And he was well-equipped, so at the very least Heather could appreciate him for something.
Oh yes, Heather knew him well. She held out a hand and helped him up now, while he grasped her fingers and glared at her as he slowly stood, almost shaking with the leftover pain and humiliation—mostly humiliation—of being taken down so easily by a woman.
Heather laughed at him. She liked him, but she couldn’t help herself. He amused her.
“Ready to spill? What were you doing here? Why are you parked outside my building? Stalking me? What’s to keep me from reporting you?”
Her snarl seemed to frighten DiSanto. After all, he knew what she was…
“I—I was just hoping to see you,” he stammered. “So we could talk.”
“Okay, you’re seeing me, so now talk,” she said, with more than a thin vein of cruelty obvious in her voice.
“Not here,” he said, glancing around. “Upstairs?”
She smirked. “You just want to fuck me again.”
He hung his head. “Maybe I do,” he said softly.
Her eyes widened. She felt squishy and suddenly hot.
Minutes later she was pulling him inside her loft door, kicking it shut behind her and shrugging out of her running sweats while maneuvering him against yet another immovable object, a brick wall.
He didn’t object. By then he was shucking clothing in no apparent order, and soon ended up with one sock on and his underwear, and a half-untucked shirt. The rest of his clothes lay in a scattered spread across the wood floor.
Heather growled deep in her throat as she slid out of the restricting panties and tore off her bra, simultaneously smothering him with her panther-lean muscular body, the engorged tips of her breasts digging into his chest while her long fingers dug into DiSanto’s briefs and found him hard and ready. He groaned incoherently as she grasped his length with her red-tipped fingers and freed him from the cotton prison.
He sighed as she began to stroke him even as her body fit itself forcefully into his contours, their heat uniting while his erection grew impossibly larger between them as she caressed him. Meanwhile her lips, still damp with sweat from her run and recent excursions, sought his and clamped on, her tongue slithering inside. If he tasted the remainder of her take-out meal from the park, he didn’t indicate it. Instead, he hungrily devoured her tongue, sucking on it as if it were a ripe fruit.
He stared into her eyes, and she knew he could see them starting to roll and change color, as they did when she was on the verge of changing.
He might have felt the long, narrow bands of fur that were springing up on her back, along her spine, and down her sides, too, but it didn’t seem to deter his hunger or his needs.
One of her hot hands cupped his balls and the other his cock as they grunted, their mouths locked in a silent, violent dance of lust up against the wall, neither giving in, and neither willing to stop.
Grasping him solidly, she straddled him right there, still with his back against the brick wall. She gasped as the heat of his erection filled her and drove down onto him, impaling herself. She rocked against him and he grunted as her weight ground him into the rough bricks.
She was more assaulting him than fucking him. It was even worse than an assault—it could be deadly. And the line could be exhilarating. She felt the wolf inside her stirring, and tried to suppress her increasing excitement. In some cases, she’d thrilled as the wolf almost took over in such a situation, teetering on the brink of lost control, but she couldn’t very well kill Lupo’s partner. No, even she wasn’t that suicidal. Lupo and his gang controlled the two Vatican blades, so she was only watching out for herself in the most basic of ways.
She suppressed harder and the wolf retreated, back inside to wherever she resided.
DiSanto was managing to thrust up into her, but their half-standing position was precarious, and she let him maneuver them away from the wall and down to the bare wood floor without letting his engorged penis slip away. She clutched him above and below as he rolled onto her and she opened her thighs to envelop him and he drove down into her. Her breathing became more rapid as he thrust machine-like but still somehow sensitively to her very core, and before she knew it she felt the waves beginning to take her.
This was unheard of! Hardly anyone had reached her so quickly, so thoroughly, and certainly not with anything so lacking in kink.
Heather panted into his shoulder, then bit into it (but gently, and as a human) as she came repeatedly when the friction of the action got to her and she screamed as the liquid fire flowed…and then almost immediately transmitted the success to him, and he cried out too. She grasped him hard and milked him and he stayed hard much longer than she expected, still thrusting and almost raising her back up to the same level she had just reached.
She continued to feel the wave rolling back and forth through her as his thrusting went on seemingly forever.
Finally he slowed and sank onto her, as if exhausted both physically and psychologically.
She let him rest a minute, then shrugged him off almost rudely. He got the message and rose up on his knees and they disentangled.
“All right, now that we got that out of the way, what the hell do you want? Or is that it?” She couldn’t help the rude girl part of her personality. She could fuck them, but she didn’t have to coddle them. She never had, and now that the wolf resided in her, she found she had even less patience.
He stood up looking hurt for a few moments, but then recovered and started to dress and adjust carefully, regaining his composure and his self-respect in steps she could follow. She kind of liked that: he was able to set aside what they’d just done, the rutting, and reclaim the parts of himself of which she would (of course) wish to deprive him.
“That was it,” he said, with a toss of his ruffled hair.
She chuckled. He wanted to play it that way.
“I don’t fuck just anybody,” she said. “You should make good use of your time here.”
“Maybe I already did,” he shot back.
He was mostly dressed now. His face was ruddy with a flush of embarrassed anger. He really didn’t know why he was there, did he?
