“Cold-blooded and rational,” said Hollis, grinning. “This is way better than I thought.”
Dana stood up. “I don’t know if I can keep going with this tonight.”
Hollis furrowed his brow. “Did I upset you with the questions? You didn’t seem to be.”
The wolf turned Dana’s head, narrowed its wolf nose and eyes on Hollis. He was still sprawled on the bed, helpless and prostrate. Easy prey. Dana could hear his blood pulsing at his neck, his wrists. She could smell him. He smelled... delicious. She had an idle thought, wondering if Hollis would taste better or worse considering he didn’t eat meat. Her tongue snaked out to run over her teeth.
Hollis sat up straighter, looking concerned. “Dana?”
Jesus. Were her fangs coming out? Dammit. She concentrated on making the teeth retract.
They weren’t going anywhere.
Dana rolled her head on her shoulders. “Hollis? Why’d you stay with me all those months when I wasn’t putting out?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I guess I liked you, Dana.”
The wolf was still sizing Hollis up, but Dana was having trouble telling where the wolf ended and she began. She was keeping down the fur, the claws, the muzzle, but the lust... Skin. Blood. Mouth on skin. Sex. Things were feeling strangely blurry. She smiled at him. “You still like me, don’t you? That’s why you kept calling me. That’s why you keep trying to get me to go on dates with you.”
“Um...” Hollis was staring at her, confused. “Are you okay? You seem... different.”
Dana climbed onto the bed and began to crawl toward Hollis, deliberate and slow, stalking her prey. “What I can’t figure out is why you like me. Wasn’t our relationship mostly... frustrating?”
Hollis swept his gaze over her. “See, I don’t think there’s a good way for me to answer that. That sounds like a trap.”
She was practically on top of him now. She moved closer, her hands on either side of his body, her legs straddling him. She rubbed her face against his, buried her nose in his neck, breathing in his scent. He was so fragile, a tiny layer of skin the only barrier between her and all that glorious... meat.
“Did you just smell me?” Hollis’ voice had a note of fear in it.
That excited her. She opened her mouth, scraped her teeth against his clavicle.
Hollis drew a ragged breath. “Okay, Dana, I’m not gonna deny this is... really fucking hot, but—”
She kissed him, sweeping her tongue into his mouth, tasting him, marking him. Hers. Prey. Boyfriend. The words seemed like they meant the same thing right now. Didn’t he belong to her? Wasn’t he hers to do with as she pleased?
Hollis moaned against her mouth, his hands coming up to explore her body, roaming over her back, her hips, her waist.
She broke the kiss, leaning back so that she was straddling him, resting on her knees, her hands free. She cocked her head. “I want to tear you apart.”
Hollis swallowed. “Whoa. That is officially the sexiest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
She stretched her jaw.
He saw her teeth. He backed away from her. “Jesus, Dana.”
She giggled. “Try to get away. It’ll be more fun if I chase you.”
Hollis scrambled off the bed. “When you said ‘tear me apart,’ you meant...”
She bounded after him, and she wasn’t sure who was in control anymore. The wolf, or her. What she did know was that she wanted her teeth in him. She wanted the blood spurting into her mouth, running down over her pelt, the hunt, the glorious hunt. Run, she thought at her prey.
And he did. He threw open the door and ran out of the room.
She waited for a second before following. She didn’t want to catch him too quickly. Then she was after him, through the door herself.
He was several doors down, knocking in a frenzy. “Avery Brooks, your partner is going insane.”
She leapt on him, letting out her claws and teeth. She dug into him, just deep enough to keep him from moving.
A door was opening.
Her claws were deep inside his skin, ripping and tearing. Blood splashed, and she was lapping at it.
“Gray?”
Then there was a loud sound. A gun shot.
She yelped when it bit into her flesh.
She turned away from Hollis to see Avery over her, his tranquilizer gun trained on her.
She whimpered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I don’t even know why you’re still here.”
“This is a story happening right under my nose, man. I’m not going anywhere until I talk to her again.”
All Dana knew was voices. It was dark, and people were talking.
“Like she’s going to have anything to say to you. And you can’t write about this.”
“I have to write about this. Are you kidding?”
She was on a bed, she realized. It was dark, because her eyes were closed. She opened them. She was in her hotel room, lying on her bed. Avery and Hollis were standing over her. It was their voices. They were arguing.
“You can’t.”
“I witnessed this. I was in the middle of interviewing her. I’m going to write about it.”
Why were they arguing? Oh. That was right. She remembered now. Crap. She struggled to sit up. “So that’s what it feels like to be hit with one of those tranqs.”
Avery and Hollis both turned to look at her.
“Gray,” said Avery. “You’re awake.”
She swung her feet over the edge of the bed, grunting. “I’m awake. I feel like I got hit by a truck. How long have I been out?”
“Not long,” said Avery. “You were half wolfed out. It must have made the tranquilizer work through your system faster.”
She nodded. “Right.”
“Dana,” said Hollis, “what were you trying to do to me?”
Avery put his hand on Hollis’ chest. “Back off. She’s not ready to answer questions. Why don’t you just go back to your hotel room? You’re fine.”
