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

by Erin Hayes

  “Mother would be displeased to find you like this,” Jerrick’s voice rattled on his shifting vocal cords as he parted her thighs with his knees. “A drunken whore who fucks dogs she found in an alley?” he gave a disgusted cough as his muzzle began to extend only inches from her face and clapped a twitching, throbbing palm over her mouth to muffle her birthing scream. “Hell, even the dogs find you repulsive!”

  The statement was punctuated by a sharp squeeze around her throat, and, after a soft pop, the muffled scream broke and turned to a forced groan. Grinning through his bestial features, Jerrick dropped her then, letting her crumple to the floor and continue her death rattle; her wide, bloodshot eyes taking in the monstrous erection he wielded before her. A series of possible scenarios danced behind those eyes, and she quickly clapped both her hands over her mouth. The brothers laughed at this. Jerrick, too far into his own change to speak for himself, dragged a long tongue over his bottom set of teeth as Ezra, who stepped forward to retrieve a soldering iron he’d had waiting for just this occasion.

  “You don’t need to worry yourself, darling,” he assured her through his own shifting vocal cords before letting a line of saliva fall onto the tool and grinning at the angry plume of smoke that hissed from the tip. “This will only hurt until you’re dead!”

  Message Received

  Between the anxiety of their findings and the guilt she felt for scolding Isaac in front of Delilah the night before, Zoey had been susceptible to her therion lover’s cunning wiles. His tactics, nestled somewhere between “you need to relax”-concern and “I’m sorry I tried to defend your honor”-pity, had her accepting his wandering hands and their aimless exploration of her body. True to his words, tension melted and guilt subsided soon after, and Zoey, panting for more, rolled onto her back and opened her legs for him.

  By the time Isaac had finished with her, there was little left of anxiety or guilt (or anything else) to plague her mind or keep her awake, and the two had fallen asleep naked and still wrapped around each other.

  Anxiety and guilt were quick to awaken them, though.

  There was only a single bang on the other side of the door to warn the two before a second kick ripped the lock from the door and sent it swinging open. Splintered wood fragments peppered the interior of the room as the door made a third and final impact, twisting the doorstop and smashing a knob-sized hole against the inside wall.

  Both Zoey and Isaac shot upright, poised to take on whatever was waiting on the other side, and found themselves staring down an enraged Delilah.

  In that instant Zoey became aware of three very distressing facts:

  She and Isaac were both still naked and wearing the remnants of the previous night’s lovemaking session.

  There were several other sets of eyes peering in at them from behind Delilah.

  And, worst of all, there had been another attack.

  The first two facts served to heighten the already horrible wakeup call—nothing like a hearty serving of public nudity to finish off violent bout of terror—but the third seemed to bury all traces of panic and modesty in a layer of dread. She made no move to cover herself or acknowledge the lingering traces of Isaac that had dried against her thighs as she blinked at the blinding reality that more than just her body was exposed.

  So was her failure.

  Isaac, however, couldn’t see the news bubbling about Delilah’s head; had no idea that the response was, in at least some way, justified. Clamoring to drape the twisted-up blanket over Zoey, he glared back at the door—back at Delilah and the onlookers behind her—and snarled, “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “Besides the sight of you two like this?” Delilah sneered.

  Zoey felt a well of tears begin to flood in her eyes, burning to rain free.

  Isaac was seething. “I thought we were past this! I thought—”

  “Why?” Delilah interrupted, “Because she said we were past it? Because you defended her? Or because we agreed to help you?”

  “I’d say any one of those is answer enough, you crazy bitch!” Isaac snapped.

  “Well,” Delilah’s voice was deepening as she took another step closer, “all of those happened before three dead girls were found butchered and mutilated and hanging from my club like fucking Christmas decorations!”

