Vampire Fight Club

Marsden’s nostrils flared, the diamond nose stud glinting in the smoky light. “He’s coming.”

The demon who owned both Thirst and Gladius was coming for a visit. Nate waited for the hatred to sear him from the inside, but instead, his chest cavity filled with ice, and his entire body went so cold he shivered. Fade was the reason Nate had infiltrated the club’s organization in the first place. He’d waited for decades to destroy the bastard, had gained his trust while growing stronger and amassing a fortune at the demon’s expense.

Nate’s hatred had eaten him alive for decades, but now it seemed that the hatred had been replaced by apathy. Once upon a time, Fade had killed the love of Nate’s life, and it was now becoming obvious that the demon had also killed Nate. He searched deep inside himself in an attempt to find a flicker of life, but there wasn’t even a spark.

He. Was. Dead.

Chapter 2

Incoming emergencies got Vladlena Paskelkov’s adrenaline surging and brought her to life like nothing else. As a nurse at the only hospital that catered to vampires, demons, and other various underworld creatures, she got to see things she’d never encounter at a human facility and, as with most medical people, the more bizarre or horrific the injury, the more excited she got.

It wasn’t as if she liked seeing anyone hurt, especially not the young of any species. But she’d inherited the medical gene from her father, who had been a surgeon at this very hospital.

Until he was tortured and killed by The Aegis, a society of human demon slayers who called themselves Guardians and made it their mission to rid the planet of evil.

Lena had been bitter, but not for long. Her father, though he’d been good to her, had walked a sinister path, and she was surprised the slayers hadn’t killed him sooner. She’d also learned to like a few Guardians, including one who used to work at Underworld General but now ran The Aegis, and one who was mated to the hospital’s chief of staff.

And speak of the incubus, Eidolon, a dark-haired, impossibly hot Seminus demon, jogged into the bustling emergency department and snagged a pair of surgical gloves from the supply stand.

“What have we got?”

Lena gloved up as she spoke. “Male shifter, unknown breed. Found like the others, with multiple wounds, no vitals when the paramedics found him, but Shade got him jump-started.”

Eidolon smirked. “What were Shade’s exact words?”

Shade, Eidolon’s brother in charge of the hospital’s paramedics, rarely minced words. Yes, he’d given her all the technical jargon, but only after his more personal observations.

“Hell’s f**king rings,” she said, doing her best Shade imitation. “Dude looks like he went through a wood chipper.”

One dark eyebrow arched. “That’s more like it.” The red rotating light at the ambulance bay doors lit up, signaling the ambulance’s arrival in the underground lot. Before the doors opened, Eidolon turned to her, lowering his voice. “Did the serum work?”

All the adrenaline that had been surging through her veins turned to sludge, and she absently rubbed the spot on the back of her hand where she’d given herself the injection.

“No.” She cleared her voice to rid it of the sudden hoarseness. “I didn’t shift.”

Pity dulled Eidolon’s espresso eyes. “I’m sorry, Lena. I’ll keep working on it.”

He didn’t say anything more. What was there to say? Sorry you’re a freak who can’t shift into your animal form, even with a drug that works on everyone else? Sorry you’re going to go insane and die?

Over the years, she’d been through therapy and lessons, desperate to shift into her furry form before she turned twenty-four, when the inability to shift would kill her. Yesterday, on her twenty-fourth birthday, she’d injected a drug Eidolon had developed as a catalyst for those who couldn’t shift any other way. It hadn’t worked. She was a failure among failures, and it was probably a good thing her father wasn’t alive to see how, very soon, she’d lose her grip on reality and grow violent before finally dying in agony. Shifters with her problem rarely survived more than six weeks after turning twenty-four, and she’d already started marking off days on the calendar. So much time wasted. So much more she’d wanted to do.

This really sucked.

The ER doors whooshed open, and Shade and his partner, a werewolf named Luc, wheeled in a bloody male on a stretcher. As they hurried the patient to a room, Shade rattled off vitals, the dismal numbers putting an immediate damper on hope. Lena had only been out of nursing school for a couple of years, but she knew a goner when she saw one.

The acrid stench of death clung to this male like a dire leech, and . . . she gasped, grinding to a halt as Shade and Luc lifted the patient onto a table.

“Vladlena?” Eidolon’s right arm, which was encased in glyphs that ran from his fingertips to his shoulder, lit up as the healing ability inherent to his species channeled into the male. “You know this patient?”

