Big Bad Wolf

by Suleikha Snyder

  The military doctors at Apex had warned them time and time again that there could be side effects depending on their species. Imprinting. Increased appetite for meat. Inherent urge to maintain pack hierarchy. Powerful biological imperative to mate. He still remembered Dr. Fredericks, this pasty little motherfucker sweating like a sixth-grade science teacher trying to explain the birds and the bees. “We tried to synthesize that element out of the serums you’ve been given. There is no guarantee we succeeded. You may still experience an overwhelming pull toward a sexual partner.”

  Fuck. Joe scrubbed at his face. Slumped on his bunk. He could practically hear Mishelle in the back of his head. The way she’d laugh when he did something dumb and try to make up for it. “Don’t think you’re going to get out of this with your moves, boy. I’m not here for your pants feelings. Button it up.” She wasn’t here at all anymore. And his pants feelings were for someone else. So fucking powerful that he had to press the heel of his hand down on his cock and will his semi-permanent hard-on to behave itself. Except his dick didn’t take the cue. No, it throbbed against his palm. And he got the fucking shakes just thinking about Neha’s fingers replacing his. About her mouth…her gorgeous mouth opening up on him. He had to bite back a whimper. He didn’t bite back the prayer.

  “Please, Doc. Please be there tomorrow.”

  * * *

  She was nuts to even consider it, beyond help for actually agreeing. Why had she said yes? The moment haunted Neha for hours afterward. What kind of woman, what kind of psychologist, what kind of lawyer, agreed to a stolen rendezvous with a violent shape-shifter going on trial for murder? She was failing this on every level. And for what? Because he turned her on? Because she’d been buzzing herself to orgasm every night for weeks thinking about his head between her thighs?

  It was just sex, for fuck’s sake. An attraction. And she wasn’t some sheltered fourteen-year-old in a Shakespearean cautionary tale. She’d occasionally had questionable taste in men, but she’d never been this reckless. She was always practical, always rational…yet she was suddenly killing the hell out of a bottle of Riesling on a weeknight while burrowed under a throw on her couch, streaming but barely watching a Law & Order marathon.

  This Neha was not the kind of woman that made a bold impression…and she didn’t give a rat’s ass. Her hair was ponytailed. She hadn’t bothered with makeup because she wasn’t leaving the house. She wore a ratty law-school sweatshirt—you could barely make out the letters for “Pace” anymore—and Old Navy leggings. The cushions were littered with paperwork for cases she’d been ignoring in favor of Joe’s. Her own cases. She had a client going to trial in two months, and aside from a few phone calls and one check-in meeting, she’d all but forgotten about it. She was letting her fellow associates and their shared paralegal pick up her slack. That was not normal for her. This was not how she operated. And to be falling apart, chucking her principles, because of a man? It added insult to injury.

  “You ever slummed it? Ever fucked a blue-collar guy?”

  And that was only the half of it, wasn’t it? Because he wasn’t just a man, just a blue-collar guy.

  “What about a supe? Every done one of us? Had someone slide their fangs into your throat while they dick into you? Grabbed on to a wolf’s ruff when he’s nosing between your legs?”

  Neha composed a half-dozen texts to various friends and then deleted the drafts. Olivia and Mika, her sorority sisters from undergrad—who she kept in touch with mostly via Facebook—weren’t the best audience for a crisis like this, especially since it would involve breaking client confidentiality. Breathing one word to Nate—who was more her boss than he was a friend—would result in her getting tossed off the case and probably losing her job. And telling Tejal about her moral crisis? No. No, she couldn’t put her sweet, funny, cousin-sister in such a terrible position. It had been all well and good when they were discussing the theoretical. The reality…? The reality was that she couldn’t drag Tejal into a battle between ethics and family loyalty, couldn’t involve her in the dangerous shifter politics that surrounded this case. She was on her own with her bad decisions. Until tomorrow. When she would be alone with Joe and his.

  “You want me to get up there and talk about what it was like over there, don’t you? Paint me as some kind of wounded war veteran who went ‘off’ because of PTSD. That ain’t me, Doc.”

