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

by Erin Hayes

  He was taking this hunt in a different direction; attacking this prey from an angle she’d never seen before.

  Isaac only nodded, moving his hand with a slow, simple motion that reminded her of a lion lowering itself behind a patch of tall grass.

  He was waiting, she realized then; poised and ready to watch.

  “Now love yourself,” he said it in a low, husky voice that was dominating without being forceful. His aura rolled off his skin in slow, tight ripples: a sea the color of an endless forest licking at the contours of his skin. She wanted so desperately to mimic his aura’s lapping motion over his body.

  She needed to!

  Ignoring his demand, recognizing it for what it was but too immersed in her own lust to care, she pounced, grabbing him around his waist and fighting to reclaim her place atop him. Again and again she felt the head of his cock wag past her entrance, knocking against her inner thighs or overshooting and slapping the crack of her rear, but no matter how hard she fought to bring him into her he found a way to slip free. The efforts intensified, becoming nothing short of a battle between them as they fell off the bed—neither offering a moment to acknowledge the blunder or offer concern for the other as they continued their personal pursuits—and tussled across the floor.

  “Love yourself!” Isaac growled. “I’ll show you stars the moment you show me you know how!”

  “Love me yourself!” she cried.

  Zoey moved to impale herself on her lover’s length, only to have him roll her over him in a tight summersault that landed her on her rump behind him. Throwing her aura out, she lifted herself off the floor and spun around, never touching the ground as she propelled herself into him once again. Isaac rolled with the impact, pinning her by her wrists under him—his erection bobbing against her stomach. Unable to see her aura, he was unable to maneuver as she ensnared him with it and began to pull him back, preparing to move his body for him if he wouldn’t choose to do it himself.

  “No!” he barked, jumping back—working with the direction of her pull—and yanking free of her telekinetic grip. “No aura! That’s cheating!”

  “Cheating?” Zoey scoffed, jumping to her feet and lunging at him. “It’s only cheating if it works! Cheating would be entering your head to make you enter me!” she beamed at the idea and smirked, “That would be cheating!”

  Isaac smirked back, catching her off guard with his own confidence. Before she could see into his head to dodge the attack, it had already landed.

  His lips were on hers with a fury and passion that ripped ever shred of auric control from her mind.

  You’re not the only one that can cheat, baby! his voice echoed in her mind.

  Damn you! she whimpered around his kiss. This is cheating!

  Only because it works! he taunted.

  She was only vaguely aware that her feet had left the floor as he lifted her with one arm and spun her in a controlled body slam back onto the bed. The force rocked the two of them and sent the mattress sliding off the box-spring and crashing onto the other side of the floor, the corner catching the nightstand and toppling it over along with the lamp atop it, which, after its cord yanked from the wall outlet, shattered against the wall.

  Again he was atop her, pinning her left hand over her head and her right…

  “Love yourself,” he growled into her mouth, guiding her own fingers between her legs and letting her feel herself. “Show me you know how, Zoe. I want to see it, then…” he let out a ragged exhale that rippled across her lips and cheek, “… then I’ll give you everything!”

  A tremor of pleasure wriggled across her body at the feel of her own fingers as Isaac led them across the parts of her he knew so well. Again. And again. The passes becoming so much more frequent, so much harder. Zoey’s fingers delved and worked, sending more and more tremors through her.

  “Y-you… you cheated,” she accused him again behind closed eyes, though the vision of him hovering over her in her mind’s eye—his aura throbbing and pulsing with the same energy as her endgame—gave away the sensual gaze he had locked on her.

  “So I did,” he whispered into her ear before nipping her lobe.

  Still her fingers worked, and it wasn’t until she moved to adjust her wrist to push deeper that she found it was no longer within Isaac’s grasp. Her eyelids fluttered open long enough to see that his freed hand was now pumping the length of his cock as he watched her finger herself. And she was fingering herself!

  Love yourself.

  She nodded at him, picking up her tempo once again and letting the pleasure carry her off as she felt Isaac’s gaze take in the sight. Her wandering aura found Isaac’s mind and, just under the surface, like her own personal mirror, she could see herself as he was seeing her, and at that moment she couldn’t blame him for waking up and wanting her the way he had.

