Sundown, International 4: Maneater Read online

  “Oh,” I said.

  Alexius’s arms tightened around me. He stroked my shoulder. My anger was gone, all gone. The power and the fury had just faded. Or been blown to smithereens by my orgasms.

  I cleared my throat, and said, “Well, that explains a few things.”

  “Does it?” His lips brushed my neck, and I shivered.

  “Well, such as why I couldn’t take my eyes off you yesterday…”

  “The feeling was mutual.”

  “Yes, but I’m a siren. I expect it.” I paused. “And it explains why you’re not remotely surprised to hear me say that. You knew, didn’t you?”

  “I confess I did.”

  “Which is why you didn’t think it was weird about the lions, and about the bellboys, and… and how you knew where I was…”

  “Yes,” he said, stroking my breast.

  “And why This Voice doesn’t work on you.”

  His teeth scraped my shoulder. “It does a little bit.”

  “Does it?”

  “Well, I am half human.”

  “Want to know a secret?”

  His other hand was investigating my pussy. “Do you have to ask?”

  “I’m half human too.”

  “Really?”

  “Mmm.” I arched against him. “It’s why I can leave the island. Why I can be with humans without eating them. Well, usually.”

  “You haven’t eaten any while I’ve been here.”

  “Haven’t had a chance. You’ve --” I gasped as he rolled my clit between finger and thumb “-- kept me busy.”

  “And very enjoyable it’s been, too.”

  I paused to enjoy his attentions for a while, then said, “I’m sorry I tried to eat you.”

  “I’m sorry, too. Do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Please don’t get the teeth out when I’m in your mouth.”

  Memories of how he’d felt in my mouth last night flooded me with pleasure. “I may have to practice that,” I said.

  “Be my guest.”

  I turned my head, and he leaned over to kiss me, and his cock throbbed inside me. I sighed happily.

  Then his phone rang.

  Alexius tensed, then he sighed. But not happily, as I’d just done. With great irritation. Was he actually going to answer it? We were having sex!

  Honestly, demigods are just as bad as humans.

  “One sec,” he said, and I scowled and wriggled away. The broken wood crackled under my body, and I remembered how it’d pierced my skin. I healed pretty well, not as quickly as Alexius of course, but pretty well nonetheless. While Alexius searched the remains of his clothes for his phone, I hauled myself to my feet and made my way gingerly over the detritus of the wrecked room to the bathroom to inspect the damage.

  The huge mirror reflected carnage on my back. Alexius had been so vigorous with me that at one point I’d moved a full six inches across the floor. My palms and knees were full of splinters, and my chest bled from a dozen places where I’d smashed through the window.

  Making a face, I started pulling out the bits of glass and wood, and set the bath to running. Alexius was pretty bloody too, even if all the wounds I’d inflicted had healed. Maybe we could bathe together. The tub was big enough for half a dozen.

  But I wasn’t even halfway through extracting the glass from my palms when Alexius slammed through the door and grabbed my arm. He started pulling me out of the bathroom.

  “Ask nicely,” I grumbled.

  “We have to go,” he said, his face grim. Grimmer than I’d seen before. “Now. We have to leave.”

  “Why? If you think the hotel will be mad I can talk to them, believe me, The Voice works on everyone --”

  “No. It’s not safe.”

  “For who?” I asked.

  “You,” he said, and I dug my heels in and stopped right there.

  “What?”

  He ran a hand through his hair, exasperated. “I’ll explain on the way. But we have to go. Now.”

  “What, naked? ’Cos I left my clothes outside the Mirage and I don’t think yours are in any fit state, and you know humans have issues with nudity --”

  I broke off, because he was striding back into the bathroom. A bathrobe came flying at me. “Better?”

  I looked at it. “Not really,” I said doubtfully. “Look, if we’re in real danger I can fly us out --”

  “No.” He looked frustrated. “Yes. Just… be subtle.”

  “A six-foot eagle with a human head is never going to be subtle, Flash.”

