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“About an hour ago.” Adam scented his fingers that had briefly made an acquaintance with her sweet pussy. He resisted the urge to lick them clean.
David narrowed his eyes as he sniffed the air. He was a Bengal shifter and his sense of smell was as strong as Adam’s was. “Christ, that’s hers?”
“Yeah.” Fuck it, Adam wanted a taste of her. He found that lush woman irresistible. He growled and licked his fingers hungrily.
“Calm down, boy. You might want to restrain your beast. You don’t want her to discover that furry, dark side of yours, do you?” David poured a drink from the mini-bar.
“Speak for yourself, buddy,” Adam spat back. “I’m not the one with a flying TV landing on my head.”
Only last week, he and Calvin had had to bail David out of jail because he’d scared a woman in his beastly form. David had taken a midnight walk when an unsuspecting woman looking out from her apartment window had seen an enormous tiger stalking in the alley. The woman had
freaked out and dropped a twenty-inch TV on the tiger’s head. The aim was surprisingly accurate, luckily resulting in David only getting a light concussion. If it had been a regular human, it would have plastered the contents of his head on the concrete. When the police had arrived, they’d found David already back in his human form, naked and unconscious. Feline shifters like them didn’t retain their clothes when they shifted. The police thought the woman must have seen wrong, but they still arrested David for indecent exposure. Calvin, who was currently working as a lawyer, had a ball making naked jokes after they’d paid David’s fine.
“Very funny,” David said blandly. He was still irritated with the whole flying TV thing. Calvin had offered to sue the woman if that would make David feel better, but David thought it was a stupid idea. “How is she, by the way?”
“Scrumptious,” Adam answered.
“Not her cream. I meant, how does she look in person?”
“More beautiful than her pictures. Her scent…” Adam gripped the edge of the desk. “Jesus…”
“That bad?” David baited.
“That bad.”
David hummed. “But she isn’t…”
“I know.”
That kind of attraction was usually reserved for when their kind met their mate. But Adam, David and Calvin weren’t natural-born shifters. They had been turned when they’d made a pact with a demon.
They had been born poor.
Adam met David and Calvin in the late eighteen hundreds in Five Points, New York, the worst slum in America. Like thousands of other orphaned kids, they’d struggled to get by doing everything to stay alive. Adam was a pickpocket before he’d met Kurt Jacoby, a German immigrant and owner of a cabinet of curiosity, a freak-show museum in Anthony Street that displayed rarities and oddities from around the world—like a mermaid’s tail, a shrunken head, or the single horn that came from a unicorn. Like most ill-reputed cabinets of curiosities, three quarters of their collections had been artificially manufactured. But back then, there were quite a lot of dumb people. The entrance fee alone had earned Kurt Jacoby a fortune.
David and Calvin had worked for Jacoby for a year before Adam was recruited. They cleaned the place, hawked people to see the exhibits, and did all Jacoby’s errands or whatever he told them to do. Jacoby provided bed and food and a small allowance, but he was a cruel boss. He beat Adam and the others on a regular basis and threatened to kill them if they thought about running away. Adam was only twelve years old. He had been scared and helpless. Then David, the oldest of the three, had the idea of taking Jacoby down.
David couldn’t take being Jacoby’s punching bag anymore. He had heard that Jacoby had received a magic gem from Zanzibar that was supposed to grant wishes.
Like most of the exhibits, Adam thought Jacoby’s newest acquisition was a fake. But David insisted that the gem was most likely real. Weird stuff happened when he went near the gem. That night, when Jacoby had passed out from too much whisky, the three of them crept upstairs and pried open the wooden box where the gem was stored. Jacoby wasn’t going to put it on display until the next week, on account he was to consult his fellow scientists about its authenticity.
At a glance, there was nothing special about the gem.
It was a sapphire as big as a bird egg, in a red, velvet-lined box. Just as soon as David touched it, the gem began to glow. A wisp of smoke came out of nowhere and suddenly they found themselves face to face with a supernatural being that seemed to be from one’s deepest, darkest nightmare. It asked them what they wanted. David promptly answered that they wanted revenge. They wanted Jacoby dead so he could no longer enslave them. The being, a demon, offered them a pact. It would take care of their Jacoby problem for a price. They had to do errands for him for three full moons.
Desperate, the three of them had agreed. They found Jacoby dead in his room the next morning, sprawled and gutted like a carcass in a slaughter house. That day, their pact with the demon had begun, and when the sun set and the witching hour approached, they changed physically. Adam shape-shifted into a lion, David turned into a tiger, and Calvin morphed into a panther. They served a new master and their job was to kill the demon’s enemies. For three full months, they ravaged other demons, shifters and humans who happened to cross paths with their master. After their time was served, the demon released them from the pact.
But one problem remained—they were no longer human. Adam, David and Calvin retained their shape-shifting abilities. They were stronger than humans and had a very long life-span. At one point the gift bestowed upon them had turned into a curse. They couldn’t control the beast within, especially at night. They had to shift sometime after midnight or they would go insane.
For years, Adam had searched for the answer to their curse. The demon they had made the pact with, Azazel, was one powerful entity. Adam eventually met a necromancer from Prague who discovered their curse could be tamed, but not entirely abolished, if they paid due to Jacoby’s descendant. They had wanted Jacoby dead and to make amends they had to protect, pamper and cherish Jacoby’s descendants until the end of the descendants’ natural lives.
There was a problem with that. They hadn’t been able to track any of Kurt Jacoby’s surviving bloodline until a few months ago. Her name was Samantha Knight. She had been raised by her adoptive parents in Springfield, Indiana. She didn’t even know she was adopted—one reason Adam’s private investigator had had a hard time tracking her down.
When they’d located Samantha, the three of them faced a dilemma. They were unsure how they were supposed to protect and cherish her as amendments to their past sins. She was married to a drunken slob. Calvin had the idea of setting up an account from an anonymous donor so she would be taken care of for the rest of her life. David was against it. The necromancer had said they had to protect and cherish Samantha and simply setting up an account would not take care of the problem. Samantha was married to a dick, and granting them a boatful of cash would only sink them into a deeper hole.
David insisted that the whole protect-and-cherish thing was more complicated than being mere guardians. What the necromancer had deciphered was that they were meant to protect and cherish Samantha as if she was their mate. Adam had argued that David’s logic had a flaw. What if Jacoby’s last surviving descendant had been male? The three of them didn’t swing that way. That brought them into another argument at which point they’d reached a stalemate. Even if David’s theory was right, it still couldn’t be done. Samantha was a married woman.
To their surprise, Samantha filed for divorce three months later and it gave them a new angle on how to repay their past. Calvin had approached her the day her divorce became final. He’d hit on her in the courthouse for a drink and dinner. But Samantha hadn’t even looked at him. She’d only scurried past him and murmured, ‘No, thank you’.
