Night Series Collection: Books 1 and 2

by RS Black

  Crawling over to the man who looked like he was on his last breath, I repeated the process. Five minutes later, with arms trembling and curls of frost feathering from between my lips, I clutched my own stomach and what little bit I’d managed to eat was now forcefully coming back up.

  Hands shaking, I stayed on my knees for a while. No one but Billy knew of my second possession. Luc had accused me of being different; little did he know how different I was. In the past I would have been able to ask Grace for guidance on this, or at least trusted her to tell me the truth. But that truth had been razed the second I’d fallen into Hell.

  Luc could barely stomach being around me. His temper flared any time I was near and I knew it was because I was pushing him away, but I just couldn’t ask him about this.

  I had no one to talk to, no one to help me understand this or even help me figure out if I could get rid of Pestilence.

  Lust was just a great big ball of nothing—she no longer really talked to me, and apart from her momentary excitement at seeing Billy, she’d gone dormant again.

  But none of that really mattered right now, because I still had to get back to Tubby. Vision blurry and slightly hazy, I got to my feet, standing still for a second as vertigo held me in a viselike grip. I’d taken most of Pestilence back into me, but the disease still permeated the vomit littering the grass.

  Using my very limited ability to ward, I passed my hand over the puddles and murmured a spell, my hands heating to molten levels as I shrouded the grass and the affected areas in death.

  Now nothing, not a human, not even a bug, would want to cross these dead zones. I’d done what I could for these guys, but just in case any asshole came their way and tried to mug them while they were still out, I placed a protective ward on them too. It wasn’t my best work and would be lucky to last an hour, but I really needed to get back to the market.

  Every step I took was excruciating. Each time I planted my leg, fire bolted up my sides, making me get a hell of a stitch under my ribs. I wrapped my arms around my chest and just focused on getting there.

  It took twice as long to get back as it had to find the couple, but when I finally returned to the marketplace, I immediately noticed the man was gone.

  “What happened?” I asked a stranger who made to move past me.

  She quirked a thin eyebrow in question.

  “The man who was lying there?” I pointed to the puddle of water. “Where’d he go?”

  I only hoped the paramedics hadn’t picked him up already. Just when I thought I’d staved off an apocalypse, things were taking a turn for the worse again.

  She just shook her head and shrugged, pointing to her ear buds before moving on.

  “Nice,” I sneered, hating the digital age all over again. People were slowly devolving into mindless creatures obsessed with self, too busy in their own heads to notice or give a damn about the world around them anymore.

  Anger propelling me, I forgot about the pain. Walking to the counter, I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “What happened to the man?”

  The young girl whom I’d set to guard him looked up at me with a perplexed frown twisting her dark brows. “No man.”

  What. The. Hell?

  I was already irritated, my body was sore in a million different places, some of which I’d never even known could get sore before, and my patience was nothing but a delicate strand at this point. A stiff breeze would make me snap. Gritting my teeth and curling my hands into the countertop, I took a deep, calming breath.

  “I told you to watch him. Where did he go?”

  She just shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The old cook looked up then.

  I licked my lips, willing my emotions to get under freaking control. “The man! He was dying. He was lying right there!”

  The old woman gently pulled the girl behind her back. She hissed; she didn’t say anything, just gave me a cold, furious look, and I figured the girl had to be either her granddaughter or daughter.

  Realizing I was making a spectacle of myself, I dropped my head to my chest, intending to take some calming breaths, when I noticed the meat stain on my shirt.

  I hadn’t imagined him. I wasn’t going crazy. I wasn’t. I couldn’t be.

  Narrowing my eyes, I held up my hand and nodded. “Fine, I’ll go, but I just have one question for you. Did you see me order food earlier?”

  The old woman didn’t answer, but the obviously frightened girl shook her head vehemently.

  Luc has a friggin’ lie detector for a nose; he can literally smell fact from fiction. But I’m not so bad at reading body language, and the absolute terror in her eyes told me she at least believed what she was saying.

