SEDUCTIVE SUPERNATURALS: 12 Tales of Shapeshifters, Vampires & Sexy Spirits (101 page)

My computer voice hadn’t paused. “Several years ago, you failed in protecting the dragon. A fire burned you while you tried to save him—by the by, that was merely the first time you were burned—but this video is merely somewhat of a survey course in what you need to know. So, dear, please access the ‘dragon’ file to learn more about what’s become of him…”

Next to me, Amari was shaking her head. I assumed I would be taught about the dragon when I needed it.

“After you failed in that,” Other Me said, “you were retired by the Meratoliages as punishment, which technically means they shut you down and then resurrected you as a revenant when required. You weren’t a happy bunny about that, let me tell you, and if these boots are in the mood, they might give you a flashback or two about that. But they can be erratic.”

Onscreen, Computer Lilly touched the boots, as if she had been great friends with them on that particular night. But we would see how I got along with them now, wouldn’t we? Present Me gave them only a suspicious look.

“When your family resurrected you,” she continued, “they sent you after the dragon, programmed to obey their every order. Again, see the file on the master if you must, but your conscious time is always limited, and there are always better matters to worry on. Forgetting can be a blessing. Just ask Amari.”

“Sure ’nuff,” the witch said.

“In any case,” Other Lilly added, “you had hard luck with the Meratoliages yet again, and you were cast into fire once more when you didn’t obey their orders. Literally burned in a bonfire. You managed to escape, and you ended up tracking down the witch in the bayous who was said to be able to heal anyone. So Amari helped you, because that’s what she does. She created these boots so you might heal your body and your mind, and it worked…in its own way.”

As my computer self took in a deep breath, the room seemed to freeze in place, as if
everything
was holding its breath—the air itself, perhaps even whatever was underneath the cover shrouding the mirror across the room right now.

Amari nodded to Jean-Marie, who left us as the video resumed.

“If there is one thing for you to keep at the top of your mind, Lilly,” Other Me said, “it’s to always have an eye out for the Meratoliages. They’ve sent family members after you before, and they’ll do so again. They want you back in the fold, but it isn’t out of love. They want to study you, see what made you go against orders since their breeding programs are supposed to abolish disobedience. Beware of their red eyes from their night-vision goggles—that will be the first sign of them. They’re cunning and well-trained in the martial arts as well as the black ones. Then again, you have a few tricks of your own to use against them. Your body will remember how to use those skills, even if your mind doesn’t, so trust yourself. Allow your muscle memory to lead you.”

My boots chose that moment to send me another burst of memory:
spinning round in the air, landing a kick at a foe, chopping at them with my bladed hand to the throat, sending my enemy down
.

I smiled, feeling as if this, at least, was familiar. The boots tingled against me, into me. They were being very accommodating tonight, and I wondered if they would get moody, as my computer image had said.

Other Me glanced off-screen again, as if looking out the window. “Dawn’s coming on now, so I’ll make this short. Amari created her own video, and if she isn’t sitting there by your side, you should access it. Before I leave you, though, I’ll add that, the last time the Meratoliages attempted to abduct you, you worked with a psychic. A man named—”

Amari reached over and tapped a button on the keyboard, halting the video just as the man’s name was on Computer Me’s lips.

Pretty brilliant for a woman who appeared to be blind. Unless Amari had some other sort of sight I should read about in her file.

She stood. “Watchin’ the rest ain’t necessary. Neither is my file. No other time for the viewin’ tonight.”

“Why? It sounded as if I was about to say something important.”

As boot steps thudded on the wood floor, Amari turned her head to the room’s entrance.

I did the same, discovering a sight that sent my pulse to racing. Even my boots reacted, throbbing heavily along with my heartbeat.

A tall man filled the doorway with his broad shoulders, dressed all in black, from the shirt he wore rolled up his forearms to his jeans to his silver-tipped boots.

“We meet again,
cher
,” he said.

