I frowned. Vampire bosses were even worse than human bosses, but with fangs. What a shitty employment situation.
Alistair stomped up the stairs, muttering, “Stupid hidebound hacks who can’t get their thinking out of the nineteenth century.” He was in the big open space with us now, a tall, brawny man in a uniform with a nightstick.
He sniffed. “Wait a minute. Something doesn’t smell quite right.” He reached for his radio.
I busted a pipe over his head. I figured it was the best chance we had of getting out of there without police involvement or a fight. At the very least, it would put the radio out of commission. Alistair gasped loudly, put off by the icy chill of the water.
“Are you kidding me?” he squealed.
Kamila turned on the lights. We’d lost the element of surprise once he picked up on our scent. She didn’t wait around to make threats or posture either. She unleashed a fireball at him that ignited the dust in the air.
I went for subtle, trying to cook him from the inside out. He screamed as he writhed on the floor. Getting burned alive, or undead, was a painful process. I pulled out my pistol with the silver bullets.
“Who do you work for?” I barked. I didn’t know if he could sense the silver somehow, or if he just knew we were the ones causing his pain.
I was being an arrogant fool. I thought Alistair was in too much pain to do anything but writhe and scream. I was very wrong. Smoke poured from his mouth as he bellowed, and parts of his skin were starting to bubble, but he reached inside of his jacket and pulled out a gun. He fired it too. Leave it to me to find the one dedicated employee in a vampire organization.
He couldn’t fire it well, and my reflexes were too sharp to let him take me out that easily. I shot him with a silver bullet, hitting him right between the eyes. He turned to ash in an instant, mixing in with the water from my burst pipe.
Kamila put a hand on my arm. “Silent alarms.”
“Shit. You’re right.” I grimaced. “We’d better get out of here.”
We left through the back door. We didn’t run. We walked at a perfectly normal pace in our club-going clothes, away from the waterfront and back in the direction of our cheap hotel. I could hear sirens as police responded to the alarm, but I refused to turn and look back. Our body language became bored clubgoers with each passing step.
We turned down a side street and doubled back to the part of town with nightlife, finding an unpretentious little bar to regroup in. I dried Tess’s clothes for her. Beyond the little bit of dampness, nothing about us gave any indication we’d been in a fight or a flood. I wiped at the black lipstick in disgust, then we ordered drinks and went to a back corner.
“So,” Tess said, and braced her back against the wall. “That happened.”
Kamila made a face, which she hid by taking a drink. “Yeah. Yeah, it did. I hope we didn’t just destroy the place where Zarya’s being held. I’m worried about her. Why would they lock up the basement like that, with the iron door?” Her presence in the basement seemed a foregone conclusion.
“I don’t know.” I drummed my fingers on the rough-hewn table. “Honestly, I’m worried about it too. We might have been able to figure something out if Alistair hadn’t come along. Now we’re kind of back to square one. The last thing I was expecting was a security guard, right?”
“A vampire security guard.” Tess glowered at the door to the bar, like the city itself was somehow responsible for having a vampire security guard. “Who hires vampires for—well, anything, really? I’ll tell you. Idiots.”
I snickered. “Well yeah. But this place, they’re basically a party planner service, right? So why on Earth would they have a security guard in the first place? Vampire or human, why would they hire a guard to watch a building that’s mostly empty and doesn’t have a lot of inventory in the parts that are rented out?”
“Belize City does have crime,” Tess said slowly. “It’s a major city. Any time you get a bunch of people crowded into the same place, you get crime. Maybe that’s why?”
Kamila cleared her throat. “You know, it’s entirely possible Alistair’s vital status was just a coincidence. I mean, there are Ferin who get day jobs, so why not a vampire?”
I did a doubletake. “Wait a minute. That doesn’t make a lick of sense. His boss, George, was talking about the war.”
