Her Sexy Beast
Page 1
Table of Contents
HER SEXY BEAST
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
HER SEXY BEAST
The Chimera Chronicles VI
KARIN SHAH
SOUL MATE PUBLISHING
New York
HER SEXY BEAST
Copyright©2019
KARIN SHAH
Cover Design by Syneca Featherstone
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Published in the United States of America by
Soul Mate Publishing
P.O. Box 24
Macedon, New York, 14502
ISBN: 978-1-68291-937-8
www.SoulMatePublishing.com
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
BY KARIN SHAH
YOUNG ADULT ROMANCE:
Halfling
PARANORMAL ROMANCE:
Blood and Kisses
THE CHIMERA CHRONICLES:
In Like A Lion
Entity Mine
The Lion’s Share
Lion’s Prey
The Dragon’s Flame
Her Sexy Beast
This book is dedicated to my husband,
whose grace and perseverance
through the challenges of life
continue to inspire me.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Sarah Ha for taking time out of her hectic life to beta read! And to Debby Gilbert, editor extraordinaire, no amount of gratitude seems sufficient, but this my attempt. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Prologue
14 years earlier
He jerked awake gasping, as if someone had splashed icy water in his face, and stared straight up into a dark, flat, tangerine-clouded sky.
Where was he?
His heart pounded. The world did donuts around him. He stayed still as he took stock, his brain sluggish. From sleep? A knock to the head? Drugs?
The dark sky meant night. He lay prone on his back on top of many assorted lumps, from tiny to fist-sized, as if he had just been dumped here.
He felt his chest. It and his back were bare. So were his feet, but thankfully, he wasn’t completely naked. Flimsy, cotton, scrub-type pants protected his legs.
Buildings guarded him on either side, funneling his vision up to that flat expanse of orangish sky. A city sky.
He was in an alley, and sprawled on top of the typical crap usually found in a city alley. It was a miracle none of the junk composing his nasty mattress had punctured his skin. There could be broken glass or dirty needles.
Shit! Dirty needles.
He rocketed into a sitting position.
The hasty movement was a mistake.
Jagged streaks of light burst behind his eyes. His stomach heaved. Agony raked his insides. He leaned to the side just in time to spill the contents of his stomach. The convulsive heaving continued for what seemed like hours, and then subsided as quickly as if it had never happened.
God, his throat burned and he was thirsty, so damned thirsty. He tried to swallow, but couldn’t gather enough spit.
Wary of quick motions, he eased himself onto his knees and twisted to examine the shit he’d been laying on, careful to avoid his vomit.
He frowned. There were no syringes, thank God, but nails, shards of curved bottle glass, and pointed scraps of brick littered the ground that had been under him.
How the hell hadn’t he been hurt?
Maybe whatever was messing with his head and stomach made him numb? Was it possible he’d cut himself and didn’t know it?
He skimmed his hands over his back and chest. He’d thought his torso was naked, but tiny, strange bumps with the curved regularity of scales registered beneath his fingertips. What was he wearing? He traced the pattern up over his sternum to his neck, but the bumps didn’t stop. They continued up to his face. Not clothing, then. Some weird hives? He held his arms out in front of him and inspected the parts of himself he could view.
He saw surprisingly well in the shadows of this urban canyon. Even better than the city lights bouncing off the clouds should allow, but the notion barely registered. He scrutinized the bumps on his arm, expecting them to be pink, but found them instead a mid-range brown, darker than he remembered his skin.
Than what he remembered.
What did he remember?
His head ached again as he tried to access his memories.
Who was he? How had he gotten here?
The alley took another joyride around him. His pulse throbbed in his ears.
He didn’t know.
He tried again, fighting against the pain in his head. A name came to him. Ronan.
His name was Ronan, but long ago they’d called him Roan. They? His family? A friend? He didn’t know.
He turned the name over on his tongue to soothe his panic. Roan, Roan.
His success lifted his spirits and he groped for a last name. There was something weird there. A name that started with a “B.” Byrne maybe? Or some variation, came to him, but another name he couldn’t quite grasp stayed stubbornly beyond his reach.
Maybe he’d been adopted?
No. He’d been a foster kid. A shuffling of homes flashed through his memories, and then joined the other last name in refusing to come forward.
