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

by Ramy Vance

  We took the first turn we saw, which led us left and deeper into the tunnels. “I think … we’re safe,” I panted.

  Justin wouldn’t let go of my hand, and he kept pulling me on. “If a semester of fighting monsters and nasty Others with you has taught me anything, it’s that you should never stop moving when you think you’re safe.”

  “Then you’ll have to go on without me,” I said, gasping for breath. I stumbled, and he finally ducked us into a lingerie shop. We nearly knocked over a scantily clad mannequin as we tumbled in, and the attendant—half-folded panties in hand—stared at us with wide eyes.

  “It’s her birthday,” Justin said, navigating us past the attendant, “and she’s really excited to get her present.”

  I raised a hand as we passed, my cheeks about ten degrees hotter than the rest of me, and the attendant offered a wan smile before she resumed folding.

  When we got into the back, we stood next to a rack of teddies and, breathing hard, stared at the store’s entrance. Far off, I could hear the howling and some vague screams. But they didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

  “Is it still coming?” Justin whispered.

  “Maybe?”

  As soon as I’d said it, the howling stopped. We waited in a held-breath stasis for four or five minutes, but everything seemed to have returned to normal. Well, more or less.

  There was still this fact: a creature of Amazonian legend had appeared in Montreal, and had chased me across the campus and into a Victoria’s Secret.

  Justin turned to me, and I to him. And before I could say anything, he wrapped his arms around me and pressed me into a kiss so delicious my thoughts slipped back into Portuguese.

  After a minute or an hour or a day, a voice filtered in. “Can I help you two with anything?”

  Filho da puta.

  Justin pulled away with a soft laugh. “No, thanks.”

  But I just stayed right where I was, my lips parted. That had been the best kiss of my long, long life. (A little hyperbolic, sure, but we encantado live in the moment.) My eyes slowly drifted to the attendant, whom I might have burnt to the ground if my gaze were capable of such a thing.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to save that for elsewhere.” She winked at us as she turned away.

  “Well,” he said, lowering his hands to hold mine, “I think we’re safe to leave.”

  I nodded, and we walked together out of the store and through one of the far exits. In the tunnels we saw the remnants of the lobisomem’s presence—a candy display knocked over, someone’s coat dropped as they fled—but an attendant was already righting the display, and people were back to their shopping.

  No screams, no howling. How quickly mortal terror shifted back into mid-morning errands.

  “Do you think we ought to go back?” I asked.

  Justin shot me a look. “Why?”

  “We could see what’s up—maybe it’s still stuck in the stairwell.”

  “Like a dog in a kitty door?”

  I suppressed a smile. “I guess.”

  “As funny as that would be, absolutely not.”

  “I thought you wanted to fight it.”

  “Yeah, when we were cornered,” Justin said. “But that was only because we had no other option. Look at me, Kat—what would I fight with, anyway?”

  I’ll admit it: I took the opportunity to look him over before I said, “Point taken.” We headed in the opposite direction down the tunnel and climbed another set of stairs leading back up to the city.

  When we came into the daylight, I fully expected my face to be the recipient of two sets of angry claws, but nothing hit me except a wave of brittle cold.

  Out here, the day went on, and the world went on. And so did we, Justin and Katrina, except we walked much faster than two lovers normally would. We walked like we were being followed.

  “Your place?” he asked.

  I gritted my teeth, shook my head. We definitely weren’t going there. “Can we go to yours?”

  “Sure, it’s just that you don’t usually like to come to the O3 house…”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Okay.” He took the lead. “What did you call that thing? Lobo?”

  “Lobisomem,” I said, scanning ahead of us and behind. Everything still seemed normal, but wolves weren’t loud creatures … until they were. They were quiet predators when they needed to be. “It’s a creature of South American legend. A hunter.”

  “How do you know that?”

  My eyes flicked to him. Maybe Kat shouldn’t know such things. “The Other Studies Library,” I said. “I’ve been on a creatures of South American lore kick lately.”

  “Of course you have,” he said. “Wait, but when did you get back to Montreal?”

  “I mean, I was on a kick before winter break,” I corrected. The more we talked, the more things seemed to be gumming up. Names, dates, places, people. I began to realize how little I actually knew about Katrina Darling. If only he’d asked me what color my hair was, or what desk I sat at in English 101. But he wasn’t going for the easy questions.

  So I did something I had been wanting to do for months. I threw my arms around Justin, pressed my whole body to his, and pulled his face down. When our lips met, I parted his with my tongue, and I felt his body stiffen before it relaxed into mine.

  I had felt this before. Many times. During my centuries of immortality I had fallen in love with hundreds of men, and they with me. Or at least, most had fallen into an all-encompassing passion with me.

  I was always a beautiful young woman. It was the gender I associated myself with, as all encantado are biologically female. You see, legend and lore have it wrong about us … encantado have never been male. That’s our blessing, our curse: we’re the superior gender, but we can’t reproduce with male encantado because there are none, and human men can’t impregnate us, either.

  We’re functionally barren.

  But that fact has never made me any less desirous of men.

