Red Hot Alphas: 11 Novels of Sexy, Bad Boy, Alpha Males (Red Hot Boxed Sets Book 2)

by Jo Raven

  Awesome. She didn’t want to kill anyone, whether musos, techs, or weird-ass cult members, or especially children.

  Sariah inched around the perimeter of the room, still holding onto her girls, and leaned against the wall near the front, probably near where Elfie would end up and right by a door. The other wives and kids bled into the crowd.

  Kumen and a couple other old guys stood near the front, where some sort of an altar had been set up.

  Elfie wished that she had had access to this room for a couple hours beforehand, and her ignition control board, not to mention her assorted stands and flash pots.

  She could have made this beautiful, too.

  Showtime.

  Galahad

  Tryp ran along the highway through the desert, his dress shoes slapping on the hot asphalt, sprinting as far as he could until his lungs cramped and then jogging past the sagebrush until he could sprint again. None of the cars that whizzed by him stopped to offer him a ride. The suit clung to his sweat, and he abandoned the suit coat, tie, and dress shirt in the desert bushes without stopping. He made it back to Kumen’s house and the rental car in forty-five minutes.

  His car was the only one in the parking area. Black asphalt stretched around it where all the other vans and big sedans should have been.

  Since everyone was gone, Kumen must have taken Elfie to the temple to marry her, which meant that he probably hadn’t raped her yet. Energy bolted through him. Tryp might still be able to save her.

  Heat puffed out of the car when he opened the door. The sun was still far above the horizon, so the heat of the day had gathered inside. He slid in and grabbed one of the water bottles from the back seat, chugging the warm, sweet water down his dusty throat before he twisted the key and skidded back to the road.

  Tryp sped through the beating sun and around the back of that shoddy excuse for a temple.

  When Tryp was eighteen, once he had some money, he had gone to the Mormon temple in Los Angeles on visiting day. He couldn’t go as a member because he hadn’t been old enough to have ever been given temple documents and because the New Empyrean temple was a wild offshoot that the real LDS didn’t recognize, approve of, or discuss in polite society.

  The LDS temple’s crystalline beauty touched Tryp in ways that he had never expected.

  Then he visited the Greek Orthodox Church where he had been baptized as an infant and attended until his mother had taken up with Kumen, and he fell into a pew, shaking, because he swore that he could remember his father standing beside him in the rainbow-dappled sunlight of the stained glass windows, peering down at him with dark eyes through the streamers of incense fog. The gilded icons shimmered in the sunlight.

  A black-frocked priest had found him half-lying in the pew and talked with him for hours, never mentioning the tattoos that were already crawling down Tryp’s arms or the rings in his ears.

  Back at this flat-box warehouse excuse for a church in the desert, Tryp heated with anger all over again.

  This fucking cult was destroying people: the teenage girls taken as brides for old men, the Lost Boys set out on the road, and all the children who received an entirely inadequate education. When Tryp had started at the performing arts high school, the school district had provided tutors to catch him up in every single subject so he could graduate on time. He’d worked his ass off. None of the others had had that chance for even a basic education.

  This cult destroyed everyone.

  Besides Sariah, his own mother had probably been up there on the stair rails, assuming that she hadn’t died in childbirth in the intervening years. She had watched Teancum aim a rifle at Tryp’s head, and she hadn’t done a damn thing.

  Tryp should have purged all the anger over his mother dragging him as a seven-year-old to New Empyrean and abandoning him to the older girls to raise until she had driven him out to the highway and left him, but the deep hurt was still there.

  And she still chose Kumen and the cult over Tryp, even when a gun was aimed at his head.

  Tryp bounced his palm off the steering wheel, killed the engine, and got out of the car to walk into the church.

  He sneaked in a set of back doors that no one had locked when he had lived there as a tween, either, and limped through the back hallways until he neared the celestial room, where he smelled acrid smoke. The doors slammed open and women and children ran out.