“There’s plenty of Ferin who know about the war too. That doesn’t mean they’re directly involved.” Kamila nudged me with her shoulder. “Come on, Jason, you heard them. George threatened to turn Alistair over to the Ferin. They’re scared of us.”
“I’d be scared of us too if I’d started a war with people who could burn me alive from the inside out.” I rubbed my knuckles. “I’m just saying.”
Tess rolled her eyes, but she didn’t contradict me. “The point is, vampires aren’t necessarily working together. If the area has a big enough vampire population, there could be more than one faction, or there could be a handful of disaffected henchmen, or it could all be a coincidence. They’re not wolves, you know. A pack mentality—and cooperation—might not be in their skillset.”
I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t believe in coincidences. Not anymore. And vampires were still vampires. They might not all be playing for the same team, but they all wanted the same prize: dead Ferin.
“The fact remains, we still don’t have Zarya or any way of finding her.” Kamila chewed on her lip. “I’m feeling a little torn. If we had local Ferin to count on, I’d bring them in. I’m not interested in getting into vampire politics or what have you. Zarya has to be our priority right now.”
I held back a smirk. Would Kamila be as gung-ho about finding Zarya if she hadn’t had a long-standing relationship with her at some point in the past? It wasn’t my business, though. If even half the things I’d heard about Zarya were true, I needed her to further shape my power if we were going to live out the war. Or the day, for that matter.
“Agreed,” I said, toying with my glass. “The only issue is, I’m not sure the two problems aren’t connected. There are just too many connections. The vampires in this building, the vampires at the club, the close distance between them, the fact that the vampires who attacked us in Bermuda and the ones who attacked Zarya had flyers for the same business. It’s just too much to write it all off.”
“You just want to go fight more vampires.” Tess sounded accusatory, but a tiny little smile played around the corners of her mouth.
“I do want to fight more vampires.” I saw no reason to deny it. “I hate those fuckers. But I also want to find Zarya and rescue her if we can. I happen to think we can’t do one without the other. If we make Zarya the priority and don’t get distracted by killing vamps, we win. Or at minimum, we survive.”
Kamila looked down. “Yeah. Okay. As long as Zarya’s the priority.”
“Let’s head back to the hotel. I feel a little safer making plans there.” Tess stood up, and we all headed back to our shelter.
The hotel room was the same as we’d left it. Daisy was asleep on the bed, taking up the whole thing in a liquid jumble of legs and paws. She lifted her head, wagged her tail once, and went back to sleep. I sat down next to her and rubbed her head. “Nice life,” I told her and then looked up. “Okay. Vampires.”
“Right.” Kamila rubbed the back of her neck and sighed. “We have an awfully big problem here. You’re right, Jason. All roads seem to lead to Morning Star, but the one area we need to get into, we can’t access. The nightclub is kind of gross, but there’s nothing nefarious about letting a bunch of youths run around, pretending to be creatures of the night.”
Tess snorted. “It’s kids being kids. With eyeliner.”
“I noticed you having a pretty good time out there on the dance floor.” I smirked at her. “But seriously, there are vampires there. The guy with the bracelet at the club followed me into the bathroom just to warn me about them. There’s also a locked room in a freezing basement. And there are vampires at Morning Star, in a l
ocked room, in a creepy basement.”
Kamila grinned. I’d known she wouldn’t take long to get on board with the adventure part of things. “Two unsavory vampire-adjacent basements only about a block apart. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“Jason doesn’t do coincidence,” Tess teased. “So what’s your play? You want to head back to the club and try to get into the VIP room? It’s the only place we couldn’t access.”
“I think we have to.” I gritted my teeth. I wasn’t a fan of the outfits. I felt like we stood out like sore thumbs in them. Still, we had to blend in to that specific environment. “The police will probably be at Morning Star for a while.”
We double-checked the windows and headed out again into the unwelcoming night. I sincerely hoped this would be the last time I had to use makeup, since my eyes itched, my lips tasted canning wax, and I had the added benefit of pants that were tight enough to lift my voice an octave.