  I hadn’t imagined those tacos, hadn’t imagined the man.

  Something had happened while I’d been with the couple, because I had a huge grease stain on my shirt. The proof was in the pudding. I wasn’t nuts.

  So if I wasn’t mad, then what was happening?

  That was a question I had absolutely no answer for. I spent the next two hours searching the streets, not only for Tubby, but for any other bodies that might have touched him. I went to the local clinic to see if he’d been taken there; I did everything I could possibly think to do to make sure sickness wouldn’t soon spread through the town.

  As absolutely, wildly impossible as it was to believe, the man was gone. If someone had picked him up, if someone had touched him, he would have left a trail of bodies in his wake. So either he’d gotten up and walked off, which I highly doubted, or I was starting to lose my mind.

  At this point, anything was possible.

  Chapter 4

  Back at the carnival, I spied Luc coming out of the sex tent. The red glow of Bubba’s half-smoked cigarette added deep shadow to the hollows of his sexy-as-sin face, making him appear more the devil than ever.

  Both boys have had their fix for the night. Luc doesn’t notice me, and I contemplate whether to make my presence known or not. Judging from the heated whispering being exchanged, they wouldn’t have noticed me if I’d streaked past with a chained monkey on my back while singing “YMCA.”

  Thanks to my sharp demon senses, I can see the vein throbbing in the side of Luc’s neck, even from half a football field away.

  He’s pissed, that’s obvious. All of us at the carnival have experienced our boss’s brand of tough love. Growls and pissing and moaning, ranting that can last for days because maybe one of us tagged someone we shouldn’t have, or one of the other ten lust-possessed Nephilim had slept with his piece of tail for the night.

  For such a man-whore, Luc was crazy picky about who he’d take to bed. But Bubba’s demon didn’t just admire flesh the way Luc and I did—let’s just say the things he did made a serial killer look tame by comparison.

  Apart from his… taste for mortal flesh (ugh, did your stomach just turn? ’Cause mine totally did. I love Bubba, but he sorta freaks me out. Just sayin’…). He’s a fairly easygoing guy, but from the way his face is screwed up and the how he’s holding that cancer stick—practically fisting it in a white-knuckled grip—I know this isn’t just some run-of-the-mill proverbial hand-slap.

  There are two sides to Luc; most people only get to see his one face. But I’ve seen them both and I know that when Luc is really pissed, he doesn’t erupt, he goes frostbitten. His gesticulating hands and lip snarl lets me know he’s not at critical mass… yet.

  Which meant not my problem; of course, it really shouldn’t be my problem. Let’s just say that things between Luc and me can sometimes get very complicated. I was exhausted, I smelled, and all I wanted was to get this night off me. Realizing I really didn’t need to be subtle, I walked toward my trailer, in no mood to deal with Luc, this carnival, or anything else.

  I wasn’t sure if I was in shock, or what was going on with me, but I felt a little light-headed at the thought that Billy was actually alive. I’d seen him die. Seen him shatter. But then I saw that man at the
marketplace too, I know he was there. I still smelled the stench of his blood all over me.

  I needed a shower, then I needed to read that book. I obviously missed something, and if it took me all night, I was going to figure out what it was.

  But no sooner had I determined that then Luc was knocking on my door. Actually, he wasn’t knocking, he was pounding incessantly. “Dora!”

  I think Jane Austen got it all wrong—it wasn’t a universal truth that a wealthy man was in want of a wife; no, the real truth was the more you resisted drama, the deeper it sucked you in. “Go away.”

  Maybe talking was the wrong idea; the scent of sulfur was thick seconds before his hands clamped onto my shoulders, twirling me about so fast that I actually experienced a flash of wooziness.

  Shoving his hands off me, I jumped back. “Don’t ever touch me like that again.”

  His eyes widened a fraction of an inch before the cold, hard mask was once again on his face. “What did you find out?”

  “Not a whole lot.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose as exhaustion rushed through the length of my body. “Grace gave me my marching orders, go get zombies. Num, num. But that’s not really what you came here to ask me, is it?”

