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Bane's Choice
by Alyssa Day

Copyright © 2020 by Alyssa Day. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Chapter One

Bane raced through the night at the head of a band of thirty riders, the fury of a fierce territoriality burning through him.

Bent over his Harley, he hit a speed that would have been impossible for human reflexes and was almost too fast for most of the vampires on bikes behind him. He’d already heard the catastrophic sound of one of his club members smashing into the guardrail on that last hairpin turn. Maybe he or she would survive, not that Bane gave a fuck.

Club members were expendable.

Vampires were expendable.

Everybody was expendable.

Almost everybody, he remembered, just barely, to amend his thought. All but those he protected—those he could trust. He glanced to his right and then to his left and saw Luke and Meara keeping pace. Tonight’s ride was not a recreational ride, done like so many, for an attempt to recreate the memory of the joy of being alive. The joy of charging down the road on a bike on a beautiful night in Georgia’s sultry autumn.

Joy, like everything else in his life, had also apparently become expendable. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt any emotion but rage—and he was currently experiencing a metric ass-ton of that.

Tonight, the Vampire Motorcycle Club was on a mission—Bane’s primary mission.

Death.

Three warlocks had entered his territory, and he’d be damned to the most fiery level of Hell before he’d let them establish a foothold anywhere near Savannah. His intel had reported that they’d set up a base in the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, just over the border into South Carolina, as if arbitrary state borders set up by humans meant anything to his kind.

The warlocks had already bound more than a dozen people to them with blood magic, and they’d killed over a dozen more in their rituals.

Not that he gave a shit about protecting any humans who were not his allies. No, this was about something far more important. Protecting what was his. His people. His land. He’d laid claim to territory that included Savannah long, long ago, when he’d burned out the warlocks who’d come to town. They’d fought back and destroyed most of the city doing it, but ultimately, he’d prevailed.

And he’d be damned if he’d let the evil blood-magic-wielding fuckers get a foothold now. What he didn’t understand was why it was happening. This was the third group in as many years to try to move in on him. After the way he’d destroyed the first two, he’d have thought everybody would get a fucking clue. Especially the Chamber, after he’d destroyed the last three delegations of “ambassadors”—read: conquerors—that they’d sent over the course of the past fifty or so years.

No Euro-trash group of dark magic practitioners was going to gain a foothold in his territory, no matter how powerful it was.

Edge, the club’s director of intelligence, had pinpointed the warlocks’ location to a shack bordering a freshwater marsh, all but hidden by the cypress trees surrounding it. Unluckily for them, nothing could hide from Edge for long. The man was lethal on two fronts—deadly as a vampire and equally dangerous as a brilliant computer hacker.

A little more than five miles out, Bane pulled into the parking lot of the Visitor Center and turned off his bike, breathing deeply of the clean night air, his senses honed to battle-readiness. Edge had cleared the space so the guards would be off duty—they’d find themselves with mysterious car breakdowns—and, when they did manage to make it to work, they’d find that the security cameras had malfunctioned.

Bane almost smiled at the memory of Edge’s glee when he’d shown Bane the two-minute clip of baby otters playing with a ball that would loop continuously on the camera feed. In spite of everything he’d endured, the hacker still had a sense of humor about some things.

The rest of the group roared in behind him, until twenty-seven Harleys, parked in a rough circle, surrounded him.

“Samson’s crash turned to fire. He’s dead,” one of the club members called out, anger harsh in his voice. “Maybe you could have slowed on some of those turns.”

Bane pinned him with an icy stare. “Are you challenging me?”

The vampire immediately bent his head in submission. The rest of them froze in place, knowing what that look on their leader’s face could portend.

All but Meara, who’d never been afraid of him once in the centuries since they’d become brother and sister. And why would she? She was the daughter of the man who’d saved Bane’s life—Bane’s sister-in-blood, who’d been Turned at the same time as Bane, by the same vampire. He’d always protected her—she’d always protected him. Nothing was more important than family, even to a man who’d forgotten how to feel.

“We will compensate his people,” she said, a flicker of something crossing her eyes. Regret, perhaps? He didn’t know. Any softer emotions had long since been lost to him.

Bane focused on the mission and addressed the group. “The warlocks are mine. Luke and Meara will assist me, but they’ll also help you. The people camped there are all under the influence of blood magic, so they’ll be dangerous and very difficult to stop. They will also be completely unable to respond to reason.” Warlocks possessed powerful magic of the darkest, most evil kind. Humans in thrall to it were as close to invulnerable as humans ever got.

“The warlocks will know we’re coming when we’re about a mile out, so go hell for leather after that,” Luke, officially the club’s Sergeant-at-Arms, told the group.

