Blood Bath & Beyond (18 page)

Hand in hand, we moved toward the stairs, going up them until they changed, turned into rickety wooden ones that led to a door about four stories up. I turned the handle and pushed it open.

Surprisingly, it was some sort of public place. Being around a group of people after spending who knew how much time down in that dark storm drain felt like a huge relief. The door closed and clicked shut behind us.

Which was around the moment I realized exactly where we were.

The storm drain stairs had led up into the hunter bar. And we were currently surrounded by about fifty hunters of varying shapes and sizes.

Crap.

“You were right.” Victoria squeezed my hand so tightly that it actually hurt. “You
are
a magnet for trouble. I think you’re a whole fridge door full of them.”

I reached for the door again only to find it had locked behind us.

I braced myself for the attack…any second now….

But no attack came.

Nobody even paid any attention to us, other than a random surprised glance here and there to find a bedraggled brunette and a cute blond kid suddenly in their midst.

They hadn’t guessed what we were. Not yet, anyway. I mean, what sane vampire would ever knowingly stroll right through the middle of a hunter bar?

Well, me. My common sense had improved some over the months, but my sanity had always been a bit of a question mark.

“Just passing through,” I said casually as we started walking toward the exit. I didn’t dare show even a glimpse of fang. No smiling allowed—which wasn’t all that difficult to manage at the moment.

The door wasn’t far away, really. And the two hunters downstairs were still unconscious. For now.

One foot in front of the other. Had to keep walking. Sunlight was ahead. Freedom was beyond. We’d recharge and reassess; then I’d figure out what my next move would be.

But then someone stepped out in front of me, blocking my path. I stared directly into his black T-shirt-clad chest.

“Sarah?” he said with surprise. “I don’t really think this is the right place for you, sweetheart.”

My eyes widened and I looked up at his face to see the very hunter I’d put my neck on the line to find today.

“Duncan,” I managed.

He was grinning, but I couldn’t say it was all that friendly. Looked more like the smile of an amused predator. “How on earth did you even get in here?”

He wasn’t immediately sounding the alarms. I hoped that was a good sign. “Magical powers.”

“You’re funny. No idea what a cute little thing like you is doing with Thierry, but maybe he has a side he doesn’t show anyone else. Am I right? Does he have a soft underbelly I just don’t know about?”

Letting on that Thierry was anything but the stone-cold, emotionless master vampire he appeared to be to most people was not in his best interest. Or mine, for that matter. “Nope. He’s a total hard-ass, through and through. He’ll kill you as soon as look at you. He just tolerates me because he lost a bet.”

Victoria had my hand clutched in hers so tightly I was certain it was literally changing the shape of it.
Soon I would have one good hand and one bloody stump. She tugged on my arm. “Sarah?”

Well, if nothing else, severe stress and trauma had made her use my real name for a change. Miracles do happen.

And I wasn’t letting any other miracles like the one right in front of me escape just because I was freaking out inside. “I need to talk to you, Duncan. Um, away from here would be a good start.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’ll pay.”

“This must be my lucky day.”

Mine too, maybe. In more ways than one.

He kept that grin on his face, and it filled me with more hope. While Duncan’s expression was filled with greed, it was a greed that would lead me to the answers I needed to help Thierry. I knew it.

“I want to know who hired you to kill Bernard,” I asked him, point-blank. I flicked a look at the door, wishing I was on the other side of it right now. “Somebody did, didn’t they?”

“They sure did,” he confirmed. “Went down a bit differently than planned, though. One of my best kills ever, I think. Did you see the look on everybody’s face before that enforcer started wiping their memories? If he hadn’t been so damn busy, I might not have been able to slip out of there.”

Markus was able to wipe the witnesses’ memories? How could he do something like that?

No time to ask right now, so I filed that away for later.

“How did it go differently than planned?” I pressed. “And who hired you? I need answers.”

“To save that hard-ass who tolerates you because of a bet?”

“Maybe I’m the one with the soft spot, not him.”

He leered at me. “You and Thierry, huh? I guess
you’re
his soft spot now, aren’t you? Interesting.”

