Beauty is the Beast: Beasts Among Us - Book 1

by Jennifer Zamboni

  After the show was over, the whole lot of us headed to Jose's bar and grill, first getting caffeinated, then a little drunk.

  The nachos I ordered were piled high with cheese, salsa, olives, seasoned burger, guacamole, and sour cream, which I shared with Meredith since she hadn’t planned on dinner. I skipped the coffee in favor of my customary rum and coke. Meredith chose a fruity margarita thing. It takes a lot to get me drunk, so I wasn’t too worried that I’d make a fool of myself.

  Lacey-Marie pouted, refusing to order anything to keep up pretenses.

  Sorry, chicky, them’s the breaks.

  She could have ordered a drink and dumped some blood in it, but she’d been complaining earlier that her jeans were feeling tight. I’d never seen her gain even an ounce. I didn’t know she could.

  I found myself having actual fun. It was a good feeling, I should have tried it more often.

  I’m not sure the wait staff was having anything close to a blast as we were messing things up by pushing tables together, shouting across the room, and passing food around. Hairdressers really like to eat and drink, which leads to acting the fool.

  Meredith was another of the few who looked less than thrilled to be there. She kept glancing at the exit, as if expecting someone to come through and rescue her.

  I shoved an extra cheesy guacamole-covered chip into my mouth. “What’s up?” I asked around my mouthful.

  “Nothing.” She shifted her eyes away from my face.

  She’d barely touched the food, and I could smell fear oozing out of her pores.

  “You don’t look like there’s nothing up,” I pushed.

  She glanced at me then away again. “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know. I’m scared shitless.”

  Percy’s head whipped in our direction.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she scooted her chair over and put an arm around Meredith’s shoulders, “it’s going to be all right.”

  “You don’t know that! You can’t promise that. If keeping this job means dying, then I want out.” Meredith’s voice rose in panic.

  I didn’t have anything to say about that other than, “Please don’t quit. We need you. You fit in well with us, and your customers go home happy. You don’t start drama. You’re a wonderful person. Please think hard before you leave us.”

  I was begging, I knew that, but if begging is what it took to keep Meredith as a part of our team, then I would have gotten down on my knees.

  Lacey-Marie joined in, though she didn’t have anything to add for a change.

  We all gave her pleading puppy eyes.

  “I didn’t say I was settled on leaving. I just thought you had a right to know that I might.” Meredith leaned back in her seat, crossing her arms across her chest.

  I smiled, shoveling another smothered chip in my mouth. Yum.

  The drinks were becoming more plentiful, made obvious when rounds of toasting started.

  “To those of us that have survived! May it stay that way!” A woman dressed completely in black raised her cocktail in the air, just barely keeping its contents from sloshing over the glass’s rim.

  “Amen to that, sister!” someone shouted.

  We clinked glasses, and Lacey raised her untouched glass of ice water, pretending to take a dainty sip.

  “To the girls who have died!” Another hairdresser climbed up onto her bench seat and raised her drink.

  More clinking glasses.

  For some un-thought-out reason, I decided to join the fun. I jumped up on my chair and raised my half-empty glass. “To Sweeney Todd.”

  There was a dead hush.

  “May the police get to him before I do!” I threw back the rest of my drink and hopped back to the floor.

  “Hell yeah!” Amanda shouted, downing her own drink.

  All around, glasses were emptied.

  Lacey-Marie was glaring at me.

  Time for another round. “What?” I asked, taking my seat.

  “You can’t seriously be thinking about going after Sweeney Todd yourself.” She set her glass back on the table without the pretense of a sip.

  “Why not? What the hell have we already been doing?” I took a gulp of my ice water and was happy to see that Meredith was finally digging into her meal.

  Lacey narrowed her eyes and leaned across the table towards me. “Well, for one thing, you can’t have these women following your example.”

