Otherworldly Bad Boys: Three Complete Novels Read online

  “I thought you’d tell me more if I came to see you. I’m here, against all the rules. Now make it worth my while. Did you do something to her?”

  He glanced at her sidelong. “Yes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What I couldn’t do to you.”

  “You couldn’t kill me.”

  He shook his head. “You’re very clever, Dana, but you’ve still never really figured it out. Think, beautiful, what would I have wanted with those wolves I tracked down? The ones who fit ‘my profile,’ as you say.”

  She was taken aback. “You wanted to teach them a lesson. You wanted to punish them because they weren’t proper werewolves.”

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t punishment. I only killed the ones that were useless to me.”

  “Useless...?” She shook her head, taking a step closer to him. “What do you mean?”

  His smile widened. “I think that’s quite enough information for one visit, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I’m much more interested in other things now that you’re here. Alone. With me.” He sprang up off the bed and advanced on her.

  Dana flattened herself against the door. “Don’t touch me.”

  He chuckled, low and self-assured. “I’m sure you’d despise that, wouldn’t you?”

  She should knock on the door. Yell for the guard. But she didn’t do either. Her mouth was dry. She tried to swallow and couldn’t.

  Cole’s hand rested next to her. He leaned over, propped up against the wall where she cowered from him. “You know what I remember the most? Those little noises you always made when I had my hands on you. Tiny gasps and sighs and moans.”

  “Shut up.” Her voice was unsteady.

  “What do you remember, Dana?”

  She peered up into his dark, dark eyes, blood throbbing against her skin, her breath shallow. “I remember everything.”

  “Do you think of me?”

  She licked her lips. “All the time. I can’t stop.”

  “What do you think about?”

  She shook. She meant it just to be her head, but it was her whole body.

  “Tell me, Dana. Tell me.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I shouldn’t think about you. I’m... ashamed...”

  This didn’t faze him. His face dipped down, closer to hers.

  Her lips parted.

  “Do you think about my touch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do I touch you, Dana?”

  She couldn’t breathe. She slammed her eyes closed.

  “Say it,” said Cole, “or show me.”

  “No,” she said, her voice tiny. But her body was betraying her, just like it always did. She was pleasantly aware of something stirring between her thighs. Cole’s voice, his proximity, was enough to wake it up.

  “You touch yourself when you’re alone, don’t you? You imagine it’s my hand. You say my name under your breath.”

  She opened her eyes, trying to summon fury at him instead of lust. “No.”

  He was grinning. “No?”

  “Just because you’re pathetically jerking off down here, thinking about me, doesn’t mean that I—”

  His hand was inside her shirt. She felt the light brush of his hands against her skin. She couldn’t think to form words. Shivers traveled up her torso. She sighed.

  “Yes,” he said. “That noise.” His hand moved, inching higher, brushing the underside of her breast.

  She grabbed his hand, stopping him. “Wait.”

  “Dana—”

  “This is wrong,” she murmured. It was disgusting and pathetic and embarrassing. And if anyone found out... God, if anyone knew...

  “Wrong is for humans. We’re more than that.” And he closed his hand around her breast. “Is this where you touch yourself, Dana? Is this where you stroke yourself while you think of me?”

  “Yes,” she said. She wound her hand around the back of his neck and pulled his face down to hers.

  Her tongue found his tongue. His mouth was wet and hot and urgent, and she kissed him like she could somehow sear out all this unwanted desire if she made her passion burn bright enough.

  Then abruptly, she pushed him away.

  He stumbled backwards, surprised.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  He touched his lips. “Just let me—”

  “No.”

  He exhaled.

  “I didn’t come down here so that you could get to second base.”

  “How about third?” he said. “Don’t lie and tell me you’re not wet for me.”

  She sucked in breath audibly, whether because she was offended or turned on, she wasn’t sure. “No more.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “All right then.”

  She ran her hands over the bottom of her shirt, smoothing it, feeling agitated. “I’m leaving.” She turned to face the door and raised her hand to knock.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Right now,” she murmured, more to herself than Cole. “I’m going to go.” Why wasn’t she knocking? She stared at the door and willed herself to knock, but nothing happened.

  “Dana?”

  She looked at him. “What?”

  “Take off your bra.”

  She bit down on her lip. “W-why?”

  “I want it.”

  She put her thumbnail to her teeth. Chewed it. “No. Someone will see it. They’ll wonder how you got it.”

  “No one will see it. I’ll hide it.”

  She shook her head. “That’s...” Gross, right? Or... sort of hot in a weird way? She imagined walking all the way back to her apartment without a bra, the fabric of her shirt rubbing against her nipples, knowing that Cole had her bra down here.

  She shut her eyes.

  “Take it off.” His voice was demanding and deep.

  She reached behind her back, inside her shirt, and unsnapped it.

  * * *

  “Jesus,” said Ursula, flipping through the printout Dana had given her. “These all fit Cole’s profile?”

  “Yes,” said Dana. “But that’s nationwide, and thus far, he’s only done things regionally. The regional potentials only fill two pages.”

