by R. S. Black
His delectable mouth was turned into a tight sneer, disgust clear on his arrogant face. I licked my lips, his eyes glued to the movement. My skin tingled, flushed with need and desire so hard it was nearly pain.
Billy planted his hand over my head, his body moving off mine enough to give him room to study me. It was a long, slow perusal. Whatever thoughts went on behind those lidded eyes of his I couldn’t tell. But wherever his gaze touched, it was like being branded with heat. He stopped for a second to study my zipper that was still unzipped, as if trying to determine if I was commando.
I was.
Then his eyes hit my navel, my breasts, and lingered for a long, hot second. It didn’t take a Neph possessed by Lust to figure out that look. Then he glanced at my face, and the heat was gone. All that remained was a killing frost.
In that moment, in that second, I didn’t care if Billy slapped me, screwed me, or gutted me. All I wanted was his hands on my body any way I could take it.
“You disgust me.” His voice was cool silk, deep and throaty. Made my knees weak and my temper flare, banking the fire spreading through my blood.
I shoved him. Hard. He leered with that arrogance that made me want to scream. I nearly ripped the sleeves off my coat as I shoved my arms through them, then belted it shut.
“Ohh, as if that hurts?” I snapped back at him. “Do you think I give a crap what you think?”
He bit his bottom lip, and I swear I almost came. I bit back a groan, hating him, hating myself and wishing like Dante’s Inferno there were some way I could reach into my boot, grab the ring, and stick it on him without alerting him to the fact.
“If you didn’t care, Neph, then why throw the coat around yourself like it was a shield?”
I narrowed my eyes, planting my hands on my hips. “Don’t call me that.” All I could think to say.
The knife was back in his hands before I could even blink. What the hell? Where had it come from? It was like he was pulling stuff from air. He toyed with the tip, staring at it and not at me, for a long enough second that I debated whether or not to go for the ring.
“Why are you following me?” I should have gone for the ring, but my curiosity had, yet again, overridden any common sense I had.
He looked at me then, letting me feel the full weight of his anger. It pressed in on me like a tangible thing, made me feel like I couldn’t take a deep enough breath to satisfy my need for oxygen. He said nothing.
I fisted my hands, taking a step closer. I’d expected him to back off, but he didn’t. Billy was an immovable wall of muscle and hard steel. Panic fluttered like moth wings in my throat; I fought the need to retreat from his burning, deep chocolate gaze .
“If you think your little knife display is gonna scare me, think again. I’m not some blushing maiden who can’t handle her weapons.” Double entendre intended, thank you very much.
His lip curled. “I should kill you.”
My breath caught, but I rolled my eyes. “Yawn. I’ve heard that before, now haven’t I?”
He stepped so close I couldn’t breathe. He took up all the space around us, his presence the only thing I was aware of. His big hands were on my jacket. He shoved it open. I gasped the second the cold air touched my nipples. The pleasure of hot and cold played like a symphony on my sensitized flesh. Liquid heat crashed between my thighs, and Lust didn’t simply wake up; she roared to life.
A rumble vibrated through his throat. Somehow, I wound up with my back pressed against the brick face again, my wrists pinned above my head by one of his large hands. “Is this what you like?” he snarled.
My heart pounded. My pulse thrummed with crystal resonance. I wanted to wrap one of my legs around his waist and beg him to take the fever away, but I couldn’t move. Every hard line of his body was pressed against mine. My head swam with visions of his beautiful lips working between my legs, my hands running through his hair. I whimpered. Lust was going to eat me alive. I writhed, which only made things worse. My whole body grew enflamed, engulfed by desire. My brain was muddied by thoughts of him, sex, and nothing else.
The man made me feel like a slut. What was worse, he was right. Lust loved it. “I hate you.” My words dripped like venom from my tongue, and I wiggled my toes, trying to figure out a way to push him off me and get to the ring.
He laughed, and the sound shivered down my spine in an erotic caress. I moaned, closed my eyes, and arched into him, feeling the brush of something thick, long, and hard against my thigh.
