Changing Beauty (Book 2) (The Deadly Beauties Live On) (15 page)

I fall to the ground, coughing and strangling on painful bursts of air that are rushing into my lungs. I hold my chest, wondering how it could possibly hurt worse than my throat.

“Ah, Princess, I should have known you’d follow me.”

Ella. It’s Ella. My eyes adjust enough to tell it’s her.

“It wasn’t you I was following, although we have been looking for you. Do you always go around torturing humans? Because that’s not why we freed the slave rings.”

I look up in time to see his lips curl in a taunting grin. It’s then I notice the tattoos slithering down his arms in sleeves. He has another scar on his neck, both of them marring what would otherwise be a handsome asshole.

He deserves more scars.

I try to push up on my hands and knees before he tries to hurt Ella. She won’t stand a chance.

“Princess, I can assure you, I’m the least of your worries. Believe me when I say I’m doing you a favor by taking care of this. I just need her to show me her true colors. I don’t feel right killing someone who isn’t fighting.”

Ella glares at him, while I digest his words. He wants to kill me? I really am in a horror movie. I half expect a wolf to howl and bats to fly overhead at any moment.

I definitely expect someone to come crashing through with a chainsaw.

“See, I was under the impression you were one of the good guys,” Ella says calmly, as though this guy isn’t psychotic.

He smirks, but that’s his only reaction. “No such thing in our world, baby. Besides, there are some people I’m itching to see. I owe them a few lashings, if you know what I mean.”

“Actually, I don’t know. How about you tell me and leave her alone?”

My head drums, and I start looking for a way to escape. I can’t just run and leave Ella behind.

“You don’t want to do this, Princess,” the guy says, though I don’t know why.

“You’re right. But you aren’t giving me much of an option.”

He grins as though he’s excited about something, and Ella takes a deep breath before her motherfucking eyes turn silver—glowing, freaky, unnatural silver.

“Game on, darling,” the guy whispers seconds before some bright surge of something comes rushing out of Ella’s hands and flying directly toward him.

All I can do is glue myself to the tree and watch in disbelief as fear and anger collide. I really don’t want to pass out, so I hope fear wins.

Fear is helped along just as I see a second body—the body of a slender girl—suddenly appearing in a dark cloud of smoke, and her hands are glowing red as she takes her place next to the scarred psychopath.

“Hold your fire. The princess is all mine,” the guy taunts, and I curl in on myself as tears slide free. My head is aching, my chest is caving in, and all my nightmares surface as panic edges in.

Chapter 14

ELLA

With barely any effort, he knocks away my power as though it’s some cheap parlor trick. He’s not supposed to be able to do that. It wasn’t a strong shot—since I’d rather scare him more than hurt him—but he just batted it down like it was a twig.

Glaring into eyes so dark that they’re almost black, I suck in a slow breath, trying not to let him smell the fear I actually feel. I assume his girlfriend is Kya, even though her face is covered by a mask.

His eyes shift, drawing my attention back as they turn a shade of green I’ve never seen, and then they shift again to red. Holy shit. He’s…

“You’re like me,” I whisper.

He smirks as though he’s amused, and he moves away from Kya, making me follow him with my eyes. Warily, my gaze darts back to Kya, then to him. I keep this up as he moves farther and farther away.

“Eyes on me, Princess. She’s not going to touch you or the other girl.”

My eyes immediately dart to Roslyn to see her wide-eyed and pale as a ghost. No way in hell is she anything more than human. She’s honestly terrified out of her mind.

If I wasn’t worried about needing her to be alert in case she has to duck or something, I’d put her under a sleeping spell to spare her the horrors she’s not far from seeing.

“Eyes on me,” he repeats a little firmer.

As commanded, I jerk my gaze back over to him to truly study him. He has a scar running from his forehead to his chin. Something had to have been powerful and painful to leave a mark on our flesh. My mother is one of the few I’ve seen scarred.

Deciding to quit playing his game and giving him power over me, I lash out again, feeling the power hum and burn through my veins, and releasing a stronger surge of energy.

Again, he bats it down, splitting the white light in half and letting it crash into the forest behind him, slicing down trees and wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting woods.

“Easy, Princess. We both know you don’t have enough control to keep doing things like that. You’re only embracing the light side of you, and the darkness lurks for its chance at control. I hear it’s a family trait—to deny your darker side.”

How does he know anything about me?

Cracking my neck to the side, I draw in another breath. Apparently he’s enjoying toying with me, and I’m not as gentle as he thinks I am.

“No,” I tell him, feeling the power shift like a tide inside of a storm. His eyebrow cocks up, seeming confused. “You’re wrong. I happen to love the hell out of my dark side.”

