Read Beauty's Beasts Online

Authors: Tracy Cooper-Posey

Tags: #A Vampire Menage Gargoyle Urban Fantasy Romance

Beauty's Beasts (8 page)

BOOK: Beauty's Beasts
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Nicholas’ eyes widened slightly.

Damian just laughed. “She’s Tally all over again, and then her father for good measure.” He laughed again, silently this time.

“Glad you find it amusing,” Riley told him.

“I’m not sure I could stand it, having Carson in the mix. I always found him irritating at the best of times,” Nicholas said, looking up at her.

“Only because he was fucking Tally and you wanted her yourself,” Damian said, his tone casual, as if he were discussing the latest football scores.

Riley jumped a little. Nicholas grew still, his gaze still on Riley.

Damian picked up the small plastic bag of food and held it up to Riley. “You should eat.”

Riley took it. She realized that she was starving to the point of nausea and suddenly didn’t care what was in the bag at all. She was going to eat every last morsel. She backed up to one of the air conditioning hubs, sat on the lid and tore into the deli sandwich with huge bites.

“We should still visit the sculptor, anyway,” Damian said, getting to his feet. “Riley isn’t ready to face Lirgon yet. How long until she will be, Nick?”

Nicholas shook himself, clearly trying to dismiss Damian’s shocking statement. He pushed himself to his feet. She felt his gaze on her, assessing. “Three days. Maybe two, but only if you were there, too.” He seemed to be struggling with inner thoughts. It made his words come slowly. “It would be risky, even then. Tally had years of training and Lirgon still…” He stopped and pressed his fingertips to his temples. “I can’t do this, Damian. I can’t.”

Riley put the sandwich down, shocked.

Damian, standing a little behind Nick, didn’t look surprised at this sudden confession. “You have to,” he said simply.

Nicholas dropped his hands and pointed at Riley. “Look at her! She had no idea who she is, her heritage, the traditions, any of it. We have to give it all to her and she’ll never absorb enough to appreciate even a fraction of it. Tally at least grew up in our world.”

Damian didn’t move. “You’re going to hate Riley because she isn’t in awe of you? That’s bigoted of you.”

Nick whirled to face him. “She has no idea what she’s dealing with!” he railed.

“I’m right here,” Riley reminded him. The food she had eaten was sitting at the bottom of her stomach now, like a cold rock. She felt sick.

He strode over to her. He was angry. Lines were drawn beside his mouth and his eyes were very blue. “You fucked him,” he said, pointing to Damian, “but you have no idea who he
really
is.”

“And you do, of course,” she said softly, suddenly grasping the shape of his anger.

“No, of course not! Damian is nearly three thousand years old. Even I have trouble trying to hold the concept of that amount of time in my mind, and I’ve lived for nine hundred years longer than you.” He gripped his hands together, like he was trying to hold his temper in. “You literally fell into our world last night, Riley. How can you possibly appreciate…?” He hesitated.

“You want to make sure I appreciate the right things and hate the things that should be hated,” she finished. “You want me to soak up a lifetime of prejudices and learning in a day, so that I will genuflect at the right moment, will be scared when I should be, and will laugh at the same things as you two.”

Nicholas straightened up. His anger faded.

Riley shrugged. “I’m sorry, Nick. That can’t happen. Not in the real world. If you wanted me to be another Tally, then you shouldn’t have abandoned me as a baby and left me for the foster system to take care of.”

He sucked in a sharp breath.

“That’s not how it happened, Riley,” Damian added.

“No?” She brushed her clean hands of invisible crumbs to hide their trembling. “I wasn’t exactly in a position to argue at the time.”

“You were born in 1983, on the same day your father was killed. By 1983 record-keeping and social services were much more effective and regimented than they were when Nicholas and I helped raise your mother. Even so, we helped your mother for the next year or so hunt down Lirgon and look after you. But when Lirgon and your mother died, it was bloody, brutal and close to public. The authorities got involved. Your mother’s body was found and when they realized who she was, they put you into the foster system.” Damian shrugged. “We were not next of kin, Riley. In 1984 we could barely produce identity papers saying we were alive.” He grimaced. “We’ve not been so unprepared since.”

