Branded Read online

  No such luck.

  I gritted my teeth. I had expended a fair amount of magic. And while I had plenty of power, my stores weren’t unlimited. I wasn’t even close to empty. But I’m only so cocky. I’m not an idiot. I don’t like to take unnecessary chances.

  With the crucifix still clenched in my left fist, I slid along the side of the car toward the driver’s side. I pulled the door open, scanning the scene around me the whole while.

  Grumpy flailed his hand at me, trying to grab my ankle. The flames around his face had mostly died, leaving charred pieces of his flesh glowing with embers around the edges. I stomped on his hand and pinned it under the heel of my shoe.

  He growled, but it sounded like most of the fight had left him.

  I took another second to glance around, and entertained the hope that the remaining vampiress had fled.

  The two I had scorched had managed to flail and pat away the flames that had engulfed them. But they were both on their hands and knees, coughing on the smoke wafting from their bodies. Their clothes were a tattered and charred mess. The air smelled of burnt and rotten meat.

  Satisfied I was done here, I slid behind the wheel.

  I did not expect to find the female vamp in the passenger seat.

  My surprise gave her enough time to launch at me and sink her fangs into the side of my neck.

  Chapter Six

  I felt my pulse in my throat pound with each gulp of my blood the vampire took. I tried to pull away, but she had me clutched tight. I worked out on a regular basis, lifted weights. I looked pretty good naked. But I had nothing against vampire strength. I did, however, kick ass in the magical department, and I needed to remember that if I was going to get away from this bitch before she completely drained me.

  I stopped struggling and took a deep breath, trying to calm my mind even as the edges of my vision closed in and my blood drained away. My heart pounded at double speed to make up for the sudden loss. Eventually it would quit. Eventually this vampire would drain everything my heart could stand to give.

  Focus, damn it.

  I drew from my power. But each time I did, I felt it flow out of me in a rush from the gash in my throat the vampire was suckling at. Magic is as much a part of a practitioner’s physiology as it is intellect or life-force. I’d never been fed on before, but I had studied hard as the son of a pair of scholars. They made sure I knew everything necessary to understand the “world behind the world” as they liked to call it.

  From my studies, I knew that vampires fed as much on psychic energy as blood. While there were, technically, something called psychic vampires that didn’t feed on blood, they weren’t really vampires in the official sense. It was more of a slang title. But real, blood-sucking vamps sucked on your soul while sucking your blood.

  All power comes from the soul. It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget until you actually need that power and something is leeching it from you.

  I pounded a weak and senseless fist against the vampire’s chest.

  She took no notice, pulled me tighter like a passionate lover desperate with need.

  I took another deep breath and drew in more power than I would normally need for the kinds of spells I preferred. That got me what I needed, and before the vamp drained me, I grabbed her by the throat and set her on fire.

  She reeled back from me as a scarf of flames wrapped her neck and chewed up along her jaw line. Her ponytail caught like a fuse and quickly turned to embers and smoke.

  I didn’t waste any time with a second strike. As I flopped out of the driver’s seat toward the ground outside the car, I threw another bolt of fire at her.

  She screamed.

  I scurried away from the car on my hands and knees, blood pouring from my neck, turning the grass a muddy red.

  The bastard vamp trapped under the front tired caught my pant leg in his grasp and yanked, which made me go flat on my face. I didn’t have the strength to push back up on my hands and knees. Grumpy Vamp tugged on my pants and dragged me toward him across the ground. I wasn’t sure what he planned to do. Bite my ankle?

  I rolled onto my back and tried to twist out of his grasp. He held tight. The cuff of my jeans did not. The denim ripped. I scooted back on my elbows and heels, out of his reach.

  He made a low gurgling noise that I barely heard over the screams of the vamp in my car, who had by now crawled over the center counsel and was climbing her way out the driver’s side after me.

