Beast of Fire -- a Demon Hunting Sexy Romance

by Lisa Renee Jones

  “That meeting is not to take place,” Adrian spouted, orbing to a standing position behind the chair he had occupied moments before. “You will ensure Cullen Moore does not trust the Knights. Tell him that ‘the Hunter’ is a Knight of White.”

  She shot to the edge of the chair, the blood draining from her face. “If the Fae discovers that I told Cullen of the Hunter, he will kill me.” Prince Risen had been explicit in his demand that the Hunter’s identity be guarded for the very reasons Adrian wanted Cullen to know. The Prince did not want Cullen distrusting the Knights.

  His eyes flashed red. “Then I suggest you take care that he does not discover you were the source of Cullen’s discovery.”

  That wouldn’t work. “I am the only other person who knows his identity. I am telling you, Adrian, he will kill me.”

  “Better you than your brother,” he said with menacing promise.

  She sunk back in the chair, the wind knocked from her chest with just those few words. Adrian had taken Caleb the week before. Caleb. Only thirteen and, no doubt, terrified. “How is he?”

  Another vase broke and she squeezed her eyes shut. Her mother’s again. He really knew how to hit at the heart. Her mother had been dead only a year. Her brother might well be.

  “I do not have time for this,” Adrian barked at her. Her lashes snapped open as he pointed to her. He could do dangerous things with a point of a finger, destroy more than vases. She grabbed the arms of the chair as his rant continued, “You will force a confrontation between Cullen and the Knight Lucan immediately. And make sure you are there. The minute Cullen attacks Lucan, the firestarter will take the ring. If anything goes wrong, I expect you to find a way to get your hands on the ring yourself.”

  She really had no idea how he expected her to go up against a firestarter, or a ring that would kill her on contact, but she wasn’t about to say that. She forced air into her lungs, forced herself to be braver than she felt. “Not unless I know that Caleb is safe. I don’t want him turned into one of your Beasts. That’s not the deal. Give him back to me. You can always take him again. We both know you can.”

  He flashed out of the room, flames flickering in his wake. A second later he was kneeling in front of her, between her legs, his hands on her waist. No emotional shield could hide her fear as she began to shake.

  "Scared little Tara?” he asked, leaning closer and inhaling. “I don’t smell fear. Perhaps I could taste it in your kiss?”

  His seduction powers were legendary. His touch, though it should revolt anyone who knew what he was, drew women into a magical spell. She could feel his magic seeping through her limbs, heating her. Please no. Do not let this happen.

  She imagined his face as nothing but a hollow, filled with snakes, and instantly recoiled, jerking her head backwards. “I want my brother back.”

  He laughed. “You are impressive, Tara. Few are strong enough to resist my touch.” His hand slid to her hair, and she gasped from the pain as he yanked her mouth close to his, his breath hot on her lips. “But really, you are not so immune to me, and we both know it.” His lips barely brushed hers. “I would convert you and make you mine, if the wolf would not smell me on you.”

  He released her hair, his hands coming down on her thighs with an iron bite that had her grinding her teeth to keep from screaming. “I cannot convert your brother. He is a child; his soul is worthless to me. But if I think for one minute that you have defied me, Tara, I will throw him to my Hounds.” A snarl sounded from outside the window. “Do not test me, little witch. Your magic is dirt beneath my shoes.”

  His red eyes held hers for two poisonous seconds, her insides twisting with the contact. And then, with a flash of fire, he was gone. Tara pulled her legs to her chest, pain radiating up and down their length. Tears pierced her eyes. If there were Hell on earth, she’d found it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kresley jerked awake at the feeling of the embedded sensor in her arm vibrating with warning – a warning system her doctor had invented to prevent her from missing a shot. She sat straight up, and Lucan followed her to a sitting position.

  “What is it?” he asked urgently.

  She looked wildly around the room, trying to get her bearings. Hotel. Lucan. New York. The room was dark, the curtains tinged with enough orange to hint that the sun was rising.