  But he looked genuinely frightened, so I bundled the two bathrobes together, shoved them into his hands, and flew us out of the ruined suite. I didn’t know where to go, so I started for my own hotel, but Alexius yelled, “No, not there.”

  I wheeled round the back of the Venetian, intending to go somewhere less conspicuous, but there were damn people everywhere. And I was a giant bird. And if I set us down, we’d be two people walking around in bathrobes.

  I beat my wings in frustration and flew up high -- and then Treasure Island’s pirate ships came into view. Hah! Yes.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Alexius screamed as I took a dive straight for the ship moored half out of sight behind the trees. With luck, if I moved fast, no one would see us.

  “Be right back,” I said, dropping Alexius on the deck and grabbing a bathrobe, then zooming back into the sky, round the back of the building where I was less likely to be seen, and down to the pool where I dropped behind a cabana. Five seconds later I walked out wrapped in a bathrobe, and calmly entered the hotel.

  Well, I say calm, I mean my heart was tapping out a frenetic Morse code, but I looked calm enough, I reckon. Certainly no one stared at me any more than usual.

  Inside, I found a boutique and used The Voice on the assistant to give me clothes and shoes for the both of us, then I reversed my journey and dropped down on the deck of the hidden ship.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Alexius yelled, that special kind of yell that’s no louder than a whisper but has all the fury of a scream.

  “I thought you knew everything,” I said, tossing him a Sirens of TI shirt and shorts. Not particularly sexy, but Alexius could make a burlap sack look like couture. Plus, I had to love the slogan.

  “Not funny,” he said, but he pulled on the clothes. “Chloe, we need to get… away. We really have to get out of here.”

  “Here as in Treasure Island, or here as in Vegas?”

  “Here as in America,” he said, shoving on a pair of flip-flops with an expression of disgust.

  “Why? What the hell is going on?”

  He ran his hands through his hair. “Just… let’s out of here, and I’ll tell you.”

  More than a little frightened now, I flew us to the pool again and we made our way back inside. I expected Alexius to go to the front entrance and hail a cab, but instead he dodged inside the hotel and moved quickly through the casino, talking quickly and quietly as he did.

  “Okay. There’s a man in this town called Starne. He owns your hotel, plus half a dozen others. He owns casinos, he owns apartment complexes, he owns half the damn police force. And he owns a zoo.”

  “Like the one this morning?”

  “No.” Alexius’s beautiful mouth was grim. “It contains unusual species, but that’s about it.”

  “What do you mean? What does he collect?”

  “People, Chloe. He collects people.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it again as a large party of blue-rinsed pensioners enveloped us. Hustling me quickly down a corridor and onto a small tram, Alexius was torturously quiet in the close confines. It wasn’t until we stepped out into the sunshine and lost ourselves in the confusion of the Mirage lobby that he started talking again.

  “I don’t know exactly what he has in there. But I’ve seen the vampire and I’ve seen the werewolf, and he’s bragged about an Elf and a Faerie.”

  “In a zoo?”

  “A zoo,” he
said, “crossed with a harem.”

  I baulked at that, but he kept me moving.

  “And he wants me for his zoo?”

  “Yes.” His eyes flashed.

  I didn’t say anything for a minute or two as Alexius led me into a huge covered parking garage. What kind of person kept people in a zoo? In a harem?

  Okay, I sometimes eat people. But I never do it on purpose, and I’m always sorry afterward.

  “He keeps exotic creatures in there,” Alexius said, steering me now with his hand at the small of my back. “He boasts about renting them out.”

  “Renting -- ew!”

  “Yeah. High rollers pay a fortune for a night with a vampire or a werewolf. Of course, he has to keep them restrained. Wouldn’t want his clients getting eaten.”

  “If he hired me out, I’d damn well eat someone.”

  “That’s probably what the vampire said.”

  “Indeed it was.”

  Alexius froze, and so did I, because those words hadn’t come from either of us. They’d come from a man stepping out from a behind huge, ugly black car with darkened windows.

  He was flanked by four very, very large men.

  “Of course, in life she was a devout Catholic, so all I had to do was acquire some chains once owned by the Grand High Inquisitor in Spain, and she was adequately restrained.”

