Page 3 of Blood Ties (City of Blood #1)

One long dimly lit hallway later, I push open the heavy door to the restroom.

Gazing at myself in the long mirror, I look over, what I consider, my uniform.

Tight black leather skirt over thigh high stockings, a matching leather corset with scarlet beads making it look as though blood is dripping down the front, and tall black boots with a thick heel.

My tits overflow the top just enough to create tip-worthy cleavage but not enough to be truly indecent, which would make it appear I am on the menu.

And finally a ruby studded choker rings my throat.

While I fix my skirt over my ass, the rhythmic thumping that I’ve heard from the closed stall door increases to, what I assume is, the climax, with a muffled cry and a faint growl.

What seems like seconds later, a waitress, Amelie, and a tall vampire emerge from the stall.

Amelie makes eye contact with me in the mirror and has the decency to flush a bright pink even as she wipes the drips of blood making their way down the side of her neck.

Her unnaturally red hair is messy, as though someone had their hands in it.

The vampire that follows her is a few inches over six foot and, honestly, kind of huge.

His chest is broad and his neck thick. He looks like he would be a body-builder gym guy in another life.

Her friend does not spare me much more than a grey eyed glance as he leaves the bathroom, followed closely by Amelie.

“Get to work!” I yell after her which is followed by a giggle.

Walking back out to the bar, I pass the stage and relieve Lilly and Sam of their work behind the counter, sending them on their way to their client.

I clear out some of the bar orders and start restocking.

I feel a prickle on the back of my neck and look around before making eye contact with the same man from the bathroom, tucked into the corner of the bar, no drink in hand.

Tall even when sitting, wavy black hair swept across his brow and dark grey eyes, he watches me curiously.

He looks vaguely familiar, though I can’t place why.

Despite knowing he just fucked my friend in the bathroom, being trapped under his gaze makes me blush and I feel the pink tinge coloring my cheeks.

Fucking vampires. I look away, annoyed with myself.

Wandering over, bar towel in hand, I approach him with a questioning lift of my brow.

“Hey, what can I get you?”

“Red wine. Something decent, if you even have that here,” is his reply, his voice Italian accented and full of disinterest. One of the old ones then, if he has an accent.

The younger blood-drinkers and the newly turned are Americans—or they were.

Now they are simply Sanguine Nocturnus. Only the Malvani family and their sirelings are Blood Ravens though; the royalty and the law.

Turning away, I make my way over to the wine cooler, don’t find what I’m looking for, and push open the door to the wine cellar.

Grabbing a bottle of 12 year old nebbiolo red, I pull the cork and pour it into the aerator before transferring it to a glass.

Stupid, fancy, demanding vampire.

“Yes, we have something decent here,” I retort, sliding the glass to the vamp. “Anything else? Something warmer?”

“No,” comes his curt reply and he drops a $100 on the counter before getting up and walking away, glass in hand. No problem, Dracula. I laugh to myself at my own joke. Slipping his huge tip into the jar, after I ring in his drink, I decide it’s worth the broody presence for the extra cash.

I really needed more than a few hours of sleep this morning, I’m practically dead on my feet. Thank fuck it’s well after midnight and the human crowd is slowing down—they don’t tend to be able to keep up all night partying like the vamps do.

The sudden terrified scream of a woman cuts through the noise in the room, bringing everyone to a hush. The music ends abruptly. Snapping my head in the direction of the scream—a shadowed corner near the stage—I squint to try and see something.

At this exact moment, a glass shatters against the floor as the Italian vampire from the bar drops his glass and shoots like a bullet toward the corner where the scream came from.

Before my brain even has time to register, there is a small flash of light over there that can only indicate one thing, I have a dead vampire and maybe a dead woman in my bar.

Great.

“Alright, everybody out! You know the rules. Out. Out. Out.” I yell as I wave my hands in the general direction of the door.

It’s not as though I can call the police since they don’t investigate murders anymore—it's safe to bet the murders are all vampire related and move on. Obviously the humans can’t set out onto the street so they all huddle in the waiting area outside the bar for their transportation to wherever they are going.

“Shouldn’t someone call, like, the police or something?

” A tourist asks me, the fear etched in her brow contrasting her frenzied excitement.

Even if we can't contact the police, we still have to make a show of doing something, anything, for the tourists. If they think we let people die, we won’t have a tourist industry to profit off of anymore.

They have to feel safe if we want them to return.

Little lies. ‘You’re safe’. ‘We care about you.’ ‘We won’t let you get hurt. ’

But we do. We let people die all the time. Between our lives and their’s, how could we ever choose them? It’s the worst part of this dark world we’re trapped in.

“Go back to your hotel. We will handle everything.”

Once the bar area is empty, I stand frozen, unsure what to do next.

I know the Italian has killed the offending vamp.

I know he is an old one. I know he is over there in the corner.

What I don’t know is what I am expected to do.

Usually if there is an incident, we call the Blood Ravens and report it.

I have no idea what happens after that. Right now though, I think the Blood Ravens are already here. At least one of them.

