by Vivian Arend
Whispering a prayer to deaf gods, I hooked my hands under Trouble’s armpits and hauled his unconscious ass into my trailer.
Trouble barely fit into my twin bed. He was too lanky. His muscular arms and legs spilled off the sides, dwarfing all my furniture, making my bedroom look like it belonged to a little girl.
Somehow, I managed to pile him up on top of my comforter. He was going to get his stink on all of my belongings. I thought that should probably annoy me, but it didn’t.
He began to stir when I wiped him down with a damp rag, but the struggle toward consciousness was slow. Judging by how thoroughly he had been chewed around the shoulders and back, it looked like he had lost his fight against the wolf the night before. It chilled me how similar his wounds were to mine, though they had been inflicted by completely different tools. I hadn’t been mauled by a wolf. My attacker had been something much worse.
Strangely, Trouble’s wounds—though bloody—looked like they were already halfway healed. The skin was trying to close.
It didn’t surprise me at this point. I didn’t think anything would surprise me ever again.
I took the quiet minutes where he began to rouse to explore the rest of his body: the large wolf tattooed across his chest, the stubble near his navel where he needed to shave his happy trail again, the silvery scars over his ribcage. Those scars were the most interesting. I could only see them if I tilted my head the right way. They were big, too—four long gashes.
I spread my hand over the scar and fitted my fingertips to them. Whatever had delivered that wound had been twice the size of my hand.
My skin brushed his. Trouble’s fist clamped on my wrist.
I sucked in a hard breath, trying to pull back, but his grip was iron. His eyes opened and there was no struggle for consciousness within him now. He was awake. And he looked angry.
If he didn’t want me pawing his scars, then maybe he should have thought twice about falling down on my doorstep. “Let go of me,” I snapped, twisting my hand and jerking my arm toward me. I escaped the circle of his fingers. “You don’t touch me like that. Not ever again. You hear me, Trouble? I’m not a piece of meat for the Fang Brothers to chew on.”
He said, “Cooper.”
“What?”
“Cooper,” Trouble repeated, and it occurred to me that I had never heard him speak before. His voice was pleasantly gravelly. His accent was American, probably western side of the country, maybe even Californian—where I had come from originally. “My name’s Cooper.”
I tried the name out on my tongue, rolling it between my teeth. “Cooper.”
He gave a low growl, rumbling so softly through his chest that I wasn’t initially sure that it was coming from him. Fire sparked in his golden eyes.
There was something intimate about saying his name. Those simple syllables. I felt like he had just shared a secret with me, something dark and illicit that I wasn’t meant to know.
He lifted his hand toward my shoulder, and I jerked in anticipation of a violent touch. He froze at my reaction. Watched me closely. Waited to see if I would move.
After the previous night’s passion, it felt so strange to hesitate now. I didn’t want to fear him. My whole body ached for him, like I had become lost in the desert for days and he was the oasis on the other side of an impassible canyon. I wanted to throw myself across that distance.
But Pops, my grandpa, hadn’t raised a dumbass. I could be a dumbass sometimes, granted, but that was despite his best efforts. He’d drilled as much sense into me as I could take. And Pops’s girl wasn’t dumb enough to allow herself to get bitten twice.
I scooted back on the bed. Just an inch. I might as well have put a whole prison wall topped with barbed wire between us because Cooper’s expression shuttered and anger furrowed his brow.
Dipping the towel back into my bowl of water, I forced myself to concentrate on the ugly flower pattern rimming my dishes, not the pain in my chest that told me to surrender to all of Cooper’s whims.
“Now, here’s how the rest of the morning is going to play out, Trouble,” I said, carefully choosing not to use his real name. “I’m going to clean you up a bit because you’re making a mess of my house. While I’m doing that, you’re going to tell me exactly what happened last night, starting with the moment you came into my bar and ending with your collapse on my doorstep. And if you think you can skip anything in between, you’ve got another thing coming.”