  Tryp dodged the people swarming out of the doors, all grasping the hands of struggling young children and turning to watch smoke floating out behind them.

  Tryp slid around the open doors.

  Inside, silver and gold sparks fountained from the floor, and Elfie flipped a tissue into the air and touched a match to it. It exploded with a sharp bang. With her manic grin amid the pyrotechnics, she looked like a fire goddess wielding wild magic.

  Behind her, yellow flames flickered in the carpeting and clawed at the walls.

  Showtime

  Elfie had tucked handfuls of the fluffy white skirt of the wedding dress into her pants’ waistband to get it out of her way. She stood before the altar in the front of the room and pinched flash paper from her pockets, flipping them into the air and tapping the lit match to them.

  Each detonated with a satisfying bang.

  She grabbed gerbs from her pockets, pre-packaged tubes of spark showers, held them with makeshift hotpads folded from the wadded ends of her pants, and lit them by sticking a flaming match in the base where the wires should have gone.

  Silver sparks shot out of the other end, and she aimed the spark fountain at the crowd, terrifying them. They sprinted for the exits.

  She lit the gerbs as fast as she could, one after another, spraying sparks at the crowd. Unfortunately, most of the small tubes in her pockets were 1/2x10’s, so they pumped sparks for only one-half of a second, which was too short to properly terrify people. She wished she had some 5x10’s. Five seconds of sparks spewing ten feet through the air would have scattered those people like a firehose, but those would have been too big to fit many of them in her pockets.

  A few feet beyond the tube she held, the sparks flamed out into cool ash, but the crowd was on its feet and sprinting for the exits.

  She was just turning to look for Sariah to grab her and leave, when a man’s hand grabbed her wrist.

  Elfie yanked, trying to get free, but the man was tall and young, and his tight grip around her wrist hurt.

  He opened his lips in a snarl and drew back his fist to punch her.

  A woman’s hand grabbed the man’s fist and pulled it behind his head, and for a moment, the three of them struggled in a chain of violence, until Elfie kicked at his knee just as another man’s fist reached through the shower of sparks and connected with the guy’s face, knocking him sideways, like the Prince of Fire himself had joined in the fight.

  Tattoos of rose vines scrolled down the wrist and forearm, and Elfie looked up, elated, as she grabbed another gerb out of her pocket.

  Run

  Across the struggling crowd, Tryp saw Elfie lean to reach into her pants’ pocket again.

  Before she could find something else to detonate, Nephi grabbed her arm and twisted, spinning her toward him and raising his other fist. Anger twisted Nephi’s face.

  Tryp swam through the crowd, pushing people behind him with his long arms, but it would take seconds to reach Elfie, and Nephi’s fist was already moving.

  Tryp leapt, trying to jump through fifteen feet of crowd before Nephi could punch her.

  From behind, Sariah snagged Nephi’s fist out of the air and dragged it downward by bending her knees. She held a toddler on her hip, and a young girl clung to her skirt.

  Sariah gave Tryp the seconds he needed to shove through the crowd to get to Nephi and unleash seven years of rage. His first punch slammed into Nephi’s face, making him drop Elfie’s arm. Sariah let go and stepped back, shielding her kids.

  Tryp hurled his fists, connecting with Nephi again and again and battering him with his knuckles until the m
an staggered away. Nephi had tried to get a few punches in, but he had been hitting women for the last seven years.

  Tryp had been training in bar fights.

  He spun, his fists raised, hoping like Hell that Kumen was standing right there, but he wasn’t.

  The crowd gapped open, and Tryp saw a weird version of his mother, her blond hair in one of those puffy buns, her lined face split by rage. She grabbed a girl of about eight and ran the other direction, their skirts swirling into the crowd.

  Yeah, Tryp had endangered her standing with Kumen and in New Empyrean with his behavior again.

  Hell, yeah.

  Beside him, Elfie ignited another gerb and sprayed the crowd with cool sparks. They wailed and ran faster for the exits.

  Flames licked up the curtains behind them.

