Replica (The Blood Borne Series Book 2) (9 page)

LEA

Clouds rolled in, darkening the evening sky. Fine by me. I pulled the cowl back and breathed in the night air, rolling it across my tongue. Finding a vampire was no easy task. Even when I was actively hunting them, I would sometimes go weeks, even months between sightings.

Now I had to find one in a matter of hours.

“Scene of the crime,” I said softly. Vamps were creatures of habit, and I knew of a place more than a few of them frequented.

Amore Sangre
. The restaurant had been owned by my patron, Victor, whom I’d killed for lying to me and trying to entrap me. “Ass fuck.”

I made my way to the restaurant, staying on foot wherever possible. The city no longer felt like a bustling human metropolis. More like a potential crypt with the door slowly shutting in my face.

I shook my head and pushed back the analogies.

The restaurant loomed in front of me in no time. Ten stories high, the actual eatery was on the top floor. As I slipped into the building, I faced a decision. Elevator or stairs?

My hesitation was minuscule. Stairs. Again, easier to maneuver. As I climbed, I went over in my head what we needed. The place Stravinsky had fucked off to. What he was doing. Who else was involved.

“Simple,” I breathed out.

At the top of the building, I paused and peered back the way I’d come. No sound of footsteps behind me, no scent of anyone following. But I couldn’t throw the feeling I was being watched. Swiveling around, I panned the walls for a camera. Nothing.

I pushed through the door that led out of the stairwell. The front of the restaurant was done up in lovely wood paneling and the doors were shut. I walked up to them and tried the handle.

The knob twisted in my hand and I stepped into the semi-darkness. From the right, a sharp wind blew through the windows I’d busted out the week before. Glass still glittered on the floor, and there had been no obvious attempt at cleaning up.

But the scent of cooking beef and fresh vegetables teased my nose, so someone was home and busy cooking. I headed toward the kitchen, following the smells.

A few pots clanged together, then nothing but a low muttering no one but me would have heard.

“I hate you, you bastard.”

Interesting.

Curiosity and the need for answers pulled me forward even though I knew things didn’t add up. The restaurant was obviously closed, yet someone was cooking. I paused at the swinging doors and listened.

“Damn you, Victor. I was a rising star.” The bang of a knife in a cutting board, the thunk of something being cut into. It probably said something for the state of my mind that my first thought was that the cook was probably dismembering the sous chef.

I put a hand on the door and stepped into the kitchen. The chef had his back to me, and there were only vegetables on the board, no sous chef.

“What did Victor do to you?”

The chef spun around, his knife raised. “Oh my God. Don’t
do
that to me. I could have cut you in half!”

“I doubt that.” I took a few more steps into the room, trailing a hand along the stainless steel appliances. I hardened my voice. “Answer me. What did Victor do to you?”

He pointed the knife at me. “You can’t be in here.”

I slammed the flat of my hand into the refrigerator, concaving the outer shell. “I’m losing patience, boy.”

His face paled at a rapid rate. “Oh, shit me out on a piece of toast. You’re one of the blood drinkers.”

“Answer me.” I was close enough that he could have stabbed me. But he seemed smarter than that.

“He ruined me. I...” Light brown eyes flicked up to mine and then away as he slumped against the counter. “I was the talk of NYC. But when he disappeared, someone leaked documents claiming I’d been using tainted meat. That people were getting Hep A from eating here.”

I frowned. “Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s an asshole? I don’t know.”

There had to be a better reason. Victor was an asshole, on that I agreed. But he had never ruined someone without reason.

“What happens when a kitchen gets condemned like this?”

He waved his knife around. “In our case, the FDA came in with the CDC hot on their tails.”

“For Hep A?” My eyes widened. “Seems like overkill, don’t you think?”

He grunted. “Not for a restaurant like this one. Lots of patrons with lots of money. Money greases wheels, if you haven’t noticed.”

Whatever had been hidden here was probably long gone, but I drew in a deep breath and held the air, tasting it. “Let me see the freezers.”

“They’ve been shut off. They aren’t cold.”

“So?”

“They were cleaned, but they still smell funky.”

Now that was interesting. “Take me.”

Chef boy led the way further into the kitchen. I had to hand it to Victor. Even his cooking staff knew how to obey orders.

“Here.” He pointed at a pair of large steel doors propped open. I grabbed his arm and shoved him ahead of me. “Hey, don’t!”

“Little late for that,” I said. I didn’t even have to take a deep breath when I stepped into the doorway of the freezer. The smell of blood permeated every crevice. I tightened my hold on chef boy. “How long ago did they clean it up?”

“A few days,” he whispered.

“Where are all the vamps?”

He shook his head. “Gone. They disappeared when Victor did.”

So before the CDC came in, someone had professionally cleaned out all the blood Victor used to keep in here. His head chef had taken the blame, and no one would be the wiser about what had really gone on at
Amore Sangre
.

