The Shopgirl's Prophecy (Beasts of Vegas Book 1) (19 page)

Connor smiled, a quick flutter at the corners of his mouth. “The library opens in the morning. Give me one more day.”

“Or two? Or ten?” She threw up her hands, all fantasies regarding tasting and coiling long gone. She couldn’t even ring London to tell anyone anything because she had no money and Roz wasn’t sharing her cell phone. Glancing at the crowds parting for them, she wondered if anyone would let her borrow their phone for a few minutes.

“We need to find out why Oleksander wants you so badly.”

Not this again. “He doesn’t.”

“He sent Volk to collect you from your tour bus. He sent that tow truck. He followed you to Paradise personally. We can skip the it’s-all-a-big-misunderstanding bullshit. It’s not. So, let’s do something about it.”

Ali wanted to be furious at him, she really did. But Connor was being so annoyingly rational. She opened her mouth to protest, but no sound emerged. What if he was right? What if she was Anya from Nadvirna and her uncle had tried to warn her with his last few breaths? Was it possible that Oleksander the Destroyer, the biggest, baddest sociopath on the planet, wanted her?

“Fine. I’ll be happy to prove you wrong.” Ali smiled, and he returned it. When he did, his eyes softened and the sight sent tingles raining down from the top of her head. “Besides,” she added, “he could have been to those places looking for you. You were there, too.”

“Do you want to make a bet?” Connor wiggled his eyebrows.

She grinned like a fool. “I don’t have anything to wager.”

He sent her a shameless look leaving no doubt as to what she had to wager with. The hum low in her belly intensified as she quickened her pace, leaving him behind and nearly face-planting when a jogger and her leashed dog got tangled up in her legs.

He caught up fast. “I was just kidding,” he said, a teasing note still in his voice. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Do you see that building?” Connor’s hand brushed the crook of her arm. “The tall, dark one? Look between the Ferris wheel and the fountain.”

Ignoring the butterfly soft touch of his fingers was difficult, but Ali succeeded by leaning to the right and squinting at an inky black tower, still under construction, about half a mile off the Strip. “What is it?”

“The new headquarters of the Coven.”

“The witches?” The Coven not only protected the Oracle, but they oversaw all of the world’s spellspeakers. Exactly what they taught or encouraged in their members was unknown.

Connor nodded. “They used to rent office space in south Las Vegas, but around the time I let Oleksander loose, they started construction. It’s thirty-four floors, and there are rumors some of them will be off-limits to the public.”

“Roz could get in, though,” Ali assumed. “She must be a member.”

“She’s not.”

“What?” She turned on Connor. “But she’s a witch.” All witches were governed by the Coven. “Isn’t she?”

He blinked and looked away. “It’s a long story. Did you know the Coven enjoys the same protections as a religion?” It was an obvious deflection, but Ali allowed it.

“I never really thought about it,” she admitted. The Coven didn’t operate in London, except through a small field office above a florist shop. They’d never particularly interested her. She gazed up at Connor. “What do you expect to find at the university library?”

He slowed to keep pace with her. “It has the most extensive collection of firsthand accounts of the infection anywhere in the world. We’re going to cross-reference Anya from Nadvirna and Alina Rusenko and see what we find. Roz has been combing all her regular sites, but she hasn’t found a damned thing.”

“And you think my name is going to pop up in this collection?” She wasn’t sure what to hope for, that it would, or that it wouldn’t. It was hard to imagine she had a secret identity on top of everything else.

“It better, because after this, the only people we’ll be able to go to for information will be the Oracle or the Destroyer. I don’t particularly want to bother either one, do you?”

She shook her head. Both scared the crap out of her. “Library it is, then.”

“Good choice.”

At the hotel’s ornate entrance, Connor hopped up the steps and held a door open for her.

“Thanks,” Ali said. “So, after we do our research and I leave for London, where will you go? Back to Cleveland?”

He frowned down at her. “Huh?”

It was a straightforward question. She didn’t know how else to put it. “Will you go home?”

He pressed the elevator’s up button, scowling at the little, lighted disc. “I haven’t killed Oleksander yet.”