  “There is a child missing.”

  “And since when did children become important to you?” I crossed my arms.

  That wasn’t fair of me and I knew it the second the words left my mouth. How could I explain to him what was inside me now, lived and breathed in me, this malevolent force that turned my days hellish and my evenings into nightmares? I was making a mess of everything, and I knew it, but I didn’t know how to stop this. I was a train wreck waiting to happen. There went the frost, the glassy stare in his eyes. I’d pushed him way too far, beyond his limits. It was easy to forget sometimes that Luc had a heart too. So often, he went out of his way not to show it, but I knew Luc. He and I didn’t just share bodies occasionally, once upon a time, a long time ago, I’d loved him. But somewhere along the way that love had shattered, maybe when he stabbed me, but I don’t even think it’s that, we were just growing apart. We were so different, and maybe he didn’t realize it yet. They say women mature faster, maybe it’s true. I don’t think he’s as ready to let go of us as I am.

  “What the hell does that mean?” he snarled.

  Hating myself, wanting to reassure him but too much of a wimp to do it, I just shook my head and pretended he hadn’t asked a question that demanded an answer, that this conversation wasn’t long overdue, and that I didn’t need to know why he’d killed all those children before I could look at him without contempt. But now so wasn’t the time to open that can of worms.

  “Who reported the child missing?”

  It wasn’t often that Luc would meet my gaze, because to do it while Lust was riding him meant I’d physically change to become his ideal of beauty, but I hated that he’d never wanted me for what I actually was but rather for something I wasn’t. Out of respect for me, he’d adopted a style of looking from the corner of his eye that would give us eye contact without forcing a change. But he wouldn’t even do that now.

  His eyes dropped to the ground, and he was studying my carpet as if it would reveal the mysteries of the universe.

  Why hadn’t I noticed how nice he looked tonight? His hair was washed, slicked back. And it was just long enough to be pulled back into a ponytail of sorts. With his slashing cheekbones and his square-cut jaw, Luc was the epitome of masculinity. Normally he dressed like he was going off to a board meeting, but tonight he was in jeans and a button-down shirt, and I won’t deny that it made my heart throb. Sometimes I missed what we should have been.

  “The mother,” he finally muttered. “She’s at the lost-and-found tent. There is no one else that I trust to go and speak with her.” He turned to go.

  I grabbed his wrist. “Luc?” I don’t know what I meant to say after that. I knew I was messing up, and it hurt me, more than he probably would ever imagine. Letting go of us, of this, it was killing me. But I couldn’t just pretend that I wasn’t disappointed in him. I couldn’t help what I was feeling, like he was partly to blame him for everything, and it was so irrational. And I was such a jerk. “Please?”

  Powerful fingers clamped onto the side of my neck. “Screw you.”

  Then he was gone, and all I could do was laugh, because if I didn’t laugh I would cry. And crying hurt way too much.

  Chapter 5

  Rather than leave with Luc, I took a ten-minute break to shower and regroup. My life was quickly going to hell in a handbasket, but I didn’t have the luxury of time to lament that fact.

  The more Luc hurt, the more nasty he got. Luc didn’t hate me; in fact, my pulling away was probably killing him and the only way to defend himself against it was to act like a prick.

  I got it.

  I didn’t like it.

  But I got it.

  There was no time to eat or read that book that Billy told me to. All I had time for was to freshen up, brush my teeth, and toss on some fresh clothes. A low-slung pair of faded and ripped-at-the-knees jeans and a skull-and-crossbones black tee. I’d burn the other stuff when I got back to my trailer. I’d been vomited on—odds were good that if a mortal touched it, the plague would spread. With a sigh, I closed Kemen’s trailer door and headed to the lost-and-found tent.

  I’d been living mostly in his space since the morning I’d woken up from the coma. The stars winked from between breaks in the cloudy black sky. The breeze was much more balmy than it’d been in South Dakota just a few nights ago, but the air was still rich with the scent of carnival fried foods and sagebrush.