  “Then who are you?”

  “You haven’t figured that out yet? Babe, I’m a guy who can’t stop thinking about you.”

  “Cute. Flattery will get you absolutely nowhere, Joe.”

  “You think this is flattery? I barely know you. It’s been, what, a week since you walked your ass in here with Feinberg and Taylor? This ain’t flattery. It’s obsession.”

  “It’s unproductive, is what it is. Can we please stay on topic?”

  She’d talked such a good game. Pretended to be objective. Only to have the entire act destroyed by one press of his mouth against hers. Was she really so weak? Was she really so naive and lust-addled that she was willing to start something with Joe Peluso that they probably couldn’t finish? Am I a terrible person?

  There was only one person she could think of to ask for the truth. One person she could trust to not hold back. Not Tejal. Not this time. Her hand shook as she reached for her phone and hit the speed-dial button for her mother. Jasminder Kaur Ahluwalia picked up on the second ring, with a too-loud and immediately rapid-fire “Beta? What’s happened? Are you okay? You don’t sound good!”

  The last bit was truly remarkable, considering she hadn’t even said “hi” yet. Neha was glad she’d picked voice instead of video chatting. Guru-ji only knew what Ma would make of how she looked right now. “Hi, Ma. I just…I had a silly question.” A silly, Riesling-fueled question. And that lead-in alone earned an instant “Chee!” of disapproval.

  “There are no silly questions, beta,” her mother chided. There was distortion on the line—presumably as she bustled around the kitchen making roti or paratha. It was her Monday-night ritual: rolling out a week’s worth of flatbreads while watching Punjabi soap operas on the iPad propped against the blender. “Now what is all this nonsense? Tell me!”

  Neha forced herself to put the fears that were currently clawing at her guts into words. “Am I a bad person? Do you and Papa wish I was…better?”

  This elicited one of those emphatic tongue-clicks that her mother excelled at. One click of the tongue from a traditional desi mom was like a paragraph-long diatribe from a white suburban soccer mom. And then Ma launched into the actual response. “Better than what?” she demanded in Punjabi. “Better than who? We’ve never compared you to anyone else. We love you as you are. We love your brothers the same.”

  Her brothers weren’t flirting with confessed killers, with shifters. Nitesh was making it his mission to date every twentysomething blond human in the Tri-State area, and Neal was working on getting his girlfriend, Gurpreet, over from Amritsar on a fiancée visa—something that had become exponentially harder in the last few years. They were good sons, decent men, with solid jobs. Neither of them on the verge of making a gargantuan mistake.

  Neha tried again. “But I’m not a good desi girl,” she said, refilling her wineglass. “Don’t you wish I was sweet and nice and on track to marry some perfect Punju husband and give you a bunch of grandkids? Or that I had a safer job?”

  “What will wishes do? We are thankful for what we have, beta.” A sigh came across the line, and Neha could picture her mother standing there in the kitchen, shaking her head. In about twenty-five years, Neha was going to look like her. Soft and round. Gray-streaked hair pulled back in a bun. “Do I think you should care for yourself more? Of course. You could stay out of the sun. Lose five, ten pounds.” There was the unflinching desi honesty Neha had been searching for. “But you care for others so much. We know you became a lawyer to help people. Your papa and I are so proud of tha
t.”

  The vote of confidence made tears spring to Neha’s eyes, and she had to blink them back. “Even if I’m helping people who are guilty?”

  “Especially then. Serving the good is easy, Neha. Serving the troubled, the bad, the lost without becoming lost yourself? That takes strength. That takes sacrifice.”

  “How do I know I’m not losing myself?” How could she want Joe Peluso and still be the daughter, the woman, the lawyer that her parents had raised so lovingly and faithfully?

  “You called your mother, didn’t you? That’s how I know my Neha is still here. I believe in you.”

  That made exactly one of them, Neha realized as she finished up the conversation with hollow pleasantries and promises to chat again in a few days. She had no more clarity than she’d had before the call. If anything, she felt worse. Like a fraud.

  “I just want to feel you close.”

