Huntsmen (The Better to Kiss You With Book 2)

by Michelle Osgood

  RAVES for

  The Better to Kiss You With

  “4 ½ stars… It was so well written that I never once doubted it. The last part of the book was very exciting and full of threat and suspense.”

  —Inked Rainbow Reads Reviews

  “4 ½ stars… I really enjoyed the writing style of Ms. Osgood and hope to read more by her in the future. Her voice was so clear and the emotions she brings forth are so rich. I kind of don’t want this book to end.”

  —Molly Lolly Book Reviews

  “The Better to Kiss You With is a heady paranormal romance with a Canadian Gothic atmosphere. Cherry blossoms bloom in a moody, misty spring while terrible notes turn up and computers can haunt more than any presence.”

  —Friend of Dorothy Wilde Book Blog

  Copyright © 2017 Michelle Osgood

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-19-1 (trade)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-33-7 (ebook)

  Published by Interlude Press

  www.interludepress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  Book and Cover design by CB Messer

  Cover Art by Monika Gross

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Interlude Press, New York

  To Leita.

  “You only find yourself when you disobey. Disobedience is the beginning of responsibility, I think.”

  —Guillermo del Toro

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three |

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  Chapter One |

  Kiara’s thumb tapped against the wood of the bar to the thrumming pulse of the music. The air in the club was thick with it, and it pressed against her damp skin offering no escape from the heat of dancing bodies packed together. She longed to step outside into the wet February night, but she’d promised Deanna another drink, and despite her physical discomfort she couldn’t deny the thrill of the swinging lights and energy of the crowd.

  “Oh, my god, I just love your necklace!”

  She cut her gaze away from the bartender to the boy who’d squeezed in beside her. He reached for her throat, and for a split second a different sort of pulse raced through Kiara’s veins.

  “Gold isn’t really, like, in right now, but, girl, you are. Pulling. That. Off.”

  Kiara bared her teeth. “I know.”

  His fingers quickly withdrew from the chunky costume jewelry that rested over the slight swell of her breasts. “You look totally fab, though. Like, super fierce.”

  The bartender moved closer, and Kiara pushed up on her toes so she could lean farther over the bar and try to catch his eye.

  “I mean, you’re tiny—god, I wish I was that tiny—but you’ve got this total badass aura. Even in that dress you look like you could totally kick my ass.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  He laughed. “Girl you are vicious! You here for the drag show? It’s so cute seeing all you ladies with your mascara moustaches and—ow!”

  “Oops.” Kiara tucked one heavy-toed boot behind the other.

  Eyebrows raised in an unspoken question, the bartender finally stepped in front of her.

  “Two tequila and sodas. With lime.”

  “Sodas?” Apparently forgiving Kiara’s “accidental” kick, the boy slung his arm around her shoulders. The sweat of his armpit was wet against her bare skin. “Don’t be a pussy! Do a shot with me! Two shots of tequila,” he informed the bartender.

  “I don’t want—” But the bartender had placed her drinks in front of her and was pouring the shots.

  “Yaaas, queen! Wait, where’s the salt?”

  The bartender barely blinked. “This is a bar, not a restaurant. That’s twelve dollars.”

  The boy pulled his arm off her and reached for his wallet. Kiara grabbed one shot, tossed it back, and did the same with the second. Not batting an eye, she plucked the two drink glasses off the bar. “He’ll buy the drinks.”

  “Hey, wait. I didn’t—” The boy’s indignation was swallowed up by the noise of the club as Kiara slipped easily into the crowd. The multi-level club in Vancouver’s Gastown neighborhood was packed. Though it wasn’t strictly a gay bar—they’d have had to go to Davie Street for that—the club hosted a drag king night once a month. The crowd was primarily queer women and non-binary folk more at ease in the slightly grungy Gastown bar than the glossy dance clubs of Davie.

  Working her way through the crowd, Kiara headed for the stairs to the basement level. Bodies closed around her like a wall, but Jamie and Deanna weren’t hard to spot. Kiara’s cousin and packmate Jamie stood half a head above the crowd, with one muscled arm slung around her girlfriend, who was chubby and radiant in her deep pink dress and blonde curls. Kiara slid in beside them, waving her bounty.

  “Thanks, K!” Deanna beamed and pressed the cool side of the plastic glass against her round cheek. She closed her eyes in a moment of bliss. “I can’t believe how hot it is in here!”

  “I can.” The bottle of beer she nursed hung precariously from Jamie’s fingertips, and at her temples her hair was damp with sweat. “How long till the show starts?”

  Kiara took a sip from her drink as she pulled her phone from her clutch to check the time. “Ten minutes.” The brief buzz she’d felt from the shots was fading, and the watered-down tequila in her glass wasn’t enough to be a blip on her radar. She was a werewolf; it wasn’t that she could never get drunk, it was just that it took a significant amount of alcohol to reach a buzz, let alone stay there. She found the effort was rarely worth the reward or the hit to her bank account. As someone jostled past her, causing soda to slosh over the rim of her glass and down her wrist, Kiara reconsidered the idea.

