There'll be Hell to Pay (Hellcat Series Book 6)

There’ll be Hell to Pay

(Hellcat Series Book 6)

By

Sharon Hannaford

COPYRIGHT

There’ll be
Hell to Pay (Hellcat Series Book 6)

Sharon
Hannaford

Copyright ©
2016 by Sharon Hannaford

Cover Artwork
by Erin Kuhle

Smashwords
Edition

All rights
reserved

This is a work
of fiction. All names, characters, places and occurrences are
fictitious and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to
actual persons, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or means,
electronic or mechanical, without permission from the copyright
holder.

DEDICATION

For everyone
who climbed on board the rollercoaster with me.

Hope you
enjoyed the ride.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It’s been a
while since I named my band of miscreants so here goes:

Thanks to
Pauline, Erin, Jacqui, Karin and Tim – you’ve all been with me from
the very first book and the ride wouldn’t have been the same
without you!

Big thanks also
go to everyone; family, friend and reader, who takes the time to
contact me, join me on social media or promote my work direct to
friends and family; your words and acts of support do truly keep me
going.

G, Rob and Ash;
keep on driving me crazy - I love you.

PROLOGUE

Caspian ran the
bone-handled straight razor over his top lip, taking care not to
miss a single hair. He leaned towards the mirror in the cramped
bathroom, a single bare lightbulb barely making a difference to the
gloom of early evening. Caspian had never attempted to disguise
himself this completely before. It took more effort than he’d
expected, and he disliked the results. He’d never considered
himself vain about his looks, but seeing his close-cropped hair
dyed to a bland, medium blond and his face bare of the carefully
crafted moustache that he’d worn for centuries drew a growl of
displeasure. The ridiculous baseball cap he used whenever he left
the apartment rested on the vanity beside the basin.

Rinsing the
razor and drying it on a small once-white towel, he took a small
glass jar off the dusty bathroom shelf and used the razor to nick
one of the veins running down his arm. His blood was thicker than a
human’s and it dripped sluggishly into the jar. The wound closed
before the jar was half full. Licking the cut clean, he folded the
blade away and slid it into the back pocket of his denim jeans. It
was the first pair of jeans he’d ever worn, and he prayed sincerely
that it was his last. He shook his head, unable to understand what
made so many humans choose to wear them. He longed for the familiar
comfort of a well-cut suit and waistcoat, genuine, handcrafted
leather loafers and his wolf’s head cane. The cane he still used
walking around the apartment, it soothed him somehow, it always
had, but he couldn’t risk using it out in public.

As unlikely as
it was that anyone from the City would ever find him, he also knew
that the Werewolf bitch computer hacker was good at her job. She
could probably hack into the surveillance cameras of any town or
city in the world, but the world was a big place. He’d been careful
about leaving anything behind that could be used by the Magi to
track him. Living in the Princep Court for decades had taught him a
few things, including how the resident Magus was able to track
people and objects. He’d known to pack up every single personal
item he could from his cramped apartment in the City, and he’d
thrown salt water over everything else. And then he’d done the same
to Mariska’s room at the Magi respite he’d freed her from. It was a
calculated risk coming here, the town of his birth. He didn’t think
any of them could possibly know the town he’d come from, the last
person he’d told he’d killed, but many knew the country of his
birth, so he could not allow his guard to slip for even one
second.

Despite the way
his town had burgeoned into a bustling city, he still felt
comfortable here, and he still knew his way around the old town.
The extreme modern nature of the newer parts of the city had yet to
reach his old haunts. Payphones still abounded here, anonymous
Internet cafe’s dotted almost every retail street, and, being the
height of the tourist season, it was easy for outsiders to blend in
and unremarkable for a small group of people to book a holiday
apartment for several months. He’d chosen one of the cheaper
apartments just on the edge of the old quarter; few of the
neighbours were permanent residents and those that weren’t didn’t
bother trying to befriend out-of-towners.

And, in the old
town, you could still employ a médico to make after-hours
house-calls and keep their mouths shut.

And it didn’t
hurt that one of his largest investment portfolios was managed
here. His fund manager knew him as Carlos Torres: forty-eight, an
eccentric and semi-retired property developer. Eccentric enough to
dislike modern technology and require cash payouts instead of bank
transfers. He’d told no one that he was independently wealthy,
instead living on the charity of the Princeps while he stayed at
Court. He was secretive by nature, and it was paying handsome
dividends. Not a single one of the idiots at Court knew he had
amassed a small fortune, ready for the day he took charge of his
own city.

He was proud of
being a self-made man; he’d built his own fortune. He’d walked away
from his poor, unambitious, farming family just after puberty and
never looked back. He’d lied and murdered his way into a position
of trust with a merchant in a nearby port city. And then he’d taken
the business over from the merchant as the elderly man slowly
succumbed to ill health. A few had suspected death by unnatural
causes, and those few had either been bribed into silence or had
simply disappeared. Under Caspian’s management, the company had
flourished, helped in no small way by the not-quite-legal cargo he
was prepared to export or import without question. He was an
entrepreneur, a man of vision and foresight, and he always got what
he wanted. And what he wanted now most of all was to be a Master
Vampire.

A grumble from
the living room snapped him out of his reverie and he quickly
shrugged into a loose-fitting T-shirt and picked up the baseball
cap and the jar.