  While some among us didn’t prefer them, I always had. Oh, how I preferred them. There’s a reason Michelangelo sculpted David. The human male form, properly developed and cared for, is unmatched.

  The other part of the encantado curse is our predisposition for obsession. Sometimes—once every few decades—we’ll see a man, and then we won’t be able to see any other man until we’ve been with that one. And by “been with,” I don’t just mean in the physical sense. I mean the whole shebang: physically, emotionally, spiritually.

  Often, we aren’t able to break that obsession until that man dies. It’s more or less how humans define “love,” and it had happened to me a dozen times over hundreds of years, though never since the gods had left.

  Not until now. For me, Justin Truly was one of those men.

  When I pulled away, he stared at me wide-eyed.

  “Take me back to your place,” I whispered.

  CHAPTER 4

  I didn’t see any of what we passed on the way into the O3 house. There might have been other rooms, and there might have been stairs. I also remembered something about a door he pushed me up against on our way into his bedroom.

  And there also might have been a killer wolf still out there, hunting the two of us. But for the next hour, we didn’t properly exist in Montreal. We occupied a half-place where I only knew touch and taste and smell, and all of it felt like too much and not enough.

  Which is to say, I nearly killed the man.

  Afterward, he lay sprawled across his bed, panting. “You ...”

  I smiled, propping myself on my elbow. One finger traced figure eights on his chest. “Me?”

  “Those things you did,” he said, half-delirious. “The part with the tongue and the earlobe. And then you bit me.” He lifted his head to inspect his shoulder.

  “You seemed to like it.”

  The blue eyes turned to me. “Kat, that was … unreal. It was like you, but not you.”

  My stomach flipped, and I said nothing. I pl
aced a delicate kiss on his lips before I lay back on the pillow and cast my eyes around his bedroom. Neat, orderly, if not a bit gender-stereotypical: lots of deep blues and dark-stained wooden furniture and some football awards gleaming off the walls.

  “Where did you learn those moves?” he persisted.

  “A lady never reveals her secrets.” But the truth was: he wouldn’t like the answer. Men didn’t often like knowing that their woman had gained her intimate knowledge elsewhere, from another.

  At least, not the men I’ve loved.

  I sat up to pull on my panties and top. Beside me, a window streamed in the last dregs of light. It would be nighttime soon. If there was one thing I remembered from the legend of the lobisomem, it was that the night was its habitat. Prime time for hunting.

  Justin’s hand slipped it around my waist, pulled me back toward him. I shrieked as I slid up against his body and he pressed my head to his chest. “I want you right here.”

  I conformed myself to the shape of him, pressing my head into the hollow of his shoulder. “Right here is pretty nice.”

  He stroked my shoulder. “That thing is still out there.”

  “It is.”

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. And I honestly didn’t. All I wanted to do was enjoy Justin, to forget that anything existed outside the frame of this bed. It was immature, irresponsible, and I didn’t care.

  So I did the thing that makes all men forget whatever it was they were talking about. And when I did it, Justin’s eyebrows rose, he turned his face to me, and we sank—or slid, or glided—into the second show of the evening.

  Maybe, I thought, just maybe it’ll disappear. Maybe the lobisomem had been unsummoned. Maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this, and Justin and I could just forget about it all.

  That was the thought I fell asleep with, while outside the moon shone like a gleaming quarter over our heads.

  ↔

  IN THE MORNING, Justin and I did the most couple-y thing you could think of: I gave him my “new” phone number, and then we walked arm-in-arm to the coffee shop. On the way, he stopped us in front of a poster. Beneath the obnoxiously massive World Government symbol, it read:

  The World Army wants you!

  Think you have what it takes to train with humanity’s best?

  Come find out at our recruitment session at McGill’s Fitness Center — 5pm this Thursday.

  “Ugh,” I said automatically. The World Army—the encapsulation of just about everything that was wrong with this world. They were so Otherist it wasn’t even funny. It was scary, actually.

  “Ugh?” Justin glanced at me.

  Then I remembered: I wasn’t Isabella. I was Katrina Darling, who might be of a different opinion about the whole thing. I waved a hand. “Nothing. I got a hair in my mouth.”

  “What do you think about me joining this?” Justin pointed at the poster. “I could be more useful to you.”

  Useful to me? I didn’t know what he meant by that, but Katrina seemed like a tough girl. She probably liked her men rough and tumble.

  “I don’t know much about it,” I said. “But if it would make you stronger, why not?”

  “OK.” He gave the poster another once-over. “Maybe I’ll go to the session.”

  At the cafe, we drank from tiny cups while admiring each other from either end of a small, wrought iron table.

  “You drink coffee now.” Justin eyed my pure shot of espresso. “And not watered down, either.”

  “Turns out college brings on a lot of vices,” I said, taking a short sip. “What have you been up to over the break?”

  “I was home with my parents.” His shoulders rounded a little; this clearly made him uncomfortable. “I was pretty sad for a while, though I found ways to distract myself.”

  I paused with my cup half-raised. “Sad?”

  “About us. The way we fought before break.” His hand reached out to me. “I’m so glad we’ve fixed things, Kat. I’m sorry about what happened with dybbuk, for my part in all of it.”