I feel the power swirling, growing, and begging to be set free as the wind stirs violently around me. My hair is whipping near my face, and I notice the strands ever so slowly turning from blonde to black.

It’s been a while since I let go, and there’s no one here to stop me.

“Slade…” Kya’s voice is a soft warning, but the guy who is apparently named Slade seems to enjoy the shift.

His smile grows wickedly, and his eyes darken once again.

“That’s more like it,” he whispers seconds before I unleash hell.

Power buzzes through me, and this time when the light leaves my hands, it’s almost blindingly bright. He grunts when he tries to slice through it, but it knocks him backward.

Adrenaline burns through my veins and everything tingles in its wake as I strike again, needing to feel that rush of death as it explodes from me.

Blue power slices through, colliding with it, tackling my power as we both push with all our strength. The powers collide again, but this time neither of us let go, both of us pushing harder and harder against the other.

Red light slashes through, almost hitting me in the side, but I throw up another hand, sending out a painful wave of power that sends Kya to the ground, screaming out in pain.

“Fuck! Stay out of it, Kya!” he yells.

He pushes harder, letting me know he was holding back, and I’m forced to release my hold on her to match him.

His eyes shift, moving to silver, and that’s when I feel the darkness truly taking over, beckoning to be in control as the beasts within me demand blood. And I cede the power to the side of me that has never gotten to fully be released.

THAD

“Ella still not answering?” Kimber asks me as I curse my phone.

“No.”

Punching the gas harder, driving back to Pine Shore from Edgebrook. That was the biggest dead end ever. Apparently Kya doesn’t want Karma finding her, and she has laid out one hell of a breadcrumb diversion path.

Bitch.

“Chaz is on his way over there, since neither one of them are answering their phones,” Kimber says from the back seat. Dice and Karma are in the very back. Gage and Kimber are in the middle set of seats, and Zee and I are up front.

For some reason, Chaz didn’t want to help us find Kya. Said he had other shit to do, which isn’t like him.

“Roslyn’s stuff is still at her house, including her phone. She didn’t bring anything last night since we were going to a party. And by the way, I forgot to mention that she still remembered Alex.”

Gage leans up, putting his head between me and Zee from the back of the SUV.

“Impossible. I wiped her memory up to the moment she got to the party. She would barely remember walking in.”

“Yeah, well, it caught me off guard too. But she remembered Jenny leaving with Alex. I kept waiting for her to say something else to allude to how much she remembered. She never did, but she seemed incredibly off. Any reason your dusting shit wouldn’t work?”

I glance over to see him studying the vacant air while he thinks about it.

“No. Hell, my shit works on fey, too. I don’t know about it working on anoin—”

“Don’t go there,” I growl.

“Why do your eyes look browner today than they did yesterday?” I hear Karma asking randomly, interrupting our conversation.

“Point of fact,” the incubus says, “our human eye color actually changes over the years at different rates based on the individual. For instance, Kane’s human eyes were solid green when he met Alyssa. Now they have a bluish hue to them. Eventually they’ll be human blue. It happens.”

Fucking random. Fucking inquisitive, new immortal demon/hybrid. I have more important things to worry about than freaking eye color.

“No way,” Karma groans, not trusting her jackass boyfriend who always spews bullshit.

“It’s true,” Zee says, getting in on the conversation.

“Really?” Karma asks, sounding excited. “Why?”

“Who fucking cares?” Gage and I ask in unison.

“Just trying to stop you two from fighting. Again,” Karma mumbles under her breath.

Gage rolls his eyes just as I do. That’s what we do—fight. It’s just how we communicate.

“Hey,” Zee says, squinting into the distance. “What kind of car does Jenny have?”

I squint, but I can’t see anything ahead of me other than an endless row of forestry.

“Fuck if I know,” I mumble. “Why?”

Before he can answer, something explodes off to our right, and I screech to a halt as red, blue and white collide, blasting up into the air and thundering in power like it’s the fourth of July or some shit.

I leap out of the car when I see ungodly white light burning inside the middle of the forest, too bright to be cloaked by the trees.

“Fuck! Ella!” Zee shouts, running with me as we all crash through the woods, racing toward the point of origin.

Ella’s the only one to ever have power that white and that powerful. And I have a bad feeling Ella isn’t the one in control anymore.

“Careful!” Gage yells close behind us. “She could kill us all if she’s lost it!”

Kimber appears in front of me, then disappears into another portal just as Gage dematerializes. My feet pound the ground as I run faster, pushing my body to its limits as I hurdle over fallen trees and turn everything into a blur around me.

