Mortality Bites - The COMPLETE Boxed Set (Books 1 - 10): An Urban Fantasy Epic Adventure

by Ramy Vance

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Is he looking at us or out the window?”

  “I’d say he’s looking at you, Isa.”

  I spun around, slamming my tray onto the rails. “No way. He’s definitely looking at the pretty Montreal sky.”

  Aimee glanced outside. “The sky looks like a white coat that got trampled on by dirty boots. You should talk to him—he’s alone.”

  “True.” I thought about what she was suggesting, then I thought about who was suggesting it. “Wait a minute, aren’t you Kat’s friend? Why would you betray her like that?”

  "We met a couple times. She was a little too aggressive for us to be friends. Not like you and me," Aimee said. "Kat's nice, but all's fair in love and war."

  I grabbed an apple, set it on my tray. “I can’t. He’s with her.”

  She shrugged. “So? Doesn’t mean he’s a nun.”

  “Men can’t be nuns.”

  She sighed. “It was a joke, Isa. Sometimes I think I should hang out with humans more often.”

  “Who would do your biology homework for you?” I flashed her a grin.

  “Oh, that’s it.” She set both hands on my shoulders and turning me toward Justin. “Go figure out what genus and species he is, future biologist.”

  I yelped as she pushed me in his direction. “Hey, I haven’t finished getting my food!”

  Aimee grabbed a plate of salmon, set it on my tray. “Got you covered, fam.”

  Salmon was my absolute favorite. My gaze softened on Aimee; she really did know me.

  I sighed, turned back to Justin. He had dug into his mountain of whipped cream, and even with his terrible dietary choices and downcast eyes, I still couldn’t help but find him dreamy.

  I wanted to approach, but I felt frozen to the spot. How would Katrina walk over to him? Probably with a confident step and two arms slid tight around his waist, considering she hadn’t been around for weeks.

  And how would he react if he saw her? Those blue eyes would light up as I’d seen them do when she stepped out of our English class and he’d be waiting for her. His eyebrows would lift for a half-second—which signaled attraction and excitement among Homo sapiens—and he would stand, enfold her in his arms.

  What if he could see her again? When the thought entered my mind, my hand flew to my chest, searching out my amulet. I pulled it from beneath my sweater, rubbed at the gem. I had seen Katrina often enough that I would only have to burn two months of my life to shift into her likeness.

  A few months of life for a few hours of bliss? Sounded like a fair trade to me. We encantados really, really prized love, lust and everything in between.

  I started toward the bathroom. I heard Aimee calling my name, but I didn’t respond, heading straight for the single-stalled handicap bathroom. I needed the privacy, and it would only take me about ten minutes to change, so I wasn’t that bad.

  Just a little bad.

  As I stepped into the bathroom, I shut the door and locked it. When I turned, my redheaded visage stared back at me.

  “Stop judging me,” I said. The face who stared back had actually been a young woman I’d seen in traveling in Rio, shortly before I’d flown to Montreal. And she had looked so…glamorous, so glorious. I’d thought, there’s the perfect person for me to be.

  There’s the person who’ll change everything.

  But soon after I’d arrived at McGill, all that gloriousness had fallen away. Now she only looked pallid and judgmental under the fluorescent light. That look reminded me of how he had stared at me, all those decades ago.

  I closed my eyes, gripping my amulet. I envisioned Katrina Darling: the brown-blonde hair, her heart of a face, the green eyes. And as I did, a tremor of power passed through me.

  Magic. It had been so long, just a taste of it felt immense.

  After a moment, it surged in me, filling my body like carbonate. First it slipped into my bones, cracking them with painful abruptness. I had to be shorter. I had to be finer-boned. Even my facial structure had to change.

  I gritted through it all, my eyes firmly shut. Back before the gods left—when I could use magic as freely as I could breathe air—I hadn’t thought anything of shifting into a new form. Now I could feel the hours rolling off the end of my life. The whole process had become a little scary.

  But, how does the saying go? Fashion hurts.

