BAD BLOOD - Excerpt

Moving through the crowd as though having some specific destination in mind, she enjoyed flowing through the tangle of bodies to the beat of the music.  Warmth, sweat, scents, the thrum of pulsing melodies… blood, heartbeats all merged as her spine became fluid, her footfalls beyond graceful.  Her stomach rumbled as her nose keened to the charbroiled beef wafting from the kitchen and she made a game out of separating scents, sounds, and voices, keying in on bits of conversation as she now loped through the large dance floor headed for the second bar where takeout orders could be placed.

Mid-step she stopped, tilted her head, and gazed into the darkened corridor beyond the bar.  A cool breeze had brought in a scent from somewhere, a scent she’d never picked up in her life. 

Sasha turned her beer up and polished it off, then continued to head toward the second bar, her eyes fastened on the dark corridor.  She could smell multiple male scents.  A men’s room?  A back room?  An exit?  A closed section of the bar?  Curiosity stole over her as she slid the empty bottle onto the edge of the bar.  She quickly placed her order, trying to forestall the insanity, but her gaze continually wandered past the server toward the back of the bar.

The scent came to her again, raising her hackles.  Suddenly out of nowhere, she rounded the bar and stepped into the semidarkness.  The server’s attention was diverted with the next order.  That scent… that wonderfully unsettling male scent.  All others evaporated, but that one lingered.  Dominant.  Who the hell was it?  Moreover, what the hell was it—it wasn’t human.  At least not wholly so, she could tell.  Yet there wasn’t the rancid, fecund smell of wet, filthy animal that came with infected werewolf sightings.  This was… wonderful and all wolf, plus…

Insides on fire, hair bristling, Sasha slipped deeper into the employees-only area undetected and passed through the long corridor scenting locked doors…  Faster, moving like a blur, following the scent that led to a cool breeze.  Her hand slammed against an exit panic bar, and suddenly she was outside in the back employees’ parking area clutching an empty beer bottle.  Her gaze quickly took in the huge Ford F-150s and Dodge Rams that haphazardly littered the small back lot amid the overflowing Dumpsters. 

Still now, she listened to her own breath, her own heartbeat, keening her hearing to the very slightest movement against the icy ground.  There was no sound, but the scent was moving, circling her, producing a delirious combination of fight adrenaline and something she wasn’t prepared to admit.

Moving with the scent, she crouched, lowering her body’s center of gravity, arms readied, muscles tensing, turning in a slow circle.  A back floodlight instantly blew out leaving her in total darkness, save the blue-white wash of the moon.  She smiled.  He had no idea…

He smiled and cocked his head to the side, fascinated that she could not readily detect him.  This time she was alone.  And this time she was no less exquisite than any other time before.  Too bad it was impossible to stay downwind from her this go-round.

Her smoky gray eyes had become almost a translucent crystalline, like that of a husky… pupils open so wide they nearly eclipsed her gorgeous irises.  Her stare intense, her honey-hued skin awash with maddening moonlight, jet-black waves of velvet barely kissing her shoulders and yet slowly lengthening as her beast flared within her right before his eyes… beautiful jawline set hard, voluptuous curves sculpted beneath a wisp of gray mohair sweater partially hidden by her bomber jacket—her throat so gloriously exposed for a submission bite… if she would accept.  His gaze raked her lean hips that tapered into seemingly endless legs engulfed by the second skin of deep brown leather… her feet enclosed in hand-tooled cowboy boots.  And the way her hand gripped the bottle.  Damn…

He briefly closed his eyes and inhaled her more deeply, wanting her more deeply, needing her more intensely than his pride had allowed until now.  She was of his clan, his pack—a shadow wolf.

But he had an assassination to pull off.  On each previous encounter she’d been with an abomination of their breed.  He’d been sickened, scenting the predator on her, especially when his mission was to hunt down the demon infected—werewolves.  That was her job, too, but she seemed ignorant of the task.  Then again he hadn’t seen the predator in approximately a month.  Perhaps she’d done her job and done it better than he’d imagined?  Black widow style.  Max Hunter checked himself.  Yeah.  If she’d gone after the were male by luring him with her body as bait, no doubt the poor bastard never saw the hit coming.

Slightly distracted, he moved again but a footfall broke through the shadows.  She immediately spun and lunged at the nothingness, no fear in her eyes, but she missed.  He stepped out of the shadows.  Her response was a severe snarl as she broke the bottle on the edge of a Dumpster, clearly prepared to kill.

“That’s not necessary,” he said in a low rumble.

“Fuck that I-come-in-peace line.  You were invisible a second ago.”

“Yeah, and?”  Perplexed, he simply stared at the disoriented beauty before him.  Didn’t all shadow wolves remain unseen until advisable?

“I hate you goddamned vampires, ya know.”  She flung the bottle away.  “So what do you want?”

He was so offended that he folded his arms over his chest.  “I’ve been called a lot of things in my time, sis, but a vampire?  Never.”