I really didn’t like this guy, but I needed him. “Talk to me, Duncan. Please. I said I’d pay.”

“Oh, you bet your sweet little ass you will. You pay me enough and I’d be happy to tell you every last detail you need to save your fiancé’s life.”

I hated hoping. A lot of the time, hope was a big, shiny, colorful bow that did its best to hide nothing but an empty box underneath. Duncan was saying everything I wanted to hear right now. Everything except the real answers I desperately needed.

It seemed as if I now required a bank machine. Stat.

“Okay, then let’s go,” I said firmly. “I’ll get you the money and you can get me my answers.”

“Lead the way, sweetheart.”

Money talks.

I was counting on that being Duncan’s rather nasty personal philosophy. He hadn’t raised the alarm that two vampires were smack-dab in the middle of this Vegas hunter bar. He just grinned at the thought of money, ready to sell out whoever hired him at the first flash of green.

I could totally work with that.

This was going to happen. This was what I’d been looking for all day and it had practically fallen into my lap. I was going to prove Thierry’s innocence and make Mr. Enforcer leave him alone. For once, something was easy. For once, I wasn’t a magnet for trouble. I’d walked right through the lions’ den and found that one of the
lions was willing to help me get out of here in one hopeful piece. For a price.

I should have known it wouldn’t last.

A shadow loomed at the entrance just as we’d reached it. A large, fierce-looking man in leather and chains whose dark eyes flashed with anger. For a split second, I froze because I thought he was looking at me and Victoria. But he wasn’t. He was looking just past us at the hunter standing behind us.

“Duncan Keller!” he bellowed. “You son of a bitch!”

“Uh-oh,” Duncan said.

I turned to face him. “Who is that?”

His attention wasn’t on me. “Just the husband of a woman I’ve been sleeping with. This shouldn’t take long. Just give me a minute to deal with this.”

Victoria’s grip on my hand increased, if that was even possible, as the other man stormed toward Duncan and grabbed him by the front of his shirt.

“Attila,” Duncan began, “I can explain.”

The guy’s name was Attila?

That did not bode well.

“Couldn’t keep your hands to yourself, could you, Keller?” Attila growled. “You should have. I’ve forgiven her indiscretions too many times, but not this time. I thought we were friends, and you’d do this behind my back? It’s over!”

The entire bar had turned to watch the confrontation with varying degrees of interest and amusement. No one seemed the least bit concerned, even when Attila shoved Duncan back. The other hunter slammed into a table, sending beer glasses and plates crashing to the ground.

“Duncan!” I yelled as he got to his feet. But instead
of backing away and apologizing profusely for what he’d done, he attacked. Fists flew and in a few moments those witnessing the fight were placing bets and cheering their choices on as if this had suddenly turned into a steel cage match.

Victoria tugged on my hand as a beer bottle smashed on the wall dangerously close to where we were standing. “We should leave.”

“Not yet. I can’t leave—he’s going to help me!”

Attila’s face was bleeding from being repeatedly smashed with Duncan’s fist, but he wasn’t backing down, either. He finally got the upper hand, grabbing hold of Duncan and raising him up above his head, wrestler-style, and then slamming him down hard on top of the ratty-looking pool table in the far corner. Duncan scrambled for his wooden stake—a decent weapon when fighting vampire
or
human—but he didn’t have a chance to use it to defend himself. Attila had snatched the pool cue from another hunter’s grip and—

“Just remember, Keller,” he bellowed. “You brought this on yourself!”

I covered Victoria’s eyes as he brought the pool cue down, pointy end first, at Duncan’s chest.

Duncan’s attention flicked to me before his eyes glazed over.

I sensed the moment his heart stopped beating and his life left the building.

My hope hitched a ride right along with it.

W
e didn’t stick around. The damage had been done.

My mind reeled from what just happened. All so fast. We’d been close—
I’d
been close. Duncan was going to talk to me, with a little monetary coaxing. He would have told me who hired him to kill Bernard. Thierry would have been proven innocent—I mean, as soon as I got Markus to believe it. The point was, it would have been a step in the right direction instead of scrambling to keep my footing on this slippery slope.