  It was at that moment, as understanding and pleasure collided within her, that she felt him begin to enter her…

  Just before Delilah kicked in the door.

  Gasping at the intrusion, Zoey recoiled and moved to cover herself with the crumpled covers as Isaac shot to his feet and glared at her. Though he made no move to cover himself or hide his already softening manhood, Zoey could see that the thrashing auras between the two shared no erotic intent.

  In fact, it appeared as though they both wanted to kill each other!

  Trembling in rage from the interruption, Isaac had already begun to transform. Whether he believed that the explosive entrance had been an attack and he was still reeling from the jolt or if he sincerely believed there was still a danger, his distending muscles and already misshapen jaw was evidence that he was ready to take the head off of someone! Delilah, however, though looking every bit as murderous, did not share Isaac’s blind, animal-like ferocity. Curious, Zoey dug a little deeper into the female therion’s intent, making sure not to invade more than what was necessary in the process, and saw…

  “Isaac! Wait!” Zoey hurried to her feet, keeping the covers wrapped around her, and planted herself between the two. “Something…” she glanced back at Delilah, guilt beginning to burn in the back of her throat. “Something happened…”

  Though the fury remained in his eyes, Isaac’s body noticeably relaxed and shifted back to his human form as he turned away to retrieve his pants and began to yank them on.

  Zoey bit her lip, staring after her lover a moment before turning back to Delilah, who had taken the moment to survey the condition of their room. “I figured you two might be interested to hear about what’s been going on while you’ve been”—she stopped and took in the two of them once again and motion to the mattress that had been thrown from the rest of the bed—“indisposed.”

  Isaac glowered back at her. “And what’s ‘been going on,’ exactly?” he demanded.

  “Death,” she answered, the simplicity of the single word offset by the weight she dropped it over them with. “A lot of it, actually. We’re having a hard time determining a number, but both we and the human police believe that the cause of death is consecutive enough to say it’s all the work of a single attacker.”

  “The cause of death?” Zoey asked, feeling suddenly dizzy from the news.

  Delilah sneered at her. “Yea, it’s a relatively common means for law enforcers like yourself to solve murder cases like the one you’re on and take out crazed killers like the one you’re after. Crazy, right?”

  Isaac growled, “Don’t be a bitch, Dee!”

  Delilah’s cold stare didn’t thaw, but she remained silent as Isaac finished dressing and stepped over to Zoey, draping an arm around her from behind and holding her.

  It wasn’t your fault, he thought to her.

  Reaching up, she put her hand over his, taking what comfort she could from the contact. Yes it is, she answered. Then, taking a deep breath, she looked up at Delilah and clarified, “I was asking what the causes of the deaths were.”

  “They were all eaten,” she seemed to break at that and broke eye contact long
enough to stifle a shiver. After muttering something to herself, Delilah shook her head and said, “It’s not like people don’t die around here, you know—it is the city, after all—but we only ever see a couple every now-and-again. A shooting here, a stabbing there. Muggings gone wrong, turf wars between gangs…” she shrugged, “Stupid human shit, mostly. It wasn’t like mythos attacks didn’t happen around here.” She glared at Zoey again. “While the urban playground might not be common hunting grounds for our kind, it’s certainly appealing for other species, isn’t that right vampire?” The malice in the female therion’s face held before Isaac gave another warning growl, then her eyes went sad again. “We worked hard to chase out the rogues when we first got here,” she admitted with a trace of pride behind her voice. “We wanted to prove that we could keep these streets as safe as any vampire clan, better even, so that The Council would see how foolish they were for doubting our vision—”

