Beauty's Beasts (21 page)

Riley could barely draw breath. Even as the climax ebbed, she could feel Nick’s cock swelling inside her. The head flaring and pulsing as he came close to his climax. Every nerve ending she had was hypersensitive and alert, receiving all signals only as pleasure.

“Ah, Riley!” Nick breathed. “Only you!”

Her senses reeled. Her third climax began as his cock pumped and jerked in her pussy. It throbbed behind her eyes, and made her throat and neck hurt as she clamped down hard with her jaw to stop from screaming her heart out. Nick’s heavy groan was rich reward for keeping her silence. She might have missed it otherwise.

When she thought it was safe to open her eyes and try to focus them, she looked at him. “You’re still a liar.”

“Yes,” he agreed, his chest lifting and falling quickly as he recovered his breath. His shoulder wore fine scratch marks from her fingernails and he glanced at them and smiled. “Don’t look so horrified. They’re honorable war wounds.” He lowered her to the ground.

“Do they…hurt?” she asked as she dressed.

He laughed softly. “Not even for a moment.” He paused from buttoning his shirt to kiss her. Very gently. The blue of his eyes looked rich in the low light of the cupboard and she knew even from just a few days it meant he was mellow and at his most human and vulnerable. “Stay with me, Riley.”

She couldn’t look away from his eyes. She knew what he was asking. There was enough honesty between them that she couldn’t even prevaricate with a stupid question like “stay here in the closet?” or pretend to misunderstand.

“Forever, Nick? Or just for my life?” Her heart was racing.

He swallowed. “I think I would prefer forever, because I hate goodbyes. But I would not force that on you. It’s a curse…and a blessing. I was not asked when I was turned.” He brushed her hair away from her temple. “I won’t ask you, because I would be asking for selfish reasons. If you want to be turned, you must ask me for it.” He picked up her hand. “But, I do not want you to ask now. Not for a while. I just want you to be you. To be human and to stay with me.” He kissed her hand. “Can you do that?”

Tears pricked her eyes. “If I stay, we can’t hunt together any more, Nick.”

He drew a breath. “No. Your father understood that better than I. He had the right of it when he refused to hunt with your mother. I’ll finish your training. I’ll give you every skill I know. But we must find different partners.” His hand tightened around hers. “You’re staying, aren’t you?”

“Did you doubt it?”

His expression was solemn. “There was always the possibility. I find the humans I’m closest to are often unpredictable, even after all this time. My own feelings get in the way of seeing them clearly, I think.” He lifted her hand to his cheek and rubbed the back of her fingers against it. His eyes closed. “I resented your mother’s bond, Riley. I hated her for it. You should know that. If I could have found an honorable way to break my word to her, I would have. It terrifies me to know how much happiness I would have lost if I had found a way to punish her for dying and leaving us alone, Damian and I.” He opened his eyes. “But by dying, she gave me something I would not have had otherwise.”

“Me,” Riley concluded.

He grinned. “I think Tally would have enjoyed that irony. She knew precisely what she was demanding of us when she made us swear to protect you if Lirgon rose again, and I think she might even have predicted to herself what the end result might be if Lirgon’s rising was far enough in the future. I don’t break my word once it’s given. Nor did Damian.” He pulled her against him and tucked her head under his chin. “Ah, Riley, I can see by your expression that you’re wondering what you’ve bitten off. I can go back to being surly if you’d prefer.”

“No, thank you,” she said swiftly. “I like you this way. I just keep waiting…to wake up.”

“You are awake, Snow White,” he murmured. “This is as real as it gets.” His hand caressed her cheek. After a minute, he said. “Was it so very bad a childhood, Riley?”

She sighed. “Physically, no. I wasn’t beaten or abused, and I’ve heard stories far worse than mine. I was lucky, in that respect. My friend Sabrina—you met her in Pittsburgh. She’s a foster kid, too, and she had it way worse than me. But even she shook that off. We both agree that it’s the loneliness that’s the worst. Not being loved or wanted by anyone. Knowing that the families who take you in are only doing it for the money and that they don’t really care about you at all, that there isn’t
anyone
who gives a shit… It weighs you down and it gets worse, year after year, until you want to explode with it, especially if you get moved from home to home, to home.”