He traced his nose along the length of my neck much like Luc does, though not to scent out a lie. This touch burned. Made the demon slither and slink through my skin, crawl with malevolent intent to harm and possess.
“I hate you, Priest,” I snapped, my voice echoing with the sound of another. My fingers twitched as my nails grew long and longer still, extending out into claws as the anger gripped me. But his hold on my wrists was absolute and crushing. I couldn’t move them.
I jerked, but he slammed me back hard. “Don’t move,” he growled.
Power pulsed through my veins; my body bristled with the need to take action. But as mine grew, so did his.
Then the knife was in his hand again, this time a dagger. I’m not into knife play, but the way he trailed it down my throat and across my chest was almost as good as a caress. I twitched, every nerve ending raw and exposed. Then the knife traced the thick scar above my chest. I gasped. Suddenly this wasn’t fun. This wasn’t good.
Billy stared at the scar, not with lust or pity, but with curiosity, as if he were trying to figure out what or who had made it, done it. I ground my molars until they ached, vulnerable and exposed.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, voice barely above a whisper. His actions weren’t making any sense. He was a walking contradiction of lust and death and other things I couldn’t name.
He looked at me then. “My reasons are my own.” Sexual attraction was gone, replaced by cold, hard, and deadly intent.
I swallowed. “Let me go.”
His lips twitched. “You know I can’t do that.”
“I know that twice now I’ve seen you. I also know that both times you haven’t even tried to kill me.”
He narrowed his eyes, and I felt the air charge, thicken with the promise of violence. My skin tingled, but I didn’t stop, too angry to care.
“You’ve been following me. Either A, you get some kind of sick jollies out of toying with me, or B, you have no intention of killing me. So which is it, Billy the Kid?” I spat, mocking the name I knew wasn’t really his. I heaved for air.
The second the words left my mouth I knew I’d pushed him too far. I felt the cold shiver of displaced air against my cheek a second before he stabbed me. I screamed as the blade sank deep into my collarbone, snapping it with a muffled pop. My stomach churned.
He shoved his face close, his nose pressed to mine. The mint of his breath tickled my lips as he said, “It would be a grave mistake for you to ever underestimate me again.”
Then he pulled the knife out, and blood poured from the wound. He shoved away from me, and I hissed as pain lanced through the left side of my chest. He stood there, bloody knife gripped in his hand, looking like some avenging angel of death. I had two choices, stand here and die or do something about it.
He advanced.
I knelt and frantically yanked on the sack in my boot, my left arm was useless, my fingers numb and cold. I couldn’t get it. Panic nearly consumed me.
A shiver of parasite pulsed across my skin like magnetic flame. But this wasn’t a low buzz of frequency, this was off-the-charts-haywire crazy. Billy blocked my view of whatever it was that had suddenly materialized behind us. All I could make out was a twirl of gray. My heart thumped. I shot to my feet, saw Billy turn. A look flashed across his face so fast I barely had time to register it. Then in a blink, he was gone. Vanished into the night.
What could make a priest run that way? was all I had time to think before I saw it too.
> Chapter 11
I can’t describe the thing and hope to do it justice, but here’s my best attempt. It was gray. From head to foot. It was shadow, but wasn’t. It almost seemed to suck all light out of the night, and yet it didn’t glow. A dense mass of matter that’s separate but somehow connected to everything around it.
It moved with the careless grace of wind and thought. And even as I could feel the shivering pulse of para, I could also feel the immense power that dwarfed me by comparison. It was an oxymoron that totally and completely scared me.
It didn’t walk, exactly, but glided with a strange-yet-seductive allure. I blinked, fighting the thrall. What was this thing?
I didn’t want to find out. I ported. Or at least I tried to. But it was like the air had grown so dense it was an iron cage I couldn’t dematerialize through. I was stuck and contemplated attacking the thing to try to throw if off balance.
Adrenaline is such an amazing high. It can make people strong enough to lift cars, bend steel, and run like the wind. In my case, however, it helped me focus and see what was really happening outside my fear.
