Page 11 of Missing Piece (Neon Scars #2)
Vincent shook his head, dragging his fingers across his scalp.
That truck was supposed to get them through the next month, both in terms of keeping them all fed and keeping the more exclusive customers of Wild Side and Marcus’s downtown nightclub happy.
“If we don’t get a new source before the next pick-up date, we’re both going to be royally fucked in less than a month,” he said.
“Can we call in a favor with one of the others? Doesn’t Jae still work at the hospital? ”
“He does, but after the last incident that required him to smuggle bags out, they keep the bank locked down like they’re hiding the Ark of the Covenant in there,” Marcus said. “We might just have to, what’s the phrase, take it on the chin?”
“Fuck,” Vincent muttered.
“Why are you worried? I heard you have a new house guest who can help in that area?” Marcus mused.
Vincent eyed Petrov, but the big man just shook his head and fingerspelled Ophelia’s name. He wondered for a moment which one of the brothers had told her, but honestly, Luka probably told her in one of their group chats the same night Vincent brought Adam home. “Your child has a loud mouth.”
“She is quite good like that,” Marcus said. “You should have mentioned it before you did it, though. We don’t know what kind of family connections he has or if missing posters are going to go up. You should have been more careful.”
Now was not the time for one of Marcus Graves’s “responsible vampirism” lectures.
He already endured enough of those for two lifetimes.
“It wasn’t planned. It was sort of heat of the moment,” he admitted, looking away from the speaker as though Marcus would somehow be able to see him through the earpiece.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I haven’t felt this kind of…embarrassment since I was human.
“You haven’t been a heat-of-the-moment guy in a very long time,” Marcus said, a scratchy noise coming through the speaker like he was scratching at his stubble. “Have you, um, started the process with him?”
Vincent hated how concerned Marcus sounded.
They had had an on-off kind of friendship for years, but when things seemed at their worst, the old bastard always came through for him, whether it be getting ready for a fight or just lending him an ear.
He hated it. Relying on Marcus and the brothers.
On Ophelia. But they were the closest thing he had to a family.
And they usually steered him in the right direction.
It would be helpful to talk to Marcus about his…conflicted feelings around Adam.
Just not yet.
“Not really,” Vincent finally said after Petrov arched a brow at his growing silence. “This isn’t about that right now. We need to figure out what to do about this attack first. Do we know if hunters were involved?”
“Oh definitely,” Ophelia said from somewhere in the same room as Marcus.
“Cliff mentioned they came ready with all sorts of behead-y type weapons, and as soon as he tried to get them off the truck, they started yanking off his daytime gear. That dumb fucking cowboy hat he wears probably saved his skin. Literally.”
“Ophelia, language,” Marcus scolded. She muttered something indecipherable even to Vincent’s ears, drawing a sharp rebuke from Marcus in Japanese. “Despite her word choice, she is correct. Probably hunters. Newer ones if they couldn’t take out one injured vampire.”
Vincent held his breath, violence coiled in his chest like a living thing ready to wrench free and go on another year-long rampage. It’s them. They’re back. “Do you think—?” he let his words trail off, not wanting to complete the thought.
“No,” Marcus said quickly. “Not them. They haven’t moved from Chicago in years. We’ve all been on our best behavior. They have no reason to do this now.”
“Then what’s the plan here? If Jae can’t help us, we need to contact others, maybe in Peoria or out of state,” Vincent said.
The edges of his device screen cut into his hand and he forced his fingers to relax.
He was moments away from breaking it just like he broke the twins’ glass the other night.
Getting a new device was a much bigger pain in the ass than ordering new antique drinkware.
“Do it. I’ll call around and see if someone has something for us down south,” Marcus said.
“Blood shortage aside, what do we tell the others? I don’t keep track of what kind of back stock everyone has, and things could get messy in town when the younger ones go hungry.”
“We need to call a family meeting to go over some free feeding rules if everyone is about to run low at the same time,” he said, concern threading through his tone.
“Petrov, can you coordinate something like that? We can have everyone meet at Euphoria near the end of the month and get things planned out.”
“Yes, Graves. On it,” Petrov said as he began scrolling through his device.
Vincent fixated on the clothes hanging by the fireplace again.
Should I give them back? Adam might be cold.
What the fuck am I thinking? He glanced down at his device, breathing out heavily as he realized he cracked the glass.
“God dammit,” Vincent muttered. “Marcus, we need to talk about something else that might become a problem.”
“Is this about your pet project?” Marcus asked.
“No, well, maybe that too. You ever heard of L’Ordre du Nouveau Soleil? The Order of the New Sun?”
Marcus was silent for a moment. “I’ve heard of The Order of the Sun. They were down in New Orleans in the ‘60s, but I’ve never heard of a branch popping up outside of the South. Why do you ask?”
“I found out one of them was posing as a dancer at my club,” Vincent said. “Is this something I need to worry about?”
“Fuck. Yeah, you need to worry about that. What did you do to her? Please tell me she is dead.”
Petrov looked up from his device, his eyes wide.
Marcus rarely advocated killing other vampires.
He believed everything could be solved with diplomacy and despised when things got messy.
“She might not be dead,” Vincent said. “Why is that a problem? It was one scrawny girl, around six months into turning. She probably just went back to her little group with her tail between her legs if she made it out of the cornfield.”
“You don’t understand, Vincent. This isn’t some collective or den. If she made it back…” Marcus let loose a string of curses under his breath. “If she’s not dead, you just painted a target on your back and invited a vampire supremacy cult to town.”