Biting Serendipity: April Fools For Love (Biting Love Short Bites Book 4) (3 page)

“I’ll save her!” Jenny cried. “
Duck.
”

A whoosh of air alerted me. I dropped.

Jenny’s tray guillotined the air where my head had been. She sailed past me, whapping tables, pitchers and stray body parts indiscriminately.

Granny swept a beer pitcher from the bar and brought it down on her captor’s head. Camille doesn’t have us carry nice light plastic pitchers. Those things are heavy glass.

The vampire’s eyes rolled back into his head and he went down without a sound.

Buddy popped up from where he had apparently taken refuge behind the bar and tossed Granny her clothes—she’d finally learned to throw them behind the bar after old Mr. Crahn stole her orthopedic fishnet stockings once too often.

She grabbed the bundle and tottered toward me. I seized her as she passed with worried hands, petting her to make sure she was all right. She grinned and tottered toward the louvered exit door.

“
Help…
” The cry disintegrated into a gurgle.

I spun. The bodybuilder vampire in the suit had grabbed Jenny. She struggled against him. He slapped her. It stunned her just long enough for him to grab her more securely. One hand around her forehead and an arm around her shoulders, he bent her like a drink straw.

Exposing her neck.

I had to do something,
anything
. Holding my tray with hands steady as boulders, I smashed it like a battering ram in rogue faces, fighting my way toward her.

Bodybuilder Suit opened his mouth, low light glinting off long fangs like knives.

Acid flooded my veins. Even as noses squished and my tray dented, I knew I’d never make it to Jenny in time.

“Hey!” Behind the bar, Buddy, the bartender, pointed the seltzer spray at the vampire. “Let her alone.” He jammed his thumb against a button.

Normally, the seltzer has three settings, water, stream, and spray. He’d apparently found a fourth setting, rocket power. He shot the suit in the face.

As Mr. Bodybuilder hacked up seltzer, I fought my way to Jenny. Ramped on adrenaline, I whacked the vampire’s imprisoning arm until he let her go.

Released, Jenny fled past where Rebecca lay, against the bar under some stools. The vampire woman’s head was still attached, good, but her features looked awfully pale. Bad. Worry scraping at my nerves, I flung my tray onto the bar and fell to my knees to see her better.

A beefy hand seized me by the throat and jerked me back to my feet—then off them.

My air was cut off. My lungs tried to suck in oxygen, fought uselessly. My vision blackened, spots whirling. My ears filled with white noise as terror seared me.

Automatically, I dug fingers into his hand and lifted my weight off my neck. My chin tucked and my neck muscles tightened courtesy of hundreds of self-defense drills. Vision cleared just enough for me to see I was face-to-stale-breath with Mr. Scary Suit.

“A blood-doe just gambols right up to me. How lovely.” His grin was the bastard child of Dracula and The Joker. “Meet your doom.”

The line was canned, but his gaping red mouth, coming fangs-first for my neck, shocked a scream from me.

Air whooshed. Suddenly, I was free, the vampire flying backwards from me as if a pile driver had thrown him. His body smashed through the front window in a crystalline
ching
of shattering glass and the crack of breaking wood.

“Cutter.” Thor stood beside me, and his voice had gone from warm whiskey to cold ice. “Never touch her again.”

Welcome relief cascaded through me.

The suit scrambled to his feet and, framed by the jagged hole in the window, grinned that terrifying grin. “Thorsson. I was wondering when you’d throw your wet blanket on the fun.”

“Me? I’m nothing but fun.” The metallic zip of fighting stars drawn from inside his vest and winged into Cutter’s forehead contradicted Thor’s words. The Viking’s expression was hard as granite—and frankly, that granite had been having a bad day.

Cutter reeled a moment before falling out of sight.

“Banter is good.” Camille twirled her blades in and out of vampire bodies, blood flying in arcs. Her once white peasant blouse was ruined, and her red leather dirndl and vest was wet with the stuff. Hopefully, she’d used fabric guard. “Sexy And Fun. Banter is definitely fun. Keep it up. It’s good for business.”

