I’m trapped in the body of a huge, black dog.
A wolf.
“Stay. Fucking. Still,” my executioner shouts, nearly lost in the cyclone of fire that’s starting to eat away at the floor beneath her. She sends four shots in my direction, in quick succession, and two of them almost get me.
The entire penthouse is on fire by now and I can hear screams rising throughout the building.
Alarms coming to life.
The sprinkler system is hard at work trying to do its job, but I doubt there’s anything that can go up against this woman’s flames.
They’re as unnatural as she is, as abnormal as the priestess I sold my soul to.
As unnatural as I now am.
Letting loose a short growl, she takes off after me, but it quickly becomes apparent that although she might be supernaturally more powerful than I am, physically I’ve got her beat.
I’m much faster.
Probably much, much stronger.
I could take down that little fire demon by simply squeezing her between my jaws.
Problem? I don’t want to. No part of me does, even the one driving me to run and survive her intent. She’s the fantasy I spent my life chasing after that night with the priestess, the ghost I could never escape.
The reason I kept filling the hole in me with money, even after I’d made enough to secure a good life.
That woman doesn’t know it, but she ruined my chances of fucking other women like a normal man. She’s the reason I always had to close my eyes and block out each partner I’ve been with, imagining her in their place.
Logically, I know she wants to kill me, that she’s disgusted by what I am, but even as she’s trying to end my life, I can’t shake the visual of her beneath me, taking the pounding I’ve lived ten years dying to give her.
Clearly, I’m a sick man.
If I’m even still a man.
We crash through another set of double doors, her fires following me the whole way. We’ve entered one of the many bedrooms and within seconds, the walls and furniture are caught in the blaze.
“You can keep running but I never fail, werewolf! You die here, tonight.”
No, I don’t, although as I run toward the massive bed and the room seems to catch fire inches behind me, I have no idea how I’m hanging onto that certainty.
She flings five more blasts, four of them missing me by no more than an inch.
The fifth one almost hits home, and what a fucking time to realize I now have a freaking tail.
I yelp at the close call—yelp—and hearing that sound sends a primal reaction through me. Not sure if it’s disgust, fear, a combination of both, but just as I jump over the bed, the unexpected happens.
In the blink of an eye, I switch back to human form.
I land on the bed, hands held up in surrender.
My beautiful killer storms toward me, highlighted in that blaze, and the confusion on her face isn’t lost on me.
She’s starting to realize this isn’t playing out the way she thought it would.
At least, I hope so.
“Listen to me, please,” I implore, keeping my hands up.
“You aren’t the first to beg for your life. Vile. All of you.”
Vile? Then why are her eyes traveling my naked form like that?
And why the fuck is my dick twitching, threatening to get hard for her, when I’m supposed to be convincing her to spare me?
“I didn’t really know I was doing it, okay? I was high. I didn’t mean to sell my soul.” Even to my own ears, the excuse sounds feeble and pathetic.
Her pretty lips part on a scoff. “Yet you profited from it and continued defending the worst of humanity, didn’t you?”
She’s got me there and I can’t even deny it. I was just gloating and celebrating my success at getting another criminal off earlier.
A sardonic smile curves her lips, and fuck me, but they couldn’t have sent a more attractive assassin after me. If their goal was to strike me stupid and near incapable of defending myself, they hit it right on the head with this one. “Okay. There’s no excuse. But you all . . . you turned me into . . .” I wave a hand back toward the living room, even as the heat of the fires in the room grow dangerously closer. “I tore them apart . . . killed them . . .”
“They all deserved it. Leeches, just like you.” Her hand rises once more, and they’ll be no escaping that next blast.
As her words ring out in my head—“Leeches, just like you.”—I start to suspect that I might not deserve to get out of this alive—
Her fires are overcome by a sudden swarm of darkness, a rotten force that extinguishes the flames, snakes through the walls, and eats away at everything in its path.
Like acid destroying matter.
There’s a stretching in my eyes, a feeling that freaks me out, and my vision is once again enhanced along with it, as it was when I was a wolf. My ears twitch as I pick up on a light ticking sound.
It’s the sound of tiny legs rushing along the surfaces of the room.
That black swarm is a hoard of spiders—no, not spiders. Fucking centipedes. Millions of them, or perhaps even more, flooding the room and destroying everything they touch.
It’s an attack that takes her by surprise as well, if her expression is anything to go by. She stumbles backward, the fires around her form the only remaining light, and she’s too focused on the ceiling falling apart above her head.
Completely oblivious to the floor beginning to give way under her feet.
She’s my murderer.
She’s my fantasy.
Letting her die might give me a chance to live.
Letting her die means I’ll never find a way to taste every inch of her.
What a fucking choice.
An impossible one because there’s no force on this Earth that’s going to stop me from saving her.
The urge to do so is too loud within my mind.
Yours! Help her!
I do.
Without conscious effort, I jump to her, moving as quickly as I did while I was a wolf, and wrap my arms around her.
Her gasp is lost in the roar of her flames.
