Twisted Fate: A Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy (The Harlequin's Harem Book 1) Page 9

  The centerpiece was the large bed in front of the fireplace on which was a woman, entirely naked, her back arched, her chest pressed against the pillows, her hands tied behind her back, the glow of the fire highlighting the curves of her body, from her shoulders, to her ass, to her parted thighs. My heart started racing, my pulse beating so fast I could feel it in my neck, in the tips of my fingers.

  Then a man came into view, walking in from the left. He was wearing an expensive black suit, with a white shirt underneath, and a black tie to go with it. As soon as the fire touched his face, and probably even before this moment if I was being honest with myself, I realized that man was Damon. He was shrugging out of his jacket as he walked closer to the woman on the bed.

  I stepped a little closer, knowing these actors wouldn’t notice my presence—not even Damon, who consciously knew I would be here. That was the true power of my mask, it made me invisible when I was dream-walking; another truth I understood through instinct, and not because I had any actual knowledge to go on.

  Damon turned around to face the fireplace and tossed his jacket on the back of an armchair. He then rolled his sleeves up, and I noticed for the first time the tattoos on his arms, on both of them. He had skulls, and grim reapers, and Japanese demons; roses, symbols, and lettering. I had never seen him with his shirt off before, and even though he wasn’t built like Eli and Logan were, his body was still perfect in many ways; toned, tight, with muscles that spoke of finesse more than brute strength.

  He then turned again and brought his silvery gaze to bear on the woman on the bed. She was facing away from me, but I could tell by the ribbon that was tied to the back of her head that she was blindfolded. When Damon approached, she turned her head up but didn’t look at him directly. I watched him run his hand along the curve of her back and bring it to rest on her ass.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, a sigh.

  Damon raised his hand, and it caught the firelight glow. He then brought it down in a hard arc and laid a smack on the woman’s ass. She yelped and flinched, pushing her face into the pillow. I had to admit, my own ass started tingling then too; and not just my ass, either. I was getting excited, not just in my chest, but in the warm space between my legs, too. I was dreaming, sure, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to get a little closer, to smell this woman, to hear the sound Damon’s hand made against her body more clearly, to touch myself while I watched.

  I moved even closer to the bed, so close in fact that there wasn’t an inch of this woman’s body I hadn’t become intimately aware of. Damon’s hand came down on her again with a smack, and when he pulled it up, I noticed the welt on her right ass-cheek. She’d flinched then, but she wasn’t yelping anymore. In fact, she was sighing, almost with delight.

  “Tell me what you want,” Damon said to the woman.

  “I want you to teach me,” she said. That voice… my body instantly started burning hot.

  “Teach you what?”

  “Teach me how to submit to you.”

  He smacked her again, only this time his hand lingered where it lay. I watched him drag it across her body, watched his fingers disappear between her thighs, watched her arch her back, and watched her thighs tremble with delight. I bit my lower lip as, from the edge of the bed, this scene began to unfold; his hand working delicately at her quivering, wet folds.

  She couldn’t see, couldn’t touch, and couldn’t move. All she could do was moan, and sigh. “Please,” she begged, “Please, more, slip inside, touch me where I want to be touched.”

  “No,” Damon said, his voice sharp and authoritative.

  “Please,” she whimpered.

  “No.” He smacked her again, this time with the other hand, and her breath hitched.

  I walked around the players heart pounding, chest floating, the woman had her head pushed into the pillows, so I couldn’t see her face, but I didn’t have to. Her voice, I recognized her voice anywhere because… it was my voice.

  Damon’s hand came down on her ass again, and she turned her head to the side to groan, and in doing so confirmed what I had just thought. The girl on the bed was me. I had a little black choker around my neck, a blindfold over my eyes, and my hands were tied behind my back with leather straps.

  Seeing this set my body alight with want. I didn’t want to be watching, I wanted to be her, on the bed, under his hand. Slowly I reached for the ribbon around my mask and I pulled at one of the straps until it came loose, and the mask fell into my hand. As it did, Damon suddenly rounded on me, his eyes fixed on where I stood.

