Sleeping with the Beast: an Adult Paranormal Shifter Romance (The Conduit Series Book 2)

by Conner Kressley

  He stopped in front of a door in the middle of the hall. It was open, and by the way he stared inside, I knew it was her. I closed the distance between us, coming up beside him to peer in.

  Briar lay flat on her back. Her red hair sprawled in lifeless strands across her pillow, and her skin—always pale—looked sallow now. She was nothing like the girl I’d known back in New York, the one who seemed to make it her mission to make my life a living hell.

  Back then, she snagged every job she could right out from under me. She spread lies about me to all of my friends and even tried to convince our shared manager to drop me. She was a grade A bitch, and there were more than a few times when I wished she would just drop dead. But now, seeing her like this, so close to that death I wished for, made my stomach churn. All of my issues with Abram seemed so insignificant in that one moment.

  I made my way over to her. The monitors connected to her chest beeped in a steady rhythm that seemed to match my own.

  “I had a boyfriend back in New York,” I said softly, staring down at her. “His name was Charlie. He was in a band, and I thought he was just about the sexiest thing ever.” A sorrowful smile split my lips. I had been so young back then. In truth, I had no idea what sexy was. I had no idea what love was, not until Abram. “But Briar seduced him. She slept with him and convinced him to leave me.” Tears burned my eyes. “I never knew I could hate someone as much as I hated her back then. I mean, I thought my father abandoned me, and I still didn’t hate him as much as her. But this”—I motioned to her near lifeless body—“I didn’t…I would never wish…”

  “I know,” Abram said solemnly. “And I’m sure if she was awake, she would know that, too.”

  “I wish I could be sure,” I said.

  “Then we’ll tell her,” Abram said, sliding his arm around me. “When we wake her up and open these damned dry skies, you’ll go out for a drink and talk about how stupid you both were.” He gave me a wink. “And you’ll tell her how you got a better one than whoever Charlie is.”

  Abram left my side and pulled open drawers until he found a needle and vial. That must have been some backwoods hospital thing, because New York would never leave needles sitting around in the actual patient rooms.

  “We need to move quickly,” he said. “If we’re found here, we have absolutely no excuse. I doubt they’ll believe we volunteered to help the sleeping. Besides, the Conduit could be anyone, anywhere. We can’t let him or her know we’re on their trail.”

  I winced as he stuck a needle into her arm and drew an entire vial of blood. Something pricked at my mind. To my astonishment, I found that it was a bit of jealousy. Could this woman—this woman who had been so horrific to me—actually be a Supplicant. Could she be the thing that made me so special? And if she was, did that mean I wasn’t so special after all?

  “Do you really think she’s like me?” I asked in a small voice.

  As if he had (finally) taken a class on knowing the exact right thing to say, Abram answered, “She might be a Supplicant, but she’s not like you.”

  And that was all it took. All my insecurities melted away. I wasn’t that young thing anymore. I wasn’t throwing myself at loser lead singers who didn’t deserve me. I was Charisse Bellamy, and the most exquisite man on Earth called himself mine. I had nothing to be jealous of.

  Of course, as the jealousy waned, the empathy kicked back in. When I saw Abram ready to extract the vial of blood onto his arm to test the potency of her blood, I raised my hands.

  “Not here,” I said, looking at her. “Not in front of her…like she’s a thing. Like she doesn’t have any control over any of it.”

  Abram looked at me for a long time. “Okay,” he said, carefully wrapping the needle in gauze and placing it in his closed fist. “Let’s go.”

  Following Abram out the door, I chanced one more look at Briar.

  “I’ll get to the bottom of this,” I muttered. “And then you and me, we’re gonna have a talk.”

  Chapter 13

  Getting out of the hospital proved even easier than getting in. Abram and I moved out the back way, weaving from one long, empty hallway to the next until we found a small silver door with a flashing exit sign overhead.

