Otherworldly Bad Boys: Three Complete Novels Read online

  Avery glared at her. “Nice try. Go back to sleep.” He started to shut the door.

  She put a hand out, stopping him. “Wait. I’m freaked out here, okay? I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t go back to sleep until I’m sure he’s not coming for me.”

  Avery hesitated.

  “Please, Brooks.”

  He opened the door up wider. “Come in.”

  She did her best not to brush up against all his bare skin when she did. She wasn’t sure what was wrong with her. Every time she’d ever woken Avery up, he’d been in his boxers. She’d seen him like this before. But she’d never found him particularly attractive before. Maybe it was the wolf thing, like what had happened with Hollis. Maybe she was turning into some kind of random horny wolf-woman. But not being able to control her wolf was another reason she needed to see Cole.

  Avery dialed on his phone. “Hey, it’s Brooks.... Yeah, tracking office.... I need you to go to Randall’s cell and make sure he’s still there.”

  Jesus, why hadn’t she thought of that?

  Because it hadn’t really been about finding out if he was there, had it? Her fears had tricked her. She wanted an excuse to see him, and that was all this was about.

  “Humor me,” Avery was saying. A pause. “Thanks.” He moved the phone away from his mouth. “He’s checking.”

  “Thanks,” she said, feeling stupid. She stared down at her feet.

  “Look, it’s okay to be frightened,” said Avery.

  She laughed. “Right, if I’m scared, then all is right with the universe.” But if I’m hot for him, well... that’s crazy time.

  Avery started to respond, but someone on the other end of his phone call interrupted him. “Okay. Great. Thank you so much.... Um, we had a tip that he’d escaped. Figured it was nonsense, but we wanted to make sure.”

  Avery was even lying for her. He was such a great friend. She sighed.

  Avery hung up his phone. “Still there. He’s locked up tight.”

  “Good,” she said. And she was relieved. She didn’t want him to get out, not really. She wrapped her arms around her own waist. “Good.”

  “You really are freaked out.”

  She shrugged, shaking her limbs free. “No, I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?”

  She nodded furiously. “Yeah, yeah. Definitely.”

  He gave her a lopsided grin. “You want a hug?”

  Her gaze fixed on all his bare skin, the way his muscles rippled under it. He was so masculine and angled and... “I’m fine.” She backed up.

  Avery looked down at himself. “I could put on a shirt.”

  She fumbled for the door. “You know, I think I’ll just go back to bed. I’m really sorry for bothering you. I’m acting like an idiot.”

  “It’s okay.” He started to say more.

  But then she was out in the hall, shutting the door behind her, and she couldn’t hear Avery anymore. Before he could come after her, she sprinted away, bounding down the hallway as fast as she could. She was so embarrassed. How could she be finding Avery, of all people, attractive? First serial killers, now co-workers. What was next? Family members?

  She needed to go for a run. That was the answer. A late night run in the cool air. Yes. Definitely.

  * * *

  “Did Cole force you to shift against your will?” asked Chantal. She had a very earnest expression on her face. Dana had never seen her quite like this before. Usually, Chantal’s questions were about how Dana felt. Now it seemed like Chantal was a detective, trying to figure out who had perpetrated a crime.

  “I don’t think so,” said Dana. “He pressured me, but I’m pretty sure I was the one letting the wolf out. I would relax, and it would just overtake me.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Chantal.

  Dana bit her lip. “Pretty sure.”

  “There isn’t some way that he could have been doing that to you, and you would have thought you were doing it to yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dana. “Is that even possible? Can a werewolf force someone else to shift?”

  Chantal sucked in a breath. “Well, not typically, no. But when you were talking about how you felt compelled to kiss Cole, that your wolf was drawn to him, but your human self wasn’t, it made me think of something I studied in college.”

  “What?”

  “I have a degree in werewolf psychology,” said Chantal. “I suppose you know that’s why the SF hired me.”

  “No,” said Dana. “I didn’t think there was any difference between werewolves and humans as far as psychology goes.”

  “Most people don’t,” said Chantal. “Most psychiatrists don’t. Studying the peculiarities of werewolves has gone out of vogue. In an academic setting, it’s considered prejudiced. The accepted view these days is that once a were has gone through training and suppressed his wolf, then he’s also suppressed any effect that the wolf might have had on his psyche.”

  Dana nodded. “Yeah, I guess that’s what I always thought. Are you saying that’s not true?”

  Chantal sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. I thought maybe something was going on here between the two of you, something that hasn’t happened in over fifty years so far as anyone knows.”

  “But you don’t think so now?”

  “I really can’t be sure,” said Chantal. “You say he didn’t force you to shift, right?”

  “Right,” said Dana.

  “But he seems to be calling you.”

  “Calling me?”

  “It’s an old term,” said Chantal. “You wouldn’t have heard of it. I only learned about it in my werewolf history class. We learned all about Fredrich Sullivan and how he treated wolves in the 1920s.”

