Persephone paced at the head of an alley behind an abandoned building in the heart of Chicago’s notorious, gang-riddled South Side. A shot rang out from a few blocks to the west, followed by more gunshots, distant screams, and then sirens.
Toto, we’re not in Kansas, anymore. The South Side was as different from the North Shore as a Timex was from a Rolex. Hey, but at least a Timex couldn’t kill you. Death was a real possibility on the South Side.
Speaking of timepieces . . .
Stepping farther into the shadows, she checked the platinum Cartier watch on her trembling wrist. She was shaking so badly it took her a few seconds to confirm the time.
The people she was there to meet were late. Then again, they usually were, but only by a few minutes.
She lowered her arms, gripping her left wrist tightly with her right hand, trying to make the shivering stop. No such luck. All she managed to do was transfer the violent tremors from her arms to her teeth, which chattered as she slinked a few steps farther into the alley as a pair of drecks appeared on the street corner, spotted her, and headed her way.
Just the sight of them with their small duffel of yes-please-I-need-some was enough to calm the shakes and bring a sigh of relief.
She’d tried to get off the blue powder, which had become blue rock, and then injectable blue serum. A month ago now, wasn’t it? Or was it two? She couldn’t think straight enough to put a timeline on when she and Miriam, her best friend and the king’s daughter, had decided to enter AKM’s cobalt addiction rehabilitation program and get off the crap.
Miriam had succeeded and remained sober.
Persephone hadn’t and was back on the blue death.
Then again, Miriam had her new mate and her new and improved father to thank for her clean status. Persephone didn’t have that kind of support at home. Lucky her.
Everything was different now that Miriam had Io in her life. She was a recovering addict, in love, and expecting her first young. All because her father had realized the error of his ways.
Almost losing his daughter had made the king reevaluate how strict he’d been with Miriam, which had led him to understand he was to blame for pushing her to use cobalt as a coping mechanism. Once he realized he was contributing to his daughter’s near-death overdoses, he quickly modified his behavior, and now he and Miriam were closer than ever, and she was getting the support she needed to stay sober.
Too bad Persephone’s own father couldn’t drink King Bain’s brand of Kool-Aid and give her some slack, too. But, noooo, her father was even worse than Miriam’s father had been before he pulled his head out of his ass. At least the king had always desired a true mate for Miriam. One who had bonded to her, soul to soul, tied one to the other through biology. It had been his methods of finding said biological mate for Miriam that had been the problem, even though his heart had always been in the right place.
But Persephone’s father’s heart was all wrong. In every way.
He followed the old traditions. Or, as Persephone called them, the archaic traditions. Traditions that had fallen out of favor with the king eons ago because of their preference for arranged matings instead of natural ones. Traditions that dismissed the natural order of things and sought to do better what Mother Nature would always do best.
Caring more about social standing and money, her father insisted on choosing a mate for her that met his standards, whether she liked the guy or not.
Only a male of proper breeding could bed his daughter, even if said bedding would never result in offspring, because it was well known among the vampire race that unless a biological mating occurred, a male couldn’t have a calling, and if he couldn’t go into a calling phase, he was practically infertile.
But to people like her father, who still engaged in the practice of arranging unions for their children, pedigree was more valuable than a male’s ability to sire a young. All they cared about was that if an arranged couple was blessed with a young, at least the bloodlines remained pure.
At least half of the vampire couples of the upper class who had been together longer than five hundred years still had no children, which was why so many bloodlines had gone extinct. No callings meant no children to pass on the family genes.
That was a fate Persephone couldn’t envision for herself. She wanted young. She wanted a lot of young. The more the merrier. But with a mate who had been chosen for her rather than one who had bonded to her naturally, a large family was out of the question.
Her father had already tried to pair her with Arion Savakis, the pure-blooded son of Gregos Savakis, another of the king’s liaisons.
She had liked Arion. He was handsome, virile, and a member of the king’s warrior class. Every female she knew wanted Arion for a mate, and she had been prepared to sacrifice her dream of a large family simply at the thought of feeling his strong, able hands on her body, her breasts, her sex. After all, if she couldn’t hope for children, she could at least hope for pleasure.
But Arion had already mated another—the male Severin—and King Bain had upheld the pairing, leaving her like a jilted human at the altar, no groom, no wedding, no honeymoon.
Still a virgin.