I washed the blood off of his left shoulder. It was a safe place to touch, relative to his abs and everything below that.
He didn’t start talking.
“Well?” I prompted.
When he remained silent, I dared to glance up, meeting his eyes.
His gaze stabbed through me.
My hand had stopped moving and I wasn’t sure when it had happened. My knuckles were brushing his hip. He was so very warm, radiating heat like the sun-baked earth at mid-afternoon. “What are the Fang Brothers doing here?” I asked, but I didn’t manage a lot of conviction in that question.
“This is where they find the new guys,” Cooper said.
My eyebrows climbed my forehead. “The new guys? You mean, the new…” I stuttered over the word. I felt stupid even thinking it. “Werewolves.”
He nodded slowly, like it pained him.
“Are you new at this?” I asked. Another nod. That little gesture chipped away at my resolve and let the maternal warmth come creeping back. Silly to want to protect such a big guy. Probably outright stupid. “Did you know you were going to change last night?”
He leaned forward slightly so that I could wash around his shoulder blade. He didn’t even flinch when I touched his healing wounds. “Yes, but I smelled you, and I couldn’t stay away.”
“Smelled me?”
“You were calling for me with your body.”
Heat flushed my cheeks. Was it possible that he could smell my body when I danced? That I had somehow put some kind of sexy pheromones out into the universe, and that he had responded?
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised by the idea, or even all that weirded out by it. If I were to be honest with myself, I had been calling to him. Not just my body, but my mind and heart.
I’d been calling to him since the first moment I saw him. Maybe I had always been calling for him, even before we met.
The Devil, number fifteen, flashed through my mind again. The grinning satyr, the naked lovers.
I didn’t know what to think about that line of conversation, so I didn’t think about it. I wiped across his chest. Up his neck. Behind his jaw. There was blood caked under his ear but I didn’t see a wound.
He kept staring at me like that as I cleaned him, as if I were saying something immensely interesting, even though we sat in silence together. He didn’t move as I sponged a path from his clavicle down to his abs again. He wasn’t bloody there, but he didn’t protest at my touch, either.
Something about the stubble down there was kinda cute. One little flaw to humanize an otherwise flawless body.
“Why are you smiling?” he asked.
“You don’t seem like a shaving guy,” I said, squeezing the towel out in the bowl. The water was rusty brown.
He shrugged one shoulder. Even that small gesture seemed to take a lot of effort. “It’s one way to…” He struggled to find a word, searching my face as if I might have all the answers. “It’s how I keep control.”
My fist clenched on the rag. “Because you grow fur on full moons.” I ran the cloth over his chest again, watching the water course down his pectorals and become redirected by the natural channels in his abs. I thought about tracing that path with my tongue.
How quickly I was willing to forget the terror of his fangs against my tender inner thigh.
“Tell me how it happened,” I said. “Tell me how you became a werewolf.”
Guess I wasn’t real surprised that he remained silent, but I was disappointed.
The pain in his eyes was palpable. Th
e darkness.
I traced my fingertip around the edge of the scars again, careful not to touch them. “It looks like it must have hurt.”
He flinched. “It did.”
I was done cleaning him. I’d washed every inch that I could touch without crossing my newly discovered boundaries. If I went any farther south than his navel, I wasn’t going to be able to control myself anymore—I could already feel that insane, intense need that had driven me the night before clawing at my gut.
Setting the bowl aside, I dried my hands on my pajama pants. They were patterned with Christmas penguins. Yeah, I wear them year ‘round, even when it’s hot. The penguins are cute. “Is Big Papa your…uh… I don’t know the word. Leader?”
“Alpha,” he said. “Sorta, yeah. It’s hard to explain.”
I guess I didn’t really care anyway. “He was the wolf.”
Cooper nodded.
That meant that Big Papa might have saved me. I didn’t like the thought that Cooper would have hurt me, nor did I like the idea that I might be indebted to the one-eyed leader of his biker gang, but it seemed like I at least owed the man a drink.