Hollis pushed Avery aside. “You dug your claws into me. You made me bleed.”
“No,” Avery said, “you’re fine. She didn’t hurt you.”
“Am I?” said Hollis. “What if I caught the lupine virus?”
Dana’s head hurt. “Not from claws, you wouldn’t.” She tried to get up off the bed, but didn’t make it.
Avery was next to her right away. “Hey, take it easy.”
She looked at Hollis. “Did I hear you say you want to write about this?”
“I’m going to,” said Hollis. “Has that happened to you before? Is that something Cole Randall did to you, or did talking about him bring it up? Do you really think you’re stable enough to be back at work?”
Dana buried her face in her hands. “Oh hell.” This was not good. How had she let this happen? Ursula had wanted a hero piece, good publicity for the SF. Thanks to her, Hollis was going to publish how crazed and unstable she was.
Avery glared at Hollis. “Maybe we should give him the virus. He’d be locked up in the SF for a month until he got his wolf under control. Maybe that would kill his damned story.”
She lifted her face. “Please do not write about this, Hollis.”
“If I leave this out, I’m going to basically be lying. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
“You don’t have to say anything to him,” said Avery.
“I lost control,” she said. “I lost control of my wolf. Cole did things to me when I was with him. He made me shift and he... He had all this stupid crap about accepting the wolf and integrating it into my sense of self. I didn’t believe any of it. I didn’t think it did anything to me.” Except for the fact that she’d been ignoring how often the wolf seemed to try to get out lately.
“Jesus, Gray, it’s not even a full moon,” said Avery. “Why are you having issues with your wolf?”
The moon doesn’t
matter anymore. The wolf is too strong. Cole saw to that. “It was only because I was talking about Cole. If I hadn’t tried to dig the past up for that interview, I never would have lost control,” she said.
“So that’s what Randall did to you,” said Hollis. “That’s why you can’t be with anyone at all. You don’t trust yourself.”
That was just a hair better than the truth, which was that she didn’t seem to be attracted to anything except that psychopath. “I can’t have that in print, Hollis.”
“But you’re back at work—”
“It doesn’t have to do with my job,” she said. “It was because I was thinking about Cole. And because we were...” She looked at him meaningfully.
Hollis opened his mouth, then closed it. He nodded slowly. “That kind of stuff makes you lose control.”
“Apparently,” she said. Wasn’t true, of course. She’d gotten intimate with Hollis because of the wolf. The wolf hadn’t come out because she was kissing him. But it was a good cover. “To put it in print, you’ll have to admit what we were doing when it started. Do you want to reveal that to the world? Do you think that will make you look like you’re objective when it comes to me?”
Hollis sighed. “Fine, Dana. I keep this under wraps. And I think we should do future interviews at the Sullivan Foundation. It just seems safer to me.”
She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. He’d gone for it.
“I’m only doing this because I like you,” said Hollis. “Even after you dug your werewolf claws into me.”
“Fine,” said Avery. “So, are you going to go now?”
Hollis looked back and forth between the two of them. “I guess I should find some bandages.” He left the hotel room.
As soon as the door closed, Avery turned on Dana, his eyes flashing. “What the fuck, Gray? What the flying fuck?”
“Brooks, don’t.”
He pointed at the closed door. “Is what you told him the truth? Is this affecting your work or not?”
“It’s not,” she said. “Hollis and I were... getting closer—”
“No, I figured that out,” said Avery. “So, you’re saying that’s all part of this weird thing you’ve got going on with Randall and everything else?”
“I guess so,” she said in a tiny voice. Honestly, she didn’t know what had happened. Not really. Only that whatever Cole had done to her had made it next to impossible to control her wolf. She was going to have to do something about it, but she didn’t know what.
“I suppose you don’t want me to tell King.”
“Not really.”
Avery shook his head. “It better not happen again, Gray. If it does, we both look like idiots.”
She bit her lip. It wouldn’t. She’d find some way to make sure of that.
* * *
Arnold Phelps’ sister was named Jenny. She had white-blonde hair and dark roots. She chain smoked in her kitchen while she talked to them. “My parents moved Arnie and I down here after he got that werewolf bite in high school. He went through the training just fine, and he never seemed to have any issues.”
“So you didn’t have any indication that he’d do what he did?” Avery asked.
Jenny puffed on her cigarette. “Well, hell, who could have expected that? About seven months ago or so, he did start talking more about it, I guess.”
“About what?” said Dana.
“About being a werewolf,” said Jenny. “Before that, we all just pretended like it never happened, Arnie too.”
Seven months ago. That was the same time that Beverly had started to withdraw from her family. Dana looked at Avery to see if he’d caught it.
He had. “What did he say?”
Jenny shrugged. “Nothing much, really. Just stuff about how it made him different that everybody else, I guess.”
That was similar. Holy hell, Cole was right. There was a connection here. “So what happened seven months ago?” asked Dana.
“Nothing that I know of,” said Jenny.
“He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary?”
“No,” she said. “One day, he had his old high school yearbook out, and he was talking about how it happened. Kind of funny, I guess, how the night after Arnold turned into a wolf in that bar, something happened in a grocery store up there.”
