Shiv Crew (9 page)

“You’re worried about how it would make
you look?”

“I assure you I will do what is
best for this organization and for the public we are sworn to protect. You need
to understand something right away, Rune. If you’re to stay on as Shiv Crew
captain, you will have to play by the rules.”

There it was. The threat. She
smiled, gratified when his face paled. She was, after all, part Other. Even if
he didn’t realize it, he’d feel something different. And it would scare him. It
should
scare him.

He raised his hands. “Rune. Come
on. I have to play by the rules too. If I thought the public would accept her,
if I thought she wouldn’t get hurt…”

“Or is it just that you hate
Others? Maybe you should join COS.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong. I most
certainly do not hate Others. You and I have had our disagreements in the past,
but you don’t know me.” He tugged on his stiff shirt collar. “I protect Others,
Rune. I don’t hate them.”

She stood and left his office
without another word.

There was nothing more to say.
Maybe he didn’t hate Others, but he was being unfair about Lex.

For now her hands were tied, but
she’d figure something out.

She walked back into her office.
Only the twins and Lex remained. Jack, Z, and Raze shared an office—an enormous
office—and Levi informed her that’s where they’d gone.

She sat down, her head pounding.
Shit.
She’d been back to work for less than an hour, and already things were going
badly.

She could have cried when Ellis
swooped into the room with a huge, hot mug of coffee. “Here you go, Rune. I
figured you’d need it after your talk with the new boss.”

“You’re a lifesaver, Ellie.”

“I know,” he said, grinning.

She couldn’t miss his probing,
worried glance, and she grinned up at him to let him know she was okay. Still,
he dropped a tiny pill on the desk. She scooped it up and washed it down with
the coffee. She’d need the pain relief out in the field.

He slapped some papers on her desk.
“For today, my dear. Don’t overdo it.”

“I’ll be fine.”

 It was nine fifteen in the
morning. Time to get to work.

You okay?

Rune glanced down at the text, then
ignored it. Fucking Jeremy.

Usually he would have left it alone,
but her phone vibrated again.
I’m sorry.

She hit reply and punched in the
letters, furiously.
Fuck you.

Stuffing the cell in her jeans
pocket, she walked to her car, Lex and the twins at her heels. Denim helped Lex
into the front, and he and Levi started to climb into the back.

“Follow us,” Rune said. “I want
some alone time with Lex.”

They glanced at each other, like
they always did, and in that second of silent communication acknowledged and agreed.
“Okay,” Levi said.

The crew was to meet her at the
first stop of the day. The last stop would be after dark at Nicolas Llodra’s
favorite haunt, a popular nightspot called Club Kiss. If he wasn’t there she’d
leave word she was looking for him, that she wanted his side of the story.

But it was hard to believe he could
be innocent. She’d seen the human body in the nest, and she knew his people
would never take a human without his permission.

Rune had other things to talk to
him about, though. She wanted to find her father. She needed to see him again.
To talk to him. To convince him to flee his master and her city before her crew
was forced to stake him.

While she’d been out of commission,
Jeremy had gotten another tip. He’d sent her crew to the pretty much deserted village
of Blackfire where they’d taken out another nest. Her father, Jack had assured
her, was not among them.

“Am I fired?” Lex asked, startling
Rune from her thoughts.

Her cell vibrated again, and she ignored
it. “Yeah, I’m sorry, Lex. The new boss has forbidden me to hire you. But don’t
worry. I’m far from finished with this. I’ll get you back in.”

The twins were tailgating her,
probably to keep a better eye on the girl. She guessed they didn’t trust her completely.
Not yet. She couldn’t blame them.

Lex shrugged. “When you need help,
I’ll be there. Whether that guy says I am Shiv Crew or not.”

“I wanted to talk to you about
something else.”

“What I saw when I touched you.”

Rune kept her stare on the road.
“Yeah.”

For a long moment there were no
sounds other than the quiet hum of the car heater. Finally Lex spoke, but her
words were nothing close to what Rune expected to hear.

“I don’t trust many people,” Lex
said. “I trust Levi and Denim. Now I trust you.”

Rune didn’t know what to say, so
she said nothing.

“No matter what you think, you’re
not a monster.”

Lex’s words brought her curiously
close to tears. Dammit. Lately she was an emotional mess.

They sank into silence, and neither
one of them seemed inclined to break it. Rune’s headache was gone thanks to Ellis’s
potent little pill.

The first item on the schedule was
another quick trip to Blackfire. After her crew had staked the vampires there,
the captive vampire Rune had captured told them to go back. There was another
nest, he’d said, in the basement of the Blackfire high school.

Maybe they’d find vampires in the
nest there, maybe not. She’d already ordered her crew to silver Llodra but not
to kill him. She wanted to talk to him first.

