Wicked Creatures Read online

  Wicked Creatures

  Jessica Meigs

  Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Meigs

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For those who have loved and lost

  “First, you gotta know—not fear, know—that someday you’re gonna die.”

  Tyler Durden, Fight Club

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  A Message From the Author

  An Excerpt from Reapers

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jessica Meigs

  One

  The chain holding the punching bag to its moorings in the ceiling rattled angrily as Riley Walker’s foot connected with the bag, sending it swinging. It had barely begun its counter-swing back toward her when she spun, striking out with her other foot, slamming it into the bag from the opposite direction as her previous kick. She followed it up with a series of rapid punches with her gloved fists. Her braid whipped her across the face as she spun again, landing another solid kick on the bag.

  Beating up on a heavy bag wasn’t doing a thing for her anger. But she kept at it, pounding the hell out of it until her heart raced, her fists hurt, and her muscles quivered. She took a step back, her lungs heaving, and stared at the bag as it swung on its chain like a pendulum.

  The hotel’s air conditioning wasn’t quite keeping up with the heat and sweat she’d generated sparring with the bag. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been wailing on it; she’d left her watch in her room. She hadn’t been able to help herself, though. It’d been three weeks since she’d gotten a good workout in, and the chance to punch something was irresistible. She couldn’t very well punch the man that had pushed her into letting him come with her; he couldn’t even really fight back at the moment.

  She paced away from the bag and grabbed the gym towel she’d left draped over the end of a nearby bench. After she stripped her kickboxing gloves off, she scrubbed the sweat off her face, arms, and hands and took a minute to look over the room. It was a typical hotel gym, though it had a few extra amenities that a lot of hotels didn’t have, but considering it was more upscale than the hotels she normally went for, that was no surprise. It had been empty when she’d first entered shortly after five in the morning, but in the time she’d been beating the shit out of the heavy bag, two men had entered and begun their own workouts. As she toweled sweat off her neck and shoulders, she surreptitiously checked them out, assessing whether they were threats. One of the men—the one trekking along at a slow pace on a treadmill—was overweight and somewhere over middle-aged, wearing a navy blue t-shirt that was already sweat stained, looking like the thought of exercise alone terrified him. He wasn’t a threat to her; the Agency didn’t enlist people like that man, not even as paper pushers.

  Which left the second man in the room.

  He was younger than Treadmill guy, much younger. If Riley had to put a number to him, it’d be somewhere around Zachariah’s age. He was pretty well built, with lean muscles and a tall, athletic frame. He was doing stretches, presumably with the intention of lifting weights, and he was facing a mirrored wall that covered an entire end of the gym. In any other circumstances, she’d have brushed him off as any other gym rat admiring his own muscles, but the way he stared at the mirror suggested he wasn’t looking at himself but past himself, right at her.

  It took a moment, but a spark of recognition flared in the back of her head. She knew him. She couldn’t put a face to the name, but she was certain she knew him from somewhere. Maybe the Agency? No, that didn’t sit quite right with her; it was close but not close enough. She’d seen him somewhere else, in a completely different setting, not in the Agency’s offices.

  Riley shook herself mentally and decided to play it cool. She was just a woman in New Orleans on vacation; that was all. Sure, she had an arsenal of weapons in her suitcase upstairs and a smaller one in her gym bag nearby, but she was just being cautious. Besides, she could be wrong about the man on the other side of the gym. He could just vaguely resemble someone she once knew. Maybe he was looking at her because he thought she was attractive.

  It wasn’t like that was beyond the realm of possibility, Riley thought as she returned her padded gloves to the battered black backpack she was using as a gym bag—“Linus” she’d named the bag a long time ago, only half-jokingly, after the Peanuts character that carried a blanket everywhere he went. She tugged her rolled-up yoga mat free from under the two pistols and the knife that lay inside. She wasn’t terribly unattractive—far from it, really, judging by how easily she caught the eyes of men. Maybe this guy had a thing for tiny, long-haired brunettes. She kept herself in shape, and she knew it showed.

  Then again, she had to. She was, after all, one of the best assassins that worked for the United States government.

  Or she used to be, anyway.

  It had all started about a month ago, when she’d been recruited into a secret program called the Agency for the Monitoring and Control of Unnatural Beings, or The Unnaturals, as everyone involved tended to call it. As she dropped her mat and started her initial stretches, she recalled all the events that had resulted from that transfer so far: the battle with vampires, of all things; her newfound powers, though she still hadn’t begun to process the implications that accompanied them; the head-on tussle with a fallen angel that had possessed her new boss, Ashton Miller; and the discovery that the director of the Agency, Damon Hartley, was her biological father and her handler at The Unnaturals, Zachariah Lawrence, her brother. As she slid into cat pose, she wondered if her family dynamic could get any weirder.

