Dark Pleasures

by Aja James

  A white-robed figure stepped forth from the shadows. Instead of answering, his visitor made an observation.

  “You seem to prefer this form,” the female said wonderingly, “You wear it often.”

  The young man thrust both hands into his hair at the temples and raked his mane back from his face. As he did so, the hair lengthened and waved until it flowed thickly down his back, past his hips. His face also changed until it was impossible to tell the gender. He was simply the Creature.

  Beautiful. Indefinable. Deadly.

  “Better?” the Creature asked in its hauntingly androgynous voice.

  The female gave a delicate shrug. “It matters not to me what form you take on. I am merely curious what your real face looks like.”

  “And why should you be curious?” the Creature hissed, shifting closer to the robed figure.

  She seemed undaunted by the threatening vibration within the Creature’s casual tone. For all its venom, she’d never seen this particular viper strike. It liked to toy with others, to manipulate and confuse. But it lacked the conviction and ruthlessness of its creator. Like any snake, it had a soft, vulnerable underbelly.

  Abruptly, she changed topics, getting to the point of her visit.

  “The fight clubs have stalled in Asia, thanks to the Dark Assassin’s network of ninjas,” she reported.

  “Not my problem,” the Creature retorted casually.

  “You must keep close watch over Enlil Naram-Anu,” she urged, “It is an order from her.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” the Creature spread its hands wide in the universal pose of helplessness.

  “He’s the Master shadow ninja. Even the Dark Assassin can’t defeat him. He can turn himself into shadows, into the very air and wind, while I can only turn myself into physical, fleshly, blood-and-bone beings. And he kills with his bare hands, while I cringe at the very prospect. How do you expect me to do anything about the great Enlil? And why does he need watching in the first place?”

  The female sat upon the only piece of furniture in the cavernous chamber—the Creature’s gigantic platform bed.

  “He has been acting on his own recently,” she revealed. “First, allowing the prisoner to escape—”

  “You think that was on purpose?” the Creature was intrigued enough to interject.

  “Then, not dealing Ryu Takamura the killing blow.”

  The Creature merely shrugged.

  “And pulling his shadow ninjas out of Asia, giving the Dark Queen opportunity to quell the fight clubs.”

  “You mean, none of this was on her orders?” The Creature was finding each revelation more and more interesting.

  “And finally, allowing the human geneticist to use the last of the serum on herself,” the female continued as if there were no interruptions, “We have no way of recreating the serum without the prisoner and Ava Monroe’s science.”

  “Fascinating,” the Creature said, its tone implying the opposite. It sounded dreadfully bored, which the female knew better than to take at mere face value.

  “If Lord Wind is stepping out of place, I’m sure his Mistress will tighten the reins when she sees fit to.”

  The female eyed the Creature keenly. “Enlil has recently made contact with your precious Sophia.”

  The absence of a ready quip from the Creature was most telling.

  “She wants you to keep an eye on him,” the female persisted. “Just report back what you observe. She will deal with him accordingly.”

  The Creature’s continued silence was neither compliance nor rejection, but the female knew that it would do as its liege requested.

  “Now come,” she said as she beckoned it with her hand. “Take your fill of my blood before yours turn black. I know that regardless of the shape you take, despite that it’s all pretense, your favorite form has ever been human.”

  *** *** *** ***

  Devlin sipped his pint of specialty beer from tap in a pub filled with young, good looking people, all of whom had given him the once or twice-over the moment he entered the establishment.

  For all the world, he looked like a confident, well-to-do man about town, ready to flirt, handy with compliments, a mysteriously devilish smile teasing the corners of his sculpted lips, just waiting for the right opportunity to spread wide.

  This pub would be one of many stops tonight for an experienced Casanova such as he, no doubt. Wherever he went, covetous eyes would follow, hungering to catch a crumb of his careless charm.

  But the good looking twenty-somethings was not the reason Devlin had chosen this particular pub. Despite his best intentions, he’d wandered onto this street and into this joint because it sat directly across the road from Grace Darling’s apartment.

  He sighed into his beer glass, frustrated to no end with himself.

  It was bad enough that he pined for her in his thoughts, but now he was stalking her in the flesh. Maybe not stalking per se, but venturing within proximity of her despite her very explicit request to not lay eyes on him again.

  Well, if she walked out her front door and looked across the street, she’d see him right away, sitting in front of the window like a besotted, calf-eyed ninnyhammer.

  Honestly, two nights of unforgettable, explosive, marathon sex should not make him this…infatuated? Obsessed? Fixated and possessed?

  The irony was that it wasn’t even the sex that he couldn’t let go of—though that was rather memorable, and he feared, unrepeatable with any other female.

  It was her insect-like eyebrows and eyelashes, her long, unblinking stares and stuttering conversation. Her deep, clear, innocent eyes. Her pillowy, generous, honeysuckle mouth.

  That mouth. That kiss. That mistake of a kiss was what did him in.

  Devlin shook himself mentally. He was starting to think with purple prose. What next? Penning desperate, badly conceived love poems and surreptitiously sliding them beneath her front door?

  “Mind if I join you?”

