Craig

by Celeste Raye

  Craig: Through the Portal

  (A Sci-Fi Weredragon Romance)

  Celeste Raye

  Copyright ©2017 by Celeste Raye - All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

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  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Also by Celeste Raye

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Wait!

  You should know that Blake is the third book of three in the Through the Portal romance series. Although each story can be read independently and all end with a HEA with no cliffhangers, to get the full experience of the Weredragons Universe, you should really read them in order.

  Through the Portal

  Max

  Blake

  Craig

  Chapter One

  Great. Just what she needed. Gina glared as Craig Morris, her biggest rival in the department and the man standing between her and the promotion she really wanted, strolled up to where she stood. He asked, “What’s up?”

  Her lips curled back over her teeth. She knew that he knew she was not at all immune to his very real charms. They’d had a tryst a few months back, one she really regretted, and she doubted he’d forgotten that either, though they had both been drunk enough to pretend to forget it. “Not much.”

  His lips turned up into a grin. “Still looking for those two women?”

  “Yes, I am. That they are missing should concern people. They were best friends. They went missing. Then, crazy as it is, they somehow resurfaced just to go missing again. You do not think that that is off?”

  His sooty eyebrow rose a bit. “Off?”

  “Off. Wrong. screwed up. Strange.” She was getting irritated, and she knew it. She did not care. He had a way of getting under her skin, and he was doing it right then too, which just flustered her because she was supposed to be keeping her cool, getting her job done, and finding these two women. Her promotion depended on that, on her doing something huge and great.

  She was either going to have to find them or go strong arm a few low-level dealers into revealing who their boss was and try to take that boss down or get a big shipment if she was going to stand a chance—especially since Craig was her rival for that promotion and he was leading her in solves and closed cases.

  The bastard.

  Ugh, why did she have to go against him? It was the worst thing. Craig had an uncanny way of figuring things out. It was irritating. It was like he could smell the crime before it even happened.

  Like she needed that in her life. She did not need him or anything like him in her life to be honest. What she needed was some guy who did not want to climb the ranks like she did, a guy who was content to just be a beat cop and let her shine. If she had that, she would be able to do her job and do it without feeling like someone was always breathing down her neck and just a single step behind or a large step ahead. Promotion in the force was almost a given—if you happened to be born with a penis and balls, but for women, it was a hard thing to pull off.

  Craig ran a hand through his longish blond hair. His hair and eyebrows contrasted sharply, and his black eyebrows, thick and heavy over his gray eyes, added to the illusion that maybe his hair wasn’t his own. She’d seen him naked. She knew it was. The hair around his penis was just as golden.

  That thought made her teeth grit together. What was wrong with her? She was trying to find missing women, an important thing whether a better position was on offer or not, and she was trying to get into that higher rank, and all she was doing was standing there thinking about the hair on his crotch?

  Craig said, “What’s got you stuck?”

  You. So go away dammit. She drew a long breath. “Well, it’s the whole case. I mean, where did they go when they were gone and how did they come back just to vanish again?”

  “Maybe they went on vacay.”

  “For months?”

  He shrugged. “Some do.”

  “Not these two. One was married to her job. She came back and got another job and was married to it, all up until she ghosted. That’s strange all in and of itself. Add to that the nice place and the designer clothes just sitting and you get the idea that maybe she didn’t mean to leave or something.”

  “I get the idea that they were flakes and they maybe took off for a different job or something.”

  “She had two thousand buck shoes in her closet. The one who owned the loft. No way would she just leave them.” Irritation prickled up her spine. “That would be Christy, who is by all accounts a very driven and ambitious woman. No way would she just up and leave.”

  “But she did. Like you just said, she did it before.”

  “I don’t think she went willingly.”

  Craig groaned. “It seems to me if they went away and came back then went away again, you can say she went without a fight. I mean, come on. Use your head here. If she had been kidnapped or whatever, she would have said so the first time. She would not have gone out and gotten another job and then, what, got kidnapped again without saying a single word about it?”

  Ugh. He’s such an asshole. He has to see there’s something very wrong here. Gina’s teeth grit again. Her toe tapped at the concrete sidewalk. “You are being obtuse.”

  His smile was sunny. “Am I? I just do not think that there is anything here. I think you are chasing two women who are wherever they want to be and all you are doing is wasting the department’s time and resources looking for them. We have real crime to fight.”