  Dybbuk. I had never heard of such a person—or such an ugly name. Had Justin cheated on Kat? I was irate on her behalf (even if I was the one with whom he was technically cheating now. Sort of). “Oh,” I said. He waited for me to say more, so I added, “I accept your apology.”

  This made him smile. “I’m happy with you. It feels like things are different between us—you’re asking me more questions and listening to my answers more closely. You’re more forgiving.”

  I set my hand over his. “That’s because I care about you.”

  I didn’t know if he and Katrina had exchanged the L-word; I hadn’t heard him say it to me yet. But I did care about Justin, and I wanted to hear what he had to say about things.

  I might have been bound to obsession by my encantado nature, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t recognize a good man when I saw one. And the truth was, every time I’d seen him over the past five months, he had been doing something decent, even if it was just giving his attention to the person he was with.

  He had grown on me in the way most good things do: in small, incremental moments. Even if he hadn’t been aware of those moments.

  He rubbed his thumb over my knuckles and a shiver went up my arm. The smallest inkling came to me that he might actually like Isabella—me—even if I didn't look like Katrina Darling.

  "The way you handled that creature yesterday," he said, "it made me so proud of you."

  I leaned close. "You mean the lobisomem?"

  He touched my nose with one finger. "Yes, I mean the lobisomem."

  A smile touched my lips, then disappeared. "But all I did was run."

  "You led it out of the dining hall, away from all those students. And you had the brilliant thought of making for the underground, which saved both our bacons. You’re so brave. It’s the reason I fell for you.”

  This was all very sweet, but my gut cinched. He liked Kat because she was brave, which was the opposite of how I’d spent pretty much my entire immortal and mortal life operating.

  Subterfuge. Illusions. Hiding. Avoiding confrontation. Those were my bread and butter.

  Yesterday, all I had done was run away from that creature. And if it showed up now, I would do it again. I would hide, hope all my problems would disappear while I kept my head down.

  You could call me Isabella “Avoidance” Ramirez.

  Justin was studying me. “What's wrong?”

  I refocused on the man at hand. “You fell for me because I’m brave?”

  “And because you’re cute. But that was just what turned my head. It’s who you are that I care about.”

  I sighed, closing my eyes. “Merda.”

  “What did you say?”

  Right—Kat probably didn’t know Portuguese. “Nothing.” I pulled my hand from under his, shame enveloping me like a blanket. Another thing about encantados: we’re often driven by emotion, by the moment.

  And in this moment, I felt terrible. He didn’t deserve the Katrina Darling currently sitting across from him. He deserved better—a woman who would step to the plate when she was tested.

  And all of this—the trickery, the illusion—suddenly felt very wrong, and very stupid of me.

  I’d opened my mouth to tell him as much when a hand slapped down in the center of our little table, sending our cups toppling. We both jerked back as coffee landed in our laps.

  Around us, the cafe went silent. Every face turned.

  The hand between Justin and me didn’t move, its long fingernails biting into the tablecloth. The back of that hand had lost some of its pigmentation to age, the coloring separating into light and dark spots pressing into wrinkles upon wrinkles.

  I knew that hand. My eyes followed it to the wrist and up the arm it belonged to, finally landing on the face of the old woman who’d walked into my English class yesterday.

  “Eu sabia que era você,” she whispered, so small and shrunken she
barely rose higher than me when I was seated.

  But she was terrifying nonetheless. She stared right at me, those green eyes boring into mine, and I thought again how familiar they were just before she raised an enormous claw and drew it down my arm as delicately as if she were opening an envelope.

  ↔

  A LINE of red blood emerged where the old woman’s claw had ripped through my white shirt and into my skin. It wasn’t a deep cut, but that didn’t stop her from straightening and pointing the red-tipped end of the claw at my face.

  “A maldição da minha família volta para você,” she growled with triumph. Which meant, “The curse on my family comes back to you.”

  And then, before I or Justin or anyone else thought to react, she turned and swept out of the cafe and onto the street, her white hair and dress floating behind her.

  For his part, Justin was too absorbed by the hot coffee all over his pants. When he looked back up at me, I’d already thrown my hand over the cut on my arm and stood from my seat.

  “Kat,” he said, then his brow furrowed. “Hey, you’re looking kind of … pink.”

  My breath caught. The other patrons were staring at us—at me. And the old woman was gone through the double doors. No one had seen her—not Justin, not the barista at the counter, not the other people sitting around us.

  “The curse,” she had said. Coming from a superstitious culture, I was acutely familiar with curses—we encantado end up cursed often. Over five hundred years I’d been called all sorts of names, and I was used to it. I mean, I never enjoyed being cursed, but I empathized with those left behind when a man chose to run away with an encantado.

  And by that, I mean: I never blamed them.

  But sometimes they weren’t just idle curses. On occasion, people who have been so severely wronged curse themselves with all sorts of nasties: they vow never to die, never to find love. They do this as an exchange, because the flipside of that curse is that they gain certain … well, for lack of a better word, powers.

  And this old woman’s power was the Mark of the Huntress.