On the other side of Slade sat the Dragon Hunter, Byrne. Dragons were among the highest-risk species within the thirteen realms, along with Tyrian’s own lot, and their Hunter had to be just as badass to contend with them. The bugger was fast, lightning fast. That Byrne had held his position for so long was a testament to his combat ability. Tyrian had yet to see anyone, friend or foe, hold a candle to Byrne in battle.
To Byrne’s right sat Lilith, one of only two females in the group. Her amber eyes followed the progress of her dagger intently as she tossed it into the air, catching the tip between her thumb and forefinger when it fell, before once again letting it fly. The Witch Hunter was a tightly packed stick of dynamite, ready to blow at the slightest provocation. Tyrian had made the mistake of revealing at a previous meeting that her fashion sense mirrored that of many of his charges. Her scathing retort that a Vampire wouldn’t know style if it bit him in the ass was followed promptly by a stinging pain on his left buttock, where she’d magicked a full-tooth bite. He’d let that one go with a warning, and since avoided mentioning her choice of dress.
To Lilith’s right was Jagger. The overly forthright Hell’s Angel embodied the bad-boy image with a not-so-subtle finesse. His leather-booted foot rested on the table in front of him, and his head was tipped back over the chair, dark blue eyes closed in feigned sleep. Tyrian did not envy the man his realm. Necros were by far the worst of the realm species in Tyrian’s opinion. They fed on the dead and dying, and they were bloody hard to kill.
Garrick sat next to Jagger. Tyrian didn’t know much about the Sidhe Hunter. Sidhes were considered moderate-risk, mostly due to the mischief they caused. They rarely ever harmed humans. Garrick himself appeared as calm and collected as a gentle breeze, slightly unfocused pale green eyes staring out across the expanse of black marble with a look akin to indifference as he waited for the meeting to commence.
Across from Garrick sat Lysander. Tyrian actively avoided that one. He couldn’t rightly remember the last time the man spoke, nor did he care to. A storm cloud of despair hung over the tall, unerringly beautiful Angel Hunter, casting a sullen shadow everywhere he moved. Tyrian didn’t know what had happened to cause the ever-present sadness within him, but to be around it for any length of time disturbed him.
To the right of Lysander sat his perpetually good-natured brother. Talk about your opposites. Aldrich was the Hunter for the Demon realm, one of the meanest and nastiest realms of all. That had never dragged him down, though. His constant smile made his light blue eyes almost glow with constant mirth, as though he were privy to some cosmic joke they all had yet to be enlightened on. It was probably true. Aldrich was the one Tyrian often went to for advice; his door was always open.
Beyond Aldrich sat Brinley. The Shade Hunter looked exhausted. He’d probably just been pulled in from a hunt. Shades were considered moderate-risk, but if they became agitated for whatever reason, they were a horrible menace. They fed on human emotion. Feelings of love and happiness made the Shades light, warm, and inconspicuous to their hosts. Feelings of anger or pain, however, made them dark and heavy, and highly susceptible to violent tendencies. Humans often attributed agitated Shades to malignant ghosts, not realizing that their own dark fear and hatred fed the problem. The only way to calm a Shade was to extract the negative emotions, a job that had, over the years, taken its toll on Brinley.
To Brinley’s right sat the Siren Hunter, Marsden. He had a pretty easy job, as the Sirens were a relatively peaceful species, preferring the calm blue waters of the open ocean. There they were, for the most part, undisturbed by humans. As it happened, Marsden seemed to spend most of his time lounging on beaches, drinking rum, and womanizing. The bastard was nothing if not appreciative of the female form.
Next to Marsden sat another of Tyrian’s good friends, Nikola. The dim lighting in the hallways was mostly for Nikola’s benefit. While he did not suffer the need to live in darkness, like his realm’s inhabitants, he always hunted in it, and had thus become accustomed to very little light. Nikola had served as the Hunter for the Nightstalker realm for over two thousand years. Nightstalkers, a wholly malicious species, preyed on terror. Nikola’s dark-as-night skin and eyes made him the ideal Hunter for the horrible beings. Nightstalkers were notoriously difficult to wrangle away from their prey, but he gave them no quarter. After all, their favorite victims were children, and Nikola had always had a soft spot for children.