  As we burst through the door and into a back alley like a pair of wannabe socialites at a Barney’s sale, we ran into a familiar face.

  Satina twirled blonde curls around her finger. “Did you get it?” she asked, smacking a gob of gum between her teeth. “The girl’s blood?”

  “You knew about that?” I balked breathlessly, wondering why Satina hadn’t just swiped a bit of the stuff on her own—since, you know, she was already out here.

  “Do you really think anything happens anywhere that I don’t know about?” She quirked one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows.

  “I hope so,” I muttered, thinking back to some of Abram’s and my less demure moments.

  “The blood,” she repeated, this time looking to Abram.

  “I got it.” He held up the vial.

  The way Satina eyed it, as though it was ice cream on a hot day, made me more than a little uneasy. That may as well have been my blood. God knows mine was just as potent. At the end of the day, no matter how much Satina helped me, I would always be that to her—a giant freaking ice cream cone. And that worried me.

  “I’ll take that,” she said hungrily, holding out her hand.

  Abram grimaced. “I don’t think so. I’ll test it out myself.”

  “And why would you do that?” She narrowed her eyes. “You know how that stuff burns.”

  I thought of my own blood, how it scalded Abram wherever it touched him. A twinge of pain ran through me. I could hurt him. The very thing keeping me alive (and putting me at the top of the mystical world’s most wanted list) was poison to the man I loved, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  “And whose fault is that?” Abram asked, his arms folding across his broad chest.

  “I’m just trying to save you pain, Beast,” Satina answered.

  “You’re trying to give yourself a power up.” His tone had dropped to a growl now. “You must be out of juice.”

  “And so what if I was?” she asked, smiling. “I’ll admit that keeping my magical presence in this place has been a bit of a challenge, what with the mystical barriers and restrictions on this damned place. But I assume you would want me to be at full-strength. Unless you would rather deal with them on your own.”

  I was about to ask who “them” was, but Satina pointed to her right, where the two bumbling bodyguards we evaded earlier were, at present, running down the alley toward us. The one on the right shouted something into a walkie talkie that was either foreign or so thickly accented I couldn’t understand it. The second one shouted “Stop!”…which I understood just fine.

  “Damn it.” Abram shot Satina a condescending look and tossed the vial over to her.

  She caught it with aplomb, popped the top, and doused herself in the red liquid. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath, as though she was savoring something. Then, just as quickly, her eyes popped open. “Oh.”

  “Oh?” I repeated. “What does ‘Oh,’ mean?”

  “Not really the time to worry about that now,” she said, tipping her chin toward the approaching guards. “You’d better run, little Supplicant, unless you would like to explain exactly what you’re doing back here.”

  “No,” Abram said. “I’ll tell them I was seeing the town. I’ll blame them for not being able to keep up with me, strike at their pride. They won’t be able to—” Abram grunted and keeled over, clutching his gut.

  “Abram!” I rushed to his side. “What’s wrong?”

  “What time is it?” he muttered, sweat beading on his brow.

  I looked up. The sun was setting in the sky. How could I not have remembered this? How could we have let it get this far? “It’s about sunset.”

  But this didn’t make any sense. Abram’s curse was tied to the moon, sure. But he was sup
posed to be able to keep it in control until midnight. This—him writhing in pain and sprouting fangs—wasn’t supposed to happen this quickly. We should have had more time.

  “Why is this happening?” I asked Satina hurriedly, looking behind me at the quickly advancing guards.

  There would be no way to talk ourselves out of this. If they saw Abram like this, our secret would be out. Whatever chance we had of saving the next suicide victims would be as gone as the rain. Satina scowled. “Oh, she’s good.”

  “Who?” I asked as Abram let out an actual howl.

  “The other Conduit. The one who tampered with this place.” Satina shook her head. “But it’s personal now. She’s messed with my creation, with my art.” She turned to me. “Quickly. Open a vein.”

