Henchgirl (Dakota Kekoa Book 1) (2 page)

There was something seriously familiar about him as though I had seen him before; yet I knew that if I had seen that dracon before, I would have remembered it. I saw an immense amount of power around him, much more than around the scruffy singer, much more than I should have seen even if I wasn’t wearing my charm bracelet. The power around him crackled like my grandfather’s soul did when he was exercising a lot of his power.

Although seeing power around a dracon despite having my charm on was unusual, it wasn’t completely unheard of for me; there was one dracon I had already been able to see power around when wearing my charm bracelet, my grandfather; he was a half-dragon and a seriously powerful one.

Something about this guy on the stage, his power, the whole situation felt wrong, all wrong.

"Excuse me, ma'am," I almost jumped as a giant hand landed on my shoulder.

I spun to look up into the yellow cat eyes of the excited were-tiger. "Can I see your ID?" He asked, his voice a purr.

I did not need to fake my terror, I was already freaked out and the were-tiger’s expression said one thing:
dinner
.

"Um," I said, "I misplaced my ID somewhere, sorry."

“You’re underage,” he said, a statement.

I bit my lip and looked up at him pleadingly. “I can explain.”

"We do not accept underage patrons. You need to come with me to see the owner; he'll be the one to decide whether or not to call the police." The grip he had on my shoulder made sure I was going to see the owner.

"Hey, hey you!" the main singer’s accented voice called into the microphone. The entire crowd quieted and several people looked back at me. I glanced around, then up, to realize that the main singer of the band had been speaking to the were-tiger and me.

"Hey, don't take her out; she's the prettiest human in here," he said with a little accented-lilt to his words. He wasn't looking at me whatsoever, just at the tiger.

He was trying to save me. How he had heard my conversation with the were-tiger over the crowd, I have no idea.

"None of us up here are of age,” he continued. “We'll take her on the stage; we’ll make sure she won't drink anything." He reached down, smiling jovially.

The distraction caused the fiddle player, who was crouched down, trading his fiddle for a guitar, to glance up and look straight at me. I almost reeled back, the power that dracon emitted, it was like a punch to my senses, even dampened as mine were. I really should not be able to sense him like this with my charm bracelet on.

He was huge, not a giant like the tiger, but nearly. He met my gaze, his brow furrowed and his eyes widened, just a little, so little I could have imagined it, and for a second it looked like he had recognized me or something about me.

"This is over," he said in a low voice as if that was the final word. "Take that human out and wait for her parents to come pick her up.” He gave me an irritated-looking glare, as if I had interrupted their performance on purpose, and then broke his gaze from mine. To his friend, he said, “Let's get back to playing."

The were-tiger’s hand clenched on my shoulder and to my surprise, he growled, "Yes sir, of course." Rustom Barns headed to the front of the club rather than the back, dragging me along with him.

I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. This was not going to happen. "But I don't want to go home!" I shouted at Mr. Barns when we were far enough from the stage as the musicians started up again.

He growled from where he stood beside me, but said no response.

I glanced at my watch, I still had fifteen minutes.

When we were almost at the main entrance, I took in a deep breath and did something really stupid. I stomped on the were-tigers foot with my stiletto boot and sprinted to the back of the club, by sprint I meant: dodged between vampires, ducked under the arms of some uproarious witches and then ran full out the last distance toward the closed door that led to the back offices. When I reached the closed door, I deliberately turned away, as if lost.

Before I moved two feet from the door, big meaty fingers wrapped around the back of my neck and squeezed. Rustom Barns’ other hand shot past me and threw open the closed door. He shoved me down the hall toward the offices.

I glanced back, rubbing the back of my neck and immediately realized how much I screwed up. The were-tiger’s teeth elongated, his bones moved under his skin, and he became more feline than human. I broke the first and most essential rule of dealing with weres: never run from them, if you run, you're prey.

As his fingernails elongated, I realized, I wasn’t going to make it to the club owner. My uncle Bobby could probably take the were-tiger, my uncle Glacier definitely could. Me? Nope.

