I’ve liked you for a long time, Danny, but sometimes you’re a real prick. Layla buried the thought as deep as it could go. No use in getting distracted. “It’s a biter,” she muttered. “Just not ours. Repeat,notour target. It’s another one; I think…”Where have I seen that face before?
“Fuck.” Nobody yelled at Ackerman for uttering a blue word, of course. “Angle’s bad until a target gets closer to the door. Do you have an ID, Layla?”
I’m working on it. She mentally shuffled every laydown in the past few weeks—the face was familiar, and sheknewhe had to be a vampire. She just couldn’t remember precisely which one; the most unsettling thing was that they all looked so goddamn normal until you got entirely too close.
Then the flawless matte skin, the slightly different texture to the hair, and most of all some indefinable, atavistic feelingofpredator, oh shit, run awaywere all dead giveaways. It was terrifying how good the human-camouflage was, until you realized there were human monsters too.
Those were entirely out of Layla’s control. At least you could feel a hundred percent good, moral, and American about killing a bloodsucking fiend.
“Man, let’s just abort,” Ben muttered. Pitched right in the sweet spot for his mic to pick up, but not loudly enough for Dan to call him out for either cowardice or defeatism.
Layla pressed her bare shoulders against the bricks; this dress was pretty, kicky, and would be absolutely zero use when the shooting started. She could remember the biter’s face, the exact position of the grainy 8x10 photo, seeing it against a stack of manila files—worth their weight in gold, each the product of her own hard work, endless online argument, and constant re-checking.
Her role was clerical, close logistics, and occasional surveillance, which was a pretty way of saying she was a glorified maid-plus-secretary. Still, that was necessary for the smooth functioning of any endeavor. Without her, they wouldn’t evenhavehardcopies of the files from O’Shaughnassey’s crew, all verified sightings and intel.
Poor Shawn.God.
“Layla?” Dan, warningly. If the operation was called off now they might never get another chance at the biter who owned the Blue Moon Spot, but this definitely wasn’t the big blond sonofabitch Roger Griskov.
No, this guy had a mop of curly dark hair, slightly glistening under the streetlights, and a nose that outweighed the entire rest of his face. He unfolded from the backseat of the middle westbound SUV, glancing to either side as soldiers marking terrain always did, and the shape of his chin was even more familiar. She simply couldn’t remember the name, though shecould smell the cold leftover Hawaiian pizza she’d downed while doing what Ack calledfuckin’ homework.
She was only certain of one thing. “He’s a red-stripe.”Let that be enough. “Skull and crossbones. Do not engage. Repeat, do not engage.”
The biter wore a black sweater with leather elbow patches, far too heavy for a sticky summer night, and loose workman’s pants—looked like Carhartts, plus heavy boots like Pete’s, like Ack’s, like her own, no doubt steel-toed as well. The beefy bodyguards moving with him had to be human employees, in dark suits tailored almost well enough to hide the shoulder holsters.
Naturally the biter wasn’t carrying. He didn’t need to, even a new vampire was dangerous enough—and if civilians noticed him at all they would assumebigwig, maybemob boss, and hurriedly look away.
But she knew what he was. Once you glimpsed what lay under the human-looking shells of a few demimonde inhabitants, nothing was ever the same again. She could swear the strange things all but announced themselves into a microphone; the guys, claiming they didn’t see the details, called it ‘women’s intuition’.
When they weren’t mocking her for a vivid, ‘overactive’ imagination, that was.
Pete shifted, and something about the movement might have caught the vampire’s peripheral vision. The curly-headed monster glanced in their direction, and for a moment his gaze met Layla’s squarely. She hurriedly glanced away—sometimes the creatures could hypnotize, and skull-and-crossbones on any file meant serious bad news.
Her small movement did the trick. She finally remembered the name typed on the manila tab, written on the back of the 8x10 glossy.
Oh, no. No. Fucking hell.“It’s the one they—” she began, but it was too late.
A high hardratatat, Ben moving in from the alley across the street and spraying the two eastbound SUVs with a short burst. Which meant Steve-o had to back him up, because once the tango started a hunter did their job, hell or high water. Ack no doubt took his shot too, but the crack of his sniper rifle was lost under the sudden, closer noise.
Pete flinched, an instinctive movement jamming her hard against the wall. She didn’t blame him one bit—very little was worse than hearing gunfire behind you, except maybe knowing a biter was there as well. Their earpieces howled with feedback, Dan shouting something; it had to be ignored.
Now the lookouts had only one job.
Run, and maybe save their own sorry hides.
Their escape route was a good one—an alley’s mouth lurked just on the other side of Cactus YaYa’s entrance; they’d counted off the steps during daylight and on several other nights during recon. Pete’s fingers sank brutally hard into her upper arm; he set his feet and hauled, trying to yank her against a sudden eddy in the crowd.
His grip was torn loose and Layla was swept up in a tide of frightened human animals seeking any cover they could, which meant through an open nightclub door barred only by a single red velvet rope. The heavy, polished brass stand it was attached to fell with a clang lost in gun-chatter, pops, and screaming ricochets; it sounded like the biter’s bodyguards were returning fire with a vengeance.
Layla’s feet dangled a good six inches off the pavement; if she went down, she’d be trampled to paste. She grabbed blindly, getting a fistful of someone’s fishnet shirt plus sweat-slick skin, and was dragged past overturned tables as the human wave crested. The screams almost managed to drown out a high-decibel assault of throbbing line-dancing music. Lights flashed, a migraine attack of whirling red-and-purple sparkles, and the poison of panic flooding through the front door spread through the dance space and packed galleries like ink in trapped water. A burst of stench—restrooms down a long hall to the right—and a puff of skunky weed-smell hit her, receded.
No use looking around for Pete, she was on her own. Fire alarms brayed; someone with incredible presence of mind or simply a modicum of drunken mischief must have pulled a lever, because piercing white strobes were now lighting up over back exits. Two of them, if she remembered the Cactus’s layout, and now she blessed Ackerman’s dogged insistence that she be the one laboriously going over social-media photos, building a layout of both clubs.
Just to be sure.
Owe you a drink, Ackie. Her bootsoles hit the floor; Layla staggered, yanked free of whoever she’d been clutching. Swept onward again, but she’d managed to aim herself in the right direction; now she just had to pray the fire exits really were in working order—and that she wouldn’t be crushed or pummeled within sight of escape.
There was a moment of being squeezed between a woman in a fantastic silver wig and tiny bedazzled cowboy hat matched by a beaded dress clinging to her every Amazonian curve, and a person with a high pink-tipped mohawk, a heavy brown beer bottle clutched in one beringed hand. The goddess’s breast smashed against the side of Layla’s face and the mohawk’s hand blindly crawled across her ass—not to grope, but desperatelyseeking any purchase—before she was spat through a pair of flung-wide fire doors and into the back alley running parallel to 21st, propelled with such force she almost bounced off a bank of dumpsters across the way. The air was only slightly cooler outside, and screams spilling from the club’s depths sounded like lost souls in a particularly cinematic hell.
