The Monster Ball: A Paranormal Romance Anthology

by Heather Hildenbrand

  “Can you spell that out for me?” I teased. Wait, no. I didn’t tease. I wasn’t engaging. “Or even better,” I quickly spoke over his response. “Tell me your tasks, so I can decide if my need for answers is worth all of this.”

  “You’re not scared?” he moved forward so suddenly that I reacted without thinking, and by the time he was upon me, there was a dagger between us, pressing up against his chest. He looked down at it, laughing, and then he pressed forward, applying pressure to the blade. My grip wavered, easing back. With each inch forward he pressed, he forced me to move my hand back, until the knife was suddenly as close to me as it was to him. He bent down, uncaring that I was trying to threaten him, and his hand caught in my hair, easing my head back.

  “You really need to stop touching me like you own me,” I breathed out angrily as my face tipped back for him.

  He bent a little, bringing our faces closer together. We still weren’t skin-to-skin, but we were close to it, and I could tell that he was thinking about closing what little distance remained between us.

  “You really need to stop ... everything you’ve done since you stepped into this castle,” he cautioned me. “I’m not the kind of man whose attention you want to catch. I’m not the kind of man whose interest you want to stir. I’m not the kind of man you want to challenge.”

  “What’s my first task?” I asked stubbornly, and the hand in my hair tugged once, forcing my head back further, his eyes dropping to my lips, the expression in them darkening.

  I felt his power hovering, the Chameleon inside me arching toward it, hungry for the new taste, the rich promise of a new cloak to wear. I forced it down, swallowing hard. He was holding himself back, too. Not allowing his power to influence my reaction to him.

  “I need you to steal something for me.” His voice was rougher than before, his eyes still fixed to my lips. He sucked in a deep breath, the velvety blue of his gaze flicking up to fix me with a stare. “And try not to bewitch the poor bastard, Sparky. If you want me to be yours at the end of this night, then you sure as fuck are going to be mine.”

  Chapter Four

  I followed Torstein back down the stairs, my mind occupied by too many things for me to even attempt to control the words that spilled out of my mouth.

  “Is this your party?” I asked him.

  He snorted. “My castle is much more splendid than this one.”

  “Did you get a silver ticket too?”

  “I thought it was a trap. I wasn’t going to come. The magic brought me here anyway.”

  “Oh.” I frowned, watching the broadness of his back as he walked before me. He didn’t seem concerned about my knife, so I had allowed my magic to dissolve it. “Lucky you were already dressed.”

  He paused, probably hearing the edge in my tone. He turned, and since he was a few steps below me, we were actually the same height as his eyes dragged down over my chain-link dress.

  “Whose dress are you wearing?” he asked, his brow inching up in amusement.

  “Christian Dior’s,” I replied flatly.

  He took a step up, closer to me. I took a step back, away from him. He reached out, hooking a finger into the front of my dress and dragging me back to the step I had been standing on before, and then down another step. Suddenly, he was towering over me again. I only allowed it because I didn’t want him to switch his grip to my arms.

  “What were you wearing when you got here tonight?” He seemed genuinely interested. Unfortunately, his words from earlier came racing back to me.

  I’m not the kind of man whose interest you want to stir.

  “An elegant and modest nightgown,” I replied evenly. “With frills and bows. Completely uninteresting and very much unappealing.”

  He knew I was lying; the amusement was now etched all over his face.

  “What a coincidence.” His laugh was tinged in darkness. “Bows and frills are my favourite things to tear apart. You’ll have to model it for me later. If you complete all of my tasks. And Sparky, your gorgeous tits are spilling out of that dress—there’s no way in hell I could picture you looking innocent in anything. You’ve spoiled me for all things gold.”

  He grinned, his free hand brushing up over the front of my dress, dangerously close to my cleavage before he caught a lock of my hair, tugging it innocuously.

  “Just to be clear.” I held my ground, refusing to step back or push him away. “You will come back to my house and answer my questions if I do these tasks for you, right?”