  Ursula sighed. “This is too much. We can’t do anything with this amount of people. There’s no way.”

  “Well, if we needed to,” said Dana, “I’m thinking that they might fit here if we doubled up and tripled up in some of the living space.”

  “I was thinking about sequestering them all here until we could get Randall under control,” said Ursula. “There’s no way we can do that. We need to narrow things down. Figure out who he was communicating with.” She flipped through the printout again. “How are you doing with Randall’s emails? Any progress?”

  “Brooks is going through most of that.” She peered across the office to Avery’s desk. He was there, staring at his computer screen, occasionally punching things in the computer.

  “You need to cross-reference the list of potentials against the emails. He’s got to be communicating with someone on this list,” said Ursula, handing the printout back to Dana.

  Cross-referencing? Yuck. Didn’t secretaries do stuff like that? But Dana only nodded. “Okay. I’ll see if I can come up with anything that fits.”

  “Great,” said Ursula. “And sooner would be better than later if at all possible.”

  “Right.” Dana headed across the office to Avery’s desk.

  He looked up at her. “What did King have to say?”

  “She wants us to cross-reference this list against the emails.” Dana held up the list of potentials.

  Avery wrinkled his nose. “That looks even less fun than what I’m doing.”

  She sank into a chair next to his desk. “I know.”

  “And to top everything off, I lost my access badge,” said Avery. “King’s going to be pissed at me. I haven’t told her yet.”

  “That sucks,” said Dana. The access badge was in her po
cket. She needed to get it back to him. She pointed at a spot in thin air behind Avery’s shoulder. “What the hell?”

  Avery turned.

  She slid the badge back under his calendar.

  He turned back around. “What?”

  She squinted. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  “It is nothing, Gray. What did you think you saw?”

  “I’m losing my mind,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. What were you talking about? Your access badge?”

  Avery rubbed his chin. “Yeah, but I was saying that I lost it.”

  “Have you looked under your desk calendar? I thought I saw it there yesterday.”

  He lifted the calendar. “What do you know? It’s right there.” He grinned at her. “You’re awesome, Gray.”

  She smiled back.

  * * *

  Dana’s muscles screamed at her as she got of the shower. She’d been running for over an hour this evening, and she thought she’d chased all her Cole thoughts away. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that he had her bra down there in his cell. What the hell was he doing with it?

  No, she knew what he was doing with it, but she shouldn’t think about it. Because then she had to experience that horrible mix of arousal and shame.

  She should never have given it to him. What had possessed her?

  It was his damned sexy voice. When he asked her for things in that voice of his, it was so hard to say no.

  God, she hated Cole Randall.

  She’d go out running again, but she was clean now, and she didn’t want to get sweaty again. Besides, it was late. She’d hoped to be able to slide into bed and fall straight to sleep.

  Too bad she couldn’t get Cole out of her head.

  She couldn’t even distract herself with work, because work was all about Cole as well. Everywhere she turned, there he was.

  She couldn’t think of any subject she’d discussed recently that didn’t have to do with Cole.

  Except maybe at Chantal’s office. That was odd, actually, because those sessions were usually about nothing but Cole. But last time, Chantal had mentioned Fredrich Sullivan.

  Dana went to her computer. She needed something to distract herself. Fredrich Sullivan and his outdated ideas about werewolves would have to do. She hadn’t done much reading on this since she was a teenager, right after she’d become a wolf. She remembered that it had been really boring and idiotic. That was what she needed. Something boring to put her to sleep.

  Fredrich Sullivan was old enough and dead enough that most everything he’d written was free on the internet somewhere, and it didn’t take long before Dana found the text of one of his papers and began to read.

  Forty-five minutes later, she wasn’t even close to being sleepy. This stuff was ridiculous. She was too busy giggling to be bored. Even if it wasn’t necessarily accurate, it was still engrossing. It some ways, it was her heritage. But she wasn’t thinking about Cole anymore, so that was a plus in her book.

  Sullivan had actually believed that female werewolves went into heat, like regular wild wolves. He had spent ages of time trying to figure out how to test them for estrus, since they didn’t seem to do it seasonally like animals did. He conducted and published a bunch of really embarrassing interviews, asking these women all kinds of super personal questions about their sex drives. In the 1920s. Some of the women were clearly clueless about sex and seemed worried about natural phenomena like pubic hair, which they mistakenly thought only grew because they were wolves.

  It was a train wreck. Dana couldn’t help but read until the end of the article.

  The webpage it was compiled on acknowledged that Sullivan eventually gave up on his theory that werewolves went into heat. Reluctantly, it seemed. Personally, Dana was pretty sure that Sullivan was just a big horn dog who wanted to ask groups of women about the changes in their vaginas. The interviews were probably masturbatory material.

  She noticed that by the time Sullivan had given up on his heat theory, he was in his sixties—an older and less excitable man.

  Anyway, since she was wide awake and definitely entertained, she decided to read another article.

