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

by Erin Hayes

  Zoey turned to face their not-so-generous hostess and felt a fresh wave of nausea at the sight of her naked body—save for the few strips of costume leather weaving around her breasts and coiling around her thighs—all but dropped against Isaac. The therion’s left breast rolled around his shoulder and plopped against the bare flesh of his upper arm as the left vanished behind him, offering only a mashed orb of flesh creeping upward against the force of being wedged between its owner and Isaac’s back. Judging from the startled flash that tore like a lightning bolt across his aura, Zoey guessed he knew exactly what he was feeling without having the benefit of seeing it. She was distantly aware of the glass mug in her hand beginning to shriek in protest as her grip tightened, but it was such a distant concern she barely heard it for what it was.

  “After all this time and you’re still hurting my feelings,” Delilah prattled on, turning her pouting lips to Isaac as she aimed her eyes and the victorious leer contained within them towards Zoey. Then, before either of the two could interject, she turned her full attention on Trey, still showing no sign of embarrassment or restraint at waving her nakedness about at anybody who’d care to look. “And you? I hope you’re doing everything you can to show our… hmm, guest”—she flicked a condescending nod in Zoey’s direction—“how we do things around here.”

  Zoey was prepared to say something about what was being shown to her when Isaac cut in:

  “He’s doing a great job, actually,” he forced a smile and tried, with no success, to shrug Delilah’s heaving breasts off of him. Hiding the irritation that his aura radiated, he raised his drink and made a show of taking a sip. “Zoey just made me the best Long Island tea I’ve ever had. Trey’s clearly taught her well in such a short time. A great teacher and… what was it again? An aspiring veterinarian?” He tried once again to pull away from Delilah and failed once again. “A model employee with nobility to boot!”

  Trey smiled, his face lighting up at Isaac’s praise and Delilah grinned, tightening her hold.

  “Yes, everyone’s quite proud of our little prodigy,” she mewled, resting her chin on Isaac’s shoulder and letting her eyes follow an invisible trail on the side of his neck with hungry intent. “It’s something we value in this pack: freedom and diversity… and forgiveness.” She glanced at Zoey and curled her lip before adding, “We know that it’s simple to make mistakes, and we like to help those in our ranks rise above such things.”

  As if to emphasize how accepting the pack could be, Delilah finished her speech by raising her left leg and hooking it over Isaac’s own, pressing her naked pelvis against his hip.

  This time the glass in Zoey’s hand didn’t just whimper under the pressure…

  Zoey worked to keep her pained whimpers stifled amidst the shriek of broken glass and the series of chimes against the floor, but the sight of several of the larger shards embedded in her palm drew out more volume than she’d hoped for.

  “Zoey!” Isaac was over the bar in an instant, nearly throwing Delilah and her nakedness back into the crowd as he did. Though it was a distant thought—and one she felt instantly guilty for having—Zoey couldn’t help but wonder how the buxom, nude therion would fair against the drunken, horny horde if she’d been unable to catch herself in time.

  Knowing her luck, however, the crowd would most likely pull Delilah to her feet, thank her for such a tasteful and in no way lewd stage production, and then turn on Zoey for trying to incite a riot against such a lovely creature while pushing Isaac into her waiting arms.

  All pessimistic fantasies aside, though, Isaac was by her side and helping to nurse her wounds before Delilah had even regained her composure.

  Had it not been for the pain, she might have even returned one of the therion’s condescending glares.

  “I…I’m sorry,” Zoey whimpered, feeling the emotions flooding her at once. “I saw her touching you like that and I…”

  “I know, babes,” Isaac said in a soothing voice as he continued to pluck the slivers of glass from her palm. “You didn’t do anything wrong. She’s just being a tramp,” he glanced over his shoulder in her direction as he muttered the last part, then, raising his voice, called out, “Trey! Get me a clean washcloth and some alcohol!”

  “Nothing top-shelf!” Delilah barked, suddenly assuming the role of the club’s owner.

