The Curse (Belador #3)(104)
“You do?” She would have been glad to hear his decisive answer if not for her empathic sense picking up on a sudden shift in Storm’s calm demeanor to one of tense anticipation, as if he expected trouble. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
“Because I didn’t figure it out until just now. Take a look.”
She flicked another quick glance down the slope and did a double take. Two males with humanlike bodies had entered the circle of torches. One had skin that was a putrid shade of green. He wore nothing but a sheath of gray material wrapped as a groin cover and he sported a tail that dragged the ground. His shorter opponent’s camo-green vest and brown pants were pulled tight over a squat bodybuilder physique bulging with muscles. He was the most human-looking of the two with his scraggly brown hair, except for the two short horns sticking out the top of his head.
Well, that and red glowing eyes she could see from this distance.
“Demons,” Storm said, without any question, and she agreed.
The two demons circled each other, bodies hunched forward, arms raised, ready for attack.
She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “What are they doing?”
“Fighting.”
“Why?”
“It’s a Beast Club.”
Her face must have shown her confusion when she looked at Storm to see if he was serious.
He explained, “Think illegal fight club, but with nonhumans.”
Now it all started to fit. People were crowded around the ring, already shouting like she’d seen on television when humans wrestled or boxed. “I’ve never heard of a Beast Club. How do you know what it is?”
“They had them in South America. The only way you found out was by being a sponsor … or a fighter.”
She wanted to ask more about when he’d lived there, but not right this minute.
The hurling scream of something in mortal pain echoed across the mountains.
Evalle snapped around in time to see the green-skinned demon rip the head off the one in camo, silencing his opponent. She hadn’t expected the big guy to lose—at least not so quickly.
Rubbing her neck muscles, she struggled to come up with a new plan. “I have to inform VIPER.”
“You contact them and they’re going to order you to sit tight and wait for them to raid this. If by some small chance that valley is owned by a person with diplomatic immunity from VIPER operations, the owner is technically within his or her rights to host the fight. By the time VIPER finishes busting up the party, your witch will be gone.”
As an agent with VIPER, a coalition of powerful beings who protected the world from supernatural predators, Evalle would be in trouble if this did turn out to be an illegal operation and VIPER found out she knew about it, but failed to report it.
Caught between her responsibilities to VIPER, her promise to bring Tristan in to Macha, and her commitment to the Beladors, Evalle knew her duty to the Beladors and Macha came first, which meant saving her own hide came last, as usual.
But that still didn’t solve her problem of talking to the witch if they couldn’t track her. “Crap. What’s the possibility of getting to Imogenia now?”
“Pretty good, actually. If she’s got a fighter entered, she can’t leave until her demon, or whatever it is, fights.”
“Then we need to get to her soon, but how?”
“That part’s easy. We just walk in.”
She didn’t like the I-already-have-a-plan-in-mind sound of that. “They aren’t going to notice a couple of uninvited people?”
“You don’t need a formal invitation to a Beast fight like that one. All you have to do is”—he paused, locking his hands behind his head and twisting, stretching his shoulders and chest—“show up with a fighter and you’re in.”
Grace be to Macha. She figured out what he was proposing. “No. I watched you almost die once. I’m not going through that again.”
He dropped his arms and stepped close, pulling her against his chest, and whispered into her ear. “I don’t know why there’s a Beast Club in North America, but now that I do and that witch is involved, I know better than to risk leaving here and you hunting for her later without me. I’m going down there to find Imogenia now. You can be my sponsor or you can wait up here.”
Continue reading for
FIRE BOUND
BY SHERRILYN KENYON AND DIANNA LOVE
A BELADOR Short Story
SIXTEEN MONTHS AGO …
* * *
CHAPTER ONE
“I hunt demons, not aliens,” Evalle Kincaid grumbled under her breath. She parked her GSX-R motorcycle in the heavy shadow of an abandoned gas station in … she had no idea what this rural area was called, only that it was an hour east of Atlanta. March apparently intended to go out like a lamb with a cool breeze in the mid-sixties. Stowing her riding gear that left her in a black T-shirt and jeans, she headed over to where four men waited inside the gutted building.
VIPER team, mostly Beladors.
Not a Men-in-Black agent among them.
So why send a VIPER team to investigate this particular crime? As a coalition that protected humans from supernatural predators, VIPER handled a lot of strange things, but cow killings?