She started walking.
Chapter Three
“I want a name,” Aiden growled through extended fangs, shoving a lowlife vampire that was a hair away from bloodlust, if not already there,
against the wall of a downtown Austin alley. The vamp was a kid, barely twenty-five years converted, drinking as much blood daily as he needed to survive an entire month.
Hungering for the rush, the added speed and strength of an elder, and too stupid to see what was wrong with what he’d become - no longer human or vampire, but monster. “Who killed those women?”
“Even if I knew,” the kid snarled. “I wouldn’t tell a scumbag Warden.”
“Was it you?” Aiden demanded, pulling a copper blade and pressing it to the vamp’s throat.
“I’m not stupid enough to kill my food.”
Suddenly someone grabbed Aiden from behind, fangs biting down on his shoulder. Aiden cursed and flung the second vamp he’d not been aware of, but in the process he let go of his grip on the one he’d been holding. The punk rocker vamp went for a knife. At the same moment, Aiden flung his blade into the kid’s chest, a direct hit to his heart. The vamp dissolved instantly into dust, a side effect of the bloodlust mixed with the poison of copper.
Aiden whirled around to face his second attacker just in time to watch his younger brother, Troy, deliver the same death by dust to the other vamp.
Troy’s light blue eyes lifted to Aiden’s, glinting with the odd blue crystal they’d reflected for ten years now, since Troy’s long black hair had also turned blonde. Since a werewolf had attacked him, he had not been the same. A wolf created by a virus that turned a human into a killer wolf, that as a vampire, Troy should have been immune to and unexplainably was not.
“So much for conversation,” Aiden said, shoving his knife under a leather coat that worked for hunting, but pretty much sucked on a hot Texas night. “Clearly, our plan to find out what the local bloodsucking population knew about the recent murders isn’t going as planned.”
“I wasn’t in the mood to talk anyway,” Troy said, pushing to his feet and inserting his blade inside a strap under his leather pants at his ankle. “And how about a ‘thank you’ for showing up when I did? I just saved your ass.”
“You were supposed to be here an hour ago,” Aiden reminded him. “What the hell happened?”
“I was hunting,” he said tightly. “That’s what we do. We’re Wardens. We hunt.”
“We aren’t hunting werewolves,” Aiden reminded him. He knew good and damn well that Troy was not only pissed off about being sent here, and being pulled off the hunt for Andres – a wolf with unique abilities, that Troy hoped to also held answers he sought. He was also the wolf that had all but killed their older brother, Evan’s, new wife.
“What if I told you that Andres is here, in Austin?”
“I’d say you’re so eager to find the bastard that you’re seeing him where he isn’t.”
“It’s his blood,” Troy said. “That’s what creates the drug these women are taking, or rather being forced to take. Andres’s blood mixed with a vampire’s. It’s an aphrodisiac, by loosely defined terms. It causes pain in the absence of pleasure. Word is that the vamps are paying big money for this cocktail and then holding orgies. And when the pain and pleasure causes a few of the women to stroke out, the vamps figure – what the hell? – and they drain them dry.”
“Holy shit,” Aiden said, scrubbing his jaw. “How sure are you about this?””
“As sure as the three vamps I was interrogating knew I’d kill them.” Aiden’s cell phone buzzed on his belt and he looked down to see he had a voice mail. The instant he saw the local number, he grabbed it and punched his voice mail button. He listened to the soft, nervous voice of Kelly and then cursed.
“We’re headed a block over to fifth street,” he told Troy. “To a place called “Twilight”.”
***
“Buy you another one?”
The question was a shout, the only way to be heard over the thrumming beat of the Twilight club music.
Kelly looked up from the cocktail on her small corner table, wanting to say no, but knowing she had to say yes.
“Thank you,” she beamed, batting her lashes flirtatiously and not missing the way the men scoped out her cleavage. God, she was too old for this.
One of the men ordered her a drink. The other moved around to her side of the table. She turned to face him. “I’m Alex,” he said.
“Kelly,” she told him.
He slid her drink closer to her. “Drink up. Another is on the way.” She grabbed the glass and sipped it, seeing no way out of it. “Thank you,” she said, smiling over the rim of the glass and then downing it. She had to look like a desperate lonely female if she was going to attract the right people and get her drug sample.