  Isaac paused at that. “What? What are you—”

  “The Blue Moon’s been on the news all day! Any moment that I haven’t had the state police crawling up my ass has been spent with The Council doing their own rooting around up there! Oh, and speaking of The Council, by the way: if you think that I’m upset about the fact that you two were undoubtedly fucking while those psychos were smearing blood and guts all over my business, you should imagine how thrilled they are!”

  “Are you implying we’re somehow—”

  “I’m saying that the rogues you came here to deal with have made a public spectacle of my pack’s livelihood in front of anybody with a working television set and you two are splayed out here wearing each other’s love-stink!” Delilah gnashed her teeth and took another step forward.

  Isaac snapped his own jaws in response, but settled as Zoey rested her palm against his chest.

  It’s okay, she told him, wrapping the blanket around her chest and trying her best to reclaim some dignity. When she was certain that the worst of her appearance was hidden, she looked solemnly at Delilah. “You’re right,” she said, offering a slight nod. “You have every right to be angry right now, but…” she felt a swell of rage from one of the therion onlookers from the hall and stifled a shudder at the reaction. “But if we’d had any clue that something like this was going to happen we wouldn’t have—”

  Delilah’s hand raised to stop her.

  Zoey did so.

  Isaac frowned, but said nothing.

  Letting out a sigh that evolved into a growl halfway through, Delilah looked over her shoulder and, with nothing more than a jerk of her head, ushered the onlookers to leave them.

  A moment later the hallway outside their door was empty.

  Delilah turned to yank the door free before starting past it.

  “Get yourselves dressed and ready to deal with this,” she growled under her breath, the words more resounding in Zoey’s head than actually being heard. “And be sure to wash the cum off yourself. I don’t feel like smelling it on you as a reminder of what you were doing while my life was going to shit.”

  Zoey was already on her feet and heading for the bathroom before the door was slammed shut behind them.

  Isaac wasn’t far behind her.

  “Zoe, you can’t blame yourself for—”

  She wretched and flooded the toilet bowl with a wad of bile. It burned all the way up and left a rancid taste in the back of her throat that reached up into her nostrils. She welcomed it all, feeling like the burning bitterness paralleled the rising anxiety and guilt. It belonged. To be caught like that—caught in that position—while people were dead, tortured, and put out on display? To allow herself a moment like that when those two were out there? She vomited again.

  Isaac laid a hand on her back, kneeling down beside her. She didn’t need to look at him to see the pity reflected in his eyes; it floated on his aura like oil in a rain puddle.

  “You can’t take this personally,” he whispered to her.

  Zoey lurched, feeling like she might vomit a third time, then gulped back what she could. “How can I not?” she whimpered back. “Those people… they’re dead! And now The Council sees…” she trembled under a wave of chills and shook her head. “Oh, Isaac…”

  “The bodies…” Zoey started, walking beside Isaac as they followed Delilah and what felt like her entire pack towards the Blue Moon. Enough time had passed while she collected herself, cleaned up, and got dressed to shake the majority of her crippling anxiety, though she still felt that a feather’s touch could send her spiraling over the edge again. Isaac had been there—right there beside her, just as he’d always been—for her
, repeating and rehashing old lines into what felt like new ones to help her every step of the way. In hindsight, her regained professionalism seemed like nothing short of a miracle. She gulped the incessantly growing doubts and convinced herself (again) that nobody else could see them. “Are they the same as before?” she finally managed to finish.

  “And then some…” Delilah’s voice was a forced calm that was harsher and more jagged than even her outright rage had been. She shook her head, her aura thrashing like a caged animal’s tail, and turned her head as though she was going to look back at them. In the end she didn’t. “These girls were tortured! Raped! There’s no sign that any of it was to get off—I don’t know how anybody could get off to that—but it’s clear that they wanted us to know there’s nothing they’re not willing to do.”

  Zoey flinched at that, but fought to keep herself on track. “Is there anything in common with the victims?” she asked, trying to keep an even balance of empathy and sincerity in her voice without forfeiting her role in the process. The last thing she needed on top of everything else was to give Delilah a good reason to accuse her of not taking the case seriously; of not being the expert The Council had trusted her to be.