  Isaac glared back at her and stabbed an accusing finger back towards the crowd. “Tell it to the hybrid that just made off with a bottle of Château d’Asshole. And, while you’re at it, stay over there! There’s no use wagging all that over here when there’s drunken slobs willing to throw crumpled dollars at it!” Then, without waiting for a response, he scooped up Zoey and once again cleared the bar, landing directly in front of her and then shouldering his way past.

  As she was carried out, Zoey noticed Delilah’s cold stare following after them. Biting her lip, no longer feeling any sense of victory and, instead, feeling weaker and weaker with every step that distanced her from the therion, she pressed her face against his chest. Then the tears came. Though she wasn’t sure how long she’d been crying, it had been enough for Isaac to get back to the apartments and return to their room. She was distantly aware that they’d arrived when the air changed around her—the musky smell of the apartments’ interior replacing the city’s oily stink—and she felt Isaac tighten his hold on her as he hurried past the burning gazes of the therions who peeked out at their arrival. Only after the door had been slammed shut and the locks put into place did Isaac release his grip on her, setting her into the bed and beginning to trade out the blood-soaked bar rag with a washcloth from the bathroom.

  “Zoey… you can’t do this to yourself!” he scolded as he finished cleaning the wounds. “I know what this is about, and you’ve gotta stop letting your insecurities get the better of you!”

  “I… I know,” she whimpered, looking down at her hand.

  “I mean it,” he whimpered, pressing his lips to the top of her head. “I understand, I really do. Delilah likes to consider herself modernized, but she’s no less a predator than any of us living in the forest. When she sees something she wants, she takes it; if she’s gotta tear somebody down to steal it, she will. She sees sex as a weapon, no different from the teeth and claws of the so-called ‘savages.’ But where teeth and claws can tear the flesh of any they’re aimed at, her assets only work if the target wants her!” He looked into her eyes with a confusing mixture of anger and adoration, “You need to stop worrying about where my loyalty lies and bottling up these emotions. I’m here for you, I won’t go anywhere.”

  Two Brothers, One Bottle

  Ezra and Jerrick had (finally) arrived at their destination.

  Or, more specifically, the first of several destinations.

  The city—a seedy and sickeningly vast stretch of over-lit, overdeveloped, and overpriced land—was their first target. Within it, the two were quickly surrounded and dangerously close to being assimilated by the absurdity of it all; every square meter seeming to represent a morbid dedication to mindless, consumer-driven masses eager to carry on about their miniscule troubles while carrying out a mundane proletariat existence. The humans that still wandered about like brain damaged cattle at that time of night reeked of Americana and the non-humans that posed as the former reeked of betrayal. Even without their sensitive noses and heightened awareness of such filth it would have been clear to the brothers that this entire place needed to be burned beyond its very foundation. When the last standing testament to this city, a city that therions—their own kin!—had turned into their own den of human-sympathizing, neon advertised heresy, was left as nothing more than ash they’d be able to cross off the first marker on American soil. It would be the perfect beginning to a perfect reckoning! The mutual thought between the brothers drew out a twin set of grins as they recognized the start of something great; the start to something they’d had to delay for far, far too long already.

  A new opportunity that had been handed to them, and to say
they were eager to accept it would have done a great disservice to the truth. They’d been eager centuries ago

  Now…

  Now they were famished for it!

  Horny for it!

  Hell, they were rabid for it!

  If there was another as aware of how disgusting the notion of human-mythos relations were—how wrong any sort of intermingling between the sheep and the wolves that hid among them—then they’d yet to catch hide or hair of them. And, honestly, neither of them thought it could be possible.

