"Mercedes Lackey - Urban Fantasies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

Chapter One
Sunset Boulevard was a blur of lights and noise, too many radios and car stereos, too many people
talking and shouting and laughing. Kayla jammed her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket and
wished all of it would just go away.
 At midnight, it seemed like everyone was on the street, all the weird and lonely and “professional”
residents of Los Angeles: the punks and the pretty boys in tight black leather, the women in brightly
colored miniskirts, the dealers with too many gold chains beneath their open shirt collars. Ten feet away
from where she stood, a nervous-looking blond man traded cash for a little ziplock bag with a
bored-looking guy in a cowboy hat; both men stepped back into the shadows of the alley as a
black-and-white LAPD patrol car glided past, like a silent shark prowling through the late night traffic.

Liane and Billy were twenty feet further up the sidewalk, gawking at leather jackets in a storefront
window. She took her eyes off the panorama of the street around her, and joined them at the window.
“Nice stuff,” she commented, looking at a tailored leather jacket with metal studs. The price tag said
$249 . . . but it might as well have been a million dollars, she still couldn't afford it.

She leaned against the cold metal bars over the glass and thought about stealing some aspirin. Just the
same as every night for the last few months, it felt like someone was pounding on her skull with a
hammer. The noise from the traffic only made it worse. “Guys, okay if we stop someplace for some more
aspirin?”

“Another headache?” Billy asked.

“It's nothing,” Kayla lied.

“You've been having headaches every day for weeks now,” Liane said. “Maybe we should take you to
a doctor. What if this is something serious?”

“It's nothing, guys. I'll get some aspirin, it'll go away. There's a QuickStart down the street, we can stop
there.”

A red convertible slowed on the street next to them, the man in the driver's seat calling out to them.
“Hey, chickies, want to party?”

Billy glared at the driver until he shrugged and looked away. The convertible pulled away back into the
traffic.

“We could've just let him buy us some dinner and drinks,” Liane said softly. “Nothing more than that.”
Liane had a hungry look in her eyes, the way she stared wistfully after the fancy red convertible.

Kayla thought about the man, and that he had a hungry look in his eyes, too. A different kind of hunger.

Billy shook his head. “He'd want something for his money, wouldn't he? And then we'd end up in a
situation like last weekend with you and Nick.”

Liane, already pale under the streetlights with her white-blond hair and very fair skin, turned even paler.
That had been an awful night, one that Kayla thought they wouldn't survive. Nick, a local “businessman,”
had been watching Liane for a few days. When Kayla and Billy were busy buying Cokes from a street