Vamped Up (18 page)

When she turned her head, finally setting her hazelnut eyes upon him, the pressure in Dante’s chest exploded. Breath hissed out of him. His body went boneless. His mind wiped clean.

For that brief moment in time, when their gazes locked and his heart stilled, Dante felt something he hadn’t felt in years.
Alive.
Sure, his heart was hollowed, his soul trampled by time, his breathing suddenly erratic, and his muscles weakened by her beauty. But with one long sweep of her tender eyes, he was made whole again. A rush of warmth spread through his body, leaving trails of gooseflesh behind. He shivered beneath the heat of her stare.

As if she read his mind, her expression softened, and the corners of her mouth curled. With a loud belt of Juan Carlos’s voice, Dante was jerked out of his tunnel vision and back to reality. “You insolent fool,” Juan seethed, his eyes darkening. “I will hear your name whether you give it now or spit it out with your blood.” He drew back a fist as a growl from the back rumbled the air.

“Enough,” a grizzly baritone voice said. “As her owner I will peel the name from her lips. Send her to me.”

Juan Carlos snarled. A success of sorts. “Up the stairs with you, elder!”

Dante’s angel stood stoic, holding him captive with her stare. There was no plea behind her gaze. No trace of weakness. No wince for help. Dante had never admired a woman more.

“I said
go
, you stubborn mule!” Juan Carlos grabbed the braid lying over her chest and yanked her down to the ground. He raised his foot to kick her from behind when she whimpered and fell face-first to the floor.

Wild rushes of adrenaline flashed through Dante’s veins. The voices he’d struggled to suppress slipped through the crack in his self-control and rejoiced as they reigned over him, body and soul. There’d be only one way to silence them now. Bloodshed. Dante leapt over the rail, dead-set on tearing every limb from Juan Carlos’s body.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“As fire, you consumed me, as wind you scorched my skin. Take me away from this place, and forgive me of my sin.”

The Reds:
White Cell Album, Reprieve

A
S
D
ANTE’S FEET
hit the cold stone floor, he felt one thing pumping through his heightened system: rage. Pure, unfiltered rage. His blood boiled in anticipation of a knock-em-out, kill-em-all fight. He could taste Juan Carlos’s blood on his tongue. It’d be spicy. Musky. Asshole smoothed over with cheap woodsy wine. He could feel the snapping of Juan Carlos’s bones in his ironclad grasp. A pathetic worm like that would break easy. Like a twig.

He closed in on Juan Carlos, who was standing in a guarded, crouched position. When they locked eyes, the scoundrel called for his therian goon squad to come to the floor and protect his pathetic ass. Dante saw his mouth moving, gaping, a gutted fish sucking in its last breath. Dante saw his arms flailing in the air, waving overhead like a windblown willow tree, but the sound was muffled. On the far side of a very long tunnel. He was too far gone to make out “normal” voices now.

The only voices he could make out for certain were the droning ones in his head. The low ones urging him to break Juan Carlos apart limb by limb, so he couldn’t lay his hands on another elder. The ones whispering for him to rip out Juan Carlos’s tongue and shove it down the back of his throat so he couldn’t yell another octave. The ones promising Dante a break from the rage and noise and constant pull of the dark . . . if only he’d submit to their will.

Just one more time. Kill.

After watching Juan Carlos shove the angelic elder to the ground, Dante was more than ready to let the voices work their dark magic. But as he passed the nameless elder, a subtle breeze of her perfume smacked him upside the head.
Warm vanilla sugar.
His eyes blurred closed, and for a split second the voices quieted.

The silence halted the screaming in his head so abruptly that it momentarily stunned him. He stood motionless—two steps from the virginal elder, but couldn’t force himself to look at her. His energy, hot and molten, was still focused on Juan Carlos.

Sugar faded to spice. Dante’s eyes flipped open. Red curtains of blood and vengeance blinded him as he peered through heavy-lidded eyes at the slimy MC. Voices surfaced. Louder. More prominent.
Kill him. Make him bleed. Make him pay for his sins.

Vision completely marred by evil, Dante grabbed Juan Carlos. Double fisted the lapels of his business jacket and chucked him across the great room. Juan’s body slammed against the wall behind him, the breaking of his bones music to Dante’s ears.

Therian guards rushed to Juan Carlos, checking his fading vitals, raising limp arms. More guards descended to the center pit.

Finish him. Force him to repent. Make him beg forgiveness.

Fists clenched, chest tight, Dante strode toward the broken wall supporting Juan’s weight, aching to silence the voices completely.

