Poison and Potions: a Limited Edition Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Collection

by Erin Hayes

  "If it were me," she whispered. "I'd just stick a pin in him. Or a reasonable facsimile." She pulled the spider costume from my grasp and tucked it under the counter. "Failing that, well... You know what they say. If a man hurts you, fuck his best friend."

  I spread my arms out. "Seriously? Would you fuck this mess?"

  She looked me up and down. "No. But then I like my lovers a little less man drunk."

  In the end, she suited me up with something from her own closet, a narrow-stepped level above the shop in an apartment that smelled of spices and a strange sort of smoky fragrance that could have come from candles, but didn't smell like any store-bought fragrance I'd ever encountered.

  I tried to ignore the pile of desiccated chicken feet lying out in the open in a basket on her coffee table. I tried to tell myself that the various candles amid the half-dozen – were they real – chicken, beast, and human skulls were really just there as decoration. Stick a pin in him, she'd said, and it was so close to Halloween that I was willing to believe that anything was possible. Even a real, live voodoo priestess working as a lowly clerk in a costume store.

  I kept my eye cautiously on her face as she wrapped a bright yellow bandanna around my head and pushed a circle of beads onto my wrist. Maybe if I didn't look around, she wouldn't rethink her impulsive kindness. She pressed a lightweight ball of material into my hands.

  "The sarong is easy to tie," she said. "Go heavy on the eye makeup, and wear nothing underneath."

  "What man can resist a sexy priestess, right?" It wasn't a test, not really. But even I heard the question in the statement.

  "What woman, for that matter?" She grinned, ignoring the undercurrent of suspicion. "The beads are real," she said. "So make sure you get them back to me. Toute suite."

  I looked down at my wrist. Beautifully cream-colored ivory. Elephant tusk? I wondered. Even as I fingered one of them, I realized the beads were too brittle to be real ivory: elephant, walrus, or otherwise.

  She quirked a black brow, but said nothing as I lifted my gaze to hers. I didn't need to ask to know that meant real authentic bone. I just hoped it wasn't human.

  I started to stammer out some sort of thank you that sounded oddly like I needed to get the hell out of there and she took to laughing and slapping her jean clad thighs.

  "I wish you could see your face," she said. "Just because I have Haitian blood you're that willing to believe I have some sort of zombie juju power." She pushed on my shoulder. "You spindly spoiled bitches. Gets me every time."

  I let her push me to the door and found my way down the stairs to her shop. She called out to me as I got to the bottom.

  "Flip the sign before you leave," she said. "Door'll lock behind you."

  I nodded stupidly. "I'll get this back to you tomorrow by noon."

  She put her hands on those voluptuous hips. "Give it till at least apres midi. Just in case you wake up in hottie's bed. But mind you, don' miss the deadline. Otherwise, dose bones der will bind you to Bacalou." She snorted derisively and waved me away.

  I wasted no time flipping the sign and pulling the door closed. I leaned back against the outside of the shop for a moment, willing my heart to stop beating as though it were about to hammer out of my chest. Just Halloween, I told myself. Get a grip.

  By the time Sam picked me up at nine, I was suitably arrayed in what I thought was pretty authentic-looking voodoo priestess attire. I'd teased my hair into a tall pile and clipped it in places odd enough that it looked like I'd been whirling in a frenzied trance. The yellow bandanna traced the outline of my hairline and the milky whiteness of my complexion, wan from all of the sobbing, actually worked in my favor, with all the black kohl around my eyes and all. I looked reverently terrifying, but also damned fucking smoking.

  Sam the hottie would be under my spell by midnight. Surely, my self-esteem was just a hop, skip and jump past that.

  "You look different," he said as I slipped into the passenger side of his car.

  I let a fair bit of thigh peek out from beneath the sarong. "Isn't that what Halloween is for?"

  He looked preoccupied as the overhead light died to black.

  I couldn't help putting a trimmed nail to the corner of my mouth and chewing nervously. "Do you like it?"

  "Yeah, sure," he said and turned away. The car roared to life.

