Mob Rules

Chapter 01

A princess among paupers; a diamond in a setting of brass and paste. That was what she looked like, the girl Dante had been instructed to kill.

Oddly enough, neither her face nor her body exuded any sort of physical attractiveness. Plain-featured with dirty blonde hair, tall but not too tall, slender but not skinny and with no curves to speak of, she would have been nothing more than a face in the crowd had something about her not screamed Look at me! Look at me! A primal sort of pull emanated from her (Could pulls radiate outward? Dante had to wonder). Dante had to work hard to ignore that pull, had to put forth a real effort to not approach her too early.

The pull was a seduction, but not an obvious one. Dante didn't know what he found so appealing about her nondescript body and face. Maybe it was the way she carried herself, her head held high and her steps confident and sure. Her walk was a flowing of well-coordinated muscle mixed with the boneless grace of a predator, but her eyes—wide ones of no noticeable coloring—darted everywhere like one who feared the predator they emulated. Odd, to say the least. One minute those eyes looked brown, the next green, the next silver. It might have been the club's strobe lights, but Dante couldn't be sure. Those colorless eyes were unearthly.

But the oddest thing of all was that despite the pull Dante too noticeably felt, no one else in the entire club was looking at her. No one at all.

Dante, secreted away in the most removed booth in the club, watched her weave through the dancing men and women on the floor with his heart beating in his mouth. How did no one notice her? To steady himself, he took a long, hard swallow from one of the shot glasses on the table in front of him. About ten stood empty; five more waited to be imbibed.

Beside him, a pudgy man with dark hair and olive skin scanned the crowd with nervous eyes. "She should be here by now," he said, raising his voice over the pound of the bass making the shot glasses on the table shiver and rock in time to the dancing strobe.

He shouldn't have bothered. Dante would have been able to hear him had be but whispered. Demon blood did that to your senses.

Dante shot him a withering look. "Quit the jokes, Enzo. She's here."

Enzo squinted and shaded his eyes with a hand. "No she isn't. I don't see her. Damn strobe."

Dante sighed. He did not lift his hand or uncross his arms when he pointed at the girl who was no more than twenty feet in front of them; he simply raised his index finger, the epitome of 'in control' and 'cool.'

Enzo followed the point, then reeled back in his seat. "When'd she get here?" he said.

"Five minutes ago. I've been watching her."

"They told me she wouldn't stand out much, but this is ridiculous. I know exactly where she is and I still keep loosing track of her in that crowd."

Annoyance made his teeth grind together. "How?" Dante snapped. "She stands out like a sore thumb."

Dante did not like the stricken look that flashed across his informant's face. "Oh crap," the chunky Italian snarled, snatching up one of Dante's shot glasses. "Mind if I have a drink?" Without waiting for a reply, he downed the whiskey and spluttered at the taste. "What a fucking mess."

"What's the problem?"

Enzo favored the devil hunter with a level stare, every trace of his characteristic joviality gone. "I'm going to give you background info," he said, setting the glass back down.

Dante blinked at him. The jobs Enzo usually found for Dante tended to be the top-secret kind, and Dante was rarely given all the details regarding his cases. Having loose ends—even the kind you could pay to keep quiet—were usually not desired by the people Dante tended to work for. Typically, Enzo supplied Dante with a job description (a take-out, a house-sitting, a slaying, etc.), the name of the client, the cash he'd get for completing the job, and nothing else unless Dante really needed it to track down his target.

The fact that Enzo was volunteering information was not a good sign. Business, it seemed, was serious indeed.

"You know who this job is for, right?" Enzo said.

Dante nodded and had to suppress a grimace. "The Mulcibar bastards. I remember."

The Mulcibar Family—headed by one Lucien Mulcibar—was one of the most prominent mafia-type "Families" in the world. The Mulcibars had infiltrated industry and politics on a global scale, making them the single most expansive and powerful underground society in history. Most thought that the Mulcibar's success was due to wise investing and plenty of underworld connections, but few knew exactly the aptness and irony of the word "underworld" where the Mulcibars were concerned. Dante, who had worked for, with, and against them several times, was privy to one of the family's most well-guarded secrets: that all of its members possessed demonic blood, and that they hired part-blooded demons on a regular basis. Normally, Dante would have worked steadfastly against such an organization (Dante had a vendetta against any and all demons, after all) but the Mulcibars were something of a demonic anomaly: they would not hire any full-blooded or insanely powerful demons, and, furthermore, Dante would not kill off part-bloods (no part-blood could have killed Dante's father, the legendary dark knight Sparda). The Mulcibars were only interested in the money and power and politics of the human world, not its destruction, and had stopped the crossing over of several powerful demons during their black-market reign (they wanted the human world strictly for themselves). Thus, Dante would work for them—but only grudgingly. They were still demons, even if not the kind Dante would kill on sight.

