Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  “Monsters,” he muttered as his gaze fell on a line of motorcycles parked along the curb. A muscle in his jaw ticked. There were thirteen of them in all, classic and pristine. “Damn,” he repeated, this time aloud. His whispered curse was quiet, but an echo to the disappointment he deeply felt. What horrid timing and unbelievable luck that the one man in the universe who might foul up Jarrod’s plans tonight would be right there in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

  The Nightmare’s gloved hands curled into fists in the pockets of his trench coat. He had half a mind to give the first bike in the row a little mental shove. If he did, they would all go over like large, chrome dominoes. But then someone would probably die. Probably him. Especially since the first bike in the row belonged to the ever infamous Cain.

  Still…. Jarrod’s gaze narrowed on the bikes. The temptation was nearly overpowering. And it wasn’t like the Monsters clan couldn’t repair the bikes. Hell, they could do so with magic alone and spare themselves the grime and grit of oil and wrenches. And it wasn’t as if every one of them didn’t have a dozen bikes a piece waiting for them in safely guarded garages across the country.

  One push, one little damaging thought, and so much of his tension would flow out of him like a taut rubber band being relaxed before it could snap.

  Don’t do it, Sterling, his conscience warned him, attempting to save his ass. They’ll know it was you, it told him. Cain will know it was you. Jarrod rolled back his shoulders as the voice in his head played the angel to his inner devil. Besides, it continued, if they can fix the bikes so easily, then knocking them over is definitely not worth dying for.

  His teeth ground. His damn inner voice was right. Antares Mace obstructing his plans was bad enough. Having to deal with the enigmatic and straight-up deadly Cain would be far more painful. Short-lived, granted. But painful all the same.

  Jarrod took a deep breath and pulled his attention from the bikes to turn a slow circle, scanning the crowd with that narrowed gaze. Now he was looking for two people instead of one. One was pleasant – and the other not so much.

  He’d gone a hundred and eighty degrees when he stopped mid-scan and went very still. His heart skipped a painful beat and his lips parted with the slightest gasp.

  There she was.

  He had to blink a few times to make sure he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing. It had been nearly five decades since he’d last laid eyes on her outside a vision. The imagined Annaleia Faith had nothing on the real deal.

  He watched in a kind of wonder as she moved down the sidewalk like a wet dream. Her singularly beautiful hair was as long and wild and free as always, months if not years late for a trim. It had always been perfect that way. But now it also sported light sun-kissed streaks in its rose gold depths that were matched by a golden tan and the flush of a slight sunburn across the apples of her cheeks and the top of her upturned nose. Full, pink lips smiled secretly as she stared absently at the ground in front of her, no doubt lost in some private thought that made her happy.

  She was always beautiful, but she was especially so when she was happy. It was one of the deeper regrets of his life that he’d managed to make Annaleia smile with seldom frequency. It was the worst part of the curse of what he was. In the end, they always found out what it was he was really after. Normally he didn’t care, but in her case….

  Maybe I can fix that now, he thought winsomely. Then he started toward her at a purposeful pace, and the crowd parted for him. Maybe there’s still time.

  Was there, though? He was here on this night and in this crowd looking for this particular woman because he was pressed for time in the first place.

  But it was always nice to hope.

  He moved fast, but yet again before he made his goal he came to a full stop and stared. For the second time that night he cursed his god-forsaken luck.

  Annaleia was deep in thought, obviously. She hadn’t seen the motorcycles lined neatly in a row across the street. Or perhaps she had, and it was only that she had no idea what they symbolized – who they symbolized. She had no idea that it meant Antares Mace was somewhere on that street. She had no idea that he was still alive, after all, much less that he was a black dragon.

  So she wasn’t on the look-out the way Jarrod was. She should have been, though. Because Mace was no doubt on the lookout for her. Probably, the blasted dragon could smell her. She smelled like rain, clean and fresh and filled with possibility in a sea of swill and alcohol. There’d be no way Mace could miss that scent. Even less of a chance he wouldn’t recognize it for who it was.