  Shutter flashes of Katrina Darling passed through my mind: the back of her perfectly groomed head in English class, the sight of her walking through campus, how she smiled, how she frowned, how she contemplated.

  Then came the muscles. They refitted themselves to my new frame, reshaping slender and lithe. The vocal cords adjusted to create the cadences of her speech.

  I hadn’t expected everything to shrink so much. Katrina Darling was even smaller than my old form, which wasn’t very large to begin with. For some reason, I’d always thought she was … bigger than that. And I wasn’t referring to adipose tissue. Her presence in class, when she spoke, had always made her seem larger than the body she occupied.

  And I realized, mid-shift, that she didn’t necessarily see herself as limited by her size. She was who she was.

  When I opened my eyes in the handicapped stall, I flinched. There she was, watching me. It was almost as though Katrina Darling had snuck in while I was shifting and was staring me down.

  When I lived in Brazil, we encantados had always called ourselves artists. We even had a test by which we judged our shapeshifting: if we saw our own reflection and felt, for a heart-stopping moment, that we had been found out by the person we were imitating, we had succeeded. We had made a person come to life.

  I had passed that test many times, but today, I had captured Katrina Darling more acutely than perhaps any shift I’d attempted before. The hair, the face, everything.

  Maybe it was the knowledge of my own impermanence, that I was sacrificing two months of my life to create this portrait of a woman. Or maybe it was the inspiration. The hair, the face, everything.

  I ticked some fake dust off the shoulder of my sweater—which was a little big on me now—and grinned.

  The door handle jostled, and a knock followed.

  “Be just a minute,” I called, and jerked my head around to survey the empty stall. It was like she had spoken over my shoulder.

  When I opened the door, a young woman in a wheelchair idled a few feet off. She offered me a slant-eyed look, surveying my perfectly able body.

  My first instinct was to apologize, but I suppressed it. Would Katrina apologize? She didn’t ever seem sorry for anything. But it was right to be sorry for taking up the handicapped bathroom when I didn’t legitimately need it.

  Something the campus therapist for Others had suggested during our last session came to mind. Instead of apologizing, thank people. But what should I thank her for?

  Anxiety—the familiar teeter-totter between my old personality and this new one I still wore like a costume—swelled in me like a fist gripping my heart. Maybe this had been a mistake, becoming Katrina. My assertiveness was melting before I’d even left the bathroom.

  I hovered for a few seconds in front of the door until she began rolling her chair forward. “Are you done?” she said. “I really have to go.”

  I blinked hard, stepped aside. “Yes, I’m done. Thank you for being patient with me.”

  I didn’t know if that was what Katrina would have said, but it was what felt right in the moment. It felt right for me.

  She glanced up at me for a second, and the ghost of a smile touched her lips. “I like your bag,” she said, and then she rolled past me into the bathroom.

  I grinned after her. Score one for the Dolce Gabbana bag. That sounded like something she might say.

  When I walked back into the dining hall, no one seemed to notice at first. After all, I just looked like your typical (super cute) college freshman. It wasn’t until I’d crossed in amongst the tables that I spotted Aimee, sitting alone with two trays. One was mine, the salmon
now cold on the plate. I felt a pang of guilt, but I’d apologize to her later for skipping out.

  As I passed her, she lifted her eyes, paused with a big spoonful of pudding in her mouth. “Ka-sriba?”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard her. Instead, I beelined for the table where Justin sat. He’d managed to plow through about half of that pile of whipped cream, and I smirked as I leaned against the table, one hand set flat on its surface.

  “That’s sweet, lover.” I reached down, swept up a fingerful and set it between my lips. “You got a double portion for me.”

  ↔

  IN MY YEARS AS AN ENCANTADO, I’ve experienced a lot of adoring gazes. Men and women alike have looked at me like I’m their goddess, the heroine of their own personal fairy tale.

  And for a time, I was. Always for a time. I could inspire that adoration within a few days, and I could even make it last weeks or months. But the illusion always faded, the lust rarely passing into something deeper, truer. It might have had something to do with showing them my real form, or it might have been an inevitability.

