Fangs and Fennel (The Venom Trilogy #2)(39)

“Not a lot, only a flask. We diluted what we used on you to not waste it. Theseus told us to do that. I didn’t think it would still hurt you, to be honest.” Like he had a choice in his current honesty.

I jerked at the thought of the oil, the pain that had sent my mind into complete shutdown, being diluted. “Where is it?” I repeated, my words hard.

“In the cellar, behind the vodka.”

I started to let him go, and Dahlia put a hand on me. “Tell him to go to sleep.”

She had a point. It would buy us time. “Go . . .” A thought hit me, and I glanced at Dahlia once before I changed my mind.

“Why do you hate Remo?”

Dahlia sucked in a gasp. “Oh, that’s gossipy. I forgive you for everything earlier.”

My lips twitched.

Santos breathed out a tired sigh and leaned in so his forehead was on my shoulder, and I kept my hands on the back of his neck, touching his bare skin. “He was always my boss. In charge of me since we were children. I couldn’t stand it any longer. And I killed his favorite girlfriend, which probably didn’t help.”

Since they were children? I pushed him off my shoulder and stared at his face. Mentally I took away the long hair and added the piercings Remo had. “Fricky dicky, you’re his brother, aren’t you?”

Dahlia gasped and Santos grunted. “Not that I like to tell people, but yes. Remo’s my older brother.”





CHAPTER 10


“Go to sleep for one hour,” I commanded and let him go. He slumped to the floor, his head hitting the wood hard enough to make the thump echo in the room. I backed away from him, my mind racing.

“Holy shit on a Ritz Cracker! They’re brothers! That explains so, so much. Talk about sibling rivalry to the max.” Dahlia gasped and I grabbed her arm.

“Come on, we’ve got to hurry. I don’t know if that’s actually going to hold him.”

“What do you mean? He was totally under.”

I unlocked the bedroom door and pushed her out ahead of me. “That’s the thing. He fought me all along. I don’t think we’ll have an hour.”

“How long?”

“Minutes,” I breathed.

“Shit.”

I nodded. “My thought exactly. Do you know where the basement is?”

She bolted ahead of me. “Through the kitchen.”

We ran down the stairs, and I tried not to think about all the things that could go wrong. The flask not being where Santos said, the other vampires coming in to check on their boss, Santos waking up. Any one of those things would spell disaster for us.

The gargantuan house was quiet as we leapt from the first landing of the staircase, dual thumps as we hit the floor in the main hall. Dahlia turned to the right, and I kept at her heels. We bolted through the kitchen . . . okay, she bolted and I slowed. The kitchen was my dream kitchen, and I couldn’t help but stop and stare. I ran my hand over the marble countertop with flecks of silver veining through it and found myself stopping at the high-end utensils. I grabbed two wooden spoons, longer than normal and used for large vats. I tucked them through my jeans’ belt loops. Not exactly weapons, but maybe in a pinch they would give me something. I ran my hand over the customized stove, and the—

“Alena, not now!”

“Right.” I snapped my eyes away from the pretties and followed Dahlia through a door I’d not noticed. The stairwell was narrow and nothing like the rest of the house. Old, dusty, musty.

“Cold storage isn’t really the same as a basement,” I said.

“Whatever. This is the only basement I know about.”

At the bottom of the stairs there was a click as Dahlia pulled a string and light flooded the tiny space. At least, tiny compared to the rest of the house.

“Look for the vodka,” she said.

I nodded and started checking the different labels. Very quickly I realized it was more of a wine cellar than a pantry. “Why would they keep so much booze? You can’t drink it.”

“But our victims can. If a vampire wants to get a real buzz on, they drink down a drunk.”

“Oh.” I breathed the word out and kept looking. “Here, I think this is vodka?”

Dahlia hurried to my side. “Yeah, Russian brand.” We pulled the bottles off and threw them behind us. They crashed into the far wall. Behind the last bottle, the glittering of a large flask beckoned. “You’d better grab it.” I took the bottle of vodka and clutched it to me.

Dahlia grabbed the flask and spun the lid.

I squeaked and took several steps back. She breathed it in. “Smells like licorice.”

“Yeah, that’s it, then.”

Time to go. I spun and froze. Two shadowed figures slid down the stairs. Apparently our luck had run out.

I stared at the vodka in my hands and made sure my voice was loud enough they would hear me. “Dahlia, Santos said to get to get the good Russian vodka, right?”

She stepped up beside me. “Yeah, we better hurry. We don’t want to disappoint him.”

The two figures fled back up the stairs, leaving before they even asked what we were doing. Their fear of Santos worked in our favor.

I led the way, vodka in hand. Just in case we were stopped. We emerged from the stairs into the kitchen where the two vampires waited. I didn’t recognize either of them. Both were men, both big with overgrown messy brown tangled hair and eyes the color of mud. Twins.