I stumble to a halt when I see a girl with black hair that should be blonde. Son of a fucking bitch.

“Probably shouldn’t have left her alone,” Dice whispers.

Roslyn is on the ground, seeming to be hyperventilating. Her eyes are dilating wildly as she stares at the brutal onslaught of blue and white power colliding.

Kya is on the ground, her mask broken and revealing her face. She’s clutching her side as though Ella has already gotten to her. Karma gasps when she sees her, and dematerializes to go to her side.

I see just the outline of a man, unable to see his face past the blue light surrounding him as he fights Ella like it’s his fucking job. Ella’s eyes are wild, dark, and fucking creepy as hell.

Shit. She’s gone. She’s lost inside the darkness none of us can understand.

Cursing, I try to figure out a way to get Roslyn out and then take Ella down. Maybe Kimber can send her to a different plane until she comes to.

“I’m probably gonna regret this,” Gage grumbles.

Without warning, he throws two red and blue orbs—red and fucking blue—into the fight, destroying the standoff when his power collides in the middle of theirs. The dick’s face becomes visible as a snarl erupts from Ella.

“I wouldn’t have done that if I were you,” the guy says, smiling as though he knows something we don’t.

That’s when I hear Gage yelp, and I look over just in time to see Ella has seriously fucking lost it enough to attack him.

“Stop!” Kimber yells.

From there, it’s all a blur of motion.

Karma screams, red power slaps Dice in the chest, something slices through my leg, and all hell breaks loose. More and more powers combine, slamming into us from somewhere else, and I groan when I’m knocked to the ground.

Son of a bitch. He has reinforcements.

At least five have joined us, all of them wearing masks as they strike with blow after blow. Leaping up, I grab the first one I can reach, and my knee hammers into their stomach hard enough to send them sailing.

Just before I reach Roslyn, a streak of blue hits me, and I’m knocked backwards so hard that I actually roar while still in flesh. I lift my head enough to see the dick with silver eyes is twitching his finger. Silver fucking eyes.

He’s a creature god. Fuck my motherfucking life.

My eyes move to Roslyn who is staring at me as her chest rises and falls rapidly, and her eyes roll back in her head before coming back down and shifting colors. My heartbeat speeds up when I see one eye sparks with flames and the other shifts with autumn flare.

No…

A bloodcurdling scream erupts from somewhere behind me as the battle rages on, but I can’t look away from the impossible. Roslyn grins darkly as she stands up, and then her attention shifts to the fucking creature god.

“So that’s what it takes?” he asks, seeming pleased about something. “Hurting your boyfriend that now wants you dead as much as I do?”

She doesn’t say a word before power flies from her hands, swirls of burning flames that rush against the guy and knock him backward. He grunts as he flies through the air and crashes through a tree.

I’m still stunned, trying to believe what I’m seeing.

Roslyn is the hybrid. The bloodthirsty, coldblooded killing witch/werewolf hybrid.

“Might have underestimated your power,” the guy mumbles before standing back up. “Won’t happen again.”

Just before he strikes, my instincts kick into action, and I shift faster than I ever have before. My clothes rip and shred as a roar leaves my mouth, and I turn into a tiger massive enough to absorb the impact of the blue streaks before they hit her.

A yelp leaves me when it feels like fire is slicing up my side in an unrelenting assault. The guy curses before the power fades, and I see another shot of black, foggy fire shoot across.

A howl erupts through the air, and I glance over to see a flash of shock white fur seconds before it disappears. In too much pain to stay in shifted form, I’m forced to let my flesh take back over.

My side is bleeding profusely when I finish the shift, and I clutch it, trying to keep pressure on it as I scan the area for the wolf I know Roslyn just turned into. With one arm, I crawl to the discarded white dress she ripped apart during her shift, and I grab it to push against my bleeding side.

“Fuck! She’s loose!” the guy yells.

She appears in a flurry of motion, a wolf materializing seconds before she’s latched onto his arm.

He shakes her off, but she disappears again before he can hit her with his blue streaks of energy.

That’s when I hear the dark, bone-chilling laughter, and I turn in time to see Ella encased in a white light, her hands out at her side as something builds. She’s about to kill us all.

Staggering up to my feet, I try to think of what to do to stop her, but nothing is coming to mind. Gage keeps trying to get close enough to knock her into a different plane, but the light surrounding her knocks him on his ass every time.

Kimber cries out as she opens a gate, doing all she can to suck Ella into it, but she’s not strong enough. I rush to her side, helping her add suction to the gate using my own abilities, but with my side bleeding heavily, it’s all I can do to keep from passing out.