  “Light,” she said. “I need the light.”

  Quick to comply, Lucan leaned to the nightstand and flipped the switch. The instant the light flooded the room, Kresley studied her inner arm. Blue. The dot that had appeared was blue. She’d slept through the twelve-hour warning. How had she slept through such an important thing? She had eight hours left. Right. Eight hours. She was okay.

  “Kresley, sweetheart,” Lucan said urgently. “You’re scaring me here. Talk to me. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, her body slowly relaxing. “False alarm. I thought I'd missed my shot.” She showed him her arm. “I have a sensor in my arm that tells me when it’s almost time to take my shot. I thought I'd slept through the early warning. Actually, I did sleep through the first warning, which is a miracle considering what a light sleeper I am.” She dropped back down onto the pillow, her heart still racing from the scare.

  “Because you used to set fires in your sleep,” he said, propping his weight up on his elbow as he lay down beside her. “I remember that from working with your doctor last year.”

  She made a frustrated sound. “Not just in my sleep. I set fires every time I so much as sneezed,” she said, running her hand over the light stubble on his jaw. It was sexy. Masculine. She couldn’t believe how comfortable she was lying there naked with him. “But the emotions set off by dreams – they were worse, because I had no way of reining them in.”

  He grabbed her arm and looked at the blue dot. “The sensor changes color based on how long you have left between shots?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Green is twelve hours. Blue, eight. Red, four. And Laura is working on a ring I can wear that will have an injection needle and serum built in. That way I am always prepared if I lose my injections. She’s always trying to find ways to give me that freedom I’ve never had.” She narrowed her eyes on him, curious about his medical background. “I know you are a scientist and a doctor, but were you always? Before becoming a Knight?”

  There was a pause, as if her question had taken him aback. “Yes,” he said. “In Boston. It was different then, though. We had a lot fewer resources, yet we got by remarkably well. But we could never have fixed a flawed genetic marker like yours. That’s the miracle of modern medicine.”

  “That you understand now. How is that?”

  He shrugged. “Med school, self study, life. I’ve worked with some of the most brilliant minds in medicine. Your doctor being one of them.”

  She opened her mouth to ask something more, but he pulled her closer, one of his muscular legs sliding between hers a moment before he tucked her beneath his big, warm body, his elbows resting on either side of her head. And that was when she saw the furrow of his brow, the worry in his eyes. “What?”

  “Where exactly are you keeping your injections, Kresley?”

  “My bag,” she said. “I brought enough to last a year. Laura made sure of it.”

  ***

  In her bag. In the apartment. Lucan thought his heart might just explode from his chest with that announcement. She was going to panic. How could she not? She’d spent a lifetime dealing with the fear her fire would hurt someone, finally gaining control. And here he was, trying to convince her that fire, the very thing that had made her life hell on earth, was a gift, and he’d forgotten her shots.

  What kind of doctor was he? He wasn’t one. He’d become nothing but an assassin. He knew nothing but killing for the Guardians. With that self-depreciating thought, he buried his head in her shoulder. Damn it, how had he let this happen?

  “Lucan?"

  That soft, angelic voice of Kresley’s seeped through his nerve endings and d
elivered a jolt, a nice little zap of reality. This kind of irrational, negative thinking crap is what had started him down the path to hell in the first place. He could kick his own ass. If he were back at the ranch, one of the Knights would gladly kick it for him. Yes, he wanted that. To be back at the ranch, and get into a scrap with another Knight and talk dirt about it later. He loved that shit. Loved the Knights. The brotherhood. Loved it as much, or more, than he did a lab with equations and problems to solve. Loved the safety of that bond between Knights and a common goal of fighting evil. Which is exactly why Kresley and he should be at the ranch and should never have left. He wasn’t leaving her this time. Nor was she leaving him. Nor was he going to let anything happen to her.

  “Lucan,” she whispered again, her hand stroked the back of his hair, tickling his scalp, sending a shudder of awareness through his body. Down boy, he murmured in his head. Later. Much later. A lifetime of making love waited in the future. Important matters to attend to first.

