Blood Debt (Kingdom of Blood #1) - Callie Rose Page 0,2
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