  A growl rose in Alexius’s throat, so soft probably only I could hear it. He shifted me subtly behind him.

  “Oh, very gallant,” Starne said. I presumed it was Starne. Who else would it be? He wasn’t a large man. In fact he was decidedly short, a fact made even more apparent by the four giants backing him. He wasn’t exactly unpleasant-looking; in the right light he might even have been considered attractive. But his slightly delicate manner of speech clued me in to the fact that here was a man who found practically everything else in the world to be extremely distasteful.

  Except for money. I had a feeling he found that to be wonderfully attractive.

  “And how do you plan on restraining a siren?” Alexius asked. Each word dripped with disdain.

  “It’s quite interesting, actually,” Starne said, gesturing to his men. “You see, I’ve been reading my Homer. Have you ever read the Odyssey?”

  A chill went through me. In my house, we do not like that book.

  “It’s quite dull really. Only it does offer one piece of useful advice. When dealing with sirens, it helps to be deaf.”

  “But you’re not,” Alexius said. Poor, dumb Alexius.

  “No, and neither was Odysseus. But his men…”

  “Had their ears blocked and were ordered to ignore any orders to untie him from the mast,” I said. My fingers were digging into Alexius’s arm now, and I felt warm blood seep over them. I hadn’t even realized my claws were out.

  “Yes, very good. Of course, you’d know the legend, wouldn’t you?” Starne said.

  “But that’s all it is,” I said. “Only a legend. What makes you think sirens really exist?”

  Then Starne did a terrible thing.

  He smiled.

  It was not a nice smile. It was a smile that said he knew something I really, really wasn’t going to enjoy hearing.

  “Well, the account of your dear friend Alexius for one,” he said. “Or, actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I understand you’re lovers now, is that correct? Tsk tsk, Alexius. That really wasn’t in our bargain.”

  The shock came over me slowly. A bargain.

  A bargain.

  “What was in your bargain?” I heard myself asking.

  “I wasn’t going to hand you over,” Alexius said quickly, and I realized I was still clinging to his arm. Stepping away, wiping his blood on my shirt, I looked from him to Starne and back again.

  “Actually, you did say, when I spoke to you about,” Starne checked his expensive watch, “half an hour ago, that you would hand her over. ‘I’ll bring her right to you,’ you said.”

  I stared at Alexius’s beautiful face, those cobalt blue eyes, his golden hair, exquisite lips. And I saw the guilt there. The claws on my hands lengthened. I felt the inner teeth break out inside my mouth.

  “How did you find us?” Alexius said, his voice low and hollow.

  “Oh, I’ve had you tracked all day,” Starne said. “It’s not hard to keep tabs on an exquisite lady like Chloe. Really I’ve been having her watched since the moment she checked in to my hotel.”

  “Then why did you need me?”

  “Well, to verify she was a siren, of course. Everyone else could be charmed by that voice. When I called Sundown in London, they told me you’d be impervious.” He ran his eyes over our combined dishevelment. “Apparently they weren’t entirely right.”

  “You hired him to find out if I was a siren?”

  “Chloe --” Alexius began, but I cut him off with a look.

  “Well, I had to be sure. There are beautiful women all over the city, but none of them have quite your…” Starne smiled again… “Charms.”

  My lip curled. “And how did you know I was going to be in the city?”

  Starne made a noise that might have been called a laugh from anyone else. “My dear siren,” he said, “who do you think sent you the brochure? Who planted the tourists in the bar in Crete talking about their trip to Las Vegas? Who spiked all the travel websites so that only hotels belonging to me would be offered to you?”

  My mouth opened, then closed again. I shut my eyes. Oh gods.

  “It was quite sweet, really,” Starne said, and I snapped my eyes open and leapt for him.

  At least, that was the plan. Almost as soon as I moved I bounced off something, something harsh and so fine it was almost invisible. It was a net, held by two of the henchmen, who quickly wrapped it around me. My claws and teeth wouldn’t break it, no matter how much I fought.

  “Release me,” I said, and was ignored by everyone except Starne, who was being restrained by a third henchman. “I said release me!”