  Flipping aside the flap of the lost-and-found tent, I stepped inside.

  Like a sheep surrounded by wolves, the beautiful brown-skinned woman sat with a handkerchief to her eyes. Vyxen and Kane stood to either side of her. Vyxen—dressed in her customary acid-trip attire—stared at the woman with undisguised lust in her emerald-green eyes. Not for her body, no, Vyxen did not suffer from that demon. Vyxen’s demon wanted. Everything. Anything you possessed. She housed Envy, and right now the woman was in danger just being that close to her.

  Of all of us, Vyxen had the hardest time controlling her urges. I’ve asked Luc to get rid of her many times, but my cries always seem to fall on deaf ears. Kane, on the other hand—another one of us Lust demons—was looking at her with seduction clear in his lavender eyes.

  It always amazed me how mortals could see and not instantly feel the prick of wrong. We didn’t look human. Not really.

  Because no humans looked as flawless, as physically perfect, as we did. Nor did their eyes glow. Several hundred years ago, the glowing eyes meant we’d needed to stay deep in hiding. But now, thanks to the advent of movies and freaky contacts, nobody guessed we weren’t wearing props.

  “Kane, get your ass away from her. Vyxen, you too,” I growled.

  Kane just blew me a kiss and, with a final trail of his fingers along the woman’s upper arm, left the tent. Vyxen, however, never really listened to me. All she did was take a miniscule step back.

  “Pandora.” My name dripped like a silky slur from her tongue. Wrinkling her nose, she adjusted her cat-ears headband. “The woman, Juanita, was it?” She looked at the woman, her eyes a brightly glowing green.

  Juanita nodded. She looked so small, wearing probably her finest dress to come to the carnival. It was well tended, worn in spots and somewhat faded, but with the red mum pinned to her bodice, there was pride in what she wore. Her hair was freshly washed, and though there were wrinkles around her eyes that bespoke a woman who worked hard for what she had, the mere fact that she’d come here with her son let me know she was light. She’d come here to have fun and hang out with her boy.

  It lit a fire in my belly, made the demon inside me go wild. Walking up to them, I gave Vyxen a slight shove back and drilled her with a hard stare. I let my eyes do the talking, telling the hellcat that if she so much as laid a finger on Juanita, I’d gut her.

&nbs
p; Vyxen never backed down. Not with me. Not usually. But tonight, she must have sensed just how close I was to completely losing my shit, because with nostrils flared, she turned on her chunky, five-inch heels and left.

  Kneeling, I grabbed Juanita’s cold hand and made her look me in the eye. “Where is your son?” I asked in Spanish.

  There was only one other Neph still here, Cash. A tall, ginger-headed, golden-eyed pride demon. Dressed in fitted gray trousers and a dove-gray silk shirt, he was striking. And even though Juanita was clearly upset, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from glancing at him.

  But Cash would be no problem to her; all he needed was a good ego stroking to get him off. Which she was giving him plenty of.

  “Dora,” he said in a smooth seductive burr, “I’m going to take a break.”

  He really didn’t need a break. Cash’s Pride could sense the woman’s nervousness regarding his close proximity; he was giving me the space I needed to operate.

  A pride Nephilim is an extremely valuable and rare commodity to have in a Neph family, and one we’d been lucky to nab from my cousin Adam’s sister carnival back in the States.

  Juanita’s lower lip trembled and when she turned back to look at me, there was a helplessness in her eyes I’d grown all too accustomed to seeing lately.

  “I swear to you, we’ll find your boy. But you need to tell me where you saw him last.” I patted her hand.

  “We were grabbing some churros before going to see the acrobat show and I turned around for just a second”—her face scrunched up and her pain was like a fist in my heart—“it happened so fast. I called his name, over and over. Everyone was looking at me, but no one saw him. He was just gone.”

  Now I understood why Luc had been about to rip Bubba a new one. I shuddered, wondering the same thing now—wondering if the boy had been tagged by a glutton demon.