Bane of the Bears (Born of Blood Book 1) Page 3

  Fucking angels.

  “Suit yourselves,” says Suit, a sociopathic smile on his handsome face. “I’ve plenty of room for dessert.”

  No one has time to blink before Suit sinks his teeth into the kneeling man’s throat.

  Ugh. Not only is this guy a whole buffoon, but he’s extra dramatic. Theatrics are never not important, but why’s he gotta be a Batman villain with it? And out in the open! Is he trying to get staked? Surely if I’ve heard the whispers of some elitist King Vampire roaming the Vegas strip, the creatures in kind have been informed?

  Whatever.

  Feels a little hypocritical to deny him the pleasure of offing this prick, seeing as I just did the same thing. For kinda the same reason, even if I was the one being violated. The white knight thing really is a massive turn on, but he’s gotta know he can’t just murder people under street lights and think that’s a-okay.

  Steeling myself for the quite possible feral reaction, I shove my fist in my clutch and whack the bloodsucker in the temple, dislodging him from the gurgling man on the ground.

  “Hey, you idiot!” I crow, stomping my foot like a petulant child. “You can’t just bite dudes in the street, what’s wrong with you?”

  No one moves. No one speaks. This is so awkward for a thwarted attempted murder.

  I slouch my shoulders, trying to appear tired, maybe a bit stoned, and wave the audience off. “Go on guys, get outta here.”

  They keep staring at me and my new chomper compadre.

  God, I hate humans.

  “My friend had a bad hit tonight, know what I’m sayin’?” I chuckle. When I still get blank, shellshocked stares, I huff. “Drugs, I mean drugs. Here, take the bleeding man and maybe don’t walk around being douches at night, yeah?”

  The kneeling dude hacks and grapples with his neck, running to hide behind one of his other frozen friends, while the vampire blinks owlishly at me, as though he’s coming out of a haze.

  “‘Kay, thanks,” I prompt, saluting them off with two fingers, “bye.”

  “Freaks,” someone finally mutters, and they take off. About time.

  The vampire stumbles over his feet, smacking back against a far shinier dumpster than the other corpses are hanging out at. He’s a vision, that’s for certain. Strong jaw, crazy cheekbones, deep soulful eyes that lure your heart right to a cliff’s edge. Never mind his soft brown hair and perfect eyebrows, perfect peach toned skin.

  Downright insulting. No one should be that attractive. He’s only, like, two steps down from the guy with the nice lashes back in the alley.

  Still pissed off he’s dead.

  “Oh. Wow,” I muse aloud, stepping into his space to study his eyes. They’re red around the rims, but nowhere near bad enough to be a blood sickness. Good news for me, I might not die tonight after all. “You’re not from around here, are you? Jesus, could you be any hotter?”

  He doesn’t reply, just wipes his mouth shakily and holds his head.

  “Anyway,” I grumble. Least he could do is talk to me, show some appreciation for saving his lousy ass. “I’m Ursula. You know. If you were wondering. Look, you need to be more careful with this shit. Word on the street is the vampire king is lurking about, and if he catches you—”

  Delayed reaction for the win. Normally these guys hang out in little groups to back each other up, clean up the messes they leave behind. Those two dudes on my pathway to this shitshow were definitely vampire victims. And if this dude is just offing people left and right, that must mean…

  “Hey!” I snap, barely pausing for another breath, let alone long enough for this guy to reply. “Are you the one who left those other two bodies just willy nilly out where anyone could see? Are you a newbie vamp or something? What gives?”

  He cringes like I hit him again, bringing his second hand up to rub his head. Still ignoring me, though. Because why start being polite now?

  “It’s like no one appreciates the things we do around here,” I ramble on, accepting the fact he’s going to ignore me until I go away. Little does he know. “Oh, just leave that dead guy there, the bears’ll clean it up. Pfft. I mean, yes, obviously we will. But that’s not the point, right? It’s about respect, and I tell you, we don’t get enough. More than the sloths, but also not the point.”

  This guy really isn’t gonna talk to me. The nerve. I know he’s older than hell, with a fancy fit like he’s got, didn’t he come from the era of manners?