Thor threw her an incredulous look. “Rogues attacking, not even bothering to hide the fact they’re vampires, and all you can think is that it’s good for business?”

“We’ll hypnotize the humans after. Banter, Thor, banter. Oh, and if you want to ‘accidentally’ rip the bodice of a barmaid’s costume, that’s fine, too. Just don’t do my leather.” Mid-slash, she pointed one of her knives at me. “I have an idea. Give the sober one more cleavage.”

“Hey.” Inanely, I grabbed my tray and slapped it as cover over my poor breasts.

“And risk getting bashed by her lethal beer tray? No thanks.” He drew blades with a
shing
and disemboweled the nearest rogue. Or not disemboweled so much as gouged and circled, coring out the rogue’s heart like a particularly tough apple.

Yeah, my legs went weak again at that, and I sagged against the rail. The Viking did a second, cutting through solid bone, then tossed the hearts into the tip jar, even more amazing. That thing was almost twenty feet away.

I shook myself. While Thor and Camille fought vampires, I stumbled to kneel next to Rebecca.

Her head was already at a less-unnatural angle. A shiver of
alien
rumpled my skin. Sure, I’d seen vampires get cut or bruised a time or two, trying to play human, and those cuts and bruises healed supernaturally quick. But she was in the process of healing a broken neck, an injury that would be fatal to a human. Incredible.

Still, even incredible becomes fact if it smacks you in the face. To help, I gingerly took her head and straightened out her neck. Never move a human who’s suffered a spinal injury, but really, if Rebecca had been human, she’d have been dead already. The bones crunched, moving into place.

Thor quickly helped mop up the rest of the rogues. I glanced up in time to see Cutter reappear in the starburst of broken window, staggering as he plucked ninja stars from his skull. He caught sight of his forces getting steamrollered, and his eyes widened.

“You owe me, Cutter,” Camille shouted. “You and your boss owe me for the window.”

“Try to collect.” Tossing the last of the stars, he gave her a little salute and ran away.

Next to me, Rebecca roused. Her head was still a little floppy, but her eyes opened and her chest began rising and falling. From what my roomies and I had gathered, vampires didn’t have to breathe to live, but breathing and a beating heart did seem to help them move.

Camille sheathed her knives with a double flirty flick of hem. “All right, let’s wipe the noncombatants.” She spoke to Thor, who was sliding his knives into his vest. “This is serious enough that we’ll have to do each individually. You take the women, I’ll take the men and the staff.” She pointed at the humans blinking through the half-open back door of the bar, my granny among them.

Thor waved the crowd back in. “Why did they attack here? Why now?”

“You got me.” Camille passed a hand before my eyes and said to me, “
You only saw a normal bar fight.
” Her voice echoed in that weird way I’d come to associate with vampire compulsion.

I sat straighter and put a little glaze to my gaze. I’d also come to realize that I was immune, but no sense broadcasting that fact. That was how my roomies and I got our best peeks into the vampire world.

I should mention the incident that made me realize I was immune happened soon after I’d returned to the Corners, the first time I’d come with Granny to Nieman’s and saw she was stripping. She’d tripped on the bar and her industrial garters catapulted her off like a geriatric slingshot. I really thought she’d die, but a big blond Viking appeared from nowhere, streaked in like lightning, and caught her. The whole bar was shocked—until Camille said, “
Good thing Thor was standing right there
” in a loud, echoing voice. Just as I was about to utter a shocked denial, I saw everyone going back to their drinks and cards, behaving as if what she said was true.

After that, I was torn, freaked out at Camille’s compulsion and Thor’s unnatural speed but also grateful and sort of turned on by how he’d rescued Granny. When I returned to my flat that night my roommates got the story out of me, and they told me Camille’s compulsion hadn’t affected me because I was immune, and I wasn’t the only one. They were too, and they’d been gathering information for a while, but it was okay because our vampires were good guys and basically I didn’t have to freak.

