The Shopgirl's Prophecy (Beasts of Vegas Book 1) (2 page)

No choppers took flight. No Humvees chased them. No further shots were fired. It was like the base had been swallowed up. Olek was making up for lost time and wiping the secret military installation off the map with nothing but his fangs.

“What happened?” she demanded.

Connor winced at the black smudges on her face, the ashes in her hair, and the blood splattered across her top.

The worst thing possible. “I fulfilled my prophecy.”

#

Maksim Volk’s prison cell faded from sight as he was dragged away by his army-issued prison garb.

Someone had thrown a grenade at him. Even now, his eyes burned and his entire left side felt gooey.

“I miss people trying to kill me with wooden stakes,” he grumbled, squinting to see who or what had a grip on him.

Oleksander the Destroyer.

“Fabulous.” Maks swatted at Olek’s iron-like fist, but only managed to bring his right arm halfway up. Yep, something was definitely wrong with his limbs. Fricking grenades.

Olek hauled him without any gentleness whatsoever across an asphalt parking lot and then roughly over a concrete curb. Maks’ legs, currently numb and useless, had been blown up a bit, it seemed.

Lovely. With a twist and a grunt, Maks freed himself and landed flat on his back.

He sat up to inventory his injuries. His right arm was burned down to bare bone, his left leg was ground beef and cloth, but nothing seemed missing that couldn’t heal. His seventeen-year-old body would regenerate exactly as it had been, leaving him forever looking like a rangy youth.

But the best news he’d received in twenty years? He was a free man.

No matter what happened next, he would never go back into a cell and be anyone’s guinea pig.

Maks crawled on his hands and knees, headed for rocky hills in the distance, and something fragrant tickled his nose. Faint, like a memory. Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeper.

Not a memory. Real.

Maks got to his feet despite the pain and stumbled west toward the scent, straining to place it.

“These mortals annoy me,” Olek grumbled as soldiers continued to fire their weapons.

Maks couldn’t care less because he’d finally recognized the scent. Vampires. Lots of rotting vampires under tons of earth. He increased his scuffling and lumbered toward a bare stretch of sand between the outer security fence and the base infirmary. The closer he got, the stronger the smell became.

He ignored the rapport of gunfire and the familiar sounds of Olek feeding messily on human victims to drop to his knees and tear into the earth as the shooting ceased altogether. His right arm was useless so he excavated with his left, scooping and clawing until his fingers were bloody and his nails cracked to the quick.

“Explain yourself,” Olek demanded, appearing behind him.

“Can’t you smell them?” Maks cried.

More specifically, his little bird. He could smell his sweet Katya, and he’d dig until both arms fell off to free her.

“Who?”

“Our people.” His fingers unearthed a trouser leg, and he dug faster.

At last, Olek knelt to help. He wasn’t half blown up and was made stronger from the soldiers he’d gorged on. He was much quicker displacing mounds of dirt.

A body appeared, rapidly followed by another and another. When the army had finished with Olek’s horde, they’d tossed the dried out, skeletal vampires into a mass grave under the base.

His mates. His fellow warriors. At last, he knew they weren’t being kept in a separate facility. They weren’t being tormented and experimented on the way he’d been. No, they’d been used and thrown out like so much refuse.

Katya among them.

His little bird had been stolen from him so long ago, and yet he pictured her exactly as she’d been two decades earlier, before their capture. Young and beautiful, shy yet passionate. She had set his blood on fire.

Olek uncovered half a dozen more bodies, emaciated corpses, but further down the bodies emerged in pieces. Hands. Feet. Heads.

“No, please.” Maks dug directly at the spot Katya’s scent was strongest. She couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t be.

She was.

Maks lifted a familiar torso, now rotted to pieces, and beside that, a skull with a tuft of strawberry hair still attached.

“
No
.”

The sky collapsed around him, drenching him in shadow. Not possible. She couldn’t be gone. Not the woman who gave his soul life, who gave his wretched existence meaning.

“Sergei, Ilya, and Ivan are beyond saving,” Olek said, picking and choosing bodies from the grave. “But my three best fighters are still strong.”