  I was one of the three women in the room who could do something about the killer without worrying about my own personal safety. Lacey had been gung-ho for figuring out who it was only a week ago. Werewolves can be killed by a clean shot to the head, but most anything else we could recover from.

  The Sweeney Todd killer didn’t seem like the gun-toting type.

  “Why, Lacey-Marie, are you concerned for my safety?” I hissed at her, in imitation of how she was speaking to me.

  “No.” She crossed her arms.

  “Ah, you want to come along and play.” I leaned back and smiled.

  She rolled her eyes at me and started poking at the ice in her glass with her straw.

  I pulled my attention away from my attitudinal friend and focused back to the general conversation going on around us. It is amazing how resilient a group like that can be. Or how stupid. It wasn’t like they couldn’t possibly be next.

  After ordering another drink, I jumped back up on the seat of my chair.

  “Listen up, people. There is one option the police didn’t discuss with us today: defending ourselves.”

  That got their attention. Once again, I had every eye on me. The police had only talked about taking precautions to make ourselves less of a target, which is all well and good, but none of those precautions had worked thus far.

  “We are not a bunch of weaklings. We stand for work all day. We blow-dry for hours on end. That requires muscle. Any one of us can hold a gun, or a knife, or, hell, a pair of shears. If you’ve got them, you can use them against him.”

  I was encouraging them to take the defense, while I had every intention to go on the offense for them. There was only a week until the new moon when I would become fully human, but there was nothing preventing me from sniffing around and keeping my ears open. I’m not a cop—I didn’t know procedure—but I hoped I could discern what was making particular hairdressers targets. I needed to get a gun or a knife to protect myself during my most human moments, but I had all week.

  I felt a tug on my arm. I looked down at Percy. She was shaking her head at me and trying to inconspicuously put me back in my place.

  I sat. “Sorry, I may have gotten carried away.”

  “You think?” Lacey said loudly, so I could hear her over the general thunder of voices in the room.

  I’d definitely started them thinking, and with most women, thinking involves talking.

  “All we need is hairdressers getting panicky and shooting random strangers on the street,” Percy murmured so even Meredith couldn’t hear her.

  “Sorry.” I shrugged off her scolding. I stood by my words that they had every right to defend themselves, if they got the chance.

  The ride back home was even quieter than the ride down. Lacey ignored me, curling up in a little ball in the front seat. Percy turned the radio on low and concentrated on the road. Meredith stared out her window, avoiding the rest of us as best she could. I sat with arms and legs crossed, waiting for someone else to say something, anything.

  No one did. Silence is a very uncomfortable way to spend a car ride.

  I pushed the button to roll down my window and leaned my forehead against the door, letting the cold air blast my face.

  After a minute, Percy rolled my window up from the front seat as she glanced at me in the rearview mirror, revealing a tinge of violet in her otherwise brown eyes. If she was having a hard time holding it together, then things were bad. Percy never lost it.

  I pulled my gaze away from hers and willed her to concentrate on the road. I’m not entirely sure she needed to look at
it to concentrate. I don’t really know how the whole fae goddess thing works.

  Hades met us at the front door, holding it open as we filed in.

  “I want to talk to everyone before you head home. The others will join us shortly.” He shut the door behind us and followed us into the kitchen.

  Lacey beat us all there and sat with a steaming mug clutched in her hands. She’d been drinking rations daily that usually lasted her the week. I chose to ignore it. For one formerly so proud of her body, she was becoming downright glutinous, no matter the public image she was trying to project earlier.

  I wandered to the library with tea in hand and settled down with my book. If I kept going at that rate, I might actually finish it before the month was up.

  I was looking forward to being human. I would pig out on all the stuff my body couldn’t handle as a wolf. Like chocolate. Mmm, chocolate. The one square I allowed myself from time to time wasn’t cutting it. I fully intended to seclude myself with a monstrous bar and a jar of peanut butter. Oh, and a mug of hot cocoa.

  If I thought any more about it, I would drool all over my book. Being that it belonged to Percy, and not me, I should probably concentrate on the reading about silly, silly Marianne.

