Nice Guys Bite

  I went along with them without protest, as though I was too worried about the gun at my side to fight back. Not that guns scared me. Not in the least. Not after seeing what Beau and Gin could do with their magic. My compliance was simply strategic.

  I needed to get the men farther down the alley before I killed them.

  Except for the van, the corridor was deserted, with no innocents around to get hurt. I didn’t know who these men were or what they wanted, but they weren’t here to give me a ride back to the Pork Pit. If I got into that van, there was a very good chance that I wouldn’t get out of it alive. I hadn’t survived working for Beauregard Benson and his hair-trigger temper all those years just to let a couple of low-level goons murder me now.

  Besides, the bastards had ruined my date. They were going to pay for that.

  So I let the men march me down the alley, while I glanced left and right, working out the best way to escape. The alley was like any other in Ashland—dark, damp, and dingy, with Dumpsters lining the walls and greasy fast-food wrappers, broken liquor bottles, and other trash littering the cracked asphalt. I got a faint whiff of the coffee from the Cake Walk, but the stench of mashed cigarettes and sour spilled beer quickly overpowered it.

  Up ahead, a cluster of trash cans jutted out almost into the middle of the alley. Right now, the giant had me pinned up against the wall, with the second man following along, still carrying my coat, scarf, and briefcase. But the three of us would have to step away from the wall to go around the trash cans. The second we did, I’d grab one of the metal lids, slam it into the face of the giant with the gun, and chop his weapon out of his hand. Then I’d grab his tie, yank him toward me, sink my fangs into his neck, and get a quick hit of his blood—and his inherent giant strength along with it.

  With that sudden surge of strength, I could easily reach up and snap the giant’s neck, then turn to the man behind me. He’d be surprised by my attack, and it would take him precious seconds to drop my coat, scarf, and briefcase and fumble for his own gun. That would give me enough time to surge forward, grab him, and snap his neck too. Then I could collect my things, dust them off, and be on my way.

  It was a good plan, and it probably would have worked, except for one thing.

  “Hey! What are you doing? Leave him alone! Silvio! Silvio!”

  Startled, the giant holding on to me whirled around, dragging me along with him. Martin stood in the alley, a concerned look on his face, his phone in his hand.

  “Stop it!” he yelled, waving his phone at the two giants. “Let him go, or I’m calling the cops!”

  “No, Martin! No!” I shouted, but it was too late.

  One of the men from inside the restaurant came up behind Martin. The giant whipped out his gun and slammed it into the back of Martin’s head, and he crumpled to the ground without a sound.

  Anger roared through my body. New plan. Attack right now.

  With one hand, I shoved the giant’s gun away from my side. With the other, I sucker-punched him in the throat. While he wheezed for air, I chopped the gun out of his hand, whirled him around, and shoved him up against the alley wall.

  Then I opened my mouth, lunged forward, and sank my fangs deep into his neck.

  A faint pop-pop sounded, as my razor-sharp fangs broke through the giant’s skin and pierced his thick, strong muscles and tendons underneath. In an instant, blood flowed into my mouth, and I swallowed it down, gulp after gulp after gulp.

  Most vampires loved drinking blood, especially fresh blood straight from the source, so to speak. Others would incessantly debate their favorite types of blood, from giant to dwarven to elemental, as if they were gourmet wines to be sampled, instead of actual people. Some vampires even hosted snooty blood-tasting parties, discussing such ridiculous things as how people who ate a lot of fruit often had delicious, plummy notes in their blood.

  Me? I didn’t really enjoy drinking blood. Never had, never would. I found the coppery taste and the thick, gloppy texture quite off-putting. Plus, it was always a bitch to brush your teeth afterward. Still, blood contained important vitamins and minerals that vampires needed to survive, so I had to consume it, whether I wanted to or not. Most of the time, when I had my morning glass of O-negative from the local vampire blood bank, I dumped tons of sugar into it, trying to offset the harsh metallic tang. Which, I readily admit, was totally disgusting in its own way.