Lies. Maks didn’t have to look to know Olek’s three brothers Sergei, Ilya, and Ivan were whole and in stasis thanks to their immortality, but Olek had never enjoyed his brothers’ company, not when the four siblings were constantly struggling for control over the vampire horde. But Olek’s three favorite lackeys—Freddie, Dawn, and Lara? They were a different story.

He smelled fresh blood as Olek fed his three acolytes from nearby soldiers’ throats.

Maks didn’t care. His little bird had been cut into pieces. He would never care about anything again.

 “How?” He cradled Katya’s head. “We are not animals. We are not experiments.”

Not that the U.S. Army hadn’t tried. For twenty years they’d been cutting imprisoned vampires open, testing their blood, pushing the limits of their mortality. Volk and Olek had been their preferred test subjects, though, and Volk had endured an eternity of pain and agony.

He would repay every second.

“I swear to you,” Olek said as his three warriors rose up around him, “we will make the human race suffer for what they have done. We will burn their world to the ground.”

Olek started to walk away, but Volk didn’t follow. He curled around Katya’s remains and was content to die from the grief splitting him in two.

“We go.” Olek grabbed Maks’ collar and pulled.

Maks scrambled to keep a hold of Katya’s skull, but he was only able to snatch her necklace off her neck, pulling strands of red hair with it before his master tossed him, Freddie, Dawn, and Lara into a Humvee with an unconscious soldier.

If he must live a little longer, then he’d get his revenge.

While they drove out of the base and into the mountains, Maks sank his teeth into the dying soldier’s throat, Katya’s locket clenched in his hand.

Chapter Two

Three months later…

A bus tour to the Hoover Dam wasn’t answering any of Alina Rusenko’s questions. It was a distraction.

She rolled her head on her shoulders to alleviate the headache she’d carried around since landing in the sweltering Nevada heat ten days ago and caught sight of her cousin Stefan sitting across the aisle from her.

“How much further?” she asked.

Stefan grunted something unintelligible and went back to sleep. Her cousin suffered DVD withdrawals. This was the longest she’d seen him off the sofa and away from his widescreen telly all weekend.

Her extended family in Paradise, Nevada were strangers. They’d been nice enough to house her while she searched for answers about her early life, but the more questions she asked, the more tours they sent her on. And every single time Stefan accompanied her as protection. Her bodyguard. What a joke.

At home in London, Dad never would’ve sent her off on a road trip with a near stranger. Working as a shopgirl was the most dangerous activity Dad allowed her to do. But Dad was dead, and he couldn’t object to anything anymore.

The wind picked up, and she smelled sagebrush and dust through the open windows as she checked her phone. Twelve-thirty, local time. Grumbling, she unpacked her brown-bag lunch. Carrot sticks. Hummus. A can of soda she passed to Stefan. Her aunt Natalie was trying to accommodate Ali’s vegetarianism, but it was hit or miss. Today was pretty good.

She munched on her food and stared at the passing desert wasteland.

All her life, she’d accepted as gospel that she’d been born in Odessa, Ukraine. Her mother’s name was Katherine Kirstak, and she’d died giving birth to Ali.

But after Dad passed away from a massive coronary, she found keys to a safe deposit box she’d never known about. Inside was a photograph of a red-haired young woman and a marriage certificate for Uri Rusenko and Kate Kirstak. The ceremony had taken place in Odessa, Ukraine.

Stranger still, were records from a secret bank account. Her dad had been sending money to an account in Las Vegas, Nevada for the past twenty years. Almost the same time Ali had been alive on the earth. Finally, discovering letters and emails from an aunt and uncle Ali had never heard of—her dad had always claimed to be an only child—had been the final straw. She’d closed up his house and booked a plane ticket to Sin City.

Why would Dad lie? That was the most perplexing part of the entire mystery. What was he hiding? And why?

To her, Vegas was the city for marrying in a hurry, gambling away fortunes, and hiring hookers. Plus the urban legend that after the vampire horde had been defeated in Prague, the U.S. Army had hidden them in the Nevada desert. But neither of those things had anything to do with her or her family. So, what was Dad’s secret?

A classic yellow Jeep straight out of the eighties passed the tour bus on the left, disappearing from view.