  Despite it all, the thrill of that adoring gaze never became less potent.

  But that wasn’t the look Justin gave me when his eyes rose to my face. I registered shock in his raised eyebrows and open mouth. Then a dash of confusion, the eyebrows pulling together to form those elevens I mentioned earlier.

  “Kat?”

  “In the flesh.” I tilted my head with a smile.

  For a half-second, his eyes softened into wrought affection, and he stood, came around the table and pulled me into his arms. “What are you doing here? Where have you been?”

  I melted into his tight embrace, ran my hands along the hard muscle of his torso and back. GoneGods be true, the muscles. And the warmth—he was impossibly warm, like a furnace.

  When he kissed the top of my head and smelled my hair, it felt better than I’d ever imagined, and I had imagined it being pretty awesome. Definitely worth the burnt time.

  “Good to see you, too,” I murmured into his chest.

  After a moment, he stepped back, both hands on my arms. That furrow returned to his eyebrows, and then he got upset.

  “That’s what you have to say after all this time? ‘Good to see you?’ Kat, I’ve been freaking out. You haven’t been in your classes, you haven’t been on campus, you haven’t responded to my emails. Your phone has been off. You just disappeared, and you never even called or texted or sent me a single word to let me know you hadn’t died.”

  Really, Kat? I thought. Then, Who am I to judge Kat’s choices? But she did leave me in a tight spot.

  My mouth opened, but I didn’t know what to say. Blood rushed in my ears, my heart like a drumbeat, and my brain’s circuitry felt completely inefficient, sparking in all the wrong places.

  “I …” I began.

  But before I could answer, I was saved by the sounds of shattering glass and screaming students as the biggest wolf I’d ever seen in my five hundred years burst into the dining hall.

  CHAPTER 3

  J ustin and I stared, both frozen, at the creature that had just exploded through a pane of glass and stood bristled and red-eyed at the front of the dining hall.

  Most of the half-asleep students took a second longer than normal people would to respond, and then the first scream broke out. With that, more pairs of checkered pajamas than I’ve ever seen at once were rushing toward the exits.

  Instead of fleeing like the others, Justin only grabbed my hand. “What the hell is that?”

  I squinted at the creature. It resembled a wolf, but many times as large; its spine probably cleared ten feet at the crest. And its eyes glowed such a fiery red, it reminded me more of a hellhound, or…

  “Lobisomem,” I whispered, and immediately ducked us under the dining table. We were at the back of the room—trapped, without any nearby exits—and anyone who could had already taken off through a side door or scrambled into one of the hallway.

  Which left just a few people huddling under tables—and me and Justin.

  Justin turned to me. “What did you say?”

  I looked over at his beautiful, ignorant face. “It’s death. We need to get out of here.”

  He shook his head. “If it’s death, we need to help these people. You and I need to fight it.”

  “We can’t fight—“ I began, and stopped sudden. “You and I,” he’d said, like this was a familiar thing. “What do you mean, 'fight it?' ”

  “You know, like as Cherub.” He mimed sliding a mask over his face and stabbing the air with a knife. “Well, mostly you fighting it and me cheering you on.”

  I stared at him. Katrina Darling was that girl I’d seen in the cherub mask? Over the past few months we’d had some crazy things happen on campus, most involving monsters, and during one of those events I’d been walking through campus when I saw a girl in a cherub mask rush by with a pack of … superheroes behind her.

  As in, Avengers-style, fireball-shooting people in costumes and capes.

  So Kat wasn’t a normal college freshman, and that wasn’t just because of her style and her perfectly coiffed hair.

  A low, rumbling growl emanated from the front of the dining hall, and from beneath the table, I could see that the creature—could it really be a lobisomem?—was slowly crossing in amongst the tables.

  And it seemed to be sniffing. I heard the distinct sound of a snout sucking in air, tasting scents.

  Fear rose up my spine like ice water. What was it scenting for?

