Dare the Wolf: A Bully Boys Novel of Paranormal Romance

by Cassandra Moore

  Neither would she have known about the lines of credit he’d taken out in her name. Proof of those hid in the safe, too. He’d used her Social Security number to open at least five credit cards. Heat rose in her neck and ears as her temper flared. This is why the cell phone company required a deposit. Then I would have gotten to Phoenix and discovered I couldn’t rent a place when they checked my credit, couldn’t get a car loan… Lou, you fucker. If you think I won’t have you nailed for identity theft, you don’t know anything about me.

  She’d barely finished stowing the pertinent paperwork in her purse when she heard a car in the front. Headlights illuminated the desert outside as the vehicle pulled in near the structure, then parked. Shit. That sounds like Lou’s car. The loud slam of the safe door made her wince, even if she knew he couldn’t yet hear it. His engine still idled, and he hadn’t gotten out of the car.

  But he would, and she needed to leave before he decided to come inside. It hadn’t looked like he still had a project active when she’d walked through the bays, but he might have decided to balance the books. Or forgotten something. Or needed an expired condom. You’ve always been an inconvenient ass, Lou. Mindful of the windows that faced the front lot, she made her way out through the work spaces to exit the back door.

  The car turned off. As she crept around the side of the building, where she could see when he went inside, she heard his car door slam. A second slam followed. He came here with someone. Maybe he really does want one of the condoms. Classy. Buy new ones, you cheap dick.

  “Get off my ass, all right?” Nicole said, testy and out of patience. “I did it to help you. You’d think that would count for something.”

  “To help me? How the hell does burning down that fucking biker’s trailer help me?” Lou’s temper had ignited.

  As had Anita’s curiosity. Lou didn’t start the fire? Nicole did? She crouched down behind a stack of old tires and scrambled to pull her phone out of her pocket. The new phone had an unfamiliar icon layout, so she launched the video recorder app and blessed herself for choosing the model of phone with extra storage. Here she’d thought she couldn’t justify the extra cost. Now, let’s hope the microphone is sensitive enough to pick this up. And that I get enough before they go inside. I don’t want to sneak back in when I just got out.

  Nicole’s voice dripped with derision. “You said you couldn’t leave that bitch until she signed over the shop. But she wasn’t going to give it to you. Not after she figured everything out. She was going to tell Shane what she knew, and then she was going to take everything you had.”

  “So you were going to kill her? What the fuck, Nicole?” The couple had stopped outside the front of the garage to argue outside. Anita wondered why they didn’t go in.

  Nicole said, “If she died, you’d get everything of hers. Including the garage. It would have solved all your problems.”

  “I wanted her gone, not dead!”

  “You can’t pretend it matters to you if she lives or dies,” Nicole snarled. “You don’t love her anymore. Don’t try to act innocent now, Lou. Not after what you did.”

  Lou bristled, but she had effectively neutered his rage. “You know I didn’t have much choice. I had to give them someone, or they were going to fuck up the garage. I don’t even want to think about what they threatened to do to me.”

  “You didn’t have much choice? Really? All the Bully Boys come to this shop. You know where every one of them lives. You could have sent the Ferals after Levi, or Travis. But you happened to send them after Jake by coincidence?” Nicole mocked him with her words and her tone. “You sent them after Jake for sleeping with a woman you don’t want anymore. Don’t you even judge me for wanting her dead so I could be with you. At least I had the spine to do it myself.”

  Wait, what? Anita stared at the pile of tires, as if they could make sense of what she’d overheard. The Ferals who attacked me on the road. Lou sent them? They threatened him?

  Lou blew out an explosive breath. “I’m not judging you, okay? But it’s not easy to think about. Maybe I don’t love her anymore, but we were together a long time. It’s one thing to think of her being gone. Another one to think of her being dead, you understand?”

  “I do understand.” Though understanding didn’t soften the edge in Nicole’s voice. “But I’m not willing to wait any longer, Lou. I waited years for Shane to decide he loved me. Me, not the promise he made to Greg. I’m tired of playing house with a loyal dog who doesn’t want me. I’m tired of hiding. Do you love me?”

