11 Poison Promise by Jennifer Estep Page A

feet tall, but his arms and legs seemed almost too long for the rest of him, as though he were a gangly teenager who hadn’t grown into his own body yet. He had a string-bean physique and not much in the way of muscles, a fact that his clothes emphasized. His white pants almost completely covered up his white sneakers, while his long-sleeved button-up shirt was about two sizes too big, although the baby-blue fabric perfectly matched the paint on his Bentley. A white bow tie patterned with baby-blue polka dots hung loose and limp around his neck.
    His face looked young too, his skin pale, his cheeks rounded with a perpetual bit of baby fat, even though I knew he had to be at least forty, if not older. His black hair was slightly mussed, as if he ran his hands through it repeatedly and didn’t care how it looked. Silver glasses perched on the end of his hawkish nose, making his pale blue eyes seem larger than they actually were.
    All put together, he looked like a calm, quiet, geeky kind of guy, a fact that the pens and notepad sticking out of the plastic pocket protector on the front of his shirt only reinforced. But he was anything but the mild-mannered fellow he appeared to be. I knew him by reputation too.
    Beauregard Benson, the drug-dealing vampire king of Southtown.

5
    While Benson studied Troy, I studied Benson.
    Even among the underworld bosses, Beauregard Benson was someone everyone talked about in hushed whispers. Unlike some of the other crime lords and ladies, Benson didn’t bother with selling blood, running hookers, or bankrolling bookies. Drugs were his forte. Uppers, downers, pot, heroin, crack, meth, oxy. If it could get you higher than a kite, then Benson was the one you were paying for the ride up into the wild blue yonder—and the piranha that was waiting to chew you up and spit you out on the way down.
    Benson finished his perusal of Troy before turning to Silvio. “Is this the one?” he asked in a high, nasal voice that perfectly matched his geeky wardrobe.
    “Yes, sir,” Silvio replied in a soft, bland tone.
    Benson nodded, then pointed at the two vampires standing with Troy, snapped his fingers, and jerked histhumb over his shoulder. “Gentlemen, you may leave now.”
    “Sorry, Troy,” one of the vamps muttered.
    The two vamps skirted past Benson and Silvio and hurried out of the garage as fast as they could. Meanwhile, the six men who’d been in the Escalades closed ranks, forming a circle around Troy. And I realized exactly what this was: an execution.
    Troy had come here to hurt Catalina, but he was the one who wouldn’t be leaving.
    Troy frowned, not comprehending that he was a dead man standing. “Mr. Benson? What’s going on? Why are you here?”
    Benson plucked his glasses off his nose. He held out a hand, and Silvio stepped forward and passed him a white silk handkerchief, which Benson used to clean the lenses.
    “I’m here because apparently, you can’t handle having your own territory,” Benson said, focusing on his glasses. “Did you think that I wouldn’t find out what happened?”
    “If this is about last night, I can explain—”
    “Of course this is about last night,” he said, tucking the silk into his pocket before sliding his glasses back onto his nose and peering through the lenses at Troy. “You and your friends went to one of our Air healers to get patched up. Your friends were smart enough to contact Silvio immediately afterward and confess their incompetence. Yet you did not. Do you want to tell me why?”
    “It was nothing,” Troy insisted. “Somebody got lucky and got the drop on me. I was going to take care of it. Tonight.”
    “Hmm.” Benson cocked his head to the side, asthough Troy were some curious specimen he was examining. “And yet here you are, all alone, in an empty garage. That doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence in you, Mr. Mannis.”
    Troy’s eyes flicked from the face of one vampire to the next. For the first time, he