She cocked her head to the side and sniffed the air, but the confusion was clear on her face.  What the hell was he—a new species?  Something that moved between shadows and didn’t make a sound.  Smelled all wolf, all male.  The rumble of his voice bottomed out in the pit of her stomach.  Still left a flutter in its wake.  Accent was strange, had French Canadian and yet West Indian tones embedded in it.  Ethnicity hard to judge.  A nightmare and a fantasy all rolled into one, wearing a deerskin suede jacket, a charcoal sweater, ripped, rough-rider jeans, and well-worn cowboy boots.  Had accosted her in the back lot.  Then she rolled her shoulders and began snapping closed the brass buttons on her jacket.  “Whatever.  You were following me, staring at me while I was trying to get my dinner and mind my business.  I didn’t appreciate it.”

Complete disappointment singed her voice as she yanked the bottom of her jacket down hard and warily turned away to round the building to reenter the bar.  The sound of her voice reverberated through him and lingered on the night air with her fabulous feminine trail thickening his groin.  Yet he sensed no fraud; she really didn’t seem to know what to make of him. 

Her piercing gray eyes haunted him as she disappeared around the edge of the huge building.  He watched her ass move beneath the leather, kneading muscle and sinew in an almost soundless stride.  But he also had to find out what had happened to the huge predator she’d been with four months ago, if there had been more infected by him.  She wasn’t at risk; like him, her shadow wolf blood was impervious to the scourges of other species.  Their bodies were even uninhabitable by ghosts and possession demons—the wolf kept them at bay.  But if she didn’t eviscerate the infected alpha werewolf and track the others he’d probably infected, a deadly were pack could form.  Why wasn’t she hunting the threat?

He shook off the question and decided to follow her back inside.

Sasha boxed the cold away from her arms, realizing that the shiver that had overtaken her wasn’t from the frigid temperatures outside.  She was getting that burger and a six-pack to go, and that was all there was to it.  She kept walking toward the back bar, unceremoniously parting the crowd now with sheer shoulder-blocking force and without apologies.  She needed to eat.

The man was an unbelievable specimen.  He was massive.  Six foot four or five and coulda probably ripped her throat out, but didn’t.  That was some sexy shit, even if he was possibly a vampire messin’ with her mind.  But the scent wasn’t of the undead.  His sweat held life, vitality, testosterone ungodly.  It was a scent that combined the earth and deep, sensual musk.

She allowed a shudder to pass through her, and hailed the bartender.  “I’m the monster burger with the works.  To go, with a six of Corona,” she shouted, determined to shake off the experience.

But as she waited and kept her gaze roving the establishment, she remembered feeling him before, although never seeing him and definitely never scenting him like this.  Now she knew his signature and she had an incredibly rugged, too ridiculously handsome face to place with the impressions.  His heartbeat was a slow, long thud.  Hue… unflawed darkness making his actual age impossible to judge.  Skin like rich, dark chocolate that made one’s hand ache to touch just to feel the texture.  Sasha licked her lips, unwilling to admit that she also wanted to taste it. 

Features—strong, nose owned a slight bend in the bridge… Native American.  Mouth, thick, lush, so sensual a feature that she was mesmerized by it.  African.  Hair, thick tendrils of dark velvet pulled back into a leather strap with Blackfoot tribal markings on it.  Glistening white teeth… a warning held in check; a square jaw covered by a dark spread of evening shadow.  Eyes, an intense midnight engulfed by shimmering amber.  So strange, as though backlit from some inner light. 

Amber and silver—the necklace he wore made her know he couldn’t be werewolf.  Rod broke out in hives just from a pair of earrings she’d worn once; couldn’t tolerate it anywhere near him or it gave him nausea, vomiting, burns, the works.  A piece the size she’d just seen would have landed Butler in ER, code blue.  Probably the only reason she could stand it was the virus hadn’t advanced in her system as quickly, yet.  But she wasn’t gonna chance it.

So how could this mystery guy, who was definitely something supernatural, have on a thick rope of silver chain with a huge hunk of rare, etched amber dangling from his neck like a talisman… in fact, even vampires weren’t big on silver, come to think of it.  Shaman?  Warlock?  What else was out there that they didn’t have catalogued?

But the way the guy moved… like the night itself, like a thief cloaked within the very folds of every shadow.  An assassin’s stealth, but owning what had to be anywhere between two hundred to two hundred and twenty pounds of pure sinew.  Massive shoulder width, arms and legs lean, muscular, moving as though every joint were a well-greased ball bearing.  Sexy as hell, if she did say so herself.

How did he do it, though?  Not even vampires had been able to catch her unawares: their absence of scent, the very stillness of it as they repressed their absence of life, was always, literally, a dead giveaway, as was the oppressive feel of their power touching the edges of her aura.  Ghosts, same thing.  The temperature dropped and they moved through the atmosphere like a heat wave or like the clear ripple on a lake’s surface before they materialized.   Demons made her gag with the foul scent of rotting flesh, and their eyes were red orbs of insanity.  Nah.  If he wasn’t any of the above—then what was he?

Curiosity and a looming presence thickened with a now familiar scent made her jerk her attention toward the entrance.  He nodded coolly and parted the crowd with a fluid ease that was unnerving.  For a moment, all she could do was watch him walk.