SEDUCTIVE SUPERNATURALS: 12 Tales of Shapeshifters, Vampires & Sexy Spirits (115 page)

Philippe, holding me on his lap, kissing me, then cupping my face in his hands…“Does that help you to know that you’re my present?”

With a jarring breath, I came out of the memory, my entire body pulsating.

Philippe had taken a step toward me, his eyes bright. “What is it, Lilly? Do you remember?”

I wanted to say yes, but that would be a half-lie. I didn’t recall anything more than the boots were giving me and, more importantly, I wasn’t feeling anything beyond these images on my own. Disappointment choked my throat as I shook my head, knowing with every beat of my heart that there was so much more to the hopeful look in Philippe’s eyes, but I had forgotten the context.

As he dug a hand into his hair, my gaze blurred. I looked down at my boots, which were even a less vibrant shade than before. They were overworking themselves with extra memories, and I couldn’t expect any more from them.

His voice was shredded. “They’re doing their best to show you what we are to each other, even if they shouldn’t be.”

Dammit, and I couldn’t
feel
what we were to each other. I was attracted to him for certain, yet…

When a mobile rang in the room, neither Philippe nor I moved. And when it rang again, his shoulders fell, and he slowly moved to a dresser to fetch the device and answer by putting on the speaker.

“What?” he said softly, as if all the life had gone out of his tone.

“Philippe.” A familiar voice… “It’s St. John. Did you feel it?”

St. John Ortega. Sin. He had been helping us with Etienne.

Philippe turned to me, his expression a different sort of intense.

“No, I didn’t feel it,” he said, “but I’m getting a bad feeling in general. What’s going on?”

A bad feeling in general
. I wondered if he were speaking of his difficulties with me…

St. John went on. “Two more tourists on the other side of the park, Philippe, challenged to a duel. But this time, they got away.”

Shite
—Etienne? Alive? But hadn’t he been injured by the car? I knew he was exceedingly strong and fast, so why else would these victims have been able to get away?

“You should get over here, Sin,” Philippe said, his voice dead again as he turned away from me. “It sounds like we’ve got some big talkin’ to do.”

But no talk would be bigger than the one I still had in store with Philippe.

* * *

While we waited for St. John, all the personal chatter was put on hold.

“As much as this sucks, what
we
have to say can wait,” Philippe said as he gathered gris-gris from his dresser. “Etienne might be on someone else’s ass right now, planning on dueling them.”

Even though I was anxious to muddle through what we were to each other, he was right. My love life was hardly more important than someone’s
life
.

He stuffed an amulet into a medicine bag, tying it on his belt loop. “Just so you know, last night, you had a bad feeling about St. John, but I wrote it off to paranoia. I never got to tell you that I didn’t read anything about St. John on Etienne’s skin when I touched the creature in the cemetery. I just didn’t have the…”

“Time?”

The answer had come easily to me, as if I were used to saying it.
No time for this, no time for that…

Philippe closed his eyes, as if my words had pierced him.

Then he was back to Etienne, as he should have been. “I called Amari to tell her you were awake. Also, today I bought materials for a homemade flamethrower, just in case Etienne did pop up again. You lost your last one at the cemetery, but I’d looked it over and I knew…what you need.”

What I needed.

Him.

He left me eating the rest of my breakfast, trying to reconcile everything. Although I attempted to keep my mind on Etienne, I was anxious to watch that other video from today that Philippe had mentioned—the one my boots had implied was much more personal—but this news of our special killer boy had put the kibosh on that.

What was on that video, though? I had to admit that my biggest fear was that Philippe would talk about seeing my burns and how that affected him. Was it an issue between us? Because more and more, I was starting to believe it was an issue with me…

Blast this. I was tired of waiting for answers, so I impulsively directed my thoughts to my boots, even though I damned well knew that they were weak and should be conserving energy for this situation with Etienne.

Show me Philippe’s face when he saw my burns that night two months ago. Please
.

At first, they tightened round my calves, as if crossing their arms, thinking,
And this is why I didn’t want to show you things about him!

Yes, I should have known better, but I needed this, desperately.
You’re supposed to be a part of me, and I’m telling you to show me!

