hidden talents (4 page)

“We"ll get to that,” Hot Cop said. “Why don"t you tell us your name?”

“Why don"t you tell me yours?”

Hot Cop"s sexy mouth curved up. His lower lip was slightly fuller than the upper, with a dent in its soft middle. “I"m Adam Santini, and these are Tony and Rick Lupone.”

“And you are cops, for real?”

“They"re detectives. I"m their lieutenant.”

Hot Cop"s eyes weren"t budging from hers any more than hers were from

him. His hair had been hidden by his helmet. Now she saw it was shiny black - a little long, a little shaggy, with a hint of a wave. Gold winked beneath the base of his strong tanned throat, possibly a St. Michael medal. Ari should have been more unnerved by how good it felt just to stare at him. It was like the sight of him was food and she"d been starving. Usually she felt awful after one of her fits, but every cell in her body hummed with pleasure. Between her legs she was

embarrassingly achy. Her nipples were so tight the stretchy bra in her tank top stung. Was the rest of him as impressive as his shoulders? He looked older than she was, thirty or thereabouts. Did that mean he"d be experienced in bed?

“I"m Ari,” she said before her overheated imagination could wander down that road.

“Ari,” he repeated. He didn"t ask for her last name. Maybe he suspected she wouldn"t say. Her head gave a funny swoop as he continued to stare at her.

“How did you get into Resurrection?” the one called Rick asked her.

Reluctantly, Ari shifted her gaze to him. Though his tone was slightly

belligerent, this seemed a harmless enough question. “I took the suburban train, then walked from the last station.”

“You walked.”

Ari"s eyebrows shot up. “I couldn"t spare cab fare. Was I supposed to fly?”

Rick"s brother Tony snickered as if he knew a joke she wasn"t in on.

“Look,” she said, losing patience. “What"s with this town anyway? Why is everything so wonky?”

Adam opened his mouth just as a flash of motion behind the window next to the bed drew her attention. Ari turned to see what had caused it and let out a bloodcurdling scream. A giant gray face stared at her through the glass. It wasn"t a mask or a statue, because its features were moving. Not only that, its lion-like body was held in the air by flapping leathery batwings.

“Hey there,” it said in a low rumble, waving one clawed front paw. “Level Five, okay!”

Then the creature stuck up its opposable furry thumb.

Ari couldn"t help it. She screamed twice as loud as before.

“Jesus.” Adam kneeled up on the bed to slap his hand across her mouth. “I thought you were a badass. You"re going to have the neighbors calling the cops on us.”

The giant gray thing"s face twisted in what she swore was apology. Then it flapped its wings harder and flew away. Adam released her mouth.

“Wh -” Ari panted. “What the fuck was that?”

“Gargoyle,” Tony answered, sounding completely entertained by her

reaction. “They"re our self-appointed National Guard. Lots of them like to hang out near where cops live.”

“A gargoyle,” she repeated.

Seeing she wasn"t screaming anymore, Adam sat back in his granny chair.

Maybe she shouldn"t have, but Ari couldn"t resist looking at him again. “Really?

A
gargoyle
?”

The smile she was getting to like way too much stretched his gorgeous face.

“I don"t know how to break this to you, Ari, but you"re not in Kansas anymore.”

∞

Ari"s head hurt too much to think, though probably she should have been glad the cops had stopped asking her questions so they could explain the situation she"d tripped into.

They"d moved the conversation from Adam"s guest room to his nicked-up

round kitchen table. Tony ordered two extra large pizzas, which the men ate almost entirely by themselves. Not only was eating pizza in handcuffs a challenge, but after the first slice Ari"s appetite had stalled.

She was in the land of Faerie, a place whose borders she could cross because of her freaky gift. The cops who"d taken her hostage were werewolves. Gargoyles were real. Ditto for vamps and sorcerers. Probably more stuff too, but she hadn"t been able to force herself to ask.

And gnomes
, she realized with a shudder. Her stomach dropped. She hoped the meat on the pizza had been regular sausage.

“Gnomes?” she asked raspily. “I, uh, saw some hanging in a restaurant

window in Chinatown.”

“Pests,” Adam said. “Like squirrels.”

