick across my larynx and weighting my body down on the green pool table felt with his.
Several things happened at once. Cole and Hone both yelled, the other male vamps jumped up as if to intercept them, and I held up the hand with the stripe ball out of Toel’s sight to signal my bodyguards to stand down.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow with the hard wooden cue stick crushing my larynx. Through the sudden dots in front of my eyes, Toel’s face was contorted with satisfaction and greed. His lust for my body and blood surfaced, mixing with his need to dominate me. He was going to hurt me and rape me in front of the others to prove his superiority.
As if I’d let that happen.
My right hand held the stipe ball, my left, the handle of my whip. Choices, choices…
Since he was such a dick, I decided to use both.
I smacked his temple with the ball first, and when he flinched, the tension on my throat eased a fraction, allowing me to breathe. I expanded my chest, flicked my whip out and smacked him across his back.
Volante cut through his clothes and made a satisfying crack against his skin. He didn’t cry out, but his body arched in response to the pain. Not as much as I’d hoped, but enough to lift his upper body off mine marginally. I dropped the stripe ball, and with another quick, although much lighter flick of my wrist, sent the end of Volante’s leather arcing over the back of his neck. I grabbed the end with my right hand and wrapped my legs around Toel’s stomach.
The boots I wore were custom-made by one of my favorite designers. Four rows of small spikes ran down the inside, outside, front and back, making them both fashionable and functional in the hardware department. I tightened my hold on him until I heard a satisfying grunt of pain.
Fighting both my restraints and the pain, Toel regained his self-control surprisingly fast. His upper body crashed back down on mine, shoving various weapons inside my cape into my chest and lungs. Air whooshed out of my lungs.
Ignoring the discomfort, I looked into his eyes as the cue stick once more bore down on my throat. He couldn’t get the leverage he’d had before since he was only using one hand to hold the stick. The other pinned down my whip hand.
Putting his vulnerable upper body so close to me was stupid, but he probably didn’t realize that, since he thought so highly of himself and so poorly of me. The demon inside me laughed.
“You bitch,” he spit in my face. “You’re going to pay for that.”
As he spoke, I discreetly wrapped the end of the whip around my right hand, clasping it tight. I also tightened my leg grip around his stomach, digging my knees and the spike-lined boots into the sides of his ribcage. Once again he arched slightly, raising his head up, and that was all I needed. Two quick turns of the whip around his neck and I jerked the finely crafted leather hard.
Toel’s body went rigid at the shock of being strangled. His eyes bulged. He released his hold on the cue stick and a new rush of adrenaline sped through me along with the air I sucked in.
The red in the vampire’s eyes darkened as he called up all of his supernatural power to fight back. Turnabout’s fair play, so I called up my own magic and made another rotation of my hand around the whip’s leather, increasing the tension on his neck. Toel’s tongue flopped out, fingers clawing at Volante’s hold on his trachea and his magic succumbed to mine.
No matter what the Undead tell themselves, demons are top of the food chain.
He gurgled and continued to fight, the swimming and surfing he’d done over the years magnifying his vamp strength to Hulk-like levels. My muscles shook with the effort to continue choking him into submission without killing him. Volante could have decapitated him, but I didn’t want him dead. I just wanted him unconscious.
Behind me, I heard the sounds of scuffling and fighting. “Don’t kill them,” I yelled to Cole. After all, if we killed Nudra’s midlevel managers, who would go back to the rest of the vamps and spread the news about what a badass I was?
I gave Toel’s ribs another dig with my knees and heard bones snap. A second later, his eyes rolled up in his head and his body went limp. He could’ve been playing possum, so I didn’t ease up on the whip’s tension while I rolled us both off the pool table and onto the floor. I exerted another thirty seconds of pressure and then released him.
Cole’s squad of soldiers swept into the room. Cole and Hone had Nudra’s managers subdued. The three of them sat on the sectional, bloodied and bruised, gazes darting between me and their fallen leader.
I stood over Toel’s body, keeping an eye on him. Vamps healed almost as fast as demons. I probably had less than two minutes to secure him in the torture chamber before he woke up. “You three.” I motioned at the male vamps. “Carry him downstairs, shackle him in the silver manacles on the west wall.” Making eye contact with Jimmy, the jiu-jitsu expert, I motioned at the Undead males. “Secure them down there too. I’ll be down in a minute to talk to them.”
“What about us?” one of the female vamps said, swaying on her feet.
“Leave.”
The one that had hung on Toel rushed me from the corner, one hand raised as if to slap me. “Bitch,” she screamed.
I caught her hand in midswing and snapped her wrist. She cried out and fell to the ground as if I’d mortally
wounded her. I shook my head. “You guys really need to expand your repertoire of curse words.”
In my ear, Madison and Rad were asking me if I was all right. “I’m fine,” I answered, but my voice didn’t sound fine. It sounded rough and scratchy.
Jimmy was rousing the vamps from the sectional. The young male who’d been standing near the window protested. He was thinking hard about the torture chamber and his fear was evident. “We just came here to hear Toel’s proposal. We didn’t know he was planning on killing you.”
Right. “What proposal?”
The three looked slightly abash. The young one spoke again. “He wanted us to object to your nomination and rally our citizens against you. At the coronation, he wanted us to stage a protest and let the Prince know we wouldn’t be led by a demon.”
“But did this protest involve killing me?”
The male vamps exchanged a look. “We never agreed to anything,” the young one said.
The adrenaline was slipping away and my nerves twitched. My brain was twitching too. Vamps. Undead and deceitful as hell. “And what did Toel promise in return?”
He looked at me slightly perplexed and shrugged. “His help. To rule the Central Region.”
“Did Toel tell you that the Prince is the one who wants this deal between the Bridge Council and the Undead nation? Did Toel say he would personally step forward at the coronation and defend you to the Prince? Did he offer to take the blame if the plan failed?”
His flat stare told me the answer.
I motioned at him and the others to grab Toel’s arms and legs. “Toel wanted the Central Region for himself. After you and your citizens started the riot, he would have stepped in and subdued you, thereby gaining the Prince’s favor and making himself look like a hero. With me out of the way, he’d have the three of you killed for insubordination, and his path to this kingdom would be a slam dunk.”