“That’s good,” he told her with a small smile. That’s very good, he thought as her lips parted and he captured them with his own. Warmth spread through him, rare and divine. He groaned, rapt despite the chaos around them, and opened her up further beneath him, his tongue delving deep, his incubus drinking like a man in the desert.
A kiss was like a snack compared to the more involved acts of sex, but it was special in that it was more intimate. It was personal. It packed more of a punch in that respect; like a protein shake versus mashed potatoes and gravy.
As he kissed her, Sterling realized Piper Maddox was a fucking banquet. He was afforded a small but rich taste of all she had to offer him. There was no time for anything more.
But this was enough.
With regret he hadn’t felt since he’d been with Annaleia, the Nightmare Warlock broke his kiss and peered down at the woman in his arms. Piper’s eyes were closed, her lips plump and red from his kiss, her hair whipping around them both as he stared down at her. He brushed his thumb gently over her lower lip just before his head snapped up to the sound of Carmen Seville calling out a familiar name.
“Anna!” she cried.
Sterling carefully released Piper and turned on his side, lifting himself to his feet. Across the room, Randall Price was just straightening from where he’d retrieved his discarded knife. Damn, thought Jarrod. That’s on me.
Between Price and Carmen stood Annaleia, once more in human form, albeit draconic human. She was dressed in charcoal gray leather from motorcycle jacket and gloves to motorcycle boots, the entire ensemble sporting a subtle purple gradient. Her long, beautiful hair was more wild than it had ever been. Electricity rode along the surface of her skin like St. Elmo’s Fire, honest-to-goodness purple lightning born of the storm within and ignited by the storm without. But it was her eyes that were the most striking. They glowed bright with that electric power, that innate change, and her beautiful white teeth now bore fangs. They were bared; she was ready for a fight.
Sterling could imagine what had just gone down. Anna had shifted to her human form, Carmen had rushed to meet her and most likely hug her, Randall Price had appeared from the shadows, and Carmen had called out a warning to her friend.
Price’s expression was one of disappointed resolve. Sterling had seen that expression before. It was the “If I can’t have you, no one will” look – but at this point, Sterling was almost hoping Price would try. Annaleia Faith was not the Withered angel of resurrection she’d once been. And there were just too many delicious ways in which she could illustrate as much to Price.
But he would have to touch her for that. And whether Anna was mated to someone else or not, Sterling would always care for her. Allowing her to come into physical contact with the serial killer again was something he simply couldn’t stomach. So he straightened and rolled back his shoulders, delightfully surprised at how much strength a single kiss had elicited him.
He glanced down at Piper a final, grateful time as she rose to her feet behind him, and then he raised his hand palm-out toward Price with the intent of blasting him out of existence.
“No, Sterling.”
The incubus warlock flinched and hesitated. It had been Annaleia speaking. She’d done so without taking her eyes off Price as if she could sense his intent behind her. Her voice boomed throughout the destroyed space, so powerful that the concrete flooring beneath Jarrod’s feet vibrated, sending rubble skittering.
“He’s mine,” she said.
For his part, Randall Price narrowed his gaze and all hint of residual lust for Annaleia that he may have been experiencing moments before dissipated, leaving a mask of sheer determination and betrayal-heavy hatred. “You sure about that, angel?” Price asked conversationally. “You don’t want to leave me for your boyfriend to rip to shreds?” Randall pretended to look around. “Where is the bully, anyway? Frankly, I’m surprised he’s letting you fight all on your own.”
“He’s busy dealing with your boyfriend,” Annaleia said with a beautiful fang-filled grin.
Sterling almost laughed. Except that Price’s chin lifted then, his green eyes glinted behind his glasses, and a bit of that lust was back. Price smiled. “He’s wasting his time.” Then he laughed mirthlessly, shaking his head. “Hasn’t he learned he can’t face Maze alone?”
But Annaleia wasn’t fazed. She tilted her head slightly to the side, lightning cascaded across the sky, and she said, “He’s not alone.”