  He could see me.

  I blinked hard, and then I was in the lounge again, laying on the couch. My mask wasn’t on my face anymore, it was in my hand. Eli and Logan were above me, staring down at me, concerned. I blinked away the sleep and looked up at them.

  “Are you okay?” Eli asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine…” I said, “Why?”

  “You were… I don’t know, it sounded like you were getting hurt.”

  Blood flushed to my cheeks. “It… what?”

  “You were moaning,” Logan said, “I don’t know how this stuff all works but I thought I would wake you up.”

  “You know, because you’d mentioned Freddy Krueger in the kitchen,” Eli added, “Didn’t want you to die in there.”

  “Oh… thanks. I was okay, though.”

  “What happened in there?”

  I glanced over at Damon who was starting to stir. “You know, I think it’s probably best if I don’t just blurt out what I find in other people’s dreams?”

  “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.” Eli walked over to Logan. “Rise and shine, man. How’d she do?”

  Damon rubbed his eyes, then brought the weight of his gaze to bear on me. For an instant I held his gaze, but that was the best I could do. As images of what he was doing to me in his dream began frothing and rushing up into my conscious mind like river rapids, I found myself needing to look away, to avert my eyes from his, cheeks burning bright and hot. I couldn’t believe what I had seen in that mind of his, but more importantly, I couldn’t believe part of me had wanted to experience it.

  “I think she did well,” Damon said.

  “Do you think she’s ready?” Eli asked.

  Damon nodded. “Dream-walking comes naturally to her. Her instincts are strong. If we’re going to find Lucia, she’s going to be the one to do it.”

  I turned my eyes up at him again. “Do you really think I’m ready?”

  “Even if you aren’t, we don’t have a choice. You have to be ready, otherwise I don’t know how else we’re going to find your friend. We can’t rely on finding a Seer, we can’t afford to tell anyone what’s going on. It’s up to you.”

  My chest tightened. It was a lot of responsibility being thrust upon me, but last night I had been adamant about wanting to find Lucia, relentless in my need to call the police, or go out looking, or doing anything that might allow us to find her. The time was now here, and I had to put my money where my mouth was. Otherwise Lucia was lost to us for good, and I didn’t know if I would be able to deal with that reality.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was one in the morning, the night sky was clouded and assailed by the occasional silent flash of light, and the air was hot, and humid, even at this late hour. Damon, Logan, Eli, and I were in Eli’s car. Eli had the wheel, Logan was riding shotgun, and I was sitting in the back next to Damon. We had come out of the Garden District a few minutes ago and were cruising along Saint Charles Avenue, heading in the direction of the Seventh Ward, where Logan had last seen the car that took Lucia.

  A flash of light split the sky as I stared out of my window. Curiously, I waited for another to strike, because I had a feeling it would. An arc of lightning tore through the clouds a second time and lit them up with shades of purple and yellow, like the colors of a days-old bruise. A cold chill ran through me. The silent lightning, the colors it disp
layed, it was ominous, and a sense of foreboding fell upon me like a splash of icy water that left me shivering.

  Damon reached for my knee and placed his hand on it. “Are you alright?” he asked.

  I still couldn’t look him square in the face, hadn’t been able to since emerging from his dreaming mind. “I think so,” I said, focusing my attention on the back of Eli’s head. “I guess we should do this then, huh?”

  “I think so.”

  “How are we going to do it?”

  “I’m going to put you to sleep, then I’m going to use magic to try and get you to sleep-talk while you dream. I doubt we will be able to listen to exactly what happens, but we may catch glimpses of what you say.”

  “Do you know how long I’ll be asleep for?”

  He shook his head. “Impossible to tell.”

  “Last time, you were both out for an hour and a half,” Logan said, giving me his eyes through the rearview.