  And the way she was headed, in two short steps Annaleia would pass right in front of the window to the bar where Antares Mace sat inside nursing a beer. He would probably see her. With Jarrod’s luck? Mace would look up at exactly the right moment and watch the woman he loved walk by the window after fifty goddamn years of fruitless searching.

  Fuck, Jarrod thought bitterly. He couldn’t let that happen. He had to do something, and do it fast.

  He gritted his teeth and prepared himself for a fight just in case. Thanks to the Monsters warden clan, he was about to spend enough magical energy that he would need to feed for sure. Unfortunately there was just no one in that Texas town he could imagine settling for other than the woman he’d come for in the first place. And it so happened that due to old-boyfriend fated circumstance, she’d just become one of the most off-limits women in the multiverse.

  Chapter Thirteen – Austin, Texas, Sixth Street

  “Of course! No, jeez Carmen! Look, Piper’s in her own room sleeping anyway. Jetlag, sunburn, and too many in-flight drinks. So we need to reschedule any fun and take twenty-four to recover. Especially you. You need me to bring you anything? Some ginger ale or Saltines?”

  It seemed all of Annaleia’s friends were succumbing to illness this holiday season. Holidays sucked.

  There was a brief pause on the other end of the line before Carmen returned in a voice raw from vomiting. “You’re alone on Sixth at midnight,” she croaked softly. “I don’t like it. You know you can’t come back a second time.” There was a sound, like someone holding back a rising tide of something nasty with the thin veil of a spasming epiglottis. Anna winced. “You die again, you’re gone for good,” Carmen finished.

  Carmen Seville and Piper Maddox were the only two people in the world Annaleia had ever told about her death, her resurrection, and the gift that came with it. And for some reason, it made them worry about her constantly.

  What was it about having two lives instead of just one that made the second one seem so much more precious? It was like in a video game where you were given several lives. People tended to blow through the first few. But the last one was so precious, gamers never took any chances whatsoever with it. They were even less daring than they were in real life, where they only had one life.

  For some reason, knowing there was no coming back a final time made all the difference.

  Anna cringed as her friend made a pathetic sound on the other end of the line. She shook her head, silently thanking the stars that they’d all gotten separate rooms for this trip so she could actually catch some sleep later. But at the moment, Carmen needed her. “I’m coming up right now to help you. Someone’s gotta hold your hair.”

  But Carmen rushed to reply before Anna could hang up. “Don’t you dare,” she croaked. “The last thing I want right now is company. No one needs to see me do this! Keep away from me and leave me the hell alone, bruja.”

  As Carmen panted a little on the other end, Anna weighed her options. When she herself was stick to her stomach, she wanted nothing to do with any other living being. God and country and the cosmos could keep their ever-loving distance and forget she was alive, so long as none of them barged in on her when her head resided in the toilet and her soul in Hades.

  “Okay,” she sighed. “Our rooms are connected. If you need anything, let me know immediately. Otherwise, Pipe and I will see you tomorrow and we’ll all have a late l
unch or a tea kind of thing, if either of you are up to it.”

  “Yeah,” said Carmen softly. Now she sounded more tired than sick. Anna hoped she was rounding the end of the food poisoning she’d probably gotten from an airport meal somewhere between LA and Austin. That was the shitty thing about meeting best friends online. They always lived far away, and getting to meet up and spend time together was a rare thing.

  “It’s a deal,” Carmen whispered. “Sorry your friends suck. Go hook up or something. Hell, hook up twice for all of us.”

  “No one says hook up anymore,” Anna said. “Buenas noches y dulces sueños.” They hung up and Anna repocketed her phone to resume her stroll down Sixth street. She was feeling jetlagged herself, but knew from experience that giving in and sleeping was like slowly peeling off a bandage instead of just ripping it off once and for all. She would rather the raging, angry exhaustion of a single terrible morning than the unending, quiet misery of two weeks’ worth of zombie-state.

