Four people in the room maintained serious expressions, and if looks could kill, they would be our hit squad. But the rest were enraptured. This told me a lot more than I’d expected it to. The four who weren’t impacted by Clementine were the necros. It made sense, since they were able to control the dead, that the dead would not be able to control them.
Marcela, her male companion, and two younger men seated at the bar were my targets in the room. Everyone else was meat in the grinder as far as I was concerned. The two guys at the bar were twins, though one had short hair and the other long. They were both
blond and had piercing blue eyes. With those scowling stares and Nordic features, they might as well have been members of a Scandinavian heavy-metal band. I was betting they had names like Lars or Sven.
“Now that I have your undivided attention, I’m hoping you’ll consider answering a few questions for me.”
“I’d sooner kill my own children than answer any more of your questions,” Marcela snarled.
“Are they here? I’ll do it for you.” I withdrew my sword and held it flat against my leg, begging the universe to give me an excuse to use it. Between the gun and the sword, I was well equipped to dispatch anyone who chose to cross me.
The man beside Marcela pulled a shotgun out from beside him and thumped it down on the table, giving me his best come at me, bro glare.
“If you think a gun scares me, you’re sorely mistaken,” I said.
“You should have been scared a long time before now,” he replied.
“Let that go to show you you’ve messed with the wrong girl.”
Chapter Twelve
The sad truth of the situation was, even with Clementine holding the biker boys in check, things were less than ideal. I couldn’t kill all four necros without losing one of my vampires, and though Clementine wasn’t my new BFF, I also wasn’t willing to sacrifice her life to get my revenge. There was also no guarantee she’d be the one to die and not Holden.
I definitely wasn’t going to put his life on the line.
He could heal a bullet wound or two, but a face full of shotgun buck wasn’t going to be an easy thing to walk away from.
“I came here as a courtesy to you. You and your people have until nightfall tomorrow to set things right and get gone.”
“Or what?” Marcela scoffed. “You’ll call the police?”
I shook my head. “If you’re not gone by sunset, I will come back. I will rain down a fire on you like nothing you ever knew existed. I’ll make you wish for something as sweet and easy as death, but I won’t give it to you. I will ruin you, do you understand me? Nothing you came here for is worth the shitstorm I will unleash if you decide to cross me.” Even as I spoke, my brain was hard at work, unraveling a list of possibilities. There was so much I could do to rip a person’s life apart at the seams.
If Marcela and her boys didn’t heed my warning, I would make them rue the day they crossed me.
I was good at a great number of things, but violent and bloody revenge was where I truly excelled.
“And why should we let you go? If you’re such a threat to us, why shouldn’t we kill you where you stand?”
I glanced to Clementine. “Can you show them what it really means to manipulate someone?”
She smiled, and I was a little frightened by the malicious gleam in her eyes. “No mercy?”
“No mercy.”
She focused her attention on the table closest to us. A man with his hair pulled back in a limp brown ponytail was staring at her as if she were the second coming of Helen of Troy.
“Hi, gorgeous,” she cooed.
As she spoke to him, I could see the others shaking off their stupor. It seemed her vocal thrall was either all, or one. She could cast a wide net or reel in a sole fish, but not both at once.
“Hey,” he said, his voice dopey and love drunk.
“Do you have a knife? Big boy like you should have a real big knife, right, sweetie?”
He nodded and slid a huge hunting knife out of the sheath on his leg, and set it on the table like a prize for her.
“Pick it up,” she said.