“Vaughn.” She stumbled to the side of the bed, her legs threatening to give out on her. “He’s my brother.”

Vaughn had been the only one of her three brothers who hadn’t tried to kill her. As the runt of the litter, she’d been the target of their vicious games, and if not for her father, they’d have slaughtered her. Now that he was gone, Van and Vic had made several attempts on her life . . . which was one of the reasons she pulled a lot of double shifts at the hospital. Here, she was safe.

Eidolon motioned for another nurse to take over for Lena, and she didn’t argue. Vaughn needed care she couldn’t give right now. Not with the way her hands were shaking and her mind was spinning.

Dear gods, he’d been torn to shreds. One arm looked like it had been chewed nearly off. Deep bite wounds left skin and muscle flayed in massive slabs that peeled back from exposed bone. His throat had been torn open, and blood seeped through the layers of pressure bandages.

One of Vaughn’s eyes was swollen shut, but the other opened, and his bloodshot gaze latched onto hers. Recognition flared in the blue depths, along with unthinkable pain.

“Hey.” She took his hand, tried not to cringe at the icy-cold, clammy skin. “You’re at UG. You’re going to be fine.” She offered a trembly smile that faltered when she glanced up at Eidolon, whose expression made a liar out of her. “Vaughn, what happened? Who did this to you?”

“Th-thirst . . .” His voice was barely a rasp, his words gurgled through blood. “Club . . .”

He convulsed, and her co-workers became a flurry of action. Shade pulled her back with gentle hands as Eidolon tried to save her brother.

Time became fluid, elastic, stretching without giving Vladlena any sense of how much of it had passed before Eidolon finally looked up at the clock and spoke the words no one wanted to say—or hear.

“Time of death, 3:22.” The doctor looked over at her, his powerful shoulders slumped in defeat. “Lena, I’m sorry.”

She nodded, her throat too clogged with emotion to speak. “Shade.” Eidolon lifted a sheet to cover Vaughn’s body.

“Where did you find him?”

“Same place as the others.” Shade gave Lena’s shoulders a squeeze and stepped away from her, though he stayed close. “In the sewers beneath Fifth street.”

Shade’s words barely registered. She’d latched onto a rhythmic tapping noise that rose up even over the din of the bustling emergency department outside the cubicle. It took a moment to realize what it was; her brother’s blood, dripping to the obsidian floor. Odd what the brain focused on when it didn’t want to think about something horrible right in front of you.

“What is going on?” Lena whispered.

Shade’s dark hair brushed the collar of his black paramedic uniform as he shook his head. “I don’t know, but your brother is the only one to make it through the hospital doors alive.”

“This is the third victim this week.” Eidolon stripped off his gloves. “The human and demon realms have been in turmoil lately, but this is too specific to be related to the apocalyptic events.”

Turmoil was a mild way to put what was happening, given that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had recently appeared, and at least one apocalyptic Seal had broken. The hospital had been dealing with the violent fallout nonstop, and Eidolon had been forced to hire unschooled help and train them on the job just to keep up with the patient load.

Shade casually kicked a towel beneath the exam table to stop the sickening drip of Vaughn’s blood. It was a small thing, but a thoughtful one, and Lena could have kissed the demon for it. “So what the hell are we dealing with?”

“Fight club.” Wraith, Shade and Eidolon’s blond, half-vampire brother, sauntered up, his leather duster flapping around his boots. “You’re dealing with some sort of underground gladiator fights.”

“And you know this, how?” Shade folded his arms over his broad chest in that universal big brother pose Vaughn used to give her while he waited for an answer he knew he wouldn’t like.

Wraith blinked, all mock innocence. “I wasn’t always a model citizen, you know.”

Vladlena glanced over at her brother’s lifeless body before quickly looking away. “He wouldn’t have been involved with something like that.”

“Maybe not willingly,” Wraith said. “These places are run by the same kind of scum who run dog and c*ck fighting rings.”

Her hands tingled, and she realized she’d been hanging onto the stethoscope around her neck like it was a lifeline. “What are you saying?”

“That your brother could have been bait. Used to train fighters. Or he could have been forced into fighting.”

The strawberry milkshake she’d had for dinner soured in her stomach. Pinpricks of pain spread through her fingers as she pried them away from the ancient stethoscope, which used to be her father’s. “Where do these things operate?”

Wraith jammed his hands into his jean’s pockets. “The really skeevy ones are run in Sheoul, but the most profitable ones are here in the human realm.”