Blood Debt: A Reverse Harem Vampire Romance (Kingdom of Blood Book 1) Read online

  Blood Debt

  Kingdom of Blood #1

  Callie Rose

  Copyright © 2021 by Callie Rose

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  Books by Callie Rose

  We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

  Oscar Wilde

  Chapter One

  I hear there are places in this world where the rain washes the dirt out of the sky and leaves everything feeling fresh and clean.

  Not here.

  The rain is as dirty as the air, and the water only serves to accentuate the pungent destitution of the streets below. Rotting wood and rotting flesh fill my nose with warning scents.

  More human victims, or just dead rats?

  I brush the thought aside, narrowing my focus as I skirt around weak spots on the rooftop I’m traversing. It would be stupid as fuck to lose my life to a fall at this point. Losing it in a fight? That’s a different story. I’m pretty sure that’s how I’ll go eventually.

  Not tonight, though. Not this fight.

  I heard the vamp making its kill, and that’s one point against the stupid fucker already. It’s careless enough to let its victim scream. Not that there aren’t plenty of other screams in this city on a nightly basis. This is Baltimore, after all. Screams happen. But screams that start with a gasp and end in a gurgle?

  Those are unique.

  Those are the screams of vampire food.

  I’m watching the vamp run from above. He’s dressed to blend in—gray sweats and a black hoodie. Most bloodsuckers don’t really do the whole Renaissance thing with the way they dress, at least not above ground. What they do in their underground palace is a mystery to everybody but the poor souls stupid or unfortunate enough to get suckered into blood slavery. I couldn’t tell you how many people that actually is, but if you’ve seen the missing persons statistics around here, you can make an educated guess.

  He’s heading for the Block. They all do eventually. There’s something about strip clubs that draws them—probably all that excited blood flow and exposed flesh.

  This will work to my advantage though.

  There’s a blind alley between here and there, right at the end of this row, where a busted fire escape dangles unexpectedly in the middle. I’ve ambushed more than a few creatures there and always had the upper hand. It’s a loud alley anyway, and the rain gives me even more cover.

  I reach the corner before he does and get into position. He’s almost under me, looking back over his shoulder. He knows he’s being stalked, he’s just wrong about where the real predator is. From this perspective, I judge him to be about two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle on a five-foot nine-inch frame. I hope that means he’ll move a little slower, but I’m not optimistic. I only have a second to process all of that before he’s under me. I drop precisely, landing ass-to-chest with my thighs over each of his shoulders, knocking the wind out of him with the force of my twenty-foot drop.

  “Heads up, asshole.”

  I whip out my blades, one in each hand, and go for his throat.

  Before I can touch him, he’s got his hand between my thighs, pressing outward to shove me off him. I curl my legs and kick off of his chest, knocking him back as I flip to land on my feet. His fangs gleam in the dull streetlights, and he growls savagely as he charges at me.

  He’s trying to get me in a headlock. I’m slippery, but he’s strong. If he catches me, I’m done for.

  I slip between his legs as he makes a grab for me, then turn and kick him squarely in the small of his back. He barely stumbles. Before I’m ready for the next attack, he’s lunging for me, teeth out, eyes blazing, aiming for my waist. I duck sideways and then shove him, using his momentum to send him to the ground. Then I raise my booted foot and kick as hard as I can, curb-stomping his head before landing on his back with my knees.

  “Aaaah!”

  With a feral yell, he flips over, tossing me away like I weigh nothing, then charges at me again.

  He’s pissed. Off-balance. Out-of-control.

  Just the way I like them.

  In his rage, he leaves his throat open. In one smooth motion, I cross my curved blades, then uncross them with every ounce of strength I have at the exact moment that his throat is between them. Every fiber of his thick neck sends vibrations through my blades, his bones scraping like broken china on steel.

  He doesn’t make a sound.

  He doesn’t have the chance to.

  His lifeless head falls to the ground, the snarl still frozen on his monstrous face. Within seconds, his head and torso both crumble to dust. Rain dribbles through the piles, turning them to mud, and that mud mixes with the common filth in the gutters.

  One down. God knows how many to go.

  I wipe the vampire’s blood off my blades and slide them into their sheaths on my thighs. Vamps don’t have as much blood as you’d expect, but what little they do have is hell on my weapons if it’s allowed to sit.

  My nerves are on high alert, my senses taking in every sound. The vampire was working alone when I found him, but these fuckers always end up in groups eventually. Unless I want to risk getting jumped and outnumbered, I’d better leave before any of his friends show up.

  I shove my hands into my pockets and put my head down. My phone vibrates against my leg inside my pocket as I turn out of the alley, and I walk a little faster. I don’t want to talk or make too much noise that close to my kill and risk giving my position away.