She laughed at him. “Clearly you need me for something, something other than this. Are you going to tell me, or play twenty questions? Or are you just running out of here with your tail between your legs?”
Thoughts and emotions flashed across his features to join the anger that was already there. “All right,” he said finally, fidgeting, looking into her eyes but then away. “All right, ever since I met you I wanted—I felt a connection…”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. We just did connect, didn’t we?”
He went on despite the redoubled flush. “What I mean is, we already have a connection. Nick. And what you are is what he is. I mean, you are both—”
“Yeah, werewolves. You can say it. It won’t bite.” She added, “But I might.”
“That’s just it,” he mumbled. “I think I want that.” He glanced nervously at his chunky silver watch, but it was a reflex and he didn’t seem to have seen it.
“You want to be…like us?”
“I don’t know. Yes. I’m not sure, but, yes.”
She licked her lips. This was unexpected. He couldn’t very well ask Lupo, so he’d come to her. Thoughts, pro and con, flitted through her mind. She could laugh him out of her place, or scream epithets at him. On the other hand…
It was kind of hot.
She could tell that having told her made him hard again. She sidled closer again until she was in front of him, close enough to feel his warm breath on her sensitive skin. She reached out and gave a little gasp-laugh—he really was growing hard again under her touch.
She sighed.
Lust had always been her downfall.
She sank to her knees and put both hands on the front of his pants. She looked up at him.
“Let me think about it,” she said, as her slim fingers reached inside past his zipper and unlim
bered him again. “I’ll sleep on it, but first I could use a snack.”
She opened her lips.
He groaned when she used them on him.
Marla Anders
The apparition’s image kept fading in and out, as if he really did have a poor connection from wherever he was calling. Like the S.O.S. hologram in the original Star Wars or something.
She didn’t know exactly why she was singled out for this reception, except for that her grandfather the shaman had dealt in apparitions and spirit guides and all sorts of great Indian folklore, not to mention some darker stuff that had gotten him thrown out of his tribe—and tossed out of his family, too, more or less.
So maybe she was receptive. She suspected she had always been, even though she had learned to suppress—or ignore—it to the point where she sometimes forgot her history.
She didn’t look half-Indian, that was the problem. When she stared in a mirror, she saw her long, straight blond hair and Scandinavian features and really saw her father and his people, not her mother and hers. Someone had once told her she resembled Uma Thurman, and she supposed she did a little—a fact which had probably helped her get cops to open up, since they could slip a little flirting into their sessions, and she’d been a heck of a lot more popular than some of her old, white, male shrink colleagues. She wasn’t one to take compliments well, but being compared to a glamorous beauty didn’t hurt the old ego, even if she herself was getting a little too old for it.
But perhaps looking a certain way—or not—didn’t matter. If the blood of Joseph Badger ran through her veins, and if he’d been plugged into the Other World, as she remembered him sometimes saying before he went to Europe on the trip that would change him and his life forever, then it was clear that the Other World existed and she was at least nominally plugged into it as well.
She was completely willing to buy in. But what was her role? What was the reason for her to get in the way of this strangeness?
The image of Sam Waters—the same Sam Waters in those photographs—had some message to pass on to Nick Lupo, her elusive cop.
When she tried to quiz the apparition, it became apparent to her that it was more of a one-way connection, because the Sam Waters image didn’t seem to hear her, although it seemed to be able to follow her with its eyes. It or him? Did it matter?
So she couldn’t ask any questions, really, but she could record what he said and she did.
The image of Sam Waters continued to fade in and out while sitting in her armchair—except how could he actually sit?—and his voice seemed to come and go, but she was able to put together most of what he was trying to tell her.
Nick Lupo was north, near Eagle River. And he was in trouble.
When she thought she understood everything the Sam Waters apparition had told her, she scooped up her phone.
Who to call?
Who wouldn’t laugh her off the line?
Maybe Lupo’s partner was the best one to call. Rob? No, Rich DiSanto. She called the station, got the dispatcher and identified herself, then requested DiSanto’s cell number. As she dialed, she wondered how receptive he would be. From what she had seen, he and Lupo had a good relationship…and she’d heard plenty of rumors about the two of them being involved in bizarre cases and situations. So she really had nothing to lose…
“Detective DiSanto? Dr. Marla Anders here…”
DiSanto
God, he was almost feverish, as if her proximity had infected him with some disease.
Of course, that wasn’t far from the truth, was it?
He couldn’t believe what he had blurted out in her presence. He couldn’t believe his half-formed thought had solidified right then, right while he was inside her, and then just minutes later had come bubbling out of his mouth like a goddamned beggar.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he muttered.
Oh God, she was extraordinary.
And dangerous.
And powerful.
And a monster?
Even so, did that mean he would be a monster? Lupo had managed to keep a handle on right and wrong, hadn’t he? Or had he?
