Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Darkness There

  Ravens and jaguars shouldn’t get along. Much less fall in love.

  When raven-shifter Bronwyn Driscoll took a job as a casino security guard in Shreveport, Louisiana, she thought it was step down from her dream job as a member of the Shield—the elite force policing the shifter community.

  Then her boss disappeared.

  Jaguar-shifter and security specialist Tomás Nahual agreed to review security at The Seven Cities of Cibola casino as a one-off—a simple task he could take care alone, without his team. But when the casino owner’s kidnapped on his watch, the job gets much more interesting.

  Teaming up to save Bron’s boss makes sense—as long as they can ignore the simmering heat growing between the two of them.

  Preface

  …Darkness there and nothing more.

  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

  But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token…

  ~ From “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

  Chapter 1

  “There’s darkness in that one.” The woman sitting on a stool in front of a Magic Mermaid slot machine didn’t quite manage to cover her comment, and Bronwyn Driscoll was reminded of how the old crows back home used to murmur as she slid by, doing her best to remain unnoticed.

  This time, she didn’t have to try to hide. Instead, she stopped, turned around, and backtracked through the slots’ flashing lights, coming to stand directly behind the old woman and the friends to whom she’d spoken.

  “You ladies doing okay?” Bron smiled as the one who had spoken glanced up at her nervously.

  “Fine,” the crow shifter muttered.

  “Winning anything tonight?” Bron’s voice was artificially bright, as shiny as the flashing lights atop the rows of machines.

  This time, it was the old lady’s friend who responded. “Oh, a little here and there. You know how it goes.”

  “I certainly do.” She pushed meaning into her tone, trusting that these two old birds would find some menacing way to interpret it.

  It worked, too. The first one began fluttering around, gathering her purse from her lap and pushing the cash-out button to retrieve her printed ticket with her winnings. Her friend joined her quickly.

  “You ladies take care,” Bron called after them as they flitted away, still twitching. “I’ll be watching you.”

  “You mean you’ll be watching over them.” Amusement threaded through the deep voice behind her. She glanced around to find Fred Rufus, her supervisor, standing a few feet away.

  “Sure,” Bron agreed cheerfully, as the two crow shifters scuttled out of the casino and into the hotel. When they were entirely out of sight, she spun to face Fred. “They’ll be back. Crows can’t resist shiny things. Or flashing lights.”

  “Ravens can’t, either, right?”

  “Not most of us, no.” Letting her gaze drift over the casino floor without any particular direction, Bron allowed the sights and sounds to wash over and through her. She sifted through them almost unconsciously, watching for anything to catch her attention. When she first took the position with casino security, she went through training—so she knew the things to watch for, the kinds of tells thieves and cheaters might have. But more than that, she had a talent for noticing the unusual bits, for picking up on those subtle actions that suggested a casino patron was about to do something stupid.

  Fred saw her scanning the crowd, and grinned. “I need you to watch the floor three entrance. I’ve got a VIP coming in tonight, and I’m taking Devon with me for a refresher on procedures.”

  Entrance duty was her least favorite, consisting as it did of checking IDs and giving directions to first-timers. Still, she nodded agreeably. “Sounds good.” She started toward the escalator outside the entrance, then paused and glanced back. “Who’s the bigwig?”

  Fred opened his hands in a low-key shrug. “No idea. Boss tells me I’m on escort duty, then I’m on escort duty.”

  Later, when she remembered that comment, she wished she could go back in time and warn him—or better yet, warn herself: don’t let him go without you.

  Ravens weren’t supposed to live alone.

  Not the ones in the wild, and not their shapeshifting cousins.

  They were supposed to mate for life—or as close to it as their humanity and a shifter tendency to cross-mate would allow.

  They lived with their parents as children. And once they hit adolescence, ravens were supposed to travel in large groups.

  No one in the shifter community liked the teenage raven-gangs, but they liked a lone raven even less.

  So when Bron said she was abnormal, she meant it: a twenty-two-year-old, single raven shifter who lived alone, surrounded by a community that expected paired-off ravens.

  But the only raven shifter she’d ever found interesting had died when she was nineteen.

  After Benjamin was killed—a bystander in some power-grab raid by a group of werewolves—she’d wanted to join the Shifter Shields back home, near Dallas. But the lead enforcer didn’t think birds were good enough to join the force.

  The head of security for The Seven Cities of Cibola in Shreveport, Louisiana, hadn’t felt that way. So instead of becoming a cop, she’d taken a job with security at the only shifter-owned casino between New Orleans and Las Vegas.

  She wanted to ask Fred if he had seen the two crows after she’d scared them off their slot-roosts, but he wasn’t anywhere to be found when she got to work the next day. After about an hour on the floor, she gestured to another security guard to keep an eye on her section while she ducked into the bathroom. She took that opportunity to check the duty roster again, an odd anxiety curling in her stomach.

