Netherworld II: Blood Potion No. 9 by Tracy St.John Read Free Book Online

completed her ensemble. If
this girl stripped, her show would last about ten seconds, tops.
Talk about scanty.
    Bane suddenly looked more tired than
mean. “Get off me, Fizz. I’m working.”
    The woman stood, her lips pursed in a
childish pout. Her short dark-rooted blond hair was spiked artfully
around her oval face. She had big brown eyes and a button of a
nose. Fizz was cute, but hard in the way that the girls at the
Beasts club were hard. And she looked to me like she might be
getting a little old to be making top dollar in a strip joint.
There was an emptiness in her expression that made me suspect she
might not have many sharp tools in the shed.
    Her high-pitched ‘pretty please Daddy’
tone became more of a ratcheting nasal whine. “It’s always
something with you. You never want me.”
    Bane flicked his eyes up to gaze at her
face. His voice was quiet, and all the more menacing for its lack
of volume. “Are you questioning me?”
    She swallowed, and the fear replaced
pique in an instant. “Of course not, Bane. I just – C.K. gave me to
you. Why won’t you fuck me?”
    Oh gross. Okay, Gerald and Dan had
warned me the women were treated like possessions and not people,
but jeez. This was just nasty.
    Bane dismissed her with an impatient
flick of his fingers. “I’ll fuck you when I’m ready to. Go back to
work, Fizz. I got stuff to do. Is Hazel here?”
    Disappointment battled with her need to
please. Subservience won. “He ain’t been in all night, thank God.
He’s such a freak.”
    Fizz pranced away, plastering a smile
on for the customers. A waved twenty from a potbellied man at one
table brought her running over for a lap dance. Bane watched her,
his eyes flat and uncaring. Then he sighed and stood, heading for
the door that said ‘Staff Only’.
    I blew out a breath and followed him. I
was getting a whole bunch of nothing from this jaunt, if you didn’t
count being grossed out. I was a lot of that.
    I followed Bane down the back hallway,
passing a smoky dressing room (apparently the dancers didn’t care
much about not smoking in public places, especially stuff of a more
illegal nature) and an office. We went right out the back exit,
coming out in the litter-strewn alley. The overripe sourness of a
dumpster mixed uneasily with the marsh-salted air.
    Bane kept to the shadows beneath the
club’s overhanging roof. He lit a cigarette.
    I sighed. He was so easy on the eyes
but so hard on the peeves. “A smoker too, huh? You just get better
and better all the time. What a waste of fur you are.”
    An unshaven man, his clothing a few
days late for the laundry, shuffled up from behind the dumpster. He
lumbered slowly, bent with the weight of the world. His shock of
black hair was so untidy it nearly hid his rounded furred ears. A
werebear, I identified.
    “Spare a cigarette?” he asked in a low
voice.
    “Suck my cock?” Bane
returned.

    To my amazement, the homeless-looking
man laughed and straightened from his beaten-down hunch. “Are you
having that good a day, Levi?”
    Levi?
    Bane blew out a disgusted breath that
contained a bit of an animal whine to it. “I screwed up, got my ass
in a sling. It’s nothing I can’t handle, but C.K. will drop the
hammer to keep the rest in line.”
    The werebear said, “Shit. You’re sure
you’re all right?”
    “It’ll be okay.”
    “Don’t get yourself killed. If you’re
in trouble, we’ll yank you out, get somebody else in the
gang.”
    Bane shook his head. “It took me a year
to reach this point. The ATF can’t wait another year for an agent
to get in with the Beasts, not with those tainted blood supplies
showing up more frequently.”
    I yelled, “Holy crap. You’re an
undercover agent, not a lowlife!”
    Of course they didn’t hear me. The bear
crossed big hairy arms over his chest. “The chances of the
contamination coming from the Fulton Falls’ chapter of the Beasts
are incredibly slim anyway. I’m betting on