“Troy wouldn’t hurt me,” she said, her voice cracking on the last two words. “Not really. He’s a hothead with a big mouth, that’s all.”

“And what about his friends?” I countered. “They’re not going to be too happy about the beat-down I gave them. Neither will whoever they work for—trust me. Troy and his friends aren’t on their way here to offer you a heartfelt apology.”

Catalina opened her mouth, but the heavy smack of footsteps cut her off.

“C’mon.” Troy’s voice drifted over to us from a distance. “The bitch has got to be up here.”

Catalina sucked in a surprised breath, but I was already moving forward, grabbing her hand, and pulling her around to the opposite side of her car. I made her crouch down beside me in the shadows.

“You stay here,” I ordered. “Out of the way. I’ll deal with Troy and his friends—”

This time, I was the one who got cut off by the squeal of tires and the rumble of several engines.

I scooted forward and peered around the back of Catalina’s car. Troy and his two friends had gotten here faster than I’d expected, because they now stood in the middle of this section of the garage. But Troy was as surprised as I was by the noise, and he turned to look behind him.

Two black Cadillac Escalades zoomed up onto this level, one going right and the other turning left, both of them stopping just before they hit the concrete walls. A few seconds later, a third car sedately drove up and parked in the middle of the metal V that the other two vehicles had created.

Unlike the other dark, anonymous cars, the third vehicle was completely memorable—an old-fashioned baby-blue Bentley that was chromed, waxed, and polished to perfection. It was the sort of fancy, high-end car that Finn always drooled over, one that was known throughout Ashland but especially over in Southtown, where its owner lived.

Now I knew exactly who Troy dealt for. Things had just gone from bad to worse. Story of my life.

Catalina crept up beside me, peering around my shoulder. She sucked in a breath when she spotted the blue car. “Oh, no,” she whispered.

Yeah. That about summed things up.

“Stay still, and be quiet,” I murmured. “No matter what happens. And if I tell you to run, then you run, and you don’t look back.”

Catalina nodded, too frightened to do anything else.

Men poured out of the two black Escalades, six of them total, all wearing dark suits and sporting wing tips that were as clean and shiny as their cars. They were all smiling, showing off a set of perfect, polished fangs in each and every one of their mouths. I’d heard that their boss was big on his men always looking their best, right down to their pearly-whites.

I looked past the enforcers to the man who got out of the driver’s seat of the Bentley. He was short and lean, and everything about him was a soft gray, from his suit and shirt to his hair and eyes. Silvio Sanchez. I’d never had the misfortune of meeting him, although I knew him by reputation. Smart. Ruthless. Vicious. The sort of sneaky, underhanded, backstabbing vampire you did not want to mess with.

Silvio being here was bad enough, but he opened the back door of the Bentley so that another man could get out—one who was a hundred times more dangerous than Silvio had ever dreamed of being.

Truth be told, the other man wasn’t an impressive figure. Oh, he was around six feet tall, but his arms and legs seemed almost too long for the rest of him, as though he were a gangly teenager who hadn’t grown into his own body yet. His string-bean physique didn’t have many muscles, a fact that his clothes emphasized. His white pants almost completely covered up his white sneakers, while his long-sleeved button-up shirt was about two sizes too big, although the baby-blue fabric perfectly matched the paint on his Bentley. A white bow tie patterned with baby-blue polka dots hung loose and limp around his neck.

His face looked young too, his skin pale, his cheeks rounded with a perpetual bit of baby fat, even though I knew he had to be at least forty, if not older. His black hair was slightly mussed, as if he ran his hands through it repeatedly and didn’t care how it looked. Silver glasses perched on the end of his hawkish nose, making his pale blue eyes seem larger than they actually were.

All put together, he looked like a calm, quiet, geeky kind of guy, a fact that the pens and notepad sticking out of the plastic pocket protector on the front of his shirt only reinforced. But he was anything but the mild-manned fellow he appeared to be. I knew him by reputation too.

Beauregard Benson, the drug-dealing vampire king of Southtown.

5

While Benson studied Troy, I studied Benson.