Nick’s arms tightened around her. “Christ…” he said thickly.

“Don’t,” she said quickly. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. This is just how it was supposed to happen, Nick. If it didn’t, then I would have grown up with you and Damian around me all the time, and you would never have seen me as someone you could love. Not
really
love. Not like this. I’d live all those years in foster care all over again, just to stand here in your arms and know I get to do this for the rest of my life.”

He touched her lips with his finger swiftly, then reached over her shoulder to turn off the light. As the closet plunged into darkness, she felt his arm move under her shoulder, and knew he was holding the doorknob with an iron grip so it would feel locked when the guards tested it.

The guards were doing their closing rounds.

It was a long time before she heard sounds of anyone approaching the closet, but Nick’s hearing was much better than hers. There was a brief rattle of the doorknob, then nothing.

Nick relaxed. “He’s already left the corridor. It’s Friday night, and the Knicks are facing Dallas at seven. He’ll be rushing home for the game.” His voice was very soft, almost subliminal.

“How do you even know he likes basketball?” Riley demanded.

“I’m guessing. But he’s heavy on his feet, so he’s overweight. Probably from too many sedentary pastimes. And that was a very superficial security check. He’s in a hurry and it’s not hockey season.” He chuckled soundlessly. “It makes it easier for us. Let’s hope he’s taking his workmates home with him for beer and pizza.”

“How soon until sunset?”

He breathed in, almost like he was sampling the air. Perhaps he was. “The sun is already touching the horizon. Lirgon will need to guard against too early a rising. Gargoyles rise at full dark, not at sunset. Ten minutes, Riley, and you will get to meet the monster that killed your parents.”

The corridor was quiet and dark except for the red glow of emergency lights. The guards had switched off normal illumination already. Ahead, the gallery was lit by small spotlights that shone on the displays, but the main gallery lights that bathed the big room in merciless white glare had all been doused. Nick moved ahead, Riley behind him. He had the vision that could see infrared beams and signals, not her, and had to take point.

Nevertheless, they moved fast, almost at a run. The timing was hurried by the sunset, which crowded too close on the heels of the closing of the gallery and the departure of the guards after their security shutdown round.

“Nothing,” Nick said softly as they emerged into the gallery proper. “For a display of rocks that no mortal can lift on their own, perhaps they feel nothing more sophisticated is warranted. He moved over to the flat black square lounge pad, picked it up in one hand and shifted it over to sit underneath the skylight. Then he stood on it and threaded his hands together.

Riley stepped onto the lounge, then onto his threaded hands, then onto his shoulders as Nicholas boosted her up to that level. He gripped her boots, holding her steady, as she examined the alarm wires the way Nick had taught her.

“The circuit
is
broken,” she told him. “Although you really have to look hard to see it.”

“Hurry,” he warned her.

She lifted the skylight. It was heavy and she strained to move the large pane, but she managed to hoist it high enough to reach over the lip and grab the duffel bag sitting next to the frame. She and Nicholas had placed it there earlier in the day.

As soon as she lowered the pane, Nicholas lowered her down to the pad. She dropped the duffel bag next to her and he opened the long zip, shoving the United Airlines tags out of the way with an impatient sound. Riley realized that this was Damian’s bag, the one he had brought with him from Greece. Her heart did a funny misstep, but she hurried. Nicholas had turned into the hard taskmaster. She could almost feel time ticking away in her own head.

He pulled out her sword first and handed it to her. The message was clear. Lirgon was the priority. He was about to wake.

She pulled the sword from the scabbard and hurried over to Lirgon. The gargoyle was still just a lump of rock to her eyes, crouched on a flat low stone pedestal, his clawed feet curled over the edges, his wings bent around him protectively while he snarled permanently as some unseen foe. The sculpture looked completely unchanged from the day she and Damian had studied it, and if she had not seen the creatures climbing from the skylight herself that night, she would have said this was just a lump of stone.

But something was beating in the air around her. Invisible, rushing past her skin like cool water or an electric charge, but neither of those things. It almost prickled.

Magic
.

