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“My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail.”
Clementine and Holden stayed a step back from me, so I couldn’t see what they were up to, but I hoped they were keeping an eye on the increasingly restless group around us.
One of the men sitting next to the redhead leaned over and whispered something to her. She pushed him away, looking angry when she addressed me again. “You’ve brought the dead among us, little one.”
“That’s kind of the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it? I mean, you rose a legion of the dead. I just brought a couple vampires with me.”
She frowned. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?” I countered. Very original.
“My name is Marcela de la Cruz.” She said it in such a way I suspected I was supposed to be impressed. I wasn’t. I had no idea who this chick was, or who these men were, I just knew they were making a mess of my life and my city. “I’ll ask again. Who are you?”
She didn’t talk like any biker chick I’d ever encountered, though to be fair my only exposure was the occasional episode of Sons of Anarchy on Netflix. In fact, she spoke more like the sophisticates in my life than she did anything else. Marcela could have been talking to Sig or Keaty instead of a gang of street thugs. Something about this wasn’t sitting right.
“Secret McQueen,” I said at last.
Since she was human I expected her to have no interest in my name, but her eyes widened slightly when I said it. “Interesting. Have you come here to slay us, rogue hunter?”
Guess her information was somewhat outdated, but still, she knew who I was. She was also being awfully smug for someone who knew I was an assassin.
“I came to tell you your numbers are dwindling.”
Murmurs spread through the group, disrupting the silence.
“What does that mean?” This from the man beside Marcela, a fifty-something wall of muscle whose dark hair was going gray, but he still managed to project a lot of testosterone-fueled menace.
“Your buddy Jock? The necro you had out in Central Park?” I held my hand up to the side of my head and then mimed an explosion. “He went and lost his head.”
“Impossible,” Marcela snapped, her face going red with anger.
“You guys didn’t feel a disturbance in the force or something?”
A few of the younger guys had gotten to their feet, shifting edgy glances from me to the group at Marcela’s table, waiting for an indication of what they should do. I looked at the table closest to me and read the back of one dude’s cut.
Hands of Death.
Lacked a certain poetic subtlety, but it got their point across. In the middle was a patch of a laughing skull. On the front of another man’s vest was a patch reading Raising Hell.
These sons of bitches made me sick.
“Jock is dead.” I shrugged with mock apology. “That leaves, by my count, twenty-one living necros.”
A guy nearby snarled at the word. They must have thought themselves above nicknames. Like being a necromancer made them too good to be abbreviated.
“What do you want?” the man at the main table asked.
“I want you out of my city.”
Marcela and the man both laughed at this demand, as I suspected they would. “It’s our city now. Didn’t you see the welcome parade on the way in?” She smiled at me with such condescension it took an ironclad will not to blow her away then and there. “Do you think you and a couple of vampires are any match for us?”
“I think the ravages of old age have already done a number on you, sweetie,” Clementine said behind me. “We’re just here to tell you you’ve overstayed your welcome, and now it’s time to get gone.”
The guys who had so recently been desperate for a fight now smiled dreamily, and a couple of them sat down again, lovesick expressions etched on their faces.
Damn. I’d known her voice was powerful, but it was much more than that. She had the ability to enthrall victims with words alone. Typically, the thrall, a vampire’s form of hypnosis, only worked at close range and with direct eye contact. But Clementine was weaving a spell on these men just by speaking. It was incredible. I wanted to see what Holden made of it, but I didn’t dare offer my back to the room.
Not everyone was dazzled by Clementine.