Across from Tyrian, and to Nikola’s right, sat Dhyrante. The Troll Hunter appeared cool and collected, his aura of confidence legendary. While Trolls were considered a low-risk species, they were also the most difficult to detect. They almost never harmed humans, preferring to pilfer and steal from them instead. Dhyrante would have none of it. Trolls were only allowed to take discarded objects, a rule they furiously argued against. According to the Trolls, anything not attached to a human’s person was considered discarded. Socks, keys, food: pretty much anything they wanted, they took. Until Dhyrante got hold of them. He permitted them only to take from the landfills and garbage dumps. If he discovered they’d been inside a human’s home, swift and decisive punishment followed. Tyrian nodded to the Troll Hunter, and shifted his gaze to the left.
Seated at the head of the table was Starla, the leader of the Hunter Administration, and only known member of a race called the Druids. Native to the human realm, Druids were all but extinct. They had the ability to read minds, see the future, and even alter matter with their minds. So when the woman slowly materialized in her seat, no one blinked. Her long, flowing snow-white hair was plaited at the sides, and her milky white gaze took in the inhabitants of the room with rapt attention. When her eyes finally landed on Tyrian’s, he heard her voice in greeting inside his head.
“Good evening, Tyrian. How nice of you to finally join us. I trust your ventures proved fruitful?”
Tyrian nodded, slightly embarrassed for having arrived late.
“Good evening, Starla. They were quite intriguing.”
Starla nodded, and held Tyrian’s gaze for a moment longer. Then her crystal-clear voice addressed the rest of the Hunters aloud.
“Shall we proceed?”
Chapter 2
“Kaelyn.”
She lifted her hooded, unfocused eyes from the swirling amber liquid in the untouched glass to the vibrant stare of the pretty young bartender leaning on the bar top in front of them. She was met with a half-pitying, half-exasperated look from those emerald-green depths, and she wondered how she must have looked to cast such a worried frown across the woman’s usually cheerful face.
“You’ve been sitting here for the past half hour, and you haven’t touched your drink. Are you okay, love?” She placed a soft, pale hand over Kaelyn’s own. The light Irish brogue of the curly-haired, redheaded bartender brought to mind another accent, one that had haunted her dreams and left her waking drenched in sweat and wholly unsatisfied for the past week. That was how long it had been since she’d seen him.
Tyrian.
He’d told her quite ardently that he would come and see her again, right before he’d mysteriously vanished off the face of the earth. She hadn’t even thought to get his last name, though how many men could there be in Boston with the name Tyrian? She had discovered that there were none.
Another mystery that left her wondering if she’d even truly met the man at all.
It was already nine o’clock. She had closed the bookstore a half hour before, having given up waiting around the empty building for someone she was certain now was never going to show. She’d locked the door, and turned to walk around the corner and trudge the next couple of blocks to the red line in the ankle-deep snow. Instead, she’d somehow found herself seated at the bar.
She slouched atop a worn, leather-topped wooden stool at the far end of the heavy oak surface. The bar top had been sanded and lacquered by hand, and had been passed down through several generations of Irish descendants, until eventually winding up in Boston.
The curr
ent bartender’s grandfather had opened O’Shanahan’s, a family bar, in the late nineteen-twenties. Ember O’Shanahan was perhaps the only reason Kaelyn came into the ruddy establishment. She never had been much of a drinker.
Now, though, she really felt like she needed a drink.
Letting her shoulders slump, Kaelyn grudgingly responded to the question with a soft huff: “Really, how pathetic am I?”
Ember firmly planted her hands on the bar top next to Kaelyn’s, and a second later, she vaulted her lithe gymnast’s body over the bar, to land next to Kaelyn. A flurry of applause erupted from the inhabitants as Ember dipped in a curtsey, before tossing her bar rag at one of her three younger brothers. Kaelyn didn’t know which brother; she found it incredibly difficult to tell the identical triplets apart.