But her father—while livid at being robbed of something he felt was his right—simply moved on, scouting the pool of unmated upper-class sons like he was tossing a fishing line into a lake without caring what he reeled in. All that mattered was how wealthy the fish was. The quality of the meat wasn’t as important as the size of the fish’s bank account, even if what he landed was a slippery eel instead of a red snapper.
She would be mated by summer’s end. That much she was sure of. And since it appeared he’d made his selection, because she knew of only one male he was still interviewing, the mating was likely to happen sooner rather than later.
Persephone’s gag reflex nearly engaged, helped along by her cobalt withdrawal. She held no desire or fondness for the male in question. He had clammy skin, oily hair, and needed to put on at least a hundred pounds and grow six inches to be of ample size to even begin appealing to her sense of physical attraction. Not only was he shorter than she was, his eyes were too close together, his lips as thin as a thread, and his nose small and pointed.
He reminded her of Professor Snape from the Harry Potter movies, but even Snape was better looking than this male.
How would she ever withstand his cold, snakelike touch? The thought of kissing him was enough to nauseate her. Sex would surely make her retch.
But her father cared not for her feelings on the matter. She was but a puppet, a pawn, a token piece on the board game of life, controlled by another, never in the driver’s seat. Never allowed to make her own decisions.
Which was why she was in this alley, pulling out a small bundle of cash and handing it to the first dreck who reached her.
If she couldn’t make decisions that impacted her life, she would make decisions that could effect her death.
“You want the usual?” the dreck asked, taking her money without counting it.
They’d gone through this drill enough times for him to know she never shorted him.
She nodded, nibbling her bottom lip as she eyed the duffel and began rolling up her sleeve.
The usual was an injection of serum now and a small cellophane bag of rocks she could smoke later. But they had to inject her. She couldn’t stomach needles.
The second dreck pulled out a syringe filled with bright-blue fluid and directed her to sit down. You didn’t want to be standing when the drug entered your bloodstream. The convulsions and instant euphoria were so strong, your legs went out from under you.
She didn’t care that the ground was damp and dirty, or that the alley smelled strongly of urine and something else resembling feces. As she dropped her butt onto the pavement and leaned against the cool brick wall behind her, all she cared about was getting the blue death inside her.
If she was lucky, tonight would be the night. Her last fix. She had gradually increased the amount of serum she purchased, hoping for the overdose that would end her life so she could finally be released from servitude to her father’s agenda. But her heart was still beating, her lungs still pumping air, her blood still warm.
She just couldn’t catch a break and die.
As the first dreck stood guard, the second knelt beside her, tied rubber tubing around her biceps, tapped the inside of her elbow looking for her well-used vein, and then slid the needle home.
The rush hit her the moment he began plunging the serum into her.
Yeeesssss . . .
Colored lights danced like tiny fairies in her vision. Euphoria not unlike that of venom euphoria—only darker and more robust—hit her. Then the convulsions started. Small at first then with greater intensity. She was flying . . . flying high above the earth . . . free with great white wings instead of arms. Wind blew her hair back from her face, and she smiled up at the heavens, spiraling higher, higher.
She glanced to the side and saw the skull face of Death. He was coming for her, dressed all in black, moving with the stealth of a thief.
Tears blossomed in her eyes. Death. Sweet, beautiful Death had finally come for her. And he was beautiful. Glorious even. So much so that her tears of joy flowed freely down her cheeks and dripped off her chin.
Then she began to fade, her vision dimming, her heart growing sluggish, every muscle falling limp like dying weeds pulled from a garden.
This was it. Freedom was finally hers. At last.
Ronan dropped two dead bodies in the corner of a dark, empty warehouse and dusted off his gloved hands.
Whoever the hell had made oversized pants that hung halfway—or even all the way—off a dude’s ass a fashion craze deserved a round of applause. Not that Ronan liked the look. He hated it, but it made his job easier. If these two vagrants hadn’t been fashionistas of the off-the-ass trend, at least one of them might have gotten away. But no, they had tried to run in their silly attire and tripped over their own low-slung, wide-leg jeans, the cuffs of which had bunched up over their feet like coiled rope.
Thank you, thug life.
Chicago was a fractionally safer place now that these two were off the streets. What he’d seen in their minds about what they’d done and what they’d been about to do had made exterminating them an easy call. The little girl—the cousin of one of the boys, if you can believe that shit—in that house they were trying to break into would be okay now. She wouldn’t be raped, beaten, and killed. She would sleep through the night, wake up in the morning, put on her school uniform, and head off to class, none the wiser to how close she’d come to being just another statistic.
What kind of human did something like that to another human? A relative, no less?