  “Scout’s honour.” He finally released me, both of his hands held up in a posture that begged innocence and sincerity.

  “I’ll kill you if you try to ... you know ... do whatever it is that your power does. Suck out my life-force or turn me into a mindless sex zombie.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “The second option would be the most accurate, but I much prefer my sex zombies to have minds of their own. Makes things so much more interesting.”

  I made a face, trying to display how completely he disgusted me. His smile turned disarming, losing the sharp edge and growing into something more genuine. Genuine amusement. At my expense.

  Bastard.

  I growled out a curse beneath my breath, pushing past him and escaping the narrow stairwell. Stepping back into the ballroom was more than just a sensory overload, it also triggered a question. Why had our host enchanted an abandoned castle? Perhaps they had wanted a temporary location. It didn’t matter to me, unless their plan was to bomb the place at midnight, turning us all into pumpkins and carnage.

  “Mind on the game, Sparky.” Torstein was behind me, his hands at my shoulders, his words whispered against my ear.

  How did he keep touching me like that? As though he had known me for years? As though I had bared my soul to him in some way and welcomed him into my life? It was perplexing, unnerving, and really really fucking annoying. And by annoying, I meant hot.

  “What do you need me to steal?” I asked, even as my body tried to melt back into his.

  I quickly pulled myself upright again, but he switched his grip to my hips, his right hand spreading out, crawling to my stomach, his fingers splaying as he pulled me back again. My nerve endings were on fire. It wasn’t fair. Why did he have to be a well-known psycho? Why couldn’t he just be a normal, unthreatening demon without a habit of making pretty girls disappear? Was that really too much to ask?

  “The fanger in the blue suit with the curly black hair. His name is Sven, and I need his phone.”

  I frowned, giving the vampire in question a cursory once-over. He seemed important: it was there in his posture, in the formidable wall of his shoulders, the heavy set of his brow, and the deliberate way that he watched his conversation partner.

  “That’s an unfortunate target,” I mumbled.

  “Why is that?” Torstein sounded amused again.

  “I have a rule: never fuck over a man with more expensive shoes than mine. They tend to be touchy about their things.”

  “You’re going to have to decide where your priorities are here, Sparky. Do you want to find out what happened to your friend Sarah? Or do you want to let this opportunity slip through your fingers? I’m right here. Tangible. I might have all the answers. Now is your only chance.”

  “Are all of your tasks going to revolve around me stealing information from powerful people at this party?” I asked bluntly.

  “Absolutely,” he answered, not even missing a beat. “Someone should have taught you not to strike deals with demons.”

  “Then I’m going to need you to touch me.” My voice was resigned, but stubborn. It was time I absorbed his power and used it to my advantage. I just hoped that I wouldn’t accidentally form a sex cult, but that was something I was just going to have to deal with later. Accidental sex cults were a problem for future Isa.

  Torstein’s hard chest rumbled behind me, and his fingers flexed against my stomach.

  “I’m already touching you,” he pointed out.

&nbs
p; “My skin,” I specified. “Just trust me.”

  “I don’t trust you.” He made it sound like an obvious statement, and he didn’t make any movements to shift his touch.

  I wrinkled my nose in frustration, turning about suddenly to face him. His hands settled at the small of my back. He seemed unable to stop touching me—that thought popped into the back of my head, but I quickly pushed it away to focus. I had to pull on the front of his suit to rise up onto my toes, but his head dipped when I needed it to, making it easier to press my mouth against his. He seemed surprised, but his hesitation lasted for barely a fraction of a second before his instincts took over. He gathered me up, pulling my feet off the ground. One of his thick arms wrapped tightly around my spine, his free hand slipping into the mass of my hair to take a hold of the back of my head. He switched the kiss in an instant: it had been something I was taking from him, but it very quickly became something that he was giving to me. He flooded me with his heat, he surrounded me in his strength, and he owned me with the hard, demanding press of his mouth. I absorbed his power in an instant, and it was the heaviest ability that had ever housed itself in my body.