  That club in Rhode Island, The Station, had become an inferno in five and a half minutes after the insulation caught fire behind the drummer. Every musician watched the pyros in case they started a fire, no matter how safe they were supposed to be.

  He grabbed Elfie’s other hand and pulled her toward the door. “Run!”

  Into the Desert

  Elfie threw the hot tube of the spent gerb to the floor and followed Tryp into the thrashing crowd.

  Tryp! Alive! And okay and healthy and beautiful and oh God her heart caught and started beating again.

  His dark suit slacks clung to his narrow waist, and the white tee shirt that he had worn under the dress shirt bared the black, sapphire, and red tattoo ink illustrating the roses and irises on his strong arms. He looked like a time traveler in this little cult on the prairie, and she was so glad to see him that she wanted to cling to his back, but she held his strong hand in hers, reveling in his warmth.

  He broke a path through the panicking crowd, leading her, and Elfie caught Sariah’s eye through the throng as they passed.

  Sariah reached for her, past two wives between them.

  Elfie reached for Sariah’s fingers, dodged a wife, and grabbed her hand. She yanked hard, dragging Sariah and her two little kids toward her and Tryp, and she didn’t let go.

  Tryp pushed and shoved, both pushing people out the logjam at the doors and getting them through the crowd. Elfie and Sariah trailed.

  They burst into the hallway, where people started running down the corridor to get out.

  Elfie fought to walk sideways and jammed herself up against a wall, peeling Sariah and her kids out of the crowd. “The fucking sprinkler system doesn’t work?”

  “It was never hooked up,” Sariah said. “Pipe is expensive.”

  Elfie hauled the older of Sariah’s two kids off the floor and around her body, slinging the child onto her back like a backpack.

  Tryp swam back and plucked the crying girl off Elfie’s back and the one out of Sariah’s arms. He settled them around his waist easily, his strong arms clamped around them. “Go. I’m right behind you.”

  Elfie ran, pulling Sariah, who kept looking back.

  “He’ll bring them!” Elfie yelled to her over the dozens of thundering footsteps and wailing women as they ran down the hallway. “I don’t think he’ll ever leave anyone behind again!”

  They burst out of the temple into the heat of the afternoon, and the laser light of the desert sun flashed in her eyes.

  Sariah tugged her hand. Elfie gathered her stupid wedding-dress skirt in her hand and wished she could rip it off herself like a stripper.

  Tryp barreled out of the doors behind them, still carrying the two kids, and in a few strides of his long legs, he was ahead of them.

  A few people straggled out behind them, but they had been at the rear of the pack. The empty doors of the temple stood open. Wisps of smoke trickled through the doors and up into the air.

  Elfie followed Tryp and Sariah, but her long skirt jerked backward. She fell, flailing. The crowd trampled around her, and she tucked and covered her head with her arms.

  Hands hauled her up, and she was still looking back to where Tryp was shoving the two girls at Sariah and staring at her, his eyes blazing with anger.

  The man’s hands shook Elfie, snapping her head back.

  Kumen, his white, crooked teeth bared, was unnaturally strong for an old man his age. His fingers vised around her wrist, squeezing the bones. She yanked her arm, trying to get away, but his fingers didn’t budge. His asshole grin widened as he yanked Elfie away from Tryp and Sariah.

  Elfie slid her legs out from under herself like sliding into home plate and dragged hard at his hand, trying to throw Kumen off-balance or make him let go, but he had had decades of experience with physically overpowering women and girls. He pulled her up by her arm like wrenching a corn stalk out of the ground, jerking her and sending a bolt of pain through her shoulder, and kept trotting through the crowd.

  This time, Elfie swung a kick, trying to tangle her foot in his legs, but he hopped and kept striding fast. The cars were just ahead. He was going to throw her in a car and drive off with her.

  Fuck, no.

  She would jump out or yank the steering wheel to crash it into a fucking cactus first. No fucking way.

