Beautiful Monster Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ………………

  1. ESCAPE FROM MELAS Logan

  2. THE SEA WITCH Lily

  3. OCEAN OF THE LOTUS EATERS Logan

  4. LOVE IS BLINDNESS Lily

  Logan

  Lily

  5. RISKING IT ALL FOR A WITCH Logan

  LILY

  6. JUDE THE OBSCURE LOGAN

  Lily

  7. AND THEN IT ALL FALLS APART LOGAN

  8 THAT OTHER CHOICE Lily

  9. WHAT KIND OF A BOAT IS THIS? Orchid

  Lily

  10. AND HERE COME THE MONSTERS Logan

  Orchid

  Lily

  11. DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU Jude

  Lily

  Lily

  12. BROKEN BONES LOGAN

  LILY

  LOGAN

  13. BLACK MAGIC LILY

  Logan

  Lily

  14. MY OLD MAN AND THE HOY Lily

  About the Author

  A COLILOQUY BOOK

  Copyright © 2015 by Heidi Kling

  First eBook Edition: March 2015

  Cover design by Beatrice Thomas

  Coliloquy, LLC

  www.coliloquy.com

  www.twitter.com/coliloquy

  The Coliloquy name and logo are trademarks of Coliloquy, LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-68105-993-8

  A LILY OF THE VALLEY is fragrant, beautiful, and delicate. Also, if you ingest one of its adorable little berries, it might send you into cardiac arrest.

  –Gabriella Garcia

  1. ESCAPE FROM MELAS

  ………………

  LOGAN

  “THIS WAY.” HER LIGHT BLONDE hair whipping in the cool ocean breeze, Lily tugged on my sleeve in the pre-dawn light. “There’s a marina over there. We’ll grab a boat and go.” She said this confidently, as if taking a boat was the simplest task in the world, but I could tell by the way she nibbled at her lip that she was nervous about getting away in time—and without further catastrophe. “Then we’ll swing back into the cove and get Orchid.”

  Simple.

  We were running from Carriag and Congression, and we’d come into a town south of Melas called Hudson-on-the-Sea. The protective spell we’d placed over the cove would break at daylight and then they’d be coming for us. Coming for the amulet that we refused to give up, coming to force Lily to stand trial for gravely injuring my warlock friend Chance, coming for Orchid, who was sentenced to die after the bloodbath formally known as The Gleaning.

  Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to run with Lily. Run far away from Melas, from Jacob. Even though I didn’t know anything about boats, as long as it involved leaving here with Lily and heading toward the cure that would revive Chance from his magical state of death, I was good with it.

  Hudson was an upscale coastal village made up mostly of custom, Spanish-style homes and cobblestone streets. Its harbor was tidy and small, neatly tucked behind a collection of posh restaurants, gift shops, and kayak and paddleboard rental kiosks. In the pre-dawn darkness, the town was absent of both tourists and locals. The only things moving—other than the two of us—were a few seagulls.

  “Over here,” Lily said, her eyes leading the way. I still wasn’t used to those new eyes of hers, which sparked like last night’s campfire, fireflies flashing against the darkness. It had to be 2, maybe 3 AM. We had one thing on our minds: Get the hell out of town before daylight.

  Lily deftly climbed over a chain-link fence marked NO ENTRY: BOAT OWNERS ONLY. She was admirably agile and looking gorgeous, as ever, in her tight black yoga pants and black zip-up hoodie. My thoughts flashed to last night, to the two of us on the beach as I followed her. Soon, we were both looking around for an available ride.

  “How about this one?” I suggested, pointing out a mid-sized boat.

  “I think this is more our speed,” Lily said, eyeing a small speedboat. “We need something fast to get us out of here.”

  “But then what? I don’t know much about boats, but I don’t think we can take this all the way to the Isle of the Sisters.”

  The corner of her lip turned up. “Oh, ye of little faith. This baby could easily make the trip around the Panama Canal and up to Scotland. We are magic, remember?”

  We locked eyes and she stepped into me, wrapping her arms around my neck and tilting back her heart-shaped face, full lips slightly open, waiting for my kiss.

  I wrapped my arms around her, beginning to pull her in tight, but just as I bent my face down, my mouth eager to meet hers, lights flashed on, flooding the docks. Squinting, I shielded my eyes.

  “We must’ve set off the security lights.” She stared at me for a beat, her new red eyes flashing. Then her narrow shoulders hunched over and she looked past me, toward the sound of shuffling feet approaching us. She tucked her hair into her hood, like a ninja.

  “Hey! Who’s there?” a low voice bellowed. A man appeared on the dock, about twenty feet away from us.

  “Hurry.” Lily tugged on my sleeve. She leaped into the back of the small boat “Crap. No keys.”

  When I hopped on, my weight caused the small boat to rock back and forth in the harbor. I held on to the side to keep from falling. Eying the ignition, I whispered. “Who needs keys?”

  Together we placed our fingers millimeters away from the key slot, closed our eyes and mumbled a spell. “Flare to life, avoid all strife, flare to life, avoid all strife.”

  The engine did as commanded.