  “What? No!”

  “I need magic to stop these morons.” She pointed to the nearing guards.

  “Then use Briar’s blood,” I said, shying away.

  “It’s worthless. She’s not a Supplicant. She’s not anything.”

  “What?” That couldn’t be. Briar was the new Sleeping Beauty. She had to be a Supplicant. That was the only way any of this made sense.

  Abram fell to his knees. He peered up at me, eyes red as they had been the first night I saw him back in New Haven. The beast was coming, and there was no stopping it.

  “I don’t have time to placate you, girl!” Satina yelled. “Your entire mission, all your missions, ride on the coming moments. Now give me your blood, or so help me, I’ll take it!”

  It wasn’t her threat. Honestly, Satina couldn’t threaten me at this point. I was beyond that. But Abram was about to get ruthless. He was about to go primal and, if history was any indicator, he would take out anything that looked like it meant me harm, guards included. I didn’t want him to have to live with that.

  “Fine,” I said, and I ran my hand down the concrete hospital wall, scraping my palm. A tear of blood sprouted from the skin. “It’s not much.”

  “It’ll do,” Satina said, swiping it up with her own hand.

  She stepped past me, her body glowing golden.

  “Suspend!” she shouted.

  The guards stopped dead in their tracks.

  “What did you do to them?” I asked, wiping the excess blood on my jeans. No need to arm Satina more than necessary.

  “I stopped time around us. It won’t last for long, especially in this place. But it’ll give us enough time to get Abram out of here.”

  “No.” His words muffled against oblong teeth. “You have to go!”

  I shook my head. “I won’t leave you like this. What if the townspeople find you?”

  “I survived for well over a hundred years before I met you, Charisse. I can make it another night.” He wretched in pain again. “Besides, I don’t know what this place will make me capable of. I don’t want anyone around me when midnight comes, especially you.”

  “We can get you to the castle, sneak you in somehow,” I pleaded. “The castle will stop the turning.”

  “I won’t make it that long,” he said, now panting. “I won’t make it another thirty seconds.” He touched my shoulder. His hands trembled, but they also felt stronger than I had ever known them to be. “I need you to listen to me, Charisse. Get to the castle. Tell them I found another woman, that I’m spending the night with her, and that I told you not to leave the castle again without my permission. It’s such a dastardly thing to do, that I doubt they’ll question it. I’ll find you in the morning. I’ll—” He grunted in pain again. “I have to go.”

  In a flash, he bounded around the side of the hospital and sprinted into the darkness in the trees beyond. He was out of sight. Gone. And I was left with tearful eyes and a trembling lip.

  I had to go to the castle—that wretched, disgusting place—alone. I just couldn’t.

  “He ruined my life,” Satina said, looking to where Abram had darted off. “But I have to admit, he’s sort of sexy when he does that.”

  “What do I do now?” I asked, ignoring the inappropriate (if true) sexy talk.

  “What he told you to,” she said. “Return to the castle. We’ll figure out the rest in the morning.”

  * * *

  When I got back to the castle, I found that all of Abram’s suggestions worked as promised. They totally bought the “sleeping with another woman” thing, and the king was so ashamed of his own henchmen that he paid no mind to them when they talked about Abram moving “at the speed of lighting.”

  Of course, he was curt and dismissive with me, but who was I to split hairs? I just wanted to get away from them and to my sleeping quarters as quickly as possible.

  The night stretched out long and slow for me. I worried whether Abram was okay, whether the people around him were okay. I worried about what I would do if the king or any of his men tried anything while Abram was gone. I worried about the next “suicide” victim, and I worried that we would never get to the bottom of this.

  As I always did back in the city, I took to a hot bath to clear my head.

  The drought made the luxury of it impossible, as I was rationed to a mere four inches of water. Still, as the steam from the water drifted up into my tired body, it felt good all the same.