  The crowd on the bottom floor was slowly increasing; the press of bodies grew ever tighter as they pushed toward the raised stage at the back of the room.

  The night out had been Deanna’s idea. Of course. Deanna had insisted that Kings of Hearts was an event not to be missed. “Especially because you’re so new to Vancouver,” she’d cajoled, green eyes bright and wide and earnest. “Don’t you want to meet other queer women?”

  “No,” had been Kiara’s blunt response. And yet here she was.

  It wasn’t that Kiara didn’t like dancing, because she did. She even enjoyed the lights and the pounding music. What she didn’t like was the people.

  Someone bumped into her again, and Kiara whipped her head around to glare at the girl tryin
g to wriggle past them.

  “Sorry.” Completely unperturbed by Kiara’s scowl, the girl tucked a strand of violet hair behind her ear and gave Kiara a flirty grin. “Come watch the show with me?” Her touch was light against Kiara’s upper arm.

  “I’m good. Thanks,” Kiara added after Jamie jabbed her elbow into Kiara’s side. “What?” she asked Jamie once the girl had vanished into the bodies in front of them. “I was nice.”

  Jamie arched her eyebrows as she raised her beer to her lips.

  “Come on, you two. This is fun!” Beside them, Deanna practically vibrated with excitement. It was almost infectious. Almost.

  “I checked on Facebook, and Terence Stallion is here tonight!” At Jamie and Kiara’s blank looks, Deanna sighed. “She—or he, rather—is supposed to put on a great show. Nathan saw him once and mooned about the performance for a month.”

  “Nathan would moon about anyone for a month,” Kiara responded.

  “True,” Deanna conceded.

  Despite Kiara’s best efforts, they were slowly being pushed toward the stage as more and more people spilled down the stairs. A bead of sweat ran down Kiara’s nape, and she copied Deanna’s earlier idea, pressing the cold plastic of her icy drink against her breastbone. The resulting chill was brief, but welcome.

  Just as Kiara was wondering if she could elbow her way out of the crowd and grab them more drinks—not for the alcohol, but for the ice—the lights in the bar winked out. Kiara barely blinked, but her feet planted themselves more firmly against the sticky club floor, readied for a fight. A couple girls shrieked: an utterly feminine combination of fear and excitement and anticipation. Deanna, naturally, was one of them. The sound was reassuring, and, as a bright white light swept over the room before illuminating the stage, Kiara allowed herself to relax. Maybe she did need to get out more.

  “Ladies! Welcome to Kings of Hearts!” the host shouted over the sound system, and was answered by an explosion of screams from the crowd. “We’ve got an excellent show for you tonight. Are you ready?”

  Deanna laughed and grabbed Jamie’s hand, twining their fingers together. What the hell, Kiara thought, and raised her hand to her lips to join in the cacophony with an ear-splitting wolf whistle. It was worth it to see Jamie wince and Deanna grin happily at her.

  “That’s what I like to hear! Our first performance is a duo that knows exactly how to make you scream.” On stage the emcee, an older butch woman, waggled her eyebrows behind her glasses. “So hang on to your panties—those of you wearing them—and welcome to the stage Phil Anders and Roland in the Deep!”

  Two kings, one Black and the other white, both impeccably dressed, strutted onto the stage as the opening bars of their song spilled through the club. One swung an elegant cane, and the other adjusted the hang of his pocket watch against his three-piece suit. Cheers erupted as the two dropped into a choreographed routine about being a classic, street-elegant old-fashioned man.

  Kiara, enjoying the show as the two performers spun and flashed, let her head nod in time to the music. The lights glinted over their skins and illuminated the painstakingly applied facial hair. Around her, the press of people became stifling. More patrons crowded into the smaller basement as word of the show trickled up to the main room. Yet the scent of joy—mingled as it was with sweat, booze, and a hundred different perfumes—that pervaded the space caused Kiara to shelve her irritation, even as more soda spilled from her cup and ran down her wrist. No matter how grumpy masses of humanity made her, Kiara wasn’t monster enough to vilify a club full of LGBTQ+ folks who had created a space in which they were happy and carefree.

  Who knows, she mused as the pair onstage wrapped up their performance, she might have a good night after all.

  “You want another drink?” Jamie had to bend close to Kiara’s ear and shout over the between-acts song. Kiara glanced at her glass; she was nearly finished, with less than a mouthful—ice and all—left. She nodded. She tossed back the rest of her drink and passed her glass to Jamie as Deanna did the same.

  “Thanks, babe!” Deanna called, leaning up to give Jamie a peck on the cheek. Despite the dim lighting, Kiara had no trouble seeing the blush rise to Jamie’s cheeks. Kiara rolled her eyes. Anyone would think the pair of them were just starting to date, never mind going on their tenth month of living together.