Price blinked, his smug expression slipping as his brow furrowed slightly. His gaze became calculating as it slid from Annaleia to Carmen to Piper, and finally to Sterling. He looked back at Anna and took a breath as if preparing to monologue in order to buy himself time to execute whatever sick plan he was concocting.
But before he could speak a single word, Annaleia raised her arm toward him, and neon purple and blue lightning whipped out from her palm, slamming full force into Randall Price’s chest. The blast was so loud, Sterling’s eardrums shut tight to protect themselves. A ringing started up to fill the silence.
Price must have cried out in surprise and pain, but all traces of any noise he might have made were swallowed up by Annaleia’s cacophony as her stalker was picked up and thrown backward with hurricane force. He moved so fast he blurred, slamming into what was left of the wall behind him before he broke right through it to fly into the darkness beyond.
Chapter Fifty-nine – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Annaleia turned away from the hole Randall Price’s body had left and faced her friends. “Are you all okay?” she asked, suddenly feeling exhausted. The lightning cascading over her skin dissipated almost at once. Her vision switched out from a highly contrasted dragon’s sight to the human vision she was accustomed to. And the storm overhead broke up and stopped spinning. Immediately, objects that had been previously airborne were dropped, fortunately not on anyone she cared about.
She looked from Carmen to Piper, both of whom were obviously shell shocked, and finally to Sterling. Jarrod met her eyes, held her gaze, and nodded, his smile genuinely kind but a little sad.
She understood.
“Anna-freaking-leia, you’re a mother-freaking storm dragon!” Piper suddenly cried out just before she broke into a run. She and Carmen reached Anna at the same time, both girls tackling her with fierce hugs and manic talking that was nearly too fast for anyone to comprehend. “I mean, did I say that right? Is that what you are? Storm dragons are a thing, right?”
Anna found herself laughing one of those deep, genuinely happy belly laughs that only the truly grateful can feel. Her response was to simply hug them back harder.
The sound of a gun being fired into the night broke up the reunion. Anna separated from them and spun around. It was difficult to determine from which direction the gunshot had come. The sound ricocheted in echo just as much as the gun’s bullets sometimes did.
But it was fired three more times in quick succession, and Anna and Sterling wound up standing side-by-side at the brink of the building’s destroyed wall, right in the middle of the hole Price’s body had left moments earlier.
Anna stared down at the unfolding scene below. A dozen men in black leather jackets faced off with men Anna didn’t recognize but who were very obviously not human. Their eyes glowed a number of different eerie colors, and they were strong enough and fast enough to challenge the Monsters clan without being instantly defeated. Anna was guessing they were Dires or Apexes, perhaps both, though that was rare.
There were a few other wardens below as well, some she recognized such as Conall Tiarnahn. The warden world had answered the call for help with record speed, and good thing too – given the fresh wave of dangerous creatures moving in from the shadow line around the abandoned building. All manner of beasts began to emerge. She could make out a bookah, a real, live fuatharkan, and a cantorip, to name a few.
The clan wardens could have handled them all. This was what they trained for.
However, everyone had stoppe
d fighting, the sound of shots fired bringing them to a sober halt. Anna recognized that this was because the wardens realized a gun would be useless in the fray against Victor Maze. The chaos he emitted would twist barrels, knock aims off center, and send bullets into the wrong recipients. Hand-to-hand combat was the safest bet, so no one was using guns. Hence, the sound of one going off was unexpected.
Anna followed the line of their sight as they all stopped and turned to face someone else. At their front and center, she found Antares. Across from him was the tall man in a white suit. The suit was torn in several places and stained with blood. Anna smiled with the knowledge that her love had managed to harm the god somehow, but her smile slipped away when she then followed Ares’ line of sight.
To where Randall Price stood in the middle of the street twenty yards down, his arm wrestle-wrapped around a woman’s throat as if he were going to choke her off, his other hand pressing the barrel of a gun to her temple. The front of his own clothing bore a massive hole, right over his chest. That was where Anna had struck him with her dragon magic. The hole was smoking – but he was absolutely unmarred.
