“I can’t believe that,” one of them said, making the others laugh.
She grinned vapidly at him. “You’re funny,” she slurred, enjoying this game immensely. She almost forgot that her life was on the line here. “Handsome too,” she hummed. “Isn’t he handsome?” she asked one of the other guys.
“Gorgeous,” the second man replied.
She made as if to step past them, then stumbled. Her primary target reached out and caught her, groping her chest while he did so. She let him support her as he leaned her against the wall, his body against hers.
A couple of things happened. First, she could feel an immediate swelling in his trousers as he asked if she was all right. Second, she felt a certain warmth in her own loins. It wasn’t that she was particularly attracted to him, but he obviously was to her. And the idea of being taken in a public place by a strange man, or men, jumped around in her brain like a kitten on crack. She squashed the idea as quickly as she could, but the heat of it lingered. She hadn’t even noticed that one hand was grabbing her ass as he pushed himself against her. She forced a giggle.
“You’re a big boy, aren’t you?” She wondered where that sultry voice game from. It couldn’t be hers. She NEVER sounded like that.
“Big and bad to the bone,” he said, pushing himself harder against her. Again, she felt a little thrill. If this was a guy she actually liked —
‘Would you do it?’ she asked herself. ‘If this were Henry? If this were Shane?’ And as much as she tried to suppress it, the word “yes” kept screaming at her from the pool of her self-consciousness where she had tried to drown all her fantasies.
Luckily for her, she heard a couple of distinct “thuds” from inside the bathroom. So did all the guards. She and her current would-be-seducer met eyes. She smiled, then head-butted him as hard as she could. The man dropped like the other shoe. The remaining three men started to react. Two of them were already focused on the bathroom, leaving her first victim’s partner looking at her with a shocked face while reaching for something under his coat. The world slowed to a crawl as she leaped into actions. These were humans and she . . . well, she wasn’t. Still, she couldn’t take them lightly. If they were in here, they were probably dangerous.
She stepped forward and instantly tried planting a knee into this man’s groin while unwinding her snakewhip from her waist. He was able to block the knee shot, but only barely. Like many desperate fighters, he dropped his arms when he brought his own knee up, so nailed him with the thick end of her whip. Snakewhips didn’t have handles per se, but the thick end of this one was loaded like a blackjack. She cold-cocked the guy before he could even grunt.
The other two guys were opening the door leading to the bathrooms, so she lunged after them. She tripped over the fallen body of the guard she had just KO’d, but she managed to clip block both of the remaining exterior opponents in the backs of their knees. They both had guns out by this point, so she had to do something. They were both looking down at her, so she stood up and drove her forearms into their crotches. She was strong enough that both of them lifted off the ground with looks of absolute horror on their faces. When their feet hit the ground again, she grabbed their heads and drove them together with satisfying thuds. She was pretty sure they’d all live. She looked towards the door to find that Henry was standing there, smiling at her.
“Took ya long enough,” he said. “I finished with mine seconds ago.”
She glared at him, kind of. “Let’s see, I had four and you had three. I had to wait until you’d already started –” She looked around. They’d attracted some attention, but most of the bar just kept on doing their own things. Just another bar fight. “Anyway, what do we do with them? Do we have a jail or something?”
“Or something,” Henry replied. He motioned to Grolik, who motioned towards a back door. They dragged guys out into an alley, then Shamira stood watch while Henry got the others. All in all, they had four vials of morning star and about 60 thousand in cash stuffed into an envelope in one guy’s jacket.
Henry called backup. “Shane will want to question them. We’ll send the drugs off. We’ve got a DNA lab downtown, and they’ll find out which beings were killed to make the stuff, assuming they were ever put into the system.” He smiled. “And now one of the perks of the job. Enforcers get to keep half the cash in deals like this, assuming the money doesn’t come from an innocent third party. Which in this case, it doesn’t. Shane gets the rest.”
Shamira’s eyes shot open. “We keep it? Just like that?”
“Yep. Fifteen grand each in this case. We aren’t exactly going to turn it over to the normal cops, and we can’t actually pay taxes on money obtained from mystical drug deals, can we?” He handed her a stack of bills. The “good cop” part of her rebelled against this, but the logical part of her mind could find no fault in it. She took the money and shoved it into her pocket. Henry clapped her on the shoulder. “You did damn good,” he said. Then he stared at her tits again. “Damn good.”
She scowled at him, but knew she probably should be blushing right now. She remembered the way that she had felt inside, and for a moment dreamed that Henry would shove her up against the dirty wall of the alley and —
‘Stop it!’ she told herself, but her mind wasn’t cooperating. Just that notion of her hands being trapped behind her back while her legs were wrapped around Henry’s waist . . . she needed to think of something else. “Hey, what’s going to happen to these guys?” A scary thought occurred to her. “Shane’s not going to torture them is he? I mean, they’re human.”