  “I suspect this might take a little longer,” Damon said, “But we’re ready for that. You just find Lucia.”

  I nodded, then I fastened my mask to my head and turned my eyes on him, only to find him staring at me from the other side of the car. I wanted to look away again, but I held myself. “Okay,” I said, “I’m ready.”

  “Good. Come here, make yourself comfortable.”

  I wasn’t going to do what he said, but part of me really wanted to, and so I did. I scooched over to where he was sitting and allowed myself to rest in the crook of his arm. Damon threw his arm around me and let it sit on my belly, setting hordes of butterflies to start dancing inside of my stomach; a sensation made ten times worse when his thumb began to move in soft circles.

  “Close your eyes,” Damon whispered, “Listen to the sound of my voice. Let my magic take hold. Think of Lucia, concentrate on a memory, and let it take you to her.”

  Damon continued speaking, and I felt the power of his magic wash over me as it had earlier on. I allowed it to envelop me, to take me under, to help me sleep, and soon Damon’s voice began to sound distant and echoed, as if he were speaking to me from behind a glass pane. I realized I’d heard this before, last night, when he gave me my mask. I hadn’t asked him why it had been he who had given me my Talisman, whatever that was. If it had actually been him, or if the Damon I had seen in that dream was just some guide, some avatar of my subconscious, and I could just as easily have seen Eli or Logan.

  I found my thoughts drifting to them, these strange men who I’d met only twenty-four hours ago but seemed like integral parts of my life now. I tried to remember what life was like before I met them, and I couldn’t. Not without great effort, anyway. Where was the Andi who had wanted to rush home and watch Survivor? She was still in here somewhere, sitting quietly on a bench off to the side of my psyche, waiting patiently for her turn to come back to the forefront of my mind when life was back to normal; when life’s routine resumed its regular programming, settling around the wake, work, sleep, repeat pattern it had been on for the past decade.

  God, Andi, you sound like a lunatic.

  The sound of Lucia’s laughter surfaced from beneath my thoughts, and I remembered what I had come here to do. I reached for the sound with my hand, clasped my fingers around it, and let it move through me like an energy force. When I opened my eyes, I was in a tunnel, not a hallway. The walls were tight around me, the ceiling so short I thought if I jumped, I would hit my head, and I didn’t want to hit my head because the walls and the ceiling of this tunnel were weak, leaking water and dusty debris.

  “Lucia?” I called out. My voice shot through the tunnel, bouncing off the walls as it travelled, but I got no response. Glancing around me, I saw nothing I thought I could use to give me an idea of where she was; there was only the length of tunnel directly ahead of me, and a similar length to my back.

  I decided to walk forward, one step at a time, comfortable enough in my steps so long as there was light with which to see, and there was—there were cables running along the roof, occasionally there was a light, often weak and buzzing, some of them flickering. This was good. As long as I could see without requiring the use of my lantern, I knew I had power in this place.

  I kept walking, eyes focused on the path ahead of me. A trickle of water dripped onto my head and shoulders. Ahead of me, part of the ceiling was cracked and open. Water would drip from the crack, too, but also dust, and bits of rock. The more I walked, the more these faults in the structure became apparent. What I didn’t know was if this tunnel was a real place, or if I was getting closer to the thing I reached out to last night.

  Ahead of me I noticed there were no more lights in the ceiling. In fact, the tunnel seemed to open up like a throat into a cavern as black as pitch. The closer I got, the faster my heart would beat; not only because something about my surroundings was about to change and I didn’t know what it was going to change into, but because the darkness meant I would need my light, and that would take some of my power away.

  I concentrated as I walked and willed the lantern to manifest in my hand. From inside, a white light began to grow and dance, growing brighter with each passing second until I no longer felt like I would be in complete darkness once I entered the cavern up ahead. But the darkness wasn’t the only thing I needed to consider.