“I think maybe next time you know you’re going to change, you stay out of my bar,” I said, keeping my eyes lowered. “I can’t do anything about you and your gang in Lobo Norte. We need your business. But I don’t need your business on those kinds of nights, so you keep your distance.”
“Then don’t dance,” Cooper said.
I clenched my hands into fists. I’d known that it would come to this—that he was going to be pissed I’d danced for Mad Dog. “Nobody tells me what to do. If you’re going to get all jealous of me, then you need to stay away from my bar every night, because that’s how I make my living. And you can just deal with that.”
“Just not on the moons,” he said.
“Yes, on the moons. On any fucking night I want.”
“You don’t get it,” he said with sudden heat. “I don’t care if you dance for Mad Dog. I don’t even care if you dance for Papa. You dance whenever you want for anyone you want, except on the moons, because that’s how you stay safe. And when you dance, you remember that you’re still mine.”
Those were the most words I had heard him string together so far. And it had been to declare me his property.
I liked the sound of that. I liked it a lot.
Too much, actually.
“I barely know you,” I whispered.
His fingers dug into my wrist and turned it, exposing the tender flesh on the underside of my forearm. Still watching my eyes, still so very careful, he lifted my palm to his lips. His breath was hot on my hand. His stubble grazed that delicate flesh as he drew a line from my pulse point to the inside of my elbow.
Cooper paused at the junction between forearm and bicep. He pressed a warm kiss there. His nose brushed my shoulder as he pulled me just a little closer, leaning forward to place a second kiss on the side of my neck.
“Mine,” Cooper said. “I knew it the moment I smelled you.” His hand cupped my head. A whimper escaped my throat. “And you do smell…amazing.”
Fighting against the urge to climb on top of him made my whole body tremble. I wanted to melt together. Make our bodies one piece. “What does it mean?” I asked, barely able to breathe.
He drew back. Trouble looked…troubled. “I don’t know. I’ve never felt like this. But I’ve never been a werewolf before, either.”
“It scares me,” I said. It just slipped out. I hadn’t meant to be honest.
“Good,” he said. “What is this?”
His hand brushed over my shoulder, and I realized that he was looking at my scars. I pulled away from him.
“Nothing,” I said.
He had to have known I was deflecting the question, but he didn’t bother arguing with me. Cooper stood. He kissed the top of my head—a strangely tender gesture. And before I could think of how the hell I was supposed to react to that, he left.
CHAPTER FIVE
I tried to throw away The Devil. It didn’t work.
I took the card out to the trash cans behind the bar after Cooper left me. I lifted the lid on the bin, put the card on top of it, and walked away before I could think better of it.
The sound of motorcycle engines built on the wind, rising and cresting and crashing over me. The storm came down the hills to the east—an army of glistening chrome belching exhaust into our bleached-blue sky.
It was cage fight night, and these biker gangs were late. They usually came in days before to spread their seed and pump their veins full of heroin. I wondered what they had been doing to make them late, but only briefly—it was probably best if I didn’t know.
There were three major gangs that always came to Lobo Norte: The White Wings, South Side Furies, and Hag’s Boys. Some of those assholes were even human. But when their motorcycles came down our hill, they brought the night with them. Didn’t matter if they arrived at high noon or dawn. Darkness followed them. Darkness, pain, and money.
Only one of those mattered to me.
I shielded my eyes to watch them descend. The clarity of the desert air made it easy to see them coming from miles away, ghosting over the shimmering mirage of heat on the pavement. They’d be here in ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Gloria would want me to have the booze ready.
The wind slammed into me hard enough that I staggered. Metal banged against rock as the trash cans tipped over. Garbage blew against my ankles, between my legs, whipped away into the sky.
One thing stuck to my heel. I looked down. The Devil grinned back at me.
My heart accelerated. Trying to dislodge it from my foot with a kick didn’t work. I had to peel it off by hand, then tip the trash can upright again and trap him inside once more.