I pinched them for good measure and, with something that felt like a you’re-going-to-regret-this stab of a middle finger, they poked me, hard, and—

Philippe with a revolver pointed…stone cold…no emotion as my skin puckered, ached, flamed…

My boots relaxed, leaving me numb with the memory.

They had revealed the moment of Philippe’s betrayal as he had attempted to capture me for the Meratoliage bounty money and when he had taken off my boots, thinking they would disable my strength and speed. Then my true form had been exposed, and there had been...

No emotion. Not even pity or shock.

Had he been beyond shocked,
so
repulsed that he had shut down in front of me?

Again, shame wormed into me, but it was much worse this time. I wanted to hide my face forever.

Monster
, I thought. That was what I truly was, and I was so afraid Philippe was going to see it in me, even if he had already come to terms with the burns I had worn on my surface.

When St. John arrived, I wandered into the front room. He headed straight for me.

“Thank God, Lilly,” he said. “It seems Etienne didn’t get to you as much as I feared.” He turned to Philippe. “I had a feelin’ your killer was gonna strike at Lilly in some kind of noteworthy way. Did she tell you that?”

“Nope,” Philippe said roughly.

All right. Yesterday’s Lilly must not have shared the warning.

St. John hugged me, but I barely embraced him back. I didn’t recall this goateed man, dressed in a vintage short-sleeved shirt, trousers, two-toned shoes, and a porkpie hat, but he seemed very familiar with me, so I didn’t protest. Had Philippe told his friend all about me after first meeting me?

I decided to act familiar, as well—it would save time—and I pointed to my upper arm, where I had sported quite the wound last night, according to Philippe’s video. Now, only a trace of white scarring remained.

Damn me for asking so much of my boots. They had been working overtime healing me, and I had wanted them to do more. And what had I received?

Misery.

“It’s only a flesh wound,” I said to St. John.

Philippe laughed sharply. “Now that sounds familiar.” He ushered St. John to a rugged chair with a thick cushion, then sat on the sofa.

I took the spot next to him and decided full disclosure was in order. “St. John…”

“Sin,” he said.

“Sin, before we found out more about Etienne, I thought there was something suspicious about you.”

“Because you saw me at the site of the fake murders on the Riverwalk?”

Philippe’s video had told me about the “murdered” dummies, as well. “I’m afraid so.”

With a tolerant grin, he held out his hand to Philippe. “Why don’t you do a touch reading to show her differently, my friend?”

“I touch read Etienne himself. You were nowhere in his thoughts.”

“As it should be.” Sin was hardly offended by my confession, and he moved on, cupping his hand over the crown of his hat and doffing it, setting it on his lap. He had laughing eyes, but they weren’t very joyful now. “As I said on the phone, I didn’t get a hell of a lot from my vision, just that the would-be victims fled in time. They were in the park, taking an evenin’ stroll, when a man in an old-time outfit swung the hilt of a sword toward the back of the male tourist’s head. Etienne didn’t even have enough juice to chase them out of the park. You’re bound to see more details on the news any minute now.”

Philippe and I looked at each other.

“Etienne
is
weak,” I said.

“He’s so hungry for more murders that he didn’t stop to heal,” Philippe added.

Sin spoke. “Well, ain’t you a team?”

Weren’t we?
I thought as I locked gazes with Philippe, my heart melting.

But…later. There would be time for straightening everything out later.

Sin’s gaze dwelled on me, then Philippe, who shrugged out of the silence by speaking.

“I already did some research on what might kill a shapeshifter. Pure speculation, of course, since they’re not supposed to exist, but it seems our best bets are decapitation, fire, or a silver bullet to the heart.”

“Silver weakens most supernatural creatures,” I said, because it was in my databanks.

Sin sat back in his chair. “I say we go out there, get rid of this shit.”

Philippe shook his head. “Tell me you’re not drunk, because it sounds like it, Sin.”

The other man lasered a glare at Philippe. “I haven’t touched a drop since last night. My stomach’s been too sour, friend.”

“Then why do I smell a nice Chianti on the air?”