“Warlocks? Guy witches? That doesn’t sound so bad,” said a vampire who’d only been Turned within the past year and had evidently been useless when he was human, too.

“Warlocks can be male or female,” Luke said. “Witches can also be male or female. The difference is that witches use benign, or earth, magic. Warlocks like to play with blood and death and worse things.”

“Blood magic,” Meara said. “It can be deadly to our kind. Let us handle the warlocks. We have experience at it.”

Normally, Bane would never bring so many untested fighters on a job like this, but he needed them to keep the humans who’d been bloodthralled by the warlocks out of his way.

Unless he just killed them all.

In the old days, he would have. These days, with technology, disappearing humans caused more problems than he wanted to deal with, so he tried to leave fewer bodies in his wake.

The warlocks, though—they had to die. And when they were dead, he’d burn their bodies and salt the ashes. It was the only way to be sure that they wouldn’t come back.

They were always worse when they came back.

“There’s still time to change your minds and get out of here. The warlocks might have spelled the humans to use fire,” Meara told them, looking around the circle. Somehow, shockingly, she still cared what happened to others.

Bane didn’t. All he cared about right now was the hunt. He could feel the muscles in his body tense, readying for the fight, and his innate magic swirled to life inside him, eager to be unleashed.

“Come or not. If you don’t show up, don’t come back to the club. Ever,” he growled. Then he raised one hand in the air and slashed it down, and every single one of them revved up their bikes and followed him to what very well might be their true deaths.

There were no cowards in the Vampire Motorcycle Club. A few were lunatics and sadists, maybe, but no cowards.

A flicker of something like satisfaction almost broke through his rage. The warlocks were in for a major surprise.

…

At the designated distance, Bane ditched the bike behind a tree and launched himself into the air. He couldn’t use any magic of his own—not this close—their wards would detect and nullify it. But flight was natural to him, and they certainly wouldn’t have warded against birds.

They’d just think he was a really big owl.

He soared over the canopy of trees, a rush of pre-battle adrenaline intensifying the fierce sensation of triumph that flying gave him. Turning vampire may have stolen the sun from him, but it had gifted him the sky. The sight of the more than twenty enthralled humans milling around didn’t even slow him down. His people would take care of the humans.

The warlocks were his.

He was still smiling when he smashed through the roof of the shack.

All three were there—two men and a woman, robed in scarlet velvet that matched the blood of the human woman dying slowly and painfully in the center of an enormous, glowing pentagram carved into the wooden floor. The warlocks had been chanting and dancing before the fire; he’d seen it through the cracks in the rotting roof.

They weren’t dancing now.

He saw in a glance that the human was beyond saving. They’d tortured her, of course, and undoubtedly eaten some of her internal organs while she lived, because their magic drew power from pain as well as from blood. Her death might end the spell, or it might make things worse by increasing its power.

The woman’s agony broke the tie, because torture pissed him off. Kill if you must, but inflicting pain for its own sake was an offense against the laws of nature.

“Not in my territory, you nasty fucks,” he snarled at the warlocks, who were still scrambling back and away from him. And then he snapped the dying human’s neck.

Instantly, the reek of putrefaction and despair began to lessen. Their spells had been tied to her agony, then. The magic must have had an element of sound dampening, as well, because now the shouts and screams of the battle raging outside the cabin broke through.

“Marta, Otto, to me,” one of the men—the tall, cadaverously thin one—shouted, holding out his hands. The other man and the woman rushed over to him and clasped his hands in theirs and began to chant. Tendrils of foul-smelling magic slithered up from the floor and started to coalesce in the corners and curl around the warlocks’ feet.

Nausea swarmed up from Bane’s gut to his throat, almost choking him—his body’s automatic reaction to the blood magic.

But the fire of his rage burned through the nausea—burned through everything but the driving need to see their blood splashed on the ground.

To end them.

“No doubt casting a spell that will do truly horrible things to me,” Bane said, his lips pulled back, fangs fully descended, not that he’d drink the blood of abominations like these. “You must be more powerful when you join hands. I can fix that.”

With that, he blurred through the air and grabbed each man by an arm, and then he ripped them off at the shoulder, ignoring the black blood that spattered in dual arcs across the room. He threw the arms into the old stone fireplace, where they immediately caught fire.

It was barely enough to slow them down.

Marta screamed out her hate and threw a spell at him that probably would have eviscerated him if he hadn’t warded himself, Luke, and Meara before they came. His protection spells would have persisted even in the face of wards that blocked his battle magic, but depriving the warlocks of their victim had destroyed their wards.