  My mind started to clear. My muscles relaxed, and my eyes began to droop and feel heavy. I should have gotten out. Falling asleep in the bath was dangerous. But I was a super magical creature, so I figured it would take more than four inches of H2O to do me in, even if they did say all it took was a few inches of water to drown.

  Before I could stop myself, I had drifted off into the sweetest sleep.

  The next thing I knew, I was staring across the island at a cliff. The castle I was supposed to be inside sat atop, stretching up toward the heavens. Slowly my gaze shifted toward the beach-side of the Island. And that’s when I realized where I was.

  On the cliff. Not the cliff where Archibald’s caste resided. The other one.

  The one where people jumped to the jagged shore below. Where people jumped to their death.

  I was standing on the suicide cliff.

  A nervous energy spun a web through my veins. This wasn’t right, though. I could see the shore, but I couldn’t feel the ocean breeze. This was a dream.

  I reminded myself that I was asleep, that I could wake myself up if I wanted. But when I tried, nothing happened.

  Briar stood ten feet away. She was wide awake and looking every bit the nosy back-stabbing bitch I had come to know and loathe.

  “You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?” She sneered, hands on her hips. “Saw me in a bit of trouble and thought you’d come and be the big bad rescuer.” She rolled her eyes. “Even now, you can’t stop yourself, can you? You have to prove you’re better than me.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” she whispered.

  “I’m here to save those people, those people who hurl themselves off that cliff three days after they—” My mouth went dry.

  “Three days after they see me in a dream?” Briar finished, arching her brows.

  This was it. I was marked. If we didn’t find a way to stop this thing, I would be dead in three days.

  “Catwalk got your tongue?” She grinned. “Come on, Char, you’re the one who said you wanted to talk.”

  Chapter 14

  The next morning, I woke shivering. It took me a second to remember why. But when the visage of Briar’s face came hurtling back into my memory, my stomach flipped.

  Three days; that was all I had. Three days, and then I would be just like those poor bastards at the bottom of the cliff, scarred and splattered across the sand.

  “Are you all right?” Abram asked, startling me with his closeness.

  He had run away last night, hiding in whatever shadows this God-forsaken island had to offer and waiting out his magically enhanced transformation.

  On one hand, it did me good to see him there, standing above me, recently
showered and dressed in fresh clothes. It meant that whatever happened last night wasn’t enough to take him out. And the fact that he had such an easy-going smile on his face meant that he had very likely made it through the night without maiming or murdering some innocent bystander.

  Of course, there was the other hand to think about—the hand that knew how crushing the news of the dream would be to him. In the time I had known Abram, the only situations where I had even seen him lose control were the ones that involved my safety.

  Telling him this—telling him about my death sentence—wouldn’t help anyone. It would render him useless. He would see red. He would get tunnel vision. Nothing would matter but saving my life. In a heartbeat, he would pull me off this island, shackle me to something stationary, and wait the three days out. He would guard me like some suicidal treasure, ensuring my survival.

  And while that might be good for me, it would spell doom for all the others afflicted by Briar’s fatal visits.

  No, I couldn’t tell him about this. Not if it meant the deaths of the people we were brought here to save. We just needed to hurry up and get this situation sorted sooner than later.

  “Char,” Abram said, sharper this time. “Did something happen?”

  “I’m fine,” I murmured, shuffling under the covers. “Just tired.”

  “No one laid a hand on you, did they? Because I swear to God—”

  “I know,” I said, my voice a ghost of a whisper. Boy, did I know. And that’s why I couldn’t tell him about the dream. “I’m okay, really.”

  “You were shaking,” he said, narrowing his dark eyes at me.

  “I was afraid,” I answered. “That you wouldn’t make it back.”

  He ran a strong hand up my arm, tickling my skin and resting his touch on my shoulder. He smoothed the strap of my nightgown away, leaving the soft skin of my shoulder exposed.

  “I’ll always come back,” he said firmly. “Always.”