I had about three seconds before he pounced; I used them to reach down to my boot for my contingency plan.

"Rustom, stop," the voice was soft but commanding, almost as commanding as the fiddle player’s had been.

Rustom, who had been, literally, squatting to pounce, stood and straightened slowly, his claws and teeth retracted. But his cat-eyes stared, memorizing me, so filled with hatred I knew that I just screwed up bad, bad, bad as I could have possibly done.

"Is she underage?" the vampire asked. I knew he stood directly behind me, though I had not worked up the guts to turn away from Rustom. Cold fingers wrapped around my arm.

I turned but did not look up at the vampire’s face and when he began to tug on my arm, I followed meekly.

"Guard the door," the vampire said to Rustom as he pulled me out of the hall into his office which I did not realize we were three feet from. The door clicked behind me.

Out of the fire pit, into the volcano…

I paused to compose myself while glancing around at the spacious sleek room; everything in it had a glassy, sterile look.

The vampire kept his gaze on me as he circled to the other side of a possession-free black shiny desk. "I have to apologize for my manager’s rough treatment of you; he takes underage drinking very seriously."

"I did not have a sip of alcohol," I said, standing up straight to look up and meet the vampire’s gaze. He looked so young; it was creepy, knowing that a century old sociopath looked out from that cherubic boy-next-door teenage face.

He took me in too, hungrily. I did not need my powers or to touch him to know how he felt, I did dress for him tonight.

I crossed to the desk. "Please, don't call the police," I whispered, pleading.

"I don't break the law lightly." He narrowed his eyes on me. "What will you do for me?" he asked. After a hundred years of doing this, he could not have come up with a better line?

I reached out to touch his hand, making him smile. Creep. His hand wasn't exactly cold, just cool and inhuman feeling.

"This," I whispered, reaching up I unclasped my dampener.

I could tell the moment he registered who I was, but it was too late; I had a good grip on his hand and forced my power to dive into his soul.

Souls have layers, like onions, but the first few layers of his soul, of any soul, aren’t actually the true soul. Like a needle, I immediately drove my power deep through all the layers and uncoiled only enough true soul to keep his body paralyzed, but no more.

Immediately, I retreated back three layers, and sorted through his surface emotions, the first layer of disposable surface emotions that were constantly used and shed.

"Wait!" he shouted. In other circumstances, even the weakest vampire or were-animal could crush me with a little bit of their inhuman strength, however, it did not take too much soul to paralyze a person’s body and I had drawn enough.

I had not drawn enough to paralyze his mouth though; unfortunately, I had been told not to do that.

He started pleading, "I'll pay him, just stop!"

With my power, I started drawing on the little pockets of happiness I found within his impermanent layers and his happiness trickled into me. When I had collected it all, there wasn’t much, I pulled it into me and burrowed deeper. I delved into the next layer, his deeper emotions. Like a damn breaking, the joy filtered into me and went from a trickle to a torrent.

Unfortunately, though I pulled his emotions into me, I could not digest them or any other person’s emotions, they just filled me up like a balloon. I had back-up to help me with that.

With a flick, I opened the ring I wore on my finger, my grandfather's ring, and fed Samuel’s emotions through me and into it. The ring was a portal that only emotions could pass through and it consumed the emotions greedily.

"It's not about payouts this time, Samuel Brooke. This is about revenue,” I said, reciting the script I memorized. “There have been too many highly publicized deaths at your night club. Seven girls died here in seven months. For the first time in ten years, my grandfather's human Mabi resorts are at eighty percent capacity."

My power examined his soul, picking and choosing, and then dragging every positive emotion from it, like a rake against his soul.

I went off script and whispered, "Is this how you killed them, Samuel? Was I next?"

I had seen the crime-scene photos; my grandfather always included the nasty details so I used my power without remorse. It never worked.

The flare of fear that passed through the vampire might as well be his response, ‘well yes, you were.’

