Chapter Thirty-Nine – Molly

 

Once we were inside, Luke moved with a kind of determination. I practically clung to him, my arm around his waist and his around mine as we moved through the crowded private room.

He knew exactly where he was going, and he practically pulled me alongside him as we headed down one of the halls.

“Thank you for that,” I said as we passed our first door. “I’ve never had a guy stand up for me before.”

“Well, if I don’t stand up for you, who’s going to? Not any of these assholes.”

“No, I guess not.” I paused, licking my lips. I was torn. I knew that I shouldn’t think what he had done was sexy, that I should’ve stopped him from scaring the crap out of that guy. But some part deep down inside of me loved the fact that I was with a man right now who could defend himself, and me. “You wouldn’t really do any of that stuff to him, would you?”

“What stuff?”

“The, you know, maiming stuff.”

“God, no. Beat the tar out of him, that’s for sure. But he thinks I would, and that’s what’s important. Half the time with bullies, criminals, or whoever, you just need to let them know you’re watching and prepared for them. If you’re a harder target, they’ll leave you alone. Pieces of shit like that go after easy marks.”

I pressed myself into his side, loving the way his arms felt as they pulled me closer. “Guess you’re not easy?”

He quirked a smile. “Never heard the word used to describe me, that’s for sure.” He brought us to a stop in front of one of the doors. “Here it is.”

“The room with the passage?” I asked as he grabbed the doorknob.

He nodded and was just about to turn it, when we both froze in our tracks.

“A moment before you disappear for the rest of the evening?” asked a familiar voice from behind us, their words thick with a continental accent. “I heard from the staff that you were asking after me, Ms. Long, and I just wanted an opportunity to meet the woman they described as the most beautiful in the whole party.”

Dominic.

“If it’s not too much trouble, of course,” he continued as we slowly turned back to face him.

As I looked into his eyes from up close, Luke seemed to sniff slightly, and to growl a little as he too looked Dominic up and down.

“We were just about to, you know,” Luke said, his voice barely hiding his contempt for Dominic.

Too intent on gazing into this stranger’s eyes, I didn’t say anything. That fire in them from the night before, that burning want and lusty greed that had seemed to strike me to my core, to chill me to the bone even as it tried to destroy my soul with its heat…

Luke looked up and down the hallway, almost imperceptible in his motion.

I put my hand on Luke’s arm, squeezing it gently. “Luke, no.”

“Why not?” he asked, putting a hand over mine. “This is what we wanted, isn’t it?”

My hand gripped his arm more tightly, but he didn’t flinch.

“Want what?” Dominic asked, smiling a little as he looked back and forth between us, clearly confused.

“A third,” Luke said.

Dominic blinked, seeming at a loss for words for a moment. “Normally, I don’t fraternize with the guests,” he said, looking up and down the hallway just as Luke had seconds before. “It’s not seemly, you understand.”

“Luke,” I said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

The handsome shifter beside me sniffed again. Without glancing down, he smiled grimly. “Sure it is. Come on, Dominic, it’s on me.”

“Well,” he said, looking me up and down as a devilish smile curved his thick lips, “what can one dalliance hurt?”

“We won’t tell if you won’t,” Luke said, turning back to open the door.

“Luke,” I said, a note of warning to my voice, “why aren’t you listening to me?”

“About what?” he asked, heading into the room first and turning on a heel. He reached into his coat pocket and began to draw out the unicorn horn hidden within. “This is good. This is perfect.”

Whereas this morning, the room I’d entered had just been a clean, respectable room, this one was doused in soft reds from the tinted lampshades perched atop two solid-looking floor lamps. Everything had a sensual cast to it, despite the color of blood drenching everything around us.

I came in after him, eyes wide. I knew what he was about to do, and how misguided it was. I went to try and stop him. “Luke,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re making a mistake.”

“I can handle this,” he growled, brushing off my comments.

