Bane's Choice Read online

  An hour and sixteen frustrating conversations later, she threw the pen across the room.

  Hunter Evans didn’t exist.

  And Ryan had to face the fact that maybe overwork and loneliness had caused her mind to play tricks on her.

  She drained another glass of wine after all, finishing the bottle, because what the hell? Tomorrow, she’d call the hospital and get a little long-overdue vacation time to sort herself out. Tonight, she’d watch another of her Top 100 Movies of All Time.

  “Hey, Alexa. What’s the best movie to watch after you hallucinate a nonexistent hot guy who disappears with your nonexistent burn patient into a magic portal?”

  The machine’s light flashed for a moment, and then the familiar computer voice replied: “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.”

  Ryan started laughing. “Yeah. Me, neither, Alexa. Me, neither.”

  Chapter Five

  Three hours earlier…

  Bane walked out of the Between and into the vast room that Meara insisted was a ballroom and shouted for help. When four vampires and two humans all lived in the same mansion, someone was usually within hearing distance.

  Luke was the first one to burst into the room, but he stumbled to a stop when he saw what—who—Bane carried. “Oh, shit. If you…is he? Fuck…I have to head to the hospital and fix this before we have hordes of peasants ready to shove flaming torches up our asses.”

  Edge floated in through the third-floor window and strode toward them. “Join this century. Flaming iPhones, maybe.”

  Luke rolled his eyes. “iPhones, my ass. We’re talking flamethrowers, at a minimum. Bane, unless you need—”

  “Go,” Bane told him, carefully lowering Hunter’s unconscious body to the center of a two or three-hundred-year-old teak table. The mansion and some of its furnishings were almost as old as he was. “There was a doctor…no. Just go.”

  Luke went.

  Edge rolled up his sleeves and shoved his long, white hair out of his face. The scientist’s hair had been black before his own government had imprisoned and tortured him and—far worse—tortured his brother to gain enough leverage to make Edge talk. If he hadn’t killed six of them—Edge had been lethal even as a human—and escaped with his dying brother then raced straight to Bane, he might have ended up like the man on the table.

  Or worse.

  “What do you need?”

  “I’m going to Turn him,” Bane said, ready for a fight. Edge wasn’t always happy to be a vampire; maybe he’d try to stop Bane from Turning another human. He’d nearly gone insane when he’d woken up and learned that his brother was now a vampire, too.

  Even though it had been Edge’s dying request that Bane Turn them both.

  Death wishes and reality seldom meshed.

  But something—some memory of humanity, an echo of a feeling from centuries ago—was pushing him to save this honorable man, who stood for others in a selfish world.

  Edge’s silver eyes gleamed hot, and he slowly raised his gaze to meet Bane’s. “Did you give him a choice?”

  “I did. He made it. Now, either help me or get out of the room. Where’s Meara?”

  “She’s hunting,” Mrs. Cassidy, their housekeeper, said disapprovingly, bustling into the room.

  Meara liked to hunt the kind of human criminal who wandered around Savannah, preying on the weak. Meara taught them about weakness before she drank from them. Bane wasn’t crazy about his sister’s nocturnal habits, although they echoed his own, but he’d learned decades ago to shut the fuck up about it.

  When Mrs. C caught sight of the man on the table, she caught her breath in an audible gasp. “Oh, the poor love. What…is he…oh, Bane. Shouldn’t he be in a hospital?”

  “He’s beyond hospitals. I need blankets and heat. Start the fire, bring space heaters, crank up the furnace, whatever it takes. It needs to be at least ninety degrees in this room for every minute of the next three days,” Bane ordered.

  When Mrs. Cassidy turned to race out of the room, not bothering to waste time on a reply, he turned to Edge. “You’re still here, so you’re helping?”

  “I’m helping.” Edge yanked the hospital blanket off Hunter’s blackened body and muttered a curse. “This is bad. This is fucking awful. Is it—is it even possible, when his body is this damaged?”