After that, another memory surfaced. He’d been ripped off the street on the way to high school and thrown into the panel van of every child’s nightmares. Men in black masks had loomed over him and the
n . . .
Damnit! Nothing. Just half-built images of men in white coats and jabs from needles followed by fire strafing through his veins, or ice, or glass or all three, and cramps so fierce he wanted to plead for death, but couldn’t force out the words.
How long had he been held? Time seemed distorted. He could have been captive for a few months or a year. He had no idea.
Why had they taken him and why had he been dumped? Or had he? Panic returned.
Maybe he’d somehow escaped and they were searching for him right now?
His heart did a drumroll. He had to move. He tried to stand, but his muscles protested as if he’d never stood before.
He scrabbled on his hands and knees past his sick and several feet away the glint of a puddle caught his eye. His thirst flared. Some distant knowledge argued that he was dehydrated and water would help.
He knelt at the shallow pool formed in a depression in the asphalt, but right away a sickly-sweet smell hit his nose. This was no rain puddle on a suburban sidewalk. This had dripped from a car engine’s AC.
His thirst warred with his common sense—and something else. A voice, both foreign and familiar, whispered, Poison.
Still he leaned closer. A face filled the reflective surface, but it wasn’t his face.
A monster glared back at him.
A scream tried to tear from his throat, but it was too dry.
Adrenaline spiked every hair on his head. He scudded away, pivoting at the same time, pasting his back against the brick wall of a building, and scanning the alley for the creature.
His heart slammed hard enough in his chest to hurt.
He fought to listen past its clamor and the ragged breathing rasping in his ears. He tried to quiet his breath.
Nothing. No hint of movement or strange shapes. He huddled into himself for a minute, afraid to breathe. Another minute crept passed, then another, and another, and still the monster didn’t attack.
Because there was no monster.
Some of his fear ebbed. The painful impact of his heart eased. He must have imagined it. Maybe whatever they’d injected him with was hallucinogenic?
He crawled back to the puddle to peer at his reflection, hoping this time to see the features he remembered, but the monster met his gaze again. He flinched, but this time he didn’t run.
He blinked his eyes. The monster blinked its glowing-green, slit-pupilled eyes in synch. He struggled for air, dizziness making his head swim, and lifted his hand to touch his face. The monster touched its face.
The scaly bumps under his hands weren’t hives at all. They were actual scales. If he was hallucinating, he was hallucinating with touch as well.
And it wasn’t just the eyes and the scales that transformed his face, his cheekbone jutted out from his skin like the boney skull of some mishmash of a person and a reptile. The edges of his nose appeared slightly flattened. While still meeting his fore face his chin thrust forward making the angle of his jaw more acute.
His pulse skittered in his veins, its mad progress audible in his ears. A roar followed and he gripped his head with both hands.
His eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. The monster he saw in the puddle was him. Whatever those white-coated men had done, all that pain had somehow transformed him into this.
Finally, accepting the truth of his eyes and hands, he dragged his body back to the wall and used it to find his feet.
But what should he do? Where should he go?
He tried to force a swallow, but his throat stung too badly. He needed water and he couldn’t stay here if his captors were on his heels.
He took a step, stumbled a little, but then regained his strength and hugging the shadows, slid into the larger, building-lined street. He ducked his head and kept near the buildings. A few people meandered down the block, chatting and laughing.
A woman came out of a twenty-four-hour drugstore ahead of him and turned his way. He lowered his head more, trying to dodge her gaze, but light from the store flooded the sidewalk and he couldn’t avoid it.
She’d been fumbling with her keys and looked up directly into his face. Her eyes widened and a shriek split the calm of the night. The noise shredded directly to something primitive inside him. Shouts sounded in the distance. The rapid patter of footsteps started toward him.
Run!
The voice in his head felt like him yet not him, but he didn’t stop to analyze. He spun and staggered into a sprint, finding his rhythm with astounding speed and swung back into the alley, bursting out the other side, running as if the hounds of hell were after him.
Questions tried to worm into his brain as he dashed down the sidewalks, following some inner guide that seemed to have a direction, but he stuffed them down.
Some imperative demanded he put as much space between himself and the alley as he could. His breathing and the slap of his feet on the pavement became his world. All that existed was the primal need to escape.
