Bane's Choice Read online

  “If I had any betters, I might consider it,” Bane said, stilling his rage to an icy calm. He could feel Meara and Luke now—they were alive. Unconscious, but alive.

  He needed to use his brain—strength and magic would not be enough against this foe.

  When the necromancer laughed, the three warlocks in the room started to convulse, pounding their heads against the floor, over and over. “Master,” the male without a knife in his throat crooned. “Master Constantin, you will protect us.”

  “Clearly, I need to get better help,” Constantin said, glancing down at them before returning his attention to Bane. “The Chamber warned me that you had magic, vampire, but they didn’t know how strong you were. Seems that our intelligence was out of date. But you’re still no match for me.”

  “Haven’t seen one of your kind in more than a hundred years, necromancer,” Bane said, his voice dangerously even. “After I kill you, I hope not to see another for at least as long.”

  “There are no others like me,” Constantin boasted. “I am more powerful, more versed in the dark arts, more—”

  But, by the third more, Bane had heard enough. He pulled on his own magic—fueled by the elements of Air and Water, fueled by the gravitational pull of the moon, fueled by starlight itself—and shifted through time and space.

  But the necromancer was ready for him and blurred across the room in a magical shift of his own. Otto and the other male warlock, somehow still alive in spite of the blood pumping from the holes where their arms used to be, cried out to their master, beseeching.

  Pleading.

  Constantin made a downward slicing motion with both hands toward the men’s heads, and Bane watched in disbelief as the tops of their skulls slid cleanly off, as if a razor-edged sword had sheared through bone and brain.

  “If that’s how you treat your own, it’s a wonder the Chamber manages to recruit any new people at all,” Bane said, shifting the currents of his magic to shield Luke and Meara.

  “There are always fools,” the necromancer replied, almost casually, pointing to Marta, who—in spite of what Constantin had just done—still crawled toward him, crooning, “Master, Master,” again and again.

  Luke and Meara now safe, Bane refocused his magic, channeling it into a single, deadly spear of invisible power, and then unleashed it, hurling it across the room at Constantin. The necromancer’s head jerked up, his face contorting into a grimace. Then the necromancer flung both hands into the air, and two things happened at once: the wall behind Bane imploded, slamming into his back and knocking him to his knees, and the female—Marta—levitated into the air, Constantin using her as a human shield.

  Bane’s magic ripped her in two.

  Bane leapt to his feet, gathering his power for another attack, but the necromancer’s hands were already busy, flashing through the pattern of a complicated spell, fueled no doubt by Marta’s death, that pushed waves of darkness and the stink of dread into the space around himself. Creating a portal to Hell, for all Bane knew.

  “Another time, then, vampire,” Constantin said. “Consider this a parting gift.”

  He stepped into the portal, and the shack exploded, raining wood, stone, and debris down on Bane, Luke, Meara, and the corpses of the three warlocks.

  “No!” Bane shouted, smashing through the rubble, fighting his way to his family, pain searing through his chest. If his miscalculation had cost Luke and Meara their lives…

  But Meara was already shoving splintered wood and rubble away from herself and standing. “What the hell kind of magic was that? I could hear and see what was happening, but it was like I was trapped in my body. I couldn’t move… Luke? Where’s Luke?”

  Bane hurled stone and wood out of his way, digging for Luke, who suddenly started to moan and then sat up, pushing debris off his body.

  “Ouch. What the fuck was that? Did you kill them? I hope you killed them all.”

  “Actually, no,” Bane told him, holding out a hand to help him out. “The necromancer killed his own. This may be a much bigger problem than we thought.”

  “Chamber,” Meara said grimly.

  “Chamber,” he agreed.

  “We’re going to have to kill that son of a bitch Constantin and ship him back to England in a box. A small box,” she continued, wiping blood off her face. “Send a message.”

  “A very, very small box,” Luke agreed, scowling. He had wounds of his own. His scalp was bleeding, and the explosion had driven a foot-long shard of wood into his shoulder. He yanked this out now with barely a grimace.

  “For now, we need to deal with the humans and then regroup,” Bane said, wiping the blood from his own head wound out of his eyes. “Are you both okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Meara said, dismissing his concern with a flick of her fingers. “But we need a new plan.”

  “A better plan,” Bane said grimly, staring at the destruction around them. “Fucking necromancer. Next time, he may bring the dead against us, too.”

  The thought of Savannah’s dead being reanimated and used as pawns in the Chamber’s twisted schemes felt like a punch to Bane’s throat.

  “A much better plan.”

  …

  In the end, five of the formerly bloodthralled humans lay dead, but no more of Bane’s people had fallen since the accident on the road. The rest of the humans had collapsed into confused huddles when the warlocks died and the necromancer disappeared.

  “You were lost in the swamp and ran into drug dealers who imprisoned you. Now, you’ll go home and tell everyone the details are too traumatic to share,” Bane ordered the thralls.