“They"re not intelligent,” Tony reassured her. “Not like dogs or cats. Or gargoyles. Now those are some smart cookies. Their language is just so different people assume they"re slow. One saying
hi
to you is a compliment.”

“But -” She swallowed. “Gnomes weren"t in that pizza, were they?”

Rick choked on his soda. “No,” he said as Adam slapped his back. “Most

non-Asians don"t like the way they taste.”

She gave thanks for small favors. “What about the girls with the pointy ears I saw in the coffee shop?”

“Elves,” Adam said.

This made her smile at last. Elves were real? That was kind of awesome.

“Don"t get too excited,” Tony warned. “They"re mostly just people. It"s not like
Lord of the Rings
.”

“You watch our movies?”

“And your TV. There"s a special channel for imported programs. We like to know what"s going on out there, in case it affects us.”

Or in case someone like her stumbled into their pocket of Faerie. She sat back in her slatted chair, trying to wrap her head around what she"d learned. She smoothed her fingers back and forth on the rim of Adam"s kitchen table. It looked so real with its chipped paint and old scratches.

“It is real,” Adam said.

Ari blinked and looked up at him. She knew she hadn"t spoken aloud. “Why is my gift stronger here? Back home, I have to concentrate pretty hard to move anything.”

“This is Faerie. There"s more magic for you to tap into.”

Adam"s steady green gaze was making her head do that swoopy thing. She

caught the table"s edge as she began to sway.

“You"re tired,” Tony said, startling her by scraping back his chair and rising.

“We"ll catch up with you tomorrow.”

“You want us to clean up?” Rick said, giving his brother a scolding slap on the back of his head.

“I"ll take care of it,” Adam said.

He didn"t show them out. Ari guessed their relationship was too casual for that.
Cousins
, he"d explained. They seemed close, like they knew each other well.

Except for being werewolves, they could have been any three guy buddies from Brooklyn.

Adam didn"t rise until they were gone. “Stay,” he said when she would have gotten up to help. “You look ready to fall over.”

She wasn"t. His sheer sexiness was making her weak-kneed. “It is kind of hard to dry glasses in handcuffs.”

He ignored the hint, though he might have suppressed a smile. It felt

strangely good to be alone with him in his apartment, right and wrong at the same time. She watched him toss the pizza boxes, scrape the plates, and stack the dirty dishes inside the sink. He turned on the water and squirted out dish liquid. The sounds were so domestic they were surreal.

“So,” he said as they lulled her. “Why are you looking for the Eunuch?”

As interrogation methods went, she had to admire it.

Ari let out a sigh. “He hurt some friends of mine. I wanted to see if I could get him off their back.”

“How do you know him?”

Adam wasn"t looking at her, just soaping and rinsing plates with those

slablike muscles shifting sexily in his back. Ari tried to calculate the angles.

Answer. Don"t answer. Trust a little and see what she got in return. Adam didn"t seem like someone who"d be on Henry Blackwater"s payroll. Then again, if he was, he"d already know what she was going to say. She drew a breath and made up her mind.

“In my world,” she said, “Henry Blackwater ... collects people like me.”

Adam shut off the water and turned, his narrow hips leaning back against the edge of the sink. How tall was he anyway? Six one? Six two? His legs looked ten feet long in the black sweatpants. Because they seemed dangerous to stare at, she dragged her eyes back up to his face. His brows were drawn together in a furrow above his nose.

“You didn"t know that,” she realized.

“No.” He dried his hands on a checkered towel. “We know what we think he does here in Resurrection, but it"s been very hard to prove. He makes a lot of money dealing drugs, and it buys him too many obfuscation spells.”

Ari supposed he meant this literally. “He deals drugs in my world too. He also runs a gambling racket. That"s what he wanted me for. With my gift, I could make things happen that no one else could predict. A odds-on favorite horse would flag in the final stretch, or a roulette ball would drop in a certain slot. More and more, the things he wanted me to do weren"t so harmless. I told him I was quitting, and for that he hurt my friends. None of us are anybody special, but they"re everything to me.”

He nodded like he understood, then sat opposite her again. The chair creaked under his muscled weight. “How did he find you?”

“That"s his thing. He has a knack for spotting people with special talents.