The ding of a timer going off whipped me around. A heavy billow of gas rolled over me. “The lines have slipped...can you fix this?” I asked.

I dragged him with me, hoping he could do something. He started to blubber. “I can’t live without my cooking.”

Oh. Fuck.

I dropped his arm and sprinted through the kitchen as the fumes spread. One glance at the stove and the blue flames licking at the bottom of the four pots he had going told me all I needed to know.

Time was not on my side. The fumes caught the blue flames and a brilliant flash popped up behind me.

The hiss of flames nipped at my heels, the heat spurring me forward. I was out the main doors by the time the first boom rocked the building. The elevator door opened on my left, beckoning me, as three demon dogs burst out of the stairwell to my right. They carried a scent I knew as well as my own.

Calvin.

I had no time to consider what it meant.

Elevator it was. I stepped in and hit the button to close the doors repeatedly. They closed, but not before one of the demon dogs leapt through them. It hit me in the back, scrabbling and clawing at my side, then reaching down and clawing through my pants and into the flesh of my thigh. I twisted, then flipped us over so I was positioned over it, sitting on it, then yanked a silver stake from the top of my boot and slammed it through the dog’s left eye socket. It whimpered, gave a full body twitch and went still.

A second boom rocked the building and the elevator shuddered. I jumped up and pushed the escape hatch open over my head. Above me, the world was nothing but flames two floors above me. The elevator lurched to a stop, swaying in place.

“Seriously?” What was it with these particular death traps and me lately?

A chunk of burning metal dropped toward me. I jerked back into the elevator as it bounced off the top of the tiny hanging box, and the whole contraption groaned. I pulled myself up through the hatch. There was only one choice—I had to get to another floor and work my way down. The cables above me groaned, and two of them snapped, slicing through the air. I leapt to the side and hooked my fingers onto the doorway above my head as the remaining cables gave way and the elevator plummeted down the shaft.

I pulled myself up to the edge of the doors and pried them open. The racket was almost unbearable to my sensitive ears—sirens blared in the distance, and there were continued smaller booms from above. Which was my only excuse for not seeing him until I was all the way through the door.

Calvin stared down at me. “Are you okay?”

I put my hand in his and blinked several times. No. Not Calvin, but a young human who could have passed for his brother. The same hair color, eyes, and build. I tightened my grip on his hand as hunger surged through me.

Had he been left here to toy with my emotions?

“Come with me.” I tugged him and he followed, falling under my thrall so swiftly I knew he’d been used before. Most people fought the urge to obey. He just got in line and did as I commanded.

We worked our way to the stairs and started the long climb down, conspicuously free of demon dogs. The firefighters had just arrived by the time we reached the bottom floor. I paused and put a hand on the lead man. “Don’t go up yet. Let it burn.”

His eyes fogged. “Don’t go up yet.”

“No. Stay here.”

It was the only thing I could do to keep the humans safe not only from the fire, but from the demon dogs up there. They couldn’t handle doors on their own, which meant someone had helped them. Rachel would have wanted me to at least try to keep the men safe.

I walked away, my new pet trailing behind me. After a while, he jogged to catch up to my side. “Where are we going?”

I didn’t answer, not wanting to know him for anything other than what he was. Food.

Three blocks down, I stopped and ducked into an alley. The Calvin lookalike smiled at me and tipped his head to the side. I took the invitation and yanked him to me, burying my fangs deeply into his neck. He moaned and wrapped his arms around my waist. The hair, the smell of Calvin still buried deeply in my mind, the intense need for blood, the sensations Ivan had aroused.

I couldn’t control myself, but to be honest, I wasn’t even sure I tried. I drank the lookalike all the way down. His death was a heady rush, the final beats of his heart the strongest, the last of his blood the richest and most vital. I ripped my mouth from his neck and tipped my head back, breathing hard.

My entire body was sensitized to the world, the humans around me, the feel of the wind along the back of my neck. I breathed out as the new vampire in my arms stirred. “Thank you, I’ve wanted this for so long. I thought I would never be turned after the other vampires left.”

He tightened his hold on me, as if to pull me into a hug.

I hadn’t given him my own blood, which meant he’d had vamp blood before. I’d found him in Victor’s club, so that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Instead it was a disappointment.

I pulled my silver stake out and rammed it into his heart. “You’re welcome.”

RACHEL

I opened the envelope and dumped the contents onto the table. Several photos and a piece of paper. The photos were of a nondescript building in what appeared to be a desert.

One focused on an entrance with two armed soldiers standing guard. It was hard to see their faces, but the uniforms looked U.S. Army. On the back of one photo were numbers. 30.5 N 47.816 E. Latitude and longitude coordinates. I suspected Hades had just confirmed that the facility in Derrick’s notes was indeed where we needed to go. I opened the folded paper next and read a cryptic phrase.