Even among the underworld bosses, Beauregard Benson was someone everyone talked about in hushed whispers. Unlike some of the other crime lords and ladies, Beauregard didn’t bother with selling blood, running hookers, or bankrolling bookies. Drugs were his forte. Uppers, downers, pot, he**in, crack, meth, oxy. If it could get you higher than a kite, then Benson was the one you were paying for the ride up into the wild blue yonder—and the piranha that was waiting to chew you up and spit you out on the way down.

Benson finished his perusal of Troy before turning to Silvio. “Is this the one?” he asked in a high, nasal voice that perfectly matched his geeky wardrobe.

“Yes, sir,” Silvio replied in a soft, bland tone.

Benson nodded, then pointed at the two vampires standing with Troy, snapped his fingers, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Gentlemen, you may leave now.”

“Sorry, Troy,” one of the vamps muttered.

The two vamps skirted past Benson and Silvio and hurried out of the garage as fast as they could. Meanwhile, the six men who’d been in the Escalades closed ranks, forming a circle around Troy. And I realized exactly what this was: an execution.

Troy had come here to hurt Catalina, but he was the one who wouldn’t be leaving.

Troy frowned, not comprehending that he was a dead man standing. “Mr. Benson? What’s going on? Why are you here?”

Benson plucked his glasses off his nose. He held out a hand, and Silvio stepped forward and passed him a white silk handkerchief, which Benson used to clean the lenses.

“I’m here because apparently, you can’t handle having your own territory,” Benson said, focusing on his glasses. “Did you think that I wouldn’t find out what happened?”

“If this is about last night, I can explain—”

“Of course this is about last night,” he said, sliding his glasses back onto his nose and peering through the lenses at Troy. “You and your friends went to one of our Air healers to get patched up. Your friends were smart enough to contact Silvio immediately afterward and confess their incompetence. Yet you did not. Do you want to tell me why?”

“It was nothing,” Troy insisted. “Somebody got lucky and got the drop on me. I was going to take care of it. Tonight.”

“Hmm.” Benson cocked his head to the side, as though Troy were some curious specimen he was examining. “And yet here you are, all alone, in an empty garage. That doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence in you, Mr. Mannis.”

Troy’s eyes flicked from the face of one vampire to the next. For the first time, he seemed to realize that his boss and his entourage hadn’t dropped by for a polite chat. He swallowed and rubbed his hands on his jeans to wipe the nervous sweat off his palms.

“I can explain, Mr. Benson—”

“Explain what?” Benson cut him off again. “How someone threatened, embarrassed, and beat up you and two other members of my organization, the men I specifically gave to you to help with the new distribution at the college? What do you have to say about that?”

“I—I—I—” Troy sputtered, but he couldn’t get the words out.

They wouldn’t have saved him anyway.

“Don’t you know that your embarrassment is my embarrassment?” Benson said. “You know that I don’t tolerate mistakes or people hiding things from me. And I especially don’t like my employees talking about my business interests to outsiders.”

I frowned. It sounded like Troy had been blabbing. But about what? And to whom?

“But you’ve done all of those,” Benson continued, “with your worst offense being running your mouth when you should have known to keep it shut, And now I’m afraid that you have to suffer the consequences of your actions, all your actions, Mr. Mannis.”

Troy bolted.

He knew what was coming, and he wanted no part of it. Couldn’t blame him for that. But the two vampires at the front blocked his exit and pushed him back into the waiting arms of the four men behind him. Two grabbed Troy’s left arm, while the other two held tight to his right side, immobilizing him.

Beside me, Catalina let out a soft gasp, her right hand fisting in the fabric of my T-shirt sleeve, even as she clamped her left hand over her mouth to muffle the noise she’d made. Lucky for us, everyone was focused on Troy and his frantic attempts to buck, thrash, and kick free.

Everyone except Silvio.

The vamp frowned, his gray gaze scanning the garage before latching onto Catalina’s car. His frown deepened, his brow furrowed, and his eyes narrowed. I tensed, wondering if Silvio might ask one of the men to make sure that the garage was empty and how many of the vamps I could cut down before they surrounded me. But after a few seconds, Silvio fixed his attention on Troy again.

