Beauty's Beasts Read online

  The teeth withdrew again.

  Riley gripped the can, her breath coming in short, wheezy exhalations. Only Nicholas’s earlier assurances that she was safe with him kept her in her seat. That and the pure unreality of what he was saying. Except that she had seen his teeth descend.

  Deal with it, he had said. There is no time.

  “Why are you telling me now?” she said. “Why seek me out?” Her voice was bodiless. Weak.

  He nodded. “There has been a series of murders in New York City. Have you been following them?”

  She shook her head. “I work, I study. That’s my life.”

  “You like roast chicken, Riley?”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” she said stiffly.

  Damian laughed.

  Nicholas smiled. “Very well. You know all those advertisements on TV for roast chicken. When they show someone tucking into a nice juicy chicken leg? They always bite into the rounded part first, hmmm?”

  She nodded.

  “Lirgon had a signature.” Nicholas sat back, watching her, forcing her to work it out.

  “Chicken legs?” she asked blankly.

  “He liked…human legs.”

  The soda can crumpled under her fist. She moaned.

  Nicholas lifted the can to her mouth. “Drink,” he encouraged softly.

  She drank.

  That was when it hit her. She had been sitting in this room with two men for five minutes and neither of them were drooling over her, or slobbering over her.

  Well, they weren’t human in the proper sense of the term. But they were male. Could they even have sex with women? Human women? If the erotic literature was to be believed, they could. But this was reality, not fiction, so…

  She brought herself up short again. She was thinking about sex? Now?

  Riley looked up at Nicholas as she took another sip. He was waiting for her, trying not to show impatience, but that was the only emotion evident in his features.

  She glanced at Damian. God damn, but that was one beautiful man. He sat like Nicholas, his forearms on his knees, leaning forward, fingers laced together. There were thin bands of leather around one strong wrist.

  “If Nicholas was my mother’s partner, how did you know her?” she asked him.

  “I was Nicholas’ lover then,” Damian said. He spoke flatly, without embarrassment, and in the past tense.

  “Oh,” Riley said. She couldn’t think what else to say. “How long had you been together?” It felt like the polite thing to ask.

  “Four hundred and thirty-two years.” Damian straightened and sat back, shoving his hands in his pockets. End of subject.

  “Four…” Riley felt her eyes widening. She turned to Nicholas. “When did you break up?” she demanded, suddenly suspicious.

  Nicholas’ face was like marble. “Damian left for Europe a week after your mother died. This is the first time he’s been back. I wasn’t sure he’d come.”

  “You weren’t sure?” Damian stood up. “We swore an oath, Nick! I’m as bound as you!”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Nicholas said coldly. He sat up straighter and looked at Riley. “You have your mother’s genes. You inherited her gifts. You are a demon hunter, Riley, though you have yet to learn this truth. Time will determine whether you are as great a hunter as Natalia Connors.” He got to his feet. “Something is killing people in New York City. I know it is Lirgon, for the thing is eating their legs, just as Lirgon once did. He has been resurrected, as your mother once feared he might be. Damian and I swore that if this day ever arrived we would protect you and do what we could to kill Lirgon once and for all.”

  Riley stared at the two men ranged before her.

  “We need you to come to New York City with us,” Damian told her. “And there we can show you more about your mother and father’s lives.”

  “And while you are there I will train you to kill Lirgon,” Nicholas added.

  Chapter Two

  Deal with it became Riley’s mantra, because once she agreed to go with them to New York, Nick and Damian dropped their human façade and let her see their true natures. They kept their masks in place only long enough to let Riley convince Sabrina that she wasn’t totally out of her mind to leave with them.

  Sabrina took a considerable amount of persuasion before she unhappily accepted Riley’s departure, but Riley refused to just leave without Sabrina’s blessing. Sabrina was the closest Riley had to family in the world. She was her best friend and they had known each other for nearly ten years. They had met when Riley had graduated high school in St. Louis, Missouri, shrugged off the last set of foster parents and become officially independent. She had found a job at Starbucks for the minimum wage and a second at McDonalds across the street. Sabrina had been working at both places as well and within two weeks they’d moved into an apartment together, and acquired two other roommates. They’d been sharing apartments and roommates ever since.

  Sabrina had been persuaded by the same two facts that had forced Riley to agree to travel to New York with Damian and Nicholas herself. They knew things about Riley’s parents that Riley would give her eyeteeth to know and when they guaranteed her safety there was a flat sincerity in their tone that was more convincing that a bonded warrantee.

  Sabrina had hugged Riley and bade her farewell with tears in her eyes…and had slipped her the can of mace she normally kept under her own pillow. The practical touch was both endearing and typically Sabrina.

  Damian and Nicholas were both terrifying and fascinating at the same time. Riley’s first biggest shock was to learn the humbling fact that they considered her to be “merely” human and quite unintelligent. Both had assumed they would have to make allowances for her lack of processing ability.

  As they stuffed Damian’s and her hastily packed bags into the trunk of Nicholas’s beautiful blood-red S-type Jaguar, Damian offered her the passenger seat but Nicholas curtly told her to take the backseat. “You will need your sleep. You won’t sleep much once we arrive.”

