by Harper Allen
When I think back on that night I tell myself that if I’d had any kind of premonition at the sight of Tash’s broken chain, I might have saved the three of us from our fate. But I didn’t get a premonition—I just got pissed off at Tash.
“Don’t worry, if I told Grammie anything, I’d tell her you broke the only thing you had to remember our grandfather by.”
“Popsie?” Tash made a face. “God, Meg, if I needed anything to remember Popsie by, which I don’t since it’s not like he’s dead, how about my little Mini sitting outside in the driveway? Or our sweet-sixteen diamond tennis bracelets, or—”
“Not Popsie, you birdbrain, Grandfather Darkzyn. Mom’s father.” There was a tight feeling in me, as if I was standing on the edge of a cliff. “Grammie once told me those crosses were a present from him on our second birthdays, and since he died not long after, I’d say you just broke your only bequest from him. But if you thought you’d be the first Crosse triplet to wear Grammie’s pearls down the aisle, think again. I’m the eldest, so I get them first.” I threw down the gleam of silver chain and the small silver cross I’d just snatched from my neck.
“You forgot to add nya-nya, sweetie,” Kat drawled, picking up Tash’s chain from the table. “And our grandfather’s name was Anton Dzarchertzyn, not Dark—”
Okay, time-out here while you try to put yourself in my place. Remember, I’m talking about Kat, for God’s sake—Kat, whose languid sizzle fells males like trees; Kat, whose favorite reading material is the Mr. Boston Guide to Cocktails. That’s what I tried to tell myself, anyway, but as her head jerked up without warning and her eyes suddenly darkened to dull cloudiness, the person standing between Tash and me no longer seemed to be my sister.
Or if she was, someone—or something—had temporarily done a pod-person number on her.
“One will be the striking talons of the eagle—she will begin the battle.” The harsh, guttural voice rasping from Kat’s throat was as chillingly alien as everything else about her. “The second will be the far-seeing gaze of the eagle, and she will warn of coming danger. The third will be our wings. She will fly us into the very core of the darkness; we pray she proves strong enough to fly us out again. These are our roles and our duty, and have been for all the unlit centuries of night. Without my presence the circle is dangerously open. I close it and form the three.”
Pod-Kat’s hand closed over the chain at her throat. With a sudden tug, she broke it free.
“I get it, all right?” Tash snatched the chain from her. “Just because I had the idea of wearing Grammie’s pearls at my wedding, you and Meg have decided to wear them to yours first. Well, be my guest. The last time she took them out of the safe, they looked like they needed restringing, anyway.” She glared at us. “And forget what I said about not wanting to marry Todd. I can’t wait to get away from your stupid insider jokes at my expense. I’m sure you both think this eagle thing is screamingly funny, but for once your dumb little sister isn’t hanging around for the punch line. I’m going to bed.”
“Somebody has trouble handling her cocktails,” Kat purred. “The punch line to what you call the eagle thing is that we don’t know what you’re talking about, right, Meg?”
She was Kat again, right down to her languid tone, and from what she’d just said, she’d totally blanked on her eerie little performance just now. With difficulty I found my voice. “Wrong, Kat. Striking talons, far-seeing gaze, core of darkness—Any of those sound familiar—?” I nearly jumped out of my skin as I heard the familiar chimes of the front door pealing.
Kat arched her eyebrows a fraction. “Tash is in a worse snit than usual, you’re as nervous as a cat…next time I make appletinis, remind me to cut waaay back on the vodka. Anyone planning on seeing who’s on our doorstep at this time of night? My money’s on a pizza delivery driver with the wrong address.”
“I will.” The glance Tash shot over her shoulder at us as she sped to the door was suddenly hopeful. She came to a halt in front of the mirrored doors of the French armoire that stood in the hall and fluffed up her curls. “Pizza guy my butt! Maybe that dreary party tonight was all part of Mandy’s maneuver to get us home in time to send Meg a totally hot strip-o-gram! I should have guessed she had something more planned!”