  It was easy enough. Humans were always ready to believe an explanation that didn’t involve magic, the supernatural, or anything that stalked the dark. And it made sense to them; it was the reality of movies and television and therefore carried more truth than the reality of vampires, warlocks, or necromancers. In dark times, a palatable fiction reassured those unwilling or unable to believe a terrifying truth.

  Sirens ripped through the air, the response to Luke’s call to 911. The authorities were near, and Bane wanted to be gone before they arrived. Meara and Luke flanked him at the edge of the bonfire they’d made of the cabin with the warlocks’ bodies within.

  “We did not win this fight.” Bane stared at the fire. “Not even close. He was laughing at us.”

  “That’s a problem for another night,” Meara said, her voice ice. “My saddlebags are filled with salt. These three, at least, will never regenerate.”

  “And this park will recover from the stench of rot and decay, now that they’re gone,” Luke said. “Can you tell if there are more nearby?”

  It wasn’t an unexpected question.

  “I’ve already tried but found nothing.” But he tried again, sending his senses out to the surrounding area in search of life. He recoiled again at the wrongness of what he found. There were no living creatures within at least two square miles, beyond the former thralls, a few birds in flight, and some aquatic creatures in the waters around them. But then, just as he started to speak, a sign of hope soared through the clearing.

  “A Golden Eagle,” Meara said, her voice reverent. “This is his home, and he’s back to reclaim it.”

  “Just as Savannah is our home, and we’ll do the same,” Bane said.

  Meara nodded. “Good always prevails over evil, in the end.”

  “In the end,” Luke repeated bitterly. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? All the shit that happens before the end. I need a drink.” With that, he stalked off toward his bike, where he’d almost certainly stashed a bottle of tequila with the bags of salt.

  “They’d think we were the evil, if they knew,” Meara said, staring at the humans. “And yet we protect them, again and again. What is the point, really?”

  It wasn’t about the humans. He didn’t give a flying fuck a
bout humans he didn’t even know. It was about protecting his territory. Keeping his club safe.

  But when he turned to answer her, she was already gone.

  …

  Constantin, high in the trees and cloaked in shadows and power, stared at the final remaining vampire for several long moments before silently turning away.

  Bane, indeed.

  The vampire would learn the true meaning of the word when he died screaming.

  Chapter Two

  Three days later…

  Luke Calhoun shoved open the door marked Club Members Only: This Means You, Shithead and walked into the ominously dark hallway behind the public front of the club. The next door he came to didn’t have a sign, but it had a state-of-the-art retinal scanner. Luke shoved his hair out of his face with the hand not holding his helmet and stared into the unblinking lens.

  “Calhoun, Lucas. Welcome back to Vampire Motorcycle Club headquarters,” came the familiar, faintly British tones of the computerized female voice. “Access granted.”

  Vampire Motorcycle Club. He’d thought Bane was out of his damn mind. But the man everyone now thought of as their club president had been right—the best place to hide the truth was right out in the open.

  “Now entering: Calhoun, Lucas,” the top-secret, highly classified, no-way-could-a-civilian-get-his-hands-on-it technology announced. The AI was basically Siri plus Google but on steroids. It had access to almost every database in the world and combined that access with a facial recognition database that would have scared the shit out of any civil liberties group.

  “Locate Bane,” Lucas said.

  “Bane is currently in the vault.”

  He closed the door behind him, tossed his leather jacket on a desk, and blew out a breath that he could almost see in the frigidly air-conditioned room that they called an office but looked more tech-heavy than the deck of the Starship Enterprise.

  The man seated in front of a bank of state-of-the-art computers never even looked up. “I’m running every search I can think of but finding nothing about the Chamber at all. We need to know what they’re up to, and none of our usual sources are returning my calls or email.”

  “Maybe they have a better computer guy than you,” Luke muttered, not giving a damn about the subject at this particular time.

  “There is no better computer guy than me.”

  When Luke didn’t respond, the man shoved his prematurely pure white hair out of his face and turned his icy silver gaze on Luke. “What.”

  It wasn’t a question. Edge rarely bothered with questions. It was more of a command.

  On another night, Luke might have jumped down the scientist’s damn throat for it, but this wasn’t another night.

  This was going to be bad.

  Very fucking bad.

  “Bane’s in the vault?”

  Edge said nothing. He’d clearly heard the AI tell Luke Bane’s location, and he didn’t bother answering inane questions any more than he’d ever ask one. Although, with an IQ way past two hundred, probably everything anybody ever asked sounded inane to him.

  “What,” Edge repeated, standing.

  Luke closed his eyes and took a deep breath to keep the rage burning in his gut from escaping into a wave of searing heat that would fry the computers.

  Again.

  “That human. Hunter,” he finally managed to rasp out past the boulder in his throat. “The one who saved Meara when she was caught out past sunrise a few years back.”

  “Dead?”

  “Dying. Soon.”

  Something almost like compassion stirred in Edge’s eyes, but then he shook his head. “He’s the closest thing Bane has to a friend, not counting those of us in the family, so to speak. I’m out of here. Tell Bane—”

  “I know,” Luke said. There was nothing to say. When Bane found out that Evans was dying, there would be no words worth saying—no place safe to hide from their leader’s fury.