How? she wondered in frustration. Why?
Anna didn’t recognize the woman he held. She was Caucasian, she had long dark hair that was pulled into a messy, loose ponytail, and she was dressed in jeans, boots, and a practical winter coat. Beneath the coat, she wore a sky blue sweater, and when she struggled in Price’s grip, Anna could see that she wore a shoulder-holster over the sweater.
A badge flashed from the side of the woman’s waistband. She was a cop.
Anna refocused her senses, attempting to see, hear and smell the scene as would a dragon. One after another, new observations opened up to her. She heard the faint tinkling of tiny fragments of glass hitting the ground and saw windshield glass break free from the woman’s clothing and hair to hit the tarmac. A broken car window, she thought as her eyes skirted quickly over the few parked vehicles in the street. It didn’t take long to find the truck – with its windshield broken out.
Anna returned her attention to Price and his captive. Her vision intensified and she noticed that the sweater the woman wore set off a pair of lovely hazel eyes. She smelled the perfume she’d just written the ad campaign for – Time Enough. And she heard the woman breathing, her heart pounding with ragged, petrified speed. She even caught the scent of gunpowder.
She reeled physically when Victor Maze coalesced into solid form behind Price and his captive. Anna’s gaze flicked from him to the Victor Maze look-alike Antares had been fighting. Fuck, she thought as she realized what the man was. A goddamn doppelganging Terror.
The real Maze was utterly unharmed and looking as sharp and healthy as ever. He’d clearly been the one to heal or protect Price as well. And now the good guys were all right back where they’d started – trying to fight an enemy that grew stronger the more they fought him.
Damn, she thought as she touched her forehead with her fingertips to brush against feverish skin.
“Anna, are you alright?” Sterling spoke quickly beside her.
But Annaleia ignored him; she had no choice. She was still in human-dragon-sense mode, and she was brand new at this. She was being overwhelmed with the scents of far too many angry male supernaturals. She couldn’t concentrate on the threat at hand. She grew dizzy beneath the heady soup of pheromones, bloodlust, and fury and barely felt it when Sterling’s arm came around her to steady her.
She prepared to pull back and try again with perhaps less focus when a fierce, deep growl had her eyes snapping open. She hadn’t even realized she’d closed them.
She quickly looked down, swinging her line of sight a sharp left, past Price, Maze, and the woman. An enormous black wolf came bounding from the shadows across the street behind the three, and everything dropped into slow motion.
Price turned in place to see what the hell the noise was, his prisoner attempted to take the opportunity to escape, and Maze instead reached out and grabbed the woman by the back of her jacket, spinning her around.
The woman saw the black wolf and her eyes grew enormous. And then Maze said, “Now, Mr. Price.”
Randall Price returned the gun to his target, this time pressing its barrel against the woman’s chest. He fired four times in quick succession just before Maze waved his hand at the wolf and it flashed into shift mode, transforming back into a human. The man that hit the ground after the transformation was a cop Annaleia vaguely recognized. A detective. “No!” the man bellowed, his still-glowing eyes filled with agony, his expression pained as he met the wide, shocked eyes of the woman who’d just been shot.
Maze looked pleased. With a small, thoroughly evil smile, he let the woman go and said, “That’ll do.” Then he turned to Price, Randall nodded at him, and the two men vanished.
The gun Price had used to shoot the woman hit the ground at the same time she did.
Chapter Sixty – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The creatures that had been flooding the wardens in the street all disappeared when Victor Maze and his serial killer crony disappeared, leaving the wardens, Anna and her friends, Jarrod Sterling, and Detective Hendrix James to deal with the aftermath.
“Can… can you bring her back to me?” the detective now asked, his shaking voice cracking under the weight of his feelings. The woman Price had shot lay cradled in his arms. He’d dropped beside her, pulled her into his lap, and rocked gently back and forth with her the way Antares had done with Annaleia not so long ago.