Her stomach clenched. “You don’t mean—”

“What do you think I’m doing here?” He glanced at the registration desk where several twenty-somethings loitered, and then lowered his voice to a hiss. “Killing him is the only reason I don’t jump in front of a train. It’s all that matters, especially now. Don’t you see he’s only running free because of me?”

It hadn’t occurred to Ali that when she was gone he’d go right back to his violent activities. The infection and Oleksander would be a distant memory when she was strolling the streets of London, but it wouldn’t be for Connor. It wasn’t over for him. It would never be over because now he could actually, truly fight back.

“You don’t remember my prophecy?” The lift dinged, and he ushered her into the oversized car. “Releasing him begins the apocalypse. I’m probably going to cause the destruction of the whole human race.” His body, from his calves to his shoulders, tensed. So much for his mellow blood high. She really should shut up.

“To be honest,” he said, standing so close she could smell him again, and the spicy mix didn’t clear her mind. In fact, her attraction got all mixed up with a new fear. “A week ago the odds of me turning were slim to none, but today? I’m this close to standing there beside him, a big, psycho killer smile on my face.
This close
.”

“There have to be other options. A cure. A treatment. Something.” It was unthinkable that he’d go to war against the Destroyer, or that he’d get hurt again. She could reach out and place her hand on the exact spot of his wound. There was no scar anymore, but right there, he’d been skewered. She couldn’t stand by and let it happen again.

The anger rising to the surface set off a mini chain reaction under her skin.

She tried to funnel all her wrath and fear, suck it all up inside the black box inside her chest. It worked. Sort of.

But she was so out of control at present, her thoughts so fragmented, she wasn’t sure how to fully recover her equilibrium. She wasn’t sleeping. She’d seen her cousin murdered, been stabbed in the throat, watched her uncle die, and cremated a houseful of people. Unstable didn’t begin to cover it. She was a mess. You could have knocked her over with a feather.

Connor shook his head. “Jesus Christ. Now I’ve got to deal with the Protect the Vampire fanatics?”

“I’m being serious.”

The elevator whooshed upward at a high rate of speed, and he took a step back, leaning against the wall. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. No one is going to rush in and save us. The U.S. Army is too busy redacting reports and spinning the truth to do anything constructive. No one cares what’s happening in the middle of the desert.”

That pissed Ali off. She cared, damn it. “No one gives a crap that my family was murdered? No one is going to do anything about it?”

He caught her eye, and the look he gave her chilled her to the bone. “I am.”

“And who’s going to avenge you?”

Connor shook his head, staring hard at her borrowed shoes.

“Why can’t there be a cure?” It was a rhetorical question, a frustrated exclamation. But he answered, anyway.

“The side effects are irreversible.” He tapped the fiftieth floor button—once, twice, three times—though it was already lit. “Either way, I know what my responsibility is.”

“How do you even know that prophecy is meant for you? There must be more than one Connor from Cleveland. Thousands, probably.”

He spoke to the lit panel. “I’m the only one here.”

The lift floated to a stop on the fiftieth floor, and the doors opened. He stepped into the hall, pulling his key card.

Roz stood on the other side of the door. “Everything okay?” She glanced from Connor to Ali.

“I’m going out,” he announced, marching into the dimly lit room and setting his last jar of blood on the cluttered table. He caught Ali’s eye. “Try to get some sleep.” And then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him.

#

Connor couldn’t think straight. His body was in overdrive. All the time.

Trying to run the sensations away wasn’t working, and he slowed from a sprint to a normal walking speed, gaining curious looks from the downtown crowds.

The blood had taken the edge off, but the real, deep down hunger remained. And he couldn’t deny it anymore. He wanted blood. Needed it. But he couldn’t bring himself to take that final step and kill for it.

It would have helped to talk to someone about the urges. Someone who understood. No one knew what it was like to wake up a vampire except for other vampires. He would’ve loved to sit down with another infected and get some answers. Short of strolling into Olek’s lair, that wasn’t going to happen.

He sensed some control. If he worked at it, he could leash all these new feelings and desires. He could master them and live an almost normal existence, but he better make it fast. Because since he’d decided to live, the idea was growing on him. He needed time. A few more days. A week, maybe.