  “Baby, you know I do.”

  “Then prove it.” Dirt crunched in time with footsteps. Anita pushed the camera end of the phone around the stack of tires enough to capture the pair locked in an embrace. Nicole stared into Lou’s eyes with a complicated expression of affection and fierce determination on her face. “We’re in this together now. We’re bound by our secrets. There’s no going back.”

  Conflict flashed through Lou’s gaze. Anita hadn’t seen that glimpse of uncertainty since their earliest days, when he had wracked his brain for ways to stay out of jail and come up empty. Then he pulled Nicole closer, one arm around her waist, the other clasping her head to his shoulder. “No going back. We’ll make it work. Then we’ll be together, and we’ll be safe. Just like I promised.”

  Another long silence as they held each other, the picture of tenderness and adoration. Except the part where one of them sent Ferals to kill Jake, and the other one tried to burn us to death. Anita stopped the video recording and glanced around. If she waited until they went inside, she could hike up the road until she dropped out of sight. Then she could call a cab, or the police, to drive her to safety. Better still, if Lou and Nicole left, Anita could drive herself to safety.

  But why had they come here at all? They could have argued in the car. Or at the house. Anita didn’t consider it likely they’d come to the garage to have a murderous lovers’ quarrel.

  After a long, impassioned kiss, Nicole spoke. “Will he really be here tonight? I want to see him.”

  “No, you don’t.” Lou unwound his arms from Nicole to take two nervous steps away. “He’s not part of a freakshow, Nicole. He’s the damn Feral in charge out here. He’s not fucking around, but he is fucking terrifying. And I ain’t ashamed to say it.”

  “I’ve seen Ferals before.”

  “Not like this one.”

  “No. None like me,” said a deep voice that sounded more bestial than human.

  Both Lou and Nicole jumped. Anita did, too, and almost dropped the phone in her hand. She fumbled after the button to start the video capture again as three huge, misshapen forms melted out of the overgrown desert around the garage. The twilight had hidden them well, though the collection of leaves and burrs on their bellies said they had crawled in low to utilize the camouflage of the local flora. They had slunk along the ground to catch the humans vulnerable, and now that they had made their points, they walked like men themselves.

  To Anita’s untrained eye, and in the dim picture the phone’s screen provided, the smaller two looked much like the pair of Ferals who threatened her had. Twisted amalgamations of humans and beasts, warped into horrid creatures that could do little but inspire fear in any who saw them. They trembled as they looked from their leader to Lou and Nicole, then back to the leader again. Lips peeled back to show sharp teeth, and tongues emerged to lick away the saliva that threatened to drip from their mouths.

  From her hiding place, Anita could smell them, rank with blood and dirt. A dubious blessing, but a blessing all the same. If she could smell them, then she was downwind, and they couldn’t smell her as she crouched out of sight.

  If she lived through this, Anita knew she would suffer nightmares in which the leader stepped out of the darkness of a closet, a pantry, any shadowed space beside any structure Anita visited at night. He would become the boogeyman, the monster who lurked out of sight but never out of mind. A grotesque corruption of flesh, an unholy fusion of man and tiger. His str
ipes looked more like dark gashes across his furred skin than patterns on a hide. Overgrown shoulder muscles distorted his shape into a larger, menacing form that loomed over those beneath him.

  But it was his eyes that scared her most. Observant. Canny. Full of angry malice. He looked on his surroundings as if he took in all he saw, and plotted how to use it to serve his ends. A frightening intelligence lurked in his gaze, inherited from the best of both man and beast.

  Perhaps humans feared other Ferals because they had become animals, creatures who no longer understood the ways of human sentience. Humans would fear this leader of Ferals because he still understood human patterns of thought, even as he embraced a beast’s brutal instincts. He was the monster that lurked in their darkest subconscious minds made flesh.

  Lou licked his now-dry lips to wet them. “You made it. I was starting to wonder.”