  “It was your vision, Dee!” Isaac jabbed, “And there’s more to what we do than just ‘chasing out the rogues.’ It’s about representing something that’s more than just your pride or your greed or your eagerness to wave your tits at a building full of strangers!” Isaac tightened his embrace around Zoey and she, in turn, tightened her hold on his hand. “That’s all I saw from you and your efforts last night! You didn’t come here for anything more than exactly what you’ve been flashing around since we showed up. You flashed this building at though it were a home, you flashed your club as though it were a territory, and you flashed your body as though you had something to claim over every other body around you! You’re a pack leader who’s dragged your pack out of the forest and into the urban jungle not because you were aiming for greater things for them, but because someone once told you that you shouldn’t. Isn’t that right? They said Delilah shouldn’t uproot and try to run an entire pack in the city, so that’s exactly what you did! They said Delilah shouldn’t start buying up property and making a big ordeal out of being a business tycoon while there’s dozens of therions looking to her for guidance and protection, so that’s exactly what you did! And when I said, years ago, that you and I would never be together, and that you should move on and find a better life for yourself…” Isaac shook his head at her, “And instead you created a beacon for any extremist hellbent on targeting the exact lifestyle you’ve been pursuing—against every piece of advice you’ve ever been given—and now that one’s here you’re going to try to make it the fault of the ones who showed up to clean up your mess? Let me give you some fresh advice, Dee: you shouldn’t fuck with me, and you shouldn’t fuck with The Council, but you sure-as-shit shouldn’t fuck with Zoey. And should you decide, like you have in the past, that being told that you shouldn’t do something is an open invitation to prove somebody wrong and you do choose to act against that advice, I suggest you try fucking with me or The Council first, ‘cause when Zoey’s decided she’s done playing it polite—when she decides she’s ready to start playing it just as mean as you deserve—then you’re going to find yourself on the sharpened end of a street meter; coins spilling out one end while blood’s spilling out the other!” Zoey saw him through her mind’s eye as he paused to look down at her from behind, pride glowing both in his eyes and in his aura. “And me?” he continued, “After watching you bring this all on yourself, endanger countless others, and then talk down to the only one capable of making it all right again, I will have no problem including a statement in my report that details my personal thoughts on how unwise it was for The Council to clear even a single one of your requests to this perverted circus you call your business.”

  Both Zoey and Delilah could only stare, awestruck, at one another for some time after Isaac had finished speaking. Then, swallowing loudly and rubbing the back of her neck.

  “You… uh, you weren’t always so well spoken,” she finally stammered.

  Isaac nodded and said, “Yea, Zoey has a funny way of making everything better than it was. You should give her a chance to.”

  Delilah nodded slowly.

  Zoey fought not to break into tears and hug Isaac. Though it was tough, in the wake of her lover’s words, to hold herself to the level of professionalism he’d just described, she was somehow able to, after an awkward and choked attempt to clear her throat, ask, “Is there any reason to assume this wasn’t just some random attack? Perhaps from one of the old rogues you’d chased away when you first came here?”

  Delilah shook her head. “Let’s just say that there’s no coming back from where we chased our rogues.”

  Isaac’s shoulders tensed at that. “You’re saying they were executed?”

  “I’m saying they’re not coming back,” Delilah’s voice wavered and her eyes darted everywhere but in their direction.

  Zoey frowned. “Do you understand the implications of what you’re telling us?” she asked. “You’re aware that the regulations you’re held against prohibit any sort of vigilante behavior? That infringing on those regulations is grounds for this—all of this,” Zoey waved a hand in front of Delilah, indicating the room and everything else around them, “and all of you—to be marked for immediate termination? You know this, right?”

  The corners of Delilah’s eyes began to shimmer with new moisture as she looked down and nodded.

  Zoey watched her for a moment, watched her aura sink with genuine remorse and watched tendrils of guilt and anxiety roll atop her head like wisps of colored smoke. Zoey watched as Delilah grasped the weight of what was happening and, without the walls of pride or arrogance erected between them, she saw a chance.

  “Then I suppose,” Zoey sighed and shrugged, “that it’s a good thing that there’s no evidence that anything like that ever happened.”

  Both Delilah and Isaac hadn’t been sure how to take Zoey’s change of heart. Though neither said a thing about it after the fact, their auras were rolling somewhere between uncertainty and bewilderment. In Isaac’s, however, there was a little something extra: pride. And this, Zoey knew, was never too far from the surface whenever he was looking at her.