The flames now surrounding us both.
The flames I feel, their heat unbearable . . . and the same flames that aren’t causing me any harm.
Not a single burn.
Her pupils shrink with what can only be terror at the fact and it isn’t hard to imagine that this hasn’t happened before.
She’s never met anyone immune to her fire.
We’ll have to worry about that later.
Squeezing her tighter, I use my newly gifted preternatural speed to rush us through the suite, past the disintegrating walls, gore covered floor, ashes left in her wake, and straight out the doors she first walked through.
Out in the hall, the swarm is only worse, reality crashing around us like the hotel is about to do.
It won’t survive this onslaught. There’s no way. If this is happening on every floor, the Ritz-Carlton is going down.
Hugging the silent, flaming woman in my arms against my naked chest, I rush through the collapsing hallway toward one of the windows.
Our only hope.
Just gotta pray whoever is sending that force after us doesn’t catch us once we’re outside.
One thing’s for certain: someone doesn’t just want me dead.
They want my assassin to die alongside me, as well.
Ignoring the unwarranted rage that thought brings forth, I barrel straight for that window, close my eyes, and jump through.
Doesn’t even occur to me I might not survive the fall until we’re in the air, spiraling nearly twelve stories toward the ground.
CHAPTER 4
Present Day
- Ritz Carlton, French Quarter, New Orleans, LA (USA)
“That fucking bitch! I’m going to kill her!” Brown waves flowing down her back, she rushes the dumpster near her and slams one booted foot into its side. It does not
hing, but the move seems to soothe her, and she does it again. “Motherfuckers! I’ll kill all of them! How dare they?”
Okay, maybe not. Something tells me it’s hard to soothe that one once she’s worked up.
Her fires remain extinguished, a fact that surprises considering her current level of rage.
I’m hidden in a darker part of the loading dock, where the shadows help hide that I’m still naked.
Naked and improperly worked up. I should be traumatized, right? And maybe I am, yet that’s furthest from my mind as I watch her pacing off her frustration.
It’s her. Can’t fucking believe it, but it’s really her.
One of my favorite fantasies of her slams into my frontal lobe—she’s on my dark wood desk in my office, hair fanning out on the surface, legs spread while I lose myself in her taste.
What does her pussy actually look like?
Jesus, I shouldn’t be thinking about this right now.
She kicks the dumpster another time, proving to me what I already suspected; she has unbelievable mythical powers, but physically her strength is inferior to mine.
Holy shit, did I really land on my feet after jumping out that window as if it was nothing?
Yeah. I did. Just like I’m capable of running at supersonic speeds now.
Just like I possess the strength to tear people to shreds.
I stare off into space as I remember, the world receding to the background.
I’m a monster. A murdering, unnatural abomination.
Not only are werewolves a real thing—fucking werewolves!—but I’m one of them.
The truth gnaws at the tissues of my brain, eroding a little bit of my sanity at a time.
“Hey! You.” The witch—priestess—goddess—whatever entity she actually is rushes to me, pointing at my face. “You said I wasn’t ‘meant to kill you’. Why would you say such a thing? Other than desperation to live, of course.”
I stare at her, mute, chest racing. This close, her scent is overwhelming me. On top of strength, speed, the ability to morph into a huge dog, and heightened vision, my sense of smell has been growing stronger for the last few minutes. I managed to ignore the smells of this city on full blast, but her?
God, there’s no ignoring her.
Her lips part and the night lights glisten along her bottom one, drawing me in. She’s saying something, her mouth is moving, but I’m in a tunnel, my rushing blood the only thing I hear.
She steps into the shadows I’m hiding in and slaps my naked chest. “I asked you a question, creature.”
Fancy that. Her calling me a creature. Wonder if she is capable of seeing the irony in that.
Although, without her powers flaring, she seems normal. A little bit goth with her outfit, a little bit gypsy with the rings decorating the length of her fingers and the pendant resting on her chest—a golden Hamsa, if I’m not mistaken.
“Answer me or I swear, I’ll render you to ashes right here.” Sparks of fire come to life above her clawed, black nails.
“You can’t burn me, witch. Remember?” No idea where that response came from, or why I’m so certain she’s a real witch, other than this whispering in me. An indistinguishable voice gaining volume in the back of my mind.
My response only causes more of those flames to burst along her hands. She glares at me with a virulent hatred, as if I’ve personally done something to her, but that aforementioned voice tells me that it’s because of what I now am. What she is. Her kind abhors mine.
I think my kind is supposed to detest hers, too, yet when I look into her light eyes, I feel the exact opposite.
My entire life, I’ve never been drawn to anyone like this. It’s unhealthy.
As unnatural as everything else going on.
“Werewolf, I swear, I’m in a foul mood as it is—”
I smirk, amused by her cute, angry expression. “You don’t say.”
Her eyebrow twitches and fire bursts up the length of her arm.
I might be somewhat immune to those flames, but I can still feel the heat of them, and it fucking hurts. “I don’t know how I know. I mean, I dreamt of you ever since that night I made the deal—”
“You had dreams about me?” she asks incredulously.