  When I’m a few blocks away from the location of the dead vamp, I dig my phone out of my pocket and glance down at the screen. It’s Nathan.

  I don’t know why the hell my brother is calling me at this time of night, but knowing Nate, it’s nothing good.

  “What’s up?” I answer, glancing around at the rain-slicked streets and keeping my voice down.

  “Mikka, I fucked up.”

  That’s all it takes. Just those four fucking words. I can hear the panic in them, and it sets off every protective alarm bell in my body. I start sprinting toward the abandominium he’s recently claimed as his apartment. It’s only a few miles from here—and in this moment, I’m grateful as fuck for that.

  “Did you OD?” My voice comes out choppy, and the phone bounces against my ear as I run.

>   “Nah—not yet—wish I did. I’m, um—I’m in a lot of trouble with a lot of people, Mikka. I had no choice. I had to do it.”

  “You had to do what?”

  He sucks in a shaky breath. “You have to understand, sis. Please. I owed a lot of people a shitload of money. Bad people, very bad people. I—I know you don’t have any left, or I would have asked you for help, I swear. I just had to call you to tell you before—before—”

  He wheezes into the phone, like he can’t make himself say any more.

  My heart sinks like a stone into my belly. “Nathan, what the fuck did you do?”

  “I sold myself,” he says through a sob.

  I slow my run, and my pulse seems to slow down along with my feet. “Are we talking dick sucking, or—?”

  “Not like that.” He lets out a sound that could be a sob or a laugh, I can’t fucking tell. Maybe it’s both. “I sold myself to the vampires. As a blood tribute. It was the only way, you have to believe me.”

  Time freezes around me. The darkness seems to swallow his words up, stealing them and muffling them in inky black.

  Blood tribute.

  My own brother has sold himself to the goddamn vampires.

  “I don’t believe you,” I force out, my throat tight. “You’d never be that fucking stupid. You could have come to me. Why didn’t you come to me? Nathan? Nathan!”

  I jerk the phone away from my face to find myself talking to my home screen. The call’s already gone dead from his side.

  My stomach feels like it’s full of battery acid, and I blink at the phone as if it has the power to rewind time and undo everything he just said.

  Shit. I’m too far away. There are no fucking cabs around here, and I’ll never get there in time if all I do is run.

  I start running anyway.

  Chapter Two

  I’m running and dialing, listening to the phone ring until the voicemail picks up, and dialing again. I’m soaked in sweat and filthy rain, and his building is still at least two miles away. I need a motherfucking cab. There aren’t a whole lot of those in this neighborhood, but luck’s on my side for once. After about ten minutes of all-out sprinting, I see a cab pull around the corner up ahead of me. I flag it down and hop in, shouting the address at the driver.

  “You have fare?” he asks, glaring suspiciously.

  Jesus. Of fucking course. I’m covered in blood and mud and whatever other dirt was in that alley. I look like a bum, so I can’t really blame the guy. I pull a small wad of cash out of my pocket and shove it at him.

  “There. Drive, dammit!”

  “Yeah, yeah. All right.”

  With another skeptical look at me, he turns around and grips the wheel. But fortunately, he seems as eager to get me where I’m going as I am to get there. I’m sure it’s for different reasons—he probably just wants me to stop dripping blood and dirt on his back seat—but I don’t give a fuck.

  He slams on the gas and peels out.

  Baltimore swirls around me, the good smashed against the awful and the ugly, and all of it nothing more than a front for supernatural predators. People like to talk about how bad the drug problem is in this city—but shit, they’d all be shooting up too if they knew they were living on top of a goddamn vampire nest. Even the ones who say they don’t believe in vampires have seen some shit they can’t explain and lived some shit they want to forget.

  After what feels like forever, the cab screeches to a stop in front of my brother’s shitty-ass building. The lower windows are all boarded up, the steps are crumbling around the edges, and the door is hanging at a stupid angle. Upstairs, candles flicker in some of the windows. The smell of urine is overwhelming. I can’t tell if it’s human or animal, which means it’s probably both. There’s no running water here, no electricity, and it’s full of rats—but it’s shelter from the elements and the cops don’t have the manpower to clear it out. Nathan thinks he was lucky to find it. I think Nathan’s been so low for so long he doesn’t remember what luck looks like.

  Since the entryway door is busted anyway, I don’t even bother trying the derelict panel of buzzers. Instead, I just burst in and race up the stairs, dodging random puddles of various liquids and the occasional passed-out junkie. Nathan’s apartment door is cracked open too, and I shove my way in, hands going to my weapons, ready to fight.

  “Nathan!” I call, my voice hoarse. “Nathan! Where the fuck are you?”