  Not after what they’d been through…

  And until the day came that they did meet another who thought as they thought, who raged as they raged, they only had each other. Each other, the scars that ran so much deeper than the flesh, and a mission that God, Himself, could not sway them from. Fortunately, though he may not have shared their loathing or their commitment, they did have the one they called “Messiah.” God may not be able deter the brothers, but, fortunately, they had the next best thing to a god giving them the opportunity they’d been waiting for. Several months earlier, while the two of them slept atop a heap of dead whores and orphans, Messiah had come to them in their dreams and outlined the new plan for their return. After they’d awakened, the two were quick to conclude that the shared dream had been no simple coincidence. That, in fact, their prayers had been answered. With Messiah an ever constant compass in their minds, binding them not only to him but to each other as well, they set their sights for America and, there, the worst offenders that the degenerate nation had to offer.

  It seemed the whole damned world of mythos had gone mad with the incessant urge to intermingle with the human element, and it was this madness that they intended to stamp out.

  And it was exactly this sort of madness that had been carried out before their very eyes only a short time earlier!

  Their worst suspicions had been confirmed as they’d stood, dumbstruck, just past the club’s entrance. Within their connected minds, they had shared a moment of elated excitement and pride as they’d snuck past during a clumsy exchange between two bouncers at the door—one seeming too eager to replace the other’s shift while the first demanded to know exactly why his shift was being cut short in the first place; though neither of the brothers cared enough to eavesdrop, the response “… Delilah said…” seemed enough to satisfy the argument, though the first looked far from satisfied. Delilah, they remembered, was the name of the audacious bitch who’d petitioned for the club and its abominable vice of catering to both therions and humans. Surprisingly enough, though, if the rumors held any truth (and they usually did), there seemed to be a certain animosity towards vampires. This, the brothers thought, was as laughable as it was disgusting; if humans were welcome guests alongside the therion patrons, then why should they stop there? Why not vampires? Why not stray dogs? Hell, why not bring in every manner of creature that could walk, fly, or slither past those doors and simply roll about in a nauseating orgy of mythos, man, and beast? That would have been the absolute zenith of debauchery in their minds!

  What they’d walked into, however, was not much better.

  With the first bouncer, seeming, strangely enough, both agitated and relieved, stepping unknowingly around them and heading for the bar, the brothers had witnessed a vast sprawl of bodies, thankfully (though only barely) clothed, gyrating and writhing at the center of the club, a storm of strobes and fog highlighting and hazing the chaos as a thrumming flood of Euro-tech beats coursed through the air like a swarm of angry insects. It was heinous! It was unholy! It was wrong in every sense the brothers knew the word by. Human buttocks rolled against therion crotches; therion breasts were cupped within human hands; the rampant and unhindered contact normally shared on a club’s dance floor amplified and emphasized wantonly by the two species. It was bad enough to imagine them sharing the same air with one another, but this?!

  From their vantage point of the lewd scene, it was impossible to tell who among the crowd, human or therion alike, might be lovers, might be friends, or might be total strangers. When they caught sight of two therion males sharing a kiss and a human female taking hold of a therion female’s breasts, both groaning at the contact, it took every bit of their control not to massacre every living thing then and there.

  Homosexuality?!

  Did this den of perversions know no bounds?

  “We gift them with every second we allow this to continue!” Jerrick’s growling voice had threatened to explode into a roar and Ezra was forced to turn his enraged grip inward, cupping it over his brother’s shoulder, to keep him from doing something stupid.

  He knew, however, that it was just as much to keep his own feet planted.

  “Nein, my brother!” Ezra said, resenting how controlled he sounded to his own ears. “Our cause will suffer if we’re impatient, and I sense…”

  Though he hadn’t been sure at that time just what he’d sensed.

  A variable they hadn’t considered, maybe?

  They aim to stop you, Messiah’s warning within their heads was proof enough that Ezra’s senses, though vague, weren’t failing him. Be wise! Keep your wits about you! Beware the viole—

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, PLEASE SECURE YOUR JAWS AND YOUR LOINS FOR OUR VERY OWN…”

  “What fresh hell is this?” Ezra had groaned out, not sure he was ready to hold himself nor his brother back from another outburst.

  “DEE-LIE-LAAAAAAA!”