Behind me, Dominic closed the door. His hands were at his tuxedo’s black bow tie, undoing the knot already, a grin on his face. “You look absolutely delicious, Ms. Long,” he said, before stopping and shifting his attention to Luke. “What’s that? What are you carrying?”

“Luke,” I said, clinging to his ill-fitting suit jacket, “no, you don’t want to do this!”

But Luke, shoulders squared and jaw set, was already advancing on him.

Dominic, seeing the look in Luke’s eyes, backtracked away. “Are you fucking mad? What’s wrong with you?” His hands and arms came up to shield his face as Luke grabbed him by the lapels and spun him around, throwing him back towards the bed sitting against the far wall. Dominic went sprawling on his back, his arms splaying out around him.

“Luke! Stop!”

“You have to get the gem,” he said through gritted teeth as he attacked Dominic. “Right through the jewel, is what Roxanne said.” Dominic tried to throw him off, to kick him away, but he might as well have been kicking against a brick wall with how little Luke budged.

I threw myself at his back, trying to pull him off. “Luke! Stop! He’s not the zmeu!”

Luke kept going, though, deaf to my call for reason. With the two men grunting and swearing as they wrestled on the bed, he finally managed to hook his fingers beneath the string holding the domino mask in place. He raised the unicorn horn in his other hand, a look of bloody murder in his eyes as he yanked it away.

I took my hands from his back and grabbed hold of his wrist as he reared back like Norman Bates. “No, Luke!”

He stopped, trying to get his wrist back from me. “What the hell are you doing?”

Below us, Dominic continued to struggle, to cover his face with his hands in fear like a scared child.

“Look!” I said. “Dominic, move your hands!”

Slowly, he took his hands away, a confused look passing over his face.

“His forehead,” I said. “There’s nothing there.”

Dominic’s face was clear, completely free of the shining gem we’d been expecting. Nothing other than some enlarged pores marred his skin. “Y-y-you won’t hurt me?”

Growling, Luke got up from the bed. Horn still in hand, he stomped away, cursing. He turned back to me. “How’d you know?”

“How did you not? Aren’t you supposed to be able to smell the zmeu?”

He sighed, a chuffing noise that seemed to reverberate inside his chest. “Yeah. When I could only smell you, though, I just thought your scent was too strong and overpowering it. How about you?”

“He didn’t remember me. At all. Zero recognition in his eyes, which really aren’t the same, either.”

“So the zmeu was doing what? Impersonating him?”

“Zmeu?” Dominic asked, straightening up a little. “Did I hear you correctly? Did you say ‘zmeu’?”

“Yeah. Zmeu. Lust demon.”

“Yes, of course I know what a zmeu is. My grandmother and aunts told me stories about them while I was growing up.” He looked back and forth between me and Luke, his mouth open a little and his eyes wide. “You can’t be serious, though. Those were just faerie tales, with Fat Fruomo saving the day, and the maiden always being beautiful and in need of help. They’re not real. Even in Romania, they’re not real.”

Luke and I exchanged a look, and we both frowned. “Sorry, bud,” Luke said, turning to him, “but they are.”

Dominic chuckled a little and looked down at his hands, as if that would somehow prove to him that they weren’t real.

“Sorry,” I added quietly, “but he’s right. I’ve seen the capcaun myself.”

He looked up at me, slowly shaking his head. “But that’s just ridiculous. You can’t expect me to believe either of you.”

“Doesn’t matter what you believe, or what you don’t believe. The zmeu’s kidnapping girls from here and eating their hearts.” Luke sighed, looking down at the horn still tightly gripped in his hand. He looked like he was about to say something, but shoved the horn back in his jacket instead. He stomped over to the closet door, sniffing the air the whole way.

“Why would we lie to you?” I asked as I turned to Dominic. “Think we’d take all this time to pull some kind of prank?”

Dominic shrugged, chuckling a little. “Well, what else could it be?”