  There was a sound coming from that cavern. Not breathing, but squelching, mulching. It was a wet sound, like lips smacking, slavering, like a bowl of chicken being marinated, the meat being moved around, air pockets bursting—or a beast devouring the entrails of a fresh kill. The closer I got, the less I wanted to be here, but I couldn’t turn around and run. One thing I had learned about dream-walking was that there was no going back once you’d started walking; all you could do was go forward and let the dream play out or stop.

  So, I took another tentative step, and another, until finally my light shone on something other than the cracked concrete floor. There was a person in front of me. Light touched their feet, then it crawled along their legs, chest, and head. I noticed the person was laying on their back, their arms by their side. It was a man, tall and slim, his skin was cold and blue, but the grimace on his face and the steady heaving of his chest told me he wasn’t dead.

  I wanted to get even closer, but somewhere back there, in the dark, this wet, mulching sound continued, and I worried that getting too close would draw the attention of whatever was in here with me. Then I saw the pit, and my stomach filled with ice. The hole was about ten feet across, perhaps. The man was lying with his head closest to the mouth of this black hole, but he wasn’t alone—there were more people arranged around the pit in a circle, each of them laying in the same way, with their heads closest to the edge of the pit, and one of them was Lucia.

  My heart simultaneously leapt and sank. A cold wash ran through me, freezing me to the spot. I couldn’t take a step forward, couldn’t take a step back if I wanted to, but my friend was there and she wasn’t just grimacing, she was shaking her head, and groaning, but not speaking. I didn’t think she could speak, didn’t think anyone could speak while in the presence of this thing, whatever it was.

  I thought if I circled around the pit, keeping to the extremities, I could reach her without getting spotted by the creature lurking somewhere in the cavern—possibly on the side of the pit opposite to where I was standing, where my light couldn’t quite reach it. That, at least, meant it wasn’t close to Lucia, so I had a chance, but it was only one chance, and if it saw me…

  I don’t have a choice.

  Careful, keeping as quiet as I could, I started moving around the outside of the pit, taking one step after tentative step. The floor was made of concrete, and my feet weren’t making a sound as they fell, but I didn’t think that mattered to the creature, the demon, lurking nearby. My light started to flicker and dim, bringing terror up to my throat like bile. Seconds passed, and my mask became noticeably colder, almost to the point where it was too cold to keep on; but I couldn’t take it off, otherwise that thing would see m
e. I had to keep moving deeper into the darkness, reach Lucia, and pull her out of the dream if I could, or take her to another, safer place, away from the demon.

  Then I saw it.

  I saw it.

  The flickering, guttering white light from my lantern illuminated a shape hunched over one of the sleepers. Its back was turned to me, its shoulders were moving like it was picking something apart, something on the floor in front of it, something that very much looked like a person. But then again, it looked like a person too; I could distinctly make out his arms, his back, his legs. It wasn’t a demon at all, but a person—wearing some kind of costume.

  It had a coat on, a black one with a checkered pattern on it. There were frills on its shoulders, its sleeves. Some of the material on its coat seemed to shine when the light touched it, showing up as purple against the darkness. It was wearing a collar in the shape of a star, each point a different color—one purple, one yellow, one black—and a floppy hat with multiple arms, each tipped with a little bell that jingled as it moved its head.

  Most people would think of Christmas when presented with the sound of jingling bells, but I thought of the Carnival instead. The colors on its clothes, the starred collar, the floppy hat with the bells attached to it. Everywhere you’d look, during Carnival, you could bet your bottom dollar you’d see someone wearing something like this; someone dressed like a jester.

  I stood where I was, shaking my head, watching this thing move and listening to the slavering, wet, mulching sounds it would make; watching it feast on the person underneath it. I knew this wasn’t actually happening, all of this was all taking place in Lucia’s mind, but I couldn’t understand how she could be dreaming about this thing. How had she come into contact with it? Was she really a victim, lying like these other people around a pit? How could that be? I’d watched her voluntarily step into a car and go away with those people.