“Killian! Mind the bar,” Ember ordered more than asked. At all of five feet two inches and maybe a hundred pounds, Kaelyn could barely believe the woman had just celebrated her thirtieth birthday. She didn’t look a day over eighteen. Her strong Irish heritage ran quick through her blood, and she commanded the bar and its patrons with an iron fist.
She was also one of Kaelyn’s closest friends.
Plopping down on the bar stool next to her, Ember shot Kaelyn an authoritative stare that brooked no argument, and asked her what was wrong.
Talk about your loaded questions.
After sighing dejectedly, Kaelyn launched into the whirlwind meeting with Tyrian, and her disappointment at having been apparently dumped before she’d even begun to explore the burgeoning feelings he’d awoken within her. Ember listened intently, nodding every so often, with a look of concentration on her face. Kaelyn quietly thanked her lucky stars for having a friend like Ember. While the woman could be louder than a firecracker when riled, she was also the best listener Kaelyn had ever met.
By the end of her tirade, Kaelyn felt slightly empty, but quite proud of herself for not shedding the tears of frustration that had threatened to break loose since she’d walked in.
Ember nodded once more, and turned to stare out across the bar. “Sounds to me like you need a distraction,” she finally said.
Kaelyn’s eyes widened, and she shot a horrified glance at the woman she had considered her best friend. “No! Ember—”
A stinging pain glanced up Kaelyn’s arm as the back of Ember’s hand met her biceps with the back of her hand a little harder than she considered necessary. A disgruntled look passed over her friend’s face.
“Not that kind of distraction! Get your head outta the gutter, will you?”
Leaning over the bar, Ember grabbed a bottle of Irish whisky and two shot glasses.
“Come with me.” She grabbed Kaelyn’s arm and lifted her from the bar stool, then shooed her in front and up the stairs in the far corner of the room that led to the roof.
* * * *
The resounding chime of the solid mahogany Howard Miller just reached its fifth cadence as the door to the old English brownstone, which was securely nestled in Boston’s prestigious Beacon Hill, slowly swung inward. He slipped through the door unnoticed, not that anyone would have been able to see much anyway. He’d entered through the back, and there were no exterior lights around the property.
Tyrian slumped into his home, and gently kicked the door shut behind him. An entire week of hunting Necros had left him completely drained. After dragging himself up the stairs and into his sprawling master suite, he didn’t even bother removing his clothes as he stepped into the expansive marble shower. The water came on in response to his presence, the scalding liquid washing away the dirt and grime that covered almost every square inch of his frame.
Opening his eyes, Tyrian caught sight of what resembled an ear on the tile floor of the shower, and grimaced.
Bloody hell, he hated Necros.
Green blood swirled with red. He forced his arms to lift, dragged the scrap of cloth that had once been a t-shirt over his head, and tossed it in the corner of the shower. His pants and boots swiftly followed.
He inspected his body haphazardly in his daze, and discovered that all of his wounds had already closed. Another benefit the ornate circular branding on his left shoulder had given to him.
The blood seal. Proof that he was a Hunter.
Bracing his hands on the tiled wall, Tyrian let the steam wash away his stress. His thoughts drifted to his hazel-eyed bookshop keeper. It had been a week since he’d seen her, and he already missed her gentle smile and welcoming peppermint lilac scent. Just imagining it lightened his mood.
He wanted to see her.
After grabbing the shower gel, Tyrian dumped a generous amount into his hands and scrubbed at his upper body. The woodsy scent filled the space almost instantly, and brought with it a sorely-needed calm.
Rolling his shoulders under the hot spray, Tyrian closed his eyes and let his mind wander. He vividly remembered the feeling of Kaelyn’s body pressed against his own, but in his mind, there were no clothes between them. He ran his hands up the length of her back, reveling in the feel of her soft bare skin.
As his mind’s hands moved higher, his own hand drifted lower.