  Fred was definitely supposed to be at work.

  Tomás Nahual stalked into the Cibola casino, every sense on high alert. He technically wasn’t supposed to be there for another twenty-four hours—but he preferred to get the drop on his clients. Better to come at them when they weren’t expecting him—a tendency that might have been attributable to his nature as a jaguar shifter, but that Tomás preferred to consider good security-business sense.

  After all, showing up unexpectedly what his adversaries would do.

  My imaginary adversaries, that is.

  His job would be much more exciting if his adversaries actually showed up to burgle his clients when Tomás was working. As it was, he simply had to conjure them from his imagination.

  Pulling a $100 bill out of his wallet, Tomás slid into a chair at the nearest Mississippi Stud table. The dealer pulled the bill toward herself, checked its authenticity by marking it with the table’s pen, and began counting out five-dollar chips in stacks of five. Tomás observed her carefully, assessing every move she made, even as he pretended to scan the casino for something more interesting.

  When she had finished stacking the chips in front of her, she called out to the pit boss that she had changed out $100. She glanced over her shoulder, waiting for acknowledgment, then pulled the Lucite handle out of the table and use the slim block to shove the bill down into the well.

  Tomás checked his watch. The entire operation hadn’t taken more than thirty seconds.

  So far, so good.

  He played through several hands, making sure to lose about as much as he won, tipping the dealer a chip every few hands. Not too much, not too little, even as he co
unted the cards in front of him.

  Be absolutely unremarkable.

  That was his goal.

  Not that he always managed it. Not with everyone, anyway. He’d already seen several women checking him out. At least a couple of them carried themselves like shifters, prowling through the three floors of the building.

  Then again, they could simply be predators of the human variety.

  One corner of his mouth tipped up at the thought. One more hand here, and he’d move on to another part of the casino. As he slid a chip into the ante, a frisson of energy shivered up his spine, and without expecting to, Tomás found himself inhaling sharply, drawing air in over the space where the Jacobson’s organ would be if he were in his cat form. Without it, he couldn’t gather as much information. Even as a human, though, his senses were heightened. Whoever had set off his internal alarms was still watching, her scent drifting across him in slight waves, infuriatingly light, frustratingly mixed with the smells of the other casino patrons.

  But definitely female.

  There was something else about her scent—something alluring.

  Tomás forced his shoulders to relax, and he ran his remaining stack of chips through his fingers, picking up the whole pile a few centimeters off the table and dropping the chips one after another back into a neat stack.

  Normal fidgeting. Nothing unusual.

  He felt it when her attention shifted elsewhere. By the time Tomás looked up from the cards, the woman, whoever she was, had moved on.

  He’d have to keep an eye out for her. Not that it would be difficult to track her down again—anyone with that much presence would stand out, no matter where she was.

  Glancing down at the cards in his hand, Tomás folded, despite the pair of Kings he held.

  The first rule of running security checks on places like this: don’t stand out.

  Chapter 2

  Bronwyn scanned the gaming tables, searching the players for the dark-haired shifter she’d noticed earlier. Something about him had pinged her inner alarm, though she couldn’t have articulated what, precisely, had set her off.

  He had moved away from the Mississippi Stud tables, but Bron could almost feel the pull of his presence across the room from where he now sat at a blackjack table. From this distance, she couldn’t tell what kind of shifter he was, but he looked like a predator, his motions managing to be both languorous and precise, even at a gaming table.

  Not a werewolf, though he had some of that same contained energy, a kind of unrealized violence shimmering around him. She couldn’t even tell exactly what he looked like—his shifter aura blurred his human features. Or maybe that was her shifter vision.

  Either way, it bugged her.

  He definitely ruffled her feathers. Bron wanted to flutter around him, maybe peck at those broad shoulders until she got his attention.

  For that matter, running her human fingers across them might not be so bad, either.

  As the thought crossed her mind, the man looked up from the cards in his hand and met her gaze, a frown creasing his forehead and drawing his heavy, black eyebrows downward.

  For an instant, the shifter energy surrounding him dissipated, and she saw him clearly. Bronze skin, bright green eyes gleaming with gold flecks, hair so dark the light glinted off the black. Sculpted features—his thin lips looked as if they had been drawn on his face in a precise hand, with an extremely sharp pencil. The only thing that kept his appearance from being totally patrician was his slightly crooked nose, which had obviously been broken more than once, and hadn’t healed quite cleanly.

  That slight irregularity also made him look approachable, and took him from “devilishly handsome” to “absolutely devastating.”

  Even as Bron realized this, a grin suddenly dissolved the man’s scowl, and his gold-green eyes sparkled at her. Uncertain what she might have done to spark the change in attitude, Bron frowned.

  I need to figure out who he is.

