“I hear you’ve been pushing drugs at the Xanadu,” I told the man I’d shoved across the room as I advanced on him. “And that you’ve been taking it out in trade when the girls can’t pay.”
As I drew closer, he tensed up in anticipation, but I didn’t flinch when his two older friends came at me from behind. Tara and Rachel had my back.
Wisely, the young guy stayed where he was.
I leaned down to grab the man by the collar of his leather vest and hauled him in close to get his scent. I couldn’t see people’s memories, like Tara, but the scent of crime and dishonesty clung to him as palpably as the odor of grease and sweat.
“What should we do with them?” I glanced back over my shoulder at my sisters-in-arms. Each of them held a biker captive by the scruff of his neck.
One of them let out a strangled cry and I saw that Rachel had raked open the side of his face with her nails. She grinned wickedly. “I say we take them apart. Piece by piece.”
“That’s enough,” Tara ordered as we shared a quick, disturbed glance. As the first of us to turn Fury, she was our de facto leader. “We agreed not to kill.”
Rachel sighed, but settled down. “The usual, then?”
I nodded. We would turn their crimes around on them; give them a taste of what it felt like to be forced to do things they didn’t want to.
I addressed the bikers. “Here’s what gonna happen—one, you will immediately give up any association with the Spartans. Two, you will surrender your bikes to the nearest junkyard for scrap metal.”
“Yeah, right. You freaks will be sorry you picked a fight with the Spartans,” the man Tara held sneered. Brave words for a man held hostage by a woman half his size.
“Three,” Rachel picked up where I’d left off. “If you even think of going back to your gang or coming after us, you’ll suffer the worst addiction withdrawal symptoms you could imagine.”
I grinned. Nice. Rachel could get pretty creative when she wasn’t using her powers to terrorize people.
Finally, Tara added her own spin on the curse. “As soon as you leave here, you will turn yourselves in to police and make a full confession. If you try to resist the urge…” She shrugged. “Have you ever seen someone trying to quit heroin cold turkey? I hear it’s not pretty.”
“Yeah, right.” The biker who’d spoken up a moment ago shifted his weight like he was going to try something. “You think you ’roided-out bitches can scare us with colored contacts and a few threats?”
I rolled my eyes. “Tara, show him, will you?”
She grinned. “With pleasure.”
She took a deep breath, pulled him closer, and breathed out toward the man. He struggled in her grip, resisting the power of the curse that rushed into him with Tara’s breath, but it was pointless. When Tara released him, he tried to take a swing at her and immediately fell back, retching and heaving uncontrollably as shivers tremored through him.
“Oh, God.” He groaned around the pain. “Make it stop.”
Megaera laughed delightedly in my head and I took several deep breaths, marking the scent of magic in the air. I was physically stronger than Tara, but she had better mastery of her powers. I still couldn’t successfully deliver the Fury’s Kiss that could bend a bad guy to my will.
Tara repeated her trick on the other two men in our clutches before I noticed that the youngest of the gang, silent until now, had managed to slip over to a fire exit at the back of the room. He yanked the door open and escaped into the alley behind the club.
“Shit!” I leaped after him, but by the time I got to the door, he’d shoved something up against it to keep it from opening. I growled in frustration as I rattled the doorknob, then wheeled around. I’d have to run through the club to the main entrance.
I was halfway across the room when the jammed door suddenly burst open behind me to slam against the wall. I turned back to it with a snarl as the runaway was shoved forward into the room. He was followed by all kinds of mocha-skinned sexy—a tall, lean man with muscles bulging in the forearm that had just sent the Spartan sprawling. Stubble covered a strong jaw line and when he spoke, his voice was hot nights, and New Orleans blues.
“Evening, ladies.” Dark eyes glinted. “Y’all lose something?”
About the Author
Author photo by Stefan Davidson
Nicola R. White is no stranger to the fantastic. Although there are no Furies in her family tree (that she knows of), she comes from a small city on the east coast of Canada where ghost stories and superstitions abound. She has worked on movie sets, as a bartender, in a lighthouse, and as a lawyer. Though she’s never been an exotic dancer like her character, Alex Hughes, she does know how to pole dance.
She has always been fascinated by the strange and morbid, and often stays up too late reading books that give her nightmares. She believes truth is stranger than fiction, and just a few of her heroes are Buffy, Dana Scully, and Xena.
Nicola is a member of Romance Writers of America and Romance Writers of Atlantic Canada, and is an active member and supporter of the award-winning Romance Divas website and online forum.
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