  But the good thing about being a vampire and drinking blood was that it let me tap into the power of that particular person, be they human, giant, dwarf, or elemental. Most of the time, I stuck to ordinary human blood, since it was the cheapest and easiest to get. Plus, human blood was still enough to give me enhanced senses, along with a bit of extra speed, strength, and endurance.

  But giant blood? Not only did I get super-heightened senses, but giant blood was also good for a whole lot of super-strength.

  With every mouthful of blood I swallowed, I felt the giant’s strength surge into my own body, like I was a balloon that was slowly being filled with air. The pure, raw energy exploded in the pit of my stomach and quickly spread out, like lightning zinging through all my muscles, tendons, and bones and making them all crackle with electricity. If I could have seen them, I knew that my gray eyes would be glowing a bright silver at the sudden influx of blood, strength, and power.

  The giant screamed and screamed as I drained pint after pint out of him. In less than twenty seconds, I’d sucked him dry, and his screams died down to faint whimpers. I ripped my fangs out of his neck, drew back, and shoved him aside. I’d barely pushed him, but my newfound strength tossed him fifteen feet down the alley, right into that cluster of trash cans that I’d noticed earlier. Garbage sprayed everywhere, but the giant didn’t move.

  One man down. On to the next.

  I whirled around, ready to battle my next enemy.

  But it was too late.

  While I’d been draining the giant, the other two men from the restaurant had rushed into the alley and joined their two friends already here. They didn’t hesitate. All four of them jumped on me at once, driving me down to the ground. I hissed and snarled, punching and kicking, driving my fists into the arms, legs, heads, and chests of the men piled on top of me.

  Even with my stolen strength, it was still four-on-one, and each one of them was just as powerful as I was. One of the giants dug his fingers into my hair, drew my head back, and slammed it down onto the pavement as hard as he could.

  Pain exploded in my skull, and the world went black.

  4

  For a long time, I drifted along in the blackness, not seeing, hearing, or feeling anything. But the darkness faded away, and I slowly became aware that everything around me was cold and hard.

  The floor I was sitting on. The wall behind my back. The metal cuff around my right wrist.

  My eyes snapped open at that last realization. Light stabbed into my brain, making me hiss and adding to the pounding ache in my skull, and it took me several seconds to push the pain away and blink the world back into focus.

  I was sitting on the floor, slumped against a wall in what looked like an old warehouse. The dirty concrete floor stretched out for hundreds of feet in all directions, leading to walls made of cracked cinder blocks stacked on top of each other. Small rectangular windows lined the very tops of the walls, circling the entire warehouse, but a thick layer of grime covered the glass, making the windows as dark and dirty as everything else.

  The warehouse looked like it had been abandoned for quite some time, but the overhead lights still burned bright and steady, and a heating unit hummed in the distance, although the air was lukewarm, at best. A stained mattress squatted in one corner, along with an empty, dented shopping cart, as though some homeless person had once bedded down here. Old magazines, empty beer and soda cans, and crushed cigarettes littered the floor from one side of the warehouse to the other.

 
Several chairs clustered around a folding table that stood on a relatively trash-free patch of floor about twenty feet directly in front of me. Stacks of cards covered the table, one at each chair, as though my kidnappers had been playing poker while they waited for me to wake up. This was definitely someone’s base of operations, which meant that they’d probably brought me here to question, torture, and kill me in private. Lucky me.

  I started to get to my feet, but a series of loud clank-clank-clanks rang out, reminding me that I was tied down. A handcuff was cinched around my right wrist, with the other end snapped through a thick, solid chain that stretched out for about five feet before it wrapped around a pipe that ran along the wall. Three padlocks hooked the chain together at different points along the pipe.