  The lobisomem was a creature of South American lore, most popular in children’s stories told after nightfall. Most humans didn’t believe it was real—and I hadn’t, either—but a single detail of the stories I’d heard stood out to me as too great a coincidence.

  They were summoned creatures, called into this plane to bring death to anyone their summoner marked as prey. And lobisomem were singularly capable when it came to scenting magic.

  Or more specifically, the use of magic. They could smell it from a hundred miles.

  I had used magic just a few minutes ago. And my illusions were sustained by it. But this lobisomem was something more, something different than the stories I’d heard ... This one seemed to interfere with my magic. I stared down at my hands, terrified.

  “What is it, Kat?” Justin asked.

  My gaze lifted to him. “Do I look different to you?”

  Another growl issued from the far end of the hall—it was near the bathroom now—followed by more screams and pounding feet.

  “This isn’t really the time, babe,” Justin said.

  Putting aside the fact he’d called me “babe,” which made my heart beat faster than it already had been, I scooted closer to him. “This thing is too dangerous for us to fight here,” I breathed into his ear. “We need to get out of this building, and maybe we can lure it away from the other students.”

  He nodded. “Good call. How?”

  A trash can fell over with a loud clang, and I flashed a glance over my shoulder toward the hallway. The creature's tail disappeared around the corner. Was he following the scent of my magic? “We run,” I said, pushing Justin out from under the table.

  We bolted for the front door of the dining hall, though I moved awkwardly in my boots. My feet were smaller than they had been before, which didn’t couple well with heels.

  I stumbled, and Justin caught me. (What a hunk, I thought for the briefest of infatuated moments.) The closest exit was the floor-to-ceiling window the wolf had crashed in through, and Justin ran us straight out through it, our feet crunching over the broken glass.

  That was a mistake. As soon as we ran over that glass, a snarl sounded from down the hallway. We spun right and tore down the sidewalk, and the wolf of Amazonian legend blasted out of the dining hall after us.

  It skidded to a stop, and I thought maybe we’d fit in with all the other students running for their lives. But then it let a howl so loud they must have heard it throughout the entire province,
and the wolf clawed the pavement with gravel-crunching power as it leapt into motion after us.

  Lobisomem was on the hunt now.

  ↔

  “WHICH WAY?” Justin yelled.

  “Here.” I hooked a right and took us down a narrow alley. The creature wouldn’t be slender enough to follow us through here—or so I’d thought.

  Ten seconds later, the ground rumbled as it leapt onto the roof of the building to our right, and I heard the pounding of its paws as it ran behind us … twenty feet up.

  I ventured a glance up and back, spotted those red eyes staring back down at me, the lips curled into a snarl. Those canines were as long as my newly reshaped forearm.

  “Don’t look up,” I breathed, already totally winded.

  “I hadn’t planned on it.” To his credit, Justin seemed to be fine when it came to lung capacity. He was an athlete, after all. He pointed some twenty feet ahead of us, where a door led off into a building. “Underground?”

  He was pointing to an entrance to Montreal’s underground mall and tunnels, which ran throughout the campus and the city. I had an acute map of them in my head because, in my Brazilian hatred of the cold, I’d used them all the time.

  The lobisomem wouldn’t be able to get down the narrow stairwell, and even if he managed to, navigating that space would definitely slow it down.

  “Underground,” I agreed.

  We darted left, our shoes tapping hard on the stairs as we plunged down the passageway. A woman carrying a shopping bag in each hand trudged up the steps in the opposite direction, and I yelled, “You’ll want to use a different exit!” as we barreled by.

  We hit the tiled floor at a run, and we didn’t slow. Behind us, a massive thud sounded as the wolf presumably leapt down into the alley. The woman we’d passed let out a scream, and I glanced over my shoulder.

  She had dropped her bags and was careening back down the way she’d come. Behind her, the creature's head and forepaws were trying to press inside the entryway to the stairwell. But he was stuck. He let a frustrated howl conveying as much, and the sheer loudness of it made me clap my hands over my ears as we ran past stores and shops.