Once Bitten (Alexa O'Brien, Huntress #1)(19)

“I don’t work for anyone,” Greg ground out between a few grunts and groans. “I work for myself. Ask the bitch if she’s seen anyone other than me.”

I looked at the woman who sat in the chair and sobbed. She didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what was being said as she pulled uselessly at her binds.

“You’re lying,” I said. “I can smell it.”

And, I could. Though vampires may rival me when it comes to the sixth-sense stuff, my other five senses had one up on them. A lie carries a very distinct scent from the change in brain chemistry.

“And, who the hell is your so called backup?”

The impatience in Kale’s tone caused me to wonder if he had fed yet tonight. He often prowled the underground vampire bar downtown for donors, something Arys frowned upon. Arys resented the imposition of being forbidden to kill. He stuck with traditional methods. Kale, on the other hand, made a point to kill humans only when necessary rather than simply from a snack attack. To each his own, I suppose.

Greg struggled in Kale’s grip but the other vampire was both too strong and determined. A mocking smile played along Greg’s greasy lips as he quickly rambled a series of unintelligible words, which I realized a moment later to be Latin.

Horror struck me. He was calling a demon. And, though my experience with them is thankfully limited, it has never been a pleasant one.

“Shut him up!” I yelled.

Kale, not one to ask unnecessary questions, promptly snapped his neck. Unfortunately, vampires can live through that. The sounds that came out of Greg when Kale dropped him in a puddle were more wretched than those of the girl in the chair. I watched with satisfaction as he writhed on the floor and wished for death.

Though I was hoping we’d cut his words off in time, the growing scent of sulfur told me we had not.

“Alexa,” Kale’s voice was low as he glanced around the hotel room. “Get out of here. Before it shows up. Just go. Now.”

“What? No way.” My eyes went to the woman, then to Greg on the floor wailing. “I can’t just leave you behind.”

“Can and will.” He actually moved as if to physically force me to the doorway.

Before he could attempt to lay a hand on me, a cloud of smoke seemed to billow up between us out of nowhere. My heart swelled as a lump stuck in my throat. Fear shook me. I watched the misty cloud evaporate until a man stood in its midst.

He was easily one of the most handsome men that I’d ever seen, a total Adonis. But, his eyes stopped me cold. They were the palest blue, almost white, so that the pupil looked particularly black. Even after Jez’s and my own, those were easily the most eerily inhuman eyes that I’d ever seen.

I don’t know if I was expecting him to speak, maybe introduce himself. But, when his first reaction was to backhand me off my feet, I knew that this fight was not off to a good start. My back slammed into the mirrored wall, which rained a shower of shards around me. Instinct placed my arms over my head. I crouched on my knees, motionless, until the glass stopped falling. I heard Kale move rather than saw him. With a growl, their bodies collided as I slowly got to my feet.

Shaking the glass out of my hair, I winced as I plucked one stray shard from the back of my hand, the only one that had impaled me. Lucky. The small cut would heal by morning. Of course, I had to live to see the morning, first.

Kale had launched a physical attack on the demon. Wrong move. The demon trapped him inside an energy circle that glowed with a red haze. My breath sucked in with an audible hiss. The demon didn’t even look at me when he released a bolt of power.

If my reaction time were any slower, I would have died in that moment. I threw my hands up and pushed back right in time to meet the blast with my own energy. Hmm, and what appeared to be a little of Arys’s energy, as well. My blue and yellow psi ball was tiny in comparison to what the demon had thrown, but it was enough to offset the impact and defer it from me.

Both the demon’s power and my own crashed into one of the Roman statues near the hot tub. It burst into dust. Before he could throw another one, I surrounded myself in a protection circle. Since I used solely my own energy, that barrier wouldn’t last long.

The demon grinned then, with his perfect teeth. He dismissed me and turned to Kale with a sneer. “Now look at what you’ve done.” He pointed one long finger to Greg, who still writhed on the floor with his neck at a hideous angle. “He’s no good to me like that. Damned pain in the ass vampires.”

I watched in stunned silence. As the demon walked softly over to Greg, he carefully stepped around the glass on the carpet. Before I could even guess what he intended, he raised the heel of a fine Italian boot and brought it down on Greg’s skull with a shattering blow.

A small scream escaped me, and the woman in the chair let loose with a loud, long wail. I turned my eyes from the gore on the floor and looked instead to Kale, who attempted a reassuring expression despite his prison of evil, demonic energy.

“Now.” The demon whirled once again to face Kale. “Would you like a chance to explain why you’re interfering with my little business venture, or shall I just gut you now and get it over with?” He made a show of straightening the cuffs of his Italian suit.

“Look, I can explain. We were acting on the assumption that he was running this little show. That is all.” Kale was back peddling fast now, which had me scared. We were out of our league here.