Winter Born by Sherrilyn Kenyon Page A

Simi can’t charge nothing else until I’m not over my limit no more. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t like it. Fix it, akri, or else I might eat him. The Simi gots needs and I needs my plastic to work.”
    The man laughed as he took it from her and pulled out his wallet. He handed her three more credit cards.
    The “demon” squealed in delight and pulled him into a hug. She put the credit cards into her coffin-shaped purse, then handed him a small shiny red nylon bag. “By the way, I boughts those for you before I broke my plastic. Since you don’t got your real hornays, these are some fake ones to tide you over until we go home.”
    â€œThanks, Sim,” he said in an incredibly deep, evocative voice as he took the bag from her.
    She smiled, kissed his cheek, then dashed off into the crowd with her wings flapping behind her.
    The man looked at Pandora then and gave her a half-grin that could only be called wicked, and yet it seemed somehow knowing. He inclined his head to her, then headed off after the woman who’d just left him.
    Every instinct in her body told her to follow him, but she didn’t listen.
    She was here to find the legendary Acheron Parthenopaeus—an ancient, immortal Atlantean her sister had hoped would help hide Pandora from those who were hunting her. Not chase after some hot, young human who looked stunning in leather.
    Acheron was her last hope.
    Unfortunately, neither she nor her sister had any idea what he looked like. All they knew was that he came to Dragon*Con every year with his daughter.
    He was older than time and more powerful than any other of his kind. She scanned the older men in the crowd who were dressed as wizards, warriors, or other creatures, but none of them seemed to be particularly wise or powerful, nor were they with a daughter.
    Just what would an eleven-thousand-year-old man look like anyway?
    Sighing, Pandora stood up and went to the bannister so that she could look down to the lower levels of the hotel and scan the crowd.
    He had to be here.
    But where? How could she find anyone in this thronging mass of people … er, aliens.
    Chewing her lip, she debated where to go look for him. Suddenly, a tall man in an elegant black suit caught her eye. He wasn’t particularly old, probably in his mid-thirties, but she sensed an unmistakable air of power from him.
    Maybe he was the mysterious Acheron. And he was heading for the bank of elevators.
    Pandora rushed after him, and barely made it before the door closed them inside the small compartment with a Renaissance drummer, a green-fleshed alien, and Darth Vader.
    But that wasn’t what made her heart stop. As she glanced out through the glass wall of the elevator, she saw four things that terrified her.
    It was a group of devastatingly gorgeous men. The two shortest of the group were identical in looks and they had to be at least six feet four. They all had jet-black hair and were dressed in black Goth clothes.
    The four men stood in a specific formation that she knew all too well, with their backs to each other as they scanned the crowd hungrily, intently, as if seeking something in particular. They were fierce. Animalistic.
    It was as if they had literally caught wind of something, and in one heartbeat she knew what that something was.
    Her.
    â€œOh no,” she said under her breath. By their build and beauty and actions, she would know their breed anywhere. No group of humans could be that handsome or that intense. Nor would any other species be so alerted by her scent.
    They, like her, were Were-Panthers, and by the look of them, they were young and virile.
    And she was in heat …

1
    Dante Pontis wasn’t the most patient of creatures. And his patience was quickly running out.
    He’d been trapped in a limo from Hartsfield Airport to the hotel with his brothers, Mike and Leo, as they bitched and moaned over the fact that Dante had forced the