  “You just don’t want her sitting next to you,” Damian accused him as they settled into the car.

  “I want her in prime condition for training when we get there.” Nicholas swerved the car into traffic with unconscious skill.

  “You want her, is the primary condition,” Damian corrected.

  “Unlike you, Damian, I rose above petty distractions long ago.”

  “Tally wasn’t a petty distraction and you were just as devastated by her death as I was.”

  “Hey, you do remember I’m sitting right here, don’t you?” Riley thumped the back of their seats.

  Neither of them replied.

  “You both sound like a couple of schoolgirls,” she told them. “You’re not going to fire potshots at each other all the way to New York, are you?”

  After a long pause, Nicholas said, “Just go to sleep, Riley.”

  “And what happens at sunrise?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “I just want to know if I have to tuck you guys in or something.”

  She saw Nicholas’ blue eyes in the rear view mirror look at her finally. She couldn’t tell if he was amused or not. “That’s just in stories,” he said softly. “Daylight weakens us, slows us down. We prefer to relax and rest. But we don’t burst into flames at the touch of sunlight.”

  “Bet you don’t sparkle, either.”

  Damian laughed. It sounded like it was derisive.

  Nicholas was still looking at her in the mirror, glancing away from the highway they were now on with the assured confidence of a rally driver. “But we do have the keen sense of smell,” he said. “And I can smell you, Riley Connor.”

  In one indrawn breath she grew aware of every sensation. Of the leather under her fingers as she gripped the edges of the seat on either side of her knees, of the slight smell of pine coming from the carpets on the floors and walls of the car, of the scent of musk and male from the two big men sitting in the seats before her—this surprised
her the most, for she had thought it took a heartbeat and pulse and body heat to create human-type scents. Her body tightened, the tips of her breasts seemed to swell and she could feel them chafing gently against her bra.

  Riley lay down on the seat and pretended to sleep, while her overloaded brain danced and her body zinged with new-found awareness. She wanted them. She wasn’t sure which of them she wanted the most.

  Since she was about thirteen or so, she had been aware that she was what the world considered “a beauty” and that most men would do almost anything in their power to have her. But “having” her meant only taking her sexually. Men never thought beyond that, and they didn’t care what she thought about the idea. Usually, they had no permanent plans beyond the initial one of fucking her. It was enough to get their cock inside her.

  If she had been as dumb as a box of rocks, they would have liked it better, she suspected. It would have made their job so much easier. Fact was, though, Riley had a brain. In the thirteen years or so that she had been—euphemistically speaking—trying to date men, not a single man had noticed or taken an interest in the fact that Riley was actually intelligent. They saw only her beauty and were caught up in the determination to fuck her so that they could say they’d had her. It was like a fever, and she had learned to spot it in their eyes and faces.

  Neither Damian nor Nicholas had even so much as glanced at her that way. Damian had spoken of Nicholas wanting her, but in a tone that implied she was simply a desirable human. There was nothing of the fevered determination that drove so many men to the lying, the beatings, the schemes, the semi-rapes that she had suffered through in the past.

  Damian’s implication also answered another question she’d had. Clearly vampires could and did have sex with humans, and both Damian and Nicholas were bisexual…if such distinctions were even a consideration in their world.

  Their almost-indifference to her was a goad. She was “merely” human, barely intelligent and only the daughter of the great Natalia Connor, not Tally herself. They were going through these motions only because they swore an oath to her mother, otherwise it appeared they could barely stand to be in the same room with each other. It made her want them with a power that she’d never felt before. After a lifetime of having men begging at her feet, the novelty of wanting someone—two someones—who seemed disinterested made her squirm on the seat.

  “If it would help you relax and sleep, Damian or I could crawl back there and…help out,” Nicholas said.

  Riley grew very still, even holding her breath. Her heart accelerated.

  “Why do you say that?” Damian said softly.

  “She’s aroused. Powerfully so.”

  Riley heard Damian take a breath, sniffing. Her cheeks heated. She turned her face into the arm of her coat, humiliated beyond reason.

  “Ah, yes,” Damian agreed.

  Riley scrunched her face up inside the protecting crook of her arm and blew out the breath she had been holding. She kept very still for another few minutes, but when neither of them made a move, she relaxed again.

  Somewhere around Somerset her sleep grew genuine. She woke to find her head pillowed on a smooth shoulder and chest, her face pressed against a strong neck and her whole body resting against a firm torso. There was a cocked knee behind her back and a hand soothing her temple.

  She tried to sit up.

  “We are ninety minutes from New York. Relax.” Damian’s voice. In her ear. Rumbling against her shoulder.

  Her heart was pistoning. She was lying on top of Damian and he wanted her to relax?

  The hand stroking her temple dropped to her hip. “You have unpleasant nightmares.”

  “I do?”

  “You were not aware of this?”

  “I know I don’t sleep well,” she muttered. Then she frowned. “I’ve been asleep for four hours?”

  “More like six, actually,” Nicholas said, from the front seat. “I had to stop for petrol once and there was road work near Allentown. It’s sunrise in about thirty minutes.”