"That's right, the Mulcibar Family," said Enzo, nodding his head. He threw back another shot and did not gag. "As you know, they've got some… different people workin' for 'em." Enzo hiccupped, cheeks turning red. "Lately there's been some weird shit going on with the Family employees. Some… deaths, and worse shit than that too, if you ask me."

"Go on."

"A month or two ago, Lucien Mulcibar had a cargo boat full of diamonds—like two tons of 'em or something, can you believe it?—leave port with upwards of twenty part-bloods on board doing guard duty. Powerful sons 'o bitches, too; known badasses every one of 'em. When the boat surfaced three weeks later and two hundred miles south of where it was supposed to be, the diamonds were gone and the guards were found either dead or gibbering like retards in the cargo hold."

Dante shot a glance at the crowd and felt his gaze pull, like a magnet, to the unobtrusively dressed girl on the edge of the dance floor. She appeared to be trying to worm her way into the writhing mass of bodies, but no one took notice of her or opened a gap for her to squeeze through.

Enzo continued: "And that's not even the tip of the iceberg. The first incident was over ten months ago; one of the family vaults got raided, the guards brain-dead or all-dead, and a cool twenty million in jewelry and cash got jacked. Since then, the Mulcibars have lost nearly a trillion in all kinds of crap. A good dozen or so of Mulcibar's agents have disappeared in the past few weeks, too. It's weird shit, man. Very weird shit."

"And Lucien thinks this girl did it?" Dante asked, reaching out a hand for another shot of alcohol. Enzo, however, picked up the glass himself and drained it.

"Maybe. Probably," he said. "Turns out she worked for Mulcibar and vanished about a year before the vault raid. No one looked for her; they assumed she cut the business and went straight, and Lucien hinted that she wasn't important enough to track down at the time. Probably wasn't very high up in the mob hierarchy; didn't know jack shit and whatnot. But she resurfaced right before the raid, demanding to be let back in, and they said no. Nobody cuts from the Mulcibar Family and is let back in."

"So Lucien figures she has a grudge against his crew," Dante summarized. "Why didn't you just say so?"

Enzo blushed and downed yet another shot. "There's more. In all the raids and thefts and shit, the only people to die or go bat-shit crazy were part-bloods."

Dante frowned. "I thought the Mulcibars only hired part-bloods."

Enzo snorted, and a wad of mucus flew from his left nostril and into his empty glass. "You better than anyone should know that part-bloods don't grow on trees. They hire all the ones they can find to do the Family's heavy lifting, but have to turn to humans for the small stuff. Who do you think was the crew on that diamond boat? They wouldn't waste halfers on stupid shit like that."

"What exactly did happen to the crew?" Dante asked.

Enzo smiled, then put a hand over his eyes. "They were bolted into the galley, so they had plenty of food, and were left to drift until someone discovered the boat. They were the ones who identified the girl Mulcibar wants you to take care of."

This did not jive with Dante. "You're telling me that a boat of twenty half-demons and what were probably Uzi-bearing human mobsters was taken over by one little girl?"

Enzo peered blearily from between his fingers. "Don't shoot the messenger, okay? I'm just telling you what they told me." He winced. "Seems that the part-bloods are her targets. More than that, the human crew on the ship all said that the part-bloods treated her like royalty—only they didn't exactly seem to be in there right minds at the time."

"So what are you saying? That I should be scared because I'm a half demon?"

"All I'm saying is that you should be careful, Dante," Enzo muttered, putting his head in his hands. "Damn, this strobe is giving me a headache. I'm gonna split." He stood and said: "Call me if you get her, 'kay? And take care of the bill for me, would you?"

"Why do I get the feeling you're not telling me the whole story, Enzo?"

Enzo attempted a smile. Failed. "Because I'm not," he said, and bolted.

Dante jumped to his feet (Enzo was not making him pay again, dammit, nor was he running off with valuable info!) but the pudgy Italian was already midway to the bouncers guarding the club's entrance. Quick was Enzo in the face of picking up a tab or spilling the proverbial beans. Sighing, Dante slapped a few wrinkled bills onto the tabletop and slipped out of the booth. He'd just have to play it by ear, then. As usual.

It did not take long for him to pinpoint his target. She was till trying to wriggle her way into the throng of dancers, and just as Dante moved out of the shadowed corner he had taken refuge in she managed to squeeze past a pair of closely gyrating bodies. "Dammit," Dante swore, hurrying to catch up before she totally disappeared into the crowd. However, he need not have feared losing her: even when she was out of sight he felt the pull, that magnetic force that seemed to draw him inexorably toward her. He plunged headlong into the mass of dancers, using the pull to follow her deep into the crowd.

I hope you all enjoyed the first chapter of Mob Rules. This features a much more detective like Dante than gamers are used to seeing (did you know that the original plan was for Dante to be a paranormal investigator? With very little sword action? Weird, huh?). However, action will play a major part in this story, as will mythology and other fun stuff of that nature. I hope you'll stick around to see just what happens to Dante on this new adventure!