We showed our hand stamps, proving we’d already paid the cover, and headed back inside. The crowd had changed a little bit, being bigger and more mixed between tourists and Goths. Now the club was crowded, bodies mashed together in ways more suited to a mainstream club.
We ordered more drinks, just to make it look good, and did a quick recon of the club. Most of the people seemed fairly innocent. There were just more of them than there had been before. When I passed by a stunning young woman with long, jet-black hair and a dress consisting more of lace than anything else, I noticed she had no warmth coming from her body at all. It felt like brushing past a block of ice.
I switched to thermal vision, which worked better in the club’s dim light anyway. What I saw made my heart seize. I leaned in to whisper to Tess, “There are ten vampires in this room.”
She did a double take. “Are you sure?”
“Walking corpses. Yeah, I’m sure.” I put my hand on her hips and pretended we were dancing.
“We need to move quickly and hope they haven’t noticed us yet.” She nibbled my neck, still covering the real cause of our discussion, and then glided over to Kamila.
Kamila agreed. Sure, we’d taken out ten vampires before, but it hadn’t been in a nightclub crowded with civilian humans. We danced our way over to the stairs labeled for the VIP lounge, still making every effort to keep things casual, and headed down toward the bathrooms.
There was a line for the women’s room. It made it more difficult to play off missing the signs for the doors. I decided I didn’t care anymore. We were going to just go for it. The words of the guy who’d tried to save us from the vampires earlier in the night echoed in my head. If they have your friend, she’s already dead. I didn’t believe Zarya was dead, but I didn’t think she had a lot of time either.
I ignored the door to the bathroom and pushed my way toward the great iron door marked as the VIP Lounge. A couple of the women objected loudly, but Kamila just turned around and blew them kisses. “Hey, no need to fret, sugar. We’re VIPs.”
We walked right up to the door, where a bouncer gave us an amused look. “Oh, you’re VIPs, are you?”
I knew that voice. This was Alistair’s boss, the man on the other end of the walkie talkie. “As a matter of fact, George, we are.” I smirked and started a fire burning deep inside his body. I had to concentrate this time, and I focused on his neck and vocal cords. I’d never tried to focus quite so intently on something inside the body, something I couldn’t see. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to get it done. Smoke poured from his nostrils and his eyes as his body seized. Tess leaned forward and plucked a key from his pocket, smiling into his roasting eyes as she let us into the VIP lounge. Kamila pushed George into the darkness, and we all crowded in behind him.
The interior proved to be nothing more than a little vestibule. It looked more like a cave than anything else. I finished George off now that we knew we were free from prying eyes, and I scattered the ashes with a splash of water. The sound was soft, like a distant wave. He was gone, and we could get back to the real work at hand.
Tess pointed to a camera and a panel of monitors. “Looks like George took his job seriously. And someone on the other side of that door takes it seriously too. We’re going to have company.”
“Fucking fangs.” Kamila leaned over the monitors. “I hate when they’re organized.”
We had no way of knowing where the stream of vampires pouring down at us might be coming from, but we knew it wasn’t good. A line of human-shaped people came at us from a tunnel, presumably somewhere behind the iron door on the other side of the vestibule.
Upstairs in the club, all ten vampires in the public space ran for the stairs. They weren’t even trying to be subtle, their feet sending vibrations that were easy to detect.
I swallowed hard and wiped my hands on my pants. This was going to be a major fight, and we needed an early edge.
I snapped my fingers. “Let’s see how hot we can get that metal.” I looked over at Kamila and put my hands on the door leading away from the club. She gave me a quizzical glance, but she did the same thing I did. Then I closed my eyes and focused.
I’d gotten metal hot before. I’d even helped to melt silver down for bullets, which hadn’t been a skillset I’d contemplated a year ago. Now I had to heat the door up enough to seal it to the doorjamb without melting it. I hadn’t practiced this skill, but I had to make the effort or risk losing everything. Including us.