  “If you’re asking if they shared any traits with the others, then no,” though Delilah’s back was to her, Zoey could all but see her rolling her eyes at the question. “But, more to the point, vampire, there didn’t need to be. One of my bouncers already IDed them. Not by sight, mind you—there wasn’t much to go in for that—but he recognized their scents under all the blood and piss and shit.”

  Stomach lurching at that, Zoey swallowed the rising bile and asked, “The bouncer knew them then?”

  Delilah shook her head, answering, “No, but he recognized them from the previous night.” She finally stopped and turned to face them, a myriad of eyes carrying cloned scorn turning with them to burn into the two. “They were customers. My customers. And they were put on display on my club.” Turning back and starting across the street and around the corner, bringing the Blue Moon into sight, she made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a growl. “A fact that the police were quick to connect, too. Their last credit card purchases pretty much confirmed that the Blue Moon wasn’t just a random choice for these psychos to display their handiwork. The cops don’t think any of us had anything to do with this—not having any irate ex-employees to identify helps there, though they’re now suspicious of how a club that’s been open for a few years hasn’t had to ever fire anybody—but I don’t think there’s any variation of ‘have you made any enemies’ that I haven’t heard in the past few hours.” She threw her arms up in an exaggerated shrug. “And how in the hell am I supposed to answer that?” she asked, loosing a humorless laugh before reciting, “Well, Officer, now that you mention it, there are these Nazi-scorning, blood-sucking, death-worshipping, half-vamp-half-werewolf radicals that see my entire life’s work as an affront to their convoluted, post-second-World-War campaign to target—what?—anybody they goddam please, I guess? I mean, I haven’t personally pissed them off, you know, but I guess an honest therion doing business in a human city is all it takes these days. What a world, right? Oh? What’s that? You say that confessing all of this will probably piss off my Council and the home-wrecking dye-job who’s presently squatting in my building and is too busy stuffing her pussy with my ex-fiancé to do her job? Wow! I didn’t consider all that, sir. Then, no, I guess I don’t have any enemies to report again.”

  Isaac drew in a calculated breath and, stifling both his voice and his aura, asked, “Was all that really necessary?”

  Zoey saw the answer bubbling in Delilah’s head before he was even finished answering the question. In the distance, coming more and more into clarity, was the club and, strewn across its surface, a patchwork of gore and bloodied, splotched outlines boxed within three sharply contrasting outlines mapped out in masking tape. Though the bodies had long-since been taken down and moved, the aftermath told enough of the story. Seeing that all behind a thin veil of police tape circling the block that they ducked under, Delilah’s answer was bubbling just as much in her own:

  “Is any of this necessary?” Zoey whispered in unison with Delilah.

  If she overheard the echo, the female therion showed no sign of it. She just stopped in front of her building and stared at the horror that the club’s wall had become. Each of the blocky humanoid shaped silhouettes showed just how broken and twisted the corpses they represented had been, a series of what looked like blood-caked railroad spikes remained embedded within the walls at the shoulders, sternums, and crotches.

  “I would’ve thought they’d take those out by now,” Isaac said with a disgusted sneer. “Put them into evidence or something.”

  “They wanted to, but the damn things are lodged in there. Cops said they’d probably have to take out the entire wall just to retrieve them,” Delilah said, resting her hand on the nearest of the spikes.

  “It’s probably not a good idea to touch that,” Zoey said.

  Delilah scoffed at that and gave it a few pats for emphasis. “Right? Because I wouldn’t want to implicate myself in all this, would I?” Why don’t you shut up and do your job? And before you get too excited and get the wrong idea I’m not talking about a blowjob, handjob, rim—”

  “I’m not talking about fingerprints, Delilah!” Zoey snapped, “I’m talking about any auric residue I might be able to trace!”

  It was the closest thing to “shut the hell up” that she could muster at that moment, and even then it felt like a frail plea.

