Dressed to Slay

by Harper Allen

  Since Mikhail was keeping vamp number four occupied, as I pulled my stake free I tossed it into my left hand and caught it with the ivory blade facing toward my wrist, which was still braceleted with blood from my struggle with the handcuffs. Without turning around, I executed a backward thrust at the undead who was about to attack me from behind before moving toward the one struggling with Mikhail and dusting him, too.

  I scanned the room. “Over there, Mikhail—those seven vampyrs fighting with Mandy and her posse. We’ll clean out that hornet’s nest next.” Mikhail raced ahead of me and I followed, my thoughts so focused that when Tash planted herself in front of me I barely registered her presence. Without breaking stride I moved around her, but I found myself being jerked backward as her hand clamped around my arm.

  “I thought you could use my help.” Tash’s face was pale as I turned to face her. “In return, you sliced a stake through my hand and then knocked me to the floor as I was about to take down one of the vamps that were trying to kill you.”

  “Now isn’t a good time for this,” I said briefly, removing her hand from my arm. “Have you seen Zena? The last I saw, she was on the stage but she’s—”

  I broke off in midsentence, my attention caught by the sight of one of the Hot Box waiters crashing into a nearby table and falling to his knees. His uniform of black pants and white shirt was torn and bloodied, and as he got to his feet and staggered toward us his movements were clumsy with panic.

  “You’ve got to help me get out of here!” He had none of the glamyred gorgeousness of the stripper vamps but he was good-looking in a boy-next-door way, although right now his soft brown eyes were wide with terror. “I keep hoping this is a nightmare, but it’s not, is it? The vampires are real!”

  Some of the color came back to Tash’s face and her strained expression softened. “Totally real, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean we’re defenseless against them. The first thing to do is arm yourself with a stake. Do you have one?”

  “No.” The young waiter looked sick. “I wouldn’t know how to use one if I did.”

  “It’s easy.” She patted his arm. “Come on, I’ll—”

  “Excuse us a minute,” I said politely to the waiter. I looked at Tashya. “Can we talk, sis?”

  She took a step toward me. “I thought you said it wasn’t a good time,” she said coolly. “If it’s about Zena—”

  “It’s not,” I said as I quickly moved past her and slammed my stake into the waiter’s chest. Immediately his soft brown eyes turned a blazing red and his jaws flew open as if he still thought he had a chance to use his fangs on me. I waited until he began to dust and then turned to see Tash staring at me.

  “How did you know he was a vamp?” she asked, her voice hoarse with shock. “He seemed so…so nice!”

  I shrugged. “That’s what triggered my alarm bells. He was too good to be true, so I knew he couldn’t be what he seemed.”

  She shook her head. “The way you fought those vamps…even while you were killing them, it was like you saw them and you as being in the same secret club that nobody else could join. And as for staking someone on the basis of a suspicion—what if you’d been wrong?” She took a step back. “You’re not the sister I know anymore, Megan, so who are you? What are you?”

  The fear in her eyes told me she knew the answer to her question as well as I did, and that a door had just slammed shut between us. I felt a sudden aching need to be in Van’s arms, but when I spoke I made sure there was no trace of vulnerability in my voice. “I’m our mother’s daughter, and tonight I’m going to take down the bitch who destroyed her. If you don’t approve of how I do that, maybe you should stay away from me.”

  Tough Megan Crosse, striding away from her sister without looking back. A real kick-ass bitch, with the narrowed gaze of a woman who knows that sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

  Yeah, right.

  Zena had torn my sisters from me and there was only one way to deaden the pain screaming through me. I took care of three vampires in the first ninety seconds of joining Mandy’s fight. I let another get close enough to graze me with his fangs before shoving my stake into him with such force that I had to wait for him to dust before I could pull it out, but as soon as I did I spun around and used it on the vamp Mikhail had by the throat. I felt the pain rising up in me again, but when I raced across the room to join a new battle I felt it recede.

