Dark and Dangerous: Six-in-One Hot Paranormal Romances

by Jennifer Ashley

  “We can wait,” the woman said, seeming at her leisure in their apartment.

  Goose bumps spread across Talia’s scalp and pricked down her spine. She swallowed. “Why do you want her anyway?”

  “We’re her ride. She has a date tonight,” she said.

  Talia had no dates. Not now, not ever. Guys picked up on her weirdness instantly and kept away. And the thought of getting physical, of letting someone touch her...No. Her only companionship was books.

  The tall, slick woman stepped closer, leaning into her to closely inspect Talia’s features before moving away. The smell coming from her was beyond foul. The assessment in the woman’s eyes was calculating, cruel, and searching.

  Instinctively, Talia backed into the shadows. The grays slipped around her body like silk veils, cold but always comforting. The room darkened. Others might have passed it off as a trick of light or a dimming bulb, but she knew better. Enough to try to control her fear and push the gathering shadows back. It had been a long time since she’d lost control. With effort, she shrugged off the dark again.

  The best place to hide was always in plain sight.

  “I think you have the wrong person,” Melanie said. “I’m her roommate, and I know for a fact that she is not dating anyone right now.”

  “Talia O’Brien, age twenty-six. PhD in anthropology. Her mother was Kathleen O’Brien, died at Talia’s birth from complications due to a congenital heart defect. Raised by her aunt Margaret, also deceased,” the tall man recited.

  Guilt and regret stirred to life with Talia over her mother, mixing with the loss of Aunt Maggie. Aunt Maggie who had died in the car accident while Talia crept unwillingly back to life and health, alone in the world at fifteen.

  The band’s noise spiraled up again to deafening.

  For the memory of Aunt Maggie, Talia swallowed her fear and forced her voice over the music. “Is this a joke? ’Cause it’s not funny.”

  The tall woman smiled over her shoulder. “No joke.” She lifted a plucked brow. “You know, you have very unusual eyes.”

  Talia felt speared like an insect under examination. She hated when people remarked on her appearance, her eyes in particular. Exotic, Aunt Maggie had said once. But exotic was too generous. Strange would be more accurate. They tipped up a little too much at the outside. And the color had a habit of shifting with her moods. Right now they’d be as dark as her shadow.

  The woman gave her a raking once-over. “What did you say your name was?”

  I didn’t.

  In her peripheral vision, Talia saw Mel reach down to the phone. “I’ve had enough of this,” she bit out loudly. “If this is some kind of shitty practical joke...”

  Talia knew it wasn’t. This was her deepest fear realized. These horrible people knew she was different, and they were going to ruin everything. She would never find a place to belong. Not at a university. Not anywhere. Not even when all she wanted to do was bury her nose in books and bother no one.

  Talia saw Melanie’s finger press 9-1-1. Help seemed ridiculous. No screaming sirens could reach them in time. Anything beyond the apartment door was worlds too far away.

  In a single blink, the square man was at Mel’s side. He knocked the phone out of her hand, caught the receiver, and replaced it on the cradle. He twitched his other hand out and caught Melanie around her neck.

  His mouth formed the words, “None of that,” though his voice was buried in noise.

  Melanie kicked out and thrashed with her arms as her face reddened.

  Oh, no. Oh, please...Talia started forward, pushing against the rise in the band’s rock.

  “Let her go. I’m Talia O’Brien,” she yelled, clasping the man’s wrist to pull it away from Melanie’s throat. Sickness inundated her, intense and thick, as if her belly were filling up with hot tar. He felt rank, malevolent, and vicious.

  Talia craned her head back to the man’s partner. “Tell him to stop.”

  The woman smiled with edged condescension. “Ms. O’Brien. It’s my honor to serve you. My master sends his regards and looks forward to meeting you in person.” She turned to her companion. “Finish that one quickly, Grady. We need to get going.”

  Grady lifted Melanie off the floor.