Even the vampire race had bad eggs, but Ronan had never understood how someone could do something so heinous against another.
Unfortunately, this was par for the course on the South Side. This area was a hive of crime where drecks and humans alike did tragically bad shit to anyone and everyone. Human females were trafficked and pimped out by the quarter hour. Little kids were murdered execution style in alleys as retaliation for a member of one gang offending a rival gang member’s mother. Money changed hands for both drugs and weapons hundreds of times a night. And drecks dealt the lion’s share of their cobalt here.
In other words, there was no shortage of criminals on the South Side who needed a brand of justice the police couldn’t serve, what with all their rules, due process, and the need for tangible proof.
Ronan needed no such proof. He witnessed the crime, he executed the grime, and then he took it out like the garbage it was.
He eyed the two lifeless gangbangers slumped on the grungy floor. It would be days, if not weeks, before the bodies were found, but the most important takeaway from their deaths was that they were two less weapons made of flesh and blood that could be used against the innocent.
Which left only a few thousand still in need of termination.
No sweat. All in a night’s work.
Making mental tick marks reminiscent of the way fighter pilots marked their planes with kills or successful missions, Ronan turned to go, his skull mask still shielding his face, ready to dematerialize back to Alexis’s Kawasaki.
That’s when he smelled them. Drecks. And cobalt. And a vampire. A female who was this very second drowning her blood in blue death.
How was that for lucky? He’d poofed right into a deal going down. He was going to get two kills tonight for the price of one and maybe even save a life.
Whisking silently to the roof, he darted around the perimeter of the warehouse, zeroing in on the activity.
Male voices drifted up from the alley that ran behind the building.
“What’s wrong with her?” one voice said.
“Do I care?” said another. “She wanted a little extra, she got a little extra. What do I care if she dies? Bitch had a death wish, anyway, and we got our money, right?”
Ronan vapored to the foot of the alley and slinked toward the sound of rustling, as if the two males were rapidly gathering their shit for a fast exit.
“Yeah, paid in full,” the first voice said. There was a pause before he spoke again. “I don’t think she’s breathing.”
“Good. That’s one less vampire we have to worry about. Grab the rocks. We can resell them to someone else and pocket the extra cash.”
Ronan peered around a dumpster to find two drecks gathering paraphernalia and stuffing it in a small black duffel. He couldn’t see the vampire they’d apparently just doped, probably because she was on the ground. Cobalt took the legs out from under a person. That’s why you drugged up on your ass, so you didn’t crack your skull when you convulsed and toppled over like a crumbling silo.
“Shit, we’ve got to go before someone catches us,” the first dreck said.
“Jesus, relax. No one’s going to catch us here. This location is as far off the radar as you can get.”
“Not for those AKM fucks. This is just the kind of place they like to patrol.”
“Fuck them. We were just filling a junkie’s need. We’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Like they’d believe that load of shit.”
Ronan pressed closer, still staying in the shadows but flirting with the light. There. He could finally see the victim. Long blond hair. Her head was slumped forward like she was unconscious. She was seated on the filthy concrete, her back resting against the brick wall of the warehouse. The acrid scent of cobalt laced the air.
Nothing wrong? This asshole thought they’d done nothing wrong? Think again.
Ronan knew the score with cobalt. He knew the damage it did and why the drecks were using it against vampires. Maybe he and his dad didn’t get along on their good days, but ol’ Dad knew things no other vampire did, and he shared his knowledge with Ronan, which was just about the only reason Ronan stuck around. He didn’t know where his dad got his intel, but possessing it gave Ronan a leg up in the information war that seemed to plague King Bain.
Stepping into the light, he blasted the first dreck with a pulse of energy from the oscillator strapped to his palm. The same oscillator he’d used to break the window at Micah’s apartment over a week ago and the same oscillator that had destroyed the internal organs of the gangbangers discarded inside the warehouse.
The dreck flew backward like tossed meat, slamming into the wall, knocked out cold as he fell to the dirty, decrepit pavement.
“What the—?” The second dreck spun around and went for his gun.
Ronan leaped forward and kicked the gun from his hand then fisted the dreck’s jacket and swung him around, slamming him into the wall so hard he heard the asshole’s teeth rattle.
“You think you’ve done nothing wrong here?” Ronan hissed. His modulated voice came through vicious and hushed. He sounded like Satan’s henchman.
The dreck scowled at his mask. “What the fuck are you? A video game character?”