That’s when
she
touched the base of his wrist with her thumb. With the gentlest of touches, she stopped him in his tracks. A sense of calm washed over him, soothing the anger coiling in his ribcage. His mind stilled. His vision cleared.

He turned, watched her expression change from soft to guarded. His face must’ve read as menacing and tight as it felt.

“Don’t,” she whispered above the roar of the crowd. She gently tugged him away from Juan Carlos and the mass of guards huddling over him. “Leave him be.”

Dante checked her grip on his arm. She dropped her hand and rubbed her fingers together like she’d been burned. Like his skin was on fire.

But he wasn’t eyeing her grip because he didn’t want her touching him. No. In fact it was the opposite. His body was humming. Downright singing shivers that danced along his spine and up to the base of his neck. The small spot where she’d touched him radiated warmth. His skin tingled like her fingers were still there, tracing tiny circles around his wrist.

He wanted her touch all over his body. He wanted her fingers tracing the lines of his muscles, up the cut of his abs, through his short scruff of hair. He wanted her hands all over him.

“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” she said, backing away, her tiny hands plastered in front of her. “Please . . . don’t.”

He was on her in a flash. He bent her over his shoulder, watching the crowd swarm the aisles and walkways like maggots, barricading their only way out. She smacked against his back open-handed, screaming for him to let her go. That
so
wasn’t going to happen.

Therians circled around him, flickering, twitching, shedding their skin. They shifted into a variety of large wildcats, their mouths foaming, anxious to tear through his flesh.

Shit.
Time’s up.

The next few moments happened so quickly, even Dante’s head spun from the magnitude of it. He knelt on the ground, fist to stone, head hung low. He focused on somewhere familiar. Somewhere safe. Pretending not to feel the elder’s fist pounding into his kidneys, Dante funneled the rage flowing through his veins right into his chest and—
Pop!
—his head went light and his legs grew heavy.

When he opened his groggy eyes a few seconds later, they were hell and gone from the circus-like ring of the elder black market. And the virginal elder was standing over him, slapping him in the face.

“W
HAT THE HELL?”
Ruan asked, as he watched the whole goddamn place erupt.

Juan Carlos’s crazy elder market got a whole lot crazier the instant Dante leaped from the front bumper and stormed through the center floor, his hands balled into massive fists. The whole warehouse rose to their feet to watch the showdown. Ruan grabbed his gun and shot through the aisle to the main walkway, ready to join in a heated fight and make some therian heads roll.

Guards inside the ring surrounded Juan Carlos’s lifeless body like he was the real gem amongst all the elders in this place, and crouched in front of him, ready to protect him at all costs. They stormed down the aisles from the right and left, shifting into angry beasts as they closed in on Dante. Overhead lights blacked out, replaced by bright red auras oozing a glow of warning from the corners. Stuffy vamps and wealthy mundanes fled the warehouse, probably fearing a bloodbath would ruin their designer suits. Blood-dolls led the charge downstairs. The warehouse turned into a circus full of wild animals with hissing and gnashing teeth.

Ruan had lunged into the walkway, dodging between therians who had yet to shift and mundanes who were scrambling to get out. He’d reached the front bumper in time to see Dante kneel to the ground, fist to stone, elder bent over his shoulder. He’d shaken violently, his head tucked in to his chest, and—
Pop!—
vanished, leaving an enormous fireball spinning in his wake.

Everyone who had surrounded him pushed back, arms extended, eyeing the flaming ball with morbid curiosity.

Dante and the elder had to be safe, wherever they were, though Ruan wasn’t sure the reason Dante picked that specific high-profile elder to use for their interrogation in the first place. Either way, Ruan decided it was time to look out for numero uno and bolted for the exit. After weaving in and out of vamp and therian traffic headed out of the warehouse, he veered from the crowd and pushed through the black velour curtain from where they’d entered not thirty minutes before. He met a brick wall.

What the hell?
The entrance was right . . .
here
. He palmed the bricks, skated his hands up as high as he could reach, then along the rough lines of mortar, down to the bottom. It was like there’d never been a door there at all.

So this was the “problem” getting out that Dante had referred to.
Fucking fantastic.
He supposed it was the perfect maware to make sure no client left the club without paying first.

He spun around, pushed through the curtain again, and followed the crowd down the spiral staircase to the basement. Seemed like everyone knew something he didn’t. For once in his life, he was content to be a sheep and follow the escaping flock.