  Bane spared him a glance. “You were worse.”

  Edge hissed, lips pulling back from his teeth, fangs descending. “I still owe some payback for that,” he snarled, his silver eyes shading to red.

  “Later,” Bane said, scanning Hunter for a spot undamaged enough to use.

  “Here.” Edge pointed. “Brachial artery. The inside of his upper right arm. He must have held the child with that arm, protecting her from the fire. There’s a patch of unburned skin here.” His jaw tightened. “Do you want me to do it?”

  Bane appreciated the courage it must have taken for Edge to offer. The process of Turning could kill both participants. He shook his head, though.

  “No. This is on me. Help Mrs. C get the heat going and find Meara. When Lucas gets back, I need him. I’ll need all three of you to help me get through this.”

  “Do you want me to bring in extra…provisions? There’s surely someone in Savannah who deserves to die tonight.”

  “No. Maybe later, if we must. Now, go. We need that heat. He’s running out of time.”

  Edge nodded and raced out of the room, almost too fast for even Bane’s eyes to see, and Bane looked down at Hunter.

  “Say good-bye to your old life.”

  He stared at the dying man for a single moment, and then he lifted Hunter’s arm and plunged his fangs into the artery.

  It took less than five minutes to drain him dry.

  …

  “Bane! Bane!” Mrs. Cassidy shouted. “Bane, you get your behind down from there, or I’ll…I’ll…I’ll get Tommy’s shotgun and shoot you!”

  The red haze of Bane’s vision slowly cleared, and he realized he was floating up against the ceiling of the room, spinning in lazy circles, his arms and legs thrown wide, in the throes of a very vivid daydream about fucking the delicious Dr. St. Cloud until she screamed his name.

  Blood drunk. He was blood drunk, and Hunter was dying.

  Or already dead.

  He arrowed down to the floor, viciously biting his wrist as he flew, and then he immediately put the open wound over Hunter’s mouth. The man was gasping out his last breath, his body shaking in his final death throes, and Bane had been wallowing in the hedonistic joy of having consumed nearly a gallon of fresh blood.

  He was a monster. A monster, he realized, who’d killed the human he’d wanted to Turn.

  Because Hunter wasn’t drinking.

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll let you die because of me,” Bane growled, and he pushed a command into the dying human’s brain.

  Drink, damn you. Drink!

  Suddenly, shockingly, Hunter’s throat moved as he convulsively swallowed, first once, and then again, and then again and again and again. Ten, then twenty, and then thirty long seconds went by, and then Hunter found the strength to raise his hands and grab Bane’s arm, clutching it to him as if afraid the blood might be taken away.

  Mrs. Cassidy fluttered around them, not knowing what to do or how to do it. She’d only seen the process once, and she’d fainted that time, but only for a few minutes. She and her husband were made of sterner stuff than to run away at the sight of a little blood, she’d declared when she’d roused, and then she’d immediately gone off to make soup.

  Soup was his housekeeper’s secret weapon, her cure-all for every situation. Love was flavored with chicken and homemade noodles in this house.

  “That’s it, my friend. Drink now and survive to fight another day.” Bane sank down into a chair someone had placed near the table and only then realized
that there was a fire blazing in the stone hearth and space heaters were glowing hot at every electrical outlet in the room.

  “Thank you, Mrs. C.”

  She nodded, biting her lip, and then she burst into tears. “Oh, you know I wouldn’t have shot you, don’t you? I’d never hurt one of you boys, or Meara, either. I just—I just didn’t know what to do, and you weren’t hearing me, and I…I…”

  He forced himself to smile, although the blood draining out of him was beginning to have an effect. “Don’t worry about it. You probably saved Hunter’s life by snapping me out of my delirium. But you know what we could really use? Some hot soup. Do you think—”

  She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and gave him a shaky smile. “You know it, sir. I’ll go do that right now. Tommy should be home soon, and I’ll send him to the store, and I’ll need chicken and…” She headed for the door, still verbally composing her shopping list, and then she turned and ran back to him.