  She tried to sit up again and this time Damian let her. “You let me sleep on you for six hours?”

  “You were not sleeping well,” he said, sitting up. He’d taken off his coat and the rounded caps of muscles of his shoulders gleamed in the low light of the car. “Your dreams were not being kind to you. We thought the touch of another might help you.”

  She bit her lip, frowning.

  Damian lifted a brow. She could just see the movement in the growing light. “What?”

  “I’ve never slept for six hours straight.”

  “You’ve never slept with a man before, have you?” Nicholas asked.

  Riley could feel her cheeks burning again. “I’m not a virgin,” she said stiffly.

  “In this day and age, I would be astonished if you were. That’s not what I’m asking.” His blue eyes caught her gaze in the mirror. “I mean you’ve never had a man stay the night in your bed. You’ve literally never slept with a man in your bed.”

  Riley shook her head.

  “Therefore, you’ve never had anyone around to point out your nightmares to you,” Nicholas finished.

  She rubbed her arms, suddenly cold. “I’ve never remembered them, either. I just figured I was one of those people who don’t sleep.”

  Damian lifted her chin with his long finger and turned her face to look at him. “Apparently you’re one of those people who sleeps better with someone.” His smile showed even white teeth. “That is something we can arrange.”

  Her whole body rippled with the warm promise in his voice.

  “Now who’s getting distracted?” Nicholas said, his voice a low warning rumble.

  Damian glared at the back of Nicholas’ head. Then he smiled at Riley. “Have you been to New York before, that you remember?”

  She shook her head. “Although, I guess, I must have been at some time.”

  “You were born there,” Damian confirmed. He waved toward the empty front passenger seat. “Why don’t you sit up front? Enjoy the view. Let Nicholas prove he’s above petty distractions.”

  Riley hesitated. She didn’t want to get between these two. But Damian gently pushed her between the seats, so Riley settled herself into the luxurious passenger seat and buckled the seat belt.

  Nicholas glanced at her. “You look refreshed, at least.”

  She felt it. She would never have thought sleeping in a moving car could have been so relaxing, especially a car driven by a predatory creature designed to hunt humans for sustenance, while she slept soundly on top of another of them.

  “Did you glamour me or something, back in the apartment, Nicholas?”

  “More fiction.” He shook his head.

  “You engender trust, you and Damian. I don’t hop into cars for interstate adventures with just anyone.”

  “You don’t trust anyone enough to spend the night with them even after sex,” Nicholas replied. “I know exactly how much trust you have placed in us. You want to know about your parents. We dangled powerful carrots.”

  “You dangled carrots that no one could possibly know about unless they had been there. For all you pretend humans are just sheep you herd for food, I saw the look on your faces when you spoke about my mother. Both of you loved her in different ways. I don’t care who did what, or what happened back then. You loved her. Deal with it, Nicholas.”

  He stared straight ahead through the screen. “Emotions are useless, grit in the grease. Look at where they got Damian.”

  “Fuck you, Nicholas.” The bitterness in Damian’s voice was deep.

  Nicholas shook his head. “Vampires have no need of emotions. They just get in the way. They’re a hangover from a human psychology we no longer have, a habit that can be discarded.”

  “Who are you trying to convince, Nick?” Riley asked. “Because it seems to me that after centuries of being a vampire, you still haven’t kicked the habit.”

  Damian pushed his head between the seats. “I like this one,”
he told Nicholas. “If she keeps slapping you around like this, I’m going to keep her.”

  Chapter Three

  Nicholas’ apartment was a penthouse at the top of an apartment block in Soho. Near the fire museum, Damian told her. It was a studio apartment and spacious. Because the building was one of the tallest around and Nick’s apartment took the whole top floor, privacy was almost total. Sun filtered through the sash windows as Damian lifted a sealed box out of his duffle bag and put it on the table.

  “I had incredible trouble bringing this through customs. I had to declare it as a museum piece, of course, and produce all the papers to prove it. It was part of the reason I was late.” He glared at Nicholas as he put the long, pale wooden box on the table reverently. It was about four feet long, by six inches wide, by ten inches deep, and opened across the long length, the lid folding back.

  “You insisted on taking it,” Nicholas said mildly, his arms crossed.

  Damian broke the heavy plastic seals on the sides of the box by simply twisting them with his fingers. Then he released the hinges and folded the top back.

  The inside of the box was lined in red velvet, and resting on tailor-made mountings was a Japanese sword with a white handle and delicate filigree guard, with a graceful curve to the blade, which ran for about two and a half feet. It seemed to be very short, for a sword. The handle seemed to be quite long, too.

  “Your mother’s modified katana,” Damian explained. “She went to Japan herself and had it made to order by one of the last surviving old masters.”

  “It looks too short to be a sword,” Riley said.

  “It almost is,” Nicholas said. He picked it up, and gripped it in both hands. “The katana is a two-handed sword, which suits human women, who don’t have the upper body strength to face large opponents. With a short blade like this, you can also stab and that makes this a superior weapon. It can be concealed more easily when it is this shorter length, too, and that was another reason for the modification.” He held it out to her. “Try it.”