In his vision, he leaned in, trailing his lips across the line of her jaw and up to her ear, then capturing the lobe in his teeth and giving it a gentle tug. A soft gasp rewarded him, as blunt fingernails raked down his biceps. He pulled back, feeling his pulse jump at the look of hooded passion in her murky hazel gaze, before he dipped his head once more and claimed her lips.
Heaven had never tasted so sweet.
He kissed her with all of the passion she’d ignited within him during their first meeting. She responded in kind, opening her mouth in an invitation for which he needed no cajoling. He swept his tongue into her mouth, plundering her depths with all the finesse of a man starved, coaxing her tongue into a lurid dance of white-hot desire. It licked through his veins with furious abandon, dragging conscious, rational thought down into the pit of his gut, where it exploded into a fireball of molten heat.
Christ, he hadn’t even touched her yet.
Following that train of thought, Tyrian ceased his tempting motions and wrapped his hand fully around the base of his thick shaft, fisting tightly and moving in short, concentrated jerks. He’d never really been one to beat around the bush.
In his fantasy, Kaelyn wrapped her leg around his hip, bringing her hot wet center flush with his straining length, and moved her hips in slow circles as his hands caressed the ample globes of her breasts. Bending her over his arm, Tyrian dipped his head and took one of her rosy peaks into his mouth. Then he lavished the pebbled bud with his lips, teeth, and tongue, leaving her panting in his arms.
Gripping her other thigh, Tyrian then lifted her easily against him, rubbing himself against her in time with the thrusts of his hand.
He was so damn close.
Resting his forehead against the shower wall, Tyrian slid his other hand down his taut stomach to palm his sack, and massaged deftly as he raced towards his peak. As his fantasy self plunged into Kaelyn’s waiting warmth, his release exploded. The force wrenched a strangled groan from his throat, and nearly brought him to his knees.
The power she held over him, and she wasn’t even there.
Thumping his head against the wall to restore rational thought, Tyrian finished washing himself and turned off the water. He bent down and grabbed his ruined garments, and tossed them down the garbage chute. Necro blood was all but impossible to get out of clothing, and if left for too long, its acidic qualities would eat through almost anything.
Ten minutes later, the refreshed Hunter stepped back into the hallway, a fresh black t-shirt and dark wash jeans adorning his body as he made his way toward the kitchen. Looking down, Tyrian cringed at the bloody footprints that littered the solid bamboo floorboards, leading from the back door into his shower.
Caleb would probably give him an earful.
Speaking of his Page, he hadn’t heard from Caleb at all while he’d been on assignment with Jag and B
yrne. As with most Pages, Caleb was an orphan, who lived in the converted underground room of Tyrian’s brownstone: separate, yet available when needed.
Pausing at the end of the stairs, Tyrian pressed one of the series of buttons on the wall, and proceeded to the kitchen.
A second later, the Hunter picked up the sound of a curse with his heightened hearing, followed by a loud thump, preceding the telltale patter of feet as someone trudged up the stairs to the main level. The door to the basement apartment swung open, revealing Tyrian’s quite disheveled Page. Wearing only boxers, he was pulling a black t-shirt that read, “Let me drop everything and work on your problems” over his messy, dark brown hair.
At Tyrian’s lifted eyebrow, Caleb’s unnaturally blue eyes fell to his shirt.
“What? It’s five o’clock in the morning. I think it fits the situation.” Caleb spat caustically and walked towards Tyrian, his arms now crossing his chest. He suddenly stopped, a visible cringe working its way from his scalp to his bare toes as he slowly lifted his right foot, trailing a string of green slime with it.
Taking a deep, calming breath, Caleb slowly followed the trail of slimy footprints with his eyes, his face turning different shades of red as the trail continued. It ran from the back door across the living room and up the stairs. Clenching his hands into fists at his sides, Caleb leveled a stare in Tyrian’s direction that would have turned an ordinary man to ash.
“Why is it so difficult to leave your boots at the door? I-is this Necro blood?” Caleb asked with a look of pure disgust. He hobbled over to the kitchen counter, and whipped a dish towel from one of the drawers.
Immortal Sleepers Page 2