  I couldn’t focus. My mind kept wandering from the words on the page to the current circumstances filling up my days and my nights. Eventually, I set the book aside. I wasn’t going to retain anything anyhow. I turned on the computer, hoping it could distract me more successfully.

  I looked up Doug’s mutation. There really wasn’t much research out there. Hypertrichosis is apparently a rare mutation, and anything I read about it, especially in recent times, linked them to the circus. There was an entire Mexican family working as part of a regular circus at one point, and one guy working for a legitimate freak show. If that’s not the politically correct term, so sorry. Along with him was scorpion boy, a guy whose fingers were fused into pincher-like hands, and another man not mentioned in the caption. The three of them were smiling, looking for all the world like they were having the time of their lives. Maybe they were.

  I hadn’t seen a smile like that on Doug’s face, and I wanted that for him.

  There was a soft knock on the door, and I turned to see Mem walking in without even a hint of a shuffle in her step, a huge improvement over the last few days.

  “Hey, Mem, what’s up?” I leaned back in the computer chair and swiveled from side to side.

  Mem took a seat on the big couch in the center of the room. “I just wanted to check on you. We haven’t talked in a few days, and I know things have been difficult. How are you, dear, really?”

  I stopped swiveling. “Pissed off. But not in a wolfy way,” I corrected hastily, not wanting her to worry about me wolfing out in the library.

  “I can understand that. I’ve been a bit pissed off myself. Mad at the world. Mad at God for taking my husband away. There isn’t anything Hades can do, is there?” She sounded so hopeful, and I hated hurting her, but I couldn’t lie.

  “No. He’s just a fae. He’s a very powerful fae, a king in fact, but no actual power over life and death. He kind of rules over all the creepy crawlies that go bump in the night.”

  She nodded, her eyes downcast and her shoulders falling. I got up from my chair and sat down beside her.

  “What were you looking at?” She changed the subject before I could say anything.

  “Stuff on Doug’s mutation. He wants to be like me. He thinks it’s gonna cure him, but mutation isn’t like a disease—it’s a part of him. I don’t think it would work, but he got the alpha changer to consider it.” I pulled my knees up to my chest, not caring that my shoes settled on the couch.

  “Oh, dear.” Mem scooted closer and rubbed my back. The maternal power she possessed was comforting, despite the fact that I was the elder, and I relaxed. Mem was almost as good at soothing the wolf as Percy, who relied on her power to do it.

  I heard noises as more girls entered the kitchen. Hairdressers always seem to be girls, no matter their age. I excused myself from Mem, leaving her reading my copy of Sense and Sensibility.

  I was suddenly curious about what Hades wanted to speak to us about. Surely he wasn’t going to reveal himself. I took a seat on the counter beside a slightly more subdued Lacey-Marie.

  “As you ladies know, I’m from away,” Hades started, being the only one to remain standing.

  “Florida,” Toni supplied.

  “Florida, right. I have access to a security team, and I’ve requested they come up here until this thing is resolved. I don’t like how unsafe all you ladies are forced to feel, and since I can help out a little, I’m going to. You’ll never see them. They’ll stay outside your homes and keep suspicious people away.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest and waited.

  “They’ll be guarding all of us?” Meredith clarified, sounding like she was warming up to the idea. She’d recently moved in with Fern, but that wasn’t enough for her to feel safe.

  “They will, just until the killer is caught. Then I will pay them and send them on their merry way.” Hades turned his attention from our employees to us.

  “Fine by me,” I said, sliding down from the counter.

  Lacey just shrugged, not thrilled with the idea.

  Percy nodded, her face a mask of blankness.

  I wondered what Hades’ security team might be made up of. Maybe I should have asked before giving my agreement. Of course, I couldn’t have asked in front of the girls since they didn’t have a clue what we were, besides Fern, who had remained silent the whole time.