  How many vampyrs did I dust over the next hour? I honestly don’t know, but if I’d been cutting notches on my stake I would have ended up with a toothpick. I was aware that their numbers were visibly thinning, and at some point I noticed most of the women who’d been alongside me earlier had retreated to the bar area, which seemed to have been turned into an impromptu field hospital with Van and Tash guarding its perimeter. But with every kill I made I felt less connected to what was happening outside my immediate zone of combat. Even the fact that I hadn’t glimpsed Zena since she’d unleashed her gang of undead strippers on us no longer struck me as suspicious.

  And before anyone pipes up with the money question, let me say that, yes, Virginia, I really do know how unbelievable that seems. My prime target had apparently vanished into thin air and I wasn’t worried? The only explanation for that is unacceptable to me—that on some subconscious level, I guessed Zena would appear when the time was right and that everything was unfolding just as she’d planned. It’s hard enough to live with the knowledge that I was Zena’s puppet that night, but I won’t believe I was her willing puppet.

  At the time, all that mattered to me was taking down any and all undead comers, so when one of the vamp bouncers made a move for me I blocked Mikhail as he tried to assist me.

  “I can handle this,” I said as I ducked to avoid the vamp’s fist. Under his short-sleeved white knit shirt his muscles looked as though they’d been hewn by a rock-hammer into the approximate shape of a human torso. His charcoal polyester slacks were cinched with a belt around his flat stomach, but strained over his massive thighs and his weight-lifter’s butt. “Steroids much?” I asked the bouncer as I dodged another blow.

  From a few feet away I heard a growl rumble from Mikhail’s throat and I felt bouncer-vamp’s foot graze my chin as I jerked my head back from his kick. I risked a glance in Mikhail’s direction and briefly met his angry golden stare. “Feels like old times, Mikey-baby, with you growling and glaring at me.” I directed my attention back to the bouncer and almost slipped as I stepped on a half circle of sliced orange. “But how about we do the memory-lane thing when I’m not going one-on-one with King Kong here, okay?” I saw my chance and slipped under the vamp’s next punch, but his reaction was faster than I expected. Before I could aim my stake at the tiny alligator stitched on the left breast of his shirt, he pulled his punch and almost caught me in a crushing bear-hug. I dropped to the floor and rolled out of his reach before jumping to my feet again.

  You want to tell me why you’re deliberately prolonging this fight? Mikhail’s voice was suddenly in my head, the ominous edge in his tone coming through loud and clear. Grabbing a chair with both hands while I held my stake between my teeth, I smashed it across the bouncer’s face. As he rushed me I sidestepped past him and wrapped my grip around my stake again.

  “I’m not.” Bouncer-vamp glided suddenly sideways and I danced out of his range. “The first good opportunity I get, I’ll stake him.”

  The hell you will—you’re trying to stay in the kill-zone for as long as you can. What are you using it to escape from?

  “Fuck you, Vostoroff.” I took a step toward Mikhail and sensed the undead bouncer rush up behind me. I spun on my heel. “You, too, hell bait,” I said as I thrust my stake into his barrel chest. He disintegrated and I turned back to Mikhail. “So I was playing the extended-mix version with King Kong, so what? You know, Mikey-baby, I’m beginning to understand the whole seduction-of-being-a-vamp thing. You can call it the darkness if you want, but what you and Tash don’t get is that it’
s one hell of a rush. Sorry if that blows your theory of me being a Daughter—”

  The rest of my sentence stuck in my throat as the room was plunged into total darkness. As a few screams rang out I felt Mikhail’s solid bulk press against my leg and my hand dropped quickly to his ruff. “Someone plugged in a kettle and blew a fuse? Nope, that’s just not working for me,” I said tightly. “Something bad’s about to happen, and since the bar’s the most crowded area in the room that’s probably the target. Can you see well enough in the dark to get us there?”

  He was already moving. I threaded my fingers more securely through his ruff and followed his lead, my apprehension growing as I heard low moans coming from some of the women around me. Half an hour ago, most of them had been fighting vamps, so their courage wasn’t a question, but there was an difference between an enemy you could see and an invisible, unknowable terror.