After a hundred years and the supernatural upgrade that he received from being infected, the waste of space had more soul than he ever deserved.

I raised my other hand to his forehead, and broke into the next layer, the emotional-memories, the final layer before the true soul. This was the part I hated the most, sorting through his memories, having them play in my head, living through his emotions.

However, in his memories I found a lack of emotion, emptiness. He only felt satisfied when he was taking power, stealing innocence then throwing the remains to his pet tiger.

"I want to die," he moaned.

"You won't. My grandfather respects your business sense; he's not ready to dispose of you. You will serve him faithfully." I fed a little of his own joy back into him. "Setting stacks of bills into my grandfather’s palm will be the only thing that ever brings you joy." I feed a little more of his happiness back in, training his deeper emotions to follow my commands. "If another girl dies and my grandfather suspects you ever even glanced at her, he won’t send me, he'll send one of my uncles."

Samuel’s gaze met mine and I saw terror there, of me, of my uncles, it flowed through him thick and viscous, but it was nothing to the feeling of hatred he had for me.

And like every other time that I've delivered this message to the dangerous men and women in my grandfather’s employment, I knew this was just one more way that my grandfather owned me, and would always own me. The only thing that would ever keep me safe from his enemies or even the people who worked for him was his protection.

With a concentrated effort I gave Samuel the coil of his true soul that I had held within me back to him. I stepped away as I lost control of his body.

I always gave every drop of the true soul back.

He slumped onto his desk.

"I'm texting my uncles, Glacier and Bobby, that we’re finished with our chat," I fastened the charm bracelet dampener back on my wrist. "They’re probably getting worried. Bobby is ready to slice his way through your club in about…" I glanced at my watch, "…thirty seven seconds. Tell your tiger to escort me safely to my uncles, they’re waiting out front. Or they'll both come in."

Without hesitating, Samuel Brooke called in his tiger and I was escorted out.

Chapter Two

I fought the urge to sit on the curb of my driveway as I waited. Glacier was late. Well, he wasn’t actually late but for the first time ever my uncle Glacier wasn’t ridiculously early to drive me to school.

I looked back over my shoulder at my mother's ‘ocean-view’ mansion. The
mansion
monstrosity
, as I liked to think of it, was by far the most luxurious house I had ever lived in. It was two stories, almost entirely made up of windows with an eastern-flare to its tiered roofs; it stretched out along a cliff overlooking one of the popular west-side beaches. When neighbors or people who we did not know came over, my mother claimed she had it built after my father died.

This was a lie.

The house was a rental and we could not even afford it. Not a single eastern-style end-table in there belonged to us.

Finally, the silver minivan pulled into the driveway that led up to where I waited. When the van stopped and the door slid open I was shocked to find my uncle Bobby in the car with Glacier. This was another first.

"Happy Friday, Dakota," Bobby said as he scooted over in the back seat.

Though I usually sat in the front seat, I crawled in next to him, pushing my backpack under the seat and sliding the van door shut. "
Happy Friday Bobby…
” I said suppressing a groan, “What are you doing here?"

He swung his arm around my shoulders. Bobby's soul was even larger and warmer than he was, and Bobby’s body-builder body always seemed to take up the majority of the room, whether he was in the bench seat of a minivan or in an indoor shopping mall.

I settled onto the seat and let the tendrils of his bright soul brush against my own.

When I did not wear my charm bracelet, my power dampener, I saw souls. Beyond being able to gage someone’s level of power, it was actually a pretty useless part of my ‘aspect.’ Seeing someone’s soul was the equivalent of ‘seeing’ someone’s personality, too abstract and complex to give me much of any readable information. Just because I could see a person’s soul, did not always mean I could tell what emotion that person was feeling. Sometimes it was obvious, if the person had an emotion so extreme that it overtook the whole surface-area of their soul. I might see, for example, it sparking with anger or lighting up with amusement or buckling into itself with grief.

However, if I wanted to get an accurate read on a person’s emotions, that was their surface, deeper or memory emotions, I always had to touch the person and dive into them with my power.