  A fraud who was going to get dressed up for court in the morning and step into the arms of a guilty man and an admitted monster. A fraud who was going to grab those minutes with both hands and cling to them.

  Chapter 9

  It had taken nearly a year, but Yulia had slowly adjusted to her new terms of employment—if “employment” was even what strict, unquestionable loyalty to her brother’s endeavors could be called. Working the hostess stand of Kamchatka several evenings a week was easy. Mindless work. It was the other nights of hostessing, presiding over the club’s most lucrative enterprise into the wee hours, that took a toll. The Bear Pit. Aleksei’s vicious little joke. The basement arena, two levels below the restaurant, with its massive steel cage, where those of their clan and outside it met in their fur and claw and clashed for sport. It was a sport Yulia did not understand. Not when immigrants and supernaturals alike were being caged along both borders now. To lock oneself behind bars voluntarily, to spill sweat and blood for money and entertainment… What horror was this?

  “You were always too stupid to appreciate our business,” Aleksei had laughed during her first shift in the Pit, when she’d been foolish enough to cringe at the first strike of fist against flesh. “Do you not understand that this is mine? The American government can do what they wish to whomever they wish, but this is my rule. Here, I am king.”

  How exactly that made him different from the tyrant in Washington, Yulia could not begin to guess. And she certainly did not wonder such a thing aloud. She’d armored herself after that first night. Now, she no longer shook when she passed through the security doors into the arena. She no longer flinched when fighters collided. The sounds of snarls and grunts and screams were white noise. Buzzing in her ears. She was stone, she was earth, she was water. Elements that did not feel, did not hurt, did not do anything but weather over time.

  She thought often of Danny. His soft laughter. His hand curled around hers, squeezing and offering strength. This Vision Danny of hers was not shocked by her family’s secrets. Not frightened away by the cinder-block walls, the rows of leather banquettes, the rapture and the glee of half-shifted bears cheering for more blood, more broken bones. He didn’t call it in. He didn’t order squad cars to converge on the premises. No, he simply held her hand and carried her through each night. You’ll survive, he told her. You have to survive. Why? So I can see you again. Perhaps it was childish to cling to a fantasy the way she’d clung to her mother as a cub, but Yulia was happy to be a child if being an adult meant reveling in pummeling one another to pulp.

  The Pit was a study in excess. Cash changing hands, bottle service, too loud, too violent, too male, too everything. Yulia navigated it with something near a smile. A taut tilting of her lips that upon close inspection would reveal itself to be a grimace. Her stiletto heels clicked against the terrazzo tile floor. The full skirt of her dress whipped around her thighs. Yulia Vasilieva, ice princess. Murmuring polite greetings, gesturing for empty tumblers to be refilled, taking vodka shots for the glory of Kamchatka. No one looking at her would know that she was anything but calm, cool, collected, professional. No one knew just how badly she wanted to run screaming out the door.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Aleksei. Sitting on his throne—an ornate chair in his box, a cordoned-off VIP area in prime view of the cage—boasting and bragging, in a much better mood than a few days ago. Perhaps he’d solved his Joe Peluso situation. Perhaps he was so confident now in his successes that it did not matter. He was entertaining some contact from one of his many illegal operations. From what little Yulia knew, the man had arrived from overseas just that morning. He’d been plucked from JFK and taken to a luxury hotel in Dumbo. No expense was being spared. He was important, and Aleksei was showing off.

  Yulia filed away details as though she were remembering a regular’s order. Thinning blond hair. He looked older than her brother, which would put him in his late forties or early fifties, but men in their business often aged poorly. He could be in his twenties for all she knew, wearing the violence in the lines on his face. She’d yet to come close enough to hear his voice, detect an accent, but his scent was easy enough to pick up. Rank and aggressive beneath a layer of expensive cologne. He smelled like a bear, but not of their clan. Not a brown bear shifter she recognized. But a better question, a more dangerous question, was this: Was he a big fish or the biggest fish? The boss or the boss’s right hand?

  “Yulia!” Aleksei’s voice carried across the arena. A sharp slap that cut through the pleasant fog of three shots of Mamont. “Come!”