  “Grandfather! Detective Ryder!” Tash’s voice, high and clear, cut through the rising commotion only feet away from me. “Kat’s not—”

  “Aaaaaaahhhh!” A terrible sound suddenly filled the darkness, a harsh, guttural scream so all-enveloping that it seemed less like something audible and more like a solid element that instantly existed in the room. It stopped and picked up again at exactly the same level and intensity, as if it was one unending barrage that had been arbitrarily cut and spliced back together. It was the sound of someone staring into the smoking heart of hell, and there was no sanity in it at all.

  I let go of Mikhail’s fur and blundered forward. Again the scream battered against my eardrums, and I felt the madness in it seeping into my own brain as I slammed into something.

  No, someone. Even before I was conscious of reacting, I had the point of my stake jammed into a shirtfront. A split-second later I realized there was a stake pressing into me. I froze, trying to blot out the scream long enough to think.

  And then a light snapped on somewhere in the room and I found myself staring into Van’s shocked face. Like a pair of explosives experts gingerly snipping through the last two wires of a bomb, we both lowered our stakes and took an unsteady step back. He exhaled shakily.

  “Aaaaaahhh!”

  My gaze flew from him toward the direction of the scream. Only then did I realize that the light in the room came from a single cone of illumination focused down onto one of the chrome striptease poles on the stage. Two women stood inside the harshly brilliant circle. One had her back to me, but I didn’t need to see her face to recognize the red hair rippling like flame down the back of the floor-length velvet gown. The other woman was standing against the pole facing the room, and although I could see her clearly, I doubted whether she saw anything. Her eyes were wide and darkly blank. The tendons in her neck stood out like cords. Her mouth was frozen open as the terrible scream kept coming from her, and the heavy chains that bound her to the pole cut into her tanned flesh so deeply that her ice-blue dress was spattered with blood.

  It was Kat. Wrenching my horrified gaze from her, I whirled around and bent over. I straightened up, filled with a hatred more corrosive than the sickness that had just spilled from me. I took a step forward and felt Van’s grip on my wrist.

  “Let go of me,” I said thickly.

  I pulled free of his grasp. On the stage Zena shook back a red velvet sleeve from one ring-laden hand and half turned away from Kat. With sudden viciousness, she spun toward her again, the back of her hand smashing across my sister’s face so powerfully that Kat’s head snapped sideways like a rag doll’s.

  Her scream abruptly stopped and her head dropped to her chest, blood pouring from the ring slashes across her face. She sagged away from the pole, the cruel bite of the chains all that kept her upright, and I heard a collective gasp come from the women in the room. My heart turned to stone in my chest.

  “She’s killed her,” Van said hoarsely.

  “Bitch would not be so kind.” Darkheart’s voice was flat with pain. “She only silences her, so noise does not offend her ears. Stay where you are!” His sharp command was directed at me, but as Tash also moved forward on the other side of him, he clamped a hand on her shoulder.

  “And continue to watch Kat being tortured?” she demanded hotly. “I don’t think so. I’m going to take Zena down.”

  “Your sister will be dead before you can raise your stake.” Darkheart’s voice was a rasp. “This is her game and she will play it her way.”

  “Very good, old man!” Zena turned from Kat, her gaze immediately fixing on Darkheart as if there were no one else in the room. She brought her palms together for three slow claps that sounded jarringly loud in the silence that had fallen over the crowd. “Is game with rules, as you say. But you have already broken them, and now game is over.” Her tone became almost sympathetic, and I felt my grip tighten on the stake at my side. “Is probably for the best. Your line has played out. Dzarchertzyn line—” She paused, for the first time turning her smile on the women in front of me. The group seemed to draw in among themselves. “But in America, is polite I use name easier on American tongue, da? Darkheart line was once formidable opponent against me and my kind, but now is not so. Your blood has thinned, old man. This is not your fault and I am not monster, to hold it against you.”

  Darkheart shook his head. “You do hold something against me,” he said. “Whatever it is, release my granddaughter and take your vengeance on me.”