  “Stop it!” The room was getting darker, but Talia couldn’t help it. “Put her down!” Melanie was almost purple. “Please let her go. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “You’ll do that anyway,” the woman answered. “And Grady’s hungry. If he doesn’t eat now, he’ll be pestering me all the way back to stop for a little human takeout. And I can’t have that.”

  Melanie’s eyes flickered back in her head like some kind of waking REM.

  Talia looped her arms over Grady’s outstretched one and put her weight into pulling them both down. He would not budge. He smiled at her efforts. She kicked at him. He seemed flesh enough, but he reacted like stone.

  The woman grabbed Talia’s shoulder and pulled her away with such unexpected strength that Talia stumbled backward.

  “You can’t hurt him,” the woman said, “it’s useless to try.”

  Talia swiped at the tears of frustration blurring her vision. Please let this be a nightmare.

  Then Grady opened his mouth. Opened and opened beyond anything human. He bared his teeth, all sharply pointed and strangely extended, and pulled Melanie toward him. Mouth clamped over mouth.

  Talia froze midbreath in horror. She felt a tug in her gut. A tug from a well of life and soul. Not hers, still seated snugly in her body. But an echo of Melanie’s self being ripped out, fed upon in a desecration of spirit that scored Talia’s mind and heart.

  Utter blackness fell as Talia screamed.

  The dark didn’t hide anything from her. It never had. Shadows only deepened color, and textures took on added dimension. Total darkness revealed a realm of sensation as seductive and terrifying as any fertile imagination could conjure.

  So she witnessed it all.

  Her scream was edged with a strange power, burning up her throat to rend the world. It ripped the dark shadows of her shelter, shredding the layers of her protection into wisps of smoke that quivered as if harried by turbulent, angry wind. The shape that came out of the wind, emerging from the center of the hell storm, was darkness incarnate, monstrous eyes glowing with purpose. He could only be Death, the heartless devil who’d taken both her mother and her aunt. He was shaped like a man, wrapped in an absence of light, and therefore readily visible to her. He grasped a glittering arched blade. Already twisting in the air, the scythe came down.

  The blade did not discriminate. The metal met no resistance as it cut through the couple locked in a gruesome mockery of a French kiss. Grady dropped like dry, boneless matter. A husk. Melanie fell with greater weight. She hit her knees, eyes open and surprised, then toppled sideways with a rough exhalation.

  Talia staggered back, her scream redoubling.

  The next swing of the scythe took the woman across her belly. She toppled like an old scarecrow. The immediate stench of decay that lifted from the bodies cramped Talia’s stomach with nausea, as if they’d both been long dead already.

  Death finally turned on her. Cloaked in blackness, its body swirled in a century of stormy shadow. The blade angled out to the side and caught light where there was none to be had. Death reached toward her. His dark hand caressed the plane of her cheek.

  Talia’s scream strangled in her throat. Choked. Vanished into a suffocated whimper.

  And so did the cloaked nightmare.

  Talia hugged herself, her fear drenching the room in blackness, but she could not stop shaking. They were earthquake-level shakes, rippling up from a tectonic shift at her core. She struggled to remain standing, bracing a hand on a wall as the heavy metal insanity from next door echoed the white noise of her inner confusion.

  The door to the apartment cracked. Help at last? Help too late?

  The silhouette of a man pushed the door open and met resistance at one of the fallen bo
dies. He shoved harder, and when the door wouldn’t budge, he trip-stepped over the obstacle. “Robin? Grady?”

  So, not help.

  Talia let no air escape her and drew none to sustain her. Had to be another one of them. The monsters with bear-trap teeth.

  He felt along the wall for the light. A lamp was already on, but Talia kept the dark battened down, hard. Bit her lips, too.

  No matter what happened, she would not scream. Not ever again. Not allow that...that other devil into the world.

  The man, tall, with swarthy skin and long black hair, moved deeper into the room.

  “Robin?” He left the door open.

  Talia spotted her purse on a chair across the room, out of reach. It held money, ID, her plane ticket. Not that she’d be going to Berkeley. That dream had died with Melanie.