Ali chewed a carrot stick. Maybe there was no mystery. After five days in Paradise, Nevada she’d seen the Grand Canyon, the Las Vegas Strip, and Death Valley, but she was no closer to understanding the identity of the redhead in the photo, why it appeared her dad was married a second time, who he was bankrolling on the down low, or why he’d lied about having an extended family. Maybe he was just a secretive guy. He’d kept her secret her whole life. He was good at hiding things.

Ali leaned her head against the seat rest and watched an endless expanse of sand broken by scraggly creosote bushes with tiny yellowish-green leaves. The bus was quiet enough for a quick nap. Several of her fellow tourists were already asleep, including her brutish cousin.

She removed her ponytail to rest more comfortably, smoothing the sticky blonde strands off her neck when something in the air around her shifted, an almost imperceptible change, like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm.

The bus driver slammed on the brakes, swerved, and crossed the center line when gunshots sounded, and he overcorrected. The bus tipped. For a breathless moment, the enormous vehicle hung suspended as it balanced on two wheels. The driver, though, couldn’t return them safely to their proper position. Ali was thrown against the opposite seat, glass exploding as the bus crashed onto its side and slid sideways across asphalt.

The bus ground to a stop in the sand, but the world continued to spin.

The shrieking was deafening. “Stefan?” she called. “Can you hear me?” Her foot was twisted among the seats and tossed luggage. Though nothing seemed broken, she’d been through a blender, and her head felt twice its normal size.

“Alina?” Stefan’s face appeared above her. “Are you hurt?”

She smelled kerosene, and she reached for Stefan’s hand at the same time a flaming glass bottle sailed down through the bus’ front door and burst against the driver.

Oh, God. Not real
. The room temperature jumped several ticks as a wave of heat blasted the side of her face.
Yep, real
. Orange and red flames washed up the benches and crawled across the aisle. A second bottle broke against a man’s back, transforming him into a human torch. She screamed.

People rushed the rear of the vehicle, trampling each other. They bottlenecked at the emergency exit, everyone shoving to reach the handle first. She shuddered, her brain refusing to compute. It was like watching a horror film.

Stefan lifted her by the arm and shoved her toward the second exit to her left. The one closer to the fire. Her long sleeves and trousers tripped her up, tangling her limbs, but her cousin yanked her along. The flames spread, leaping across the seats.

A young man dropped through the front door of the overturned bus, landing gracefully atop the smoking steering wheel. An inhuman maneuver. Which meant one thing.

Vampire
.

She’d never seen a real, live infected before. Only heard stories. The man with the midnight black hair was younger than she was and so out of place in a pair of dark slacks and a well-made shirt amidst the smoke and chaos, Ali wondered for a moment if she hadn’t passed out and begun dreaming.

His cold, blue eyes locked on her face, and he seemed momentarily entranced by her, not the other way around. And then everything became very, very real. That whole unattached observer thing—long gone.

There was no safe place to go but to the rear of the bus. Ali bolted. Outside, she’d be safe from the fire and the vampire. She could find a passing car and call for help. Fresh air and room to run became super important priorities. Stefan was right behind her.

Until he wasn’t.

She glanced back as the teenaged vampire cut her cousin’s throat from ear to ear, and Stefan’s blood sizzled through the flames.

Panic surged through her, forcing her to move faster. She scrambled, dry heaving on the way, choking on smoke. There would be time for crying later. When she was alone. Until then, she must hold it in and use it like jet fuel in her escape.

They’d passed a miniscule town twenty minutes back. Someone in one of the houses would help her. One moment he was on the other side of the bus and the next the vampire locked his bloody fingers around her wrist. She couldn’t pull free no matter how hard she tried.

“No,” she said, struggling with the emergency hatch now at eye level. One-handed, she couldn’t even wiggle it.

She should have stayed a simple shopgirl, should have remained in London where tour buses weren’t attacked by infecteds and burned down with people still inside. She was going to lose it. Scream, puke, pass out. Something bubbled up inside her.

No, no, no.

The vampire hauled her toward the front of the bus. She fought, but it was useless.

Please let it be over quick. Kill me, drain my blood, but don’t start eating my insides until I’m dead.