Club Monstrosity (12 page)

Drake didn’t respond for a moment, but slowly settled himself into a dusty velvet chair. Natalie stared at him. This was his element, it seemed. No longer did he look like a confused monster out of place in modern society. He looked like the lead of a horror novel. Calm. Cool. Collected.

“If there is no more war between us, why are
my
people being murdered?” Drake asked in a low and calm tone that barely carried in the huge library.

Natalie swiveled her gaze to Van Helsing. She hadn’t exactly thought Drake would be so blunt, but she wanted to see the other man’s reaction. There was none beyond a brief burst of pleasure in his eyes that was gone as soon as it appeared.

“Why would I know anything about that?” Van Helsing asked.

He folded his thin, wrinkled fingers in his lap and tilted his head like he truly didn’t think there was a reason to involve a monster killer in an investigation of the deaths of monsters. Natalie forced herself to keep her mouth shut and let Drake handle this issue. He was doing pretty well and she didn’t want to intrude.

“
You’re
Van Helsing. You need no other reason,” Drake said in a tone that could have made ice, it was so cold.

Van Helsing’s thin smile vanished, replaced with anger. “The ones who started these wars were
your
kind,
not
my family.”

Drake leaned forward. “You mean when you took money to break into my home and stake me in the heart while I slept peacefully, that was justified?”

“Absolutely.”

Natalie’s wide eyes went even wider. The two men kept leaning closer and closer, their tones dropping lower and into more of a warning zone. This was going to turn into an old-man fight of epic proportions. And while that might be a little bit entertaining and get a ton of hits on YouTube if she recorded it with her cell, she doubted it would get any of them anywhere. Certainly not any closer to finding out what was the motive behind the murders of Ellis and Blob. So she had to exercise a little control, since the two of them were apparently incapable of it.

“Look, Mr. Van Helsing,” she interjected, trying to get into the line of sight of both men so they’d remember she was actually there. “Two of our people have been killed in terrible ways. And someone
was
following others. We’re just trying to determine why.”

“And so you came here?” Van Helsing drawled with increasing disdain that made Natalie’s blood boil.

She folded her arms. “Let’s not pretend that you and your family don’t have a history with us. You’ve certainly been the cause of the death of our kind before and been proud of it, as the tapestries in your hallway prove. Drake and I came to you with the thought that you might have information that could be helpful in determining the specifics of our current situation.”

Van Helsing returned his stare to Drake for a long moment, then looked up at Natalie. “Drake. And you go by Natalie. You know, you may pretend to be human, but you are not. You never will be. You never could be. You are a nameless abomination, child, no matter how you hide your scars with makeup or play at being people.”

Natalie’s nostrils flared. Earlier in the day, Alec had said she was a little more monstrous. Now she felt a
lot
more monstrous. And not in a good way. She wanted to rip this man’s arms off.

Which would only prove his point.

Instead, she leaned closer to him and growled, “Do you know who might be behind these attacks, Mr. Van Helsing?”

He stared at her evenly for so long that Natalie began to think he might have died and no one had noticed. But finally, he cleared his throat.

“Describe this person who is supposedly following you,” he ordered, his tone dripping with condescension.

Natalie counted to ten in her head as she quickly described the person outside of Jekyll and Hyde’s apartment.

“How narrow a description,” Van Helsing sneered. “Yes, I’m sure we can pick this person out of a lineup.”

She bit her lip. “He was wearing a medallion, as well. Square, large, possibly with a jewel in the center.”

Van Helsing’s stare jerked to her face briefly, but then he shook his head. “I can assure you, my family has nothing to do with this. Now leave.”

“But—” Natalie began.

“No. And if you monsters use this fancy of yours to interfere with the Van Helsings, know that our war will rekindle. I’ll make certain the world knows what kind of disgusting mistakes you all are.” He straightened up in his chair and Natalie could see a glimpse of what he’d been before disease and age had wizened him. “We have more money than ever, Ms. Gray, and with modern technology, your lives could be hell on earth. I
will
destroy you in every way. If there is war this time, it will not end until
you
are ended.”