I glared at the trash can and The Devil within.
“Stay,” I hissed.
We didn’t have trash collection in Lobo Norte. Not exactly. When you live in a nowhere-place that doesn’t exist on any map, nothing functions the way you expect. Mail shows up without ever being delivered. Our trash disappears without ever touching a garbage truck. Where it goes, I don’t know or care—as far as I can tell, it just vanishes.
Hopefully that card would vanish with the rest of it.
The roaring of engines grew louder. I retreated into my trailer, slamming the door behind me, and shut out the incoming gangs. When I first arrived in Lobo Norte, I used to gawk at the new arrivals, awed by the array of tattoos, leather, and scars. The White Wings, for instance, were into ritual scarification; their skin had been plucked into rows of raised, bumpy ridges all over their shining scalps and cheeks and chests. I’d seen one without a shirt once and knew that they cut wings into their backs, too.
They had willingly done to themselves what had been forced upon me. It should have been horrifying. Instead, I found it entrancing, the way that they took charge of their bodies. They hurt themselves before anyone else could.
Once you’d seen a hundred mangled men that reeked of weed and engine oil, though, the allure wore off. It took a lot to impress me these days.
I’d see them all tonight when they were beating the shit out of each other within my cage.
Tugging my shirt off over my head, I kicked my shorts into the corner as I headed for the shower. Something shining on my bed caught my attention from the corner of my eye and I stopped.
There was a card on my pillow.
I almost didn’t touch it. I knew what it was instantly, and I didn’t need to look to confirm my fears. Even so, I reached out and turned it over carefully, as though it might explode if I moved it too fast.
The Devil had come back.
“You asshole,” I whispered.
He wasn’t bothered by my insult. He kept grinning.
Pops hadn’t raised me to give up easy. I flung the doors to my closet open and shoved my costumes out of the way with a clatter of buckles and chains. Behind them, there was a second, smaller door set into the wall. It creaked when I opened it. D
ust showered onto the carpet.
A low table was hidden in the very back of my closet. It was covered in a purple tasseled cloth, upon which stood two wax figures that I had carved myself. I wasn’t much of an artist. One was male, one was female. The male had horns coming out of his wavy, shoulder-length hair. The female had heavy breasts and wide hips.
Tearing a match out of the dusty matchbook on the corner, I flicked it against my thumb. Orange light washed over the other trinkets on my altar.
A quartz crystal. A tiny ruby centered atop sand in a glass bowl. A pine cone. A vial of ocean water I’d collected from Long Beach. A photo of me with my brothers, Cèsar and Domingo, down at the boardwalk. Little pieces of the life I’d had before Lobo Norte.
Pieces of magic.
My grandma, who we called Abuelita, had taught me everything she knew in secret. Pops hadn’t wanted me to know magic. He said it was too dangerous for a Hawke girl. But I’d never let shoulds and should-nots dictate my life, and nor had Abuelita; with her guidance, I had become comfortable drawing on the strength of the earth and sky under the watchful eye of the goddess Hecate.
There was no time for worship in Lobo Norte, though. Not while scrabbling to survive, not when Gloria had made it clear that my priority would be the bar or else I wouldn’t have a job. I wasn’t sure gods could even reach me here.
“Forgive me,” I murmured to the wax figures. “I need help.”
It had been so long since I’d cast a circle of power that I wasn’t certain I could do it anymore. I didn’t attempt it. I just lit one of the tapers and blew out the match.
“Blessed Hecate, work thy will,” I whispered hurriedly, keeping an eye on the door, praying Gloria wouldn’t choose this moment to butt into my trailer. “Let the unclean thing burn. Purify it with fire.”
Dipping the edge of The Devil’s card into the flame, I waited for it to catch fire.
And waited.
The candle flickered along the side, licking toward my fingers. It danced over the mechanical art deco design on the back. I rotated the card so that I could see the fire touch the lovers.