  “You be careful. With him and with yourself,” she said. Then she leaned down and kissed his forehead, blushed a rosy pink, and ran back out of the room.

  A wave of dizziness washed over him, and he realized that Hunter had taken too much blood, and so far, there was nobody back to help replenish Bane’s.

  So be it.

  If he had to die, what better reason? He’d ruined so many lives, caused so many deaths—would it deliver an ounce of redemption to a blackened soul to save a single life at the end of his miserable existence?

  Worse, did he even care?

  Blackness encroached on his vision, and then he heard a voice which sure as hell wasn’t one of Hunter’s scantily clad angels welcoming him to Heaven.

  “You’d better not die on me, you fool.”

  Meara was back.

  Chapter Six

  “Well, when a mommy demon and a daddy warlock love each other very much…”

  Constantin Durance let the sarcasm in his voice finish the sentence for him.

  The Minor demon he had by the neck choked and hissed but knew better than to try to fight back.

  “The little creep knows how baby Minor demons are made, Con,” Sylvie said mildly, her narrowed eyes giving the lie to her calm voice. She circled the human corpse on the floor of the abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Savannah, tapping her chin thoughtfully. She nudged the side of the dead woman’s head with one high-heeled boot. “Still dead. Hmm. And that’s not what I was asking, as you very well know. ‘How were you made’ is human vernacular for how were you caught?”

  The demon, its tail now drooping between its legs, tried to talk but could only make choking noises.

  There was spittle.

  Constantin grimaced and dropped the creature, who lay gasping on the floor, its claw-tipped hands and feet limp, its scaly red chest heaving for breath. Constantin observed this with a slight feeling of distaste and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hands.

  “Wasn’t caught. Er, wasn’t made,” the demon rasped. “Saw him talk to a lady doctor. He couldn’t glamour her. Disappeared with the human.”

  Sylvie glared at the demon. The creature howled and scuttled away to hunch against the corpse, as if in some hope of protection from a dead human who’d had none of her own.

  Constantin sighed. Minor demons were almost as stupid as humans. And Sylvie wasn’t helping.

  “I don’t care!” Sylvie snapped. “Where is Bane?”

  “At his house. I think,” the demon moaned, curling in on itself.

  “You think? Since when did you learn how to think?” She advanced on the creature, but Constantin raised a hand.

  “No. We need to know everything he saw, and he may yet be of use. You can kill him later.”

  The demon’s ears, which had flickered a little, drooped down again.

  Constantin pointed at him. “Why aren’t you sure?”

  “The house is warded. Strong wards. Very strong,” the demon whimpered.

  Sylvie sneered. “I’ll take care of that. How strong can his wards be to the likes of us?”

  Constantin held in a sigh. New warlocks were so arrogant, often unjustifiably so. And the female warlocks were always the most vicious.

  “If we smash his wards now, he’ll know we’re here, before we’re ready to announce our presence. We need to be ready to take them all out if we’re going to claim this territory without massive casualties among our own people,” he pointed out.

  “Then what?”

  He smiled at her, and her expression faded from arrogance to something very much like fear. He found he liked that.

  He liked it very much.

  “Did you know he has a sister? Other vampires he protects? A human staff? All potential leverage, if he cares anything about them.”

  “Leverage,” Sylvie repeated, and she began to smile. “I can work with that.”

  Chapter Seven

  Bane’s sister by blood and circumstance, Meara Delacourt had been a vampire exactly as long as Bane had. Count Delacourt, a minor French noble whose wife had died in childbirth, had Turned his only child—a daughter—and three other humans, including Bane, into vampires on that same night. And then, caught in a frenzy of blood drunkenness the likes of which Bane had never heard of, either before or since, the count had flown directly into a bonfire at the harvest festival, burst into flames, and died spectacularly.