  I turn to tell him off, maybe give him what for on how you address a lady—especially one who saved your undead life—and see he’s in some considerable pain. His shoulders are hiked to his ears, full body trembling as he gets smaller and smaller on himself.

  “Hey.” I step in closer, taking his elbow before he can get any closer to the wet ground he’s hovering near. “Hey, are you okay?”

  He hisses, and I snap my hand back. Motherfucker, he did not just do that.

  “You better not be hissing at me when I just saved your idiot hide from your king,” I snap at him. The audacity.

  His knees give out on him, and he hits the ground hard on his all too cute ass.

  “Oh, whoa. Okay,” I mutter. What do I do with an injured vampire? “Just sit there for a second. You look like I felt after I had that dumpster binge in the state park. It was a dark time, don’t ask.”

  Not that I plan on him talking to me.

  “Stop…” he whimpers, the agony so palpable it turns my stomach. “...talking.”

  It speaks! And confirms he’s rude.

  “Can’t do that,” I say, letting the dickhead comment slide. For now. “Sorry, friend. You’ll learn like my other friends did. Ursula never shuts up.”

  His body shudders like an old film reel, his eyes rolling back into his head, a cold gasp rattling out of his chest.

  “Really gonna pass out before you can tell me your name, huh?” I ask, poking his arm. “You can’t fool me, Batsy. Vampires don’t sleep.”

  But he doesn’t react.

  I hum, curiouser still and clueless as to what I’m supposed to do with this guy. He’s not dead, I don’t think. So it’s really not my problem. He’ll sleep off whatever this little episode is, and go on about his life… but that feels like stooping to his level of asshat, and I simply do not have that in me.

  Still. I don’t have any ideas.

  But I know who might.

  “How many?”

  “Why do you always assume the worst in me?”

  “Kinda goes with the territory,” Dov mutters through the phone, dull, chuckling in spite of himself. “I didn’t say I thought you killed anybody.”

  “Hmmph.” I sigh. “Two and a half.”

  He coughs. “Two and what?”

  “Ew—not half a body, freak,” I grunt. “Two dead, and one… incapacitated.”

  “And we care?” he asks.

  “I think so,” I say. “He’s a friend.”

  “You don’t have any friends.”

  “I have you.”

  He doesn’t reply.

  I huff. “Okay. He’s a new friend. Stop sassing me and get to Cleveland and Tam.”

  “Yes, your majesty,” he snarks again, then hangs up.

  “That’s what you’ll be saying when your flappy little king gets ahold of you,” I tell my snoozing land piranha. “I expect a thank you when you’re conscious. Otherwise you’re gonna hurt my feelings. I know your suit is ruined and all, but that doesn’t make us even. And if you hadn’t been a jerk earlier, I totally would’ve caught you. Maybe.”

  I scrunch my nose at the vampire when he still doesn’t react to my words. He’s either an excellent actor, or he’s legit passed out. Never heard of such a thing. I don’t know a lot about vampires, save for what I’ve seen in the city. And lemme tell ya, Vegas Vamps?

  The. Worst.

  They keep The Order in high dollar, though. One of our main jobs is to keep the supernatural world under wraps—and that involves, primarily, cleaning up bodies the messier groups leave behind. Werewolves are a number one offender, and, surprisingly, demons.

  Literal pigs.

  The utter disregard that someone is gonna have to piece that body back together and put it somewhere, just, appalling. I get the urge to kill people, my moral compass is gray, gray, and more gray. Clearly. I mean, Dov was cleaning up one of my kills not thirty minutes ago.

  But that’s the kicker, isn’t it? We clean up.

  Ridiculous.

  Dad won’t care about that guy, either. I’ll throw on the sad eyes when I tell him what happened, and he’ll approve. Easy peasy. And, besides his cock, I left his body fully intact. So Dad can sell it to the ghosts for a pretty penny. Surely there’s a ghost who won’t care about the genital region.

  Yeah, ghosts… Don’t know much about them. Thanks to my dear old pops. He likes to keep that pretty quiet. No one knows about his arrangements with them, save for a handful of higher ups he’s befriended. And even then, the only one who knows what the ghosts want with the bodies, and what they give in return, is Dad.