Drake got to his feet and turned. “Understood, hunter. But also know that if your family is behind this . . . the war will come from our side as well.”

Then he caught Natalie’s arm and all but dragged her from the room and away from the one human they knew for sure was aware of and hated them in every way.

12

Drake strode down the street at such a clip that Natalie had to hustle to catch up with him. She had questions and he was going to give her some answers, one way or another.

“Hey, what was that all about?” she demanded.

He skidded to a stop and turned toward her. His face was pale (even more so than usual) and Natalie leaned forward in anticipation of some real answers. But before he could give them, Kai stepped from an alleyway beside them.

“How did it go?” she asked, all chipper and like hiding in an alley was totally normal.

Natalie stared at her. Was this for real?

“Kai?” she sputtered. “Wh-what the hell? What are you doing here?”

She shrugged, but there was high tension on her face and in the way she held her body. “Just wanted to know what was happening.”

Drake stared at the Egyptian girl, too. “But
how
did you know where we were? I didn’t tell anyone the details of the address except for Natalie.”

He glared at Natalie and she lifted her hands. “I didn’t tell anyone anything!”

Kai waved her hand as if to dismiss that question. “So what happened?”

Natalie pursed her lips, but she couldn’t exactly hide the truth from Kai, even though her suspicions about the mummy and her boyfriend were now running rampant. Kai wanted them to believe Rehu was innocent, and heaping all the blame on the Van Helsings was the best way to make sure that happened.

“Well?” Kai encouraged.

Natalie rolled her eyes and quickly recounted their entire meeting at the brownstone.

“Then this Van Helsing is a viable suspect,” Kai said with a grin that certainly didn’t fit the gravity of their situation.

“I wouldn’t rule the family out of our troubles, that’s for sure. We all know they are more than capable of this kind of violence.” Natalie shook her head. “But
that
man didn’t kill anyone. I’m almost sure of it.”

Kai wrinkled her brow. “Come on! Just because he’s old doesn’t mean he couldn’t have done it.”

Natalie blinked. “Um, he’s confined to a wheelchair, Kai.”

Kai hesitated for a moment, then her eyes lit up again. “Okay, well, what if he’s faking?”

Natalie drew back. “Faking?”

“Being in the wheelchair,” Kai said with a nod. “He could be totally whole and fine and just using a ‘disability’ to lull us into a state of calm.”

Natalie stared at Kai. There was one thing the Mummy Girl usually was, and that was reasonable. Unlike the other monsters, who often went to crazy lengths to defend their behavior or steep themselves in paranoia, Kai stayed on the straight and narrow path. She didn’t believe in ghost stories. She didn’t freak out.

Except now she was flipping out to Linda proportions. And there was only one reason why she would do that. Rehu. He had always been her Achilles’ heel. Her personal form of madness. Natalie was seeing that in Kai again for the first time since he had been kicked out of their group a year before.

Kai was desperate to protect him. Desperate enough to spin wild stories that put the blame on anyone else in the world. And if she was this desperate to protect him . . .

Well, it only made Natalie more suspicious that Kai knew something she wasn’t telling the rest of the group.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Kai,” Drake interrupted with a sigh of frustration. “Of course Van Helsing is truly in the wheelchair.”

Kai shook her head. “I know the family has been your foe longer and so you have some respect for them, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t resort to lying for sympathy or tolerance or even to trick us.”

Drake folded his arms. “I
know
he’s in the wheelchair. I put him in it.”

Natalie blinked. So often she forgot that up until the last few decades, Drake had still been Dracula. And he had lived accordingly.

“You put him in it?” she repeated in quiet shock. “How? When?”

Drake’s gaze got distant. “It was during World War II. I fought for the Allies and, even though Van Helsing was German, he turned on his countrymen and fought for our side, too.”

Even Kai seemed caught up now. “Because of what the Germans were doing to the Jews?”