  Riley tore her thoughts away from the crap that had been enveloping her life lately and discreetly glanced up at the men in the gym as she pushed up into a plank. The man on the treadmill had left, but the younger one still remained; he was working the leg press and, just as she suspected, was still staring at her. She raised an eyebrow, meeting his gaze challengingly.

  “Some reason you keep staring at me?” she asked, shifting into cobra pose without tilting her head too far back so she could keep her eyes on him.

  He pushed the leg press up one more time, let it down slowly, and climbed off the machine. “You look like someone I knew once,” he told her, striding to the chin-up bar. “Someone I haven’t seen in years.”

  That was such a cop-out answer that Riley wasn’t sure what to do with it. She shifted from cobra back to plank and said, “That was vague. How will you know I’m this mystery girl unless you tell me her name?”

  “I think she knows what it is already,” he said, and then suddenly he had a pistol in his hand, aimed right at her. Riley dropped from plank, tucking and rolling forward. This put her within reach of her backpack, and she shoved her hand into its depths and snatched one of her pistols out, all in the time it took her to roll up into a kneeling position, her left knee digging into her thin yoga mat, her right foot flat on the floor, her pistol aimed back at the man. She completed this move in less than four seconds, an
d in the back of her mind, she could hear the slow clapping of her former handler, Brandon Hall, and his sardonic voice saying, “Well done, Miss Walker.” She scowled and shoved it aside, barking out, “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m surprised you don’t recognize me, Miss Walker,” the man said. His stance was firm, his pistol unwavering. His posture spoke of extensive training; he stood like an agent.

  Shit.

  “Or is it Miss Hartley these days?” he continued, and her stomach clenched. “It’s so hard to keep up when you’re out of the loop.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Riley repeated. “Answer the question this time.”

  “Or?”

  “Or I’ll introduce you to the business end of a bullet,” she snapped. “I have no problem with changing hotels.”

  The man stared at her for a long minute, like he was assessing the veracity of the statement. Then he shifted the pistol away from her, redirecting its aim to the ceiling, finger away from the trigger and the gun balanced on the web between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Shit, you really don’t remember me,” he said, and he actually sounded like that had hurt his feelings.

  Something about the way he said that turned the spark that had kicked up in the back of Riley’s mind into a flame. She lowered her own pistol and slowly stood, her eyes wide. “Jesus Christ,” she said out loud.

  “Almost, but not quite,” he joked, a cheeky grin spreading across his face. “Though I’m pretty sure you’re thinking I’ve come back from the dead right now.”

  Riley wanted to slap the grin off his face. She didn’t, though, because a name had finally surfaced in her mind, and if she didn’t say it out loud, she was going to explode.

  “Jax Tremblay,” she said.

  He opened his arms wide, the pistol dangling loosely from his hand. “One and the same,” he confirmed.

  “But…you’re dead,” Riley said. “You are dead. I saw you die.”

  “Sometimes things aren’t what they seem,” Jax said, sitting on the end of a weight bench.

  Riley hadn’t been kidding when she said she remembered seeing Jax die. She’d been there, three years ago, when her former partner Kevin Anderson had pulled the trigger and Jax had fallen. It had been the very first assignment she and Kevin had taken together, which was probably the only reason she remembered it, and she hadn’t known that Jax was an agent. Kevin had fired the shot, and he never missed; he’d always prided himself on putting a bullet in the exact spot he wanted it to go. She couldn’t remember why they were supposed to hunt Jax down and kill him. It was no wonder she hadn’t recognized him right away, though—once the target was dead, she usually pushed the assignment out of her mind.

  Besides, he looked subtly different than he had all those years ago. He’d made attempts to change his overall appearance to blend in better with New Orleans crowds. Where before, she’d always seen him dressed in business wear that made him resemble an accountant, now he looked like he was more at home in casual; his blond hair had gotten longer and shaggier than its previous professional cut. From what she’d seen of the people who swarmed over NOLA, she thought he’d succeeded admirably in becoming just another one of the general population.

  “What are you doing in New Orleans?” she asked. She lowered herself to a knee again and carefully set her pistol back inside Linus the backpack.

  “I live here,” Jax said. “It’s where I went to ground after Kevin helped me orchestrate the whole fake-my-death thing.”

  “Fake your death?” she repeated.

  “Yeah,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “Obviously I faked it, or I wouldn’t be here. Have you hit your head recently or something? You seem a little out of sorts.”

  “No, not lately,” she said dismissively. “But…how the hell did you know I was here?”

  Jax shrugged. “The Network,” he said, and the way he pronounced the name suggested a capital “N.” “The rumor mill says you’ve been labeled rogue. If so, welcome to the club.”

  “There’s a club?” Riley asked before she could stop herself.