The gray blob—for lack of better word—was definitely a tangible presence. It was also somehow muted. I could feel enormous power roll off it like hot mist, but it felt... wrong. Half substance and half... something else.
Though this mass hemmed me in like a cornered rat in a science experiment, I didn’t actually sense the threat of violence from it. I bit my bottom lip, stood my ground, and hoped against hope I was right.
The closer it drew to me, the more it began to take shape. The mass tightened, pushed in some places, out in others, until I saw what resembled a head, arms, a long body, and then it stood before me. A gray robed figure with two red dots staring out of a black void where a face should be.
“Peace, I bring you,” he said, the ephemeral voice like a haunting melody echoing on the breeze.
My heart thudded violently. Call me dumb, but I wasn’t feeling exactly peaceful at the moment.
He—and I use that word loosely, since I really had no clue what it was—stood there, and I kind of got the sense that it really was trying to put me at ease. I put on a brave face, notched my chin, and stepped away from the wall.
The scent of sandalwood was still very strong around me. Billy hadn’t left; he was close. I could almost feel the sights of a gun trained on my skull. The thought covered me in goose bumps. I glanced up at the metal railings on the sides of the buildings, trying to spot his shadow while still keeping aware of the thing before me.
“Trust no one,” he said with that same lyrical quality.
“What?” I snapped, irritated and tired, and rubbed my forehead. My wound had already begun sealing, but the bone still ached, not fully mended yet.
He shook his hooded head, and this time I was able to glimpse something, a flash of orange-colored haze. Like the glow that shines off flames, it flickered so fast I wasn’t sure if I’d seen it all. What freaked me out worse was that even through the glow I could see no form. This was moving, breathing, thinking shadow.
“Who are you?” I asked. I’d never seen anything like this before. For that matter, what was it? It wasn’t human, and though it pulsed like a parasite, I know for a fact it wasn’t one of those either. This... thing was an entity unto itself.
“I am the Gray Man.”
When he said it, I swear the ground beneath my feet rumbled. “What are you?”
“I am order. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
I shook my head; it was all Greek to me. For an ancient, sometimes I feel really stupid. How come I’d never seen him before? For that matter, why hadn’t I ever heard of him before? I frowned.
“You tell me to trust no one. Can I trust you?”
“Friends you think you know, you don’t. Enemies you think you have, you don’t. Trust no one.”
Dread, like a ball of grease, settled in the pit of my stomach. Who was this? Why was he telling me this? Who, or what, had sent him?
“Who do you work for?” I stalked forward. “Who sent you?”
“Tell no one about me. Speak to no one about me. When you think of me, think only of the Gray Man.” His tone was insistent, sharp, and menacing. I blinked, trying to understand the reason for the warning. “If you do, I’ll know.”
The threat hung hot and heavy in the air, and then violent magick rushed around me. It squeezed my throat, choked the air from my lungs. I gasped, clawing at my neck, trying to shove the dark spell away. I dropped to my knees, desperately trying to breathe in oxygen grown as dense as water.
Just when I was sure I would black out, it was over. I jerked, dragging in the sweet fresh air like it might soon run out. I coughed and wheezed and stared at the thing in dumbfounded horror.
It’d been choking me, and it hadn’t even touched me.
He stepped back, blending into shadow, form beginning to grow distorted and fuzzy. “I will be in touch,” he said, voice echoing in the hollow silence of night, and then he was gone.
I shivered, coughed weakly, and rubbed my arms. I needed to leave. Now. I took one last look around and this time was able to port away.
Chapter 12
“Pandora.” Luc nearly tore the door off my trailer as he rushed inside. His hair was wild, poking up around his head as if he’d been running his hands through it half the night. He looked an awful mess, face haggard, clothes wrinkled. “Where were you? I called Grace to see if you were still there, she said you’d left already.”
