The Shopgirl's Prophecy (Beasts of Vegas Book 1) (33 page)

When she returned, she’d brought a knife. For a moment, Maks believed she was going to gut him. Instead, irrationally, she drew it across her own pink wrist.

“Come on, pretty boy,” she said, sitting and lifting his head into her lap. “Drink up.”

If Maks could have spoken past his crushed vocal chords and swollen throat, he’d have asked her why she tried to help him.

As if reading his mind, she said, “I want out of this hell hole, and you owe me.”

She forced her open wound between his lips, and Maks drank.

#

Connor came to instantly, sitting straight up. “Ali?”

“I’m here.” She gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. “Relax.”

“Oleksander?”

“He’s dead. It’s over.”

“You killed him.” An image of Ali lying in the center of a crater flashed through his mind.

He took a quick inventory. His right arm was back in its socket and no longer a numb hunk of flesh. Someone had stitched up the gash across his ribs. And he tasted blood, human blood, on his tongue. He took hold of her wrist, inspecting it for open wounds.

Damn it. She’d cut herself again.

“Stop it,” she chided, hiding her arm behind her back. “You needed blood. It was the least I could do.”

He looked around him. Creamy plaster walls. Light streaming through balcony doors. The smell of cleanser and scented soap. She’d brought him to their suite on the Strip.

“Where’s the doctor?”

“At her clinic, I guess. She really doesn’t like you.”

“Doesn’t matter. Did she help?”

“Yes. I’m fine. I just got my circuits crossed, or something. No ill effects. In fact—” she smiled, “—the doctor gave me a blood test. I’m not infected.”

“But.” Connor remembered placing his bloody and bleeding fingers onto her open chest wounds. Of course, she was infected. “It hasn’t been six hours yet.”

“You’ve been unconscious for a day and a half.”

A day and a half? “Where’s Roz? Volk?”

“She’s out getting supplies,” Ali said. “I don’t know about Volk.”

“But you’re not infected? How?” He sat up, and she fluffed two pillows behind him. “It’s impossible.” His blood had mixed with hers. People had been infected with far less.

“Stay with me for a sec. I have a theory,” Ali said. “Maks infected my mother while I was still in the womb. His blood passed through me, but affected me much differently than it did her. What if I’m immune?”

“You mean, his blood left antibodies behind?”

“In a sense.”

“No.” He shook himself. It was foolish and wishful thinking.

“But what if?” She smiled again, her fingers trailing little designs across his jean-covered knee. “It’s possible.”

“It would mean your blood could be used to create a vaccine. Your blood could end vampirism.”

“Yes.”

He tilted his head back on the pillows, his mind racing. “We’d have to go to L.A. or New York and find a communicable diseases expert who will take us seriously.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to undergo all kinds of tests. They’ll poke and prod you silly.”

“But think, what if?”

Roz walked through the front door carrying brown paper bags and stood, sort of shy, at the foot of his bed. “Anton wired get-outta-town money into my account. We can catch a plane heading east tonight if we hurry.”

Connor stood and helped Ali to her feet. “It’s worth a shot.” He slipped his arm around her shoulders.

Roz packed the groceries into overnight bags. “Well. I— I was thinking I would—”

“Don’t.” He sent her a look. “Don’t even say it. We go together.”

She opened her mouth but hesitated to speak.

“We need you, and not because you’re a witch,” he began.

Ali finished, “Because we’re a family.”

Connor ducked his head, but couldn’t contain a smile. His vision blurred, and he sniffed. Being part of a family again sounded really good to him too.

Epilogue

One month later.

Connor unlocked the door to their suite at the Le Sort Hotel, and then waited for Ali to enter. He ushered her into a seat while he put away their overnight bags in the bedroom.

Of course, she didn’t stay where he put her, but wandered into the room behind him and started unpacking.

“Sit,” he pleaded. “You need to rest.”

“I’m not sick,” she chastised gently, but under her eyes were gray shadows. This last trip to Utah had been hard on her. The combination of tests and the stress of waiting for answers were taking their toll. “I’m fine.” She slipped his sketchbook from a backpack and idly flipped the pages, scanning his artwork with a hint of a smile.