Now that Philippe mentioned it, I sensed the aroma, as well. But we didn’t need our own fight when we had a much bigger one outside.

A point of memory lanced me, even if I couldn’t identify quite what it was. Just a feeling, really.

“I could be bait,” I said. “I know that Etienne was attracted to me—”

“And I’ve heard
this
before,” Philippe muttered.

“You have?”

“Yeah, and the answer is still an unqualified, set-in-stone no, Lilly.”

“But if he’s at the park,” I said, “we can go there and draw him out for good. Otherwise, there’ll be a hell of a lot more victims to come. And not all of them are going to run away.”

Sin sighed. “She’s got a point, man.”

And so did my boots, because they stabbed me, activating, concentrating on what they had been designed for—justice and survival.

A young man in antebellum clothes and tousled hair…“Will you come with me to duel willingly somewhere else without the law to stop us? Or do you wish to die here right now…?”

I pulled out of my own vision. “In the cemetery, Etienne wanted to duel with me. I want to take him up on it—or at least pretend to.”

Philippe rose to his full height. “No, Lilly.”

I also stood. “I’m not going to sit by and watch this happen, Philippe. I can’t.”

Shadows strayed into his gaze, and I knew that what I had just said applied to him, as well. For such a strong, solid man, he was helpless in many ways.

That sense of loss returned to his gaze, and my vines seemed to whisper to me on one last Philippe-focused breath.
Rosa
.
Her name was Rosa
.

It was only then I knew that Philippe was afraid he wouldn’t be able to do anything about losing me, too.

Shadows Till Sunrise: Chapter Eleven

We decided St. John would stay behind, but it wasn’t because he lacked the courage to join us. Philippe had persuaded his friend that he would be the only one of us remaining if we should fail with Etienne, and he would need to take up where we might leave off.

I hadn’t agreed with Philippe’s bleak outlook, but then St. John had reminded me of his warning about Etienne “getting to me.”

“Exactly,” Philippe had said. “That boy’s got another chance at you and at me, Lilly. So we need a backup plan, and that’s Sin.”

St. John piped in. “Though I doubt I’ll have to do any backin’ up. You and this girl have got this.”

Evidently, Sin didn’t know about my track record of failure—the Lilly on the computer had mentioned my bungle with the Meratoliages and the dragon, after all—so I listened to Philippe. I tamped down my rash confidence, which seemed to be such an integral, and perhaps someday fatal, part of me.

Now, as Philippe and I walked the short distance from his place to the park, it was clear he wasn’t happy to be part of this baiting plan. But this didn’t mean he wasn’t ready for Etienne: he was armed with his revolver and silver bullets, and he would be aiming straight for the killer’s heart. I, myself, was carrying St. John’s own personal revolver, and we had loaded it with the only extra silver bullets we owned—four. Fortunately, I had my homemade flamethrower, as well. I had constructed it from a big water gun, a metal bracket, tinfoil, a lighter, and a candle before we had left, using muscle memory and the Internet.

It was my own version of a backup plan.

“So tonight’s the night,” Philippe said, looking up at the sky, which was dark with clouds, the street lit only by lamps. “I can feel it in my bones.”

“You can?”

“It’s gonna end for someone. Dammit, I wish I’d done another Tarot reading, because I don’t know if the one from last night applied to just the cemetery or to
this
plan of ours.” He motioned with the hand that wasn’t trying to keep his revolver out of sight in his pocket. “The reading said we’d be successful—but did it mean then or now?”

Was he making small talk? Tension was still heavy between us, and I found that, every time he glanced at me, I would lower my head, as if I could hide those phantom burns. The more time passed, the more they bothered me.

Monster
, I kept thinking.
Creature
.

I fixed my eyes on my boots as we walked, feeling his gaze on me. In this light the footwear seemed a sickly green.

“I’ve seen those vines healthier,” he said.

“They’ve been busy, sending me more memories than they’re probably used to giving.”

“Memories that’ll help us tonight?”

“Help us with Etienne? Or do you mean memories that will help…
us?
”

Why had I even mentioned it? Damn me.

He paused, and I stopped walking, too, my hand on my weapons bag.