Okay. Remember what I said about not having a premonition when Tash took her chain off, and how, if I had, I might have been able to change our fates? Well, the premonition thing finally kicked in as Tash looked through the security peephole. Big whoop, since it was already too late to stop what was about to happen, but of course I didn’t know that at the time.
“Don’t open the door,” I said in a rush. “Those stories you mentioned that are going around about the strip club aren’t the only weird things that have been happening in Maplesburg, Tash. The other day I overheard Popsie telling Grammie that the police have gotten more than the usual number of complaints about Peeping Toms in the last couple of weeks. The thing is, more than half of the women insisted someone was standing outside the upper-story windows of their homes. And like you said, there’s been a rash of job absenteeism and disappearances lately, not just of young guys, but girls, too. Something’s going on in this town. I don’t care if Heath Ledger’s body double is standing on the front step, it’s midnight and we’re three women alone. We’re not going to open the door to a stranger—”
“Oh. My. God.” Tash’s hand was already groping for the doorknob. As I reached her side she turned towards me with an expression on her face that could only be described as glowing. “If I can’t answer the door to a stranger, how about to our fiancés?” she said, her tone oddly breathless. “Because that’s Lance and Todd and Dean out there, sis. But there’s something—” A flush of pink rose up beneath her skin. As her lashes swept down over the blue of her eyes, she bit her bottom lip, as if to stop it from trembling.
I’d seen her like this once before, when I’d barged in on her and Todd going at it hot and heavy in the cloakroom of the country club the night he’d proposed to her. Except that time I’d been pretty sure she’d been faking it, and this time I didn’t think she was.
Her lashes swept dreamily up. “There’s something different about them,” she said in a purr Kat might have envied.
“They’re Lance and Todd and Dean,” I scoffed. “And we agreed earlier that they don’t exactly get our motors racing, so what’s with the cave-girl routine?”
“I’m with Meg.” Kat drifted up beside us, her hand at her mouth to cover a delicate yawn. “We all know what our hubbies-to-be are here for, don’t we? They’ve just come from a stag party. They’re probably a lot drunk and a little frisky—and from one or two unfortunate experiences with former boyfriends, I can tell you that drunk almost always wins out over frisky. If we let them in, we’ll be spending the next two hours stroking their—”
“Egos,” I said firmly. “So turn out the porch light, Tash. That should send the message they’re not getting any tonight.”
Tashya’s hand slid slowly from the doorknob, the dreamy look fading from her gaze. “I guess you’re right,” she said in a puzzled tone. “It’s not like I want Todd thinking he can have it any old time he wants it. What kind of marriage would that be?”
“You think one day Dr. Todd might regret dumping mousy Bev Simmons for our sister?” Kat mused as we turned away.
“Big-time,” I agreed promptly. I hesitated. “Kat, we need to talk. Are you sure you don’t remember spouting off about roles and duty and the closing of the circle by—”
“Oh, merde.”
Her disgusted response wasn’t directed at me, I realized as I followed her gaze and saw Tash looking through the peephole again. Even as I headed grimly back to the door, Tash’s fingers flew over the security keypad to disable the alarm.
“I can’t help it, Meg,” she said in the same breathy voice as before. “I mean, look—have you ever seen three hotter males in your whole life?” She flung the door open as she spoke, and I skidded to a halt. Two fee
t away, just over the threshold, stood Lance and Todd and Dean.
I tried to swallow, but my throat was suddenly too dry. Tash was right, they were different.
They were incredibly, sexily, irresistible.
Chapter 2
Better take another time-out here.
The thing is, our fiancés weren’t irresistible. Lance had a beefiness about him that even his Armani suits couldn’t conceal, and Todd had boyishly tousled chestnut curls that Kat and I suspected were the result of a body perm. Tash swore they were natural but even so, his eligibility stemmed more from his tax bracket than from devastating good looks.
As for Dean, the two times we’d done the horizontal mambo together I’d nearly nodded off while he’d sat on the edge of the bed folding his boxers and meticulously cuffing his silk socks into flat balls, as if he were packing for camp. When he’d finally joined me, I’d realized that watching him fold his clothes had been the thrilling part, and for the next five and a half minutes—oh, please, every girl checks her watch when she’s with a man like Dean—I occupied myself by weaving a highly creative fantasy that included a couple of gorgeous firemen from the Maplesburg FD, a cop whom I’d flirted out of giving me a speeding ticket the previous day and the sexy mechanic who’d worked on Popsie’s Mercedes the time I’d borrowed it and done something unfortunate to the steering. They’d been hot. Dean and Todd and Lance weren’t.