  “Sullivan,” repeated Dana. He was the guy who the Sullivan Foundation was named after. He had studied wolves in the early part of the twentieth century, and the foundation was named after him as an honorarium. He was the first to study wolves scientifically. Dana wasn’t sure, but she thought the Sullivan Foundation had been formed sometime in the 1960s, after Sullivan’s death. It wasn’t officially sanctioned by the government until the 1980s. Sullivan’s ideas had very little to do with the current incarnation of the SF. He’d been a little bit crazy, as near as Dana remembered. He’d experimented with using cocaine to treat wolves (unsuccessfully), and he’d been obsessed with the idea that werewolves were like regular wolves. “He really thought werewolves were like wild animals, right?”

  “You do know,” said Chantal.

  “I know a little,” said Dana.

  “When he first began to observe and treat wolves, he found that they seemed to gravitate to each other, to live in groups,” said Chantal.

  “Oh,” said Dana. “Right. He thought they were packs, like animals, right? He thought they were connected by some kind of animal bond.”

  “Exactly,” said Chantal.

  “But really,” said Dana, “they all lived together because the lupine virus is hereditary, and so it often affected whole families, and because they were afraid of persecution.”

  “Right,” said Chantal. Her shoulders slumped.

  “What?” said Dana. “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Chantal. “I was crazy to think it in the first place. Sullivan was crazy too, everyone knows that. He had some good ideas, and people were able to work with them to create the training process we use today, but that other stuff he thought was just nuts. I don’t know how I let myself get carried away.”

  Dana wasn’t sure what to say.

  “It’s just that I’m so frustrated by this case,” said Chantal. “I feel like I can’t help you.”

  “Actually,” said Dana, “I really think I’m doing better.” That wasn’t true. But Dana had decided that if she was ever going to get back down to see Cole, she was going to have to convince Chantal that she wasn’t having any problems anymore. Chantal had cut her off, and Chantal would give her access again. Dana just had to seem like she was ma
king progress.

  Chantal raised her eyebrows. “You do?”

  Dana nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah. I really think that getting back to work and staying busy was the best thing I could have done for myself. And not seeing Cole is good for now. Kind of out of sight, out of mind.”

  “You haven’t been thinking of him?”

  “I have, but it’s been less than usual,” said Dana. “A lot less.”

  “Really?” Chantal narrowed her eyes.

  Dana avoided her gaze. “Really.”

  It was quiet for a moment.

  “Well,” said Chantal. “That’s good news. We’ll see if things continue to improve at our next session.”

  * * *

  Avery slapped a stack of paper down on Dana’s desk. “Here you go. First batch of Cole Randall’s email correspondence.”

  Dana groaned. “I’m trying to compile this list of people who fit Cole’s profile. Can’t you look through the emails?”

  “Oh, I am looking through the emails,” said Avery. He pointed to his desk, where she could see a stack twice the size of hers. “See? I gave you a smaller batch.”

  She made a face. “I hate doing stuff like this. Someone should write a computer program for this.”

  “Right,” said Avery. “Considering that would be really lucrative for them.”

  She looked down at the stack of paper. The first email was written to Cole from someone with the email address “randallfan09994.” It asked for information on Cole’s favorite food and inquired about what kind of TV shows he liked.

  Dana moved it to the bottom of the stack. She needed some way to filter through this, to look for certain words.

  “Hey,” she called after Avery. “Do you have these digitally somewhere?”

  He turned to her, eyebrow arched. “You want to read them on the screen?”

  “No,” she said. “I want to use a ‘find’ program to search for keywords.”

  Avery’s eyes widened. “Okay, that’s not actually a bad idea, Gray.”

  She grinned.

  He beckoned. “Come over here and show me how to do it, why don’t you?”

  She went over to Avery’s desk. It was covered in a big desktop calendar. Avery had penciled in the dates of all the baseball games his favorite team would play. It said nothing about work. His access badge peered out from under the edge of the calendar.

  Dana bit her lip. What were the odds that Avery would notice his badge was missing if she took it?

  Maybe if she used it later tonight?

  He wasn’t going to notice it if she had it back to him by tomorrow, was he?

  “What are you looking at, Gray?”

  “Just that you’ve got nothing on your calendar except baseball games,” she said.

  “I have to remember to set my DVR for the ones that fall on full moons,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “What? I hate missing them.”

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out two crumpled dollar bills. “If you go to the vending machine, I’ll buy you a soda.”

  Avery shrugged. “Sure. What kind you want?”

  “Coke’s fine,” she said.

  “Be back in a minute.”

  She waited until he was out of the office before sliding the access badge into her pocket.

  She’d see Cole tonight.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Dana swiped Avery’s access badge inside the elevator. It was 1:17 AM, and she hoped that meant it was late enough that no one was paying much attention to what was going on. On the other hand, maybe it meant that going to see Cole was conspicuous. Maybe the people on the maximum security floor would be suspicious.

  She pressed buttons on the elevator, and it began to move.

  She wasn’t even sure if she’d be able to see Cole. After all, they’d made it so her badge wouldn’t let her down the elevator. Maybe they’d told everyone who worked down there not to let her in.

  She paced the inside of the elevator nervously, watching the floors click down.

  Was this going to work?