  If Serena was here… she thought.

  Hell, if Serena was there she’d probably have had the case solved by now. She’d have jumped the bar that first night, ripped the snarling hybrid demanding the high-priced bottle in half, and then lured his partner in to meet the same fate. Then, just for the fun of it, she’d have stormed the stage, kicked Delilah right in the you-know-what, tossed her off the stage, and probably one-upped her with her own strip-tease to a soundtrack she’d had prepared for just that sort of occasion. Something original and tastefully titled, like “Cunt-Punt & Pussy Shaking Jams vol. 7” or the like.

  Then she and Zane would ride off like crazed rock stars into the sunset, her laughing like an asylum patient and mounted on Zane’s lap as he drove so they could have sex the likes of which only happened in well-funded porno films—her aura extended and forming a giant purple middle finger aimed back at the city they’d needed less than a night in to make everything right.

  What else could she expect from the beautiful blonde bombshell who’d somehow managed to save the entire world from a resurrected, rage-fueled death wizard?

  At the very least, however, Serena would be brave enough to tell Delilah to “shut the hell up” at that moment. That moment, when she was being accused of being, in no other words, a slut in front of over two-dozen therions and whoever cared to walk by at that moment.

  But she wasn’t as strong as Serena, and that fact was hitting her hard. She didn’t have the blind, arrogant instinct to act violently without a mountain of evidence to back it up and she didn’t have any uncaged audacity to spit venom at anybody who even looked at her wrong. She was just a timid, by-the-books “nerd”—as Zane always called her—who’d long ago discovered a glimmer of rebellion by dying her hair blue just to prove that she would and had been fortunate enough to catch the eye of a tough-as-nails therion who, for whatever reason, loved her in ways she’d never expected. In her circle of friends she couldn’t drop a stone without it landing on the foot of somebody who would’ve buried their fist straight down Delilah’s throat that first night, but here she was taking the abuse of her and, with it, her entire pack.

  Why had she allowed herself to become so weak?

  It was, of course, Isaac who rose to the occasion:

  “All this hell raining down on you and your pack and you’re still focused on your petty jealousy. It’s hard to tell if you’re just short-sighted or if you’re truly this
stupid,” he spoke so calmly it took a moment for even Zoey to realize he’d just insulted her. As a collected gasp rose from the other therions, Isaac stepped forward, shouldering past a few of the bolder members who tried to block his path. It wasn’t until he was practically nose-to-nose—or, given his height, mid-chest-to-nose—with Delilah that he added, “And you wonder why I chose loneliness over you?”

  Delilah’s aura flared in a way that seemed comparable only to a forest fire. Humiliation and sadness and jealousy were words printed on buckets of gasoline that were, all at once, thrown into the mix, and the therion’s eyes reflected the heat as they shifted to those of an animal.

  She was about to do something stupid.

  And she was about to do it in public, in eyesight of a human public that was already scrutinizing her.

  Serena would’ve just let it happen. Serena was strong enough to turn her back on what was coming and let it all collapse on Delilah and her pack. Over and over again the voice—Serena’s voice; that little bit of Zoey that held onto the hopes of being so bold—told her to do just that: sit back and enjoy the show. The fuse to Delilah’s end would be lit the moment she did whatever she was thinking. She’d either attack Isaac—a quick death—or try to push past him to attack her—an even quicker death—or create a public scene that would warrant an instant response—more than likely a full block’s worth of mind erasing and, once they’d dragged her somewhere private, a quick and justified death. Her pack would be disbanded, either forced to relocate to other packs—an awkward process from what Isaac had told her—or go through the process of filing as registered rogues where they’d be extensively tracked for any potential threat to The Council’s system. That, or risk running from the all-seeing mythos government for the rest of their lives—their drastically shortened lives should that be their decision. Then it would be a simple process of dealing with Ezra and his partner without fear of interference or further loss from their not-so-hospitable “hosts.”