  The sudden silence started to fray my confidence. "If you don't like it, I can go back and change." Change. Really. And into what? But I had to say something, even if it meant that I was going to ramble on like some sort of possessed idiot. Saying things like: I'll just go put a sheet over my head, go as a ghost, or we can stop at the Walmart and I can grab a kid's mask.

  He chuckled. "No," he said, patting me on the knee finally. "I think it works."

  "It better," I said. "You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to get it."

  His hand slipped up beneath the sarong to cup my inner thigh. Part of me tried to insist that the smart thing to do would be to move into his hand, but the other part: the part that had been flogged quite badly by a litany confession of betrayal just days before wouldn't let me. I felt my muscles tense.

  He responded by stroking his hand back down toward my knee and squeezing. "You're modest," he said. "I like that."

  "Not exactly modest. More like gun shy."

  I caught him stealing a glance sideways at me. "Unlucky in love," I said by way of explanation.

  "I guessed that."

  "You did?"

  "I did. Either a bad breakup or someone had just died. You looked like you'd been crying for days."

  I sighed theatrically. "Well, you guessed right. I must have looked pretty pathetic."

  "It's what attracted me to you, actually."

  "You have some sadistic streak or something?" My nerves hummed, making my skin electric with anxiety.

  "Or something." He flashed a grin at me. Hot. Damned hot. I smothered the nerves with a good dose of lustful thoughts that started with his sandy blond head between my legs and ended with several satisfying fingers plunging deep inside me. I was already mid-fantasized orgasm when I realized he was speaking to me.

  "What was that?"

  "We're here," he said.

  I peered out the windshield and then through my window. If we were indeed here, here was someplace I'd never dreamed I'd ever be going to.

  "It's huge."

  He pushed his door open. "Mistress of the obvious," he said and my brows scuttled down in reflex, feeling stupid. He reached in across his seat to touch my arm. "I was teasing," he said. "It is huge. The guy is some bigwig who only comes to the city once a year."

  "Then what does he need such a big house for?" I used the term house pretty loosely, because what was in front of me, lording over the expanse of a parking area big enough to be a football field, with several boxwood hedges and exotic plants, was anything but a house.

  "I heard that when he comes, he has big shindigs." He ran his hand behind my neck before easing back at his side and closing the door.

  I pushed out my own side, taking his arm when the valet took the keys. "So are you some bigwig too?"

  He laughed, showing me a healthy set of teeth but for the one crooked canine. "Hell, no. I'm some other bigwig's lackey. Business, you see."

  "Lucky you to be doing this kind of business."

  He shrugged. "It has its perks." He reached behind me and ran the flat of his hand almost imperceptibly over the round of my ass. I snuggled in closer to his side, thinking he'd surely realized that the only thing between his flesh and mine was a thin piece of rayon.

  "What do you say, Jade, shall we go in?"

  Chapter Two

  WIDE AWAKE AND DREAMING

  If the outside made me goggle, the inside made me want to have three sets of eyes. I couldn't see enough. The costumes on the guests were elaborate enough, with Marie Antoinettes and Cleopatras and any number of pirates, serving wenches, Highlanders, and Angels. And vampires, of course. What was a Halloween
party without the token vampires? But whoever owned the place had paid out a princely sum for decorators to come in and dress the place. It looked like some sort of Gothic medieval castle complete with candle sconces and oil lamps and linen fold paneling. I counted three fireplaces alone on the bottom floor and the stairs told me that there were at least two more floors.

  The host, if I was right, was a tall, broad-shouldered Viking next to the biggest of the fireplaces. Everyone who came within reach of him deferred to his attentions, introducing themselves briefly, being scanned by that stare, moving on when approved.

  "You figured it out, I see." Sam touched my elbow and nodded toward the Viking. "Said bigwig."