“
Molok, is it time for her
medication
yet?” he asked, walking
out of the bathroom. A man-sized figure hunched at the small dining
table near the kitchenette. In the semi dark it was hard to make
out that the figure was human. In the clear light of day, the
figure would seem even less human. A spindly arm, so thin that the
bones showed starkly through the pale, blue-veined skin, reached
out of the cloak of moth-eaten animal fur to pick up a small
digital timer from the table.

“
Twenty minutes,” the figure muttered, the words running
together in a heavily accented rumble. It had been months before
Caspian was able to decipher Molok’s speech; few at Princep Court
had taken the time to even try. Most assumed he was deaf, dumb and
mute, a freak to be pitied but generally avoided. Caspian wasn’t
sure why he’d initially bothered with the horribly disfigured man,
certainly not out of kindness, perhaps from boredom, but once he’d
discovered the cretin’s secret, he’d known his time had not been
wasted. He’d had no idea that the time he’d spent taking the man
small treats and trying to understand him would pay off quite so
monumentally, but then again, he’d always believed he was a man of
forethought.

“
You’ll see to it?” Caspian asked him, placing the jar of blood
on the table and reaching for a leather jacket folded over the back
of a chair. He didn’t like the smell of the leather or the way it
creaked as he moved, but it was more comfortable than the denim
pants. “I must feed, and then I will bring food for you and
her.”

Molok grunted
his agreement and rose from the chair. It was his habit to see
Caspian to the door and then close and bolt the door behind him.
The fetid stench that arose from Molok’s cloak of crudely stitched
animal skins assaulted Caspian’s nostrils. He breathed as
infrequently as possible, but even a Vampire required breath for
speaking, and somehow the stink never became less pungent even
through constant exposure to it. But the skins meant something to
the cretin, and he refused to be parted from the cloak. His awkward
gait, the result of a club foot and one leg being shorter than the
other, set the cloak swinging, swirling the odour throughout the
room. Caspian was grateful to leave.

Out on the
street he paused for a moment, making himself one with the shadows
as he carefully searched for anyone, or anything, out of place.
Nothing untoward presented itself: a couple cuddled, giggling
together on a bench under a street light two blocks down; in a
nearby cottage a mother chastised a child for spilling a drink; TVs
blared several different programmes from several different
directions; and on the block behind this one, a chef shouted orders
to his kitchen hands. Dry summer dust mingled with the distinctive
smell of fried peppers and chorizo.

As he emerged
from the shadows to begin his hunt, a trio of young women erupted
from a doorway and onto the street, laughing and chattering as they
linked arms, dressed for a night of partying. They had a
twenty-minute walk to the newer, more upmarket part of town where
the nightlife catered to summer tourists. It would be nice to feed
on something young and pretty and sweet smelling, but three was too
tricky to take on at once, and he doubted he’d be able to get them
to split up.

One of the
three had long, mousey brown hair worn in loose disarray, exactly
like the woman in the upstairs bedroom of his apartment. Aside from
the bright youthful clothing and bubbly personality, she could be
Mariska’s younger sister. Thoughts of the Dark Magus brought
conflicting emotions to the boil inside him. He’d so hoped they
would become a team, that they could work together towards a common
goal. She hated the snooty, do-goody Castius Magi as much as he
did, and, even better, she hated Julius and Gabrielle. She had
sworn vengeance on them and had tried repeatedly to kill them or
bring them down.

Caspian knew
the facts; he’d been drawn into some of her machinations while he
was forced to pretend acquiescence to Julius’s Mastership. He’d
counted on using her anger to his advantage, but there was no sign
of it now. She was a woman broken. A sad and sorry excuse for a
living being, her belly swollen with pregnancy, her body thin
almost to the point of emaciation, her eyes vacant and staring,
lifeless except for the occasional surge of furious activity when
even his blood couldn’t subdue her—those times when she tried to
take her own life, tried to scratch her eyes from their sockets,
begged anyone in hearing distance to kill her.

He hissed out a
frustrated breath and turned a corner between two apartment blocks
and away from the woman with long, brown hair. Using his blood to
control the Magus’s mind wasn’t the way he’d wanted to do this, but
he’d been left with no choice. He was sure that her Magi powers
would return once she gave birth to the twins she carried, but he
knew better than to tell her that. She would try harder to harm the
bebès, to make herself abort them. There was nothing she wanted
more than the return of her Magi powers. And that was not an option
for Caspian.

To Caspian the
bebès were everything he’d wished and prayed for these last few
long, tiresome centuries. The reason he hadn’t kissed the sun when
Simone, his sire and trusted mentor, had dumped him like a broken
toy to move onto her next conquest. Because he knew his greatest
vengeance would be achieving the level of Master and rising in the
ranks of the Centuria and ultimately the Decuria. How unexpected
that one of the few good deeds he’d done in his life would produce
the first glimmer of hope for his chances at reaching Master
level.

He’d been so
terribly, terribly excited when first he’d heard of Gabrielle, a
Dhampir, the one and only known living Dhampir in the world. A
creature so rare the world hadn’t seen one for centuries, that
Vampires had forgotten how to create one. But somehow he had. In
saving her mother from a Rogue Vampire while she was pregnant with
Gabi, a miracle had occurred. Between them they had done the
impossible.

And then Julius
had stolen her right out from under him. First Simone and then
Gabrielle. Entrancing them, luring them to his bed with his wiles
and charm and, in Gabrielle’s case, his power. Oh, the bastard had
been a Master, but he hadn’t been anything worth noticing until
he’d gained Gabrielle. The Decuria hadn’t even known he was alive
before he took up with the Dhampir bitch, and now they were
actively trying to recruit him. Not that the idiot even realised
what an honour that was.