I shove my hands into my pockets and put my head down. My phone vibrates against my leg inside my pocket as I turn out of the alley, and I walk a little faster. I don’t want to talk or make too much noise that close to my kill and risk giving my position away.
When I’m a few blocks away from the location of the dead vamp, I dig my phone out of my pocket and glance down at the screen. It’s Nathan.
I don’t know why the hell my brother is calling me at this time of night, but knowing Nate, it’s nothing good.
“What’s up?” I answer, glancing around at the rain-slicked streets and keeping my voice down.
“Mikka, I fucked up.”
That’s all it takes. Just those four fucking words. I can hear the panic in them, and it sets off every protective alarm bell in my body. I start sprinting toward the abandominium he’s recently claimed as his apartment. It’s only a few miles from here—and in this moment, I’m grateful as fuck for that.
“Did you OD?” My voice comes out choppy, and the phone bounces against my ear as I run.
“Nah—not yet—wish I did. I’m, um—I’m in a lot of trouble with a lot of people, Mikka. I had no choice. I had to do it.”
“You had to do what?”
He sucks in a shaky breath. “You have to understand, sis. Please. I owed a lot of people a shitload of money. Bad people, very bad people. I—I know you don’t have any left, or I would have asked you for help, I swear. I just had to call you to tell you before—before—”
He wheezes into the phone, like he can’t make himself say any more.
My heart sinks like a stone into my belly. “Nathan, what the fuck did you do?”
“I sold myself,” he says through a sob.
I slow my run, and my pulse seems to slow down along with my feet. “Are we talking dick sucking, or—?”
“Not like that.” He lets out a sound that could be a sob or a laugh, I can’t fucking tell. Maybe it’s both. “I sold myself to the vampires. As a blood tribute. It was the only way, you have to believe me.”
Time freezes around me. The darkness seems to swallow his words up, stealing them and muffling them in inky black.
Blood tribute.
My own brother has sold himself to the goddamn vampires.
“I don’t believe you,” I force out, my throat tight. “You’d never be that fucking stupid. You could have come to me. Why didn’t you come to me? Nathan? Nathan!”
I jerk the phone away from my face to find myself talking to my home screen. The call’s already gone dead from his side.
My stomach feels like it’s full of battery acid, and I blink at the phone as if it has the power to rewind time and undo everything he just said.
Shit. I’m too far away. There are no fucking cabs around here, and I’ll never get there in time if all I do is run.
I start running anyway.
Chapter Two
I’m running and dialing, listening to the phone ring until the voicemail picks up, and dialing again. I’m soaked in sweat and filthy rain, and his building is still at least two miles away. I need a motherfucking cab. There aren’t a whole lot of those in this neighborhood, but luck’s on my side for once. After about ten minutes of all-out sprinting, I see a cab pull around the corner up ahead of me. I flag it down and hop in, shouting the address at the driver.
“You have fare?” he asks, glaring suspiciously.
Jesus. Of fucking course. I’m covered in blood and mud and whatever other dirt was in that alley. I look like a bum, so I can’t really blame the guy. I pull a small wad of cash out of my pocket and shove it at him.
“There. Drive, dammit!”
“Yeah, yeah. All right.”
With another skeptical look at me, he turns around and grips the wheel. But fortunately, he seems as eager to get me where I’m going as I am to get there. I’m sure it’s for different reasons—he probably just wants me to stop dripping blood and dirt on his back seat—but I don’t give a fuck.
He slams on the gas and peels out.
Baltimore swirls around me, the good smashed against the awful and the ugly, and all of it nothing more than a front for supernatural predators. People like to talk about how bad the drug problem is in this city—but shit, they’d all be shooting up too if they knew they were living on top of a goddamn vampire nest. Even the ones who say they don’t believe in vampires have seen some shit they can’t explain and lived some shit they want to forget.
After what feels like forever, the cab screeches to a stop in front of my brother’s shitty-ass building. The lower windows are all boarded up, the steps are crumbling around the edges, and the door is hanging at a stupid angle. Upstairs, candles flicker in some of the windows. The smell of urine is overwhelming. I can’t tell if it’s human or animal, which means it’s probably both. There’s no running water here, no electricity, and it’s full of rats—but it’s shelter from the elements and the cops don’t have the manpower to clear it out. Nathan thinks he was lucky to find it. I think Nathan’s been so low for so long he doesn’t remember what luck looks like.
Since the entryway door is busted anyway, I don’t even bother trying the derelict panel of buzzers. Instead, I just burst in and race up the stairs, dodging random puddles of various liquids and the occasional passed-out junkie. Nathan’s apartment door is cracked open too, and I shove my way
