Night Huntress 03.5 - Devil to Pay
Jeaniene Frost
Chapter One
As soon as Blake saw the men, he knew tonight would end with death. The problem was, Blake didn’t think it would end with his death.
“I don’t want any trouble,” he said, realizing the stupidity of those words. It was after midnight, he was in a derelict alley with three thousand dollars’ worth of crack cocaine on him—and that was the good news.
“You lost?” one of the men asked, coming closer.
The other three from the opposite end of the alley drew closer, too. There was no way out. Blake could feel him rouse, sensing the danger. He didn’t have much time.
“You need to leave,” Blake said, fear setting in as he felt that familiar buzzing start in his head.
Another of them laughed. “Give us those bags you just bought, bitch, and we’ll leave.”
For a split second, Blake hesitated. He’d bought the crack with the last of his money, and he needed it. Not because he was an addict; Blake had never touched drugs in his life. No, he’d intended his first use to be the last thing he ever did.
But that buzzing in his head was getting louder. No. Not yet. Not until I can get away from these people…
“Take it and leave me alone,” Blake ground out, yanking the bags from his coat.
One of them took the bags, then shoved Blake. He staggered and fell, tasting blood as his mouth banged against a fire escape.
That rustling in his head got louder. It was too late.
“Kill me,” Blake gasped.
Confusion was stamped on the faces peering at him. “He crazy,” someone muttered.
Blake glanced around. No one had a gun or knife drawn. This was a dark, gang-infested alley in Columbia Heights, DC. Couldn’t one of them stab him or shoot him?
Blake began to yell the most incendiary thing he could think of. “What’re you standing there looking at? You recognize me from last night, when I was fucking your mother?”
“Oh, hell no,” one of them said.
They surrounded Blake, kicking him. Blake twisted, making no move to defend himself. Instead, he arched toward the blows. Fear rose, but not of dying.
Break my neck, Blake thought savagely. Or take a pipe and smash my head open!
They didn’t, though one of them did smash his foot into Blake’s face, breaking his nose. Blake coughed up blood even as his whole body clenched. He was almost here. Blake tried to force him back, but he was too strong.
“What’s the matter with you?” Blake roared with his last ounce of strength. “Kill me!”
A hard kick snapped Blake’s head back before his world went white. For a brief, blissful moment, Blake thought he’d finally gotten to die, and he felt overwhelming relief .
But when Blake came back to reality, there was blood everywhere. A few people were gathered at the end of the alley. Blake didn’t know how long they’d been standing there, but their eyes were wild, faces chalky with shock. They’d probably never seen anything like this, even there, in one of the worst parts of the District.
Blake let out a howl of despair as he stared at the thick red blood coating his hands and the bodies around him. Damn you, he silently screamed at the monster inside him. Damn you to hell!
But that was the problem. Hell was where the devil inside Blake came from.
Elise’s living room began to shake, but she barely noticed it. She was so used to the vibrations every time a train zoomed by that it was more attention-grabbing when there were extended periods of calm.
The fifties song “Jump, Jive and Wail” played on her iPod, a recent gift from her sire, Mencheres. Elise would have continued to listen to music on her records, no matter how many times the trains made the needle jump and scratch them, but one of Mencheres’s most common lectures was to embrace the changing world. Some vampires, as they got older, withdrew from society and became hermitlike, clinging to the things from their original time period. Eventually those vampires could become so disconnected that hatred for the ever-advancing world was a side effect.
Elise was already a loner. She lived under a metro tunnel, didn’t socialize much with other vampires or humans, and far preferred big-band music to the noise on the radio these days. All things considered, Mencheres had reason to be concerned about her sliding down that hermit road, but she didn’t hate the modern world or its changes. She was just happier by herself.
More shaking of the walls announced the arrival of the six-fifteen train. Elise put her book down with a sigh. Time to shower and eat, activities that required her to leave her comfortable home.