  This one was about wolf packs. This was something Sullivan had never given up on, even though later researchers denied that it was true. They said that Sullivan expected werewolves to behave more like animals, so his observations were filtered by his own prejudgments. After all, no one before Sullivan had acknowledged that werewolves had even a shred of humanity. Before his work, the general way to deal with werewolves was to kill them on sight.

  The wolves that Sullivan observed, then, were tight-knit communities that hid what they were from other people. They often traveled like gypsies, never staying in one place for too long. If anyone figured out what they were, they would all be in danger.

  Because of this, it was easy to see why Sullivan had assumed the wolves lived in packs. As she read through his article, Dana realized she probably would have assumed it as well.

  “Every pack I have encountered has a male and female alpha, just as a pack of wild wolves does,” wrote Sullivan. “They are the matriarch and patriarch—often the progenitors of the line of wolves. Often a pack is a group of family members, all related by blood. In rarer cases, the wolves may be tied together not by blood relation, but because of the transference of the wolf by bite. In the case that a wolf has bitten and changed other wolves, he is the alpha over them, and they behave as if they are his offspring.”

  A female alpha, huh? Dana hadn’t even known about that. She’d sort of assumed that alpha wolves were all male, maybe because she’d read too many romance novels in high school, and had only heard the term alpha male used in that context. But it sounded instead like Sullivan had observed couples as rulers of these packs he’d seen.

  Of course, he was completely off base. When Dana had been turned into a werewolf, she certainly hadn’t become a beta to anyone. She wasn’t part of a pack. It was all nonsense. Truthfully, the social structure of wild wolves—animals—was apparently relatively similar to the social structure of humans. It was easy to see why Sullivan had seen wolf packs where there were only people in groups.

  “The alphas cannot control the members of their pack,” wrote Sullivan. “They have only two bits of influence over them. They can force a member to shift into a wolf whenever they wish or to shift from a wolf into a human. They can also call members of their pack. The wolves tell me that a call manifests like a strong desire, almost an obsession.”

  Dana looked up from the computer screen.

  Wait. Chantal didn’t think that Cole was...

  Dana’s alpha?

  Dana stood up. She began to pace her room. No, that was crazy. There were no werewolf alphas. She didn’t buy it. Not one bit.

  Sullivan was crazy. He was outdated. He’d been proven wrong.

  The SF had been functioning for decades, and none of the wolves who worked here functioned in a pack. There was no hierarchy. There were no alphas. If something like that were possible, the SF would know about it. She worked for the organization that knew more about werewolves than anyone else in the world.

  She rubbed her face. She wasn’t going to be able to get to sleep anytime soon, was she?

  She wondered if Chantal would prescribe her sleeping pills if she asked for them. But that would require telling Chantal the truth, that she was still as obsessed with Cole as she ever had been. That she wasn’t improving at all. And that would mean that she couldn’t see him.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Why did she want to see him? Why had she given him her bra? She crumpled into a ball on her bed, her arms around her head. Sometimes, it was all simply too much.

  * * *

  “Nothing,” Avery said, slumping in his desk chair. “Nothing at all. I don’t see anyone on the list of potentials that Cole sent emails too. You?”

  Dana stood over his desk, holding her half of the potentials list. “No.”

  “Of course, it doesn’t help
that those emails don’t have to be real names.”

  “Right. Anyone can give any name they want when they sign up for an email address.” She sighed. “King is going to be really upset. She said we had to narrow that list down somehow.”

  He picked up the list and rattled it. “We’re basically saying that anyone on this list could suddenly go rogue again and start killing. Right? We don’t know how, but we know Randall’s got something to do with it.”

  “We’re nowhere,” said Dana.

  He slapped the list back on the desk. “Well, he’s communicating with them somehow, right. It doesn’t seem to be email, but that’s not the only way to get in touch with someone.”

  “That’s true.”

  “We keep a record of people he calls? People he sends letters to?”

  “I... don’t know.”

  “Well, I think we better find out.”

  * * *

  Dana was surprised to find the waiting room of Chantal’s office in disarray. Usually, the room was a calm, ordered arrangement of soft couches in muted colors and potted plants. Now, it looked as if someone had torn it to pieces. The plants had been overturned, the soil spilled out all over the floor. The couches had been ripped and slashed. The magazines that usually sat on tables had been thrown all over the floor.

  Dana walked two feet inside and stopped in astonishment, her hand going to her mouth.

  Chantal appeared in the doorway to her office. “Who is that?” She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail on top of her head. She wasn’t wearing makeup. She looked haggard and worried.

  “Um, I had an appointment?”

  “Oh, Dana, the secretary was supposed to call you.”

  Dana held up her phone. “Battery’s dead.”

  “Well, your appointment’s cancelled. All the appointments are cancelled.” Chantal touched her forehead with the back of her hand. “Someone will be in touch with you when we get this sorted out.”

  The destroyed waiting room was between them. Dana took a step towards Chantal, but then stopped because there was dirt in her way. She didn’t want to track it all over everything. “What happened?”

  Chantal shook her head. “Vandalism?”

  “Why would someone vandalize a psychiatrist’s office?”