  Now she was pissed off. “This is a real crime. Two women are missing. Their names are Christy and Heather, and they have no reason to be gone, but they are. Something’s up with that, and I want to know what it is.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” He held up his long hands in what would have looked like a signal of truce if she did not know so much better. Craig never gave up. He was just trying to defuse her anger. Not that he could. She was fighting mad, and she wanted to know what the hell was going on with Christy and Heather, and she wanted to know now.

  Just then her radio crackled. Gina took it off her shoulder and spoke into. “Go ahead.”

  The dispatcher spoke. “We have a body.”

  Gina tensed. A body took precedence over the missing women, and she knew it. But her instincts told her that there was still something there.

  Chapter Two

  Craig was both frustrated and amused by Gina. She was gorgeous, for one thing, and she had given him a single night before shunting him aside like it had never happened. Her cold shoulder afterward was not just cold either; it was utterly icy.

  He was also worried about her. The women that were missing? He had a good idea where they might have gone. He had smelled a familiar scent in the apartment t
hat they had once shared, a scent that was enough to make homesickness twist in his gut.

  Dragons. That was what he smelled in that apartment.

  His kind.

  He knew Gina well enough to know that she would hunt down any and every lead and that those leads would take her right into Dragon world—something he could not have. He had turned his back on that world by choice. He had wanted to be here, to be something more than just one more weredragon and knight in a world ruled by open skies and dragons.

  Gina snarled at him as he aimed for the squad car, “I’ll drive.”

  “You always drive.”

  “That is because you are a shitty driver.”

  She was not wrong. It was one of the few things he never had really learned how to do well, though he knew he had to eventually.

  They took off and, as always, her crazy style of driving at top speed down packed streets with her sirens screaming and her head out the window to scream at reluctant drivers who did not want to give up their spot in the stalled traffic made a low lump settle into his guts.

  Gina muttered, “It’s him. I know it is him.”

  He knew it too. The Gripper had been a presence in the city for nearly a year now and had left a trail of bodies in his wake. There was a certainty behind Gina’s words and his feeling for a good reason. Bodies generally were his, he thought, as they rolled into a low-slung area of the city where the river ran up high against the banks and poverty was evident in the crumbling buildings and the broken patches on the street’s surface.

  The body was that of a young woman, her hand still stretched outward like she was asking for help. Pity suffused through his body. Humans were so fragile and frail, so easily broken and discarded.

  His pity caused him to look away. He blinked it back, knowing that it would not do him any good to pity her. What he had to do was figure out who the maniac who had killed her was before he had a chance to do it again.

  Gina sighed. “I thought he was gone.”

  “I hoped he was. It’s been a year.” His sighs raked over the body and the street below her. He sighed again, “No, he’s not. There’s his signature.”

  His signature was the single bloody streak he made in the shape of an arrow. That was a detail the press did not know and by the time they were allowed on the scene, it was gone, thanks to the expert crime scene cleaners. Craig sighed again, “Anyone find anything that would identify her?”

  The tech shook his head. “No, but I will send her dental impression and fingerprints on to the labs.”

  Gina said, “I would…I wonder…”

  “I don’t think your missing women are related.”

  She huffed for a moment. “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t fit. They weren’t homeless, sex workers or addicts, from all reports. He tends to ply his particular style of murder on those people.

  Yes, The Gripper. He held the city in a grip of terror once a year. He always killed exactly three people, and he was clearly a fan of old Jack too because he liked to taunt the police during his spree. But at the end of that three-person run, he went silent, and that was that, until the next year.

  Every year the force was sure that this would be his last year, but it never was. For fifteen years now, he had run the city for the week he killed. Craig sighed, “We need to start to figure some things out. This is number one. We have to try to get him before he can take number two and three.”

  “We have two women missing.”

  Ugh, she was going to let her determination to find those two make her lose focus on the task at hand. She was dead set on believing the things were connected and he knew damn well that they were not, but how he knew that was not something that he could explain to her.

  He shifted on his feet, ignoring that last bit from her in order to say, “Let’s walk the scene.”

  They started at the corners, trying to determine what direction the killer would have come from to leave the body. It was likely he had driven the body there and given that it was a street known for its strolling prostitutes and slow-moving traffic, he could have just tossed the body and barely even stopped to do it.

  Craig said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if he drove something flashy or spectacular? Or if he made some sort of rookie mistake?”

  Gina snorted, “If he did, he would already be behind bars.”