Except now they were. Dean’s open shirt revealed washboard abs that almost rippled as I looked at them, instead of the incipient little paunch I was used to seeing on him. His thinning blond hair was thinning no longer, but swept back from his forehead in a thick golden cascade that ended up somewhere around his collar. His cheekbones were more prominent than I remembered, hard slabs that matched the new firmness of his jaw.
This last one almost broke through my reverie. Dean’s weak profile had always been his least attractive feature, even trumping his hair. In the dim recesses of my mind a feeble alarm bell rang, telling me that if Dean Hudson the Third had suddenly acquired bone structure a supermodel would sell her soul for, something was really, really wrong with this picture. Instead of listening to it, I impatiently shut it off as my gaze strayed south of Dean’s belt. I sagged against the hall armoire.
My boyfriend had a package. I blinked, shook my head in disbelief, and looked again. It was still there. My boyfriend had a real, honest-to-God package, and it wasn’t the kind that came wrapped up in pretty paper and ribbons, it was the kind that usually came wrapped in a well-worn pair of Levi’s on a bad-boy biker in my daydreams. Dean’s investment-banker suit trousers were straining over the unmistakable bulge, and even as I watched, his zipper notched down a trifle.
I heard a tiny moaning sound, realized it was coming from me and sank my teeth into my lower lip in an effort to get control of myself. Beside me, Tash was making the same kind of low moan.
“So adorable of you boys to drop by.” Kat came up behind us, her sex-goddess drawl tinged with regret the way it always is when she’s about to puncture a male’s hopes. “But you’ll have to take rain checks all round, sweeties. You don’t—”
Her drawl cut off abruptly. I heard her swallow, heard her moan like Tash and I had, and then I heard her huskily ask Lance if he felt like a nightcap…and just as she did the mute button on the alarm bells in my head suddenly released.
“No!” I turned swiftly to her. “Whatever you do, don’t ask them in, Kat! They’re—they’re—” My protest sputtered off as I tried to figure out why I was making it.
“We’re what, honey?” Dean’s voice had a sexy note I’d never heard in it before. “A little bit drunk? A little bit horny?” His eyes, their normal pale blue now a glowing sapphire, met mine and again I felt heat lapping over me.
“A little bit…dead,” I said faintly.
I didn’t know where the words had come from. Confusion filled me, and I opened my mouth to begin an apology—but then I stopped.
Because just for a second I saw what was really standing on our doorstep.
Unbuttoned shirts fluttered open around three rotting chests. Lank clumps of hair barely covered brown, parchment-looking scalps. Even as I watched, Dean leaned casually against the doorframe and a chunk of greenish flesh detached from his fingers. They hadn’t been dead long enough to have become putrid corpses, of course. I realize now that what I saw in that instant was the essence of their deadness.
But the way they looked wasn’t the worst part. That came when I glanced down and saw what remained of their feet: Dean’s in polished Brooks brogues, Lance’s in Italian slip-ons, Todd’s in the ergonomically correct German loafers he swore were the only shoes that could stand up against hard hospital floors.
Admittedly, Todd’s uber-shoes always made me want to fling my hand across my eyes and cry, “The horror, the horror!” but not this time.
Because this time they were hovering an inch or so off the ground…and so were Dean’s brogues and Lance’s slip-ons.
And then they weren’t. All three of our gentlemen callers were standing on solid ground, and as my gaze traveled upwards I saw everything else was back to normal, too. They shimmered. They were gorgeous. They were walking wet dreams and they were here for the fabulously fortunate Crosse triplets. And even if that wasn’t normal, suddenly it seemed so to me.
“A little dead?” Beside me Tash gave a breathy laugh. “Don’t mind her, Toddie. Meg’s been chugging back Kat’s appletinis all evening.”