I raised an eyebrow and put a hand on my cocked out hip. “That it’s real? Look, I met you last night. You walked my friend Heidi in through the front door, and we spoke. I was her driver. You don’t remember it, though, do you?”

Slowly, he shook his head. I could see the mirror image of what I’d experienced earlier in the day happening to him, like his world was falling apart brick by brick by brick. His reality was coming unhinged by the moment, and there was nothing he could do to make everything stay together.

“Were you here last night?” I asked.

He nodded, his eyes still distant. “I was. But…”

“But?” I asked after a second of silence.

“But, some of my staff said they saw me where I wasn’t supposed to be. I keep a schedule, a rotation when there are parties. They know this. Yet, sometimes I was in the wrong room, or out front greeting people when the regular staff should have been meeting guests.” He looked up at me, his lower lip trembling. “I’d thought they’d just somehow been confused, mixed up my costume with someone else’s. I never imagined it could be another version of me.”

“These things,” Luke said, still at the closet door, “I think they’ve been following you. You were in L.A. a few years ago, weren’t you, doing this same thing?”

“We’ve been all over,” Dominic said. “But, yes, we were in L.A. under a different name.”

“Same kind of killings happened there. That’s part of the reason why we thought you were involved. Your parties have been leaving a trail behind them.”

Dominic’s face dropped into his hands. He ran both down his cheeks, cupping his chin as he looked off into space, eyes blank and distant. “How many?”

“Nine that we count, so far,” I said. “Ten if we don’t find Heidi.”

“More, probably,” Luke said. “We just haven’t been able to find all of them. These things are old, and you’ve been at this a while. If you hadn’t been treating these women like disposable humans, maybe you would have realized you needed to stop these parties.”

Dominic shook his head. “I had no idea. There were stories in the news, but so many of the women we hire use different names while working, I never connected them.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s no going back to change things now. If you really want to atone for this, the best thing you can do is keep out of our way. Understand?”

The party host nodded, sending some of his disheveled hair flopping down over his forehead. Distractedly, he brushed it back, his face serious and determined. “Yes, I understand.”

“Over here,” Luke called from inside the closet. He’d opened up the door and slipped inside. From the sound of it, he was all the way at the back. “Molly, come check this out.”

“What’d you find?” I asked as I stepped up to the closet and peered into the dim light.

“A hole in the wall. Smell that?”

I stepped up next to him. Even with just my normal, human nose, I could smell the damp floating on the air gusting in. “The caves?”

He nodded. “Be right back.”

“Where are you—?”

But he was already gone, disappearing back into the room. I stepped out to the closet door as he went over to one of the two metal floor lamps positioned in the corners of the room. He heaved it up from the floor, ripped the plug from the wall before Dominic or I even had a chance to register what he was doing. The crimson-tinted lampshade fell to the floor behind him as he marched over with the lamp gripped in one hand.

“Pardon me,” he said, brushing past me as he ducked into the closet.

“You can’t do that,” Dominic said from beside me as Luke raised the lamp in both hands.

“Watch me.”

Chalky white dust flew into the air as he began to batter at the wall with the solid shaft and base of the lamp, each strike breaking off a thick chunk of drywall. Wood splintered, and even the ground thudded with the vibrations, as Luke continued to batter the hole open.

“Is that…?” Dominic asked, trailing off as he watched Luke gradually open up the cave entrance buried behind the wall. “How long has this been here?”

All three of us stared into the tunnel. From deep within, I could hear water dripping, and the air seeming to sigh as it passed through the twisting depths of the earth.

Beside me, Dominic ran a hand down his face. “When we purchased this place for our club, there were rumors it had been owned by members of some drug cartel operating under a different shell company. Maybe they dug the tunnels?”

“Maybe,” Luke said, setting the lamp aside. He pulled out his flashlight, clicked it on, and shone the powerful beam of white light down into the opening.

The walls glimmered from moisture under the light, and it looked like a strange orifice leading down into the netherworld as the smell of limestone and stale air came up, blowing lightly past our faces.

