Hell's Belle (10 page)

CHAPTER 14

I eased into the right turn by my building and looked across the street. The dog was there, pacing along the wall of the dilapidated building.

I came to a stop and killed the engine. She looked at me warily, hunched over a bit, head down and eyes up. I surveyed her in a similar manner.

For a big dog, she was a scrawny thing, all legs and ribs where she should have been solid muscle. Without taking my eyes from her, I swung off the bike, reached into the saddlebag and pulled out the package of ground beef from Venda Ravioli.

Both of us yelped in surprise when the building's door crashed open and a stocky man sauntered into the noon sunlight. I had never seen him in the neighborhood before, and I eyed him warily. Apparently, the dog wasn’t too keen on him either.

He stopped when he caught me looking at him, and smiled, a gold bridge covering his front teeth. Bristling, I snarled at him, exposing my fangs.

I wasn't the only one snarling. The dog's growl suddenly caught his attention. She advanced on him, showing her teeth too, the growl getting louder and more intimidating. She inched forward, hair bristling, a hungry look in her eyes. The man was too scared to move, which was probably for the best. The dog would have given chase.

If I looked half as scary as that when I was pissed off, vamps like Marcello would beg for a stake through the heart. The power the Rottweiler was throwing off was awesome.

Slowly, I walked towards the dog. By now, she had the gold-toothed man almost cornered. He had his hand back on the door, ready to bolt back inside. Which he immediately did when I called out "Hey pretty puppy!" and she turned to stare me down.

Ears back, she cautiously padded her way towards me. At least she wasn't showing me her teeth. Progress!

I rested on my haunches to meet her on her level. She circled around me, leaving several feet between us. I ripped open the package of raw meat, and pulled out a chunk. I held my hand out, palm up, with the ground beef on top and waited.

Her nose twitched. She cautiously moved towards me, eyes never leaving my face. She tentatively sniffed at the meat and then snatched the whole piece into her mouth and swallowed. Just as fast, I grabbed another wad and held it out. She gobbled it up. We repeated this until she downed the whole pound of ground chuck.

"Sorry, girl," I said soothingly, wiping my hands down the sides of my pants. "I am all out."

I stood and walked back to the bike, and she followed along a few feet behind. I turned and looked at her. Her ears were now forward -- alert but friendly. Her panting almost looked like a smile.

I didn't want the sound of the bike to spook her, so I pushed it towards the garage without starting it. With a press of a button, the garage doors on the loading dock raised, and I walked the bike into the building. I could hear the tip tap of her nails come in behind me. I stopped with my back to her. She walked up to me and nuzzled my hand. We were friends.

Dropping to one knee, I stroked her head while looking her over. Her eyes were bright and alert. Even once she bulked up, she'd still be small for a Rottweiler. I checked her ears -- dirty but no mites. No fleas either -- the one bonus of living on the street in the winter months. Underneath the grime and matted fur, she was a beautiful dog. Too beautiful to leave on the street.

As if she were reading my thoughts, she pushed her wet nose into my face and licked. Then she turned and trotted back out the garage door and across the street to continue her patrol along the opposite building. She clearly had something on her mind, and didn't want to leave the street just yet. I was worried about her, but she made her choice. I'd pop out later and give her some steak.

I closed the garage door and made my way to my apartment. The building was quiet. Frankie was in the basement, well hidden from the sunlight. I unlocked my apartment door, and breathing deeply, entered my sanctuary of an apartment. After removing my ass-kicking boots, I walked to the living room, and stared at the mess of books on the floor. I grabbed my laptop off my desk and dropped down to the couch. Firing up my computer, I figured I would try good old Google translate. It was a reach, but I had nothing to lose for trying.

If Frankie were awake, he would have laughed me out of my apartment. There were many modern things he refused to believe in, and one of those things was the Internet. For all the tinkering he did with electronics and his spectacular ability to build just about anything, including my fabulous bike, his abhorrence of the World Wide Web was pretty shocking.

Once the site loaded, I opened to a random page in one of the old tomes. I pecked out C-O-Q-U-O-E and hit return. I blinked and a correction popped up. "Do you mean C-O-Q-U-O?" I clicked yes and a translation popped up. "Boil." It was Latin. Sort of.

DUH.

Frankie and I both missed the obvious. Of course, it wasn't Latin exactly. It was easy to misread it as something else.

I tried another word. C-I-C-U-O-A-T-E changed to C-I-C-U-A-T-E translated to Hemlock. Boil poison? Lovely. What the hell was I reading anyway? D-E-A-V-O-T-I-O-U? It was really "devotion," an incantation used to imbue the poison, apparently from the days of Caesar. These books belonged to my parents? That was weird.

I stuck a scrap of paper into the book to mark the page and stretched. The sun was low in the sky, ready to slide away to the horizon. I had my date with Max in a few hours, but needed to work off some aggression and clear my head. My little gym in the corner was calling to me. It was time to channel some vampire angst.