“You left me in the system. Alone. You didn’t try to find me.” Riley wished the plaintive note wasn’t there in her voice, but there it was.

“We couldn’t find you,” Nicholas said simply. “We tried.”

Damian lifted a hand. “He’s lying just a bit. Once you emerged from the foster system, he had your St. Louis location within twelve months.”

She looked at Nick. His gaze cut away from her.

“But you still didn’t contact me. Why?” she demanded.

Damian answered again. “We could see you were building your own life. We didn’t want to dismantle it just because we selfishly wanted to bring you back into ours.”

Her eyes pricked with hot, hard tears. “It didn’t occur to you I might like to have the choice?”

Nicholas’ blue-eyed gaze speared her. “There’s no
choice
when we’re in your life. The underworld is destructive and seductive, and it takes over your life until there’s nothing left but this—the hunt, the chase, the constant thrill of your next target and the bizarre bohemian shadow world that normal humans have no idea exists right under their elbows and behind their ears.”

She shuddered. His eyes seemed to grow larger, until all she could see was the summer blue of his gaze.
Staring directly at a vampire is a challenge
. Damian’s words echoed in her mind.

“Let me go,” she whispered.

Nick blinked and turned away.

Riley drew in a breath. Then another. Her heart was thundering and her clitoris was swollen and pulsing. Her breasts were aching and heavy, the tips pushing at the soft material of the singlet. She licked her lips. She was powerfully aroused—Nicholas had been forcing her to it with his stare. She wiped her sweaty palm on her jeans, trying hard not to look at Damian, for she knew he would be able to sense her aroused state. At least here on the rooftop the open air would sweep some of her telling pheromones away.

When she thought it was safe, she let her gaze lift up from her lap. Right into Damian’s eyes. He clearly had been waiting for her to look up. He had returned to his deceptively indolent lean against the edge of the roof, both arms spread against the ledge. Now that she was looking at him, he spoke. “Riley has a psychological need to stay in control, no matter what. She probably acquired it from her turn in the foster system.”

Riley bit back the moan of betrayal. How dare he speak of it aloud? And to Nicholas?

Nicholas turned to look at Damian, then her, quickly. Her expression must have given him all the confirmation he needed. He glanced at Damian again. Something passed between them, a silent communication.

Riley wrapped her arms around her middle and squeezed. “Shouldn’t we go and see the sculptor or something?”

Nicholas considered her again. “It’s the dinner hour. It would be uncivilized to interrupt a human during their mealtime.” He spoke absently, his gaze on her face. “The foster system did more damage than I thought.”

“Just shut the fuck up,” she snapped.

Damian straightened up from his lean and strolled toward her. “She has such a need to control, in fact, that she will not let go, not even in my arms.”

Riley jumped to her feet, her face burning hot. “God, you had to tell him even
that
?”

Damian lifted his shoulders. A shrug. “You’re a liability. He has to know.”

Her breath deserted her, just as it had earlier that evening. The impact seemed somehow worse this time. Damian stopped barely a foot away from her, his eyes drilling into her with chilled mercilessness.

She found her voice. It was nearly bodiless. “All that talk this afternoon. The things we did. And the whole time you were just…assessing me for Nick. Sizing me up. Seeing if I were fit for duty.” The words tasted like ashes in her mouth.

“It’s a tough world out there. We have no use for a gentle maiden and a delicate sensibility that would get slaughtered in the first pass.”

“A test? This was a
test?”

“You can call it that if you want.” Again, the disinterested shrug.

Fury ripped through her. She had been moved around the chessboard like the pawn she had been determined not to become. She had been utterly blind to the fact that she was being manipulated all along. How stupid was she? She had been completely unaware of when an agenda was being worked around her.

“Go back to your training room, little girl,” Damian added, jerking his head toward Nick, who stood just to one side, watching this all go down with perfect stillness.

Afterward, she was never able to reconstruct the reasoning that made her act. There was none. There was simply hurt and fury and the need to strike back—and a subconscious knowledge that nothing she did could possibly hurt Damian, who was so much faster and stronger than she was. He would stop her long before she could do anything to him and probably damage her in retribution…and she would deserve it.