  Elfie yanked harder on her arm, pulling with her weight and her hands, and she glanced back.

  Tryp reached over her head and punched hard, cracking Kumen in his cheekbone with his fist. The side of Kumen’s face crunched inward. He collapsed, finally releasing Elfie’s arm, and she lost her footing and fell backward.

  Tryp scooped Elfie up in his arms and ran back the other way through the chaos of the crowd, her white skirt billowing around them. She latched her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder for one moment, so relieved to feel his strong body around her. The shock of seeing him had to wait, but the world was brighter, and she would be okay if he was out there somewhere.

  His voice rumbled in his throat, “You okay?”

  She nodded, gulping air. “How did you get away? Are you all right? Oh, Tryfon!”

  He ran a few more steps, settled Elfie on her feet, and gathered Sariah’s wailing children in his arms. “Come on, girls. It’s okay. I’m a friend. Let’s go.”

  Elfie ran beside him around the back of the temple, Sariah sprinting just a few footsteps behind them.

  Flames poked through the flat roof of the temple and slithered onto the roof. Black smoke bubbled into the flat blue sky.

  Their rental car was the only sedan parked back there. When they got to it, Tryp nudged Elfie with his hip, and she dug into his front pocket to get the keys. She clicked it and got the doors open. Tryp shoved the two little girls in the back seat, murmuring, “You’re okay, you’re okay,” and Sariah climbed in behind them.

  Elfie leapt into the passenger seat. Tryp slid into the driver’s seat, and he peeled out, rooster-tailing gravel in the empty parking lot.

  Elfie held on tight as the little girls cried in the back seat, but lots of wrassling and some seat-belt clicking suggested that they would be as safe as possible back there, even without car seats.

  Within minutes, they were on the highway and speeding out of town.

  The girls stopped crying, and Elfie hung onto the panic handle on the door until Tryp took the turnoff from the little country highway onto I-15. At that point, he reached over the cup holder console between them and found Elfie’s hand, and she clutched his warm fingers because she had thought that she would never have that chance again.

  When they passed the state border signs and were out of Utah and into Arizona, she breathed a little easier, but when they hit the Nevada state line and started seeing signs for Las Vegas, then she let go of the door handle and believed they had made it.

  New Empyrean’s tentacles might reach through their county law enforcement offices and even into nearby parts of Utah and Arizona, but Nevada, and especially Las Vegas, might as well be on a different planet.

  Elfie and Tryp had rescued Sariah, and Elfie tried to be glad that the two of them could finally be together.

  Sir Fucking Galahad

/>   The high desert rolled by outside the car window, and Elfie stretched the cramps out of her fingers from clutching the door handle. Tryp’s warm fingers around her other hand were steadying, reassuring, but she was still shaking deep in her stomach.

  When they had been driving for about an hour, when the dashboard clock read five-thirty, the little girls had been quiet in the back seat for a while, and Sariah cleared her throat.

  “Yeah?” Tryp said, glancing in the rearview mirror at her.

  “Tryfon?” Sariah said. “Can we talk?”

  Elfie was so relieved with escaping that she got a little breezy. “Sure! Don’t mind me. I’ll just step outside.”

  Tryp laughed, and Sariah chuckled.

  Sariah said, “I have no secrets. I just need to, well, discuss something.”

  “All right,” Tryp said. A car passed them going the other way, and Tryp watched it in the rearview mirror. Elfie leaned and watched the white sedan drive down the black asphalt in her side mirror, but it didn’t turn around and follow them.

  Sariah said, “Tryfon, I want to thank you for getting me and my girls out of there, and I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I want you to know that I can’t marry you. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not, and I need to focus on raising my girls. I just can’t be married again right now. I know that it’s odd for a woman to not have a husband, but I just want to be with my girls, even if I don’t know what will happen to me.”

  Elfie held Tryp’s hand more tightly. Good God, woman! she wanted to shout. What the hell is the matter with you that you would tell Sir Fucking Galahad that he wasn’t good enough for you?