The giants yanked Vinnie up and started hitting him, while the third man stood back and watched. Thwack-thwack-thwack. The giants held Vinnie up between them, so he couldn’t even curl up tight and try to protect himself. Their massive, meaty fists slammed into his chest, his face, even his balls once or twice. Vinnie groaned with every blow.
After thirty seconds, Vinnie was in bad shape. At the minute mark, he looked like he’d been hit by a bus. By the time two minutes had passed, the bus had been joined by a couple of tractor trailers.
I thought about intervening, about jumping into the mix and stopping the torture. After all, I had questions for Vinnie — questions that he couldn’t answer if he was dead. But the giants weren’t going for broke just yet. They could easily have killed Vinnie with one blow to the head. Quick, efficient, mostly bloodless. But instead, they concentrated their fists on his chest, hitting him hard, but not with enough force to kill. Which meant that they only wanted him bleeding and broken, not dead. Not yet, anyway.
Finally, the giants finished beating Vinnie and dropped him into the sandbox. Vinnie let out another low groan and coughed up several mouthfuls of blood. The thick gobs gleamed like wet rubies against the gold, glittering sand. The giants moved back a few steps and stared down at him with their oversize, buglike eyes. Their ham-size fists hung loose and ready by their sides, just in case Vinnie had any misguided bit of fight left in him.
The third man, the one who’d been leading the way to the playground, stepped in front of Vinnie. I mentally dubbed him Mr. Brown because everything about him was a dark sable color, from his hair, skin, and eyes to the suit, tie, and shoes that he wore. He was much shorter than the other two goons, only about six feet tall, which meant that he wasn’t a giant. He smiled, and I saw the fangs in his mouth. A vampire, then. One who wasn’t big on personal hygiene, judging from the yellowish tint to his teeth.
“Vinnie, Vinnie, Vinnie,” Brown drawled, pacing a loose circle around the bartender, his wingtips sinking into the blood-spattered sand. “What are we going to do with you? You know, you really disappointed LaFleur tonight.”
“But I did exactly what she said,” Vinnie sputtered. A thick Russian accent colored his voice.
Somehow, Vinnie pushed himself up onto his knees, swaying from side to side as he tried to maintain his balance and not pass out from the excruciating pain that he had to be feeling. Blood trickled down the left side of his face, where the giants had opened a cut high on his cheek, while his right eye had already started to blacken and swell from their hard blows. Sand crusted in his dark goatee and hair, and he had his arms wrapped around his middle, as if that would ease the pain in his sure-to-be-broken ribs.
“I told everyone at the bar about the shipment of drugs coming in. And I gave you the names of all the people who seemed interested, just like you asked. Every single one of them, I swear.”
“Well, Vinnie, you must not have been convincing enough because the Spider didn’t show last night like LaFleur thought she would,” Brown said. “Which means that LaFleur couldn’t kill the bitch like she’s being paid to do. Like she promised Mab Monroe that she would.”
Despite the blood, bruises, and sand covering his features, Vinnie’s face paled a little more at the mention of the two women. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down like a yo-yo in his throat.
“Let me try again,” he pleaded. “I will tell more people. Many more people. I swear it.”
The vampire crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. “I don’t know that I believe you, Vinnie. I mean, look what happened tonight. LaFleur comes by to have a little chat with you, to tell you that no one showed up, and what do you do? Wait five minutes, and then bolt for the nearest door. Your actions don’t inspire a lot of confidence.”
Vinnie didn’t say anything, but his face took on a greenish tint underneath the bruises. So he’d tried to run after LaFleur had come by. And, in doing so, he’d brought about this little smackdown and hastened his own death. At least, that’s what he would think.
But I knew that LaFleur had just been playing with the Ice elemental. She’d come by the club with the sole intention of spooking him into doing something stupid like running just so her men could beat him. I hadn’t had a chance to read Fletcher’s file on her yet, but I recognized the type of person, the kind of assassin, that LaFleur was — a sick, sadistic bitch who enjoyed playing with her food before she killed it.
“It’s a real shame,” Brown continued. “We all know what’s at stake for you Vinnie — namely, your continued existence. I just never thought that you’d do something like this, especially given that sweet little daughter of yours at home. What’s her name again?”
Vinnie’s face tightened. “Natasha.”
The vampire snapped his fingers. “Natasha. I have to say, the first time I saw her, I wasn’t exactly concentrating on her name, if you know what I mean. But then again, I like them young like that.”
The vampire let out a low, evil chuckle that told everyone exactly what he’d been thinking about doing to Natasha. The harsh sound made even my skin crawl. I’d been around the block more than my share of times. I’d seen a lot of bad people do a lot of bad things, myself included. But men like Brown, who got their rocks off hurting and abusing kids, well, there was a special place in hell for them. My hand tightened around the hilt of my knife. Despite my being an assassin, I’d never taken any real pleasure in killing my targets. They were just jobs to me, obstacles to overcome, nothing more. But tonight, part of me was going to enjoy sending Brown on his merry way. I’d consider it a public service, like putting down a rabid animal before it could hurt anyone else.
“Please, I—” Vinnie started to plead for his life, but coughs racked his body. The Ice elemental doubled over, spewing up more blood.
The vampire’s eyes tracked the blood, and he licked his lips at the sight. All vamps needed blood to live, of course. To them, it was just another form of food, nutrition, something that they craved the way that normal people did potato chips. If a vamp had a hankering for a cheeseburger, he’d get a frosty glass of O positive to wash it down with, instead of a triple chocolate milkshake like the rest of us.
And that wasn’t all that drinking blood did for them; vamps could also siphon strength and magic out of it. Regular, old-fashioned human blood was enough to give any vampire a little something extra, like enhanced hearing and superlative eyesight. Those who drank giant and dwarven blood on a regular basis got the inherent strength that both of those races had. Just like vamps who sucked down elemental blood got the Air, Fire, Ice, or Stone power to go along with it, depending on whom they were drinking from. Then there were vamps who were elementals themselves, who already had the magic flowing through their veins, instead of having to steal the power from someone else’s blood.
But Brown wasn’t ready to sink his fangs into Vinnie just yet, because he waited until the Ice elemental quit coughing and straightened back up before he continued his speech.
“Forget it, Vinnie,” the vampire said. “It’s too late for all that now. Tell me, what did you think you were going to do? Go home, get Natasha, and get out of Ashland? We’ve had men watching your apartment all night long. And once you tried to do your disappearing act, I took the liberty of calling my men and having them scoop her up, despite her babysitter’s protests. You fucked up big-time, Vinnie, by trying to run.”
The bartender didn’t respond, but anguish and tears filled his pale eyes.
“We came to you with a simple plan,” Brown said. “Be Mab’s eyes and ears inside Northern Aggression. Watch Roslyn Phillips. See who she hangs out with. Make a list of any woman close to Roslyn who could possibly be the Spider. Pass along the information about Mab’s drug shipment in order to help us trap the Spider. But you just couldn’t do that, could you, Vinnie?”