  Flames still chewed on her leather jacket, but her brunt and twisted face was no longer alight. She didn’t need to peel back her lips, because I had managed to burn them off.

  I pulled for more power, and for the first time in my life found myself up against a wall. With so much of my blood in her belly and all over my front lawn, I was nearly physically tapped out. That made sense. But it wasn’t only a physical limit I had reached. I could not find any more magic within me.

  My heartbeat quickened and my breathing exploded out in hungry gasps. What the hell was going on?

  The vampire crawled the rest of the way out of the car.

  I dug my heels into the lawn and pushed backward, away from her. But she was crawling faster than I could scoot. My limbs felt cold and clumsy. My mouth was full of the tang of my own blood. My vision blurred, making the vamp’s burning jacket look like an bright orange blob coming for me.

  I took what power I could gather and threw it, raw, in her direction. Raw magic didn’t possess a whole lot of control. Without using some form of the elements to give it form, it operated under fuzzy physics. It was magic after all. But I didn’t have the strength to do much more than light a match if I wanted to use fire. And air wasn’t very deadly without a great deal of force. I doubted I could blow out the flames on her back. So raw was what I had, and it’s what I gave.

  The throw went wide and struck the car instead of her. But it was enough to lift the car into the air and flip it as if it were made of tissue. It flipped on its long axis and came crashing down on its roof, right on top of the vamp.

  Frighteningly enough, she probably survived the impact.

  But I had not only given the last of my magical energy, I had reached the limits of blood loss, so I wouldn’t get a chance to see whether she survived or not before I passed out.

  The darkness that followed felt like an eternity. When consciousness aroused me, I expected to find myself with a long white beard and the world I’d known lost under some bizarre future of flying cars and robot servants.

  I did not, however, expect to find myself chained to a slab of wood in the middle of an abandoned warehouse.

  Chapter Seven

  Blazing white light from a pair of floodlights on stands made me squint. The air carried a wet, dead stink. When my eyes adjusted to the imposing light, I made out the silhouettes of a ring of vampires standing around me, all staring with their red eyes. A mixed demographic was represented here. Young and old. Short, tall, fat—every one of them ugly.

  Whatever I lay on felt like a picnic table you’d find at the park, although I didn’t see any benches on either side. Chains wrapped around my legs, my torso, clear up to my neck. In fact, when I tried to lift my head to get a better look around, the chain links dug against my throat and choked me.

  I should have bled out by now, I realized, remembering the bite to my neck.

  I couldn’t see the wound, but it felt sticky, more than wet. Somehow the bleeding had stopped. The vamps had done something to me to speed up the clotting. I had no idea what.

  More importantly, I had no idea why.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  No one bothered answering.

  Among the vampires I could see, I didn’t recognize any from the attack in front of my house. I tried to take some solace in that, hoping that I had fucked them up enough that they were either dead—officially, that is, as opposed to undead—or were wishing they were from the pain of the damage I had dealt them.

  I was suffering some of
my own pain at the moment, so that comfort was short lived.

  My whole body felt like I had spent a few hours falling down an endless set of stairs. I couldn’t tell if anything was broken, but a particularly nasty sting in my side suggested I might had a cracked rib or two.

  “What do you want from me?”

  Being chained to a table, laid out in front of a bunch of vampires, and none of them feeding on me, bothered me more than all the aches and pains I was suffering.

  As if in answer, an old man vampire arrived beside me. He was naked from the waist up and wearing a pair of black cotton pants that kind of looked like pajamas. His chest looked emaciated, as if he’d been half starved to death when he’d been turned. His skin was pale and ashen. His face was extra wrinkly and he had a big-nostrilled pug nose that, along with the pink glow in his eyes, made me think he might oink at any moment.

  “You’ve messed with the wrong sorcerer,” I said to my new companion.

  He smiled. It would have looked grandfatherly if not for the fangs. “Oh, I’m afraid we’ve messed with exactly the right sorcerer. But let’s not waste time with pleasantries. There will be plenty of time for that once you’ve joined the family.”