“So?” I shrugged, slid my jacket off, and walked over to the floor-length mirror hanging behind the door of my bedroom, pulled my hair to the side and studied the area where Billy had stabbed me. The skin was flawless, smooth save for a small brown birthmark. The bone however, was another story. It was sticking up at an odd angle. Dammit. It had set wrong. I was going to have to rebreak it. I was tired and so didn’t want to deal with this right now.
I studied my neck, half expecting to see a visible purple bruise where the Gray Man had choked me, but there was nothing.
“So!” He marched behind me. “That was four hours ago.”
I twirled on him and smacked his outstretched hand away. “I’m in no mood for one of your crazy fits of temper. I don’t know what’s going on with you, Luc, and honestly I don’t care. I just had the night from hell...”
He narrowed his ice-blue eyes.
“I’m tired, I stink, and all I want is a hot shower and to go to bed.”
That wasn’t the truth, not really. I wanted to talk, have diarrhea of the mouth, and tell everything, share everything. But looking at Luc now, I wasn’t sure about anything anymore.
He was still the same Luc, still a pest and a nuisance, but... he had changed. I’d been noticing a difference these past few days. Was Grace right? Could I even trust him? Should I?
I took a deep breath; this was all too fresh, too new. I needed time to think, to decide what I could and couldn’t share.
A muscle tensed in his jaw. “You’re not... hurt?” he asked, voice stilted and full of suppressed fury.
I held my arms out at my sides, wincing only a little when I moved the left one. I really needed to reset it before too much more time passed. “Do I look hurt?”
He looked at me, eyes settling on my breasts. The room quickened with the rush of his response. He stepped closer to me and trailed his finger along the curve of my breast. I hissed as Lust stirred.
Luc’s gaze turned soft, molten.
“No,” I said forcefully, stepping out of reach. Lust may not have liked it, but I’d already fed her tonight. I didn’t want sex, not with Luc, not with anybody.
He closed his eyes, as if trying to compose his thoughts. I glanced down at his pants. His body was only at half-mast. He’d obviously sampled the night’s wares. He’d be fine.
“Did Grace say anything?” I finally asked, shifting topics.
He cleared his throat, rubbed his whiskered jaw. “Just that she was worried about you and sh
e’d like you to call her when you got some time.”
“Did it sound important?”
He shrugged. “Not really.”
“Fine. Thanks. I’ll call her tomorrow.” I nodded, then jerked my chin in the direction of the door. “Listen, if you don’t mind, Luc, I’m tired.”
I turned back around and unzipped my leather pants. Luc was already forgotten in the clutter of my mind.
There were so many things that’d happened today. Who was this Gray Man? Why did he tell me to trust no one? Echoing almost the exact same sentiments that Grace had shared earlier. What was going on? I wanted answers. Where to start looking was the question.
“Pandora...” I looked over my shoulder. Luc had his arms crossed over his chest, studying me as if he knew I was keeping secrets. Finally after several tense seconds, he shook his head. “Nothing. Never mind.”
I smiled weakly. “Tomorrow, promise. I’ll bring doughnuts and coffee, and we can catch up on the latest gossip,” I said, hoping to lighten his mood.
“Sometimes you really disgust me,” he said, lip curling. Then he turned on his heels and was gone.
“Join the club,” I muttered. I reached into my closet and pulled out a leather paddle—yes, I do like to play the Dom sometimes—and sat on the edge of my bed, wondering what I’d done to piss off the men in my life.
So they hated me, big deal.
I sighed, wishing for a moment I was gay. It had to be easier with women. Fingers clammy, I shoved the paddle in my mouth, bit down hard, grabbed my left wrist, and yanked until I heard the bone snap.
Sweat rolled down my face, my back. I screamed, the sound muted by the leather, and squeezed my eyes shut until the terrible pain dulled down. I spit out the paddle, reached under the side of my bed, and pulled out a brace I kept tucked away for such moments. I secured my arm to my side for the ten minutes it would take to heal.
Needing to think about something other than the vomit-inducing throb in my shoulder, I started to piece together the events of the past few days.