CHAPTER 15

Drenched in sweat, I pushed the weight up for the final rep of the bench press.
Weight-training helped clear my mind, especially when I was frustrated.

I climbed on a chair to reach my pull up bar. "Control the negative
" I reminded myself, through gritted teeth, at the top of the movement, and slowly lowered my body back down. Repeat. After 20 pull-ups, I dropped to the ground. Chugging water, I walked in circles to catch my breath. But my mind refused to slow down.

My lineage traced back to ancient Greece. My dad was a descendant of the
Empusa, a demigoddess who seduced young men and sucked their blood. Since so many vampires had been vanquished over the years, particularly during the Victorian age when vampire folklore ran amok, there were not many left directly descended from the original vampires. This made my father one of the most powerful vampires in the world when he was alive. His powers apparently passed down to me, but would never be fully realized until I turned into a full vampire, which wouldn’t happen until I was dead.

According to Dr. O, I was one of the few true vampire children in the world. Vampires are made, not born. So I was a freak phenomenon. I don’t think my parents even considered that I would have vampire in me. With a human mom, it was hard to imagine that they thought I would be born anything but human.

My mom was a student at Brown University, a double major in religion and folklore, when she met my father. Being from Catemaco -- where there’s a witch on every corner, and the supernatural is part of everyday life -- she was fascinated by him. According to Babe, my dad finally found love after searching for it for 700 years. They didn’t think about the consequences of trying to live a traditional life. Who would expect that there would be consequences?

Could this be why someone wanted my parents--and me--dead? I never asked Dr. O what happened to the few other vampire babies, and he never told me. I just assumed they lived their lives, died and were reborn as vampires. They either remained in the shadows or they were staked.

And how does my dad’s knife tie into all this? Is Max right? Does Marcello have something to do with these murders? And the victims weren’t vampires. Casper was a witch. It was possible the others were too. Was Marcello targeting witches? Vampires and witches hated each other. Maybe they were just grudge murders while he waited to off me.

I grabbed a jump rope and used the remote to turn up the music. While Flogging Molly vibrated off the walls, I exploded off the floor. After several months without Blood Ops, I was soft. I needed to get back into fighting shape. Frankie and I used to beat the crap out of each other daily. Based on the other night, I could hold my own with Marcello but I wasn't sure I could take him down.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and with the speed of a puma, I swirled the rope around and hit the intruder in the chest, knocking him back. He leapt away, moving so fast that I lashed out again at a blurred outline, this time with a roundhouse kick that connected to his jaw.

He grabbed my foot on its way down and flipped me to the floor. "Nina, stop!"

"Ow!" I fell to the floor with a thud, landing hard on my back. "What are you doing, Frankie!"

"You need to learn how to lock your bloody door." He helped me to my feet, and then turned down the music.

I shrugged. "What do you want?"

"I wanted to make sure you were alright." He looked worried. "When I left you at sunrise, the vomiting seemed to have stopped."

"I really don't remember too much." I mopped my sweaty face with a towel.

"Yeah, you were a regular Linda Blair," he said, punching at the heavy bag in the corner of the room. I hoped he didn't punch a hole through it.

"Babe's damn henbane." I had little recollection of drinking it, but I assumed that was the cause. "Guess it was good to barf that crap out."

"How's the head feel?" he asked.

"Fine, actually. Beyond 100 percent," I said. I was a little surprised about that, considering that I had been sick and blacked it out like a college kid on a bender.

"Good," Frankie said. He took a mock swing at me, and I ducked. "Score one for Babe's poison. Cure worse than disease and all that."

"And while you were lazing around in your coffin," I said, sending a punch out towards his chin, "I figured out the language in those books."  My punch missed of course. Frankie was across the room before it even got close to landing.

"You know I don't sleep in a coffin." He reached out and grabbed me around the waist, flipping me onto my back without breaking a sweat. "So, are you going to share?"

"Latin-ish." I pushed up to a squat position.

Frankie roared with laughter at the "
ish." I took advantage of his momentary mirth to sweep my leg under his feet, and down he went beside me on the mat.

"The Latin is old," I explained, still feeling a little smug. "So it's not the easiest Latin to recognize, but it's some form of Latin."

He shook his head. "I bet it's Etrusian." After living for half a century, Frankie knew a bunch of arcane languages, but this one had him stumped. "So, how did you figure that out?" Now he refused to get up, lounging on the mat.

"Google." The shit-eating grin on my face spread.

Frankie waved his hand dismissively. "I refuse to bow to the Google gods."

"Well ancient
Etrusian is not going to help me destroy Marcello." I wanted to refocus on our task. "I don't know that I am strong enough to battle someone his age."

"You sure about that?" Frankie smiled, rubbing where I kicked his jaw.

"Frankie, I get some good shots at you, but I have never been able to take you down." I looked at him sideways. "It was the same with him the other night."

"What you need to do is train up." Frankie's voice was stern, but his look was mischievous.

