I jerk the phone away from my face to find myself talking to my home screen. The call’s already gone dead from his side.
My stomach feels like it’s full of battery acid, and I blink at the phone as if it has the power to rewind time and undo everything he just said.
Shit. I’m too far away. There are no fucking cabs around here, and I’ll never get there in time if all I do is run.
I start running anyway.
Chapter Two
I’m running and dialing, listening to the phone ring until the voicemail picks up, and dialing again. I’m soaked in sweat and filthy rain, and his building is still at least two miles away. I need a motherfucking cab. There aren’t a whole lot of those in this neighborhood, but luck’s on my side for once. After about ten minutes of all-out sprinting, I see a cab pull around the corner up ahead of me. I flag it down and hop in, shouting the address at the driver.
“You have fare?” he asks, glaring suspiciously.
Jesus. Of fucking course. I’m covered in blood and mud and whatever other dirt was in that alley. I look like a bum, so I can’t really blame the guy. I pull a small wad of cash out of my pocket and shove it at him.
“There. Drive, dammit!”
“Yeah, yeah. All right.”
With another skeptical look at me, he turns around and grips the wheel. But fortunately, he seems as eager to get me where I’m going as I am to get there. I’m sure it’s for different reasons—he probably just wants me to stop dripping blood and dirt on his back seat—but I don’t give a fuck.
He slams on the gas and peels out.
Baltimore swirls around me, the good smashed against the awful and the ugly, and all of it nothing more than a front for supernatural predators. People like to talk about how bad the drug problem is in this city—but shit, they’d all be shooting up too if they knew they were living on top of a goddamn vampire nest. Even the ones who say they don’t believe in vampires have seen some shit they can’t explain and lived some shit they want to forget.
After what feels like forever, the cab screeches to a stop in front of my brother’s shitty-ass building. The lower windows are all boarded up, the steps are crumbling around the edges, and the door is hanging at a stupid angle. Upstairs, candles flicker in some of the windows. The smell of urine is overwhelming. I can’t tell if it’s human or animal, which means it’s probably both. There’s no running water here, no electricity, and it’s full of rats—but it’s shelter from the elements and the cops don’t have the manpower to clear it out. Nathan thinks he was lucky to find it. I think Nathan’s been so low for so long he doesn’t remember what luck looks like.
Since the entryway door is busted anyway, I don’t even bother trying the derelict panel of buzzers. Instead, I just burst in and race up the stairs, dodging random puddles of various liquids and the occasional passed-out junkie. Nathan’s apartment door is cracked open too, and I shove my way in, hands going to my weapons, ready to fight.
“Nathan!” I call, my voice hoarse. “Nathan! Where the fuck are you?”
The living room—if you can call it that—is empty. So is the bedroom and the dry, grimy bathroom. I scream for him again, not caring if I’m waking his neighbors, but I know it’s pointless.
He’s gone.
I’m too late.
He must’ve called me right before he left, probably because he knew I’d try to stop him.
Ice twists through my belly. I’m shaking, and my face is wet with tears, even though I can’t feel them falling. Shit. I haven’t cried in a long time, and I’m pissed off that I’m crying now.
Dammit, Nathan. What the hell could be so bad that you had to go to the fucking vampires?
He’s got piles of paper stacked around the place, mostly scrap paper with notes scribbled all over in his slanted, erratic handwriting. Shopping lists are mixed up with horse’s names, and random dates and dollar amounts are scribbled all over everything. Crouching on the floor of his living room, I riffle through pile after pile until I come across a piece of paper with a phone number written in a beautiful, old-fashioned hand. Of course it’s written in red. Vampires are dramatic bitches. Beside it, Call Mikka is circled twice.
“Okay, but what did you do?” I mutter. “What the hell did you get yourself into, Nathan?”
When I flip the paper over, my heart sinks. It’s an itemized bill from a bookie, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the bottom, in Nathan’s handwriting, is a dollar amount for slightly more, with Blood Tribute Minimum Bid written beside it.
My hands start to shake even worse, and the scrawled note blurs in my vision as I blink away new tears. I put the paper down before my trembling fingers can accidentally rip it.
“You idiot,” I growl, grinding my fists into the filthy carpet. “You absolute fucking idiot!”
I should have known. I should have stopped this. Certain people in this town talk about vampires the way other people talk about loan sharks or hooking. If you can’t pay your bill, they’ll point at those goddamn monsters and say look, I know you’re not really trying, because if you were, you would have explored all the options. I should have seen this coming, dammit. Nathan already told me he sold sex once to pay a bill, and I’ve already bailed him out from under a loan shark before. This is the final stop on the debt train, but I never thought he would go this far. Never.
My brain is a chaotic mess, and I grind my teeth together, trying to organize my thoughts.
Think, dammit. Come on, Mikka. Focus.
The note says minimum bid, so he’s clearly not selling himself directly. He must’ve pledged himself to the auction house—the place people go to offer themselves up to the vampires of Baltimore as “tributes.”
I’ve never been inside it, but I know where it is. Downtown, there’s a bar. Behind the bar is a strip club, which is a front for the whorehouse in the basement. Behind that basement is another, larger basement which used to be attached to a museum. The museum doesn’t exist anymore, but the security measures are still in place. It’s impossible to get in unseen—and, from what I can tell, it’s impossible to get out at all.
So, fuck it, I won’t even try to get in without being seen. I’ll do the exact opposite.
I won’t be the first woman to offer myself up to the vampires willingly, not by a long shot. It happens all the time. All I have to do is play dumb and pretend I’ve watched too many sparkle-emo movies.
I suppress a shudder as I think about what happens next. If they pick me as a tribute—which they fucking better—I’ll be taken to the palace. Or fortress, whatever you want to call it. You’d be right either way. I’ve never seen the inside of it, but I’ve been down in the old paved-over parts of Baltimore enough times to know exactly where it is. It’s impenetrable from the outside. A massive high-rise made of steel and bulletproof glass sits on top of it, and vampires patrol the sealed perimeter. Waste that smells like spilled blood and old wine trickles between grates too small for a mouse to get through, and too strong to break with anything short of a natural disaster. The only way in is to be brought in.
And the only way to do that is to sell myself.