  I dunno why. No one would frown on Dad for being a good business man and making money, or deals, or even gaining favors. That’s kinda how the underground world works. You make allies with the dangerous beings and hope, if there’s ever a war of supernaturals, you’re on the side with enough scary things to survive.

  Vampires would be a good partner in that war, me thinks, ’cept they’re impossible to befriend. Least in Sin City. No one wants to be friends with child predators…

  I’ve read historical articles in regard to vampires that imply they’re, for the most part, harmless. They need blood to feed, but it doesn’t hurt if they don’t want it to, and they don’t necessarily need to kill people to stay alive.

  That might
all be wrong, written by a church goer who thinks sex before marriage is a sin. But it seemed right, in my head. After all, why would there be so many fangbangers in the world if getting bit wasn’t a little sexy?

  Maybe my toothy friend here is a good one. I can’t imagine he’d go all out to save a girl from getting gang banged and then munch on a toddler in his spare time. He could’ve just killed all of them.

  But no. He did a good deed, and for that, he will be rewarded with my undying friendship.

  I pat his leg twice. “You’re gonna be fine, lil buddy. We’re gonna be good friends.”

  Whether he likes it or not.

  Evidently, carrying an unconscious stiff in a diamond suit isn’t all that impressive in downtown Las Vegas.

  Dov trails behind me as we burst through the gym doors, the vampire hung carefully over his shoulder. It’s slow out front, as to be expected so late in the evening, and over half of the sweaty, sticky humans are too caught up in their reps to notice us barreling straight through to the back office. No one really pays us any mind, and those who do happen to meet our eyes are deterred by a quick sneer.

  As I said. Humans.

  The real party is downstairs. Past the locker room and through the Employees Only door, the passageway leads to a safe place for all us monsters.

  My dad trains supernaturals—primarily shifters, but we don’t discriminate… for the most part—on how to fight, shift, and properly defend themselves. He owns a wrestling ring downtown and puts on little freak shows sometimes, too. I think the wolfy boys are renting it out tonight.

  You can’t get in either place without a password.

  Ask me if I ever remember what it is.

  “Passphrase?”

  “Lorcan,” I chirp. A grizzled werewolf pup who normally posts up at the ring. All about the rules, this one, even for Daddy’s Little Girl.

  He smirks at me knowingly. “Urs.”

  “Lemme in,” I say. “It’s just me.”

  “And the lads,” he notes seriously.

  “Yeah, Dov,” I sigh, “and a buddy.”

  He stares at me expectantly, shaking his head. “What’s the passphrase, lass?”

  I drop my head back and growl at the ceiling. I get the point. There are changelings and skin walkers galore in Vegas, so hypothetically, I could be a threat. Dad has a crippling fear of the fae, even though they’ve been dormant for goddess knows how long, and an even deeper hatred for the winged little freaks.

  He’s never told me why. Always promises it’s something he’ll explain when the time is right, and then blows me off in the hopes I’ll forget. Or at the very least, let it go.

  It’s kinda hard to forget his paranoia when it’s this hard to get into what should be my business, though.

  “Lorcan,” I growl, “baby. You’ve got three freckles on your left hip, and like, probably a ten inch dick. Which considering you are approximately eight feet tall, is perfectly respectable. Isn’t that passphrase enough?”

  His face flushes, the Irishman in him showing, and his nose scrunches as he sniffs at the three of us. He must smell the telltale coppery vampire under all of my toothy friend’s fancy aftershave, if the horrified look is anything to go by. “Ye know the rules, Ursula.”

  “Technically, I didn’t make this no vampires on the premises rule,” I argue. “So it’s not even valid. Not that it doesn’t make sense, with all the kiddo nappings going about, but that isn’t the point. You may ask, then, what is the point? Well, I’ll tell you: it’s my business, and that makes Dad your manager or whatever, but I’m the CEO. That’s fancy talk for ‘open the damn door.’ And another thing—”

  “Enough, enough,” he mutters, closing the eye window and unlocking the door. He makes a wide gesture with his large hands. “No faery could fake ye bossiness.”