  He lifted his head, fixed her in a steady stare, deciding to get the bad news out of the way. Say it, get the panic over, move on. He went for it, “We’ll need to run by the apartment and get your shots.”

  Her eyes went wide, and he could see the pulse in her throat leap. "Oh my God!” She tried to get up, and he held her easily. She shoved on his arms. “I have to go now. I have to make sure I have that shot before time runs out. I –”

  He kissed her, a long, deep, passionate kiss. She stiffened, unyielding, for all of two seconds, before she sighed into his mouth and kissed him back. He loved the way she melted for him, loved those sweet, little sighs.

  The beast within him flared to life, but Lucan embraced the darkness, fed it with the taste of this sweet, delicate woman. After a night of making love to Kresley, a night of struggling with his beast, he had learned something important. He now knew that his fear of the beast is what fed its power, gave it control he did not wish it to have. The instant Lucan had decided that the man was stronger than the beast, he had claimed control.

  When finally he managed to drag his lips from hers, he peered down at her, confident, secure in his words. “We’ll get the shots, and everything will be fine.”

  “But—"

  “No buts.” He kissed her again. And he’d kiss her until she simply agreed with him, until she had no arguments left. His tongue swept over hers in gentle caresses full of promise. “Everything is going to be fine.”

  “What if they’re missing?”

  “They won’t be,” he said with confidence. “They will be right where you left them.” His voice thickened with promise. “We’re going to get through this. You and me. Together.”

  “Don’t,” she hissed. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  Confidence flared within him. “I never make a promise I don’t keep,” he said. “We will make it through this.”

  “My fire—"

  “Is a gift.”

  “A gift does not cause destruction.”

  “Using it to kill Demons stops destruction. It saves lives. To say otherwise is like saying the Knights of White are evil because we carry swords.”

  “It’s not the same,” she argued.

  “Of course it is.”

  Her brows furrowed, a cute little dimple forming between them. “You were recruited by angels,” she argued right when he was about to kiss that spot.

  “As my mate, you are a descendant of angels,” he countered. “That should pretty much put to rest any question of origins. You were created for good, not evil.”

  “Then why does evil always seem to follow me?”

  “To stop you from stopping it.”

  She stared hard. Moved abruptly and pounded on his arms. Lightly, but forcefully. “Let me up. I can’t argue with you on top of me.”

  He laughed. “Then don’t argue.”

  That earned him a reprimand. “Don’t give me reason to.” She pursed her lips. “Let me up. I need to think.”

  Lucan rolled off of her and snagged her robe from the end of the bed. The hotel had selected well; the green silk matched her eyes perfectly.

  “Better put that on,” he told her, his hot stare brushing her ripe, rosy nipples as they puckered in the cool air. His mouth watered and he snapped his gaze back to hers. “I can’t argue when I want to kiss you.” Pause. “Every damn inch of you.”

  Her eyes flared with shock, her cheeks flushing. She snatched the robe. “You do not argue fairly.”

  He slid to the headboard. “I try not to argue.” He yanked the covers low over his hips, which offered more decorum than a thin pair of boxers, considering his aroused state. He patted the bed. “Arguing makes for bad bedside manners. A doctor can’t have bad bedside manners.”

  She looked at the spot where he wanted her and sat back on her heels, her chin tipped defiantly. “Why give me a power that’s supposed to help people and give me no control over it.”

  Lucan’s mood shifted as quickly as a gust of hard wind. That question hit a nerve. The "why’s" could destroy you. They almost had him.

  “Why,” he said softly, thoughtfully. He lifted his leg, restless, his arm draped over his knee. “When I first became a Knight I didn’t understand ‘why’ either. Why my family had died. Why I had lived and they had died.”

  “You watched them die.”

  “Yes,” he said, the burgundy swirl of the bedspread twisting in his mind's eye as memories revealed themselves. He didn’t normally talk about the past. Tried not to think about it. But this was Kresley, he told himself. She had to deal with her past, had to get past the questions, as he had–past the "whys" that tormented a soul – that could destroy it.