  A sound broke through our kiss, emanating from his throat, and he quickly broke away, setting me down. His pupils were dilated, my breaths were short. We stared at each other, astonishment and need passing between us.

  “You ... just … influenced me,” he accused, running a hand over one of the tattooed sides of his skull. His fingers were shaking. “How did you do that?”

  “I copied your ability,” I informed him. “Thanks for the kiss. That’s all I needed. Meet you back here in a bit!”

  I flounced off, pretending to be unaffected, but my knees were wobbly and I felt like re-assessing my moral compass. There was no way that I was allowed to be that attracted to a person who was as bad as Torstein. Who cared if he had a great sense of humor, strong arms, and a kiss to burn my bones to ash?

  He was a bad guy who did bad things.

  I was pretty sure, anyway.

  I mean ... I should probably be absolutely sure before I turned him over … which would mean keeping him for a few extra days. I wouldn’t want to make a mistake; that was hardly professional. Not that I was really hired to pass judgement on people. It was more than possible that my patrons had hired me under false pretenses to track down people that were less malicious than they were made out to be. It was entirely possible that their reasons for having me track people down were more malicious than the things they were accusing my targets of. It wasn’t like I bothered to background check my clients before I accepted their jobs. That would be silly, since I needed their money. It made a lot of sense for me to keep Torstein around for long enough to determine whether he had done the things he was accused of having done—even if I ignored the verdict and handed him over anyway. At least I would know.

  That decided, I quickly turned my attention back to the task at hand. I had no idea how to use my newfound power of seduction or sex-enslaving, though I knew what incubi like Torstein were capable of. I knew enough to understand that while my walk hadn’t actually changed, people had begun to stare at me as though my dress were made of literal gold, and they were all in sizable debt. I could feel the hungry eyes raking down my figure as I approached the vampire in the blue suit. More than one man had tried to intercept my path, stepping out in front of me with a drink in his hand, his arm outstretched and a request almost tumbling from his lips. I dodged each of them, frowning, and then quickly attached myself to Blue Suit, slipping my arm through the crook of his and nestling into his side.

  He made to extract himself immediately, barely even pausing to look at me. Maybe this happened to him often. He continued with what seemed to be an uncommonly harsh litany of passive-aggressive insults, without so much as a break in his steady diatribe as his conversation partner visibly paled, flicking me several wary glances. I clung tighter, until he eventually turned the angry power of his attention on me.

  I smiled. He paused.

  “Oh sorry,” I pouted, making my voice tremble a little. “I thought you were my Uncle Dicky.”

  I began to withdraw my arm, but he quickly laid his hand over mine, capturing it. His power nudged at me, but I brushed it aside with ease. My Chameleon was happily basking in a brand-new coat—it didn’t need another taste of vamp.

  “I’m not your uncle, but I can be your Dicky,” Blue Suit informed me, looking entirely serious.

  He didn’t even bother sounding flirtatious, or cracking a slimy leer. I was almost convinced that he had told me my market shares had dropped three percent instead of offering me his ‘dicky’. I forced out a coy giggle, tugging on my arm. This time, he released me. I inserted myself between him and his ‘conversation victim’, one of my hands slipping to the front of his suit, my fingers toying with his lapel, my other hand cupping his around the lowball glass in his hand. I pressed closer, bringing his glass to my lips as my eyes flicked up to his. He stared me down, clearly enjoying my display as my fingers teased down the line of his lapel—though he still made no move to encourage me in any way.

  I pressed even closer, tipping the glass so that the cool liquid teased the seam of my lips as my hand quickly slipped into his suit jacket. As I expected, he kept his phone in an inside chest pocket. He was the type to do that. He groaned a little as I pulled back, running my tongue along my bottom lip. It tasted like rum. I tucked my hand behind my back, casting a quick glance over my shoulder. The other guy had made his escape.

