Bane's Choice (Vampire Motorcycle Club #1) - Alyssa Day

Chapter One

Bane raced through the night at the head of a band of thirty riders, the fury of a fierce territoriality burning through him.

Bent over his Harley, he hit a speed that would have been impossible for human reflexes and was almost too fast for most of the vampires on bikes behind him. He’d already heard the catastrophic sound of one of his club members smashing into the guardrail on that last hairpin turn. Maybe he or she would survive, not that Bane gave a fuck.

Club members were expendable.

Vampires were expendable.

Everybody was expendable.

Almost everybody, he remembered, just barely, to amend his thought. All but those he protected—those he could trust. He glanced to his right and then to his left and saw Luke and Meara keeping pace. Tonight’s ride was not a recreational ride, done like so many, for an attempt to recreate the memory of the joy of being alive. The joy of charging down the road on a bike on a beautiful night in Georgia’s sultry autumn.

Joy, like everything else in his life, had also apparently become expendable. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt any emotion but rage—and he was currently experiencing a metric ass-ton of that.

Tonight, the Vampire Motorcycle Club was on a mission—Bane’s primary mission.

Death.

Three warlocks had entered his territory, and he’d be damned to the most fiery level of Hell before he’d let them establish a foothold anywhere near Savannah. His intel had reported that they’d set up a base in the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, just over the border into South Carolina, as if arbitrary state borders set up by humans meant anything to his kind.

The warlocks had already bound more than a dozen people to them with blood magic, and they’d killed over a dozen more in their rituals.

Not that he gave a shit about protecting any humans who were not his allies. No, this was about something far more important. Protecting what was his. His people. His land. He’d laid claim to territory that included Savannah long, long ago, when he’d burned out the warlocks who’d come to town. They’d fought back and destroyed most of the city doing it, but ultimately, he’d prevailed.

And he’d be damned if he’d let the evil blood-magic-wielding fuckers get a foothold now. What he didn’t understand was why it was happening. This was the third group in as many years to try to move in on him. After the way he’d destroyed the first two, he’d have thought everybody would get a fucking clue. Especially the Chamber, after he’d destroyed the last three delegations of “ambassadors”—read: conquerors—that they’d sent over the course of the past fifty or so years.

No Euro-trash group of dark magic practitioners was going to gain a foothold in his territory, no matter how powerful it was.

Edge, the club’s director of intelligence, had pinpointed the warlocks’ location to a shack bordering a freshwater marsh, all but hidden by the cypress trees surrounding it. Unluckily for them, nothing could hide from Edge for long. The man was lethal on two fronts—deadly as a vampire and equally dangerous as a brilliant computer hacker.

A little more than five miles out, Bane pulled into the parking lot of the Visitor Center and turned off his bike, breathing deeply of the clean night air, his senses honed to battle-readiness. Edge had cleared the space so the guards would be off duty—they’d find themselves with mysterious car breakdowns—and, when they did manage to make it to work, they’d find that the security cameras had malfunctioned.

Bane almost smiled at the memory of Edge’s glee when he’d shown Bane the two-minute clip of baby otters playing with a ball that would loop continuously on the camera feed. In spite of everything he’d endured, the hacker still had a sense of humor about some things.

The rest of the group roared in behind him, until twenty-seven Harleys, parked in a rough circle, surrounded him.

“Samson’s crash turned to fire. He’s dead,” one of the club members called out, anger harsh in his voice. “Maybe you could have slowed on some of those turns.”

Bane pinned him with an icy stare. “Are you challenging me?”

The vampire immediately bent his head in submission. The rest of them froze in place, knowing what that look on their leader’s face could portend.

All but Meara, who’d never been afraid of him once in the centuries since they’d become brother and sister. And why would she? She was the daughter of the man who’d saved Bane’s life—Bane’s sister-in-blood, who’d been