“I’m guessing that’s not part of how this whole thing works?” That “thing” being the selling my soul scenario and her coming to collect it . . . or whatever purpose my death fulfills for her kind.
Ignoring my question, she backs away from my naked form, and thank God for that. One inch closer and she was going to notice how my dick is threatening to swell to full length, twitching like a hungry bastard in her direction.
Damn, she smells good enough to eat. Literally.
“So in these dreams, I didn’t kill you?”
I shake my head, and dispel the images in it. The ones where I have her high against one of these brick walls, legs over my shoulders, and I’m feasting on her cunt like a madman. “No, the dreams were similar to what occurred in the penthouse. Only a few differences. In them, you always threw that first burst of flames my way and I began to—to change.” I swallow the sudden lump of dread in my throat. “They always ended there.”
“So then how would you know I wasn’t going to kill you?”
“I don’t know! It was always just a feeling in me. One that haunted me the last decade, even though I didn’t think any of it was actually real.”
“You said I was meant to ‘own’ you. What the fuck does that mean?” she snaps.
“What the fuck does it sound like?” I snap back, oddly defensive at the vulnerable sensation in my chest.
“Desperation, as I said,” she mumbles with a shake of her head and turns away from me.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I ask, “Hey. What’s your name anyway?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah, actually. It does.” Whether I die by her hand or she becomes something more to me, I think I deserve to know her name at least.
Her eyes trail my form over her shoulder and I can’t shake the feeling that she’s somehow able to see every naked inch of me, even past the shadows I’m hiding in. “Why haven’t you dressed yourself, wolf?”
“Don’t call me that.” It defies tolerance even thinking about it too deeply. A part of me keeps expecting I’ll wake up any moment now, just like I did the night I had that crazy dream about the priestess and her motley gang of whatever-they-were dressed in all black.
But it turns out that wasn’t really a dream, was it? And the object of my decade-long obsession is sneering at me with those light eyes, a different shade than my own gray-green ones, seeming torn between ending me on the spot or enacting whatever revenge she’s plotting on her own people.
“Your name,” I repeat stubbornly, chin raised.
“You don’t need it.”
She’s so damned wrong about that. I’ve needed it since the first night I dreamt about her.
Her hand waves through the air and I jump as clothes manifest over me—the same outfit I was wearing before my entire world collapsed. White button down, black slacks, Dior shoes, and the David Yurman Revolution watch on my wrist.
A ridiculous, outrageous waste of six-thousand-dollars meant to impress the very people I slaughtered about an hour ago.
Her lip curls in disgust at the sight of it. “How do none of you realize what you’ve become?”
“I realized,” I admit begrudgingly, yanking the cuff of my sleeve over the watch. “But it was better than the alternative.”
“That being?”
“What I once was.”
My reply angers her for some reason. “You were worth a million times more back then, you blind fool.”
Her statement is like a slap and I rear away from her. What does she know about my life back then? About who I was?
“I will be back to finish you, wolf. Not because my treacherous coven deserves the energy of your tarnished soul, but because beings like you deserve to die.” She turns to
leave me.
The sight of her back does odd things to me, a chain-reaction that has me following after her in a burst of energy. Don’t let her get away. She can’t leave. “Wolves, you mean.”
“That, and vile leeches that are willing to risk their souls just to have all the riches and power their pathetic mortal lives can offer. Leeches that don’t care who they hurt as long as they get their way.”
Okay. A little too close to home for my comfort. And as we walk to the end of the loading dock and toward the street, I find myself lashing out in defensive denial. “You’re the ones that offer us those lives for your own twisted motives! And I didn’t hurt anyone.” Even to my own ears, the rebuttal sounds false.
She spins on one booted heal and rushes back to push at my chest—my body doesn’t react to her attempt, and it fuels my suspicion that my strength does hold in human form.
As well as the fact that I can sense it growing, an infusion that’s like hot energy over my muscles.
“While I deal with the mess of my people, I invite you to analyze that bullshit statement long and hard.” Leaning into my space, her breath ghosts along the bottom of my jaw, her eyes flashing like cold steel. “Think about who you’ve been defending, Mr. LeBlanc, attorney . . . at . . . law. So the next time I come back to kill you, you’ll understand exactly who you’ve hurt and why you deserve to die.”
She’s right.
Merciful Lord, she’s right, and I’ve known it for years, but I willfully shoved it aside as I ran from the memory of who I once was.
I’m as bad as the people I killed—the ones whose approval I so obsessively courted—and I deserve an even worse fate than theirs.
I left their remains behind, broken body parts, scattered entrails and blood, to be consumed by that plague of centipedes that managed to destroy the hotel.
As I ran from it, this witch clutched in my arms, it had begun to come down in a cloud of sheer dust.
“Oh,” she says as an after-thought, expression sardonic. “Just so you know, the only place you’re safe from us is your home. It’s the one spot in this entire city we can’t kill you in.”
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