Psychics who aren"t fakes. Healers who really do. He gets something on them so they have to work for him. In my case, I was on the street when he found me. All he had on me was that I was hungry.”

She heard the bitterness in her confession. He did too. He stretched his big hand across the table and covered both of her handcuffed ones. Ari"s jaw tightened even as pleasure rushed through her at the heat of his palm.

“If you"re underage or don"t want to use your name, you can still get jobs in New York, but at the least you have to be clean and fed. My friends and I couldn"t pull that off until Blackwater threw me the occasional assignment. Until then, we were living under bridges and begging. Sarah busked in the subway with her guitar, but that was only safe if one of us could stay with her. She was pretty and guys would -” She cut herself off before her mouth ran away with her.

“The rest isn"t your business,” she said stiffly.

His thumb stroked her knuckles. “Ari ...”

His voice was gentle and deep, stroking nerves only sound could reach.

Chances were, he was being nice to soften her up, but she wanted to tear off his clothes and forget every trouble she had with him. She didn"t even know if she could have sex with him. Would it turn her into a wolf if she did?

“He comes here every couple months,” she said, ignoring how husky the

words came out. “Nobody knows what he does, only that he disappears. Some of his goons go with him, but they don"t share details. I only found out where he went because he jotted it in his dateminder. I used my gift to break it out of his locked desk drawer.”

“And you followed him here?” Adam shook his head like he couldn"t believe anyone would be that stupid.

“I told you. Maxwell and Sarah mean everything to me.”

They were all she had. No other souls in the world would care or even notice if she ceased to exist.

She thought about the last place she and her friends had lived. The apartment hadn"t been as nice as Adam"s, but it was good. No roaches. No leaks. An actual bedroom for the girls to share. A big bright window with light for Max to do his artwork by. He paid his share of the bills as a wall painter, but art was his calling.

Of course, the stratospheric New York rent was a struggle once Henry Blackwater made sure Ari lost her hostess job. Max kept his until Henry"s goons broke his fingers. God, he"d cried that night. Only the second time she"d seen him do it, the first being when he"d confessed he was in love with Sarah.
Things were finally
getting better for all of us
, he"d choked out with his beautiful hands lying immobilized by splints and bandages in his lap.
What’s wrong with us? Why can’t
our
dreams come true?

Ari"s throat closed with emotion. She turned away from Adam, unwilling to let him see the personal things in her eyes.

“You"re close to this Maxwell?” Adam asked.

The discernible growl in his voice yanked her attention back to him. Color was rising faintly in his lean face.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “That"s not my business either.”

In spite of everything, Ari smiled. He was jealous. He thought Maxwell was her boyfriend.

“He kissed me once,” she said, unable to resist teasing him. “But it was a mistake. He"s been in love with Sarah forever.”

Sarah was the fragile one in their little trio, a sweet-faced beauty with light brown shampoo-commercial hair and a heart so tender she"d give her last penny to someone worse off than she was. Max and Ari were tougher, but they loved her.

“I see.” Adam cleared his throat and stared at the table. His cheeks were bright red now.

Ari laughed. “Jeesh. For such a sexy dangerous guy, you"re adorable.”

Maybe she shouldn"t have called him sexy. When his head came up, his eyes were fiery. His irises glowed like a gas stove"s flame, the green edging into blue.

Ari"s breath caught and she jerked back against her chair. Her breasts might have been small, but they were sensitive. Her nipples felt like someone was pinching them. Warm sleek fluid gushed from her pussy, dampening her panties. Adam"s nostrils got wider. He flattened his hands on the table top until their knuckles paled from pressure. His gaze dropped to her mouth and stayed there.

“I want to kiss you,” he rumbled like hot gravel.

His canines were sliding out like his cousin Tony"s had earlier. This

shouldn"t have aroused her, but more cream trickled out of her. His lengthening teeth made her think of erections.

“I don"t think I"d stop you,” she said faintly.

He licked his gorgeous lips, his tongue leaving a wet trail. “I want to do more than kiss you.”

A blaze of heat swept through her. Ari stretched her handcuffed hands toward him. “You could take these off first.”

He shook his head, a tight side-to-side motion.