Midnight Bites (The Morganville Vampires)(119)

He did, moving slowly, and his massive muscle-bound arms rose as far as they could. I’d impressed him, at least this far. He might not take a .38 seriously, but he knew I couldn’t miss if I fired it into his heart from that distance. He could have grabbed my arm and broken it in two shakes, but that left the knife at his throat.

So we did the dance, moving backward, until we were out of the bleachers . . . and that was when Michael said, from behind Mr. Big, “Need any help?”

I grinned tightly. “Well, I think I’ve got this, but sure. I wouldn’t want you to get bored.”

Michael grabbed the guy by the scruff of the neck and swung him around like a bag of cotton balls, slammed him face-first into the cage bars with stunning force, and Mr. Big dropped to the dirt floor limp as overcooked pasta. (I know about overcooked pasta. I am so not a cook.)

That left Mr. Slick, but he wasn’t just standing around, as it happened.

He’d unlocked Jeremy’s cage, and stepped back to pull the silver bars of the door in front of him as protection from attack. I decided, from the way he moved, that he was the local lion tamer. Or, more likely, lion-abusing a-hole. “This is your chance,” he said to Jeremy. “Kill them and go.”

Jeremy looked at him through the bars, close range, and said, “What if I want to start with you first?”

You’d think Mr. Slick would be freaking scared, but this was—unfathomably, to me—a guy who’d managed to capture a sociopathic machine like Jeremy and keep him under control for what looked like quite a while. He didn’t seem scared, or even ruffled. “You won’t,” he said. “You can keep the girl. I know you like to play with them first.”

“Hey!” I said, and pointed the gun at Slick. “Standing right here!”

Jeremy hadn’t moved his gaze away from his—I guess?—jailer, but somehow, in less time than it took for me to register the blur, he was moving toward me. I didn’t have time to get the gun or knife up in my own defense; he was just that fast.

And then, he was past me.

Jeremy came to a sudden stop next to the unconscious bruiser Michael had left lying on the floor, picked him up like a rag doll, and—before even my vampire husband could stop him—had his fangs buried in the man’s neck.

Michael tried. He grabbed Jeremy by the shoulder and yanked hard, trying to separate victim from predator, but it was useless; the kid’s wiry strength wasn’t going to give, and anyway, it was over fast.

When Jeremy dropped the corpse formerly known to me as Mr. Skinhead, it was paper white and drained of every drop of blood.

Mr. Slick didn’t move for a second, clearly stunned, and then as Jeremy licked his lips clean of the thin smear of red that remained, he dashed around the cage door, threw himself inside, and slammed it behind him. Then he cowered in the center of the cage, eyes as big as headlights and just about as shiny. He’d thought he’d broken this lion he’d caged, but he’d just discovered that was completely wrong.

Michael was looking spooked, too, but he spoke gently. “Hey, man, Amelie sent us. She wants you to come with us, back to Morganville.”

“Morganville,” Jeremy repeated, without so much as a flicker of emotion. He’d just killed somebody, and he didn’t seem to have really cared at all, beyond looking a little less pallid. “Never been there.”

“You’ll be safe there. No one will hurt you.” Michael was being unaccountably gentle; maybe he hadn’t seen the flat, shark-worthy shine of the boy’s eyes as he drank up Mr. Skinhead. “Trust me, man. Please. We need to leave here.”

“You forgot something,” Jeremy said, and pointed one long, skinny, dirty finger at Mr. Slick cowering inside the cage. “He just heard where we’re going. Can’t be safe if he knows. Got to get rid of him.”

“No, we don’t,” Michael said. He moved to the bars and crouched down, and when he spoke next, I heard that scary vampire tone in his voice. He didn’t use it often, but when he busted it out, he had real power. “Look at me.”

He waited, and after a long few breaths, Mr. Slick uncovered his face and met Michael’s eyes. I couldn’t see them, but I knew how they would look—glowing, red, terrifying if you weren’t drowning in that pool of crimson and unable to feel anything at all.

Michael had one of the most powerful forget-about-me abilities Amelie had ever seen, apparently, and he proved it now, because he said, in low, measured tones, “Poor Jeremy starved to death in this cage. Say it back to me.”

“Poor Jeremy starved to death in this cage,” the man repeated in a dull, calm voice.

“And you’re feeling very bad about that.”

“I’m feeling very bad about that.” I watched Mr. Slick’s eyes suddenly fill up with wet, hot tears that spilled over and down his cheeks in messy trails. “Oh God . . .”

“You feel so bad that you’re never going to run this kind of show, ever again. Not with anyone who doesn’t sign up and get paid. And there are no such things as vampires. No real ones.”

“No real ones,” he echoed. His voice was shaking now, and so were his shoulders. Wow. Michael had really rocked his world, and not in a good way. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. . . .”

“How many others knew about Jeremy?”