In an addendum to this morning’s
schedule, Mitch had instructed them not to try to bring Llodra in alive. There
were no good reasons for it, and it was too risky. He was too powerful a vampire.

There were undertones of Jeremy in
Mitch’s order. Whatever. She didn’t care.

She was going to question the
master vampire. If she didn’t find him today, she’d look for him at Club Kiss
tonight. She wouldn’t give up trying to talk to him until she saw the stake in
his heart and his head lying at her feet.

Maybe he’d flee the city, but she
doubted it. It was too difficult for expelled vampires to find free territory. If
a master entered another master’s city, he’d be torn apart.

It was not a kind world for the
monsters. Not kind at all.

Fifteen minutes later she turned
off the highway into Blackfire and followed the bumpy, broken streets to the
old high school.

Jack and Z were already there,
dragging kill kits out of their cars. The twins were right behind Rune. She
spotted Raze’s truck with its overly tinted windows rolling toward the school
from the opposite end of the street.

“Seven Shiv Crew members,” Z said.
“Lucky number.”

“Six,” Lex pointed out. “I’m not
technically Shiv Crew.”

Rune shrugged and opened the hatch
to get her kit. “Fuck him. As far as we’re concerned, you are.”

Denim and Levi grinned and
high-fived each other.

“You’ve got to tell me about these
dance sessions between you and Ellie,” Rune said to Lex. Ellis loved to dance.
He spent most of his nights at clubs getting down with his bad self.

“We’ve only danced twice,” Lex
said, “but he was right. Expelling energy helps. Maybe I do need the outlet.
Whatever, he was right.”

“He usually is,” Rune replied. “But
don’t tell him I said so. Already have trouble finding him a hat that’ll fit.”

Lex smiled. “He deserves every inch
of that big head.”

Raze walked up to Rune’s car, where
the others had gathered. “Ready to find some monsters?”

“If they’re in there, we’ll find
them,” Rune said, and slammed the hatch shut. She was a trained professional,
and the edict had been sent down. Still, tremors of unease trickled through
her.

She was getting soft.

“Remember,” she reiterated, “if you
see my father or Llodra…”

“We got it, Rune,” Z said.

She noticed that even though he was
snuggled into a warm jacket and black watch cap, he looked askance at her
turtleneck and gloves.

“You know it’ll be too dark for the
shades inside,” he said.

He was suspicious. The rest of them
paused at his words, picking up on his doubt. She sighed. Fine, she’d show them
her battered face. She should have known it wasn’t going to be possible to hide
it from them. The sunglasses were a pain in the ass, and the concealer was
itching like she’d smoothed it on with poison ivy.

She’d think up a lie. Wouldn’t be
hard. She’d been lying her entire life. She reached up and pulled the glasses
off her face. “Fine. Look, laugh, poke fun. I was attacked by a couple of
pissed off, very large ladies at a bar.” She pursed her lips, waiting.

“Hilarious,” Z said. “I just wanted
to make sure you really did have a hangover and not a couple of bruises. I’d
have had to kick some ass if that’d been the case.”

The rest of them laughed—except for
Raze. He never laughed. He never laughed, and she never cried. Well, rarely. Her
men turned away and began walking toward the school.

Confused, she opened her door,
tossed the glasses onto the floor, then looked at her reflection in the
rearview mirror.

What the hell?
She had not a
single bruise. The cut on the bridge of her nose was gone. She had no fading
marks, cuts, or anything else that would suggest she’d nearly died at the hands
of her lover.

She’d noticed a lack of pain but
gave that credit to Ellis’s pill.

“Rune,” Z called. “You’re gorgeous.
Let’s get going, sweet thing.”

She shook her head at her image,
totally mystified, then jogged to catch up with her crew. “Don’t call me sweet
thing,” she said to Z, and took her place at the front of the line.

Time to go in and catch some
monsters.

She’d think about her monster
later, when she was alone. She might hate it, but the bastard sure took care of
her. Of course, it was her monster’s fault she
needed
to be taken care
of. What a vicious cycle.

She led her crew to the basement of
the school. The place had a peculiar smell. If she concentrated, she got whiffs
of a particular odor only schools seem to have, but mixed in with that was a
stronger odor of rot, mold, and blood.

It was not a soothing bouquet.

The deeper they went, the worse the
smells became.

“If they’re not here now,” she told
her crew, “they sure as hell have been. Do you guys smell that?”

“I smell mildew,” Z said. “But no
dead bodies or anything. What do you smell?”

She kept her mouth shut. Her
monster seemed to be getting stronger, and now it was scenting things the
humans couldn’t. The bastard had remained deep inside her for most of her life,
but had decided it’d been in the dark long enough.

