Page 13 of A Touch of Brimstone

I spun around to get a look at my abductor, who honestly should have been cast in stone and placed in front of a museum. Tousled umber-brown hair, parchment-colored skin, aquiline nose, broad pronounced cheeks, and generous rose-tinted lips. My eyes fixed on the unnatural contrast of his opal-colored eyes.

He was too close. When a person abducts me off the street, they aren’t doing it out of politeness. I shoved him back. “Personal space.”

His taunting smile widened, exposing sharp canines. Vampire. One hard blink. I convinced myself that when I opened my eyes, he’d be gone.

He wasn’t. Standing just a few inches from me was a vampire.

A vampire.

“I like her. Perhaps a taste before we proceed.”

A perverted vampire who wanted to taste me. There wasn’t time to process it. My only goal was to protect myself. Come out of this alive. More optimistically—unscathed.

“Try it and you’ll never taste anything again,” I shot back, demonstrating a bravado I didn’t feel and touting abilities I didn’t have. How would I stop a vampire? If he tried to get a “taste,” I’d do what I could to make good on my threat. The only weapons I had were my knees, which were going straight into his groin, and my fingers into his eyes. Damage be damned, I was going to smack him across his head with the phone in my back pocket.

He dismissed me with an exaggerated flourish of a bow.

I looked around. The creepy vampire wasn’t the only person I had to worry about.

“I see the appeal. But as you know, the fiery ones tend to cause the most trouble. And this one has caused a great deal,” said the woman seated at the middle of the semicircular table.

The vampire was still too close for my liking.

“Kane, step away from her,” the woman instructed.

After he moved back several feet, her calculating hazel eyes homed in on me. Her narrow face took on a more severe appearance and her lips thinned into a tight line. I was willing to bet the lines that crinkled as she drew her brows together weren’t from excessive smiling. Warm ivory skin was a stark contrast to her cool and aloof countenance. Her dark hair with hues of purple was coiled into a crown braid and the back in a low bun. Dressed in a blue suit complemented by a pearl silk shirt, she seemed to be in charge—or perhaps the role was self-appointed. The cool discernment in her eyes led me to believe she was older than she looked.

It felt like I’d been dropped into the middle of a conversation and couldn’t figure out the right questions to ask. Whatever they were convinced I was guilty of had made me their enemy. I divided my attention between the people, the room, and the view of the city, compliments of the floor-to-ceiling window that took up the entire back wall of the room. I wasn’t on the main floor. Maybe the third or fourth.

When I pulled my attention back to the people, I found the woman who’d called me trouble looking down her pert nose at me. Hazel eyes that bored into me with revulsion came from the younger woman to her right. Maybe enemy was being optimistic. The man seated to her left had the same luminous violet eyes as the woman with Dominic that day at the coffee shop. A colorful sleeve of tattoos covered each of his arms. Through his teal V-neck t-shirt, I could see the outline of more ink. He observed me with a gentler look as his fingers twined around strands of his ear-length reddish-brown hair.

“What do you wa—”

My question was cut off by the light padding of feet. Slowly approaching me was a lion. A lion. A huge lion. When he licked his lips, I began calculating how long it would take to make it to the door. The occupants of the room appeared totally unconcerned that an unbidden apex predator was just traipsing into the room as if it happened every day. Maybe it did. Sitting down for lunch, bam, a lion walks up and takes the steak off your plate.

I tensed as it moved around me, its nose brushing along my leg and then along my balled hand. Before I could gather a plan, it shuddered, and a man—a naked man—was on all fours at my feet. He stood, his lips quirked at my effort to hide my shock, which was something he definitely expected and wanted.

I needed to get away from this den of freaks.

“Lance, must you make a spectacle of yourself at all times?” the regal woman chastised. With a wave of her hand, a gust of wind pushed in my direction, followed by a swirling of golden lights that ensorcelled the human lion, and when it disappeared, he stood before me fully clothed in a fitted t-shirt, relaxed jeans, and flipflops. Unruly chin-length sandy-colored hair, his skin coloring just a few shades lighter. Predaceous, emotive golden-brown eyes and a long oval face. He was his animal incarnate.

He cast a look over his shoulder at the woman who’d clothed him. “Madeline, this isn’t a witch,” he announced.

Thank you. Listen to the shameless man who—oh dear fates—was a lion a minute ago. It hit me like a brick. He was a lion just moments before.

All eyes went to the man with the violet eyes. “She is the one I saw,” he confirmed. He leaned forward in his chair; his elbows rested on the table as he steepled his hands. Wary interest entered his kind eyes. “She tasks me. This is the one I envisioned before seeing the empty Perils. How can this be if she has no magic?”

Madeline’s frown deepened. “I thought she was shrouded in a cloaking spell, which was why I couldn’t sense it.” She directed her attention to Lance. “But a cloak doesn’t work on shifters. You’re sure she’s human?”

It wouldn’t be hard to determine that I wasn’t a witch, if everyone with magic gave off such foreboding dynamic energy. It prickled at my skin, plucked at my nerves, and made it very apparent that I was in the presence of something other. With all of Reginald’s declarations of being a witch, nothing about him felt like this. Surely, nothing about me hinted at it, either.

“Yes, I am human,” I offered before anyone else could. “So there’s no need for me to be at… whatever this is. I don’t know, the Meeting of the Weird and Scary?”

No one seemed to find me amusing.

I started backing away, but the shifter’s sharp predatory scope stopped me in my tracks. A warning. “She’s human,” Lance confirmed.

Madeline looked unconvinced. “But does it make her innocent?”

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