  The emcee bounded back onstage. “Hot damn! Those are my kind of classic men! And if you’ve had enough of elegant gentlemen… if you’re maybe in the mood for something a little… dirtier—” She gave a roguish wink. “We’ve got Terence Stallion—” She paused to let the screaming die down; when it became obvious that the crowd had no intention of shutting up, the emcee made a show of throwing up her hands in exasperation before she walked off the stage with a dismissive wave.

  The pulsing interlude faded out, and new music came on.

  “This is the one Nathan loves!” Deanna looped her arm through Kiara’s and gave an excited wriggle as the next performer’s song rose. It was “Wilderness” by Nick Jonas—one of Kiara’s secret, guilty pleasures. With Deanna’s infectious enthusiasm beside her, Kiara couldn’t resist her own anticipatory grin as the performer swaggered onto the stage.

  Whereas the previous two performers had been faultlessly put together, this king swaggered onto the stage with a thorough air of debauchery. His jacket was held carelessly over one shoulder; the gray tie was so loose around his long neck that it was a mere suggestion of decorum. The buttons on his white shirt were undone to expose a line of golden skin, and long, dark hair spilled from under the cocky jaunt of his hat. In the spinning lights Kiara could just make out the light dusting of carefully applied facial hair, barely enough to sketch the sharp outline of his jaw. As the first lines of the song began, the king tossed his hat into the surging crowd of eager women and held up a defiant face.

  His dark eyes locked directly onto hers, and the world fell from beneath Kiara.

  Ryn.

  Chapter Two |

  Shock numbed Kiara and held her frozen on the dance floor. On stage, Ryn hadn’t missed a beat of her routine. With Nick Jonas’s voice urging the audience to take themselves back to the wilderness, back to the discovery of desire, and Taryn’s long, lean body suggesting all the things that might entail, flashes of memory slammed into Kiara like fists:

  Ryn’s hands clenched in Kiara’s hair, the hard press of parted, demanding lips against her own;

  Kiara arched over Ryn, her sightless gaze on the water-damaged ceiling of Ryn’s apartment as pleasure shuddered through her;

  Running through the woods with the snow cold under clawed feet. Their mouths hung open and panting as their breath steamed in the crisp air.

  The slick taste of Ryn in her mouth, the tangle of their limbs.

  Now that she was aware of Ryn’s presence, Ryn’s scent overwhelmed everything else. She smelled the same, like skin-warmed leather, heated by accents of orange peel and cloves, overlaid by the eyelash glue under Ryn’s ghost of a beard and her not-quite-scentless deodorant, smelled as strong as though Ryn’s arms were around her.

  “Oh, man.” Deanna’s voice was low and reverent, possibly not meant for Kiara’s ears under the music and the noise. She fanned herself with her free hand. “Nathan wasn’t exaggerating.”

  “We need to leave.” The words stuck in Kiara’s throat. She wasn’t sure if she’d said them aloud.

  “What?” Deanna asked, not pulling her eyes from the stage. “No, we don’t.”

  “Yes.” Kiara yanked her arm free from Deanna; panic sharpened her voice. “We need to go.”

  Deanna turned to her; the lights made the worry stark on her face. “What’s going on?” She reached out, but Kiara jerked back, uncharacteristically graceless, and knocking into the person behind her.

  “Watch it,” the younger woman chided.

  “Sorry,” Kiara said.

  “Se
riously, why—”

  “Leaving. Now.”

  “Good.” Jamie was suddenly at Kiara’s shoulder and was strung so tight with tension she echoed Kiara. “You saw them, too.”

  Kiara’s gaze moved to the stage and Ryn’s continued performance. It took everything she had to pull her attention back and focus on her cousin. Anxiety rolled off Jamie; the sharp spike of it made a jagged counterpoint to the thick roll of lust that permeated the air of the club.

  “How did you—” Jamie hadn’t met Ryn. None of them had. They’d known about her, sure, but Ryn had been Kiara’s, just Kiara’s. How could Jamie recognize someone she’d never seen?

  “An axe.” Jamie continued as though she hadn’t heard Kiara. Her chest heaved. “At first I thought, coincidence. But then, another. That can’t be—” She broke off, and her eyes left Kiara to dart around at the strangers surrounding them.

  “Axes?” Deanna’s green eyes widened. “There are people here with axes?” Her voice rose, terror closer at hand in queer spaces since Orlando.

  Trying to shut out the sound of the crowd, of the music, Kiara pressed her fingers to her temples.

  From the way Jamie was talking, the weight she’d given the word “axe,” Jamie could only mean one thing—as impossible as it sounded. Huntsmen.

  The crowd seemed to press closer; the mass of people, which had been simply irritating, was now ominous. The Huntsmen were human. Nothing distinguished them from regular club patrons, save for the way they marked themselves: with the symbol of an axe.

  Fear clawed Kiara’s throat as she forced herself to look past the crowd and find the club’s exits. There were two downstairs, one close to the stage and another across the floor. To wade through the crowd would put them too much at risk. The best option was to go up the stairs and out the front—the narrow stairway meant they couldn’t be surrounded, and once they’d reached the top there was only a few feet of open space before the narrow hallway to the club entrance. It was still a risk, but a smaller one.