She whipped out the carbon knife from inside her coat and gripped it hard in her hand. An ugly cry burst from her lips as she grabbed the front of Damian’s coat for purchase, took a perfect lunge forward with her lead foot and thrust with the knife, straight into his stomach.

The knife buried deep—it was incredibly sharp and she had thrust hard. She felt something give, deep inside him. There was a soft sighing sound and blood gushed over her hand as she stared down at it.

She pulled out the knife. “Oh god, oh god! No, no, Damian!” She looked up at him as he staggered sideways, his eyes closing. His hand came to his stomach. The sideways stagger ripped the knife from her grip and it dropped to the rooftop.

Nicholas was suddenly there behind Damian, holding him, lowering him to the ground.

Damian coughed and blood trickled from the corners of his mouth.

Blood was everywhere, all over his coat, all over his hands as he pressed them against his stomach.

Riley dropped to her knees next to him, Nicholas beside her. “Damian, why didn’t you stop me? Dammit to hell, why did you do this? What do I do now?”

He coughed again. “Too late, I think,” he said weakly.

Fright tore at her with cold, icy fingers. “
What?
” she breathed.

His eyes closed and his head rolled limply to one side. His hands slipped down to the tarmac.

Riley wasn’t aware that she was shaking him, or that she was crying his name, until Nicholas uncurled her fists from Damian’s coat one finger at a time, picked her up, sat her in his lap and turned her face into his chest. His arms shut out the ambient light.

She wept in great wracking sobs that hurt her chest and her head and Nicholas did not say a word. It wasn’t until she rested silently against him that he wiped her cheeks with his hand and then licked his fingers of her tears. “Control is an illusion, Riley. No one ever has total control, however much they like to think they do.”

She watched the way he relished the taste of her tears. “Do you know what I’ve just done?” Her voice was hoarse and ragged.

“You just lost what you thought was control,” Nicholas said calmly. “We forced you to it deliberately.” He pushed her bangs out of her eyes and tucked them behind her ear.

She might have felt a cold chill in the region of her heart except that her capacity for surprise and hurt and shock had maxed out. She stared at him.

A hand curled around her neck and she caught her breath. She knew instantly it was Damian’s, even without looking around. Nicholas was beginning to smile.

“You tricked me,” she told him.

“We…suggested. The power of suggestion was enough.”

Finally, she had the courage to turn and look at Damian. He sat right behind her, and although his coat was still stained in blood and ripped where her knife had sliced clear through it, his stomach was healed. He’d wiped his mouth of blood already.

“You son of a bitch,” she breathed.

“Guilty,” he agreed.

“Do you know what you put me through just then?”

“No. I really was…well, I guess unconscious is as good a term as any. I plan on asking Nick for details later though.” He didn’t even have the grace to look uncomfortable about such an intimate discussion. His expression sobered. “But it needed to be done, Riley. You cannot go on believing you can operate alone and in control like you were.”

“But if there is no such thing as control, then what is there? Something must exist if there is no such thing as control, or the world would be in chaos.”

Damian nodded. “Trust.”

She stared at him. “Trust.” She half laughed. “You’re kidding me.”

He shook his head.

“Three thousand years, we’ve split the atom, gone to Mars, there’s no such thing as control and what’s really running the world is
trust
?”

He smiled. “Yes.”

Nick’s arms tightened around her. “He really is not fooling around,” he murmured.

Damian got to his feet. “Trust is something you give. Control is something you take. They’re two sides of the same coin. It starts very simply by giving your trust to a few. Perhaps one, if that is all you can bring yourself to give up control to. You lay your life, your love, your trust in the hands of another and expect that they will not let you down. Ever.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s no simple matter, Riley. You’ve already had a small taste of how complex handing over trust can be. There’s sorts of trust you can give. From all consuming, complete-life trust,” and he glanced at Nicholas, “to just trusting that someone will come through with tonight’s meal for you. People give their trust all the time, from their dentist to their coffee clerk, without realizing the implied contract between them. They think the world runs on control, but it’s running on trust. Control isn’t going to do you any good if the trust isn’t there. You can’t force people to behave. In three thousand years, we
have
learned that much.”

BOOK: Beauty's Beasts
3.72Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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