Locked away in a drawer of DiSanto’s desk was a copy of the coroner’s report on the gunshots that had killed that motorcycle gangbanger a while back. Silver in the bullet fragments. Strange DNA, an error. In the same drawer was a copy of an ME report on a gun dealer named Rag, from further back. Silver in the bullet fragments. No strangeness with the DNA, but Lupo’d caught that case with his old partner before the Martin gang had started blowing up Eagle River. Then there was Eagle River and the off-the-books ops he himself had helped Lupo with. And that drone control house in Minnesota. In that drawer was a veritable treasure trove of circumstantial evidence against Lupo that a talented DA might make stick, especially one working with a dogged Internal Affairs chief like Roman.
Roman was new, but then DiSanto had to tick off a couple more names in his head. Griff Killian had disappeared. Former head of IA just drops off the face of the earth, with the shrink Marcowicz. And what about his predecessor, Julia Barrett?
Jesus, did Lupo know the difference between right and wrong?
How much of a monster was his good-guy partner?
And if Lupo was a monster, why did DiSanto just confess to a dangerous woman who was possibly complicit in numerous crimes along with Lupo that he longed to be just like her? And Lupo?
He put his head down onto his cradled arms and cried with a mixture of shame and fear and disgust that he figured would have earned him a one-way ticket to the psycho ward in any facility in the country.
But at the end of the day, he still wanted to fuck Heather Wilson again.
And he still wanted to be a werewolf.
He jumped when his phone went off again.
Lupo
He’d been stumbling somewhere inside the tree line after making it out of the cleared area around the cottage.
It had to be late by now, but he was forced to admit he was disoriented in every way possible.
How long had it been?
He had no idea.
He had started to shiver. A reaction to his wounds, plus the cold. Winter was starting to give up the North Woods, but it still owned the nights.
Small miracle he had managed not to drown himself in the tiny lake that spread out from the front of Sam’s old place—his place, now—and instead he had entered the thickest part of the woods surrounding the reservation’s land. There was a lot of ground to cover here, but if the hunter was merely playing with him, then he was doomed because he still couldn’t see, he still couldn’t change, and he was bound to walk into a bullet sooner or later.
Or freeze to death.
Lupo had been thinking, though, as he bumped into trees and the occasional boulder that was probably a glacial artifact…
He was certain by now that the explosion couldn’t have been intended to kill him. Just to hurt, maim, stun, and render him as helpless as possible, so he’d be more fun to hunt. They could have loaded the damn thing with five times the C4 and a mound of silver, money being no object. Yes, there had been silver—it was still burning inside him—but it was a smaller, measured amount. Just enough to make it harder and more painful to bounce back from, making it a part of the intended result.
Hell, the shooter didn’t have the Wolfpaw or Wolfclaw stamp, as far as he could tell. That bunch would have dropped a bomb the size of a Cadillac on him. A rack of Reaper missiles. Overkill was their middle name. No, this had the stamp of a sadistic mob asshole playing with his dinner before eating it.
Face it, it had to be Joe Rabbioso, because who else knew this much about him? And who else had a grudge that would lead him to play a cat and mouse game?
Hell, Lupo was Italian—he knew how to hold a grudge. Just add C4 and silver shrapnel.
Joe Rabbioso, where are you?
Funny, he’d just been thinking the asshole was now on the run, but if this was him then he’d decided to double down and get a slice of reven
ge while it could still be served hot. He wondered how large a crew he had managed to scrape up, or was he going it solo? Clearly somebody here had helped set it up—and now that made him think of Jessie.
Was Jessie also in danger? What if Rabbioso had decided to take them both out?
Christ, how was he going to check on her if he couldn’t even help himself?
He had to outflank the asshole. There was no trying, he had to just suck it up and do it.
Still shivering uncontrollably, he tried to put the cold out of his mind. As a wolf, he would have laughed at the cold. As it was, he was lucky to have had a coat on.
Lupo had gone back to walking in a rough zig-zag pattern continuously interrupted by inconvenient trees, now trying for a general easterly direction as he tried to see a map with his mind’s eye, and simultaneously continuing to urge the Creature back from wherever he had crawled. It was as if his wolf side had taken a time-out.
You’re always trying to suppress the damn Creature, and one time you need him…
Another slug splattered against a nearby tree trunk, taking out a chunk of raw wood and spraying it and shrapnel across Lupo’s chest like tiny javelins.
Goddamn it, the pain was intense where the slivers jabbed through his damaged clothing and into his chest.
If the slugs were silver, and they seemed to be, then one or two of them hitting any major organ would do it and you could kiss Nick Lupo good-bye. The fact that the shooter kept missing was indicative of how much of an asshole he was, giving Lupo the so-called sporting chance. It was more like torture. And giving himself a boner while doing the torturing…yeah, that was something you never heard of. Especially with the mob. Some of these guys went around with hacksaws and propane torches and a gleam in their eye at every limb they could threaten to slice off.
Plus he must have had a night-scope on his telescopic sight.
Just for the hell of it, Lupo tried to force a change again.
But his it’s-a-fact-Jack fell on deaf ears. Nothing happened.
He had no doubt that if he were able to change into wolf form Rabbioso’s shooting would get a whole lot better. Lupo had a hunch the bastard was trying to drive him in a general direction like a tiger in those old-fashioned Indian hunts he’d read about as a kid. But how long would his blindness last?
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