The shallow-roofed basement below was composed of three long, dark hallways branching off in different directions. The hallway on the left, with not a single door on either side as far as the eye could see, sloped downward, deeper underground. Ruan was sure from how deep they already were, it’d have to tunnel under the bay. The second hallway straight in front of them was illuminated by candles every couple feet. Doors lined both sides of the hallway and the same running lights from the foyer were pinned on the edges of the cold stone floor.

Those rooms must’ve been elder holding cells. His stomach turned as he got the same familiar feeling from his dream. The feeling that there was energy in this basement.

Dark energy.

He closed his eyes, trying to feel through the herd of people moving through the dark, trying to grasp onto the energy reaching for him and ball it in his gut. Someone bumped him from behind. He elbowed back to gain some room, and kept moving.

Everyone was quiet as they filed through the hallway on the right, their whispers muffled by the soft echoes of the stone basement walls. Ruan kept his ball cap down, the collar of his coat flipped up high. An open door appeared on the right with a therian bouncer guiding vamps out.

“Consider yourself lucky, people,” he boomed in a gruff voice, waving his arms out the door for people to follow. “This exit didn’t exist yesterday and it won’t exist tomorrow. Get the hell out!”

So how did patrons usually leave the black market? Ruan wondered. Did they leave at all? Were they kept as inmates in the hall where Ruan felt the dark energy? Were they killed? Wouldn’t he and his other khissmates have heard about something like this? He sure as damned hell wouldn’t forget.

Someone—vamp or therian, Ruan couldn’t tell at first—was up-close and personal with a burly guard standing stoically to the right of the exit, pointing in his chest and screaming in his face. Probably the bidder of the virginal elder, wanting something to show for his top-dollar bid.

As Ruan walked by, struggling to keep his attention where it belonged, the angry sucker locked eyes with him.

Savage.

The traitorous vamp who stood in as Primus to his haven. The same parasite who gave intel on his khiss, arranged a therian attack on San Francisco’s haven during Winter Solstice, and nearly killed everyone Ruan had ever cared about. Ruan couldn’t mistake those red eyes. And that scar sliced across his cheek.

It was too late to dodge past. Too late to pretend Ruan didn’t see him.

Savage squared his shoulders to Ruan as vamps and therians continued to file out. By the time Ruan reached him, facing the open door, he still hadn’t figured out a damn thing to say to the leech. He palmed the gun in his pocket; his finger sliding into place around the trigger. He had in his right mind to shoot the traitorous sucker in the heart. If he had one at all.

But it appeared the rough-looking therian guard standing behind Savage had the same idea about Ruan. Right as Ruan drew the shaft of the gun from his pocket, the therian followed suit, only revealing the top silver handle of the revolver buried in his leather coat.

Savage lifted his chin in some sort of ridiculous show of male camaraderie that didn’t exist between them. Not after he’d tried to kill everyone Ruan loved.

“Ruan, what the hell is someone like you doing in a place like this?”

Think fast
. “You’re one to talk. Why would a thief like you come to a market to pay for something when you’d just as fast steal it behind their backs?”

The therian guard eyed Savage skeptically.

“No trust among thieves, right?” Savage said, his eyes onyx narrowing. “I guess I just didn’t think you were the black-market type.”

Ruan pushed through the open door onto a rickety wooden dock, glad to feel the wet breeze of the bay on his face. He looked back. “Do us both a favor and don’t think about me at all. Ever again.” His trigger finger twitched as he followed the fleeing crowd up a flight of stairs that led through the exit of an abandoned warehouse at Pier Five.

Even after he strode across the street and turned a corner, he could feel a pair of eyes on his back.

No matter how many times he turned around, how many times he clenched the gun in his grasp and checked blind turns before pounding pavement back to the Tahoe, he couldn’t shake the feeling someone—probably Savage—was following him.

As he slid into his driver’s seat and drove through the city, weaving quickly in and around turns to lose his possible shadow, Ruan wondered where Dante and his elder were, if Eve was sound asleep at home, and when he’d be able to curl up beside her again . . .

His cell vibrated in his pocket. He leaned over, fished it out, and upon seeing Eve’s number, flipped it open. He tried to sound calm. “How’s my baby?”

“Fine . . . I’m fine.” She paused long enough to let doubt in. “When do you think you’ll be home tonight?”

Her voice sounded funny. Tight. An octave too high.

Something was wrong. Someone was in their apartment.

He checked the rearview. No headlights shone in his wake. If he’d had a tail at one point, the sucker was long gone. Ruan turned toward home.