Which would make the next few minutes a lot more fun for Bane and a lot less fun for the warlocks.

He grinned and flicked a stasis spell at Marta that knocked her back and pinned her against the wall of the shack. Just then, Luke and Meara burst in from windows on opposite sides of the room, blood dripping from a scrape on Meara’s forehead.

“Starting all the fun without me,” Meara said, leaping to his side and then whipping her daggers out of their sheaths and hurling them into Marta’s throat. The warlock’s spilled blood broke Bane’s stasis spell, and she fell, but then she started crawling toward the dead woman in the pentagram. Horribly, she gurgled out laughter with the knives still in her throat, black blood bubbling out around the edges of the blade.

Luke, meanwhile, grabbed the tall man, who must have been the leader, by the back of the robe when he tried to flee. “Not this time.”

A stinking, sulfurous wave of dark magic more powerful than any Bane had felt in three hundred years of existence hammered into him from behind, smashing him across the room and into the wall next to the fireplace so hard the entire cabin shook from the blow. He managed to turn in midair, though, and landed on his feet, immediately falling into battle readiness, his gut twisting in rebellion to the unnatural forces swirling through the air.

He’d known this would be bad.

He hadn’t realized it would be something far, far worse than bad.

His skin tried to crawl off his body in reaction to the power stabbing into him—an unholy tidal wave of magic so foul that it could only come from a necromancer.

Luke was down, unconscious or dead, and Meara lay sprawled on the floor, eyes staring, unseeing, at the ceiling. Whatever the warlock had done, it had decimated Bane’s wards, leaving Meara and Luke, who had no natural immunity to magic, at risk.

If the bastard had harmed them, he would die.

If he’d killed them, he would wish for death.

Bane started toward Meara, but an invisible force ripped a chunk of stone from the fireplace and hurled it at him, forcing him to dodge aside.

“Move again, and the next one crushes her head.” The cold, dead voice that spoke the words preceded the speaker into the room. Unlike the three in the room, this warlock emanated power from his physical presence as well as his magic. He was tall and heavily muscled, with a gleaming bald head and a jutting nose. His thin lips were pulled away from his teeth in a sneer. “The Chamber sends its regards, bloodsucker. And our demand that you vacate the territory to your betters.”

“If I had any betters, I might consider it,” Bane said, stilling his rage to an icy calm. He could feel Meara and Luke now—they were alive. Unconscious, but alive.

He needed to use his brain—strength and magic would not be enough against this foe.

When the necromancer laughed, the three warlocks in the room started to convulse, pounding their heads against the floor, over and over. “Master,” the male without a knife in his throat crooned. “Master Constantin, you will protect us.”

“Clearly, I need to get better help,” Constantin said, glancing down at them before returning his attention to Bane. “The Chamber warned me that you had magic, vampire, but they didn’t know how strong you were. Seems that our intelligence was out of date. But you’re still no match for me.”

“Haven’t seen one of your kind in more than a hundred years, necromancer,” Bane said, his voice dangerously even. “After I kill you, I hope not to see another for at least as long.”

“There are no others like me,” Constantin boasted. “I am more powerful, more versed in the dark arts, more—”

But, by the third more, Bane had heard enough. He pulled on his own magic—fueled by the elements of Air and Water, fueled by the gravitational pull of the moon, fueled by starlight itself—and shifted through time and space.

But the necromancer was ready for him and blurred across the room in a magical shift of his own. Otto and the other male warlock, somehow still alive in spite of the blood pumping from the holes where their arms used to be, cried out to their master, beseeching.

Pleading.

Constantin made a downward slicing motion with both hands toward the men’s heads, and Bane watched in disbelief as the tops of their skulls slid cleanly off, as if a razor-edged sword had sheared through bone and brain.

“If that’s how you treat your own, it’s a wonder the Chamber manages to recruit any new people at all,” Bane said, shifting the currents of his magic to shield Luke and Meara.

“There are always fools,” the necromancer replied, almost casually, pointing to Marta, who—in spite of what Constantin had just done—still crawled toward him, crooning, “Master, Master,” again and again.

Luke and Meara now safe, Bane refocused his magic, channeling it into a single, deadly spear of invisible power, and then unleashed it, hurling it across the room at Constantin. The necromancer’s head jerked up, his face contorting into a grimace. Then the necromancer flung both hands into the air, and two things happened at once: the wall behind Bane imploded, slamming into his back and knocking him to his knees, and the female—Marta—levitated into the air, Constantin using her as a human shield.

Bane’s magic ripped her in two.