  Instead, she made for the door and silently slid out of the apartment. Then she flew down the concrete walkway that led to the apartment building’s outer stairs.

  “Son of a bitch!” The shout exploded behind her, from inside the apartment.

  She had taken the darkness with her. The man had just seen...everything.

  She ran, leaping down the stairs to the parking lot by twos and threes, a billowing cloud of blackness seething on her skin.

  A dark SUV idled next to the building, driver waiting. She turned away from it, tucking herself behind a low wall that marked the perimeter of the building’s parking lot.

  The stairs rang low and metallic as rapid footsteps descended.

  Had to be him. She quieted her thudding heartbeat by holding her breath.

  An automatic window hissed nearby.

  “You see the girl?” a man demanded, not six feet from where she crouched.

  “No. Nobody,” another man answered, drawling and lazy.

  “Fucking carnage up there. Grady and Robin are dead.” Anger and disbelief roughened his voice.

  Talia hunkered in her concrete corner. Her head pounded in time with the blood in her veins, and a residual whine from a memory of the band’s music set her teeth on edge.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “They were dead,” the man insisted.

  “But He promised...”

  “I know what He promised, and I know what I saw.” His words tumbled over each other in his urgency. “They’re dead and the girl’s gone. I swear she was there when I went in, but I couldn’t see worth shit. She’s got to be hiding here somewhere.”

  “If Grady and Robin are dead, I don’t want any part of her. I signed on to live.”

  “You dickhead. What happened to them up there is nothing compared to what He will do if we come back empty-handed. Get out of the fucking car and help me look. She’s just a girl, and we’re not going back without her.”

  Campus life hummed through the apartment building at Talia’s back, students building bright futures and making lasting connections. Heart hollow with loneliness, her hand lingered on the brick for a moment, and then she fled alone into the trees.

  Shadowman fights the lashes of darkness that harry him unwilling back to Twilight. The fae veils of Shadow ruthlessly bind him, silence him, rob him of any power that would permit another trespass across their boundary. Even as little as a word of warning.

  He roars into the storm, but Twilight is cold to his pleas.

  His daughter.

  The deathless ones have found her.

  The punishment for his transgression with her mother: to witness the hunt, perchance his daughter’s destruction, and in so doing, learn never to break the laws of Twilight again. So the sins of the father are visited upon the child.

  In his mind’s eye, he can see her. She clings to Shadow for cover, the proof of her fae heritage. Skimming the farthest reaches of the Otherworld she flees, but she cannot cross to safety. Her mother’s mortality will not allow it. Thus, she is doomed to Between.

  Run, child, run. And when the deathless find you again, scream, and I will come.

  Then blood will tell.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Not now,” Adam said. He pitched his voice low for Custo’s ears only.

  They crossed the lobby of the FBI’s Phoenix field office, signed out with the guard on post, and exited into the blast of record heat. At 117 degrees, the city baked in a concrete-and-clay oven seasoned with sprigs of cactus and palm trees. Adam held a hand up to shield his face from the glare of the sun as the light seared across red-tiled rooftops. They strode to their rental car. Custo took the driver’s seat.

  Adam opened the passenger door, burning his fingertips on the handle—damn hot—and slid in, adjusting the a/c controls to blow near arctic. Custo glanced over, green eyes transparent in the filtered light, his short dark blond hair spiked from his own drying sweat.

  “How’d it go?” Adam asked, snagging a water bottle from the six-pack at his feet. While Adam had been interrogating their latest source, Custo had the unenviable job of bringing the locals up to speed on wraith capture and holding strategies.

  “Local feds are skeptical, but informed.” Custo pulled away from the lot. “Apparently, Homeland Security has released a report on the wraith phenomena, though detailed accounts are lacking. The Phoenix branch is running a search on area crime with the parameters I provided from Segue. Anything on your end?”

  Adam shrugged his frustration. “The kid claims he knows a woman matching Talia’s description. Says she runs with the university street crowd, possibly an addict and a prostitute.”

  Custo scowled. “Another dead end, then?”