I was halfway up from the floor when he pulled my feet out from under me. I went down in a heap. He was still lounging on the floor.

"No fair!" I growled while Frankie laughed at me. "I am a half-blood; not that quick."

"Nina, you have to learn to do it." He pulled me up to my feet. "Marcello doesn't give a shit if you're a half-blood. And the faster you can move away from him in a fight, the better."

I definitely saw that logic. But there was no way I could best a full vampire in the speed department.

"Try it," Frankie encouraged. "Look at me, and imagine coming at me at the speed of sound.

I screwed up my face as I looked at him.

"What's that?" he asked, copying my expression. "You look constipated."

"I can't do this," I said. I dropped my shoulders.

"No," Frankie said calmly, and then he tripped me again and moved to the other side of the room before I could even lash out at him. "You refuse to do this. You are a vampire, Nina. Stop being so damn scared of it."

"I am
half
vampire, and I am
not
scared of it," I barked.

"You've always been scared of it," Frankie goaded me on. "Ever since you were a kid, you were petrified of it."

My face grew hot as my anger hit a boiling point. From the floor, I glared up at Frankie with such fury that even he stopped.

My eyes caught on a pile of over-sized art books on a bookshelf above him. I imagined the lot of them landing on his head.

In a split second, the heavy volumes slammed straight down on him, sending him off his feet. He landed on the floor with a loud crash, the books sprawled beside him.

My eyes were as large as saucers.

"What the fuck was that?" Frankie stared at me as he rubbed his head, looking at the bookshelf still attached firmly to the wall.

"I don't know." I shrugged. It was definitely weird. "Maybe I didn't install the book cases right."

We booth stood, and Frankie moved in on me. "You are such a girl."

His eyes flashed, and he gave me a
fangy smile.

I crouched into position, ready to leap. He held up his hand.

"Condition," he said. "You have to be fast."

I rolled my eyes. It was enough for Frankie to get the first shot in, a kick right to the stomach. He knocked the wind out of me.

I back flipped to my feet and rushed at him, pushing my palm straight into his nose. I heard the satisfying crunch of bones breaking, and blood poured out.

Frankie looked up at me, but it wasn't Frankie anymore. He moved closer, his fangs glistening. His blue eyes blazed.

"Oh shit," was just about all I could gasp out. He was just inches from my face, and he grabbed my arms, crushing them against my sides, pulling me towards him. I started to squirm, my pulse pounding.

"Don't fight me," he begged. We went too far. He was losing control. I gulped in air and tried to calm down. I closed my eyes and willed him to stop.

Something heavy pushed into Frankie. He dropped me as he flew backwards across the room. He hung pinned against the opposite wall, arms and legs splayed, for about ten seconds before he dropped to the floor.

I stared at Frankie's crumpled body across the room. I had watched him turn vampy on me and wasn't sure what to expect now. He didn't move.

Crap. This was my best friend. I refused to be afraid of him. I crossed to his slumped form and knelt down beside him.

"Frankie?" I poked at him carefully.

His eyes popped open and he grabbed my shoulders and pushed me to the floor, pinning me down. He looked almost scared.

"What was that?" he held my shoulders for a second too long, his blue eyes, only a twinge of red remained, staring into mine. It made me uncomfortable, so I looked away. He released me and we both stood up.

"Time for a drink," I replied, wiping sweat off my face.

"No, what
was
that?" he repeated.

"Why don't
you
tell
me
what that was!" I spat out. "You lost control, Frankie."

I walked to the fridge, grabbed a beer and popped the top open.

"I knew what I was doing." He was totally lying. "I had control the whole time. I was trying to scare you."

"Well it worked." I didn't want to fight with him but I knew there was no way he was in control of himself.

"What pinned me to the wall?" Frankie's eyes were intense. "Did you feel it?"

"I thought that was you." I squinted at him and took a swig of my beer.

"No, no, my love," Frankie crossed his arms. "That was all you."

I leaned against the counter, watching him look at me with a curiosity I had never seen before. I wasn't sure I liked it.

He walked to me, and I caught him breathing in my scent. I pushed him away. "Don't sniff me!"

"Nina," his voice was measured, like he was explaining something to a defiant five-year-old. "That was most definitely you. I don't know what it was, but I think those may explain." He looked at the books that he had procured from Babe's attic. "Time to pay a visit to Auntie Babe."

"Don't be stupid," I huffed. "I am not running to Babe because you lost your shit. She'll hit the roof. Besides, I have a date. And I don't intend on breaking it."

"Date?" Frankie looked up. "With that FBI guy?"

"Maybe..." I felt my cheeks blaze again.

He shook his head. "Tell you what, I’ll go visit with Auntie Babe, you enjoy your...date." He snorted.

What the hell was his problem?

"Frankie!" I yelled at his backside as he stalked to the door. He hesitated a minute, and then a rush of wind blew through the apartment as the door opened and closed quickly. I heard the dog bark, low and vicious, outside. Good. I hope she scared the crap out of him.