Tainted Blood (Hell's Belle Book 2) (11 page)

I cringed. Max was within earshot.

Max rose his eyebrows. "And I was worried about your hand."

Matteo clearly enjoyed running his mouth. "Elias said she was like a tiger. Rawr!"

My cheeks went hot, and I wanted the floor to swallow me up. Instead, the door blew open and the nasal greeting "Hi, it's Eva!" rang through the bar. I owed her big for the perfectly timed distraction.

"Here she comes," Alfonso groaned from his perch, where he was once again refilling his own glass. At this point, I'd given up keeping track of his bar tab.

"Come on, Al." Eva pulled her tarot deck out of her coat pocket. "Just one reading! I'll do it for half-price!"

As Eva cajoled Al into getting his cards done, Matty looked between me and Max, and a look of understanding wiped the confusion from his face.

"Ooohhhh, you guys have a thing."

"A thing?" I snorted. "There's no thing. Here. Between us."

"No thing." Max tilted his head a bit. Did he look almost hurt?

My stomach knotted as I considered our brief fling from a few months ago. After Bertrand turned him into a Berserker, things kind of cooled between us. The Berserker made him angry. Or maybe he was angry he was turned into a Berserker. But that was a chicken and egg argument. I'd never been a fan of boyfriends, so the idea of having an angry one wasn't exactly appealing.

The door blew open, and Bertrand entered with a rush of cold air.

I crossed my arms and glared. "Where's your sidekick?"

"Consoling a woman with a broken nose," he said pointedly.

I grinned. "She had it coming."

He waved his hand at me. "I am here to discuss the terms of tomorrow evening..."

I cut him off with a wave of my hand. "No terms. We aren't doing it."

"You'll be called in anyway," he pushed.

"Then I'll wait to get the orders from the usual source." I postured a bit. Honestly, the orders came from Dr. O. I was usually shielded from his contacts in the Department of Defense, and I had no problem with that. The few DoD lackeys I met were shits.

"What do you want, Nina?"

"Get a pen. That list is long."

He sighed. "Can we just unite in this one thing? I need the city to feel secure. I don't need a riot on my hands right now."

The demon actually looked exhausted.

"How do you do that?" I said, my voice low. "How do you get your face to look all human and tired?"

"Years of practice." Even his smile was tired. It was irksome how he could manipulate his facial expressions. "Aren't you going to offer me a drink?"

"Nope." I turned my back on him and stacked the dirty barware into the dishwasher.

Bertrand's eyes followed me. He looked bemused.  "Why aren't you afraid of me?"

"I could ask you the same damn question," I countered, scraping lipstick off a glass with a dirty bar rag. That long-wear stuff never came off without a good scrub.

His laugh was interrupted by a burst of snow sweeping in with the open door. Good old New England weather. If you don't like it, wait a minute.

A diminutive man removed his overcoat, shaking snow on the floor. Shivering, he settled a few stools over from Bertrand.

"You look like you could use a whiskey," I said as I dropped a cocktail napkin in front of him.

"Thank you." He nodded gravely. He kept his head bowed down, but his eyes followed me as I pulled a bottle of the cheap shit off the shelf and poured out a finger. Looking at him again, I poured an extra half. Poor guy looked like he could use it.

When I placed it on the cocktail napkin, he caught my arm, pulling me toward him with unexpected strength. Caught off guard, it took a moment for me to recover and pull away. I moved so quickly, and forcefully, that he actually ended up sprawled on top of the bar. But his grip remained on my arm.

"Please," he whispered. "I need your help."

I shook off his hand. "Rule number one: Don't manhandle me."

"Sorry." He bowed his head. "Is there somewhere we can talk?"

"Right here works just fine."

He shook his head, eyes moving to Bertrand and back to me. Well, hot damn. Did he
know
?

I worked on scraping lipstick from a second glass. "How can I help you, friend?"

With his eyes still fixed on Bertrand, the man sipped his whiskey and hedged. "I heard you fixed...stuff."

"I'm known to be handy from time to time." I looked at him curiously. "What kind of stuff needs fixing?"

"Friends of mine. They aren't feeling so good lately."

"They offer that kind of help at the bar down the block." I glared at him. I heard rumors that one of the bartenders at the dive around the corner had a nice side job pushing illegal drugs through the joint. It was irksome when people mistook Babe's for that shit hole.

Shifty-eye dude visibly jumped when Bertrand stood and slapped a $10 bill on the bar. "That should cover this man's drink. We'll see you tomorrow night."

"No. You won't!" I flushed with anger. But he dismissed my protests with a wave of his hand before he disappeared out the door.

I snatched the ten and tossed it into the till, slightly placated that Bertrand more than paid for top shelf and I poured the well whiskey. It's the little things, right?

"Not that kind of sick," the man piped up. With Bertrand out the door, he looked a lot less constipated.

"I can't deal with cryptic right now, Mister. Tell me what you want or finish your drink and get out." The crowd was thinning, and I really wanted to get some sleep.

He grimaced, this time showing me two tiny fangs. Beta. I wasn't expecting that.

"I think you know the kind of sick I am talking about," he said. "Had one of those in here last night. Right?"

That gave me pause. I admit, I started to panic. "Wait, you aren't—"

He shook his head. "No, no. Not infected. But last night, that was my friend."

"Did he come here looking for help?"

The guy nodded.

"There's a bunch of us, we came to this state together. Look out for each other, that sort of thing." He dropped his voice. I had to lean in to hear him. "And like half of us are sick now. And we have no idea why."

"Where do you get your..." I paused. "Nourishment?"

