One Hell of a Guy: The Cambion Trilogy, Book 1 (3 page)

“Come on,” he said. “One dance?” He reached out and took her hand.

It was the oddest thing but the second he touched her, every intention she’d had of repeating her refusal just drained away. She turned to look at Miri and opened her mouth but no words came out. Miri shrugged, then smiled and nudged her towards the dance floor.

Superman-handsome took her by the upper arm and drew her onto the dance floor, where they were quickly lost in a sea of dancing bodies.

For a moment, Lily felt awkward about her own limited dancing abilities — even if Miri was right and she was being too self-deprecating, the fact remained she wasn’t much of a dancer. But then he moved in close and slid his arm around her, placing his hand firmly on the small of her back and pulling her just close enough to smell him and feel the heat of his body, but not quite close enough to be indecent.

Then he started to move … and it was so far beyond indecent Lily didn’t have a word for it. She didn’t really have any words for anything, because all the blood drained out of her head and rushed to answer the summons his body was sending out. He had some serious moves; she forgot to be self-conscious and let him fit her along the length of his body and move her however he wanted, losing herself in the music and the heat and the vibe that rolled off him like pure power. Somehow, her normal approach to dancing — just try not to move too much, and don’t show off — fell completely away as she followed his lead.

Turns out I don’t do half-bad … with the right partner
, she thought distractedly.

Superman-handsome tilted his head down and put his mouth entirely too close to her ear. “What’s your name?” he said, so close his lips brushed against her.

She shivered, then shook it off and replied. “Lily.”

“Nice,” he said, and again his lips brushed against her, this time just in front of her ear where she was incredibly sensitive. “I’m Sebastian.”

She had been sort of amused thinking of him as “Superman-handsome,” but
Sebastian
was nice too.

“Do you like the club?” he asked, moving against her and then backing off, leaving her unsure again whether he was coming on to her or just dancing.

“It’s nice,” she said. “Loud, but I like it.”

“Loud’s the best part,” he said, and pulled back so she could see his face. He was smiling again and her stomach did a little spin when she saw the look in his eye. “I like it loud.”

Is he making an innuendo?
she thought, and smiled nervously. “Do you?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, and moved in close to her again, set his lips against her ear — more firmly this time, so she knew it was no accident. Her nerve endings sat up and sang the Hallelujah Chorus. “The louder the better.”

The tempo of the music changed. It wasn’t much of a change — dance music was dance music was dance music, in her experience — but enough that she felt she’d fulfilled any obligation she had to dance. Time for a graceful exit. This guy was some kind of whack-job — women bored him, until he met one who told him no. Then he wanted her.

No, wait
, she thought.
That’s not a whack-job. That’s pretty typical.

And the worst part was, if she kept dancing with him, he was going to get what he wanted. Because every time his lips brushed along her ear, it roused something primal in her and she felt ready to rub herself against him like a cat in heat. What the hell was going on? This was not her. She didn’t grind herself on perfect strangers — even if they were, literally, perfect.

She took a deliberate step back, out of his arms. “Well, you’re in luck,” she said, raising her voice to be heard despite the distance between them, “because it’s awfully loud in here. I actually think I’m going to head home; I’m getting a bit of a headache.”

He looked at her with the same look as before, like she was speaking a foreign language. “You’re … leaving?” he asked, moving a step closer.

“I believe I am, yes,” she said, moving a matching step back, nearly tripping over another dancer. He leaned forward to help her but she practically jumped to get away from him. Better to keep her nerve endings to herself, all things considered. She turned and hurried back to the bar, and Miri, though she could sense him following her.

“Hey —” Miri began, but Lily cut her off.

“I’m going home,” she said shortly.

Miri raised an eyebrow, but she said nothing.

Sebastian’s voice spoke behind her. “Let me get you a cab,” he said.

“I can get my own cab,” Lily said, not looking back at him as she practically shoved Miri off her barstool. “I’m fine, really. Just need a little rest.”

“Come back another night,” he said, stepping closer. “I want to see you again.”

“Maybe,” Lily said noncommittally as she pushed Miri in front of her, towards the door.