  He drew a thick breath, barely managed to fill his lungs. Helifted his gaze to hers. “I found my parents dead.” His throat thickened. Damn it. He paused and swallowed. “My sister was still alive.”

  “Oh God, Lucan.” She seemed to measure her words. “Were you already a doctor at that point? Able to help?” He nodded. Would have said something if he could have found his voice. It was gone, like his family. Finally, “I was a doctor in a Boston settlement. The only doctor. It was 1707. A long time ago.” Yet his chest hurt as if it were yesterday. He continued, “We didn’t have the resources of today. I tried to stop the bleeding but . . . she bled to death. There was nothing I could do. I can still see her face. I try not to. She was young like you. Her life ahead of her.” He made a disgusted sound. “Ironically, I was attacked while burying them. It was as if the Beasts had waited for me to endure the torture of grieving before coming back for me.”

  “And the Knights saved you?” she asked.

  “Salvador.”

  “I’ve heard that name,” she said. “Jag's mentor, right?”

  “Yes,” Lucan said. “He is the one who creates us. The one who chooses who will become a Knight.” He thought back to that day, to the days directly following it. “I didn’t so much as think about medicine for a century after that.” He curled his fingers in his hands. “I took to the sword for penances. Lived for every time I killed one of those bastards.”

  She studied him in silence, studied him with the intensity of an artist painting a picture. She slid to her hip, resting her weight on one hand. “Yet you found your way back to medicine.” It wasn’t a question.

  Another short nod. More memories he didn’t block out. He let them flow. “I was struggling with the past. I couldn’t let it go. The battlefield wasn’t enough anymore. I was hungry for knowledge. For something other than war. It felt. .. important. As if I were supposed to learn more, do more. I went to medical school. Traveled after that. I studied with great scientists, doctors, explored alternative medicine, even spent some time with an Indian Shaman. I was a sponge. And then as suddenly as I had left the Knights, I knew I had to go back. But what I found wasn’t good. The Knights were aging – not in body, but soul – struggling with the beast within that I had yet to struggle with myself.”

  “That happens at differe
nt ages depending on the Knights, right?” Kresley asked, obviously following every word he spoke.

  “Yes. None of us know when it will hit us. Some are very young when the erosion hits. Rinehart was two hundred years younger than me and barely hanging on when he met Laura. At that age, I was fine.” He found himself surprisingly eager to continue his story, “I had the idea I’d find a suppression serum. There weren’t any mates back then, and we all needed hope. So I went to work, and I was driven at first. Confident. But Knights started falling to the darkness, turning into Beasts or intentionally dying in battle to avoid going to the other side. Our leader, Tezi, was furious. He blamed the Angels, said we were being used, that heaven was no better than hell. He went willingly to Adrian. My biggest fear is that the ring the Wolf wears will end up with Tezi. He wants the Knights dead. Destroying them is his vow of vengeance against the Knights' creators.”

  “The Knights were the ones he was trying to protect.” Her words were laced with disbelief. “His friends. Moer than friends. I’ve heard the Knighs call eac other brothers. To avenge them would not e to kil them.”

  “Revenge is what he is after and not for us. For himself. Tezi has no soul,” Lucan reminded her. “Without a soul, there is only evil. He knows no friends now. Only enemies.”

  She let out a long breath, as if she’d been holding it while he spoke. It took effort but he looked at her, let her see the pain in his eyes. When she spoke, her voice quavered. “I don’t know what to say. It’s all so...horrible. I don’t know what else to call it.” She twisted the sash to her robe around her hands; they were shaking.

  It touched him that she felt his story so deeply. He didn’t want her upset, but it had been a lifetime since he had felt that someone understood his pain enough to be moved by those feelings. He wanted to go to her, to pull her close. But he’d shared his story to help her heal. This was about her reaching inside and learning about herself, about how his pain could, hopefully, help her recover from hers.