  “You were arguing with your woman and hoping I would not come.” The Feral’s tail lashed behind him. “I have been here longer than you know.”

  Had Anita not been terrified of discovery, and now worried the Feral knew she lurked around the property, she would have laughed. Even the Ferals knew Lou was full of shit.

  The mechanic cleared his throat. “I’m just not used to dealing with you yet.”

  “Become so. There are others who could serve your purpose.” The Feral leaned forward to put his weight on the hood of Lou’s car. Metal groaned in protest. “There is something you want to say. I can smell your impatience.”

  On the spot, Lou decided to front up. “Your people – creatures – botched the job. The werewolf I told you how to find didn’t die.”

  “Not yet.” The Feral didn’t move. A dent started to form in the sportscar’s hood. “The wolf showed up before you said he would. More of us did not have time to arrive to join the ambush. And the lone woman on the road was too much temptation. Did she bring the wolf early?”

  “She might have.” Lou looked uncomfortable. The Feral had turned the blame back around on Lou, and the mechanic couldn’t keep his gaze off the potential dent in his car. “So you’re still gonna deal with him?”

  “Yes. We will deal with all the wolves.” Claws drummed on the hood. Anita could imagine the paint chipping beneath them. “Do you have a problem with how long this has taken?”

  “It’s, ah, it’s been inconvenient,” Lou said as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “That delay made some trouble for me.”

  Now, the drumming claws became a single tap-tap-tap against the metal hood. “You believe you can do better. Perhaps you would like to be as I am so you can try.”

  Lou took three hasty steps backward. “No, no, I’m-”

  “Or perhaps you do not want the work of leading. You would prefer we took your shop from you? Left you among the useless herds of your kind?” The Feral’s claws flexed. Steel shrieked with a scream far worse than nails on a chalkboard.

  “No! No, it’s fine!” Lou flailed his hands in front of him, frantic. “It was a little inconvenient! That’s all. Inconvenient happens. No big deal. I’m glad to help you out. Tell me what you need, and I’ll get it done.”

  Prideful, arrogant Lou had lost a battle of manipulation with a Feral. Anita wished she could enjoy the way Lou squirmed and begged to serve. Mortal terror leached the savory taste right out of an otherwise delicious schadenfreude.

  If the situation amused the Feral, he didn’t show it. He took his hand off the hood of the car, where he had done enough damage to make his point. “I want the den of the werewolf leader. You know where it is?”

  Nicole had spent the conversation thus far with her eyes wide and her jaw clamped shut. Anita wondered if Nicole regretted her desire to get a look at the Ferals’ leader yet. Despite the obvious fear, she found her voice, though it came out small and weak. “You’re going to kill him, aren’t you.”

  “Yes,” the leader answered simply. “We will kill him. Then we will kill his leaderless pack. Your town will watch their protectors die, one at a time. The people will lose hope. They will see there are none who can save them. And then, they will deal with us.”

  Nicole arched an eyebrow. “They’re trying to deal with you already.”

  Before Lou could interrupt, the Feral leader chuckled, a deep, growled sound that set Anita’s nerves on edge. “You mistake. When they see none can stop us, they will come to us with their heads down. They will buy our mercy. And we will take the next step towards our freedom. As it should have been from the start. We will have the lives that are the right of our birth.”

  Nicole had fallen silent. As the Feral leader spoke, her horrified realization dawned across her face. “You want to rule the humans.”

  “No. The humans want us to rule them. Is that not why they made us?” The Feral’s whiskers rippled as he smirked. His tail lashed. “Or did you think we were an accident? Freaks from nature?”

  Lou took a step to put himself between Nicole and the Feral. “I’ll tell you where the werewolf leader’s den is.”

  “No. First, you will let her give her answer.” The Feral took a step forward. As he did, he drew himself up taller, larger.

  Bravely, or foolishly, Lou tried to stand his ground. But he couldn’t. After a moment, he turned to look at Nicole in sheepish defeat.