Beta-Vamps couldn't bite. If they had a willing donor, it would be easy to trace the source of infection. If not, they used a blood bank. My heart accelerated at the thought. I satisfied my bizarre blood craving from a blood bag at the hospital.

I took a deep breath, hoping to calm my nerves. Getting blood out of a blood bank wasn't easy. And Betas couldn't glamour like regular vamps. They had all the drawbacks and none of the bonuses of vampirism. That made them a whole lot more risk adverse.

"Jackson," he said. "Jackson got bags for us."

"Jackson?" I poured another finger of whiskey out for him, this time from the good stash, and one for myself. "Where did he get the bags?"

The Beta shook his head. "Not sure."

"The bags usually have an info label on it. Expiration date, that sort of thing."

"Not these," he said.

I exhaled in relief, not even aware that I was holding my breath.

"They didn't even have a label with the blood type," he continued. "And I hate O positive, so when I broke open that bag..."

I held up my hand to silence him. The whiskey was taking effect, and he was getting a little loud. "I get it."

I glanced at Max and Matty, who were both eavesdropping on the whole exchange. I wished Frankie hadn't left. He knew the most about this weird disease, having lived through the good old days of legal opium consumption.

But Max was the next best thing. Blood bags without a sticker sounded like black market shit to me. I motioned for Max to come over.

"What's your name?" I asked him.

"Chuck," he said.

"Okay, Chuck, I want my friend Max to join us for a minute." Chuck's eyes went wide and he shook his head violently. "Don't worry, he knows about this sort of thing."

I reached out and squeezed his arm gently. He stared into his whiskey glass for several seconds before nodding.

"Max, this is Chuck. Chuck is a Beta, and he says a guy called Jackson has been getting him and his friends blood bags with no stickers on them."

Max shook his head. "There has to be stickers on them. Regional blood donation center codes, blood type, that sort of thing. It's how they track the blood."

Chuck was shaking. "These don't, sir, I swear."

Puzzled, I glanced over at Max, this time noticing that he was wearing his damn FBI shield on his belt. That explained Chuck's panic. Hell, I was lucky the bar didn't clear out completely when he walked in. Gritting my teeth, I made a mental note to tell Max to hide his shield before entering the bar. He'd put us out of business.

I poured Chuck a glass of cold water. One more whiskey and he would be of no use to us. Shooting Max a look, I tried to sound reassuring. "Don't worry. Max is cool about our kind. Even the FBI has one or two that get it."

Chuck nodded and took a deep drink of the water. "There was no hospital and no blood type," he said once he swallowed.

I shook my head. "Max, this whole thing sounds like black market blood."

"Black market blood?"  His face was a mix of fascination and repulsion.

I nodded. "There are plenty of humans who get their kicks from being 'vampires,'" I said using air quotes. "Black market blood is for the ones too scared to bite. They drink it."

"That's a public health threat just waiting to happen." Spoken like a true Fed.

"Humans are lucky that there are very few 'vampires' among them. These Betas, not so much."

"So where does black market blood come from?" Max asked.

"That's a question I can't answer. The black market blood I've come across was always stolen from blood banks. Hospital stickers were on them, blood type, that sort of thing."

"Our blood came from Jackson," Chuck offered.

"And who is Jackson?" Max asked.

"He's a guy that comes by our campsite."

"Campsite?" Max looked puzzled.

"Betas tend to stick together," I explained. "They are not strong like other vampires, and that makes them vulnerable. Chuck, why are you guys camping in the middle of winter?"

I was kind of surprised myself. Given their vulnerabilities, camping in the woods in the middle of winter was pretty reckless.

"It's only until we find a place large enough for all of us."

"How many's all of us?" I asked.

"About one hundred."

I whistled. "One hundred? That's a huge nest."

He shrugged. "Biggest I've ever been in."

"How do you guys travel together?" I asked, remembering that Betas moved around a lot because their vulnerabilities kept them on the run.

Chuck shook his head. "We don't. We all met here."

I crossed my arms and raised my eyebrows. This was not textbook Beta behavior.

"I came with my nest," Chuck continued. "There were around 11 of us. Big yes, but not a hundred."

"So if this is an unusually big grouping, what brought all of you together?" Max asked.

I was impressed with how quickly Max was grasping this. I didn't meet a Beta until one exploded on Frankie and me in the Superman Building. But I had studied them with Geena, one of my instructors at the Blood Ops base. She had only met one Beta, and it was someone Blood Ops had brought in for testing. Not only were Betas rare, but they usually stayed off the grid.

"Jackson," he said.

"The same guy bringing you black market blood?" I shook my head.

"Jackson said that Rhode Island was going to be Shangri-La for all supernatural creatures. Even Betas. He said that once the mayor took the city," Chuck said, pointing at Bertrand's empty bar stool, "he'd take over the state next, and he'd let us live safely."

I gasped. "Holy shit. Bertrand's building a supernatural Shangri-La? For what? What the hell is his endgame?"

"Not our focus right now," Max stopped me. "Is your camp the only one?"

Chuck shook his head. "I don't know. I don't think so. We saw Jackson a lot when we first got here, but now he only comes by every few days to bring us the blood bags. When he dropped off the bags the other day, I got a look into the back of his truck. I saw seven huge coolers — they could be full of bags. Now he just drops and leaves. I don't know where he goes."

"I think I am going to need one of those," Max pointed at the beer tap. "There has to be more camps."

Damn. I needed a drink, too. I poured out two pints of Narragansett — one for Max and one for me.

"What about these blood bags?" Max continued. "Why aren't all of you sick? Is there some sort of immunity?"

Chuck shook his head, his eyes filled with tears. "I have no idea why the blood isn't killing all of us."