  Zena’s mouth tightened to a red slash, the pretence of sweet reason she’d assumed falling away. “This is how I take my vengeance on you, Darkheart—by destroying what you love, as I did once before! Then you insulted me by sending a lapsed Daughter against me. Now you send a false Daughter, a mewling girl who does not even have the stomach to kill the trash I tossed at her tonight. Do you know where she is right now, old man? Do you know why she screams?” She drew herself up to her full height. “She is in hell! She is suffering alongside those few she killed, screaming at the same tortures. Every moment she is there is an eternity to her, Darkheart, and when I kill her I will make that eternity of hell real!”

  Her sleeve fell away from her hand again as she spread her fingers, showing crimson nails. “You drove a stake through your daughter’s beating heart, old man. I let you do same with granddaughter’s when I tear it from her chest.”

  Zena began to turn toward Kat. Cursing myself for listening to Darkheart when he’d warned that any move on our part would cause Kat’s death, I pushed urgently past him and Van just as Tash’s voice rang out behind me.

  “You skanky undead bitch, leave my sister out of this!”

  Zena froze, her taloned hand outstretched toward Kat. “Skanky?” She shook her head in seeming confusion, her eyes taking on a flat red sheen. “Is unfamiliar Americanic word to me. Means what?”

  “Look it up in the dictionary sometime,” Tash retorted. “Except you won’t be able to, because you’ll be a big pile of ashes. You’re all, ‘I’ve been dissed because Darkheart sent a non-Daughter against me’?” Her voice quavered slightly. “Well, you’re right—Kat obviously isn’t a Daughter of Lilith, so I guess that must mean I am.”

  Mikhail stood in the shadows behind her and Van and Darkheart were nearby, but I only saw Tashya…and I suddenly knew it was the first time I truly was seeing her—not as my brat sister but as the woman she really was.

  A dried trickle of blood ran from her tangled curls to her eyebrow and her lips were pressed together in a stubborn expression she’d worn dozens of times over the years during spats with Kat or me, always a signal that she was determined to take the fight to the limit even if she wasn’t sure she’d win. Although her opponent in this fight was the queen vamp who’d destroyed our mother and put our sister in hell, Tash wasn’t backing down this time, either.

  She was so damn brave, so damn loyal, so damn…I saw her turn her back to the stage and my heart sank. “Oh, Tashie, you’re so damn predictable,” I said under my breath.

  She snapped into a backflip and kept going, tumbling end over end thro
ugh the parted crowd of women toward the stage. I stuck out my foot.

  While she was still dazedly sorting out her limbs I walked over to her, extending my hand as Darkheart came toward us. As she stood to face me she snatched her fingers free from mine. “I can’t believe you just did that, Megan!” she said furiously. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “What I tried as hard as possible to convince myself I couldn’t be, Tashie,” I said flatly. “I’m a Daughter of Lilith.”

  Chapter 19

  “You half suspected that earlier this evening, didn’t you?” I asked Tash.

  She opened her mouth, the words of denial ready to spill from her. Then her eyes met mine and she let out a breath. “It’s so totally not fair,” she said unevenly.

  “I know it’s not. You would have made a way better Daughter than me.” I began to turn away. “But this is my fight, Tash.”

  “Stake you are carrying is unusual. Where did you get, Granddaughter?” Darkheart’s tone was sharp.

  “I stole it from Zena,” I answered. “Why, is that another Daughter of Lilith rule I’ve gone and broken? Look, I know you probably can’t believe I’m the—”

  “Was not what I was going to say at all. Fits your hand like was made for you.”

  I looked past Darkheart to the gleam of gold eyes in the shadows behind him. “I’m getting used to the feel of it,” I said shortly. Squaring my shoulders, I turned toward the stage.

  Be with me. As I touched the leather-wrapped ivory to my lips, the words ran silently through my mind. I clamped the stake between my teeth and began to run, no longer thinking of anything or anyone but the task and the opponent ahead of me. I reached the stage and leapt onto it, landing in a half crouch facing Zena. Instantly I straightened, ready to strike.