Drake rolled his eyes. “No, because the Allies paid him well. Never forget, children, this family is made of mercenaries. They always have been. They always will be. They hate us, yes. But they love money almost as much.”

“Why would the Allies pay for a German defector?” Natalie asked. “They had plenty of men ready and willing to fight for the cause.”

He sighed. “Hitler loved the occult. The stories about the Ark of the Covenant and mysticism and using magic to fight were all true. The Allies feared he would make . . . or recruit . . . monsters. So they hired the great Van Helsing family to sniff our kind out. To ensure our ‘evil’ wasn’t used to Hitler’s advantage.”

“Hey!” Natalie scowled. There was monstrous, and then there was pure evil like Hitler. “No monster I know or ever knew fought on the side of the Germans. Perhaps Hyde might have wanted to, but I’m sure Jekyll wouldn’t let him.”

“Of course that’s true. But Van Helsing was more than willing to encourage the misconception of the Allies if it meant lining his pockets and getting to kill a few monsters,” Drake continued. “He had no idea that I was fighting on the Allied side, but one day we saw each other in a camp. He moved for an attack. I protected myself. And he ended up in his current state.”

Natalie was quiet for a long moment, allowing the tale to sink in. “But didn’t anyone suspect something after you injured Van Helsing? How were you not found out?”

Drake stepped closer and met her eyes. Immediately, Natalie felt the pull, the uncomfortable spiraling, of his mind control. She turned her face.

“Stop.”

“You are able to fight my mind control thanks to your hyperawareness and sensitivity brought about by your reincarnated status. Your monster skills, as you like to call them,” Drake said softly. “But humans are susceptible in different ways.”

Kai swallowed hard. “So you tricked them into believing . . . what?”

“That it was an accident. Friendly fire, I think they call it now,” Drake said with a shrug. “Ultimately, they called it a tragedy of the war. And that was true. They just didn’t know which war.”

Natalie’s eyes went wide. “Seriously? Shit, Drake.”

He lifted his eyebrows with a dismissive shrug. “It is what our war has always been. Brutal.”

“See, brutal!” Kai said, rushing back to the current subject of the murders. “This guy is brutal and you don’t think he could be responsible? Even after everything you’ve just heard?”

Natalie shut her eyes with a quiet groan. Kai was obsessed. “I’m not saying Van Helsing is incapable of attack, but I doubt he shoved a huge Blob man into a freezer and locked him in. Just saying.”

Kai’s face fell. “Maybe he hired someone.”

Drake shook his head. “No, the Van Helsings are too protective of their work to hand it over to a hireling. Aside from inciting mob violence, they do not use outside forces.”

“Like Ellis’s attack,” Kai encouraged. “That was mob violence.”

“True,” Drake said. “But if one person is responsible for all the attacks on our group, it still doesn’t fully explain our predicament.”

“He does threaten us with renewed war.” Kai hesitated and Natalie could practically see the wheels turning in her head. “Drake, are there other Van Helsings in the city?”

The vampire shrugged. “Perhaps. I haven’t kept up with the family since the old days. Once the war was over, I tried to avoid even thinking of them. There may very well be. They’re like cockroaches. They never fully die off.”

Kai nodded. “I’m going to find out. I don’t believe for a second that those killers aren’t somehow involved in what’s happening to all of us.”

“Do what you must, Mummy,” Drake said with a shrug. “But I want to eat.”

With that, he shut his eyes and poofed into a bat right there on the street.

“God
damn
it,” Natalie muttered with a quick look around to make sure he hadn’t been seen. “He’s going to be the death of us all.”

But to her surprise, Kai, who was normally the stickler for the don’t-draw-attention rule, seemed to hardly register what had happened.

“I’m going, too,” she said. “Gotta hit the books and find out if there are other Van Helsings.”

Kai turned on her heel and raced away toward the subway.

Natalie shrugged. “That’s okay, everyone. I’m good. I’ll just go back to work.”