  “Oh yeah, and I’m the recruiter,” he said with a laugh, but the humor didn’t reach his eyes. “I was actually asked to track you down and talk you into the fold, see if you’d join us.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. A sense of unease tried to surface in her gut. What would he do if she rejected him outright? She wished she hadn’t put her pistol away. She decided to go with a diplomatic approach, something she didn’t use very often but would hopefully work in this situation. “Look, I’m not sure what you and your buddies have going on, but honestly, I’m not in a position to get involved. I have a lot on my plate right now.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Jax agreed. “Look, I’m not supposed to help agents who aren’t in the Network, rogue or not, but…keep your eyes open.”

  “What for?” she asked, watching as he stood and ran his hands through his hair.

  “Word is that you’ve been followed to New Orleans,” he warned her. “And not by anyone who has your best interests at heart. Hell, considering his past behaviors, I have no doubt he’s here with very, very bad intentions.”

  “Who?”

  “Brandon Hall,” he said. “You know, the guy who declared you rogue.” She gave him a surprised look, and he chuckled. “What, you think we don’t have ways to read Agency email anymore? One of my men spotted him in Baton Rouge two days ago. Obviously, he hasn’t found you quite yet, but if I could find you as easily as I did, then it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Brandon could track you down just as easily.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  Jax took a step toward her, and her calf muscles tightened, like her legs wanted to play gazelle and carry her away from him against her will. He stopped outside of arms’ reach and studied her closely before saying, “I’ve always liked you, Riley. You’ve got this take-no-shit fire about you that I’ve always admired from afar. It’d be a shame to see that fire get extinguished over some of Brandon’s stupid political bullshit.” He held out, of all things, a business card, pinned between his forefinger and middle finger. Riley hesitated before taking it. It was plain, with no typeface, just the handwritten word “Jax” and a phone number. “If you run into any trouble that you need help with—beyond what Scott Hunter can give you—don’t hesitate to give me a call.”

  Riley couldn’t say she was surprised that Jax knew Scott was here with her—he was obviously incredibly good at his job—but his sudden mention of the man threw her brain off track. She folded the card in half and palmed it. “I’ll think about it,” she said, her voice carefully neutral.

  “You do that,” Jax said. “Be careful, Riley.” He didn’t wait for her reply. He turned his back and collected his belongings then left.

  Riley stood there for a long moment, the chill from the gym’s air conditioning settling into her skin, the edge of the business card pressing into her palm. She wondered how the hell she’d had this sort of luck, that she’d run into a potential ally in the most random of places.

  Scott Hunter woke up to the sound of running water and a female voice singing terribly off key, the vocals amplified by the tiles in the bathroom. He shifted in an unfamiliar bed against unfamiliar sheets and buried his head underneath an unfamiliar pillow. This was the seventh time in the past two weeks that he’d been woken up like this, bellowed into the conscious world by out-of-tune a cappella songs and disoriented by where he was.

  As the volume of the woman’s voice escalated into a crescendo, singing something about being halfway there and living on prayers, Scott threw the pillow off his head and gave up trying to go back to sleep. It just wasn’t going to happen with Riley “singing” in the shower.

  New Orleans, he remembered, levering himself into a sitting position with his left hand, ignoring the thump of a book that had been laying on his chest as it tumbled to the floor. They were in New Orleans, Louisiana. That had been Riley’s pick, naturally, but he had
n’t minded. He hadn’t been to New Orleans in years—as an agent, he hadn’t been in the field Stateside very often—and it had changed drastically since then. The scars of Hurricane Katrina still lingered on the city, but it was slowly, gingerly, inch by inch, crawling out of the damage from the murky floodwaters and trying to regain its extravagance and grandeur.

  Speaking of extravagance, Riley had decided that a $500-a-night suite at the Hotel Monteleone was the ideal place for them to lay low while she sorted through her familial issues. This wasn’t his idea of “laying low.” But it wasn’t his money, either, and ultimately, he didn’t have a problem staying in an expensive hotel on someone else’s dime. Besides, the bar and restaurant downstairs were superb. If she wanted to pay for them to stay in a hotel like this, that was all on her.

  And he wasn’t going to lie and say it wasn’t pleasant to have the opportunity to stop, relax, and decompress after the last two scuffles he’d been involved in. Vampires and demons. He still couldn’t believe the things he’d seen, done, and killed over the past couple of weeks. It had barely been three weeks since he’d first met Riley, since he’d been dumped headfirst into the abject terror that was working in The Unnaturals sector of the Agency. The terror he could deal with. He’d felt varying degrees of it through the course of his regular assignments. Riley, though? Some days, he just wasn’t sure.

  He’d survived the scuffle with the vampires without a scratch, and the fight with the demons had left him walking away with a broken right wrist, which had been promptly swathed in a cast in an Alabama hospital. Riley had spent the time since they’d left Tuscaloosa pestering him to let her draw on the cast with permanent markers—she’d even purchased a multipack of Sharpies in a rainbow of colors from a Walmart in Baton Rouge explicitly for that purpose—but he’d been resistant so far. It just seemed like such a high school thing to do.