  Or so Bane had heard, he himself having been unconscious and at the beginning of the three-day-long coma that accompanied the Turn at the time of the conflagration. Neither Meara nor Bane knew how her father had become a vampire. It was another fact long lost to time and distance, like the names of the other two who’d been turned and, indeed, Bane’s own name. The name his mother had given him at birth had gradually disappeared from his mind after Meara had started calling him Bane.

  “You’re the bane of everyone around us,” she’d teased, when he’d been a human boy, and then repeated, more seriously, after they’d been Turned and were struggling to survive.

  Back then, he’d been the bane of many.

  Luckily for Bane and Meara, Pierre Delacourt had tucked them all away in a secret underground chamber and left a roaring fire with plenty of wood and a thoroughly entranced servant to tend it before turning himself into the centerpiece of the most memorable harvest festival in Yorkshire, England’s history.

  Meara had been Bane’s sister ever since. A golden-haired, golden-eyed beauty who was smarter than anyone he’d ever known, more stubborn than a herd of mules, and the dirtiest fighter he’d ever met. Also, since then, she’d had his back just as he’d had hers, in trouble on both sides of the Atlantic.

  When he scented her blood, he lunged for the wrist she held over his mouth.

  “If you die for this…this…human, I’m going to chase you into Hell and drag your ass home,” she snarled, just before she smacked him on the side of the head.

  Hard.

  If he’d been human, she’d have given him a concussion. For him, though, the blow didn’t hurt nearly as much as the knowledge that he’d caused the warm tears that dropped on his forehead.

  Partially revitalized from her blood but unwilling to take more, he took one final swallow, swept his tongue across his bite marks to heal them, and then pulled away before taking a deep breath. “Don’t cry for me, Meara. Never for me.”

  He then turned to Hunter, and a faint feeling of satisfaction whispered through him at the sight of the man’s healing body. The blackened, burned skin was flaking away, leaving only pink, new skin in its place. That doctor would have lost her mind to see what she’d only be able to comprehend as a miracle—no science or medicine could have healed these injuries.

  When science and technology were gone, only miracles and magic remained.

  Meara glared at him and turned away, her hands going to her chee
ks. When she faced him again, the tears were gone, but the fury remained. “You promised me, after the last time. You said, ‘Meara, I promise, I won’t do it again.’ Do you have any memory of that, you lying piece of crap?”

  Edge walked into the room, carrying an armload of firewood, just in time to catch the end of Meara’s angry question. He dumped the wood in the wrought-iron log holder next to the fireplace and then brushed off his hands and turned to face them, bleakness stamped on the lines and angles of his face. “I know. I’m sorry. Bane never should have risked his life to save mine.”

  She whirled on him. “No. He should not have. And don’t try to make me feel guilty for saying what we all know is true. The Turning is far too dangerous. My father died. Bane, I won’t lose the only family I have left for some ridiculous notion of…what? Nobility? Leave saving the humans to the doctors.”

  With that, she pulled invisibility around herself and vanished but deliberately didn’t bother to mask the sound of her boots stomping across the gleaming wooden floor as she left the room.

  “Hey! What did I do?” Luke walked into the room rubbing his jaw. “Why did Meara just punch me in the face?”

  “Because she still can’t bring herself to hit me,” Edge said, sadness and something else Bane didn’t want to think about darkening his silver eyes to storm cloud gray.

  “What?”

  “Never mind that,” Bane said. “I need more blood. And what happened at the hospital?”

  Luke casually bit open his wrist as he crossed the floor to where Bane sat next to Hunter. “Take what you need. I found a willing nurse who remembers only a few kisses and cuddles on the roof with a handsome visiting doctor, so I’m good to go.”

  Lucas used his much-bragged-about charm to feed, leaving his prey feeling sensual and satiated. Bane, when he did feed, didn’t bother with any such niceties. He simply found the worst scum in town, took what he needed, and then—when he could be bothered—ripped the memories of the night from their minds.