A couple strolled by, dressed like they’d been to the theater. They stared at Natalie and she blushed as she began walking toward the subway stop that would take her back to the medical examiner’s office. She’d rather follow Kai, but there was no doing that when work and dead bodies called.

She pulled her phone from her bag as she approached her station and found Alec’s number in her phone book. She texted quickly:

Kai followed us. Acting weird. Any update on the mummy?

Then she snapped her phone shut, got on the train, and hoped Alec would have more answers than she had found that night.

Alec heard his phone buzzing with a text, but he ignored the sound and continued to stare at the door before him.

He had followed Kai since she’d left the meeting at Jekyll and Hyde’s apartment. She grabbed coffee . . . actually,
two
coffees . . . picked up dry cleaning, and eventually led him here before scurrying off to some other place. But that didn’t matter. His intuition told him this was where he was supposed to be.

The Meatpacking District had gone through several incarnations over the decades. Originally the slaughterhouses had been here. Alec had first come to this country at that time and remembered sneaking in for meat when the full moon made him itchy and hungry.

It had fallen into abandoned disrepair in the mid-twentieth century until the 1980s, when someone had gotten the bright idea to open a bunch of sex clubs in the old buildings. Alec had been less interested in those.

Now it was becoming the fashionable place to play and live. But as he stared at the cleaned-up building, Alec believed the neighborhood had been more interesting in its previous incarnations, when it was raw and animal.

This apartment was closer to the past than whatever future the posh designers were creating now. It hadn’t quite caught up to the rest of the area’s gentrification.

Most importantly, though, it wasn’t
Kai’s
apartment, which was a stylish, uptown loft.

Alec knocked.

There was nothing for a moment and then some shuffling. A male voice behind the door moved closer.

“What did you forget, Kai?” it asked, and then the door opened and Alec found himself face-to-face with Rehu.

Alec supposed he should have been shocked, except he wasn’t. Kai had been too freaked out by the mention of Rehu’s name for Alec not to think she would lead him exactly where she had: right back to her boyfriend.

For years Rehu had struggled to acclimate to a modern world. Clothing, accent, and mannerisms had been difficult for him to adapt, and he had spent many a meeting whining about that very subject.

But now he stood in head-to-toe Tommy Hilfiger, a cell phone on his hip. He looked every inch a young New Yorker, maybe a douchebag stockbroker or lawyer.

Except that he was just another monster.

The mummy stared at him for a fraction of a second. There was a slight flare to his lip, one that said,
I’m going to kill you,
and Alec pounced, hitting the other man with all his might and forcing them both into the apartment.

But Rehu was strong and once the element of surprise was gone he fought back, shoving Alec backward until both men hit the apartment door and slammed it shut with their combined weight.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Wolf?” Rehu growled as they struggled, holding each other’s lapels, pushing and shoving even though neither was making much headway in gaining control of the other.

Alec had always hated that their strength was almost evenly matched. Damn mummy.

“I’ve been looking for you, Bandage Boy,” Alec snarled back.

Rehu stared at him for a long moment and then shoved backward to extricate himself from Alec’s grip. Alec let him go, though he never let his guard down.

“What are you doing in the city?” Alec asked.

Rehu stepped backward until he stopped against the back of a black couch. He leaned there and folded his arms.

“What’s it to you?”

“Last I heard, you left,” Alec said. “And good riddance.”

Rehu’s jaw tightened and Alec smothered a smile. They were alpha (at least around this asshole) versus prince; oil and water. And Alec knew just how to push the other man’s buttons. It was a hobby of sorts. He’d actually missed it.

“I had matters to attend to overseas,” Rehu said with a scowl. “But you and the other freaks in that group don’t own New York City, Wolf. I will come and go as I please.”

Alec frowned. He had a sneaking suspicion that Rehu’s “matters” probably had to do with the sale of his artifacts that the other monsters had prevented in the U.S. The very motive they had guessed might make the Egyptian murder them in anger and a thirst for revenge.