Bane leapt to his feet, gathering his power for another attack, but the necromancer’s hands were already busy, flashing through the pattern of a complicated spell, fueled no doubt by Marta’s death, that pushed waves of darkness and the stink of dread into the space around himself. Creating a portal to Hell, for all Bane knew.

“Another time, then, vampire,” Constantin said. “Consider this a parting gift.”

He stepped into the portal, and the shack exploded, raining wood, stone, and debris down on Bane, Luke, Meara, and the corpses of the three warlocks.

“No!” Bane shouted, smashing through the rubble, fighting his way to his family, pain searing through his chest. If his miscalculation had cost Luke and Meara their lives…

But Meara was already shoving splintered wood and rubble away from herself and standing. “What the hell kind of magic was that? I could hear and see what was happening, but it was like I was trapped in my body. I couldn’t move… Luke? Where’s Luke?”

Bane hurled stone and wood out of his way, digging for Luke, who suddenly started to moan and then sat up, pushing debris off his body.

“Ouch. What the fuck was that? Did you kill them? I hope you killed them all.”

“Actually, no,” Bane told him, holding out a hand to help him out. “The necromancer killed his own. This may be a much bigger problem than we thought.”

“Chamber,” Meara said grimly.

“Chamber,” he agreed.

“We’re going to have to kill that son of a bitch Constantin and ship him back to England in a box. A small box,” she continued, wiping blood off her face. “Send a message.”

“A very, very small box,” Luke agreed, scowling. He had wounds of his own. His scalp was bleeding, and the explosion had driven a foot-long shard of wood into his shoulder. He yanked this out now with barely a grimace.

“For now, we need to deal with the humans and then regroup,” Bane said, wiping the blood from his own head wound out of his eyes. “Are you both okay?”

“We’re fine,” Meara said, dismissing his concern with a flick of her fingers. “But we need a new plan.”

“A better plan,” Bane said grimly, staring at the destruction around them. “Fucking necromancer. Next time, he may bring the dead against us, too.”

The thought of Savannah’s dead being reanimated and used as pawns in the Chamber’s twisted schemes felt like a punch to Bane’s throat.

“A much better plan.”

…

In the end, five of the formerly bloodthralled humans lay dead, but no more of Bane’s people had fallen since the accident on the road. The rest of the humans had collapsed into confused huddles when the warlocks died and the necromancer disappeared.

“You were lost in the swamp and ran into drug dealers who imprisoned you. Now, you’ll go home and tell everyone the details are too traumatic to share,” Bane ordered the thralls.

It was easy enough. Humans were always ready to believe an explanation that didn’t involve magic, the supernatural, or anything that stalked the dark. And it made sense to them; it was the reality of movies and television and therefore carried more truth than the reality of vampires, warlocks, or necromancers. In dark times, a palatable fiction reassured those unwilling or unable to believe a terrifying truth.

Sirens ripped through the air, the response to Luke’s call to 911. The authorities were near, and Bane wanted to be gone before they arrived. Meara and Luke flanked him at the edge of the bonfire they’d made of the cabin with the warlocks’ bodies within.

“We did not win this fight.” Bane stared at the fire. “Not even close. He was laughing at us.”

“That’s a problem for another night,” Meara said, her voice ice. “My saddlebags are filled with salt. These three, at least, will never regenerate.”

“And this park will recover from the stench of rot and decay, now that they’re gone,” Luke said. “Can you tell if there are more nearby?”

It wasn’t an unexpected question.

“I’ve already tried but found nothing.” But he tried again, sending his senses out to the surrounding area in search of life. He recoiled again at the wrongness of what he found. There were no living creatures within at least two square miles, beyond the former thralls, a few birds in flight, and some aquatic creatures in the waters around them. But then, just as he started to speak, a sign of hope soared through the clearing.

“A Golden Eagle,” Meara said, her voice reverent. “This is his home, and he’s back to reclaim it.”

“Just as Savannah is our home, and we’ll do the same,” Bane said.

Meara nodded. “Good always prevails over evil, in the end.”

“In the end,” Luke repeated bitterly. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? All the shit that happens before the end. I need a drink.” With that, he stalked off toward his bike, where he’d almost certainly stashed a bottle of tequila with the bags of salt.

“They’d think we were the evil, if they knew,” Meara said, staring at the humans. “And yet we protect them, again and again. What is the point, really?”

It wasn’t about the humans. He didn’t give a flying fuck about humans he didn’t even know. It was about protecting his territory. Keeping his club safe.

But when he turned to answer her, she was already gone.

…

Constantin, high in the trees and cloaked in shadows and power, stared at the final remaining vampire for several long moments before silently turning away.

Bane, indeed.

The vampire would learn the true meaning of the word when he died screaming.