He ran faster and further than he should have been able to, his surroundings a blur around him, until finally the orangish sky was on the horizon behind him.
Entering an area of broad lawns, tall trees, and neat separate houses, he slowed to a stop. No one and nothing moved here. The streetlights were sparse, and unable to saturate the wide spaces. Only the porch lights on each house rebuffed the darkness in-between.
His throat ached, his thirst rammed back into the forefront of his mind, and he followed the instinct that had guided him in his flight to a hose hooked to a spigot on the side of a house.
The rusty metal knob groaned for a second. The sound seemed as loud as a backfire to him. He froze, listening for a moment, waiting for a shout, a light to flick on, but nothing stirred.
Water spurted with a gurgle from the hose and he guzzled down several gulps. Panting, he yanked the nozzle away, letting the trickle of liquid wet the dry grass, waiting to see if his stomach would rebel. When it stayed in place, he drank until he couldn’t take another drop.
Still under some compulsion he couldn’t identify, he turned the squeaky knob off, pausing with every squeak to listen for discovery then lurched back to his feet and hurtled deeper into the maze of houses.
He had no idea how long he ran, only that the sky had begun to gray near the horizon when he came to a gravel parking lot, and stumbled into the ghostly quiet of a darkened carnival. The oily smell of stale grease, popcorn, cotton candy, hotdogs, and deep-fried treats clung to the rides and attractions.
His inner compass seemed to abandon him now. Exhausted to the bone, he staggered through the silent structures until he found the funhouse. He glanced upward. Please let there be a place to hide and rest.
He opened the door, stepped over the threshold, and smacked his head on the lintel. What the fuck? His eyes watered, but it wasn’t his injury that worried him.
When had he gotten so tall?
He’d been tall before. He remembered that, had always been much taller than his classmates. Childish voices yelling schoolyard taunts sounded in his mental ears, Big Ugly Giant, Frankenstein, Gigantor, and then vanished like his earlier memories, when he tried to examine them closer.
But he should have fit through the opening with a foot to spare. He scrubbed at the bump on his scalp and found it shrinking under his fingers, until it flattened completely. He’d healed in a matter of seconds. Had whoever’d done this to him given him super-healing?
He ducked lower and shook his head to drive away the crazy thought. He must have imagined the bump in the first place. He was so sleepy, his mind played tricks on him.
A shape moved in the corner of his eye and he spun to confront it, only to find the same freakish reflection he’d seen in the puddle. A hall of mirrors. Wonderful.
He rounded turn after turn until he came to an open space. It wa
s darker here, but he could make out strangely large furniture and weird slanting floors, probably intended to fool the eye. There was space here though, behind a molded plastic chair, to hide and sleep. A tight fit with his size, but he managed to stretch out.
The narrow crevice was dusty and the textured aluminum floor cold against his skin, but he drifted off just the same.
~ ~ ~
Sometime later, he woke with a start. A single bulb now lit the area where he huddled. His heart jumped into action.
A woman hummed in the hall of mirrors. The swish-splatter swish-splatter of cleaning spray and the soft grunts of effort following, said someone polished the mirrors. The ammonia of the spray drifted closer on an air current, so did the sounds. She was making good time. She’d be in this section any minute.
He had to get out of there.
To his left, a glowing exit sign led away from the advancing woman. He stood, keeping low, and extricated himself from behind the oversized chair.
Before he could slide to the exit, the woman rounded the corner. She caught sight of him. The whites of her eyes flashed in the shadows and a scream echoed though the room.
An answering shout came from outside in the direction he’d planned to go. He had no choice. He launched forward past the screaming woman and dove back into the hall of mirrors.
At almost the same time, the double doors at the front entrance slammed open one after the other, hard enough to vibrate the thin walls.
Sunlight flooded the hall of mirrors, bouncing off the reflective surfaces and carving the maze-like room into a dizzying morass of piercing light and velvet shadow.
A shout reverberated through the space. A big man, judging by the timbre. Roan’s pulse ticked up a notch. He was trapped between them.
The double doors banged closed. Even with the spare yellow task lighting of the bare bulbs at the beginning of each section, the sudden absence of sunlight blinded him. Blotches of red, green, and yellow retina burn obscured what little wasn’t cloaked in black.