  A voluptuous brunette sidled up to Devlin’s stakeout at the counter that ran along the length of the pub’s front window.

  He glanced at her briefly, taking in the self-assurance of someone who must be called “gorgeous” and “stunning” several times a day, the come-hither smile on her heart-shaped lips, the blatant sparkle of invitation in her large, arrestingly blue eyes.

  She was a bona fide twenty on a scale of ten, and Devlin was not even one iota attracted to her. All she presented was a nuisance.

  “Have a seat,” he invited nonetheless, the gentleman in him too well-trained to say otherwise.

  She slowly maneuvered all her curves into a sitting position on the stool next to his, contorting her long, lithe body this way and that and letting all her bouncy bits jiggle and wiggle just the right amount, as if to say, “look how firm they are, my size-D boobs and peach-like bottom. Test them for springiness and see for yourself. Come on, you know you want to.”

  Devlin didn’t want to. He wanted her company like he wanted a colonoscopy.

  But what he said was, “Can I get you a drink?”

  She beckoned an envious waitress over and submitted her order. Devlin didn’t miss the victorious grin she displayed to the rest of the pub’s occupants at large as her proprietary gaze swept across the room, both proclaiming her prize (him) and staking her claim.

  Devlin turned to face her while keeping a corner of his eye on the apartment across the street. The woman liked to hear herself talk, apparently, and required very little response from him. He nodded and murmured at the right times and didn’t absorb a word she said.

  Within himself, he debated whether or not to take her to bed. It went against his usual protocol—he didn’t even know her and had no interest in getting to know her. But he needed to purge this strange obsession with Grace Darling.

  Maybe it was the novelty of the two-night-stand that threw him off his game. Maybe it was the fact that he’d never slept in a stranger’s bed before and he felt too vulnerable and expo
sed afterwards.

  Whatever it was, if he repeated it with someone else, maybe he’d finally get back to his normal self: Devlin Sinclair, the devil-may-care charmer who had no attachments to anyone or anything, and therefore, no chinks in the armor through which he could be hurt.

  Never again.

  But then a movement across the street took him on a different course.

  “This should cover it,” he said as he flipped a couple of bills onto the counter, interrupting the brunette mid-sentence, leaving her gaping as he left the pub so fast he nearly knocked down a cadre of four bubbly, eager young things that were just entering through the double doors.

  Devlin just hoped he wasn’t too late.

  *** *** *** ***

  It was after ten o’clock at night when Grace’s cell phone buzzed with a message.

  “Devlin. Door codes. Go to terrace ASAP.”

  Grace looked at the strange message with knitted brows.

  How did he get her number? She supposed he hacked it. And why should she leave her comfortable Westin Heavenly bed to go up to the terrace? It was in the middle of the night and she was only wearing her underwear and an oversized T.

  She was snuggled comfortably amongst her blanket and pillows with a pen and her red leather-bound notebook. It was atypical of her to write in her journal at night, but she’d felt inspired to put feelings to paper.

  “Grace! Let me in now!”

  Was that Devlin’s voice just beyond her front door? What was he doing outside her apartment? She’d told him she didn’t want to see him again.

  Well, that wasn’t precisely true. She wanted to see him again. She just didn’t think it was good for her to do so.

  She didn’t want to get attached. Pet fish and chinchillas she could handle. One aunt was manageable. But Devlin Sinclair would present a different sort of attachment, one she wasn’t confident enough to take on.

  In fact, she was just trying to articulate this inner struggle with words. At this rate, she’d have to get a new journal soon. Her thoughts about Devlin Sinclair were quite epic in nature.

  Nevertheless. She couldn’t leave him locked outside her door in the middle of the night, could she?

  “Get out of—fuck!”

  What was he…

  But even as Grace began the thought in her head, a movement caught her eye in the middle of the studio. Something inky slid along the sleek white quartz of her kitchen counter, then oozed down the side facing her.

  Grace clutched her notebook tighter and sat up alertly in the bed. Something about that black, oily, yet semi-transparent substance looked eerily familiar. It spread like spilled water, or more accurately, spilled liquid glue, viscous and thick yet diffused and stretched like…

  Shadows.

  As if a gun went off in her head, Grace leapt off the bed and scrambled for the back door to the terrace. The shadow seemed to sense the frenzied attempt at escape and immediately shot forward in pursuit.

  But Grace was faster, closer to her destination, and reached the door sooner, wrenching it open and dashing out, not bothering to close it behind her. If her pursuer was truly as amorphous as shadows, a solid obstruction wouldn’t deter it anyway.

  She ran barefoot up the back stairs all the way to the roof of the building until she burst through the terrace door and into the balmy, summer night. The sky was covered in layers of thick, ominous clouds, preventing a wan moon from shedding any light on the concrete rooftop.

  Darkness was everywhere. Somehow, the light from the streetlamps and still-open bars and restaurants below failed to reach up this high. Grace wondered whether the unsuspecting pedestrians and party-goers would be able to hear her scream from this far away.

  The shadow poured through the terrace door opening and slowed in its approach, as if knowing that she had nowhere else to go. Gradually, it heaped upon itself and lengthened into the shape of a man.