This keeps happening, she thought. Victor Maze keeps putting us in these positions. Something needs to change.
“Can you?” he asked again as if she hadn’t heard him. “Faith, please bring her back to me.” He brushed the woman’s hair from her face and peered down at her as if she would open her hazel eyes any second now. She’s his partner, Anna thought. But also more.
“I can’t,” she admitted to him softly, shaking her head. But she kept her expression serene – because she knew something they didn’t know. She knew it because she could smell it, she could feel it, and because it was knowledge of magic, and its verity moved through two of her three hearts.
She turned to her friends, who were standing with Sterling just off to the side. “But she can.” She nodded at Piper.
Piper stared at her, mouth agape. She stared a little more. Her gaze flicked to the woman in the detective’s arms. And then flicked back at Annaleia to continue staring. “What was that?” she finally asked.
Anna couldn’t help but grin. “Piper, this is going to be hard for you to accept, but the truth is you now possess my ability to revive the dead.” Annaleia had unwittingly transferred the power when she’d saved her friends. Along with something else.
She looked at Carmen next. “And I know you’re not going to want to hear this, bruja,” she told Carmen with perfect Spanish pronunciation and more than a little sass. “But you got my ability to cast spells as a magic user.” Affecting a truly horrible British accent, she grumbled, “You’re a witch, Harry.” She smiled.
Now both girls stared at her. Carmen said, “No, mija you’re wrong. This was just residual magic.” She shook her head emphatically and gestured to her friend. “Piper said so.”
Anna nodded. “No doubt there was some of that. I poured everything I had into the two of you. But that’s just it…. I gave you everything I had.” She waited a beat for that to sink in, but she could hear the detective’s shallow, shaking breaths and his rapid-fire heart and she knew he was suffering. They were going to need to accept the truth with record speed.
“And now? When all is done and said?” Anna continued. She searched the crowd until she found her own warden leader. She met Conall’s gaze and nodded respectfully. “The torch has been passed,” she said. “And all is as it should be.”
Conall’s expression was both resigned and hopeful. He’d lost his clan’s resurrecting angel. However… Anna knew Piper well and she knew the Draco clan leader was thinking the same thing
she was. There was always the possibility of gaining another “resurrecting angel.” It was possible Piper would join the clan. Conall could be very convincing.
Which would mean that in the end, he would have lost nothing. Instead, he would have gained a dragon. A storm dragon.
“Anna, you’re wrong,” Piper said.
Anna turned back to face her friend. Piper shook her head; she’d gone pale. She no doubt felt the immense amount of pressure that had been shifted onto her shoulders. Anna could hear her heart speeding up dramatically. “I don’t feel any magic left,” Piper insisted. “All of that residual stuff I had at first is gone. Carmen is the one who had to transport us here, in fact.” She looked over at Carmen. “Maybe you should try to resurrect her,” Piper suggested.
Carmen’s eyes got very wide. “Son of a bitch Piper, I would know if I were Jesus Christo.”
“No, Piper,” Anna told her gently but firmly. “It has to be you.”
Piper turned back to her helplessly, the wind taken from her sails. Anna gently took hold of one of her hands and pulled, leading her to a spot directly beside the detective and his fallen partner. “Here,” she told her, gesturing for Piper to kneel next to them. “Just do what I tell you to do and trust me.”
Annaleia understood what Piper was going through. She was familiar with that “lack of magical feeling” that Piper was describing. The ability to revive the dead wasn’t something felt the way that magical energy could be felt. It was only its absence that could be felt, because it was draining. Unfortunately it never worked the other way around. That was where candy could help, at least a little. She’d learned that the hard way during her own baptism by fire.
And now here she was putting her friend through the same.
Piper gave her a final uncertain look before slowly lowering to her knees beside the detective and his partner. James looked from Annaleia to Piper, his gaze searching. He seemed so lost in that moment. And Anna could feel the shared anxieties, hopeful fears, and strained anticipation that everyone around them echoed where this was concerned.
Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon Page 42