“They’re humans, yeah, but they’re part of our world. Shane will probably just try to pry it out of their minds first, but if he thinks he needs to get more extreme to stop this trade, he will.”
“But torture? I can’t do that! I can’t be part of that!” She turned to walk away.
“Shamira, listen to me.” Henry moved in front of her. “It is always Shane’s last resort, but things work differently here. And you don’t know what this trade is like. This isn’t like growing a plant and smoking it. I’ve seen a morning star bleeding house,” he said, his voice grim and eyes dark. “You haven’t seen bodies of vampires, weres, and faerie strung up like butcher-shop meat with tubes and needles stuck into them, or the hum of the machines pumping their blood out of them. Ever see a body with no blood? Like a withered ghost. And for us vamps, it’s the worst. Ask Shane. He almost got drained once when he was a fledgling. Says it feels like your body is eating itself from the inside out. They don’t sedate their victims, because that would taint the blood before mixing. This place had security cameras, complete with audio. I heard how much they screamed. Don’t tell me that these guys don’t have everything that’s coming to them.”
Shamira and Henry stared each other down. Shamira had killed a man, and it frightened her how relatively easy it had been to get over it. It was a slippery slope between between justice and chaos, and she’d seen what happens when that line blurred. “You can make me a vampire,” she replied coldly, “but you won’t make me a monster.”
“We’re not monsters, Shamira. We’re just trying to survive in a sometimes brutal world that has different rules and laws than you’re used to. You might want to take a look around before you condemn us all.”
What had started as a good night with a successful bust and good company had soured considerably. Any carnal feelings she had felt earlier were suitably repressed, and she and Henry didn’t speak to each other again. When Renata and a team of human security arrived to cart the would-be dealers and buyers off to a holding area on Shane Stapleton’s property, the Brazilian werejaguar could feel the tension. She pulled Henry aside and got his account of the impromptu raid, but he wouldn’t say anything about why he and Shamira were shooting daggers at each other. And the new girl seemed to have no interest in talking with Renata either. Twice she had performed admirably on the job with little to no preparation, and twice she had become withdrawn afterward.
‘She’s too damn new at this for Shane to keep throwing her out like this,’ she thought. Renata promised herself that she’d have words with the boss once this got sorted out. She personally manhandled the prisoners into the back of a specially built and magically reinforced paddywagon before they all headed back home. Shamira rode back with Renata, still silent as the grave.
———— ——————–
Back at the house . . .
———— ——————–
Shamira stood in front of her closet, staring at all the nice if somewhat risque things that they had bought just a few days earlier. She wanted to leave. She wanted out of this nightmare, but she couldn’t take any of these things. None of them were really hers. She had no suitcase, no money of her own, no wallet . . . even the sweats that she was wearing were borrowed. She was a vampire, but she felt more like a ghost. She was hanging around this world, but did it really have a place for her? She wanted her old life back. It might not have been much, but it had been simple.
“What are you thinking?” came a warm, masculine voice behind her.
“That it’s time for me to go,” she replied, turning to look at Shane. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“I think you can, but the choice must be up to you.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “Henry told me what happened. He feels bad about snapping at you, but he takes this personally. He told you about the bleeding house? Well, he probably didn’t tell you that he found a friend of his hanging from the ceiling.”
Shamira froze. ‘Oh God,’ she thought. She couldn’t even imagine what that must have been like. “He didn’t say anything about that.”
“He doesn’t like to think about it. He knows how dangerous it is to let the vengeance overtake him. Believe it or not, he does understand.” Shane contemplated something. He wanted her to understand. “Would you believe that the bleeding house that was raided was actually run by a vampire?”
Her skin felt colder than usual. “What?!”
“He wasn’t stable before he was brought over, and his creator was later punished for this. All full vampires are held accountable for the actions of their children. Anyway, he was quite psychotic but very cunning. It was about twenty years ago when he got the idea of taking gullible humans and making them fledglings. He then convinced these people, who had no concept of the world they had been introduced to, that werewolves and faeries were truly evil and used his new vamps to hunt them down. He would then turn on his fledglings and chain them up right next to those they had helped capture. He bled them dry, mixed their blood, sold it off, and then moved on.”
“You make it sound like he did this more than once.”
“That was his third house. He’d killed twenty-one vampires, werewolves, and faeries by the time we caught him.”
“I so owe Henry an apology,” she said.
“No you don’t. I’m glad this is hard on you. Sometimes, even the most noble intentioned amongst us needs to be reminded of our ‘humanity,’ so to speak. And whenever Henry digs up those ghosts, he tends to hit the bottle a little hard.”
“I didn’t know vampires could get drunk.”
“Oh, very much so. It just takes a while, and we can pretty much sober up at will. We just divert the alcohol from our brains by force of will and we’re fine again.”
“That’s cheating.”
“Undoubtedly.” He got up and placed his hands on Shamira’s shoulders. “So, are you willing to stick around?”