As long as she could control it,
everything would be okay. She could manage. She could live the lie.

Her monster wasn’t the only thing
in darkness. She halted and slipped on her goggles, waiting for the rest of
them to do the same before she continued down. Darkness was a friend of the
vampire. The human? Not so much.

She almost stepped on the first
vampire before she realized they’d found the nest. And it was full.

“Shit,” she hissed, and held up a
hand letting the others know. Time to go quiet.

The vampires lay upon the floor in
rows, and she stepped carefully between them looking for Llodra and her father.
Each time she left a section and moved on, her crew stepped in to do the dirty
deed.

She only realized when they were
halfway finished that she hadn’t killed one monster. She looked up at a humming
sound. Lex was standing right beside her.

Lex wouldn’t need goggles. She was
always in the dark.

She tugged at Rune’s sleeve and
pointed toward the far wall.

Rune hooked her hand around Lex’s
neck and pulled the girl’s mouth to her ear.

“Human female,” Lex whispered.
“Alive.”

Shit.

Rune waved her hand in the air,
getting Jack’s attention. He came immediately, stepping over the vampires.

“Warm one by the wall,” she
whispered, and with Jack beside her, slipped toward the spot Lex had pointed
out.

She heard the crew spreading out
inside the room, the quick
thwacks
of the vguns, and the slicing of the
big knives.
Thwack!
One less vampire in Spiritgrove.

Jack saw the human before she did.
He nudged her and pointed his gun to where the human lay.

Lex said she was alive, and Rune
had no reason to doubt her.

Carefully, she and Jack stepped
over sleeping vampire after sleeping vampire until finally they stood over the
girl.

Rune holstered her vgun and then in
one smooth movement straddled the girl and placed her hand over her mouth.

She woke screaming and kicking as
Rune had known she would. Jack lent his strength to control the girl, while
Rune tried to calm her.

“It’s okay, baby. We’re here to
help you.”

The girl shook her head hard,
trying to dislodge Rune’s hand from her face. When that didn’t work, she managed
to open her mouth and take a nice hunk out of Rune’s palm.

“Son of a bitch.” Rune jerked her
hand away and stood. “Pick her up, Jack, and carry her the fuck upstairs.”

The girl screamed, and it was
enough to cause some of the still-living vampires to move restlessly in their
twilight sleep.

“Fuck,” Jack muttered, and
strong-armed her out of there, Rune on his heels.

He dropped the wild girl on the
second-floor landing beneath a dirty window, and he and Rune hunkered down on
either side of her.

She wouldn’t be still. Her red-and-purple
hair stood on end, and mascara smudges stained her pale face. Rune would have
been surprised if she had seen her eighteenth birthday.

She wasn’t very big, but she was a
handful. For some crazy reason, she kept trying to run back down the stairs.

Finally, after she punched Jack in
the throat and caught half of Rune’s face beneath her jagged nails, Rune drew
back and slapped her. Hard.

“Calm the fuck down, you little
idiot. We’re here to save you!”

The girl stopped struggling
suddenly, Rune’s words cutting her off mid-screech. She darted her stare
between Jack and Rune, her lips drawn back from white, even teeth. “Save me?
Save
me? Bitch, who said I needed saving?”

Rune exchanged a quick look with
Jack, who raised his eyebrows. The girl hadn’t been entranced by the vampires.
She was much too active and aware for that.

Rune narrowed her eyes. “So you’re
here because…”

“Um, because I
want
to be
here?”

Disgusted, Rune wished she’d
slapped the silly girl harder. “You want them to turn you.” Sometimes a single
exchange was enough to turn a human. The vampire would bite the human, drain at
least half their blood and then open a vein for the human to drink from the
vampire. This exchange of blood could—and usually did—turn the human.

But sometimes they could try for
weeks and still not turn a human. Those humans seemed to have a natural
immunity. Scientists were hard at work trying to isolate a gene in the DNA
responsible for the protection, but so far, were having no luck.

There were a few cases of the human
being turned without either party intending for it to happen. After being
brutalized by a vampire, the human’s wounds were contaminated by vampire blood,
causing the human to turn.

The girl shrugged. She was wearing
a stained purple shirt, a torn pair of jeans, and multicolored nails on dirty,
shoeless feet.

She pushed up a sleeve and showed
Rune the punctures and marks on her skinny arm. Many of them. It was like she had
been kissed by a whole lot of high school boys with not one man among them who
knew what he was doing.

Then she turned her face away,
pushed her hair back, and pointed out the marks on her neck. “I have them all
over,” she said, her eyes dark, proud. “I’d rather be undead than anything else
on earth. They
rock
. And they live forever. Who wouldn’t want to be
turned?”