Bad Moon Rising (Cole and Dana)

by Chambers, V. J.

  Well, that was good. Progress. At last. “Okay, let’s find a way to do that, Rusty.”

  “Thing is, you gotta extend that same promise to me that you extended to the rest of us. If I send those kids out, you’re not going to put them through that training, are you?”

  Avery knew that the promise had been a lie. But he didn’t have to worry about that now, because these were children. “There shouldn’t be a need for that, Rusty. They’re children. We wouldn’t put children through the training. The training requires the wolf to be able to shift.”

  Genetic werewolves didn’t generally begin shifting until just before puberty, when they were eleven or twelve. Sometimes the girls started a little bit younger, but Avery was hoping that it wouldn’t be an issue.

  Rusty let out a relieved breath. “All right. I’ll get those kids out, then.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. I don’t know when exactly. I’ll let you know. As soon as I can.”

  “How soon? Hours? Days? Weeks?”

  “Days at the worst,” said Rusty. “I’ll be in touch again, Avery.”

  * * *

  Cole was barely dressed, and Dana was still fully clothed. But she was twined with him on the narrow bed of his cell, her head burrowed into the crook of his shoulder. He didn’t think they’d ever done anything like that. Never been close this way.

  She was soft in his arms. Warm. Amazing. He felt sleepy and satisfied. He had one of his hands inside her shirt, and he lazily ran his thumb over one of her nipples.

  Her eyes were closed. “I knew you didn’t need those glasses.”

  “Hmm?”

  Her eyes fluttered open, and she smiled at him. “Your glasses. You lost them when you shifted into a wolf, and you’re not hurting without them, are you? You wear them as some kind of weird affectation, don’t you?”

  He chuckled. “For all you know, everything is a big blur to me right now.”

  “Whatever.” She stretched against him. “I need to go.”

  “Don’t,” he whispered. Something about this, about the two of them lying together like this, excited him more than the idea of fucking her. “I don’t want you to leave.”

  “I have to eventually,” she said. “Brooks is probably back by now. He’ll be looking for me.”

  “Man, fuck Brooks,” he muttered. He raised his head up to look at her, letting out a caustic laugh. “Well, you are, aren’t you? Fucking him?”

  She opened her eyes. “Not… recently, no.”

  He lay his head back on his flat pillow, pulling his hand out of her shirt. “That day he called me, before all this got started? He was so possessive. That’s when I knew that you were giving it up to him.”

  “Well… I don’t know what’s going on with Brooks and me.” She started to sit up.

  He stopped her. “Wait.”

  “I really do have to go. Anyway, you can’t think that there could ever be anything between us beyond… this. It’s stupid of you to be jealous.”

  “I’m not jealous,” said Cole. He considered. “Okay, I’m jealous.” He pulled her down against him. He kissed her forehead. “Don’t go yet, though.”

  “Cole...” She squirmed against him. “We don’t cuddle, okay? This is just weird.”

  “Why don’t we?”

  “You know why not. Because it’s not like that between us. It’s just explosive tension release. We don’t actually care about each other.”

  “I care about you.” He kissed her. “I care about you more than anyone else I know.”

  She pushed out of his arms. “Well, I don’t know if that’s saying much.” She sat up and began rearranging her clothes, pushing her breasts back into the cups of her bra.

  He sat up behind her. “What if it could be something else?” He kissed her shoulder.

  She turned to him. “Even if I thought of you that way, which I don’t, you’re still a murderer. And you’re going to spend the rest of your days locked up. If you think I’m going to spend my nights locked up in a cell with you, you’re crazy.”

  That was a problem. “What if I wasn’t locked up?”

  “If you escape again, you mean? I’m going to make sure you never get out.”

  “I don’t mean escape. What if I got, like, a pardon?”

  “You’re not going to get a pardon. You’re a serial killer.”

  “I killed six wolves,” said Cole. “You put people through training at the SF who’ve killed three times as many people. And then you release them back out into the world.”

  “It’s not the same,” she said. “They’re rehabilitated.”

  “Maybe I’m rehabilitated.” He glared at her. “Have I killed since I escaped?”

  She gave him a funny look. “No, I suppose you haven’t. Or at least, if you did, you hid the bodies well.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone. I only killed because I was making the pack anyway, and I haven’t tried to make another one.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “You said you would, when I let you go. I asked you if you’d go off and do it again, and you said that you’d do what came naturally. I know you think wolf packs are natural, so why not do it?”

  He studied his fingernails. “I didn’t think you’d like it.”

  “What?” She got off the bed, her expression horrified.

  That wasn’t the reaction he’d expected. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You said that I couldn’t change you with a hand job. You said that you wouldn’t turn into someone different because of what we did. And—and I can’t be responsible for that. You can’t lay your behavior on me.”

  He was having a hard time meeting her gaze. “Well, the thing is, I’ve done a lot of thinking, and it doesn’t seem to me that the way I was making a pack was very natural in the first place. It was all…” How could he explain this? “I was making a pack the way Jimmy made a pack. But werewolves naturally make packs by making families, and—”

  “Oh, no you don’t.” She thrust her hands into her hair. “Don’t you dare even suggest that you and I—”

  “I wasn’t.” He got off the cot and went over to find his shirt. He fished it up off the ground and shrugged into it. “Dana, there are things about the way I was raised that… did things to me.”

  “Oh, great,” she said sarcastically, “now you’re going to tell me that you killed people because you had a bad childhood. But I guess you’re all cured now.”