  Better yet, she needed to find a way to avoid catching the attention of the casino patrons. She wasn’t supposed to fraternize with the guests. Unlike the dealers, her job as a security guard wasn’t necessarily to make the gamblers feel more comfortable. Granted, she wasn’t supposed to make them feel uncomfortable—she shouldn’t have sent the old crows scrambling the day before, for example—but it was fine if they eyed her little warily.

  They definitely weren’t supposed to watch her with ravishing smiles.

  Grimacing, Bron finally tore her gaze away from the beautiful stranger and began threading her way through the slot machines. She might be assigned to this floor, but that didn’t mean she had to stay where he could see her.

  I am not supposed to be noticed in this job.

  Invisible. That was the goal.

  Maybe if she disappeared long enough, he’d forget about her.

  Unfortunately, she was absolutely certain she wasn’t going to forget about him. Whoever he might be.

  A bird.

  The casino was employing some kind of a bird shifter as a security guard.

  It was all Tomás could do to keep from laughing aloud. Of course he had been drawn to her. His inner cat must have recognized her.

  As potential dinner, anyway.

  If the head of security had any sense at all, she was a bird of prey—a hawk or a falcon, or even an owl.

  Now that he’d solved that mystery, he could move on to actually analyzing the casino’s security.

  So long as the pretty little bird’s scent didn’t get his cat stirred up again.

  As she pushed the elevator call button, Bron tilted her chin to greet the armed police officers leaning on the gold-toned railing delineating a small waiting area in front of the elevators in the lobby. Usually, Vance patrolled the guest floors in the first half of the shift, but they had traded off tonight. She didn’t want to admit it even to herself, and she would certainly never say it out loud, but Bron was actually pleased to be able to avoid the unsettling cat shifter prowling the casino.

  The uniformed cops nodded in return, but as usual, they didn’t go out of their way to try to build any sort of camaraderie with the casino’s unarmed security guards. It was one more irritation Bron was keeping close to the vest.

  Stepping into the elevator, she slid her access card into the reader and waited for the light to flash green before pushing the button for the top floor. As the doors closed, she made eye contact with the cop facing her, and allowed her nose and mouth to blur together into a raven’s beak in the last millisecond before he could no longer see her, then pulled out of the shift entirely.

  If she laughed all the way up, it was because he deserved a little bit of a freak-out when he saw her, just for his lack of respect. And anyway, his double take at her face—well, it was fricking hysterical.

  Still, she had to make sure there weren’t any further repercussions. The company’s walkie-talkies were supposed to work in the elevators as well as they did in the rest of the hotel, but everyone knew that wasn’t entirely true. Bron waited until she had reached the top floor, but she stayed in the elevator lobby to call down to the camera room. Penthouse guests liked being disturbed even less than other casino patrons.

  “Driscoll on penthouse to surveillance. Turn code. I need you to run back the tape on elevator four. Loop it about thirty-five seconds.”

  That was probably the biggest benefit to working in a shifter-owned casino—everyone on the security team’s surveillance duty was also a shifter, and knew when and how to cover up evidence of unauthorized shifting.

  “Copy that, Driscoll. Watch the turns. Surveillance out.”

  Watch the turns—code for “don’t shift in front of outsiders.”

  Can’t have the humans figuring out who we really are. God forbid they have to deal with the reality of predators more dangerous than they are. She rolled her eyes as the thought ran through her mind, even as she acknowledged that it was better to keep the shifters’ existence secret.

  After all,
there are many more of them than there are of us.

  There had been a time in their history when the shifters had considered coming out to humans—back when the snake shifters, the lamias, had still been around. Lamias had wanted to take over the whole world, shifter and human. It was why they’d been wiped out, back before Bron had even been born. The lamias had become too dangerous, too powerful, and the shifter community had come together to destroy them.

  Now, the shifter community agreed that it was best to keep humanity in the dark about the creatures sharing their world.

  Tomás leaned back in the tall chair at the blackjack table. The crowd on the main floor of the casino was beginning to pick up, grouping around gaming tables in the pit, and filling up the seats at the slot machines that created tiny, maze-like corridors around the edges of the room.

  Watching the dealer flip cards, he folded and pushed a couple of chips toward the woman running the table.

  He heard his mentor Carlos’s voice in his mind: Always better to leave a tip.

  Despite the larger crowd, he was beginning to think that he had shown up about twenty-four hours too early. Usually, the extra time gave him a chance to scope out a casino’s security set-up, try a couple of clothing changes to try to throw off their security teams, and check out a couple of shift changes and money drops.

  His inner cat usually helped with this pre-appointment security check. Unlike his competition—and generally unlike his clients—Tomás’s heightened senses of hearing and smell often tipped him off to problems long before humans were likely to notice them. He was beginning to get a reputation for an almost preternatural ability to track down flaws and holes in a casino’s security net.