Slightly uneasy, he leaned against the dresser and waited for her to find his message. He knew for a fact she hadn’t looked through the book in the last month, not since the day she’d vaporized Oleksander.

She paused on a page near the middle, frowning.

Connor knew by heart the page she was on. In the center was a sketch of her sitting in his Ford truck, and in the corner he’d written what he thought were his last words to her.

Ali, you made my fucked up life worth living.

“You wrote this?” she asked hesitantly. “That night in the truck?”

“I love you.” Conner grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her flush to his chest. “You gave my life meaning. Before you, I thought I wasn’t good for anything.”

“Does this mean you’re okay with staying in Vegas?”

They could have gone anywhere. Between the two of them, they had enough money to travel the world. Or settle in London. Or Cleveland. But strange as it seemed, Vegas had become home. Besides, the Nevada desert was where the real battle for the future of the human race would begin.

“I want to stay,” he assured. “I want to keep fighting the good fight and protecting the people out here.”

“Me too,” she said.

He kissed the tip of her nose, and then as she ducked her chin, he inspected the gauze around the crook of her elbow. “They took too much,” he worried.

“I’m fine,” she assured, settling more fully into him. She wiggled her taut belly against his hips, and the friction was nearly enough to distract him from the reason she was bandaged.

“I expected them to take a vial of blood,” he complained, “not eight.”

She rose up on tiptoe, bowing her back, and then he knew she was doing it on purpose.

“Roz will be back any minute,” he reminded her. “And you’ve been in a doctor’s office all morning.”

Not that the doctors in Salt Lake City had done anything productive with all those vials. It was the fourth communicable diseases specialist they’d been to in a month with zero success. This latest lab had taken samples of her blood and run tests. They might even look at it someday, if someone got really bored. But they weren’t nearly as enthusiastic about Ali’s story of infection and immunity as she was. They had listened to her with expressions of skeptical incredulity.

The best response they’d received so far was from Dr. Burke in Henderson. Natasha and Anton had sent her Ali’s blood work panels, and the doc believed she could crack her DNA to create a shield against vampirism in everyday human beings. She couldn’t do it yet, but she was very eager to try.

“Doesn’t our bed look inviting?” She tried to distract Connor with kisses along his jaw.

It was working.

His arms tightened around her, lifting her off her feet. “I forgot what I was going to say,” he teased, kicking the door closed behind them.

#

Natasha stood beside Anton at the lip of what looked like a crater in the sizzling Nevada sand and took pics with her cell phone, turning once to take a selfie with the opened grave.

“I can’t believe we actually made it,” she exclaimed, bouncing a little. “I almost gave up hope of actually standing in the presence of vampires and really interacting, really making a difference.”

Anton snorted indelicately. “It was only a thirteen hour flight across the ocean and a puddle jumper into Vegas,” he reminded her sarcastically. “Not to mention driving two hours into the middle of nowhere. The time just flew by.”

He’d been grumpy since they left New Zealand, and she couldn’t blame him. The airline had messed up his gluten-free, vegan meal and then the rental car company in Las Vegas had lost their reservation and couldn’t give them a luxury sedan.

On top of all that, he hadn’t seen his online friend Connor Beckett in person yet. Natasha wanted to surprise him, Roz, and Ali. The trio had no idea she and her brother were in the States.

“It’s not the middle of nowhere,” she said, playfully punching his arm and trying to change his crabby mood, “We’re standing on a mass vampire grave inside a top secret—now abandoned—military installation. Come on, this is exciting.”

Anton smiled half a smile. “You’re right. It is exciting.”

“That’s the spirit,” she exclaimed. “Now get out your phone and start recording everything.”

Rolling his eyes, he produced his cellphone.

While he preserved their visit for posterity and later uploading to their website, Natasha knelt to get a closer look. Tucking her long, glossy dark hair over one shoulder, she blinked at the exposed body parts half visible under sand and gravel. It raised goose bumps on her arms to think there were vampires buried beneath her whom she knew by reputation. Vampires who’d been involved in the failed invasion of Prague. And the last people to stand where she was standing were Oleksander the Destroyer and Maksim Volk. She could hardly feel more exhilarated.