* * *

After making swift introductions and small talk, Amari had rustled me out of bed and out of the room, saying there was a lot to catch up on with this newest stranger, a man who called himself Philippe Angier.

He went with me to the front porch, where the boards creaked under our boots as we made our way to a questionable swing that I feared wouldn’t hold our weight. Yet when he stayed standing, I made myself comfortable, risking a seat. Behind him, a motorcycle caught the porch lantern’s light, and my boots sent me a flicker of memory…

Philippe walking away, leaving his bike behind, as well as me…

As the recollection faded, our surroundings faded back in to my consciousness: Spanish moss draped off the cypress trees near the green, weed-filled water. A mild, semi-humid night, somewhere between the end of spring and the start of summer. Frogs and crickets serenading the darkening sky as the lantern shone over the man in front of me.

And, I must say, he was fit indeed, with his longish midnight hair tied back, leaving most of it free and flowing to his shoulders. His skin was a toasty shade, making his smiling gray eyes piercing. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said that Jean Lafitte the pirate had come back to life in modern times. Odd that I knew this trivial name—or any trivia at all—but even odder still, I recognized the necklace Philippe wore.

The Eye of Horus dangled from a black cord round his neck. The all-seeing eye of a psychic such as Philippe Angier.

I waited for him to explain his reason for popping in, as if this were high tea in Windsor Castle. He merely lingered, leaning against a post, all laziness and bayou heat.

“I see,” I said after my heart had finished jittering up and down, “that you returned for your bike at some point.”

A few moments ago, he had joked to Amari about once leaving it here and badly missing it. Evidently, when I had known him before, I had kicked him out of the area after we had taken care of the Meratoliage who had been hunting me down.
Really
taken care of her, as in snuffed her out.

“I got the bike back shortly after our night together about two months ago,” he said. “Amari contacted me and said that as long as I stayed out of your sights, I was welcome to it. When I arrived, you were in the back, tending to her herbs. I hear you’ve been doing a lot of apprenticing for her.”

I shrugged, having no idea.

He didn’t comment on my daily amnesia. “When I got in touch with her today, she told me that you haven’t been far from home since we last met. She explained your situation and how she’s been trying to find a way to give you back your memory without the aid of those boots, all while still keeping you looking like…this.”

I frowned. There was something about the manner in which he had said it. “Did you ever see me without the boots?”

He looked toward the water, hooking one thumb in a belt loop.
Laconic
, I thought. He didn’t wish to give me an answer, but his body said it all.

I had been burnt to a crisp.

“I suppose,” I said, “I was rather fearsome to behold. That’s the impression I gather, at any rate.”

“I hear you were wounded pretty bad.” He turned back to me wearing that charming smile again. Distracting as hellfire. “But then you put the boots back on, and when I got a better look at you, there you were,
cher
. Pretty as a picture.”

I never minded his compliment.
Wounded pretty bad
, he had said.

Something like shame erupted in me, because I wished he hadn’t seen me in my natural state. I wondered how familiar I was with shame, though, and I brushed at it, trying to leave it behind. Yet it didn’t go anywhere, because I had been exposed to him, and in a very terrible way. I already wished for Philippe Angier to watch me with longing, and I thought he might have done so before he had seen my burns, even if I couldn’t recall it.

He nodded at me. “So I see you’re not dead yet, Lilly. Based on how wild you were that night, I half expected you to be gone by now.”

“Word is that I have many skills that keep me alive.”

When he combed a slow gaze over me, my boots hugged my calves, warming, sending vibrations up and up until they settled between my thighs. The sensation made me cross my legs, squeezing them together. There it was—the way I had wished he would look at me.

If only I’d had the time to watch more of the computer video, because I was suspecting I had been attracted to Philippe Angier two months ago. That, perhaps, I might have even had some rumpy pumpy with him.

Not a terrible notion at all.

Finally, he spoke in that velvety low tone. “You do have skills. Last time we met, you nearly kung-fued me in greeting.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, and he chuckled.

I had to know. “Did we shag?”