He reached out and stopped her with a hand on her arm, and with his other hand he grasped her by the chin, tilted her head up so she had no choice but to look directly into those improbably blue eyes. “Tell me you will,” he said.

She nodded, struck suddenly dumb, and he leaned down as though he were going to kiss her — Lord, how she wanted him to kiss her! — but at the last moment he shifted and brushed his lips along her jawline. Her whole body shuddered and she felt him smile, but it was an odd, grim little smile.

Then he turned and headed away through the crowd; within moments he was gone.

”What the hell was that?” Miri asked, staring at Lily with her mouth open.

“I have no idea,” Lily said. “Let’s get out of here.”
 

Chapter 4

SEBASTIAN SLAMMED INTO the back office in a fine fury, and dropped into the visitor’s chair on the near side of the big mahogany desk. By all rights he should have been on the other side, but —

“Vivienne, why are you in my chair?”

His mother swiveled away from the bank of security camera screens and gazed at him coolly. Her eyes were blue today, he noticed — fitting for someone as blonde as she’d chosen to be. “I’m keeping an eye on the club,” she said. “Which is more than I can say for some people in this room.”

“My actual eyes were
in
the club,” he retorted. “It doesn’t get any more eyes-on than that.”

“The only thing you had your eyes on was that chubby little redhead,” she said, crossing her long legs and leaning back in
his
chair. “I’m surprised at you, Sebastian. Such a non-starter.”

He bristled. “I don’t recall asking you to vet my selections.”

“You haven’t,” she said. “Nor would I want to. How … unseemly. Still, I don’t have to be holding auditions to have an opinion, do I?”

“As if anyone — or anything — could stop you,” he muttered.

“I’m just saying, she’s a nothing.” Vivienne lifted her chin and all but sniffed with disdain. “I stepped out into the club proper to get a sense of her, and I swear, it was like looking at a black hole.”

Was she nuts? The girl had been electric with energy; he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes — or his hands — off her. Not that she’d returned the sentiment, which was starting to make a horrible kind of sense now that he knew his mother had gotten herself involved.

“What did you do to her?” he demanded, too offended to even try to keep his tone civil.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You did something to her.”

“I did nothing, Sebastian.” She turned her attention back to the screens, clearly bored. “Why would I? She’s virtually null.”

“She turned me down.”

Vivienne turned her face back to him slowly, eyes wide. “She did what?”

“I asked her to dance and she said no.” He felt humiliatingly close to stamping his foot like a child. “What did you do to her?”

“What did
you
do to her?” she countered. “Because when I saw her she
was
dancing with you. I thought you weren’t going to be enthralling anyone anymore. It felt like cheating, and all that?”

He scowled at her. “I just gave her a little pull. To get her to dance.”

“So, your moral fiber didn’t even outlast the first time you wanted something,” she observed archly. “It’s good to see there’s something of me in you, after all.”

To that, he said nothing. What was there to say? He found her abhorrent, and didn’t want to be anything like her — but he
had
compelled Lily, when she said no.

Still, it had been such a small thing. Just a little pull, through the place where their hands were touching. He hadn’t kept it going, and she’d still been almost purring against him.
 

And then … nothing. She’d walked away.

“Some people are more resistant than others,” Vivienne was saying with a small shrug. “You know this.”

Yes, he knew that. And yes, he’d met people strong enough to resist his aura, his general presence. But he’d never met anyone who had responded to a pull … and then turned him down.

He thought of it as a pull because that’s what it felt like. As a child, he’d gone fishing with his father — mostly upstate but once all the way to the mountains of New Hampshire — and he’d learned early how to set a hook and reel a fish in slowly, carefully. One didn’t want to dislodge the hook and lose the fish — and, quite probably, the bait. That was what it felt like, to enthrall someone. Before he’d known what he was doing, even, that’s how he envisioned it.

Now, he couldn’t even stomach thinking about it.

Except — he’d pulled Lily.

And she’d walked away regardless.

“It bears a little looking into, though,” Vivienne said, bringing his attention back to the present. “I wouldn’t have expected anybody so useless to have that kind of natural resistance, and it would
have
to be natural. She wasn’t shielded, or powerful, or … anything.” She shook her head, then reached down, pulled a long, thin, wickedly sharp knife out of her knee-high boot.