  Joined the family?

  My gut turned to a sour pit. A cold shot ran down my spine. It all made sense in a single blow to my psyche.

  “No fucking way,” I said. I searched within myself and found the core of my power. My forced nap between my house and here had allowed me to regain some juice. These guys were in for a rude awakening.

  Something registered in the old vamp’s eyes. He knew exactly what I was thinking. He raised one hand, which held a nasty looking dagger with a slim blade. He used the blade to slice open his wrist, then he slammed his open wound against my mouth.

  I clenched my lips shut as his cold vampire blood smeared across my mouth. If I let so much as a drop into my mouth, I would be infected. From there it was a short jaunt to becoming one of the undead myself.

  Not going to happen.

  I twisted my head to the side, but he followed me with his wrist, keeping it pressed firmly. I heard the clank of the dagger as he set it on the table beside me. Then he reached with his free hand and pinched my nose closed, cutting off my oxygen.

  Damned dirty trick.

  Breathing helped a great deal when trying to center and cast a spell. It also helped, you know, continuing to live. He was trying to force me to open my mouth. Like hell I’d give him the chance.

  Despite suffocating and the weakened state of my body, I dug deep, honing my will until I had a clear picture of what I wanted to accomplish.

  I focused on the dagger he’d dropped and used the air as my servant. The dagger shot into the air. I guided the blade as gravity did most of the remaining work for me, making sure the point faced down as it struck the vampire in the back.

  I felt him go stiff. His eyes widened for a second, then I watched the glow in them fade.

  He sagged forward and dropped on top of me, his weight pushing the last bit of stale air in my lungs out. My body’s instinct betrayed me and I gasped involuntarily. Before the vampire crumbled into ash, I felt the wetness of his blood hit the back of my throat.

  Oh, gods, no.

  I spat blood and ash. But it was too late. Even as I sputtered and coughed, I knew it was too late. The vampire’s blood had entered my system.

  I was infected.

  A wave of anger rolled through me. I bucked against my chains. My magic pulsed through my body and I unleashed its raw nature outward. I didn’t need to aim. The raw force broke the chains away from my body.

  The vampires around me were either shouting, screaming, or even crying at the sight of what had happened to their comrade. I got the impression he was some sort of elder or leader among them. Seeing their master cremated right before their eyes had shocked them. A few cowered away from me as I swung my legs off the table and stood, the chains rattling behind me.

  One of the vamps charged me.

  The power I had pulled from my rage still coursed through me. I rolled it up into a fiery ball and all but obliterated the attacker in one blow. He turned to a cloud of dust and embers before he got anywhere near me.

  This show of power made the others hesitate. I stood surrounded by them, but none of them dared another attack. It was a sort of Mexican standoff, the magical equivalent of the climax to so many Quentin Tarantino movies.

  I turned in a slow circle until I spotted the warehouse’s exit. Beyond the vampires standing in front of me, there stretched about fifty yards between me and a large steel rollup door. Even if I used magic to throw the door open, I could not outrun a pack of vampires. The only reason I had managed to catch up to Darius Strong on Belle Isle was because I had toasted him pretty good first.

  I either had to fight and kill them all, or die. And if I died, that would be the least of my worries, because with my body lifeless, nothing would stand in the way of the vampire infection from taking over and turning me into one of these freaks.

  I raised my hands, still running on the anger I had used to vaporize that last vampire. I drew on every shred of my magical stores. My hands lit up with pure blue flames. The sight made the circle of vampires back up. Before they could spread out too far and make this spell all the more difficult, I swung my arms out at my sides and summoned a ring of fire.

  I felt something in the center of my being tear. Like an over extended psychic muscle. I had tapped into a deeper store of power than I had ever accessed in my life.

  It was enough.

  The ring of flame shot outward and engulfed the vampires standing around me.

  Their howls and screams sounded like a choir of devils.