  I swallow down about a million and a half rebuttals and storm past him. He’s not the first to not take me seriously, and he won’t be the last.

  I’m supposed to be the top dog around here. As the first born girl in the family, I am the rightful heiress to the Jelani estate. Bear shifters have a different way of doing things, with the women in control of the clans, the magic, the businesses, everything.

  The first born daughter is highly regarded, and, in my family, becomes the sole source of our power. I’m referred to as the Master. Only way to get into or out of The Order is for the Master to swear you in with a frenzy of blood magic, and if anything happens that would snuff my magic–like, I’m killed–no one in The Order has powers. And we’re pretty damn cool. We can’t reap a soul from a body or anything, but we can call death upon someone. Like a gift from the fates: I want you dead, I cut the string. Easy peasy.

  On top of that, we can dreamwalk. Dreamwalking is a skill where we can step into people’s minds, see their dreams and darkest secrets and, sometimes, we can twist them. That’s usually a form of torture and is a little bit frowned upon, but, hey, we can do it. Long as I’m around.

  Basically, I die, the whole thing goes caput.

  Ergo, I’m kind of a big deal. But because Dad is some über conservative worrywart, I’m relegated to cadaver collector, scooping up starved, forgotten, and murdered bodies and selling them to ghosts for the highest bid—or steepest favor.

  The Jelani bloodline is something mystical and magical or whatever. We’re the first. Hence why all this phenomenal cosmic power and responsibility hangs out with the demon on my shoulder. Stories of our creation have been lost and bastardized along the generations—were we cursed? Gifted? Did we make a reaper fall in love with us, or did we scorn them beyond all realm of sanity?

  Who knows. Only Dad cares. Far as I know, he’s been looking for “reasons” for everything since the day I was born. I get the idea from everyone else in Dad’s age range that The Order of today knows way more than he lets on, but I try not to dwell too hard on that fact.

  If it’s true, it just confirms he thinks I’m too stupid to head this thing, and I don’t know how much more of his disappointment I can handle.

  It’s bad enough he is consistently getting in my way, I don’t need him verbally confirming it, too.

  “Oh, Daddy!” I squeal the word out, shrill and unnecessarily chipper, to throw him off his footing. He swings right when he should’ve blocked left, and his ring mate—my archnemesis, Torben Kersey—strikes him hard in the jaw.

  A hush falls over the gym in a cloud, making my schadenfreude fueled cackle all the more obnoxious.

  Oh, I’m definitely getting that security cam footage on a hard drive.

  “I am so sorry,” Torben rasps, his voice trembling as bad as his hands as he steps towards my dad as if to help straighten him out.

  Dad stretches his jaw, pushing it back into place like a warrior and cradling the bruise forming on his face. His eyes are dark, his voice cold when he mutters, “Nice swing.”

  “I really didn’t mean to hit you.”

  I flatten my palms on the sweat slicked canvas floor and hoist myself up, dangling on the edge and gazing up at the two of them. “If you’re in a fight ring,” I say with my million dollar smile, kicking my feet lazily through the air, “your main objective is to hit your partner. In case you didn’t know.”

  Torben sneers down at me. “How about you come up here and show me?”

  “I’m just trying to be helpful,” I simper. “You were confused.”

  Once upon a time, I truly believe Torben would’ve given his left nut to get in bed with me. Maybe even the right one, too. He was playful and flirty, no matter how many times I politely ignored him, or not-so-politely told him I wasn’t interested.

  I didn’t really become a massive bitch until he started going down on Dov and got him killed. Sure, death was temporary, of course, otherwise I’d be carrying bat boy around all on my lonesome. Not to mention Dov got some real cool reaper powers in the process of, y’know, fighting one off. But it’s the principle of it. Dov got dead, came back, and now, he’s basically the most powerful Order member in the country. He handles death magic better than anyone—even most reapers.

  That’s ‘cause… well, he is a reaper. Technically. But that’s his and my little secret. And a story for another time.

  For now, I’m busy pissing Torben off, and reminding him why he’d give his left nut nowadays for the chance to rip out my throat without consequence.