  “You two. Stop right there! Harbor police!”

  “Police? More like Harbor Rent-A-Cop,” she said under her breath, in a flippant tone I wasn’t used to hearing from her.

  The security man stood on the dock, just beside us now.

  “Young lady, is this your boat?” His voice was magnified. In the shadows, I could see that he had a megaphone, not unlike the ones lifeguards used to convince wayward boats full of drunken party kids out of the sea before they got themselves or some innocent bystanders drowned.

  Lily carefully balanced as the boat rocked. “Yes, Sir. We’re borrowing it…from my aunt.” She smiled innocently.

  “Please step off the boat and produce some ID,” he said. I could tell by his tone that he didn’t believe her.

  “Sure, sure,” she said. She didn’t move toward him but dug in her pockets for some ID I knew she didn’t have. We had nothing. No ID. No money. No changes of clothes. We must’ve looked like runaways at best, meth-addicted thieves at worst.

  “I don’t have all night, young lady.”

  “Just a second,” Lily said. I didn’t like the way he was talking to her. The engine was already on. If I knew how to drive it, we’d be out of here.

  “I got it …I had it…I don’t know what happened to it.”

  Facing him, she shrugged. Bathed in the harbor floodlights, she looked like a beautiful ghost—ethereal.

  “What about you, kid?” The guard looked at me. “Have any ID or, let me guess, you lost yours too?”

  Following Lily’s lead, I patted my empty pockets. “It’s a funny story, actually-”

  “Alright, alright. Both of you step out with your hands up.”

  “We’re ten feet away from you. No need for the megaphone.”

  “Watch your mouth,” he said, but set it on the dock anyway. When he bent down, I could see a barely concealed silver bulge on his belt.

  “Lil,
he has a gun,” I said softly.

  Lily flitted her fingers behind her back. The tips lit up like fireflies in the darkness. “Yeah, well, I have these,” she whispered back.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to convince him not to arrest us.”

  I nodded. Sure, we were Spellspinners, Rognaithe, The Chosen, et cetera. Sure, we had the amulet, but we were dealing with humans now. Lily understood their world far better than I did. “Good luck.”

  I watched as Lily approached the man, they argued and then I heard a bang and he slumped over, crumbling to the ground. “Logan, move!” Lily’s voice cried out. The boat shifted with her sudden jump on board, and soon, she was at the dash, trying to move the boat out of the slip. Her hands were dripping red. And trembling.

  “Lily. Is that blood?”

  “It’s nothing. I need to untie the boat. Get ready to drive this thing, and fast. To give it gas, just squeeze this button and push this forward. This is the throttle, push it down to go forward and pull it back to go in reverse. When it stops in the middle, the engine is in neutral. The steering wheel is just like a car; only it moves the rudder instead of the wheels. Just go slowly until we get away from these other boats.”

  That gunshot was loud. Certainly, we weren’t the only ones to hear it. The police, the real human police, would be coming soon, and we’d have to deal with them and the magical cops after us, but still, I couldn’t leave that man bleeding on the docks. I leapt from the boat.

  Lily followed, putting her bloody hand in mine.

  It was worse than I thought. On the dock, the uniformed man looked like he was dead. There was blood pouring out of a gaping wound in his leg. “You shot him.”

  “I d-d-didn’t mean to. He was reaching for it.” She glanced back at the boat with a wince before her face turned back to me. Defiantly, she said, “We need to go. We need to.”

  I didn’t know much about gun wounds, but on the leg seemed better than in his chest. We’d healed something like this before. The gangbanger on the boardwalk.

  I knelt beside him, checking his pulse. “Lily,” I called. “Come here.”

  Pale and trembling in the harsh light, she slowly made her way over. Staring at him, wide-eyed, not getting too close.

  “We have to stop the bleeding. Go see if there is something we can use in the boat.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Lily? Come on, get something to stop the bleeding.”

  She still wouldn’t budge. She stared through me, her fire eyes lit up against the night sky, hair whipping across her face, blood dripping from her pale, trembling hands. I wasn’t getting through to her. She was in shock. We couldn’t afford to waste any more time, so I ripped my t-shirt over my head, crumpled it into a ball and pressed it to the guy’s gushing wound. His blood soaked through it in seconds. Unless Lily snapped to and tried to heal him with her magic, this guy might not make it and we’d be in even bigger trouble than we already were.

  “Lil, help me with the healing spell.”

  “I c-can’t.”

  “I know this is really hard. I know we have to get out of here, but we can’t leave him to die.”

  Sirens blared in the distance. Crap.

  “They’re coming,” Lily said, her words no more than a whisper in the cool air. The wind blew her hair as if she were conjuring it from the sea.

  “Hurry then.”

  Still, she looked through me as if she were talking to someone else. Wrapping her arms around her chest, she stared up at the cliffs. “He’s coming to.”

  Her voice chilled me to the bone. She shuddered, and then, as if breaking free of some internal voice, she looked right at me. Present. Regular Lily.