  Every one of them was covered from head to toe in flames. They flailed about, stumbling into one another.

  I waited until a gap between them opened and I hurried out of the circle. I sensed one come tearing at me. I threw out my hand, palm facing the attacker, and shouted, “No.”

  A wave of solid air struck him and sent him flying like a fiery comet.

  My legs buckled and I fell to one knee. My heart pounded. Suddenly, I found it hard to breathe.

  What the hell is going on?

  Too much magic in one night, topped with a massive amount of blood loss, and a mouthful of vamp blood. That’s what was going on. I had limits. Everyone and everything does. I had just never tested mine.

  I never wanted to again, thank you very much.

  I forced myself back to my feet.

  Most of the burning vampires had either turned to smoking piles of dust or had dropped to the floor to spend their last seconds undead as little more than firewood.

  I staggered toward the garage door. I lifted a hand, intended to magically roll the door up on its tracks, but I hesitated. There was no point in wasting any more energy. But when I tried to lift the door by hand, I found I didn’t have the physical strength either. I leaned my back against the door and looked around for another exit. A standard door was all the way on the other side of the warehouse. It looked a million miles away to me.

  I shuffled toward it.

  Again, my legs gave out. This time I dropped onto the concrete floor on my side. The floor was cold. All this time, I hadn’t realized that I’d been stripped to the waist. But while I lay there a moment, trying to regain the will to get back on my feet, I noticed a strange feeling inside of me, like something—or several somethings—crawling through my veins.

  I knew instantly what it meant.

  The vampire infection was taking effect.

  Chapter Eight

  I found my shirt and my phone in a neat pile on a workbench not far from the exit. I don’t know how long I had laid on the floor feeling the infection skittering through my system, but I was pretty sure I had passed out at one point. I was only feeling slightly better now. I had found that I could focus what little magical energy I had left to push back that creepy feeling. I didn’t know if it actually had any effect
on the infection itself. It made me feel better, though. I’d take it for now.

  I also felt better once I had a shirt on and my phone in hand.

  I had speed dialed Sly and now waited for him outside the warehouse in its weed choked cement lot. I was somewhere downtown, but not in any place I had been before. When I had explained my surroundings to Sly, he seemed to know where I meant. He probably could throw together some potion or something to trace me too. I had given him a lock of my hair a while back for him to use in case I disappeared without warning. My line of work, that’s a distinct possibility. I trusted Sly with such things. I trusted him with my life.

  I was more than relieved when he pulled up in his Caddy. I got in and stared out the window as he wound his way around several blocks until he reached I-75.

  “You ready to tell me what happened?” Sly asked as he merged onto the expressway.

  I opened my mouth. The words did not present themselves. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the glass of the side window. My sweaty forehead slid a little against the glass.

  “That bad, huh? Was it a job?”

  “No.” My voice growled as if I’d inhaled too much smoke. I guess I had. Yummy vampire smoke. “I don’t know what the hell that was.”

  Sly didn’t say anything.

  According to the clock on the dashboard, it was after three in the morning. I had long since missed out on my date with Fiona. Guess I could kiss that dating opportunity goodbye. Probably just as well. She didn’t want to get wrapped up with a guy who’d nearly been turned into a vampire.

  “They tried to turn me, Sly.”

  “Who tried to turn you into what?”

  “A group of vamps. A whole slew of them.”

  The car veered into the next lane. Sly glanced at me. “They tried to turn you, turn you?”

  I nodded and sighed. I really wanted to crash in bed and sleep for an eon, but I had too much to do before I could rest. I had to get this vampire infection out of my system, for one. And I had to deal with the inevitable fallout of the fight at my house. My neighborhood had an active neighborhood watch program, which, in my opinion, was an official means of snooping for nosy neighbors. Like the old lady who lived next door. She was widowed about ten years before I lost my parents, and since that day she had given them hell with all the questions and commentary about their comings and goings.