  I rattled the cuff and the chain, but they didn’t give, so I studied them a little more closely. The chain and the padlocks were just ordinary metal, but the handcuffs were made out of silverstone. Even with what was left of my stolen giant strength, I’d still have a hard time breaking through the magical metal. Still, I tried, rattling the cuff and the chain again and again—

  “It’s no use,” a low voice rasped out. “I’ve tried that already.”

  I looked over to my left. Martin was sitting on the floor about ten feet away from me, also cuffed and chained to a pipe. His dark brown hair stuck up at odd angles, but his blue eyes looked sharp and clear. He’d lost his trench coat, and dirt and grime streaked his tan suit. Dirt also smudged across his left cheek, but it didn’t diminish his handsomeness.

  He winced and raised his hand to the back of his head, where the giant had hit him with the gun. After a few seconds, he held his hand out, but nothing stained his fingertips.

  “No blood. That’s a good sign, right?” he said, trying to make a joke.

  I didn’t say anything. No words would make this situation any better.

  So I glanced around the warehouse again, using my enhanced eyesight to peer into every nook and cranny, searching for anything that might help us get out of here. And I actually found something: my briefcase, sitting on the floor beside one of the chairs at the poker table.

  Martin followed my gaze and realized what I was staring at. “Is that your briefcase? Do you—do you have a gun in there?” he whispered.

  I shook my head. “No. But my phone’s in there. If I could just get to it, I could call for help.”

  He nodded. “You’re right. We need to call the cops.”

  “No, not the cops. Someone else. Someone better equipped to deal with this sort of situation.”

  Martin frowned. “Who would that be?”

  “G—” I started to say Gin’s name but stopped myself at the last second. I wasn’t quite sure why.

  Martin kept staring at me, his forehead wrinkling with confusion. “Why did you rush out of the restaurant? Why did those men pull a gun on you? What’s going on, Silvio?”

  I shook my head again. “I don’t know. I just don’t know—”

  A metal door at the far end of the warehouse banged open, cutting me off, and the four giants from the Cake Walk strode inside. All wearing suits and guns, just like they had been earlier.

  One of the giants who’d been watching me inside the restaurant went to the table, grabbed one of the chairs, and brought it over to where I was sitting on the floor. He was tall, even for a giant, well over seven feet, with a body that was all hard-packed muscle. A wide swatch of gray ran straight down the middle of his black hair, almost like a skunk’s stripe, and his eyes looked like two brown marbles set into the wrinkles of his tan, leathery skin.

  He turned the chair around so that the back was facing me and sat down in it, but his frame was so large that he oozed off the sides, like an enormous square peg trying to fit itself into a much smaller round hole.

  “You can call me Vincent,” he said in a low, gravelly voice. “I’m the one who’s going to be asking the questions.”

  “And what questions are those?” I asked, even though I already had a pretty good idea.

  He smiled, revealing a mouthful of dead, rotten, gray teeth. “The ones about your boss. Gin Blanco. The assassin. The bitch who calls herself the Spider.”

  Martin sucked in a ragged breath. “A-assassin?” He looked over at me, his face white with shock. “I thought your boss owned a barbecue restaurant!”

  This was the moment I’d been dreading, the one that I’d tried to avoid at all costs. Gin’s identity wasn’t exactly a secret, especially not among the underworld, but ordinary, noncriminal folks at most thought that the Spider was just an urban legend, a story that thugs told other thugs to scare each other.

  I hadn’t told Martin anything about Gin’s alter ego because he would have left the Pork Pit and never come back. I hadn’t wanted that to happen. I’d just wanted something normal, especially today. A nice guy meeting another nice guy for coffee. Simple, easy, uncomplicated.

  But the horror on Martin’s face was the final nail in the coffin of our date and whatever relationship we might have had. Even if we survived this, he’d never look at me the same way again. Still, I was going to keep up appearances for as long as possible.

  “She does own a restaurant,” I said. “I think that these gentlemen have me—and her—confused with someone else.”