  What would she say if she got to the bottom floor and they told her she wasn’t allowed down there? Could she pretend it had been a mistake? Could she laugh it off? Maybe she could convince them they were making a mistake.

  But, oh God, if Avery found out that she’d taken his badge, he was going to be pissed off. And everyone would take her behavior as further proof that she shouldn’t be around Cole.

  Maybe she shouldn’t.

  But she had to see him.

  The elevator door opened.

  A woman was at the door, staring at her computer. She was watching a television episode. One of those police procedural shows. Dana couldn’t remember the name of it. Without looking up, the woman said, “You know where you’re headed?”

  “Yeah,” said Dana.

  “The guard’ll open any door you need.” The woman waved Dana by.

  Okay, so far, so good. It was working. Dana stepped past the woman and started down the hallway. She remembered the cell that Cole was in, but she let enough of the wolf out to smell, just to make sure.

  A guard saw her walking down the hall. “You need a cell opened?”

  “Yes,” said Dana, stopping in front of the same cell Cole had been in before. She could smell him. He was here now.

  “Randall,” said the guard. “You’re one of those trackers trying to figure out how he’s connected to those rogues, right?”

  “Right,” said Dana. He didn’t know anything! He had no idea she wasn’t supposed to be here.

  “Coming while he’s sleeping is a good plan,” said the guard. “You’ll get under his skin.” He got out a key and put it in the door. “Just knock on the door when you’re ready to come out, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Dana, forcing herself to smile. She was a wreck inside, her palms sweaty and her pulse racing. She was going to see Cole. She drew in a shaky breath.

  The cell door opened.

  It was dark inside.

  “I can get the lights in there for you,” said the guard. “Only take me a minute after I close the door behind you.”

  “Thanks,” she said. Her voice had gone breathy. She lurched into the dark room, her center of balance off.

  His smell was intense. It was all around her. She couldn’t see anything but blackness, but the dark smell of Cole wrapped around her.

  The door shut behind her.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She waited.

  She could hear his steady, even breath, not far away. He was asleep.

  Cole sleeping. She’d never quite considered it before. He’d be vulnerable. And if she wanted, she could go to him, cover his mouth and nose. Suffocate him.

  All her problems would be solved.

  The light came on.

  Cole’s cell contained a bed, a desk, a toilet, and a sink. It was tiny, white, and bare.

  He sat up in bed, making a startled noise.

  She backed up against the door. What was she doing here? Why had she come?

  “Dana.” He swept his glasses off his desk, which was right against the bed, jammed them on his face, and was across the small cell, inches from her.

  “Stop,” she said, panic shooting through her.

  He did. He didn’t touch her. He stood in front of her, hands at his side, and he gazed at her greedily, as if he were lapping her up with his eyes. She realized that this was the first time she’d seen him that he hadn’t been wearing handcuffs. She took a shaky breath.

  “What took you so long?” he said. “I told you to come back to see me.”

  “They won’t let me,” said Dana. “I had to sneak down tonight.”

  He smiled. “But you made it.”

  She nodded. She gazed deep into his eyes for a second, and then she looked away. She studied the floor instead. “You did something to me.”

  “You did something to me too,” he said.

  She turned back to him. “No
, I don’t mean...” She pointed back and forth between the two of them. “I don’t mean this. I mean that I’m losing control of my wolf. It keeps trying to come out anytime it wants, and it’s endangering people. You changed something when you made me shift all those times.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”

  “Interesting? Fuck you.” Her hands clenched into fists. His little games made her so angry. Why couldn’t he just explain something for once?

  “Dana, your wolf was released from the prison you kept her in. She woke up and matured. You’ll never be able to put her in that box again.”

  “Never?” She twisted her hands together. “You’re saying that I’ll spend the rest of my life never sure if the wolf could pop out at any minute.” She felt close to tears. “You bastard. How could you do that to me?”

  “I’m not saying that at all,” said Cole. “Stop fighting the wolf and trust her. She’s just another aspect of you. She wouldn’t do anything that you wouldn’t do.”

  Dana flashed on a memory. Being outside the baby’s room in Coraline’s house. The wolf curling back up and getting under control at the word “cub.” Was what Cole was saying true? Was the wolf really trustworthy?

  But she didn’t contemplate it too much, because the memory reminded her of something else, and she was livid. “You did this last thing. You made them shift, didn’t you?”

  Cole grinned, and his whole face lit up. He looked insane. “You’re figuring it out. Very good.”

  “People died, Cole.”

  “Oh, I thought you’d be pleased. It was really a lot less than last time. Body count of two, I believe.”

  “One of those rogues had a baby. She could have killed the baby.” Dana’s nostrils flared. “I know you’re a monster, Cole, but a tiny, helpless—”

  “She didn’t kill the baby, did she?”

  Dana folded her arms over her chest. “Don’t try and pretend you could control that.”

  “Not me,” said Cole. “The rogue. She’s tuned in, that one. She’s not quite as advanced as you, of course, but she could get there.”

  “As me? Did you do something to her?”

  Cole shrugged. He walked over to his bed and sat down, smoothing out the covers.