  With the excuse to look again, I let my gaze travel back to the Norseman, planning full well to roam the breadth of him with my eyes, taking in the shoulder length blond locks, the scruff of beard beneath eyes so cobalt they reminded me, even from this distance, of a long ribbon of pre-dawn sky. I felt almost guilty gulping the image of him down as though it was a feast for a starving appetite, but I reminded myself that I was starving. My eyes were traveling back up his chest and to his face when he caught my eye.

  I immediately had visions of him slashing and hacking his way through a Nordic village, plundering and raping as he went. Something inside my chest quivered at the thought of coming up at the end of his sword, his piercing gaze settling on mine as he decided what to do with me. I had to shake off the ripple of pleasure that tremored through me in that instant. He smiled with the left corner of his mouth and for a moment, I felt as though the image was more of a memory, rather than fantasy, even the sounds of battle echoed somewhere behind my ears. He raised his drink at me and swallowed down several gulps, the muscles in his throat working slowly and purposefully, as though he were demonstrating exactly how much control he had over his body.

  Even as I was trying to tear my attention away, I felt Sam's arm wrap around my waist and pull me closer. I swayed against him, making my neck muscles turn in his direction. It took a while for my eyes to follow the same command, and they only did so because a petite redhead had commanded the Viking's attention.

  "What did you say?" I asked Sam.

  "I said, would you like a drink?"

  I nodded as though I'd forgotten how to speak. He squeezed me closer and grinned, but although it stretched widely across his cherubic cheeks, I couldn't see any humor in the smile. It was a flash of muscle movement across his face that spoke to nothing more than a sort of social courtesy.

  "You look as though you've seen a ghost," he said.

  "Oh, is that it?" I couldn't stop my fingers from trailing to my throat. The bones on my wrist clattered, making me feel even more unsettled. I couldn't decide if it was the Viking or the deadpan expression behind the eyes of my date that was sending the chills down my spine; all I knew was I could feel the goose bumps rising against the material of the sarong. I needed a drink. Most definitely. The upset of being dumped had mangled my ability to read signals, and I couldn't be sure if I was interpreting any of them correctly or even if there were signals there for me to read at all.

  I imagined the place had a bar, but through the throngs of crowds, I couldn't see enough of the walls to see if there was one set up. I decided it wasn't important when I noticed a tuxedoed gentleman with fingers splayed across the bottom of champagne laden trays. I gripped Sam by the fingers and pulled him closer to a walking tuxedo. I grabbed for the tray with both hands and passed him both glasses, then reached again for two more.

  "Here's to finding oblivion in a mansion where the only thing that sucks are the cheesy Draculas." I upended one glass, then the other without waiting for him to partner me. After four days of crying, getting drunk seemed just about right.

  I felt his eye on me as I drained the second glass. "What? Aren't you drinking?" I realized he still gripped the stems of his glasses. I swallowed convulsively, nervously, realizing that this wasn't some college keg party. I'd probably embarrassed him. I twirled in place, trying to find some place to divest myself of the two glasses. "It's okay," I blurted. "I'll just..."

  I felt his hand on my arm and the current of his touch set my feet into paralyzed shock. At least I could read that signal correctly.

  "Don't worry about it," he whispered. He stepped closer, leaning in so that his face buried itself in my neck, his lips against my ear. "You make me fucking hard when you look all vulnerable like that." He eased in closer, pressing his hips against mine. Just feeling that demand made my knees go to water. Or was that the remnants of the anxiety? Might even be the flash of images from the Viking still coursing through my synapses. Maybe it was all of that. Maybe it was knowing I was about to do something so completely out of character, that my brain had decided to send my body warning signals and my muscles were mistaking them for fight or flight. I wondered briefly which one would win.

  "Second-floor," he rasped. "There's a balcony that looks out onto the garden."

  I didn't dare turn to look into his face. I wanted so badly to be wanted, to fling my self-consciousness into some early grave that I was afraid to see the results of those desires mirrored on his expression. And if I recognized so much as a hair of that want, I knew I wouldn't be able to keep from giving in. I could only nod against his shoulder. The next thing I knew, a white-gloved hand divested me of my burden, and Sam was pressing his wine glasses into my hands.

