Bane's Choice (Vampire Motorcycle Club #1) - Alyssa Day Page 0,13

choking noises.

There was spittle.

Constantin grimaced and dropped the creature, who lay gasping on the floor, its claw-tipped hands and feet limp, its scaly red chest heaving for breath. Constantin observed this with a slight feeling of distaste and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hands.

“Wasn’t caught. Er, wasn’t made,” the demon rasped. “Saw him talk to a lady doctor. He couldn’t glamour her. Disappeared with the human.”

Sylvie glared at the demon. The creature howled and scuttled away to hunch against the corpse, as if in some hope of protection from a dead human who’d had none of her own.

Constantin sighed. Minor demons were almost as stupid as humans. And Sylvie wasn’t helping.

“I don’t care!” Sylvie snapped. “Where is Bane?”

“At his house. I think,” the demon moaned, curling in on itself.

“You think? Since when did you learn how to think?” She advanced on the creature, but Constantin raised a hand.

“No. We need to know everything he saw, and he may yet be of use. You can kill him later.”

The demon’s ears, which had flickered a little, drooped down again.

Constantin pointed at him. “Why aren’t you sure?”

“The house is warded. Strong wards. Very strong,” the demon whimpered.

Sylvie sneered. “I’ll take care of that. How strong can his wards be to the likes of us?”

Constantin held in a sigh. New warlocks were so arrogant, often unjustifiably so. And the female warlocks were always the most vicious.

“If we smash his wards now, he’ll know we’re here, before we’re ready to announce our presence. We need to be ready to take them all out if we’re going to claim this territory without massive casualties among our own people,” he pointed out.

“Then what?”

He smiled at her, and her expression faded from arrogance to something very much like fear. He found he liked that.

He liked it very much.

“Did you know he has a sister? Other vampires he protects? A human staff? All potential leverage, if he cares anything about them.”

“Leverage,” Sylvie repeated, and she began to smile. “I can work with that.”

Chapter Seven

Bane’s sister by blood and circumstance, Meara Delacourt had been a vampire exactly as long as Bane had. Count Delacourt, a minor French noble whose wife had died in childbirth, had Turned his only child—a daughter—and three other humans, including Bane, into vampires on that same night. And then, caught in a frenzy of blood drunkenness the likes of which Bane had never heard of, either before or since, the count had flown directly into a bonfire at the harvest festival, burst into flames, and died spectacularly.

Or so Bane had heard, he himself having been unconscious and at the beginning of the three-day-long coma that accompanied the Turn at the time of the conflagration. Neither Meara nor Bane knew how her father had become a vampire. It was another fact long lost to time and distance, like the names of the other two who’d been turned and, indeed, Bane’s own name. The name his mother had given him at birth had gradually disappeared from his mind after Meara had started calling him Bane.

“You’re the bane of everyone around us,” she’d teased, when he’d been a human boy, and then repeated, more seriously, after they’d been Turned and were struggling to survive.

Back then, he’d been the bane of many.

Luckily for Bane and Meara, Pierre Delacourt had tucked them all away in a secret underground chamber and left a roaring fire with plenty of wood and a thoroughly entranced servant to tend it before turning himself into the centerpiece of the most memorable harvest festival in Yorkshire, England’s history.

Meara had been Bane’s sister ever since. A golden-haired, golden-eyed beauty who was smarter than anyone he’d ever known, more stubborn than a herd of mules, and the dirtiest fighter he’d ever met. Also, since then, she’d had his back just as he’d had hers, in trouble on both sides of the Atlantic.

When he scented her blood, he lunged for the wrist she held over his mouth.

“If you die for this…this…human, I’m going to chase you into Hell and drag your ass home,” she snarled, just before she smacked him on the side of the head.

Hard.

If he’d been human, she’d have given him a concussion. For him, though, the blow didn’t hurt nearly as much as the knowledge that he’d caused the warm tears that dropped on his forehead.

Partially revitalized from her blood but unwilling to take more, he took one final swallow, swept his tongue across his bite marks to heal them, and