“Are you sure that’s below the legal limit?” he asked, allowing just a hint of derision in his voice.

“A woman that looks like I do, walking alone on the streets of New York?” She raised an eyebrow at him. “A little dagger in the boot is just an insurance policy.”

As if she would need a physical weapon for self-defense. It was ridiculous.

Knife in one hand, she reached with her other hand into the pocket of the little leather miniskirt she was wearing, and pulled out a small round compact made of dull bronze inlaid with glossy, polished bits of what Sebastian knew — to his disgust — to be human bone. She opened it deftly, one-handed, and set it on the desk in front of her. Its scratched and warped twin mirrors cast dull circles of light onto the wall beside the desk.
 

“Wait—” he began, leaning forward, but it was too late.

With a swift indrawn hiss and an oddly delicate motion, she sliced the knife along the meatiest part of her thumb. Blood welled up and spilled over immediately; she moved her hand so that the thumb dripped steady droplets onto one of the mirrors in the compact. He watched her lips move as she counted drops but he didn’t speak; talking while she was conjuring could have disastrous results. One did not divide one’s concentration when summoning an imp.

As the tenth fat droplet fell, light flashed from the mirror, bright enough that Sebastian squinted against it, and the room was immediately filled with the stench of rotten eggs. There was a hollow
pop
; it felt like all the air was briefly sucked out of the room. And there on the desk next to the compact stood his mother’s favorite imp.

Pusboil was basically human-shaped, though only about two feet tall, with leathery gray skin and irregular tufts of matted white hair under its arms and in the region of what would have been its genitals, if it had any. Its eyes glowed pink in the dim room as it slowly looked from Vivienne to Sebastian then back again.

Finally, it spoke, its voice somehow soft and shrieky and gravelly and echoey all at once. “What the hell do you want now, Vivienne?”

Sebastian rolled his eyes at his mother’s delighted smile. She actually
liked
the little shithead’s attitude. Sebastian wasn’t planning to call up any imps any time soon — he wasn’t even sure he
could
— but if he did, he’d certainly prefer one that was properly sober, and maybe even respectful.

“You’re supposed to call me ‘Mistress,’” Vivienne said in a stern voice, but reached out to scratch it under its chin regardless.
 

It flopped over onto its back like a dog asking for a belly rub, and stretched its neck out to give Vivienne better access. “And you’re supposed to be seven feet tall and have bat wings,” it said, smarting off in its dreadful voice even as it was writhing in ecstasy over the scratching, “but here you are all tarted up trying to look good for a bunch of puny humans.”

Vivienne’s fingers closed around its throat and she picked it straight up off the desk, where it dangled, glaring at her with its watery pink eyes. “I look good for myself, Pusboil,” she snarled, and Sebastian almost laughed at the incongruity of a creature like Vivienne spouting quasi-feminist
Cosmopolitan
-Magazine-style bullshit.

As though it had read Sebastian’s mind — and honestly, Sebastian couldn’t swear it
couldn’t
read minds, what did he know? — Pusboil said, “Yes, you’ve come a long way, baby. Put me down, please.”

Vivienne set it on the desk and leaned back in her — in
Sebastian’s
— chair, folding her arms over her chest. “I have a job for you,” she said. “It’s very simple, but it’s also important. And you must not be seen, no matter what, because we are dealing with an unknown quantity here.”

The imp mirrored her, leaning back with its tail propping it up and crossing its own arms. “An unknown quantity of what?” it said. “I hope it’s something tasty, like kittens.”

“That’s quite enough,” Vivienne snapped. “Now, Sebastian was just downstairs leg-humping some little chippy, and she left the club less than fifteen minutes ago. You go get a whiff of her, find her trail and follow her home.” The imp nodded. “I want to know everything she does, and with whom she does it. Any sense you can get from her of whether there’s anything otherworldly about her or any of her friends or acquaintances, I want to know about it.” The imp nodded again. “Oh, and anything you overhear her say about my darling son, of course.”