  She detoured just long enough to pick up another chilled bottle of vodka from the bar. You’ll survive, Danny reminded her again. You’ll get through this.

  She was stone, she was earth, she was water. She would weather this night, just as she’d weathered everything else.

  * * *

  The display on his smartphone read just a few minutes until midnight. Joe Peluso’s pretrial hearing was tomorrow. Almost today. Nate knew his arguments backward and forward. And he had every confidence that they wouldn’t matter one tiny bit.

  “You know we’re fucked, right? There’s no way this case is gonna go our way.”

  Dustin’s low voice rolled across Nate’s skin like a rumble of thunder. Appropriate, since a storm was about to hit them both. “Aren’t you supposed to be the optimist?” He scowled, slumping back in his chair with his tumbler of scotch, tempted to just swap it out for the bottle. He really had no business drinking at all…but wasn’t that what law school prepared you for? All the vices and all the functionality rolled into one ruthless package? “One of us has to believe in the greater good, remember?”

  His best friend laughed, crumpling up his empty Red Bull can. “I didn’t realize it was my shift on the rah-rah squad. Sorry. I left my puppies and rainbows at home, man.”

  Nate didn’t even have a supply of puppies and rainbows anymore. The greater good. Ha. What did that even mean now? In a country where presidential term limits had vanished, abortions had been criminalized in more than half the states, and being different in any significant way got you sent to detainment centers? He’d grown up with “never again” echoing in his ears, learning his family’s history over his bubbe’s brisket, knowing firsthand what devastation creeping fascism could result in. He’d naively thought it couldn’t happen here. And yet here they were.

  In the past few years, their pro bono cases involving supernaturals had skyrocketed, coming just about even with their work with undocumented immigrants and those seeking political asylum. A decent percentage of their clients were innocent, railroaded by authorities who were basically acting like bullies—factions of NYPD, ICE, the SRB, all playing secret police for the modern age. But the firm had plenty of clients who’d committed actual crimes, too. Peluso had killed people. He’d taken justice into his own hands. The odds of getting him off, or even brokering a decent deal, were slim to none. Sure, Nate and Dustin were the Wonder Twins—the best at what they did—but there was only so much th
eir powers could actually activate. “Are we doing the right thing?”

  “Fighting for this? Fuck yes!” D exclaimed without hesitation. “The Peluso case might not be ideal, but if we sit around waiting for the ideal case, it’ll be too damn late to do anything. Our client did the planet a favor by taking out those assholes. The least we can do is make sure he gets a fair trial. It may not go our way, but we’re trying. The minute we stop trying, it’s over.”

  It was nothing Nate hadn’t already said to himself, to Neha. Neha, who was already too close to this case, to this client. But Nate couldn’t help the unease that washed over him. There was no guarantee that he was right to feel so off-kilter. He wasn’t psychic, couldn’t boast any particular supernatural identity or ability. He’d been asked, sure. The “What are you?” questions for anyone who didn’t fit into neat little boxes were more frequent now—and no less rude. But being gay and Jewish, while both marginalized identities, was a completely different thing than sprouting fur or conjuring magic. He trusted his instincts, though. They’d seldom let him down.

  Something was wrong. About this case. About this client. About this whole entire world. Nate had devoted most of his life to making things right…and he had the sick sense, the ever-growing suspicion, that he was doing it in vain. That tomorrow’s hearing didn’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things. That nothing was ever going to change for the better, no matter what they did or who they fought for.

  Dustin slid a can of Red Bull in front of him, shaking his head and sighing. “Still need those rainbows and puppies, huh?”

  “No,” Nate admitted grimly. “What we need is a global miracle.”

  Chapter 10

  Joe’s court suit was the one he’d worn to Kenny’s funeral. Maybe it had fit once, but now the jacket was too tight across his shoulders, the pants a little too short at the ankle. Almost as restrictive as the handcuffs they’d slapped right back on him after he changed. It wasn’t a good look for someone desperate to steal time with a woman he was obsessed with. He felt like a kid playing dress-up. Or the Incredible Hulk about to bust out of his clothes.