Satisfaction surged inside Cain. This felt right. Making another vampire submit to him, beating him down and showing him who was stronger, triggered a spark in him. As if a tiny candle was illuminating something in his past. Something that lay just beyond his reach. So close, yet so far away.

Amaury’s next punch hit him in the stomach, making him fold over for an instant. Another blow followed the first, confirming that Cain’s moment of contemplation had cost him the upper hand.

“Fuck!” Cain growled and cleared his mind.

He avoided Amaury’s next punch by swiveling on his heel and jumping behind his opponent. Cain kicked his leg out and hit Amaury in the back of his knees. The linebacker-sized vampire lost his balance and fell backward, landing hard on the concrete ground.

A whoosh of air expelled from Amaury’s chest, but already he tried to jump up. Cain was faster. He landed on him, pinning him to the ground, when Amaury’s eyes suddenly stared at him in shock.

It took a second for Cain to realize what Amaury was looking at.

In horror, Cain recoiled, scrambling backward to release him, while he looked at his own hand in disbelief. He was holding a stake. A ragged breath tore from Cain’s chest. He hadn’t even noticed pulling his stake from his jacket pocket.

“Shit!” he cursed and dropped it to the ground.

Amaury sat up. “I’ve never seen anybody as fast as you.”

Cain rubbed a trembling hand over his face. “I didn’t mean to—”

The simultaneous pinging of two cell phones saved him from completing his sentence. Automatically Cain pulled his phone from his pocket to look at it.

Trouble at the End Up. Vampire involvement suspected, the text message read. Accept or reject, it flashed an instant later.

The End Up was a popular nightclub in the South of Market area. He knew from experience that it could be a hotspot for trouble. Heck, most nightclubs in the city were.

“Crap!” Amaury cursed, clearly having received the same message.

Their gazes met.

“Are you with me?” Amaury asked.

It wasn’t an order, but a request that he saw in his fellow vampire’s eyes. It made all the difference.

“Let’s go and kick some ass.” Cain jumped to his feet and reached his hand out to Amaury.

Amaury flashed a grin. “They’re not gonna know what hit them.”

4

From the door of the End Up, which was guarded by a bouncer with way too many tattoos on his face, neck and arms, loud techno music emanated. A crowd of youngsters stood in line, waiting to be let in.

Without hesitation, Cain followed Amaury as he walked to the head of the line and stopped in front of the bouncer, ignoring the verbal protests of the waiting clubbers.

“Hey, there’s a line!” one of them complained.

Cain turned, letting Amaury do his thing with the bouncer, while he glared at the kid who’d dared make a stink. “Official business. So butt out, little punk.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned back just as the bouncer made a motion for him and Amaury to enter.

The thing Amaury had done was a little trick known as mind control. Every vampire possessed the skill, which had always been thought to work only on humans. However, only recently they’d found out the hard way that there were vampires who were capable of exerting mind control on other vampires. To Cain’s knowledge, all vampires possessing that particular skill had been eradicated—all but one: Thomas, the chief of IT at Scanguards. And luckily Thomas was one of the gentlest creatures Cain had ever met and absolutely devoted to Scanguards. Almost as devoted as he was to his blood-bonded mate, Eddie.

Cain entered the club, his eyes instantly adjusting to the dim interior. A vampire’s vision was superior to that of a human, and he could see everything as clearly as if the place were lit up like a Christmas tree. The noise was deafening, and unfortunately not something Cain could easily drown out.

It wasn’t hard to see why Scanguards had gotten a call from one of their informants—trusted humans and civilian vampires who kept their ears to the ground to alert Scanguards to any problems that needed to be taken care of immediately.

While Scanguards was primarily a company supplying bodyguards and other security personnel to politicians, celebrities, foreign dignitaries, and other rich people, the mayor of San Francisco, a hybrid himself—half human, half vampire—had recently hired them as an underground security unit that not even his police force was aware of. As such, Scanguards was now in charge of rooting out problems that human police officers were ill equipped to deal with.