  She hugged herself against a sudden chill and forced her legs to keep moving. Where to, she had no idea. She was just moving. The sun had gone down and the air was changing. The temperature had dropped drastically over the last few hours; she was only truly noticing it now. She huddled a little further into her jacket. This kind of fast temperature change wasn’t rare for Texas, but it was still irritating. It was hard to look nice when you always had to dress in layers.

  And she was suddenly pretty sure that she hadn’t worn enough of them.

  Maybe her skin retained enough heat from Oz that she’d forgotten the bipolar nature of Texas winters. She also seemed to have forgotten that Austin, while normally hot and humid, was in the Northern Hemisphere. In December.

  Anna sighed and considered stopping into one of the shops along the street to buy clothing like a true tourist. She paused in front of a storefront display window. It was all done up in holiday lights and glowed softly against the early twilight of winter. A dark gray hoodie on display read, “I did six sixths on Sixth Street.” The quote was ridiculous, but the hoodie looked soft and warm.

  She thought about it a second more.

  And then she laughed. “Just – no.”

  As she walked, she realized there was moisture in the air; it smelled like snow. The shifting wind brought not only heavy clouds, but memories.

  Of a Midwest Christmas. Fifty years ago.

  “Snow…” she whispered to herself, tilting her head up to peer at the dark sky overhead. Was it going to snow? Was that what she smelled? Snow in Austin was rare. When she’d visited a few years back, the city had seen a little more than an inch. That small amount had amazed and delighted most of Austin’s population. But she could feel it building heavy around her this time, accumulating quietly in the darkness. “Maybe it’ll be a white Christmas,” she wondered aloud before closing her eyes. Mist immediately formed on her eyelashes, chilled nearly to the point of freezing.

  “I can’t deny a bit of sun complements your complexion, but I do believe it’s the cold that has always suited you best.”

  Anna froze where she was, head tilted back and eyes closed like a child.

  “You’re practically glowing, Annaleia.”

  She recognized the voice despite the number of years separating the present from the last time she’d heard it. When she opened her eyes, it was with the vague sense that she was in a dream. Or that she’d been in a dream for fifty years and hadn’t in fact ever left Philadelphia or put miles and minutes between them.

  The crowd moved around the two of them, parting on either side of the pair as if they were stones in a stream, caught immobile in a moment in time.

  The man was tall and dark, his eyes like dark matter. But as it had been for the majority of their strange relationship, his smile was warm and friendly, quite different from the expression he’d first graced her with in a diner half a century ago. That smile took him right up the ladder from handsome to one of the most beautiful men in the world.

  But she knew that outer beauty was just his nature, part and parcel to being an incubus.

  When he tilted his head to regard her, it felt as though she’d known him her entire life. In a way she had. She’d known him for the sum of her second life, any way.

  “I don’t believe this,” she whispered. “You have got to be kidding me.” She shook her head as she took him in. He was wearing a darkly hued three-piece suit. It was perfectly tailored to his admittedly equally perfect proportions. Of course. “And you dressed up for me.”

  “Always,” he returned with a chuckle. “It’s good to see you, Annaleia.”

  His sudden appearance scrambled her brain, negating the possibility of most coherent thought. What was left was quite simple: She knew why he was there and why he’d tracked her down. There could be only one reason. It was a reason both very good and very bad. “Who’s dying this time?” she asked point-blank.

  Jarrod Sterling’s smile became a grin, and Anna stifled a groan. He was a sexual creature, so even his laugh was like foreplay. His dark eyes sparkled. “You know damn well I would come to you, impending death or not. Any time. Night or day.”

  That was probably true. Male sex demon and what not.

  “However…” he continued, taking a single step toward her that rang out in her head like a battle drum, “I do know you’d have nothing to do with me if a life wasn’t on the line,” he finished, and his smile turned slightly sad.

  That was also probably true.

  Anna felt her fingers twitch. She desperately tried to weigh her options but he was so close and she was so tired, and this all seemed surreal. She couldn’t think straight. Then again, that could have been his doing; a spell of some sort. She wouldn’t put it past him. “So?” she repeated, her voice lowered but demanding. “Who is it? Who’s fated to die this time? And how the hell did you find me, Sterling?”