“So how about it, big guy?” Kat looked through her lashes at Lance. “You up for it? A nightcap, I mean.”
“And anything else you’re offering, beautiful,” her impossibly handsome fiancé growled back. “You inviting us in?”
BING!…Bing!…bing…I firmly shut off the irritating bells that kept fading in and out in my head as Kat replied.
“As tempting as the three of you are, lover, I don’t think my darling sisters would appreciate me poaching on their turf. I’ll let them hand out their own party invitations.” She crooked a pink-polished nail at him, gave him her most smoldering look and began sauntering back into the living room.
Lance looked at Todd and Dean. “The crooking-her-finger thing—unspoken but a definite legal invite, right?”
“Hell, don’t look at me.” Todd raked strong surgeon’s fingers through his chestnut curls, and even as Dean’s locked-and-loaded state sent erotic shivers down my spine, I indulged myself in imagining what Dr. Todd’s dexterous fingers could do to a girl. “I’m the schmuck who figured if a nurse’s aide was batting her eyes at me, I had the green light to hustle her sweet ass into the laundry cupboard and give her my best bedside manner, and we all know how that turned out. Sure, the little tramp was fired, but I almost got hauled up before the hospital board. I’d say the crooked-finger thing’s a tease.”
“That was a no-means-no situation, Whitmore.” Dean saw me watching him and gave me a devastating grin before turning to Lance. “Unlike our groping friend here, Zellweger, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving it a shot. See what happens when you try to cross the threshold.”
I can’t explain it. Tash says she can’t, either. We both stood there and listened to this conversation, and neither one of us found anything weird about it. All I felt was a kind of dizzy impatience to get Dean alone and out of his clothes, and I couldn’t understand why they were still standing there.
Neither could Kat, apparently. “Come on in and help me whip up more appletinis, gorgeous,” she murmured as she passed by on her way to the kitchen with the empty pitcher dangling from her fingertips. “Why waste time making nice with the brat and the brain when you could be with the only Crosse sister who can tie a cherry stem with her tongue in three seconds flat?”
“That’s my cue, boys.” A sharklike grin on his face, Lance stepped over the threshold and into the house. “Think you can perform that trick without the cherry, babe?” he asked as his hand slipped around to Kat’s tush.
Kat, who’s made it cle
ar in the past that she doesn’t appreciate being handled like a melon being tested for ripeness, gurgled sexily. “I can try. Let’s find some privacy while your dreary future sisters-in-law are deciding whether they’re women enough to handle what their fiancés can give them.”
“Women enough? What a total bitch!” Tash sputtered in outrage as Kat led Lance down the hall into the kitchen.
My attention was temporarily diverted from Dean. “But being obviously bitchy isn’t like Kat. Do you think she’s—”
“She could be right.” Todd’s superheated look at Tash held a hint of dubiousness. “If you’re still set on waiting until after the ceremony tomorrow, princess, I can respect that. I think I’ll head on back to the Hot Box, okay?”
“The Hot Box?” Tash’s gaze narrowed. “Listen, Pookie, whatever my cherry-stem-tying slut of a sister says, I can show you a whole lot better time than some boob-job recipient in a G-string. Get in here and I’ll show you.”
Okay, the Crosse triplets could never be mistaken for Jo and Beth and Amy of Little Women. I mean, even now I was storing away the intriguing tidbit Todd had let slip about Tash rationing out the sugar until she was well and truly Mrs. Doctor. Tash had given the impression that her prowess in bed was so amazing her formerly tomcatting fiancé didn’t have the energy to look at other women anymore. But there’s a line we don’t cross, and both Tash and Kat had just jumped eagerly over it. First off, we never diss each other in front of anyone else—not seriously, that is. Secondly, we don’t use what Grammie calls “gutter-talk.” Bitch didn’t quite make that category. Slut did. And Kat’s slam about us not being women enough was unforgivable.
So, as a panting Tash yanked Todd into the house, I reached out to do the same to Dean…and then let my hand drop. I turned to watch her flounce up the stairs, Todd so close behind her you couldn’t have slipped a piece of paper between them.