  “Let’s go look for your Uncle Dicky somewhere private.” Blue Suit made to capture my wrist, but I took a quick step back. He frowned, and his tone turned immediately sharp. “Let’s not play around here, girl. I have shit to do at this party.”

  “Sorry.” I answered him with a shrug, all of my coyness disappearing. “I took you for a whiskey drinker. I have a complex. I can’t buy my own drinks. It’s a thing.”

  I watched with satisfaction as the barest hint of space appeared between his top and bottom lip. For Blue Suit, I was suspecting that this was the equivalent of him dropping his entire mouth open in shock.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” He wasn’t angry, only confused. He really thought that there was something wrong with me.

  “I’m young and pretty,” I answered him.

  He waited for more, but I had already delivered my explanation. After a moment, he shook his head in slightly disgusted astonishment and walked away. Almost immediately, heat ran up my spine, a body hovering behind mine. I didn’t bother checking who it was or moving away—Torstein was easily discernible for many reasons. The first being that he smelled distinctly of pine and wood smoke—possibly a product of his ability—and the second being that he was the only person I had met that was capable of wrapping my body in heat without actually touching me. The phone was lifted from my hand as his lips brushed my ear.

  “The next one won’t be so easy, Sparky.”

  Chapter Five

  He was right. My next task wasn’t anywhere near as easy as the first one. Why? Because my next task was, by definition, impossible.

  “I can’t get his fingerprint,” I huffed out, tossing my arms wide in exasperation as I whispered at Torstein as loudly as I dared with so many people around. “I’m not a super spy.”

  “Not my problem,” he replied blandly. “His tablet requires a fingerprint. I’ve had the tablet for a week, but no finger.”

  “Back up.” I narrowed my eyes, stepping into his personal space. “You said finger-print, you didn’t say finger.”

  “How are you going to get the print without the finger?”

  I opened my mouth to shout something obvious at him like ‘I can’t just skip around this party stealing people’s fingers’, but my mouth snapped shut again, defeated. He wasn’t going to listen to me, anyway.

  “Give me another task,” I demanded.

  I had his full attention now: his eyes snapped to mine, growing a degree colder, forgetting all about
the man whose finger he needed. His hands cupped my elbows and he lifted me quickly until I was up on my toes and he could duck down to fix me more directly with his stare.

  “You’re not the one making the terms here,” he reminded me quietly.

  For the first time that night, I saw a hint of the Torstein in my reports. There was a hardness around his mouth that hadn’t been there before, a flash of something in his eyes that chilled me even as the nearness of his body heated me. The man holding me was ruthless; I could see it now. His appearance suddenly seemed menacing, with his imposing bulk, his skull tattoos and the long, white-golden braid. He was positively medieval.

  The people moved around us, ignorant of his menace and my realisation, forcing us into a bubble independent of our true surroundings. It was just me and him: suspicion and domination. I was sure that I wasn’t the only one annoyed at the need that still passed between us, judging by the narrowing of his eyes when he pulled me in closer. We were now toe-to-toe, chest-to-chest—though in truth, my chest barely topped his abdomen.

  “You look like a Viking,” I snapped.

  What the fuck? That’s all you have to say, Isa?

  His expression mirrored my thoughts. “I appear to people as their greatest desire, not as I am.”

  I flushed, but after a moment, confusion chased away my embarrassment. Torstein was on the ‘insane’ end of whatever scale was used to measure hotness, without a doubt, but I wasn’t typically into blonds. Or … long braids and half-shaved, tattooed skulls.

  “Hate to break it to you, but I’m more of a traditional gal,” I admitted, as his hands dropped from my arms, the confusion in his face deepening as my feet settled properly back on the floor. “I like my guys tall, dark, and stupid enough to think I orgasmed just because I said I did.”

  “There’s something wrong here,” he spoke quietly.