He choked back his laugh, but his smile only grew. “I would love to say yes, but…” He held a hand over his heart. “We just didn’t have the time, darlin’.”

Hmm. “Did we snog?”

“I’m not sure what that is, but I’m pretty certain we didn’t do it. Actually, you gave me a little kiss at the end. Other than that, we flirted some, and truthfully, that’s all I can commit to anyway.”

Interesting. But why did it seem there were layers and layers covering his last comment? Why did I get the feeling he had something buried deep within him he never talked about with anyone?

Shaking his head, he dropped his hand to his side. “All we had time for was runnin’ and dodgin’ your Meratoliage enemy and trying to find a way to get those boots off you. You thought you might’ve stolen them from Amari, so I was helping you to find a way to return them. We came here and I intuited how to get them off you, with some incantations. And when they came off…”

He averted his face again, and I thought he must have been picturing how I had appeared without the boots—my skin withered with burns.

But those boots wanted their say, too, and they sent a jolt of memory through me:
Philippe holding a revolver and pointing it at me, saying,
“Come along with me,
cher
. I won’t hurt you. I promise…”

I straightened my spine. “You…”

“Had a vision that told me before you even showed up that you’d be coming to me that night and that your family was offering a bounty for your return? And that I managed to get the boots off you because I actually thought they made you an ultra woman and I didn’t want you having all that strength and speed to fight me?” He took a breath and inclined his head like a pirate indeed. “Yup, that was me.”

The boots kicked in with something else he had said that night.
“I saw that they were searching for you, offering money I can use for my
maman
’s health…”

His mum? That was the reason he had betrayed me and held a gun on me?

It was as if those boots liked Philippe and wished for us to get along. Why else had they added a memory that made me sympathetic toward him? How could I despise him for this?

He was watching me, as if he suspected I was snatching recollections here and there. He no doubt also saw my expression soften.

With a rogue’s smile, he shrugged. “I did end up saving your life, after all, yes?”

I couldn’t confirm or deny, but Amari had welcomed him into her home, and I was alive, so there was that.

“How is your mum?” I asked, because I would be such a git if I didn’t care.

The smile disappeared. “She passed on shortly after I met you, so the bounty would not have done much good anyway. The cancer had already eaten through her far more than anyone realized.”

My heart sank. “I’m sorry to hear that, Philippe.”

He clipped out a nod, his wide shoulders slumping ever so slightly. Suddenly, the pirate wasn’t very flirty and rakish—he’d become haunted.

“When she started to get worse,” he said, “I moved into the home connected to her double shotgun house, and it allowed me to be there whenever she called out, needing help, needing…someone.” He idly toyed with his necklace pendant, his voice flat. “Her neighbors were like family to her, too, and they did all they could, along with me. I swore, then, that I would do anything for them in return.”

But their affection for Philippe’s mum hadn’t saved her in the end. I could see the sense of unfairness in his eyes.

A pang traveled through me. I, myself, had never known neighbors. Hell, I didn’t even require memories to tell me that.

His tone went even darker as he held onto that pendant. “I stayed at her house after she died. She’d left it to me, seeing as I have no siblings. And that is what brings me here tonight, Lilly.”

“Your mother?” Had he received a psychic vision from the great beyond and he was here to get Amari’s help to…do what? Reel his mum back to the earthly plane through some white magic? Ease her pain?

“No,” he said softly, steel in his tone. “It’s not my mother that brought me here.”

He went silent, his jaw clenched. His entire body had gone tight, as if he was warding off pain. I wished I had known a mother’s love as he had. It was clear he had done everything he could for her and would have done even more.

But…a mum. A father. Even without my boots, my chest tightened in something close to anger and loss. I had never been loved by those Meratoliages.

He stopped touching his necklace, then looked at me with a gaze so intense that my heart began a drumming beat again.

“When I left you,” he said, “I knew it would be only a matter of time before we would meet again. In this city, the supernatural is unavoidable, and we run in the same crazy circles. I knew that, someday, I might need your help and you might need mine.”