  Grace hoped she’d be able to scream. She didn’t recall having done so before.

  For all she knew, she was one of those people who, when frightened or confronted with a nasty shock, went dumb and mute instead of using the full force of her lungs to draw attention. The most noise she’d ever made when facing something unpleasant, like a giant cockroach crawling into her shower, was squeak with dismay.

  She drew breath to shout now, for whatever good it did her. She wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  But before she had to exercise her vocal cords, something large and cat-like vaulted onto the rooftop and charged at the shadowy figure, slicing right through it with glinting, silver slashes.

  Grace heard a rough grunt as the shadow separated into three equal parts, each elongating into a black-robed man.

  In their midst, almost entirely blocked by their darkness, was Devlin Sinclair, a lethal looking curved knife in one hand, a long stiletto in the other.

  Before her very eyes, the shadow men closed in on Devlin, their forms dissipating like smoke in the wind. But Grace saw the dark swirls swarming around Devlin’s person as he slashed and stabbed at them with deadly precision and speed.

  There was no other noise or movement, save the strange, mortal dance that was taking place right in front of her on her rooftop terrace.

  Devlin used his left arm mainly for defense and his right for attack. When he hit something solid, she could hear a gasp or expulsion of breath, but no other sounds emerged.

  Once in a while, a spurt of blood or some other fluid would projectile out from their relatively contained death match to splatter onto the leaves of the potted plants or stain the gray concrete with dark red.

  And of course, Devlin received his fair share of counterattacks in turn. Even under the pale, scattered moonlight, Grace could see his black shirt rip in places, his pants tear in one thigh and at the back of the knees. She could see that his arms where they were bare were coated with blood. Whether his or his enemies, she could not guess.

  And then he stopped her heart by going down to one knee, his left arm falling limp by his side.

  Before she knew what she was doing, Grace launched into action, using strength she didn’t know she possessed to pick up a nearby potted Fiddle Leaf Fig by its stalk and swinging the heavy steel planter with enough centrifugal force at the shadows that surrounded Devlin that they dispersed with an audible whoosh.

  Clutching the potted plant firmly in both hands, Grace stood over Devlin’s crouched form like a she-lion defending her cub. She didn’t know how she was going to fend off shadowy assassins, but she was going to die trying.

  Thankfully, she didn’t have to put her shot of wild courage to the test, for the momentary distraction she provided gave Devlin enough time to get back to his feet and pick off the shadows one by one, moving with a lethal efficiency that Grace found oddly mesmerizing.

  Soon, each shadow collapsed into the form of a man, and each man briefly held his shape before suddenly disintegrating into specks of black debris, like ashes from a violently smothered conflagration. Until there was nothing left but dust.

  And a heaving, bleeding, mess of a man.

  Grace let go of the potted fig and reached for Devlin just as he collapsed heavily against her shoulder, almost knocking her to the ground.

  “Can you make it back downstairs?” she asked, though she didn’t really expect an answer given his condition.

  His head fell forward, and she took that as a nod.

  Gingerly, supporting much of his weight on her shoulders, with one of his long arms wrapped around her, she half carried, half dragged her severely wounded rescuer back to her basement apartment.

  But when she finally got him to her back door and tried to haul him inside, he shook his head and rasped, “Not safe here. Must go.”

  “But where?” she asked.

  She wasn’t sure if she could help him move another inch to save her life. She’d already performed a superhuman feat having dragged him this far.

  “The Cove,” he breathed, his voice reduced to a croak.
>
  With a squeak of dismay, Grace lost her footing as Devlin toppled on top of her, squashing her under his full weight.

  “Ana…” he seemed to say, “…come…wait…”

  And then he lost all consciousness. At which point Grace discovered that she could in fact scream.

  Chapter Eleven

  “You’re very strong for a woman,” Grace couldn’t help but comment as she stared openly and unblinkingly at the statuesque warrior-princess-like female who carried Devlin’s prone body in her arms like a babe.

  The female spared Grace an arrogant look and spread her lips in the simile of a smile to show off a top row of bright white teeth bracketed by two gleaming, sharp fangs.

  Grace swallowed but didn’t withdraw her stare. She was too fascinated to look away.

  “I guess vampires are extra strong, huh?” she asked no one in particular.

  She certainly didn’t expect the Amazon to reply, as the woman hadn’t said a word throughout her miraculously timed arrival to Grace’s apartment (Grace didn’t have to scream for very long, and cut the sound at one pointed look from this awe-inspiring female), and her taking charge of the situation with Devlin and transporting them to the “Cove” in her black SUV.

  Grace guessed that this would be where Devlin intended for them to go, though she would have told the taxi driver, had they taken a cab, to go to the Chrysler Building instead. Because that was apparently where the Cove was based.

  Once at the tower, they went below ground into a tunnel Grace didn’t know existed and then into a shiny elevator with no buttons or panels, illuminated by three overhead halogen lights.

  Good thing she didn’t suffer from claustrophobia.

  She assumed they were going up, though the ride was so smooth and soundless, she couldn’t really feel the movement. The slight pressure in her stomach told her they were indeed rising, and rapidly.