  Starne struggled, but the big guy was too strong for him. I knew what he’d done, of course. He’d blocked the ears of his henchmen, just as Odysseus did, and ordered them to restrain him.

  Terrified now, I screamed as loud as I could, which had Starne sobbing in pain, but didn’t bring anyone else to my aid. Not even Alexius, who was wrestling the fourth henchman. And he’d have won, I knew, if one of the guys holding me hadn’t gone to the back of the car, withdrawn an old-fashioned bow, and shot Alexius in the shoulder.

  The effect was instant. I’d expected him to pull out the arrow -- what with his healing powers it shouldn’t take more than a minute or two to be perfect again -- but instead he fell to the ground, his face white, his eyes wide with agony.

  I stared in horror. Blood soaked his shirt, and the skin of his exposed arm and neck was turning purple.

  “What did you do to him?” I screamed, but no one answered. Instead, the guy behind me brought down something heavy on the back of my head, and the last thing I saw before I passed out was Alexius’s eyes on mine, reflecting horror and pain.

  Chapter Five

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to communicate by typing. I assume since you booked your flights and accommodation over the Internet that you’re familiar with a Western keyboard?”

  Starne’s voice came from a large flat screen TV, which was also showing his face. His hideous, hateful face.

  “Obviously, I can’t take the risk of you using that famous voice on us. But at the same time, I don’t want you to think no one’s listening.”

  I started growling. True, my cell wasn’t all that prison-like -- in fact, it was a spacious, pleasantly-decorated room, not unlike the hotel suite I’d booked. But it had no windows and only one door, which was made of steel.

  I typed, I doubt you’d like to hear what I have to say.

  Starne laughed that eerie mirthless laugh. “You have a full set of punctuation marks, if that will help.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Now
,” he went on, “since we don’t yet know what effect your voice will have on other paranormal beasties, we can’t allow you to socialize. Besides, the vampire has occasional psychotic episodes, and I don’t want her doing damage to you. Obviously you don’t have the accelerated healing some paras do. And we’ve taken the precaution of soundproofing your room, also for obvious reasons. I’m afraid you can scream all you like; this insulation can withstand sounds up to 300 decibels.”

  I didn’t know what 300 decibels were. I did know I could scream loud enough to shatter glass. It was a shame my Aunt Raidne wasn’t here. I’d once seen a rock melt at the sound of her voice.

  “You may of course communicate with the other inhabitants by --”

  He broke off as he saw me typing, Don’t you mean prisoners?

  “My dear, you’re not a prisoner.”

  No? So let me go.

  He gave a cold smile. “And yet you are not free. You’ll be well treated.”

  I didn’t even bother to reply to that.

  “Is there anything you would like to eat?”

  You, I replied, and he gave that horrible laugh again.

  I screamed. Loudly. So loudly a picture fell off the wall. But it didn’t have any effect on Starne and it didn’t smash any of the walls.

  What the hell was that thing you trapped me in? I typed.

  Starne looked pleased. “Ah, yes. That is the net woven by Hephaestus to trap Aphrodite and Ares in bed together.”

  I stared.

  “Quite a coup, don’t you think? It’s proved to be totally unbreakable. No force yet devisable by man has come even close to damaging it. It’s completely impervious. Even the werewolf can’t break it.”

  A werewolf.

  You’re sick, I told him.

  “Sticks and stones, my dear siren,” he said, and then the screen went blank, just as I’d been about to ask him what he’d shot Alexius with. Not that I really was really all that concerned. The bastard had sold me down the river. For all I cared he could rot alive.

  I screamed again, just for the sake of it, and kicked the keyboard on the floor. The screen reverted to the image it had been showing when I woke up, which was a pleasant garden with a tinkling fountain. Pleasant, that is, until I looked closer and saw that it was lined with cells, inside which paced naked women of various species. A tiny blue creature I presumed to be an Elf, and a tall dark woman who was baring her fangs at the garden. The psychotic vampire. Well, if I’d been kept here long, I’m sure I’d be psychotic too.