  The madness…

  “And below the ninth circle,” Ezra’s voice was a steam-whistle whisper from the churning fire that his guts had become, “Dante found this!” Then, by some strange miracle, he found himself again and told his brother to leave, not wanting him to witness any more of the spectacle.

  As demanding as the need was to put the sight behind him, though, the need to numb its memory was twice so.

  “But what of the Messiah’s warning?” Jerrick asked. “He warned of violence!”

  Ezra frowned, not certain that that had been the nature of Messiah’s warning, but finally offered his brother a confident smile all the same. “We are the greatest sort of violence these perverts shall ever know. Be calm and wait for me outside. I’ll be only a moment, and we’ll seek satisfaction to this fresh itch elsewhere. These ones…” he looked out over the club, extending a long, enraged glare at the one called Delilah as she wagged every part of her body at her following. He felt a stirring that he was eager to disregard as anticipation for her demise and yanked his attention away before finishing: “They’ll see the error of their ways soon enough.”

  “Along with their entrails, yes?” Jerrick’s excitement showed then, and the shared thought gave Ezra an excuse for his growing erection.

  “Of course,” he nodded before motioning back towards the door.

  Without waiting to see if Jerrick would obey him—he knew that he would—Ezra turned and started towards the bar.

  “Beware the violet-headed harlot,” Ezra growled as he stormed out of the club, taking a long pull from the bottle before tossing it blindly over his shoulder to Jerrick.

  He didn’t need to see to know where to throw, and his brother didn’t need a warning to know to catch it.

  “I know,” Jerrick said, mirroring Ezra’s bottled anger, as he caught the gift and took several gulps of his own. “Messiah showed her to me through your eyes. The Council sent her to stop us? Do they see us as a joke?”

  Ezra shook his head, snarling loud enough to scare a man walking towards them on his cellular phone to side-step into oncoming traffic, staring wide-eyed into his own doom as the ton-and-a-half of metal behind the headlights and blaring horn swerved to miss him.

  Pity, the two thought simultaneously.

  “If The Council sent her then it’s safe to assume that she is stronger than she might appear,” Ezra said. “And she is not alone!” A tick tugged at the muscles in his jaw and he felt a yank of rage pull into a momentary grin. “She beds a therion!”

  “Like Ma and Pa?” Jerrick
murmured.

  “And look where it got them!” Ezra resisted the urge to turn and strike him.

  “But were it not for their—”

  He succumbed to the urge then, and a nearby group of humans gasped and muttered as they watched him give his brother the back of his hand there in the street.

  Jerrick stood, stunned, and looked back at him like a beaten puppy.

  “You do not think to praise their union for our being! They cursed us to this life, brother! Or have you forgotten what we’ve seen; what we’ve lived through? For the love of God, man, how long did we have to stare at our own insides because of what we are?” He shook his head at him and finally turned away again, “We are not tools to carry out our cause! We are proof that this cause needs to be carried out!”

  For a long time Jerrick was quiet as he followed after, sipping from the bottle and then throwing it forward to Ezra for him to take his own drink. Catching it blindly for the third cycle, he finally asked, “Where are we going?”

  “I—we need to kill something,” Ezra corrected himself

  Jerrick didn’t protest. He didn’t speak at all. The need for violence—not violet as Messiah had been trying to warn them—screamed so loudly within their shared mind that it was a wonder the humans walking the streets didn’t hear it. They walked for some time, continuing to pass the bottle back-and-forth—blind throw met by blind catch; gazes drifting everywhere except in the direction of their alcohol-filled missile—in search of suitable prey. While many humans, and even a few mythos, littered the streets around them, they were neither sizable enough to present a challenge or isolated enough to not create a scene. As much as the two longed for the day when they might be able to maim in the public eye—to have such freedom that not even an audience could threaten their cause—they knew that that time was not yet upon them. They hated hiding their actions (though they lived to flaunt the aftermath), but it was as it had to be…