“What?” said Avery, his eyes narrowing.
“Where did Arnold go to high school?” said Dana.
“Webster High School,” said Jenny. “We knew that other woman who did it too. Beverly Martin? She was Beverly Glass back then, of course. She and Arnold both caught the virus at the same party.”
Dana closed her eyes. What had she been thinking before? That Beverly Martin fit Cole’s profile except for the fact she wasn’t part of a pair? She leaned forward. “Were they the only two survivors of an attack, Beverly and Arnold?”
Jenny nodded, sucking on her cigarette with wide eyes. “That mean something?”
* * *
Dana slammed her hands down on the table in front of Cole. “They fit your profile.”
Cole chuckled. “I love the fact that you call it a ‘profile,’ like I really am a serial killer.” He was in a conference room, manacled and seated. He looked clean and calm, like he’d been expecting her.
She was livid. “You are a serial killer. You’re a crazy psycho, and you do it because you like it, no matter what you tell yourself.”
“I do like it,” he said. “You like it too. You can’t help it. It’s your nature.”
Dana glared at him. She didn’t need him saying crap like that to her, especially not after what had happened with Hollis. But he was doing what he did best. Distracting her. She’d come down here to talk to him about one thing, and one thing only. “What do those killings have to do with you?”
“Have I got your attention? Are you sufficiently intrigued? Will you come back to see me again?”
“Answer the question, Cole. What do the killings have to do with you?”
He leaned his head back, clearly enjoying himself. “What could they possibly have to do with me? I’m locked up in here.”
She folded her arms over her chest. “They fit your profile. They’re people you would have killed when you were free. And you knew about the connection. So, it’s got something to do with you.”
“Maybe,” said Cole. “Maybe not. Maybe I’ll tell you more if you promise to visit me more regularly. I get lonely, Dana.”
“I’m not promising you anything,” she said. She shrugged. “Maybe you don’t have anything to do with it at all. Maybe it’s all a coincidence. You saw it before me, and you’re trying to manipulate me with it. Well, I’m done with that. You don’t have any power over me anymore.” She stalked to the door of the conference room and raised her hand to knock.
“Dana?”
She paused, but she didn’t turn around. There was something in his voice, some little change in pitch or tone that woke something in her. The wolf. It stretched, pricking up its ears. It liked Cole. A lot.
“Don’t leave yet.”
And that seemed to undo her completely, because all his smugness was stripped away. His voice was raw, even vulnerable. She turned around. “Tell me what I want to know.”
He was standing behind the table, his hands shackled in front of him, his feet shackled to the table. He lifted both his hands to her. “Come back here.”
She was moving before she knew it, crossing the room to him. And she didn’t stop on the other side of the table. She went around it, so that she was standing next to him, so that there were mere inches between their bodies. “Fuck you,” she muttered. She wasn’t sure why she was doing this. Why he could do this to her.
He cupped her face with his palms. “I’d do anything I could to see you. Do you understand that?”
She shut her eyes.
“Don’t you want to see me?”
“I...” She put one her hands over his, gripping it. “Cole, you’re a killer, and y
ou hurt me, and I don’t feel anything towards you.”
“Yes, you do,” he said, bringing his face closer to hers. “And I do too. I don’t want it either. What I feel about you has destroyed all my plans. You ruined everything, Dana.”
She was gazing into his eyes now. They were so dark. They seemed to call to her, some kind of strange primal urge passing between the two of them. She could feel it. They were tied together with something stronger than the metal that had made up her chains or the shackles he wore now. She sighed, her eyes fluttering closed.
And then his lips were on hers, warm and insistent.
She kissed him back, pressing her body tight against his.
He groaned. “Dana,” he whispered into her mouth.
She gasped. And, with effort, she pulled away. “How are you involved in the killings, Cole?”
“Come see me again,” he said. “I’ll tell you more if you come back.”
* * *
Dana’s feet pounded against the ground. She was making her fourth circuit inside the fences of headquarters—not just jogging, really running. She urged herself to go faster, to push herself harder. Maybe if she got running fast enough, she’d be able to chase the thoughts from her brain.
It wasn’t working. Earlier that day, she’d been to see her psychiatrist, Chantal. She’d recounted the whole sordid story of the last few days. Nearly biting Hollis, kissing Cole, all of it. It had never occurred to her to keep things from Chantal, because she thought she needed to be honest with the woman who was trying to help her.
But she’d seen something in Chantal’s eyes that had made her feel like she should have kept some of it to herself. Chantal was good at her job, and the look she’d given Dana had only flitted across her expression for half a second before the woman had herself together again. But that brief time was long enough for Dana to have seen it. And long enough for her to have regretted saying anything.
Chantal had been vague, saying that she might want to do some subtle adjusting to Dana’s treatment. Nothing to worry about, of course. She’d have it ready in time for their next session. In the meantime, Chantal didn’t think it was a good idea after all for Dana to see Cole.
No Cole.
Well, that was fine. Dana didn’t want to see him anyway. She wanted him out of her life. She’d be happy enough if she never thought of him again.
But she did think of him. She thought of him almost constantly.
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