  She took a quick, deep breath. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  Another rough chuckle escaped the Feral. “You are so very human.” To Anita, it sounded like the greatest insult the creature could muster. “Do not worry, little human. You will be safe in exchange for your help. When we have the town in our jaws, your man will speak for us. He will negotiate our mercy for your kind. Humans will call him a savior for helping them buy peace. He will have their respect, and so will you. Now. Give us the location.”

  Looking like he didn’t even have his own respect, Lou gave directions to Shane’s house. Anita hated him even more in that moment. As if sleeping with his friend’s girlfriend weren’t betrayal enough, Lou had now sold Shane to the enemy.

  Nicole spoke up again. “He shouldn’t be riding tonight. The Bully Boys keep a schedule. Shane had tonight off, when I talked to him about it last. He should be dead asleep, so if you sneak in quietly…”

  “Then he will be just dead. Be here again in three nights.” In one fast, startling motion, the Feral turned and stalked toward the desert. His two guards followed, one with a threatening snarl for the humans by way of farewell.

  Nicole watched them disappear into the night. Then she glanced at Lou. “You were right. I didn’t want to see that.”

  “Me, either.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Let’s get out of here. I want to go somewhere with lots of lights. And a bar.”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said too quickly.

  They scrambled into Lou’s car like frightened jackrabbits. Anita couldn’t blame them. She wanted to sprint the distance to her own vehicle and dive into its safety herself. Though given the size of the Feral leader, she wondered if the lightweight sedan would offer her any protection at all from an angry, hungry abomination.

  Goosebumps prickled over her skin. The Ferals could still be out there. Maybe they’d scented her, despite the direction of the breeze. Maybe they were waiting to catch her alone. Adrenaline set her on edge, triggered the fight-or-flight reflex all creatures lived by. Never had she fought so hard to stay still, count breaths, and wait.

  Anita listened as the growl of Lou’s engine faded up the road. When the red tail lights disappeared around the bend, she bolted out of her pathetic hiding place and made a beeline for her car. She fumbled at the key fob until she heard the door latches snap unlocked. It felt like she might pull the door off the hinges, she opened it with such force. Half the area must have heard her slam it behind her. It took three tries for her to get the key into the ignition with her shaking hands.

  Only when she’d left the garage in a cloudy wake of dirt did she relax at all. Common wisdom said not to drive while distracted by her pho
ne, but common wisdom failed to mention vicious, human-eating monsters who intended to kill her and her friends. She had discovered the singular situation where driving distracted was the lesser of two evils.

  She found Shane’s contact as the car bounced up the dirt road, and tried to call. It went to voicemail on the first ring. Bet he has his phone off. He needed to get some rest when I saw him last. Come on, Shane. Your ex-girlfriend literally wants you dead. No luck.

  She hit the contact number for Jake. It rang and rang, but he didn’t pick up. Why do I always have this problem with him? If he ever speaks to me again, we need to talk about him actually answering the phone now and then. Then again, he could have taken a shift on sweeps tonight, or decided to drown both his sorrows and his phone, or…

  The call went to voicemail. She hung up and tried again. Shit. I have a new phone number. He may not want to answer a call from a number he doesn’t know. Please, Jake, be curious about why an unknown number is blowing up your phone.

  Third time was a charm. “Hello?”

  Anita almost melted from relief. “Jake? Please don’t hang up.”

  Even over the road noise, she could hear the layers of surprise, hope, and caution in his voice. “Anita?”

  “Yes. Listen to me. You have to warn Shane. I tried to call him, but he’s not answering. He’s in terrible danger.”

  A pause on the line. Then, “Anita, what’s going on? Are you on your way out of town?”

  It was hard to decipher his tone. It held the same neutrality she would expect of a seasoned fighter who’d just heard of a threat, but beneath that hid a faint bitterness. An edge left on the armor he’d piled around his heart. Words spilled out of her. “No. I grew a pair and realized I didn’t want to leave you. We have to talk about this later, Jake. You need to call Shane.”