A shiver went through my body as I considered that Heidi was down there somewhere, had been for almost a full day.

“Might be multiple places all over the desert where these come out. Tabitha said there were miles and miles of tunnels beneath these mountains—no telling how extensive they are. You could store drugs up here, run them in and out through the cave system. Do damn near whatever you want, and law enforcement would never be the wiser.”

I swallowed and took a deep breath as I gazed down into those depths. This tunnel was evil. Pure malevolence given rocky form.

Luke glanced back over his shoulder at me. “Give me a kiss for luck?”

“Why don’t you give me one for luck?”

“Because you’re not going down there. It’s too dangerous, and I can’t watch my back and you at the same time.”

“Really?” I asked, rolling my eyes. I was getting tired of this same damned argument. When was he going to get it through his thick skull that we worked better as a team? Never? “Because that’s not how it worked in the sewers. You went down there, got thrown around, and I ran the capcaun off.”

“You distracted it,” he said. “Not exactly the same as running it off.”

I sighed. “Whatever, Luke. Fine. Whatever.”

“What?” Luke asked, a look on his face like he was surprised I was upset with him. “I’m just trying to keep you safe.”

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered, shaking my head. “No matter what you do, you’re not going to be able to keep me one hundred percent safe all the time. I’m not a fucking china doll, all right? I’m a human being. But, if you want to go down there alone, I’m not going to stop you. But just remember: when you need someone to hold your flashlight, or save your ass again, I’ll be up here, surrounded by a bunch of men who just want to throw money at me as long as I fuck them.”

Maybe it had been the brashness of my words, or just the hurt anger in my voice, but his mouth dropped open a little. Even Dominic took a step back, leaving us alone in the closet.

I turned and followed after Dominic, purse clutched in hand so tightly my knuckles had begun to turn white. I could feel Luke’s eyes on my back.

“Molly, I didn’t—”

He didn’t have a chance to finish his words, though. A scream broke out in the common room down the hallway, the voices of both men and women rising like a flock of birds into the sky at the sound of a rifle shot. They tore through the air with tortured, terrified screams as feet pounded down the hallway.

“Molly,” Luke said, rushing out of the closet, pistol drawn as he pulled me behind him. “Stay here.”

Before he could even get to the door, though, someone was throwing it open and rushing in, slamming the door behind him. The software CEO. Even in the red light of the one remaining lamp, his face looked pale and drawn as he gasped for panicked air, sweat pouring down his forehead and cheeks as he looked frantically around.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” he gasped.

“What happened?” Luke asked, going to him and putting a hand on his shoulder.

The CEO flinched, looked up at Luke, and flinched again as he recognized him. He started his seeming litany of swear words.

“Hey,” Luke barked. Then, more slowly once he’d gotten the guy’s attention: “Get it together. What’s happening?”

“A shadow,” the guy gasped out. “It came in from the porch and just started attacking people. It’s-it’s-it’s killing everyone!”

The handsome shifter looked back over his shoulder at me as I came walking up, the look on his face tortured. “Molly?”

I put my hand on his back. “Go, okay? Go kill that thing. I’ll be fine here, promise.”

Luke nodded, that look of indecision on his face. I knew he didn’t want to leave me, even if I was pissed at him for what he’d just said moments before. But, he was right—he was the only one in here who could fight this thing. “Right.”

Seconds later, he was moving the software CEO away from the door. Seconds after that, he was already gone, only saying: “Don’t let anyone in, okay?”

“I won’t,” I replied. “Promise.”

He closed the door, and I leaned back against it, letting out an agonized sigh as I looked to the ceiling. When I found nothing reassuring, or interesting, there, I turned my eyes back to the bed, to the petrified men in front of me.

With all their money, and all their power, they were as useless as tits on a bull.

The only man worth a damn was out fighting that thing.

And as I nervously bit my lower lip, ruining my lipstick even further, all I could think about was how much I needed him to get back safely.