Cute. Very cute. If only he knew. “I’m your worst fucking nightmare. And you’re about to get Mario Brothered.”
The dreck sneered. “Even if you are AKM, you have no jurisdiction over me.”
“You just became my jurisdiction, asshole.” Behind the mask, Ronan grinned. “And you’d be better off if I were AKM.” This fucker was in for a surprise. A nasty, demented, torturous surprise.
Worming his way into the dreck’s mind, he began stretching his thoughts, turning them, distorting them, twisting them into nightmarish insanity that felt more real than the world around him. He was delivering a fate worse than death. He was gifting the dreck with madness.
The dreck’s eyes widened. His body tensed and shuddered, and his breathing intensified, growing ragged and haphazard. Within seconds, abject terror lined his face, filling his eyes with horror.
Ronan had no idea where his gift had come from, being that both his parents were full-bloods. Typically, only mixed-bloods were born with such supernatural gifts. But he’d learned almost twenty years ago, right after his transition, that he could distort someone’s reality so drastically that they could no longer decipher truth from fiction unless he allowed them to.
Only one person knew of his gift. Alexis. She’d seen him use it.
But he didn’t abuse it. Maybe he scoffed in the face of danger. Maybe he laughed at fear and let reckless abandon dominate in ways it shouldn’t. But he would never take his gift for granted. Only those he deemed most worthy of a trip through hell suffered its wrath.
Ronan yanked the dreck away from the wall and tossed him aside like a rotten fish carcass. The dreck landed haphazardly and staggered, blabbering unintelligibly, cackling like a crazy person strung out on gasoline-laced PCP as he turned and lurched for the alley’s exit. If he didn’t get himself killed by stepping in front of a moving car, he might make it to morning before taking his own life.
The first dreck groaned and pushed off the ground, shaking his head, dispelling the brain fog that resulted from being tossed against brick and mortar.
Ronan was on him in a heartbeat, lifting him off the filthy pavement. “Looks like you picked the wrong night to be out dealing cobalt.”
He pressed the oscillator directly over the dreck’s heart. A split second later, a pulse ripped through the dreck’s chest. His arms and legs jerked, and he convulsed as if he’d been struck by lightning. Then he went limp, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, his eyes lifeless orbs.
Ronan discarded him as carelessly as he’d done with the first dreck then turned toward the female.
Crouching beside her, he gently lifted her head and bushed back her hair, listening for any sign of a beating heart.
As he revealed her face, he caught his breath, his whole body growing lighter, as if he’d been lifted by an angel and his feet no longer touched the ground.
He’d never seen a more beautiful female, nor one so pure. One full inhale was enough for him to know she’d never been touched. Never been violated in the most intimate way.
A virgin? On the South Side? Trying to reconcile the two was like trying to read a book upside down.
So what in the hell was she doing here?
Enchanted to the point of bewilderment, he took in her full pink lips, her rounded cheeks, the way her dainty eyebrows arched over her closed eyes.
He’d do anything for her to open those eyes and look at him, just so he could see what color they were.
Her labored breathing was what finally jolted his wits back into him. Her pulse was sluggish. He could hear her heart thumping hard but slow—too slow—to keep her alive for long. If he didn’t do something to save this fair creature, she would die.
Vampires might have been immortal, but cobalt was their Achilles heel. Overdosing led to death, and it was obvious she had way more than OD’d.
Ronan couldn’t let her die. He didn’t have to see into her eyes or hear her voice to know the world would be a far worse place without her in it.
Casting aside his fascination, he scooped her into his arms. “What the hell are you doing using this shit?” he murmured.
She obviously came from money. No one wore couture to buy drugs unless that was all they had in their wardrobe, and the Hermès scarf and Chanel handbag lying beside her bespoke of wealth.
What could drive such a fine female to shoot up? What was she trying to escape that was so awful? If he could stomach his own abhorrent life without requiring drugs to do so, she could certainly accept hers.
Snatching her handbag and cradling her against him as he connected with her near-lifeless form, he dematerialized and reappeared outside AKM.
If only there were somewhere else he could take her, because AKM was the last place he wanted to be, but this was the best place—the only place—capable of treating a vampire overdose.
Rushing through the front door, he shot toward the reception desk. “Cobalt overdose!”
The female behind the desk jumped to attention, her expression contorting into one of terror as she stared at Ronan. Oh, yeah, he was still wearing the mask and using his voice modulator.
“HELP! She’s dying!”
She jumped to attention then quickly punched in a series of numbers on her phone.