I brought everything I had to my hand and focused on the seam between the door and the frame. Then I traced my fingertips along that line. My fingertips glowed red, and the smell reminded me of being in a blacksmith’s shop. It was a little bit like blood that had been burned or scalded. It set off a reaction right in the back of the mouth, like when your mouth watered, but it was also uniquely repulsive. I focused harder, and slowly, that line between the two metal pieces faded.
The door to the main hallway crashed open with a groan and a thud. We were in a kill pocket now, and the choice was simple. We fought or we died. If I let myself be distracted, the vampires coming from the tunnel underneath the club would surge forth and attack us all. Sweat pumped from my body as I bore down on the metal, bringing my will to bear on every inch of the frame.
Fortunately, Kamila and Tess were up to the task. We might have been in a kill pocket, but they couldn’t fit more than two or three of their own kind in the vestibule either. Kamila sent a fireball out into the mass of vampires surging toward the doorway, and screams filled the air. Some of them might have even come from civilians, but there would be time to mourn later. For now, it was a small, dirty war being fought in a room the size of a walk-in closet. There would be no quarter given.
Tess launched an attack, a silver-tipped spike in each hand. I could only spare half a glance to watch what she was doing. I had to focus on sealing the door, but I could see her hands flying and vampire after vampire falling under her assault. She looked like a lethal flower as she moved, hands a blur of metal and ash as she stabbed and ripped into the cold vampire bodies. They collapsed into dust at her feet, and I could almost feel bad for them.
Almost didn’t quite get me there. These were monsters, and plenty of their friends were trying to get through from the other side of the door. I could feel the impact as they threw themselves at the giant slab of metal, and I heard their muffled cries when they landed against the hot iron. They might have been near immortal, but they still felt pain, and burning metal was a great equalizer. Even the undead had a sense of self-preservation.
I finally finished sealing the doorway, turning my attention to the other vampires, who were still storming into the vestibule. Kamila threw one bodily into the control panel, and I took the chance to shoot him with one of the silver bullets. I could have used fire, but I’d already given myself a nosebleed with the door stunt I’d just pulled off. I shot another one, shooting close enough to Tess’s ear that she barked out a warning.
Using a gun didn’t come without consequences. The people still waiting to use the “Room o
f Respite” hadn’t all fled upstairs. They could hear the gunfire. I supposed if they weren’t going to be bothered by the sight of people crumbling into black ash when stabbed, I didn’t need to worry too much about the civilians getting flustered over a few gunshots. I was wrong. Firearms drew screams and calls to ring the police. Now we were good and fucked.
I couldn’t trust the Belize City police’s response time to be as slow as the sheriff’s department in a rural American county.
Kamila burned another vampire, the last one. “What now?” she snapped at me. She must have been having the same thought I was about the cops.
Fortunately, I already had a solution. “Secret passage, remember?” I waggled my eyebrows.
Tess wanted to protest then grinned as she ran out into the deserted hallway. She ducked into the women’s room, and Kamila and I followed her. The secret passage was hidden behind what I’d thought was a ventilation grate, which opened into a small dark space with a door.
We opened the door and followed a short corridor out into an alley behind the club. The alley was empty, except for trash and broken glass. I closed the door behind us once I realized we were alone. Just for good measure, I sealed it behind us too. I didn’t give it the good seal I’d given the door to the VIP area. I just made sure it would stick well, giving it the impression of having been unused for a while.
I didn’t feel capable of much more.
“Okay. New plan.” Kamila turned to me, jaw tight. I knew she wasn’t mad at me specifically. She was just worried about her friend.
I started walking—not running—away from the site. “Yeah,” I told her. I looked back and winked. “How much do you want to bet what just happened here pulled the cops away from Morning Star?”
Kamila and Tess exchanged glances. Then they laughed and jogged to catch up.
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Forever Young - Book 2 Page 14