Werebeasties Read Free Page B

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