She bent into the primary ready posture, bringing her sword over her head, both hands on the hilt. She kept her eyes on Lirgon. There were five other gargoyles, but they were for Nicholas to keep at bay, and the threat to their leader would halt them at first.

“I’m here,” Nicholas said softly, from behind and just to her left, which was her unprotected side. “Keep watch. It’s about to begin.”

“I know,” she agreed. “I can feel it.”

“As soon as his eyes glow, he’s vulnerable,” Nicholas added.

She didn’t point out that he had told her this many times already. This was Nick’s way of worrying. She brought the sword farther overhead so that the point was in her range of vision, and directly lined up on Lirgon’s muzzle.

Her heart was hurting. She was shaking, but knew it would pass when she began to move. She was terrified, but knew that the terror would pass, too.

Then she saw it. Lirgon was changing right in front of her. If she tried to watch it happening she couldn’t see it. If she focused on any one part of him, nothing appeared to be moving, but if she looked over all, then she saw it. It was like watching a really big mound of snow during the spring thaw. You could watch it all day long and it didn’t seem to change at all, but in two days the mound would completely disappear under the heat of the spring sunshine. The stone-like quality of Lirgon’s hide was changing. Becoming more like leather.

When the creature’s wing moved, Riley snapped her gaze back to the gargoyle’s eyes. They were no longer stone. But they weren’t glowing yet.

Yet the wings were moving. The toes were stretching. The claws extending.

She gripped her sword with her sweaty hands as the eyes rolled in their sockets and the creature began to straighten up from his daytime hunch.
Not until the eyes glow.
It was Nick’s voice, from all the training sessions, calm in her mind.
If you bury your sword in his brain before the tissues are converted properly from stone sleep, he won’t be vulnerable, and you won’t kill him. You’ll just piss him off, and you’ll break your blade, both very bad things.

“Nick!” she breathed softly, trying to contain her panic.

“Wait.” He was so calm.

Lirgon at full height had to stand at fifteen feet. How in hell was she even going to reach up to his head? Nick had overlooked that tiny detail. Full panic gripped her chest, locked her breathing. The creature was moving. Slowly, it was true. And so were the other five.

“You. A bloodsucking abomination and your meat-sack woman. You are not welcome here!” The cry came from her left.

Do not let anything distract you
, Nick had warned her.

But she knew that voice, and knew who spoke with such venom. It could only be Azazel, come to protect his beasts, and he had a weapon that could kill Nick.

“Don’t turn around,” Nick told her flatly. Quickly. “Deal with Lirgon. He’s the greater threat.”

“Azazel will kill you just to get at me,” Riley cried.

“I will,” Azazel confirmed. “I will kill your other blood-sucking lover, you perverted
bitch
. He will die in agony at your feet.”

“Don’t look at him,” Nick said quickly. “He’s trying to provoke you.”

“No! You must not do this!” The thin voice came from behind them. From the stairs. Fábio Natan. She knew the voice even without turning. The beseeching quality was distinct.

She caught a glimpse of movement to her left, and turned her head just enough to spot it. Azazel, still looking like her father, was moving slowly into her range of vision. Closer to Lirgon.

Nick was tracking him. The tip of his broadsword came into her view, as well. Azazel wore a full-length raw brown leather coat that was scuffed and torn in places. Anything could be under it, including the gun that fired the concentrated gargoyle toxin pellets.

Natan rushed toward Azazel and actually stepped in front of Nick. “You can’t do this,” he told Azazel. “You can’t.”

Riley switched her attention back to Lirgon. The beast was stretching, the wings lifting out to their full span. Perhaps thirty feet across from tip to tip. Azazel stood inside that radius.

A sour stable smell washed over Riley as the wings beat back a little, fanning air in her direction. Beast smell. She studied the eyes. They were not glowing. There was no intelligence there yet. Lirgon was still waking. This was just rolling over and scratching himself as he got out of bed.

Natan wrung his hands as he stared at Azazel. “For god’s sake,” he said. “Where’s your sense of decency?”

Azazel threw his head back and laughed. “Little man, you have no idea what you’re dealing with.” He reached into his coat and pulled out the thick, ugly gun, the one that had killed Damian. Gargoyle toxin.