  “I don’t know. The kid said the woman always has a book, used to hang out in the university library until they kicked her out. Says she talks smart and can pass for one of the students.” Adam shifted in his seat. In spite of the heat, excess stress and tension had him edgy, his body complaining for a hard run. He contained the energy with grim determination. First things first.

  “He was sure it was her, just a strung-out version of her.” Adam stared out the window. The deep blue of the sky paled to white overhead as the sun fell farther to the west. Night coming on. Another day lost.

  Two months had passed since Talia O’Brien and her roommate, Melanie Prader, disappeared. The Prader family had peppered the University of Maryland campus with a picture of her face and had even managed a TV news spot, the girl’s mother pleading over a bold caption that read: Have you seen Melanie?

  For all his resources, Adam had done little better. He reached beyond the campus to a statewide and then national missing-persons search for both Talia and Melanie. He looked at government institutions, cults, organized crime, calling in favors and motivating the flow of information with the flow of cash. He’d covered the Internet as well, his people insinuating themselves onto message boards, friendship lists, as well as public and private forums. Disturbing forums.

  And he’d been inundated with hits:

  “Hooked up with the hot one with the short hair in a bar in Chicago...”

  “The woman with the long hair looks exactly like my sister’s kid’s preschool teacher...”

  “The blonde chick lives in the basement of a campus library. Fifty bucks, and I’ll tell you which one...”

  Another dead end? Not acceptable. Talia O’Brien was the only person in his six years of searching to use the name Shadowman in any kind of context that would help his brother. If she still lived, he was going to find her.

  Adam forced himself to speak in the present tense. “Talia O’Brien is dependable, steady, and reliable. Predictable. She’s been in school all her life. I’ll bet she feels most comfortable near a campus. If one kid has seen her, others will have, too. I want to ask around.”

  “I get why she’d choose Arizona in the winter when it’s warm, but why the summer when it’s hot as hell?” Custo merged the car onto a freeway marked 101. Traffic ran fast and free down lanes burned almost white and radiating heat in upward waves.

  “If she’s here, she has a reason.”

  Adam knew Ta
lia, had studied her the way she had studied her academic subjects. One of the first things he did was contact the university to get his hands on her work. Her papers were creative, twisting logic, but she supported her conclusions with an abundance of data. Her life was ordered and planned with study time and classes blocked out in her planner for the semester she had never completed. Her books were even tabbed with color-coded stickies, a system it had taken him two frustrating days to decode. Talia O’Brien liked control. He doubted very much she was a strung-out prostitute. It was simply not in her nature to succumb to that degree of chaos.

  They exited the freeway at University Drive and trolled a palm tree–lined street along the outer perimeter of campus. Two kids lounged in a boxy shadow made by the setting sun ducking behind a building.

  Custo slowed to a stop. Adam hopped out, Talia’s picture in hand. The heat outside immediately leeched fluid from his body, drying him from the inside out.

  One kid shook his head. The other’s gaze flicked up at the photo and back down to his iPhone. “Haven’t seen her.”

  Four blocks later, a thicker group gathered in the parking lot of an old 7-Eleven. Dark, short men, brims of baseball caps pulled down over their eyes.

  “No la ví.” Haven’t seen her.

  Another group—older teens mixed with university bums this time—swelled in a parking lot in front of an old strip mall. Their attention was trained on a young man, a Caucasian with dreadlocks, holding court from a tall concrete wall that separated the parking lot from the adjacent business.

  Adam tried a kid first, maybe fifteen. He held out Talia’s picture.

  “Nah. Haven’t seen her.” The kid popped his skateboard. His shirt was salt-stained from perspiration.

  Adam’s own charcoal-green polo had dampened on his back. He held up a twenty-dollar bill. “Can you tell me where she might hang out?”

  “You her old man?” Gaze appraising, the boy spoke with a cynical maturity beyond his years.

  “Brother,” Adam corrected. Brother was the most important relationship in his life. It did him good to remind himself of the bond every chance he got.