“Excuse me, uh, Mr. Italian guy,” I whisper-shout in the general direction of the incident, knowing he can hear me either way, and feeling wrong about yelling now that it’s me, him, and whatever is in the corner. “Do I need to call and report this? It’s the rules.”

“No,” he replies again. He seems to say that word a lot.

There is a harsh end to the word that makes it clear he does not intend to say anything else and does not want me to ask any additional questions.

I may be trapped in this city and I may be in the bar all alone, since everyone fled, with an old vamp who is god knows who but I am not stupid.

I will not be sticking around to find out what is going to happen next.

I quickly close up the bar, pull the money from the tip jar and the register, and swear to the camera above me that I will clean up Monday morning.

“Ok, well, goodnight then,” I say into the quiet room and push through the door into the staff hallway where the offices are, passing the door to the back rooms on the way to my tiny office.

Slapping my palm onto the reader on the office door, I enter the office, set the money on the desk, and sit down onto the pink faux leather sofa.

Putting my head in my hands, I allow a few solitary tears to run down my face.

A few tears for that woman who is not making it home tonight.

A few more for the rest of us and how helpless we are.

Standing, I pull myself together, wipe my face and exit the office, letting the door lock behind me. I make my way to the back room hallway and let Sean in the security office know what happened in the bar.

Another night in The City of Blood.

“How do you bear to watch?” I ask him as I perch on the edge of his desk, watching him flick through the various camera feeds showing the rooms. I truly don’t know how he does it. Some of the stuff I encounter when I clean up is already more than I can handle.

“If me watching is the only way they stay safe, then I watch,” is his stoic reply.

He’s older, in his fifties, certainly not busting in and taking down any bad guys but he never misses an incident in the rooms. His hair is greying at the temples and he has frown lines between his brows, but if I trust anyone in this place, it is definitely Sean.

He takes his job and the safety of our workers extremely seriously.

While everyone gets up to some rough shit in those rooms, no one dies.

It's in the contract they sign. As far as I know, it's only happened twice and the families were well-compensated. It doesn’t change what happened to those girls though.

“Thank you, Sean. It means the world to all of them, knowing you’re watching—even if I can’t imagine doing it.

I’ll be in the office when you’re ready to lock up,” I tell him and he barely nods, already focused on the screen again.

I slide off his desk, thump the bill of his hat, and walk out of the security office back to my own.

KNOCK. KNOCK.

“Come in,” I say as I press the buzzer button under my desk when I spy Lilly and Sam standing in the hallway on my camera. It's about an hour until sunrise; they must have finished up with their clients.

“Hey, Elina,” Lilly says as she flops down on my sofa.

“Hey, girly,” comes from Samantha at the same time.

“Ladies.” I lean back in my chair. “I assume you heard about the incident in the bar.”

“Yeah, and fuck Lina, I hate when shit like this happens. It makes it too…real, I guess. I can pretend it's just a normal bar out there most days but this shit? It makes me want to run and never come back. Except…there is nowhere to run too,” Sam says all in a rush, ending in a whisper. She isn’t afraid to say it—not really—but hearing it out loud makes the situation feel even more hopeless to think about.

“Lina, your family told you what happened when the wall went up, didn't they? My parents died in the Guerra de Sang and I never knew how we ended up here or why we could never leave,” Lilly says from her reclined position on the couch.

“Yeah, Grand-mere Celeste told me. She and Grand-pere had been married the year before, at 19. They bought their house in Little Woods near the water in April and were enjoying being newly married. Then the city announced they were building new levees, you know, for flooding. Every inch of Ville de Sang—well, New Orleans then—that touched water suddenly had a huge levee. All the roads in and out had a fifteen foot tall watertight gate. It took 2 years and everyone was so happy it wasn’t going to flood anymore.

Soon, even the roads that were not near water had a gate.

The city promised it was to protect us and no one was worried.

“It happened one day in June, just 2 years after the levee project began.

In the early hours of the morning, before the sun came up, all the gates closed.

All at once. No explanations. That morning, when people got up to go off to work and tried to drive out of town, they couldn't get through the gates.

That was the only day they could have escaped, before the Shadow Court started guarding, but no one knew yet why the gates were closed.

They were told to come back after dark. So, at sundown, everyone lined up to find out what was happening.

That night, the vampires checked everyone's ID, and if you lived in New Orleans, you were told to return to your home. If you lived outside the city and had gotten trapped, you were allowed to leave but you couldn’t return.

“Grand-pere and Grand-mere had their home here and weren’t allowed to leave.

They were the only Girards inside New Orleans at the time, and thus were cut off from their families.

That was the beginning of the end of New Orleans.

The Shadow Kings brought their own enthrall humans—I guess they knew they would need people in the daylight hours to enforce their new rules.

In the days and weeks that followed, anyone who caused problems during the day were imprisoned, and after dark, they became dinner for all the newly turned vamps.

New signs went up for Ville de Sang, new laws were passed, a king sat on a throne at St. Louis Cathedral, and everyone got trapped inside.

And in sixty years, not a single resident of Ville de Sang has managed to escape the city and live.

” I blow out a breath as I finish the story, wishing, like I have a hundred times before, that it had a different ending.

“Well. Shit.” Is the only reply from the couch.