I hated this. Every direction I turned just led to more failure and the day was fading fast. It was late afternoon by now—almost five o’clock. We’d been unconscious in the tunnels longer than I thought we were. That garlic dart had been extremely potent.

I sighed shakily. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“Give up,” Victoria said.

“Excuse me?”

“Sometimes you need to know when to quit. I wanted to figure it out, too, but it’s not looking like that’s possible.” She had her hand on her hip and was looking at her little pink cell phone. “The hunter’s dead and so’s your chance to clear sourpuss’s name. I’d take
the hint if I were you. Besides, how long’s he been alive? Hundreds of years? I’d bet he’s done lots of bad stuff in his life way worse than what happened to Bernard. Maybe he deserves this.”

I didn’t say anything. Every word she spoke dropped on me like a tiny bomb. Not because I necessarily agreed with her, but because her point was painfully clear. Quitting would be what a lot of people do when they see their path is filled with rocks. That they’re fighting a losing battle. That they just stepped in quicksand and they better pull their foot out while it’s only an expensive shoe they’re going to lose and not the entire leg.

Had Thierry done bad things in his existence? I mean, I didn’t know half of it. A quarter of it. A hundredth of it, really. But I knew he had. The most recent skeleton I’d found in his closet was the group of hunters Bernard told me about who’d paid the ultimate price when Thierry had lost control of his bloodlust.

Was there an expiration date on evil acts? If you did something heinous a hundred years ago, did time and tide wash it all away? And if so, where was the line drawn? A century, a human lifetime, a decade?

How long did someone need to be actively redemptive before he was purged of all sins?

Yikes. My head throbbed just trying to wrap itself around questions like that. I wasn’t the right person to make these sorts of determinations. I wasn’t a lawyer or a judge or a jury. Had Thierry done enough in his six-hundred-plus years of life to land himself on death row? If so, did that mean he should be there now, even if it looked more like a luxury suite in a fabulous hotel?

And if I weren’t in love with him, would I be so willing to forgive the things he’d done in the past?

So many questions, so few answers.

Such was my life.

All I knew was that he was a man with a great deal more history than I had. And, yes, those skeletons in his closet could fill an entire graveyard. A big one with tall iron gates.

But even though I knew this, it didn’t change a single thing for me. Not a single damn thing.

I touched my left hand, feeling the loss of my engagement ring.
That’s
when my bottom lip finally started wobbling.

“Puppy?” Victoria asked warily. I didn’t bother to correct her on the nickname. I wasn’t feeling quite as fierce as I had in the tunnels with the vampire girl. “Don’t cry.”

I couldn’t break down, not in front of her. I didn’t want her to see me totally lose it right now. “I’m not going to cry.”

“He’s not worth it.”

That was debatable. “It’s done. Until I figure out what to do next, I should get you back to Charles.”

Her potentially psychopathic pseudo-daddy who’d be tracking us down any minute now.

She consulted her phone again. “I texted him. I left out the part about us almost getting killed. He’d probably blame you for putting me in danger.”

I wasn’t sure if I should thank her for this omission.

“Oh, he’s just replied. He says for us to meet him at Blood Bath and Beyond in half an hour.”

The blood addict wanted to meet us at a blood bank. That wasn’t a terribly surprising location. “Fine. I could use a drink.”

I could use a lot of things at the moment, but I’d start
with a little B-positive before I wandered the city homeless and directionless now that my main lead to help Thierry had a big piece of wood sticking out of his chest. It was an ironic end for a vampire hunter.

As we headed toward the blood bank, I started thinking about home and how I’d left mine to travel here with Thierry, assuming it would be the beginning of life on the road for us. They say that home is where the heart is.

It was only a little over a month ago that I’d finally moved in with him. He held tightly on to his privacy, but my previous housemate, George, had packed up and left the country to move to Hawaii and that left me homeless. I didn’t have all that many things to gather, but gather them I did and I arrived at Thierry’s doorstep like some sort of street urchin.

He opened the front door of his townhome and looked out at me. “You’re here.”