Now, as I sat in pretend stupor, Thor gently guided a female patron to a stool, sat her down, and waved a hand in front of her face. In a deep, hypnotic voice, he told her she’d only seen a bit of roughhousing.

“Roughhousing,” she echoed.

“
Did you make any video or audio recordings?
”

“No.”

“
Good.
It’s strange.” The last was to Camille, in a conversational tone. He turned from the woman, his brow wrinkled and that sexy glint to his eyes he got when his brain was turned on über high. “All of our kind is careful about not getting discovered, careful to preserve the masquerade. Yet these rogues attacked when the bar was full—with dozens of witnesses. That doesn’t sound like Cutter or his boss.”

He left unsaid why vampires avoided the limelight, but I’d already worked it out. Despite the number of fangy dudes in Meiers Corners, vampires were a drop in the human ocean. If we knew about them, we’d Van-Helsing them extinct.

“Between you and me,” Camille said, “Cutter’s boss has gone downhill since I left. Way downhill. You ask me, his revenge rage is making him careless.”

“
This
careless?”

She shrugged. “They’d have to know we’d wipe any witnesses.
Sera
,” she said to me. “
Clean up spilled drinks and broken glass.
Kurt Weiss, come here.
” She crooked a finger at the blond poodle of a man shivering in the corner with one arm around his wife and the other hand clamped on a pitcher of beer. When he sat, without the wife but still glued to the beer, Camille used her echo voice on him.

“You ask me, Cutter looked strange. Grinning a little too much, and a bit wild-eyed.” Thor took the wife. “
This was a simple bar fight.
And what if we hadn’t wiped the humans for some reason? Why court disaster?”

“Cutter’s an ass. I wouldn’t trust him to sit the right way on a toilet. If he had his own comedy show, it’d be called
The Big Duh Theory
.”

“Harsh, considering you used to work with him.”

“Not for five years, I haven’t, and believe you me, I don’t miss him or any part of that boy’s club. Besides, he didn’t waste time bidding for my place.”

As I played zombie barmaid, shuffling around in an apparent daze to clean up, I listened closely, trying to pick up clues. There’s some sort of “us” versus “them” among vampires. I didn’t know the details, but Camille was with “them” until five years ago. Now she’s with “us,” though our vampires don’t really trust her. Thor works for her, but I think even he’s on the fence about her loyalty.

I’d have asked directly, but everyone treated it like a big secret, so I wasn’t totally sure which humans were in the know. And with the vampires, well, there was the whole possible people-smoothie issue.

“Speaking of lieutenants,” Camille said. “ You remember my onetime allegiance with the Coterie?”

Camille’s old organization, the “them”, was the Coterie, based in Chicago. “Us” was the Alliance, based for some reason in Iowa.

Thor snorted. “We were adversaries for years. How can I forget?”

“Yes, well, I’ve still got an ear inside the Coterie—”

“You mean a mole.”

“Please, darling. Mole is so negative. My
source
had information about the pretty blond twins—Luke and Logan Steel.”

Logan I knew. He was a vampire who’d married a Corners’s woman.

“What information?” Thor asked.

“About Luke Steel’s wife, the one who died. There’s more to her death than we thought. Get word to him for me, will you? Those boys don’t take my phone calls anymore.”

Thor shook his head. “That’s not the kind of information that goes well over the phone. I’ll give it to him next time I see him.”

“Oh, well, I’ve done my duty. And it’s already been a few centuries. A few more months won’t matter.”

Camille and Thor continued to hypnotize us humans, ending when Camille did her echo voice on Jenny. She never did Buddy. I filed that away in my mind.

As Thor and Camille worked, Rebecca got to her feet and started cleaning up body parts. She grabbed the snow shovel we use for clearing the front walk and shoveled them out the door onto the sidewalk. When she was done, she carefully wiped the blade of blood and put it away, but I was never using that shovel again. Then Buddy handed her the tip jar. Shrugging, she emptied it of its hearts by upturning it out the broken window, the wet, meaty pock-pock-pocks ensuring I’d never use my stomach again either.