  The living room—if you can call it that—is empty. So is the bedroom and the dry, grimy bathroom. I scream for him again, not caring if I’m waking his neighbors, but I know it’s pointless.

  He’s gone.

  I’m too late.

  He must’ve called me right before he left, probably because he knew I’d try to stop him.

  Ice twists through my belly. I’m shaking, and my face is wet with tears, even though I can’t feel them falling. Shit. I haven’t cried in a long time, and I’m pissed off that I’m crying now.

  Dammit, Nathan. What the hell could be so bad that you had to go to the fucking vampires?

  He’s got piles of paper stacked around the place, mostly scrap paper with notes scribbled all over in his slanted, erratic handwriting. Shopping lists are mixed up with horse’s names, and random dates and dollar amounts are scribbled all over everything. Crouching on the floor of his living room, I riffle through pile after pile until I come across a piece of paper with a phone number written in a beautiful, old-fashioned hand. Of course it’s written in red. Vampires are dramatic bitches. Beside it, Call Mikka is circled twice.

  “Okay, but what did you do?” I mutter. “What the hell did you get yourself into, Nathan?”

  When I flip the paper over, my heart sinks. It’s an itemized bill from a bookie, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the bottom, in Nathan’s handwriting, is a dollar amount for slightly more, with Blood Tribute Minimum Bid written beside it.

  My hands start to shake even worse, and the scrawled note blurs in my vision as I blink away new tears. I put the paper down before my trembling fingers can accidentally rip it.

  “You idiot,” I growl, grinding my fists into the filthy carpet. “You absolute fucking idiot!”

  I should have known. I should have stopped this. Certain people in this town talk about vampires the way other people talk about loan sharks or hooking. If you can’t pay your bill, they’ll point at those goddamn monsters and say look, I know you’re not really trying, because if you were, you would have explored all the options. I should have seen this coming, dammit. Nathan already told me he sold sex once to pay a bill, and I’ve already bailed him out from under a loan shark before. This is the final stop on the debt train, but I never thought he would go this far. Never.

  My brain is a chaotic mess, and I grind my teeth together, trying to organize my thoughts.

  Think, dammit. Come on, Mikka. Focus.

  The note says minimum bid, so he’s clearly not selling himself directly. He must’ve pledged himself to the auction house—the place people go to offer themselves up to the vampires of Baltimore as “tributes.”

  I’ve never been inside it, but I know where it is. Downtown, there’s a bar. Behind the bar is a strip club, which is a front for the whorehouse in the basement. Behind that basement is another, larger basement which used to be attached to a museum. The museum doesn’t exist anymore, but the security measures are still in place. It’s impossible to get in unseen—and, from what I can tell, it’s impossible to get out at all.

  So, fuck it, I won’t even try to get in without being seen. I’ll do the exact opposite.

  I won’t be the first woman to offer myself up to the vampires willingly, not by a long shot. It happens all the time. All I have to do is play dumb and pretend I’ve watched too many sparkle-emo movies.

  I suppress a shudder as I think about what happens next. If they pick me as a tribute—which they fucking better—I’ll be taken to the palace. Or fortress, whatever you want to call it. You’d be right e
ither way. I’ve never seen the inside of it, but I’ve been down in the old paved-over parts of Baltimore enough times to know exactly where it is. It’s impenetrable from the outside. A massive high-rise made of steel and bulletproof glass sits on top of it, and vampires patrol the sealed perimeter. Waste that smells like spilled blood and old wine trickles between grates too small for a mouse to get through, and too strong to break with anything short of a natural disaster. The only way in is to be brought in.

  And the only way to do that is to sell myself.

  Wiping my hand over my face, I look around the rest of Nathan’s apartment. I already know I’m going to save him, that I’ll do whatever it takes to get him out of the vampires’ hold in one piece. It’s what I do, whenever I can. Save him. I haven’t had much luck saving him from himself, but I’ll be damned if I don’t rescue him from these vampires.

  Scrambling to my feet, I grab the note again and stuff it in my back pocket. Then I glance around the dilapidated space. If Nathan has anything worth anything in this apartment, I should take it back to my place for safekeeping. Knowing this city, his apartment will be occupied again by tomorrow night.

  “And he’s never coming back here,” I mutter under my breath, my nails digging into my palms as I curl my hands into fists. “Never. I’ll make him live with me again, whether he likes it or not. I can make it work this time, I know I can.”

  Before he moved into this shithole, I offered to let him stay with me, like he’s done from time to time in the past. But he refused, no matter how much I begged and cajoled. He promised me this dump was just going to be a temporary housing solution, a place he could stay rent-free for a little bit while he sorted some things out.