  In fact, the rest of them would be lucky to survive it.

  Luke waited to feel sad…afraid…anything…about his impending death.

  Waited.

  Nothing.

  He just didn’t give a shit.

  He’d already died once, after all. And now he was going to give bad fucking news to the man who’d brought him back.

  “I’m headed to the vault.”

  He shoved past Edge and pushed open the steel door that led to the stairs and walked down into the darkness.

  At the bottom of two flights of stairs, he only hesitated a fraction of a second before pushing open another door and walking into the heart of the club. The Boss’s “Born in the USA” played at maximum decibel level, and the smell of Japanese Camellia seed oil told him that Bane was oiling his swords and daggers and brooding—never a good combination.

  And Luke was the lucky son of a bitch who got to give Bane terrible fucking news while the warrior had his hands on a few dozen of his favorite weapons.

  Not that Bane wasn’t a weapon all by himself.

  Three-hundred-plus-year-old vampires tended to get that way.

  Bane took one look at him and was on his feet, dagger and bottle of oil crashing to the polished concrete floor, six feet, four inches of danger coming off the leash he held so tightly over his own immense power.

  “Who?”

  “Bane—”

  “Who?” Bane roared the word, and the centuries-old stone walls vibrated with his fury.

  “Hunter Evans. A fire.”

  Before he could get the next word out, Bane was on him, and Luke saw his own death in a pair of empty black eyes.

  …

  Bane wrapped one hand around Luke’s throat and lifted the man several inches into the air, slamming him back against the metal door.

  “Did. You. Do. It,” he snarled, every atom in his body straining to kill, rend, destroy. “Did you kill him?”

  Never mind that Luke was one of a very few that Bane allowed near him.

  That Bane had brought Luke over into this new life.

  That Luke had proven himself over and over again.

  And Luke was suffocating to death in Bane’s grasp. He loosened his grip.

  “Did you—”

  “No! No, damn you, no, I would never do anything—” Luke stopped, choking and wheezing, bleak memory stark in his eyes. No doubt remembering the times that he’d nearly burned innocents to death when he first Turned.

  First came into his fire-starter powers. Bane and Meara had been shocked when it happened. All vampires gained some small forms of magic when they Turned; it came with the gig. But they’d never heard of any vampire who could start fires with his mind.

  It was a fucked-up power to have, for a creature who was even more vulnerable to fire than a human, that was for sure. But there you go: Luke’s life had been a disaster when he was a human. Why would Bane have imagined it would be any different when he became a vampire?

  Remembering the ones he had killed, before Bane had been able to stop him.

  More innocent deaths on Bane’s blackened soul.

  Bane released Luke and flew back and away from the man before he killed him.

  “He’s not dead,” Luke gasped. “Not yet. He saved a little girl—I happened to see the fire, but I was a mile away at a bar. By the time I got there, he’d already gone into the house. He wasn’t on duty, just happened to be passing by. Her bedroom was on the second floor, and he was holding her out the window for a couple of neighbors who were trying to find a ladder.” A coughing fit took him, and then he cleared this throat. “I got them both out. The kid’s going to be okay—he reached her in time, but—”

  He stopped. Shook his head. “I cleared memories at the scene, don’t worry, but you need to get to Savannah General. Fast, if you want to see him before…before…”

&n
bsp; By the second before, Luke was talking to an empty room. Bane pulled Shadows around himself and stepped into the Between.

  Seconds later, he was on the roof of the hospital.

  The two women standing at the edge of the roof, smoking and talking in the spring moonlight, never saw him. There could have been fifty humans on the roof—hundreds—and they never would have seen him.

  He followed the smell of burned flesh to the room where what was left of Hunter Evans lay hooked up to wires and tubes and machines. The human’s skin—what was left of his skin—was charred through to bone.

  And he was screaming.

  Burns—burns were always the worst. Bane had seen far too many fires and far too many victims of fire in his lifetime, especially back in the days when buildings were built of wood. He had to clench his teeth against the urge to retch at the rich, greasy stink of burned flesh; had to clench his fists against the urge to look away from the ruin of his friend’s burned body.

  The medical personnel in the room were moving with speed and purpose, but Bane needed none of them. Had no time for them. He knew the Reaper, and she was present in the room, already whispering her seductive call into Hunter’s ear.

  Bane was almost out of time.

  “Leave,” Bane told the humans, forcing so much compulsion into his words that they all scrambled to obey, not knowing why. One of them even thought as she passed him that she would go home immediately, lock her doors, and hide in her closet.

  Even humans could sense the threat of an apex predator.

  The Reaper, her outline only a faint shadow in the brilliant light of the hospital room, raised her head to pin her shining gaze on Bane.

  “He’s not for you,” he ground out. “Not yet.”

  She stared at him for a long moment and then acquiesced, fading to a mere shimmer and then disappearing, until a faintly whispered, “Soon,” was all that remained.

  The room smelled of antiseptic and Hunter’s seared body, and Bane was at the bed before the firefighter—his friend—could draw another shallow, faltering breath.