  The three were quick to take the conversation out of their room, agreeing, though not actually saying anything, that it was hardly the place to discuss business.

  Love-smashed furniture and the lingering smells of sex had that impact, after all.

  Though it didn’t stop things from getting awkward soon after, just not in the embarrassing sort of way:

  “Swastikas?” Zoey frowned at the word for more reasons than one.

  Delilah nodded and sighed, repeating herself again, slower this time: “Yes. The victims, most of them, at least, had swastikas carved into their bodies.”

  Zoey looked over at Isaac and said, “That can’t be coincidence.”

  “No. I suppose it can’t.” He rubbed his chin before dragging his palm to the back of his neck, holding it there with a tense uncertainty. “It just seems strange.”

  “What?” Delilah asked, leaning forward, “What seems strange?”

  Isaac frowned and looked to Zoey, the thought It’s up to you what she gets to know echoing on his thoughts.

  Zoey sighed. If the tension between her and Delilah had any hope of getting settled for the sake of their mutual goal, it rested with honesty. After all, if she wasn’t willing to disclose their intel to the therions, what right did she have to expect them to disclose theirs?

  “The file The Council sent us on the subject was…” Zoey pursed her lips and chose her next words carefully: “less than helpful.”

  “It was a fucking joke!” Isaac offered, breaking through Zoey’s many layers of tact and subtlety to get straight to the point.

  Zoey blushed and pulled her left shoulder up in a hesitant shrug, not eager to admit that The Council that she and the rest of her clan worked under could be guilty of such a thing.

  “You mean that single page of nonsense?” Delilah asked, smirking. “The one that’s mostly crossed-out assumptions?”

  Zoey felt her face go hot. “They sent you a co
py?” she asked, feeling a bit more of her embarrassment carry out on her voice than she’d expected.

  Delilah shrugged. “They said we should be prepared and faxed it to the club. We looked over it, had a laugh, and I believe one of the doormen used it to wipe his ass.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Zoey said with a sneer.

  “So’s your precious Council’s case file,” Delilah said with another shrug before looking between the two of them with renewed interest. “Now what’s this coincidence you were speaking of?”

  It took Zoey a moment to get back on track with their previous point, but once the gears in her head were turning in the right direction she began to explain:

  “The subject seemed to be following a pattern similar to another who targeted European villages shortly following the end of the second World War. There’d been some speculation that…” she pursed her lips to one side and rubbed at a growing ache in her temple at the realization that what she was saying already made perfect sense. She sighed then, following it with a deep breath, and finally said, “No, I’d safe to say that the speculation’s been proven accurate at this point.”

  “What speculation?” Delilah asked, impatient. “Come on, vampire! You’re not getting paid per hour here!”

  Zoey felt Isaac’s aura spike with anger at her words, but, before he could say anything, she interrupted them:

  “I need to make a phone call.”

  Ezra. No last name. And while Isaac probably saw that missing detail as a reason to mock this new report, Zoey saw it as cause for much more concern. The Council had access to the best of the best, warriors and keen minds alike. If a prisoner refused to speak, they had plenty of auric vampires on staff capable of cracking the most resilient and even protected minds. But this wasn’t just a case of a silent prisoner with a resilient mind. According to the records keeper that Zoey had spoken to, this Ezra’s identity—and, in fact, almost all of the facts they’d acquired on him—was obtained after the fact through third party sources. Unsettled by this detail, Zoey had asked if Ezra had ever been in The Council’s custody, to which the record keeper, after a painfully long silence, confirmed that they’d never gotten that close to him. Mulling over this, Zoey had gone through the new report that they’d sent upon her request. That the details of this Ezra were practically non-existent—only slightly more detailed than the first report, Zoey noticed—and that he’d avoided capture for all that time meant much more to his elusive nature. Coupled with the decades that he’d avoided their radar and the fact that he’d been able to start right back up without giving away his identity from the start meant that he was far more cunning than anybody had given him credit for in over half-a-century.