By this point, Troy’s struggles had dwindled down to tremors that racked his body from head to toe. “Please, Mr. Benson,” he begged. “Please. I’ll do better. You know I can do better.”

“I’m afraid that it’s too late for apologies, pleas, and promises, Mr. Mannis,” Benson said, his voice calm, if still very nasal. “You are only as strong as you appear to be, and I can’t have any weak links in my organization. Especially not now, when I’m rolling out a new product.”

New product? I wondered if he meant the red pill Troy had given me at the college.

Benson snapped his fingers. Silvio reached into the Bentley and drew out a long white coat, the sort that a scientist might wear in a lab. Benson held out first one arm, then the other, and Silvio carefully helped his boss into the garment, smoothing the fabric down over his arms and back the way a valet might. Silvio even did up the buttons on the front, so that the white coat covered Benson’s clothes.

Troy shuddered, as if he knew what was coming next. So did the vamps holding on to him.

Benson smiled, his fangs glinting like pointed diamonds in his mouth, the sharp tips ready to cut through flesh and bone—Troy’s. He strolled toward his minion, his stride smooth and steady, and snapped his fingers again. At the command, the four vamps holding Troy let go and stepped back. If I was the kid, I would have been hightailing it out of here, but he didn’t move at all. Instead, he stood absolutely still, as if he was frozen in place by the Medusa gleam of Benson’s glasses.

I thought that Benson would grab Troy, snap his neck to the side, and bury his fangs in the kid’s throat, but to my surprise, Benson clapped a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, as if to let him know that there was no real harm done. Troy sagged in relief.

And that’s when Benson made his move.

His hand darted over and wrapped around Troy’s throat. Benson lifted the other man up as easily as he had snapped his fingers, then pivoted and slammed Troy down onto the ground, hard enough to crack the concrete. It was an impressive display of strength, even for a vampire.

Troy must have had some giant blood in his family tree to survive that kind of blow to the body, because all it seemed to do was daze him for a few seconds, before he started gasping, choking, and clawing at Benson’s hand around his throat.

Instead of tightening his grip, Benson actually let go of his dealer. He crouched over the terrified man and started stroking his hand down Troy’s cheek, as soft and easy as you please.

“There, there,” he cooed. “Don’t be frightened. It’ll only hurt for a minute.”

Benson’s crooning only made Troy panic more. He heaved and kicked and flailed, but it was as if all the strength had suddenly left his body, because he didn’t actually go anywhere, and his struggles were the weak, pitiful thrashes of a dying animal.

Silvio and the other vamps stood by, still and silent, in a ring around the two men. Everyone but Silvio averted his eyes.

A strange blue glow began to emanate from Benson’s hand, so pale at first that I thought it was just a trick of the fluorescent lights overhead. But the glow grew and grew, and Benson’s eyes took on the same eerie tint, magnified by his glasses.

But the strange thing was that the glow seemed to be moving from Troy and into Benson. Every time the vampire stroked his hand down Troy’s cheek, the blue light intensified, like Troy was some sort of human cigarette that Benson had taken a quick hit off of.

The normal thing, the expected outcome, the logical action, would be for Benson to plunge his fangs deep into Troy’s neck. All vamps needed blood to live, since all those frosty pints of O-negative contained essential vitamins they required, just like other folks needed solid food to maintain a healthy playing weight. And depending on whose blood they were swilling down, vamps could get more than minerals from it. Regular human blood was enough to give most vamps enhanced senses, along with extra speed and strength. But if they drank from giants, dwarves, or elementals, vamps could absorb the traits of those races—a giant’s strength, a dwarf’s durability, an elemental’s magic.

But Benson didn’t go for Troy’s throat. Didn’t bare his fangs. Didn’t seem at all interested in all of that sweet, sweet blood pumping through him. Instead, Benson kept stroking his hand down Troy’s cheek, as if it was enough for him just to smell the salty sweat streaming down Troy’s face; hear his small, weak, incoherent cries; and see the pain, panic, and fear twisting his whole body.