  “True.” He sighed again. His eyes traced back toward the body. He shook his head. “It’s like he is a goddamn ghost. We might as well be chasing a figment of our imagination. I have been on this case for six years, and I have never gotten so much as a sniff of who he might be.”

  Gina’s shoulders slumped. “I’ve been on it for three, along with half the city’s cops. The task force got to be too expensive, so they disbanded it but that just left us sprinting to try to get it all together before they set the file into the cold room.”

  Anger hit. The people who had died deserved better than to be just open case files sitting in a room marked storage. “Yeah. There has to be something all of us are overlooking, something so basic and simple that it just goes right by us.”

  Gina hugged her arms around her slim waist. “I agree. But what it is, I don’t know. I know there’s something we should be seeing but damned if I can actually see it.”

  “That is the genius of it.” He should know. He was hiding in plain sight, a dragon among men. He knew where the portals that would lead to his world were, and they too were hidden in plain sight.

  So yes, that was the genius of it all.

  Just then a car cruised to the curb and out stepped Jack Houghton. He called out, “Is it our boy?”

  Craig nodded wearily. “I’m afraid it is.”

  Jack groaned and headed for the body, being careful to keep his body outside the scene of the staked-off crime scene. “Dammit. I thought this would end by now.”

  That was a sentiment they all echoed, often, over the years. Jack had been there since the beginning, and he was now easing his way toward retirement. He surveyed the scene and said, “There will be two more.”

  Not if we don’t stop him.

  That thought was a heavy one, but a true one. It was a fact. It was also a fact that most of the people on the force had just about given up on finding out who the Gripper really was. He was so damn good at what he did that it seemed catching him was an impossibility.

  Jack, who had been on the force for nearly twenty years now and was a senior detective, ran his hands through his thinning hair and grunted out, “Anyone see the little taunt the bastard leaves?”

  They both nodded wearily. Craig pointed to a small numeral carved into the vic’s body. A number one. It was the Gripper’s other signature. Jack shook his head. “Dammit. Look, let’s hit the streets. Fan out. Figure out who she is and where she got here from. He had to have brought her in from somewhere. Let’s talk to the neighbors.”

  They headed off to knock on doors. Gina strode along beside him, her step spry and light. The way she moved drew his eye to her body, distracting him in a way he knew he did not need just then. The neighborhood was beyond sketchy; it was downright dangerous. He doubted that they would have any luck getting anyone to talk; part of the Gripper’s success was that he chose marginalized and disenfranchised people to kill, and then he threw them away in neighborhoods where the police were people nobody trusted. The first door in the apartment building opened to reveal a huge man in a tight shirt and pants that could barely span his waist. He snapped, “I didn’t see anything, and I didn’t call you.” Then he slammed the door.

  Gina shook her head and headed for the next door. He watched her go. Her pants cupped her cheeks in a way that made his blood heat and his own pants get a little too tight. Great, just what he needed right then: an erection. A large one that would be easily seen, to boot.

  Ugh. He gave his rod a hard pat with one hand, a warning that made it shrivel away, thankfully. But watching her walk was not a good thing so he caught up with her and then managed to get himsel
f slightly ahead of her as well. They knocked on doors, getting nowhere and nothing but suspicious stares and denials of having seen a single thing, for nearly an hour.

  Frustrated and furious, Craig led the way out of the building and back to the car. Gina took the wheel. He glanced at her. Neither of them was exactly happy about working together, but her older partner had transferred to a new division, and he had a rep for not working well with others—as did Gina. The brass had decided that the two of them were a natural fit and so there they were, partners on the job.

  But he wished that they were partners in bed again. Goddamn, she was a hell of a lover.

  She was also ambitious, and the promotion was one she wanted badly. That they were competing for it only added to the ever-present tension between them. He said, “Okay, that was a bust. I suggest we—”

  Gina yanked the wheel, hard, and Craig let out a yelp, then shouted, “Are you trying to kill me?”

  She ignored that and jumped from the car, heading toward a skinny little dude that they both knew. He was a low-level drug dealer who had a habit of staying in business by working with cops to make sure his competition didn’t. Craig levered open his door and followed her.

  Gina called out, “Ramone!”

  Ramone groaned. “Aw, come on! I ain’t doing nothing!”

  There were a few other corner hustlers nearby. Gina raised her voice. “I got a body down by the river. You see a single thing pertaining to that?”