  Vincent let out a low, ugly laugh. “Denying all knowledge, and protecting your boss’s secrets to the bitter end. I can respect that. Loyalty is hard to come by these days, especially in this city.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Gin doesn’t have any secrets. Other than the recipe for her barbecue sauce. If that’s what you’re after, then I’m afraid that you’re out of luck. Even I don’t know what she puts in it that makes it taste so good.”

  Vincent studied me with his cold brown eyes, and I stared right back at him. I kept my face blank, but my mind churned, trying to figure out who these guys were and what they really wanted.

  The giants could be after the millions of dollars’ worth of precious jewels that Gin had recovered at the Bullet Pointe theme park. Of course, Gin had given the stones to Ira Morris, the park manager, but maybe the giants didn’t know that. Maybe they thought that Gin still had the stones. Besides me, Gin, and our friends, though, the only other person who even knew about the jewels was Hugh Tucker, and I didn’t think that these guys worked for him or the Circle. Otherwise, Tucker would have been here himself and already torturing me for information.

  So if the giants didn’t work for Tucker, then whom did they work for?

  I flipped through my mental dossiers on the underworld bosses, thinking about all of Ashland’s many gangs, drug dealers, bookies, loan sharks, and more. But no one stood out to me. The best bet was the Southern Shine gang, but these guys just didn’t strike me as bikers. No leather jackets, no boots, no tattoos. Besides, bikers were never far from their rides, and no motorcycles were parked inside the warehouse. No helmets perched on the card table, no parts littered the concrete floor, no gas cans, no tools, nothing like that.

  So who were these guys? What was this all about?

  “You have a funny sense of humor,” Vincent said. “Normally, I would enjoy beating that out of you, especially since you killed Hank.”

  A dark scowl twisted his face, and his fingers twitched, as though he’d like to wrap them around my throat and strangle me. Hank must have been the giant that I’d drained in the alley.

  I sighed and asked the inevitable question. “But?”

  “But if you’re anywhere close to being as tough as Blanco is, then it will take hours before you give me what I want.”

  “And what is that, exactly?”

  Vincent shrugged his massive shoulders. “I told you. Information on Gin Blanco. All of the Spider’s dirty little secrets. Her strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities. How much Ice and Stone magic she really has. How she’s managed to kill so many oth
er people without dying herself. How many knives she sleeps with under her pillow at night.”

  The answer to his last question was one, which I’d always thought was rather restrained on Gin’s part. Especially given how many people wanted her dead.

  Vincent sounded like he already knew quite a bit about Gin. Maybe if I could convince him that I didn’t know anything about her being an assassin, then he would let Martin and me go free. Doubtful, but it was my only move right now. At the very least, it might buy me a little more time to figure out how to escape.

  “And you think that I know those things just because I work for Ms. Blanco?” I shook my head. “I hate to disappoint you, Vincent, but I’m just her assistant. I help run her restaurant. I spend my days suggesting menu items, calculating food prices, and ordering ketchup bottles by the bulk. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Complete lies, of course. Gin was more than capable of running her restaurant all by herself. I didn’t have anything to do with the Pork Pit, other than eating all of the delicious food that she cooked there.

  What I did do was handle all of Gin’s business as the head of the Ashland underworld. Names, dates, places, meetings. I kept detailed records of every boss she’d ever talked to, all the favors they’d asked of her, all the deals they’d worked out, and all the ones that they’d reneged on.

  I also helped Gin update her mentor Fletcher Lane’s files on various criminals, their organizations, manpower, and the like, so she could determine how big a threat they were to her and the rest of the Ashland underworld. And of course, I’d been helping her identify the members of the Circle, based on some photos that Fletcher had left for her in several safety-deposit boxes.

  But most important, and unbeknownst to her, I also kept notes on Gin herself. Her likes, dislikes, habits, hobbies, even her training regimens with her knives and all the tricks she could do with her Ice and Stone magic. Not because I was plotting against her but just to help me do my own job better. Just so I could be a truly great assistant and see to her needs.