  I fidgeted as the girls hung around to chat. Leave, just leave. Time to toddle on home, little chickies.

  It took a while, but they eventually did leave, and I swung around to fix my gaze on Hades, who was staring coolly back, despite my glare.

  “What’s the security team? I’m guessing they’re something less than human.” I crossed my arms, mimicking his stance.

  It had better not be vampires. While they could certainly fight most things off, they had a tendency to kill who they were protecting, especially in bunches where they could egg each other on.

  “One of my security teams from home,” he answered, more vaguely than I would have liked.

  “What are they, Hades?” I tapped my foot.

  It was just him and me in the kitchen, so he wouldn’t have to worry about any of the humans hearing. Who knew where Lacey-Marie and Percy took off to.

  “A necromancer and his zombies,” he admitted.

  Ew. “Is that, uh, kosher?”

  “They’ve done surveillance work for me before. The zombies act like security cameras most of the time, with their necromancer as a monitor. If anything goes down, he’ll notify me. Then I can choose to call the police or deploy the zombies, depending on what the threat is.” Hades didn’t seem to find anything icky about it.

  I rolled my lip in disgust but didn’t pursue the topic. Instead, I grabbed some leftovers and headed out. I had band practice and a gig coming up.

  I stopped as soon as I reached the salon.

  Something stood there, completely covered in dark robes and veils. The only thing visible were black eyes and some red-tinged skin.

  Percy dashed down and greeted him. “Welcome, Bob! Let me show you to one of the guest rooms. Gretchen, would you please notify Hades that his security team has arrived?”

  I took me a moment to move. This was just too weird, even for me.

  Despite staying out late to rehearse with the guys, I submitted to being dragged around the Isenburge Garden Festival, a fair disguised as a celebration of spring, and yet another event to get our minds off things. I wasn’t too keen on the idea, seeing how the last one turned out. I was really hoping we wouldn’t come across anyone suspicious there, or any funny smells that needed investigating.

  Doug discovered our plans and latched on to me. Not that I minded. Much better than walking by myself since Percy had Hades, and they looked at things with an entir
ely different perspective than I did.

  Not that Doug and I shared a point of view—on the contrary—but he was fascinated by how I experienced things and still hadn’t let go of his desire to be changed.

  Lacey, of course, couldn’t come due to the whole sun thing. It’s hard to dodge around, even with a parasol.

  The salon was in a state of flux as our clients were starting to call to volunteer not to come in. I think they were afraid the killer would jump from stylists to them. The pattern was far too set for that, but I supposed it was better safe than sorry. Either way, it was horrible for business.

  Despite being in my human form, and having layered on the clothes, the animals were able to sense the predator emanating from me. They might say hi to a dog, but there’s something about a werewolf that animals are instinctively terrified of.

  Doug had no such problem. Despite his odd appearance, most of the animals would come over and give him a curious sniff as long as I stood well back.

  We paid our entrance fee around lunch time but opted out of food for the time being.

  “We’ll meet at the pulling ring around four. The girls should be here by then.” Percy glanced down at her watch, ready to sync up.

  I held up my empty wrist, as did Doug.

  “Well, you could just ask someone, couldn’t you?” Percy balled her fists on her hips, elbows jutting out, “ Or check your cell phone.”

  “Didn’t bring it. If I remember, I will,” I promised.

  “I’ll remind her.” Doug followed up my promise with one of his own as he placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Good. Have a wonderful time, kids. Oh, Doug, do you have to work tonight?” Percy asked before letting us split.

  “No, I got out if it, thanks to Sabrina.” Doug smiled, revealing white teeth that were slightly crooked on the bottom.

  “Lovely. Then you’ll get to see Chaos Theory perform tonight. See you later!” Percy took Hades’ elbow and steered him away.

  Doug grabbed my arm gently. “You’re playing tonight? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  I shrugged. I hadn’t thought to mention it.

  He looked hurt, and I couldn’t think of anything to say to fix it.