  "Go on," he urged. "I'm driving."

  "Right," was all I could get out, and even that had to push its way past a fairly thick clot of sudden lust that made me dizzy. Like the first two glasses, I downed these, but I did so as surreptitiously as I could. I already felt the tingle of inebriation dancing beautifully with the currents of desire. It was going to be okay. Women everywhere did this sort of thing all the time. Just this once, one of those women could be me.

  I thought I felt people watching us as we threaded our way through the crowds. I fancied the blond Viking couldn't take his eyes from my bared shoulders. The delicious thought of his eyes roaming my body as I let Sam plunge into me sped my heart rate. He'd be occupied with the redhead, of course, but a gal can dream. In fact, I felt pretty damned magnificent as I threaded my way through the crowds behind Sam. Jade was getting her juju back. That was what. To hell with old what's his name. He didn't deserve one more tear. Let people stare. Let them all stare.

  At least one rather seedy looking Dracula reached out for me as I passed. I gave him an icy look and tried to shrug him off. He kept his grip on my arm for several long seconds, meeting my glare with an almost detached eye. He wavered in front of me as though he were standing on the other side of a shower door. I stumbled, cursing the vanity that made me wear two-inch heels to a standup party.

  I took a deep breath and forced myself to turn to watch Sam's broad back ripple beneath his suit jacket as he strode ahead of me. For the first time, I wondered why he'd chosen to wear a cheesy cloak over his Wall Street executive costume. Then I realized I truly didn't care what he had on. Tonight was about letting my guard down, about filling the empty space that my cheating fiancé had bored into me. It wasn't just about payback; it was about finding my confidence again.

  The second floor room turned out to be the master bedroom suite, obvious from the California King-sized bed. But the opulence of the room, the sheer size of it struck me dumb as he led me straight across to the balcony.

  "How did you know this place would be empty?" I couldn't help peeking over my shoulder, worrying that someone would come in. Then I realized, who was I kidding? I knew exactly what we were going to do, and I knew a small thing like being caught would not deter me. Hell, it might even add to the flavor. I felt a pang of uncharacteristic naughtiness streak up my throat. At least I told myself it was anticipation; I would never admit it might be intuition trying to ruin my fun.

  The palm of Sam's hand slipped up the back of my neck before we even made it to the French doors that led onto the broad balcony. He pulled me toward him in a kiss that devou
red the last of my reticence. I found myself pressing back against him, pushing him outside so that I could close the door behind me. If I paused to take a breath, I wasn't aware of it: my lungs were burning with the need to breathe. I broke away only long enough to pull in a sweet draft of honeysuckled air, tasting the last bit of pollen from late blooming flowers.

  "I'm so sorry," he murmured against my neck, his hands cupping my backside, scooping me up onto his hips. "So sorry."

  I found myself straddling him for the brief moment it took for him to find the railing. I let my head drop back, savoring the feel of his lips against my throat, the liquid fire of the alcohol blazing through my veins. Maybe at some point I would open my eyes, when I didn't feel so damned guilty about letting go, but for now, with them squeezed shut, I could let this fantasy run its full course, let it take me.

  "It's okay," I told him. "I want this too. You're not going too fast."

  I let my body mold to his. I waited for the moment when his hand would slip beneath my sarong and find me wet. I braced myself against the railing, my hands on either side of me, straining everything else toward him. His breath moved in hot drafts against my chest, his fingers slipping beneath the bodice and tugging my breasts free of the sarong. My tongue roamed my bottom lip as his circled my nipple; I could taste his pleasure, the electricity of it was snaking its way up my throat and tightening my jaw.

  "Fuck," I said without meaning to say anything at all. I couldn't do more than sag against him, grateful that the railing was behind me to keep me from collapsing completely from the pleasure of letting go. Whether it was the bolts of alcohol in such fast succession or the feel of his teeth making my nipples rise and my skin prickle into goose bumps, all I knew was I was fast approaching the point where my dignity would come second to getting good and fucked in a stranger's bedroom balcony. The back of my neck prickled.