  Jarrod sighed heavily, and Anna had the sense that there was a lot unspoken packed into that sigh. “Can we go somewhere and talk, Faith?” His voice was soft, his words blunt. He glanced around at the crowd that seemed oblivious to their presence. “I understand the need to keep this public, and I’m more than willing to retire to a public venue. However,” he said as he looked back at her and splayed his hands open in a show of good faith. “The truth is I’m exhausted and I would very much like to sit down and rest.”

  She narrowed her gaze at him, studying him carefully. That wasn’t the answer she’d been expecting. He did look a little pale. And she was betting he could tell she was worn out as well. He was playing to her current state of physical and mental being. Like a smart man would.

  “Allow me to buy you dinner?” he offered gallantly. “Any place you choose.”

  Anna chewed on her lip and contemplated carefully. Finally she nodded. “Fine. I’m tired too. And, I could eat.” Then she closed most of the distance between them herself, and Jarrod rolled back his shoulders, straightening a little as she approached. It was a posture meant to lend him height and grace, as if he needed any extra of either. But she supposed he was just used to it.

  “But before I go anywhere with you, I need two straight-forward answers.” She held up her fingers. “Just two of them. No negotiating on these, Sterling. One, who did your vision show you was going to die? And two – once again – how did you find me?”

  The incubus-warlock’s willingness or unwillingness to cut through the bullshit right here and now and be forthright with her would completely outline how Annaleia dealt with him going forward. For starters, it would determine where she took him for “dinner.” If he was honest and she felt she could trust him, she would take him to a favorite restaurant of hers where the food was genuinely good and relatively inexpensive. If he wasn’t – well, she knew of a few places in Austin where wardens liked to congregate. And few warden clans dealt more swiftly or effectively with trouble-making supernaturals than did Texas wardens.

  Sterling regarded her a long while in silence. His dark, hypnotic eyes search
ed hers for something unnamed, or perhaps unnamable. She couldn’t help but be reminded of everything they had shared over the years.

  At last, the warlock took a breath and said, “I can’t tell you who is going to die. I honestly can’t because I’m not certain. The vision was unclear. But I can tell you that the death will be wrong… and that it will be someone I care for deeply.” He waited a beat, and Anna processed his words, wondering whether she would be able to tell if he were lying. “As to how I found you,” he said as he came forward, closing the final gap between them once and for all. “I never really lost you, Annaleia.” His words whispered to her now; there was no distance left for them to traverse before they entered her soul. “I’m good at what I do.” He shook his head and cupped her face gently with his hand. She let him; he was warm and it felt good. “I let you go, little heart. But I’ve possessed the ability to find you all along.”

  Chapter Fourteen – Still Austin, still Texas, still Sixth Street

  Antares had been right. His prayers had gone unanswered. Sleep had mostly eluded him, and what little he’d actually attained was littered with nightmares. After the better part of an hour, Ares had called it quits, grabbed his black leather jacket, and headed back downstairs for yet another beer. Like werewolves, dragons were decidedly difficult to inebriate, but he’d never been a quitter.

  “You know… a description of the target might be good,” Cain told him out of the blue. “Tends to help when you’re hunting someone. So, who exactly are we looking for?”

  Antares stopped mid-beer raise, stiffening at Cain’s words. If Cain had already figured out that Ares was looking for someone, then he probably also knew who he was looking for. And also, Ares had never asked for Cain’s help – or company, for that matter. The son-of-a-bitch warden leader was just asking about it in order to prove he was aware of the situation. And to be a pain in the ass.

  When he hadn’t had any luck getting his fair-haired past out of his head, he’d downed those few more beers, switched them out for shots, gone back to beer, and then headed back out onto the Austin street in the middle of the night. He’d been in awe of the crowd that hadn’t thinned out one iota over the last few hours. All his years of existence, and this was his first time on this particular street at this particular time of year. Was that normal for Austin during Christmas? He genuinely didn’t know. Three a.m., and they were still partying like it was the end of the world.