He probably looked like the Grim Reaper, but instead of taking away the dead, he was trying to keep the mysterious, beautiful female alive.
“We have an overdose in the lobby!” the receptionist barked to someone. “Alert medical and get someone up here now!” She disconnected and stared fearfully at him but said nothing further.
He rocked the precious female in his arms and felt for her pulse again. Shit! Where was her pulse? He shifted his fingers on her neck. He couldn’t find a pulse! Couldn’t hear one, either.
“Help me!” he shouted at the receptionist as he fell to his knees and laid the blonde on the floor.
The receptionist hesitated.
“HELP ME NOW! She doesn’t have a pulse, goddamn it!”
The other female rushed around the counter and landed on her knees beside him. “What do I need to do?”
Ronan pushed up his mask and tilted the blonde’s head back. “Start chest compressions.”
The female clamped her hands together and began pumping on the blonde’s chest as he guided her to press down forcefully to the beat of the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive.” After twenty compressions, Ronan told her to stop, bent down, pressed his lips against the blonde’s—they were so soft—and breathed for her.
“Again,” he commanded as he sat back up. “Twenty more compressions.”
Back and forth, he and the receptionist performed two more sets. On the third, the blonde sputtered and coughed, blinking frantically as she tried to get her bearings. As she opened her eyes for good, Ronan dropped his mask back over his face and lifted her upper body off the floor.
“You’re okay.” He brushed back her soft, silky hair. “You’re going to make it.” He glanced behind him as the double doors leading into the belly of the building burst open and a team of doctors and nurses poured through, pushing a gurney. “See, they’re here to help you. You’re going to be okay.”
Her eyes were the bluest he had ever seen. Light blue. Jamaican-water blue. Clear-sky-after-a-summer-storm blue. Her perfect brows scrunched as her gaze focused on him. Then a faint smile touched her pale lips as her expression softened, and she reached for his face. For his mask. “Death . . . my hero,” she whispered weakly.
My hero.
Those two simple words echoed inside his head as if she’d shouted them inside a canyon.
My hero. My hero . . . my hero . . .
He’d never been anyone’s hero, and hearing the words lift from her mouth caused his heart to skip a beat. Someone like her, who had everything, who should have wanted for nothing, thought of him as a hero. Her hero.
If only she knew. He was no one’s hero. If anything, he was a curse. Nothing but trouble and bad fortune had followed him all his life. He’d fought relentlessly just to have anything that resembled a normal childhood.
He stared at her, mesmerized by her eyes. “I’m no hero,” he said quietly, trailing his fingers down the alabaster skin of her cheek. “Just someone in the right place at the right time to save the most beautiful female in the world.”
Her smile widened in that drunken way a drug addict grins when she’s seeing purple elephants dancing in tutus. Then she let out a breathy giggle that quickly turned into sobs as she clutched the front of his hoodie and tried to pull herself up from the floor. “Please help me. Don’t let him do this to me. Don’t let him take me back. Please.”
What was she talking about? Who was him? Where was back? Why didn’t she want him to send her back there? And where could he find him and rip his heart out for making her so afraid?
He took her hand and pushed her toward the doctors as they reached for her.
“You’re okay. They’ll take care of you here.” He didn’t want to let her go.
“Pleeeaaassse . . .” She sobbed and continued reaching for him even as the doctors lifted her from his arms, stripping him of her touch, and placed her on the gurney. As they hurried her away, her eyes locked onto his and screamed silent pleas for him not to leave her.
He watched them whisk her away, feeling an unfamiliar ache stir inside his chest, along with a peculiar sense of loss. It felt like he’d just missed something vital. Something that meant life or death. Letting them take her didn’t feel right.
“What the fuck?”
Ronan glanced up as two enforcers joined the receptionist, who had retreated from him and now stood several feet away. One of the enforcers had long blond hair and shoulders as wide as a tractor trailer. The other had high and tight dark hair and a wicked tattoo sleeve down one arm.
Severin and Io. He knew the players inside AKM well enough to identify these two.
“Skeletor! Get him!” Io shot toward him with Sev hot on his heels.
In a blink, Ronan darted out the door and dematerialized, engaging the refilled vapor pod attached to his belt to erase his trail as he flew away from AKM.
Away from her.
The female who’d stolen his heart with just one look.
The female who had awakened something inside him he’d never felt before.
My hero . . .
This wasn’t going to end well.
For her.
For him.
For everybody.
Weeks from now, he would look back on this night and wish he’d done about a million things differently.