Damali put her foot against the wall and began tightening the laces in her boot. With the mini and her pose, she was serving all thong, and had no modesty about it whatsoever. He could only assume that she was trying to really piss him off, and it was working.
"Look, I don't know what you're trying to prove out here," he said, crossing his arms, "but--"
"I don't have to prove anything, Carlos. This place drew me, had some crazy energy, but I went through the entire club and couldn't even get a good beat-down going." She dropped her foot to the ground and then began working on the other laces. "If you would stop being so muy macho and feel the wall, you'd see what I'm talking about."
Angered by the charge she lobbed, he walked over to the wall, spread out both palms, and tried to focus. "Nada."
"Figures." Damali cut him a glare, sheathed her Isis, and began walking toward Dan's car.
"What's that supposed to mean, 'figures'?" Exasperated, he walked in long strides to catch up to her, and grabbed her arm, forcing her to stop.
Damali looked down at his hand until he removed it. "You didn't feel the bodies... the faces... the hands on that wall pushing like they were caught inside and trying to get out of it? It wasn't a pure demon presence, or a vamp or werewolf sensation." She sucked her teeth when Carlos looked back at the wall. "Like I said. Figures. You're so worried about your so-called woman doing whatever, and dressing however, you can't focus on the real."
"That's bullshit," he muttered, walking toward the wall and opening his hands against it again. "And if it was all that you said, what the hell is wrong with you, getting all up on it until you knew what it was?"
She arched an eyebrow and gave him a wicked smile. "It felt good. What can I say? I'm going home."
He whirled on her as she jumped over the door and slid into the driver's seat. "Just like that--no, 'Baby, you need a ride?' "
"Just like you blew in here, now that you can do transport with accuracy, you can take your own ass home. I drove because I wanted to feel the motion and keep my mind occupied with some music, okaaay? If that's all right with you."
He stood in the darkened alley listening to air-conditioning compressors and club music thudding through the walls as she turned on the engine and careened away.
Something was so wrong with his baby that he could only look up at the full moon and stare. Fury was spiking through him so hard that it almost stopped his pulse. About to leave, Carlos turned as he felt it, or rather, felt them.
Twenty very foolish, lower-level male vampires eased into the alley with smug expressions. Carlos just stared at them. They had no idea how badly he needed to kill something to vent the bubbling rage within him right now. Every chest before him had a bull's-eye on it.
"Where's your shield, Neteru?" the boldest one in the group said, stepping forward. The blond vampire chuckled as the others began to fan out in a semicircle around Carlos. "What... ain't got no blade?" The vampire shook his head. "A dark alley is a real bad place for an ex-Councilman to be caught solo."
Carlos rubbed his jaw and smiled, appraising the biker-looking vamp with a bad mousse job on his spiked platinum blond hair. Skinny motherfucker was gonna get his heart ripped out. The Goth crew with him, serving hard-dyed black-and-red punk-style haircuts with black hps and nails, made the muscles in his forearm twitch. "I'm not in the frame of mind," Carlos said in a quiet, lethal tone. "Just be advised." He looked around. "Damn... this used to be my club, too."
One copper-coiffed, very high vamp giggled in a squeaky-pitched tone. He adjusted his twisted nail-and-leather dog collar and then opened his black leather vest to stick out his bony, na**d chest at Carlos in a dare. "He's claiming old territory, fellas--is gonna hurt something with no fangs and no blade. Oh, I'm soooo scared! He used to hold check here, yeah, I remember, just like he used to hold check on his woman, but don't now."
The high vampire glanced around smiling a snaggletooth grin as all twenty vampires suddenly bulked to bodybuilder proportions. "Just like his lady came out here for a fight, was gonna hurt somethin'. Oooohhhh... Sends chills down my spine. Makes my dick hard, just thinking about it."
That was it. Slow rage set off something crazy within Carlos that had no limit. It was all the excuse he needed to kick some ass, and he surveyed the group deciding which one would die first.
"Yeah, she was gonna hurt something all right," another vamp said from the sidelines, taunting Carlos. "The outfit was killer, for sure. But at least she had sense enough to bring her blade--unlike this dumb bastard."
Carlos didn't even turn as they fully encircled him. He kept his eyes on the ringleader and released a very slow breath. This was just what he wanted, and he could actually feel an invisible block break his contact with Yonnie and Damali. The threatening sensation crackled through his aura as though a black net had been dropped around him. Good.
"Thank you," Carlos said evenly. "Tonight I really needed this one-on-many beat down.... Y'all just don't know."
"Be cool, man, his boy is a Master and might come back--or that bitch with the Isis could," a smaller vamp warned the group in a low, nervous whisper. "Just 'cause Yonnie ain't in good standing, don't mean he can't get in it, feel me?"
Carlos looked at the lead entity and spoke in a calm, deliberate tone as he began to slowly walk forward. "You ain't gotta worry about my boy... you need to worry about what you just called my wife."
"Chivalry is not dead, huh?" the platinum blond said with a snarling laugh. "But it will be soon."
It just took a glib second. The moment the vamp before Carlos briefly turned his head to gain another round of laughter from his friends, eight inches of battle-length fangs instantly filled Carlos's mouth. He bulked to stand, six-foot-eight, towering above the six- foot-two blond, and had reached in for a snatch so quickly that the entity before him just stood there for a moment, dazed, chest cavity cleaned out, organ gone. Carlos had yanked it out so fast that the vamp's lungs and esophagus dangled from his fist still attached to the severed heart: The copper-haired one that was talking trash instantly lost his throat all the way down to the bone, causing his head to drop back, hanging by only the thin ligaments and tendons that still kept it attached to his shoulders.
"Oh, shit!" a vamp beside the blond shouted as their leader dropped to his knees with a thud, then keeled over and torched beside the smoldering vamp with no throat. "This motherfucker still got fangs! Still got the speed snatch--get him!"
Carlos left the ground before their muscles could react to send them airborne. Heart tissue and an Adam's apple squeezed between his clenched fists like oozing black mud. The punch that he landed on the vamp that had just spoken disconnected his jaw and sent it skittering under a Dumpster. The deadly group lunged in a blur, and Carlos pivoted, slammed his fists through two chests, coming away with spinal columns and then used them like bloody chains to bullwhip around throats and lacerate once-smug faces. "I told you I was not in the frame!" Carlos shouted, disemboweling four entities in a windmill rake as he spun then kicked several back, his black Timberlands connecting to temples, noses, and cheeks, and coming away with fangs in the sole of his shoe. "But you kept f**king with me tonight!"
Three half-wounded vamps tried to scramble up the fire escape, and Carlos grabbed the bottom rung of the iron bar, flipped up above them, crouched low in a saliva-dripping growl, and then lunged. Throats were between his jaws like old times. Adam's apples were summarily crushed, then gone. He glanced up with silver gleaming eyes and burned right through a beginning swirl of bats, then leapt off the fire escape right into the fray of nine remaining attackers.
He came away with a thigh bone, and plunged it into a chest, breaking it off and leaving part of it planted in a screeching vamp that became cinders. Noting the short bone dagger in his hand, eight vampires backed away but were too injured to propel themselves away to escape.