Bane's Choice (Vampire Motorcycle Club #1) - Alyssa Day Page 0,5
Motorcycle Club headquarters,” came the familiar, faintly British tones of the computerized female voice. “Access granted.”
Vampire Motorcycle Club. He’d thought Bane was out of his damn mind. But the man everyone now thought of as their club president had been right—the best place to hide the truth was right out in the open.
“Now entering: Calhoun, Lucas,” the top-secret, highly classified, no-way-could-a-civilian-get-his-hands-on-it technology announced. The AI was basically Siri plus Google but on steroids. It had access to almost every database in the world and combined that access with a facial recognition database that would have scared the shit out of any civil liberties group.
“Locate Bane,” Lucas said.
“Bane is currently in the vault.”
He closed the door behind him, tossed his leather jacket on a desk, and blew out a breath that he could almost see in the frigidly air-conditioned room that they called an office but looked more tech-heavy than the deck of the Starship Enterprise.
The man seated in front of a bank of state-of-the-art computers never even looked up. “I’m running every search I can think of but finding nothing about the Chamber at all. We need to know what they’re up to, and none of our usual sources are returning my calls or email.”
“Maybe they have a better computer guy than you,” Luke muttered, not giving a damn about the subject at this particular time.
“There is no better computer guy than me.”
When Luke didn’t respond, the man shoved his prematurely pure white hair out of his face and turned his icy silver gaze on Luke. “What.”
It wasn’t a question. Edge rarely bothered with questions. It was more of a command.
On another night, Luke might have jumped down the scientist’s damn throat for it, but this wasn’t another night.
This was going to be bad.
Very fucking bad.
“Bane’s in the vault?”
Edge said nothing. He’d clearly heard the AI tell Luke Bane’s location, and he didn’t bother answering inane questions any more than he’d ever ask one. Although, with an IQ way past two hundred, probably everything anybody ever asked sounded inane to him.
“What,” Edge repeated, standing.
Luke closed his eyes and took a deep breath to keep the rage burning in his gut from escaping into a wave of searing heat that would fry the computers.
Again.
“That human. Hunter,” he finally managed to rasp out past the boulder in his throat. “The one who saved Meara when she was caught out past sunrise a few years back.”
“Dead?”
“Dying. Soon.”
Something almost like compassion stirred in Edge’s eyes, but then he shook his head. “He’s the closest thing Bane has to a friend, not counting those of us in the family, so to speak. I’m out of here. Tell Bane—”
“I know,” Luke said. There was nothing to say. When Bane found out that Evans was dying, there would be no words worth saying—no place safe to hide from their leader’s fury.
In fact, the rest of them would be lucky to survive it.
Luke waited to feel sad…afraid…anything…about his impending death.
Waited.
Nothing.
He just didn’t give a shit.
He’d already died once, after all. And now he was going to give bad fucking news to the man who’d brought him back.
“I’m headed to the vault.”
He shoved past Edge and pushed open the steel door that led to the stairs and walked down into the darkness.
At the bottom of two flights of stairs, he only hesitated a fraction of a second before pushing open another door and walking into the heart of the club. The Boss’s “Born in the USA” played at maximum decibel level, and the smell of Japanese Camellia seed oil told him that Bane was oiling his swords and daggers and brooding—never a good combination.
And Luke was the lucky son of a bitch who got to give Bane terrible fucking news while the warrior had his hands on a few dozen of his favorite weapons.
Not that Bane wasn’t a weapon all by himself.
Three-hundred-plus-year-old vampires tended to get that way.
Bane took one look at him and was on his feet, dagger and bottle of oil crashing to the polished concrete floor, six feet, four inches of danger coming off the leash he held so tightly over his own immense power.
“Who?”
“Bane—”
“Who?” Bane roared the word, and the centuries-old stone walls vibrated with his fury.
“Hunter Evans. A fire.”
Before he could get the next word out, Bane was on him, and Luke saw his own death in a pair of empty black eyes.
…
Bane wrapped one hand around Luke’s throat and lifted the man several inches into the air, slamming him back against the metal