  “Logan, listen, the ambulances are on their way. This is a human with a human problem. Let them handle it their way.” She grabbed my arm, trying to pull me away. “We have to go.” The urgency in her voice wasn’t about this guy, but about our getaway plan. I flinched out of her grasp, pressing harder on his wound. My hands were now soaked with his blood.

  “Human problem? Your whole thing is helping humans, remember? Why would you just abandon this guy—?”

  And, more importantly, why did you shoot him in the first place? And worse? Told me to go, and you were just going to leave him to die?

  My questions garbled into a sick lump in my chest.

  This was bad. Something was wrong. The Lily I knew would never do anything to hurt a human.

  Gazing at the speedboat, her face remained chillingly still.

  It had to be shock?

  I reached out to grab her hand. When I touched her, she lifted her eyes to mine. “Logan…I had to do it. He was going to arrest us, and then we’d be done, all hope for Orchid and Chance gone. Just listen to me. We need to go. We need to prioritize our own.”

  She was right. He did have a gun. He was trying to arrest us. I trusted her. “Okay,” I said, “Okay.”

  Lily would never hurt anyone unless it was a worst-case scenario, and she was right about Orchid, she was right about Chance. Taking my hand, she pulled me toward the wobbling boat, and then hopped over the side. She pointed me to the back of the boat, where it was latched to the dock.

  “See if you can burn it with magic,” she directed, confidently. She stood at the wheel.

  “It will take me less time to just untie it.”

  “Just try, Logan.”

  “Okay.” She was acting so weird, but arguing would only prolong our exit and we needed to get the heck out of Dodge.

  Crossing to the back of the boat, I mumbled a Fire spell:

  Fire fire spark and tear

  Fire fire spark and tear

  The rope burst into flame. I kicked the burning strands into the ocean and glanced up. When I did, I saw the security guard coming to. His watery eyes met mine. Sirens rang out in the distance.

  “Help me,” he begged as the sirens grew louder. Closer.

  “Logan! Hurry!” Lily called from the driver’s seat.

  I could spare a few seconds. I had to try.

  I quickly made my way over to him.

  Pressing my palms against his leg, I felt heat, magic heat, then cool, healing energies radiate from the full moon onto my back, casting energy through my core, down my shoulders and through my hands. The ink on my arms and chest sprang to the surface as the bullet slowly worked its way out of the man’s leg, dropping with a ping to the dock. The wound closed, leaving only crusted blood. The guard blinked with relief and shock, but mostly relief.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything, so I squeezed his hand hard. “Swear.”

  “I s-swear.” The sirens were approaching faster. Louder.

  Nodding, I patted his leg firmly. “Good. By the time the police arrive, you should be able to walk. Tell them you tripped on the dock. Tell them you were wrong about seeing people here. Tell them it was just the gulls.”

  He stared at me.

  “Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when the owners ask about the missing boat, you know nothing about it.”

  “Right.”

  “Logan!” Lily called. Her voice was a trembling breath on the wind. “They’re here.”

  I followed her eyes to the cliffs, looming over the harbor. There was a figure there, taller than a regular man, wrapped in cloaks, flapping in the wind. “Carriag.” Not only did I see him, but I suddenly felt him too; his devilish heat radiated through the air. I broke out in a hot sweat.

  How had he found us?

  Without another look at the guard, I ran to the boat, jumping on board. “Lily, go! Drive!”

  No hesitation from Lily as we pulled out of the sleeve and into the darkness, the boat smacking the flat water like a rock too heavy to skip. When we hit the open water, the engine noise changed in tone from that of a VW diesel to that of a Mack truck.

  The
night was bright because of the full moon. I glanced at Lily. The cool wind moved past my face and through her hair. She must’ve dipped her hands in the ocean while I was with the guard because they weren’t bloody anymore. She faced forward. Determined. Driving the boat with the confidence of someone who did this for a living, we flew over the waves into the night.

  When we were a couple miles out to sea, she asked, “Is he still up on those cliffs?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see.”

  “Do you think he’ll follow us?”

  “I’m not sure. How could he?”

  “Logan. I’m scared.”

  “I know. It’s okay. I don’t think he has a boat. Jacob never had a boat that I knew of. He’d have to steal one and that’ll be hard with the police who’ll be there.”

  “Can they swim?”

  “The warlocks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The young ones, but I’ve never seen the elders swim. Just the thought of Jacob in a Speedo…” I crossed my eyes and made a face. Lily laughed uneasily. I reached out and took her hand. It was warmer than usual.

  Soon the buildings and lights from the coast grew so small it was hard to see land, and then it was just the two of us in the middle of the sea on a speeding boat. Lily let off the throttle and the engine hummed to a stand still. “Why are you stopping?”

  “Can you feel him still?”

  We sat for a second, bobbing up and down over the waves. It was quiet out here: no clouds in the sky, no weather patterns, not even any wind, just a cool calm—too calm, maybe.

  “Looks clear,” I said. “Feels clear, too. What about with you?”

  Lily’s arms were wrapped around her shoulders. She didn’t look at ease.

  “Lil?”

  “Let’s go. The further we get from that harbor, the safer we’ll be.”