Reading about vampires was fun, hiring your own vampire-hunting duo was really fun, but actually standing on vampires’ graves and in their footsteps was beyond any high she’d ever felt.

The sand beneath her shifted and made mini avalanches of gritty dirt cascade further into the crater. “Are you getting this?” she asked, glancing behind her at her brother.

“Yep.”

She squinted through black-rimmed librarian glasses at the red light on his phone. “You’re live streaming this, right?” Their fans and colleagues expected the very best.

“No,” Anton said. “I want to edit it before we upload. I’ve been experimenting with really subtle sound and visual effects.”

She sighed dramatically. He knew how much she disagreed with him on the tampering of eyewitness video, no matter how subtle. Natasha took a breath to ask him as calmly as possible to please switch to live streaming for their site, as they’d never have another opportunity like this when the earth seemed to rumble beneath her.

“What the…?” A withered, gray hand broke through the upper crust of earth and hovered there, sort of half waving in the bright afternoon sun. “Oh, my God,” she breathed, totally thunderstruck. They were still alive under the earth. Desiccated and starving, but alive. “Tell me you’re getting this.”

“You bet I am.”

Tentatively, Natasha reached out and very gently swept the sand away from the limb, exposing more mummified flesh.

“Who do you think it is?” she wondered aloud. Three of the Four Sons were rumored to be buried here.

The hand seemed to track her the way a snake tracks its victim right before a strike, and then with inhuman speed the corpselike fingers locked around Natasha’s wrist.

“This is unreal,” she gasped, grinning at her stroke of luck. She was touching a real vampire. Maybe even one of the famous ones.

The hand yanked on her, and with a squeal of both surprise and delight, she landed on her belly inside the crater. “Anton?” she called nervously, hoping he was getting good angles with his video. She would be so pissed if he messed this up.

Another cave-in, and Natasha screamed as the rest of the vampire rose from the earth, a dirt-covered husk of a man, and sank his fangs into her carotid. Fireworks went off behind her eyelids as he drank deeply, gorging, a greedy fiend. With her last thread of strength, she called out for her brother.

Anton answered her, “Natasha!”

Her attacker released her, and she rolled helplessly onto her back, too weak to move or even speak. She’d lost her glasses, and her vision blurred.

Poor Anton. So brave, so foolish. He jumped in after her, but the vampire grasped him by the neck and crushed his vertebrae like a fistful of toothpicks. Her brother’s body went limp as an old dishtowel, his phone dropping soundlessly onto the sand.

The vampire tossed Anton across her midsection, an uncomfortably heavy restraint, and began to dig deeper into the earth with his bare hands. One after the other, mummified men were freed and laid out like kindling at the edge of the pit.

Natasha felt loads lighter and realized the vampire had lifted Anton’s body from hers and carried him out of the crater.

“Drink up my brothers,” the monster said, tearing Anton’s head from his shoulders to rain his life’s blood upon the faces of the corpses. “We have work to do.”

Look for
Spellspeaker’s Prophecy
(Beasts of Vegas #2) coming soon!

About the Author

Anna Abner lived in a haunted house for three years and grew up talking to imaginary friends. In her professional life, she has been a Realtor, a childcare provider, and a teacher. Now, she writes edge-of-your-seat paranormal romances and blogs from her home in sunny southern California about ghosts and magic.
Connect with Anna at
www.annaabner.com
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Other Works by Anna Abner

Novels

Spell of Summoning
(Dark Caster Series Book One)

Spell of Binding
(Dark Caster Series Book Two)

Spell of Vanishing
(Dark Caster Series Book Three)

Spell of Shattering
(Dark Caster Series Book Four)

Elixir
(Red Plague Trilogy Book One)

Antidote
(Red Plague Trilogy Book Two)

Panacea
(Red Plague Trilogy Book Three)

The Red Plague Boxed Set