An infected had been captured, once. Someone had posted a shaky video on YouTube of a drooling, screaming, mindless creature for about a day before public outcry had forced it to be taken down. He’d escaped almost immediately and killed three men, then leapt from the hospital roof and experienced an eight-story drop onto a parking lot. His skull had splintered like a watermelon. No putting that back together.

Scientists had blood and tissue samples, CAT scans, and MRIs. They’d mapped the evolution of the infection. They showed precisely what it did to human cells in ten-second animated clips for the news networks, but they couldn’t say how much blood vampires required or how often they fed. How much was enough?

Olek’s horde was rumored to have kept blood donors back before their defeat in Prague and subsequent capture by the U.S. Army. They drank a little from different hostages, leaving the victims alive for months, even years. Connor would have to be out of his mind with hunger before he stooped to such a level. He wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He’d find another way.

He stood among the palm trees in front of a rundown casino on the very edge of town, the neon shapes overhead dull and depressing, but he didn’t hunt. Not tonight. Not yet.

He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, people in various stages of drunkenness flowing past him in both directions, and listened. If he concentrated, he could hear their heartbeats.

On nights like this, he didn’t want to be Connor from Cleveland. He just wanted to be normal, though that runaway train had long since left the station. He would never be Connor Beckett, a dumbass engineering student again. There was no cure for vampirism.

His time in Nevada seemed like an eternity, like a prison sentence. Three months of endless struggle and defeat. Three months of thankless, lonely obsession, and he had nothing to show for it.

Connor hobbled through the busy streets, tired and sore from his sprint through town. By the time he made it back to the bright, towering Le Sort Hotel sometime after midnight, he wanted to fall into a comatose state and sleep away the next twelve hours.

Before his little run, he hadn’t considered where he or the girls would sleep or how he’d lock himself away. From her. He had a vague notion of shutting himself inside the bathroom and catching some Z’s in the tub.

But the moment he closed the hotel room door behind him and warm, fragrant night air enveloped him, he had second thoughts. One of the girls had turned off the AC. The air lay still, heavy, and quiet. The bed loomed in his room, a king-sized bit of fluffy heaven. The girls had split it, one on either side. And between them stretched a swath of comfy mattress the exact width of his body. It would be so easy to crawl in and collapse.

He debated curling up beside Ali, offering her the comfort and protection she needed. It wasn’t sexual. At least part of it was chivalry. The girl had lost her family. She could use a hug. And if he was going to be perfectly honest, he could use a fucking hug, too.

The last two nights hadn’t been much fun. He’d contemplated exhaustively every possible method of restraining himself. Everything from ropes and chains to drugs and exsanguination. In the end, he’d decided against them all. In case another vampire showed up, Connor wanted to be able to protect them, so he’d barely rested at all. He’d been a jumpy, nervous wreck waiting to bug out at any second and lose control. To sleep in a real bed would be miraculous.

He glanced through the hazy dark at the bathroom door. He should sleep in the tub. It was the safe thing to do. The smart thing.

#

Ali couldn’t sleep. She lay on her side, her eyes closed, but she couldn’t relax.

Her dad hadn’t prepared her for vampires. Maybe he hadn’t fully understood the situation himself. Or maybe he thought he could protect her from all of it. He’d never talked about his past, especially his childhood in the Ukraine. That was off limits. But what if he’d left his homeland because of the infection? What if he hadn’t been emigrating, but running from something? Whatever his motives, he was gone and she was stuck. With Connor Beckett.

She couldn’t get his expression out of her mind. The sad, scared one. He was on some kind of suicide mission, carrying the fate of the world and all that martyr garbage, crumbling beneath the weight. He actually wanted to fight Oleksander again, despite how close he’d come to dying the first time. No wonder Roz stuck around in an impossible situation. What person could look at him and not want to help?

The box springs squeaked. Someone shifted beside her. Roz. They’d agreed, reluctantly, to share Connor’s bed rather than isolate themselves in separate rooms. Roz explained it was easier to defend a single door than two. But they’d sworn to keep to their sides. No accidental leg kicking or hands touching rear ends in the middle of the night. If Roz was this close, then she—