  He shook his head. “Never mind.” He glared at her. “Forget it. Forget I said anything.”

  She folded her arms over her chest. “No, I want to hear this. Why did you kill those people?”

  “Because they didn’t have…” He scratched the back of his head. “Look, the way Jimmy runs the farm, he thinks that everyone besides him and the girls that he brings there should be celibate. And most of the girls are essentially celibate, because he rarely has sex with one of them after she gets pregnant. Then he just puts her on the shelf and replaces her with someone else, you know? So, when I was making the pack, I didn’t want it to be like that. I picked people in pairs.”

  “Like you and me,” said Dana. “They were modeled on you and me.”

  “Maybe.” He took a deep breath. “Well, if one member of the pair didn’t submit to me, then they couldn’t be part of the pack. But if they didn’t submit, they were lucid, and they’d seen me, and I couldn’t risk them telling people what I was doing, so I killed them. And then I had to kill the other member of the pair, because I didn’t want to leave that person alone in the pack without someone, because I saw what it did to the people on the farm with Jimmy—”

  Dana’s eyes flashed. “That is the most fucked up thing I ever heard.”

  He hung his head.

  “Cole, why didn’t you just leave them out of your pack? Why seek them out and kill them?”

  “I took them in pairs, Dana. It was too late by then.”

  “Coraline Shirley and her partner. When you went and chan
ged them, they weren’t in pairs.”

  “You think?” said Cole. “Either of them have real strong memories about the night that I made them part of my pack?”

  “Well, no.” She hugged herself. “So, you’re saying that you killed out of self-preservation, and that’s supposed to make it better?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Do you even feel sorry about what you did?”

  He looked at the floor and tried to think about how to answer that. “Sure.”

  “Sure?” She was incredulous. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means I feel sorry.” He looked into her eyes, challenging her to argue with what he said.

  “You don’t sound sorry.”

  “Well, I am.” But he had a sneaking suspicion that his idea of feeling sorry for killing someone and her idea of it were miles apart. He felt sorry for killing Tasha. Always sorry. Infinitely sorry. But that hadn’t really been his fault. He hadn’t had a choice. He didn’t know what Dana wanted him to feel, but he was fairly sure he wasn’t capable of feeling it. He didn’t feel much, except when it came to her. Or Jimmy. When it came to Jimmy, he felt plenty.

  She let out a wild laugh. “And what about the rest of it, Cole? About how werewolves should go out and attack humans, because nature has to keep a balance?”

  “That… that was sort of something that my father said. He had this theory that the end of the world would happen because of werewolves, and that was how they would do it, and it just seemed to make sense, and… I’ve never attacked humans on a full moon. You know that.”

  She threw her hands up in the air. “I don’t want to be near you right now.”

  Right. He’d screwed this up again. She was always going to hate him, and there was nothing he was ever going to be able to do about it.

  There was only one way he knew to try to get Dana back on his side, one way to stop her from pouring hatred onto him.

  He crossed the room to her and put his hands on her.

  She pushed him away. “Don’t.”

  He persisted anyway. “Dana, you know you can’t resist me like this.” He kissed her.

  As usual, she relaxed in his arms, responding to the kiss.

  He wrapped his arms around her, crushed her against him. He didn’t want to let go of her.

  But eventually, their lips came apart.

  He looked at her, and there were tears in her eyes. She was crying again, damn it. He wished she wouldn’t.

  “Cole, this is so fucked up. We are so fucked up.”

  He let go of her. “Why do you say that? When we’re close, does it feel fucked up?”

  “Yes.”

  That stung. His jaw worked. “You know, we’re going to have to deal with the fact that we’re both Jimmy’s beta wolves at some point. One way to break away from him is for us to mate.”

  She shook her head. “No, don’t even say it. I won’t go through that again.”

  “I’m not saying it’s ideal,” he said. “Hell, it screwed with my head. Sometimes I don’t even know if the things that I feel about you are real, or if they didn’t just get stuck in my head because of the fact that we were bonded. Maybe I only feel it because I remember feeling it.”

  She let out a bitter laugh. “Now you sound like Brooks.”

  He didn’t understand why Brooks would be talking about that kind of thing. But he pushed the thought aside and pressed forward. “If I wasn’t locked up, would it really be so bad, though?”

  She rubbed her face. “Cole, you can’t seriously be—”

  She stopped speaking, and her face went blank.

  “Dana?”

  She lurched, unsteady on her feet and turned away from him. “Jimmy,” she mumbled.

  And then Cole felt it too. The pull started in his intestines and spread throughout his body. Suddenly, all he wanted was to be close to his father. He needed to go to him. He struggled against it. “He’s calling us,” he grunted.

  Dana ran at the door, banging into it. “Jimmy!” she shrieked.

  Cole doubled over.

  Oh no, not that, he thought.

  But it was happening. The itch at the back of his neck. The wolf scrambling up inside his body, clawing to be let out.

  Jimmy was forcing them to shift.

  * * *

  Outside Cole’s cell, the woman at the desk turned when she heard the banging on the door. She made a few swipes on the keyboard in front of her, and the door to the cell unlocked.

  But no one came out. The banging got worse.

  A muffled scream came from inside.

  The woman stood up. “Larry, there’s trouble in Randall’s cell,” she called down the hall to the guard.

  Larry and another guard both looked up.

  “Better come down here and help them out,” said the woman.

  Larry and the other guard sprinted down the hallway to the room.

  Larry opened the door.

  He was tackled by a huge werewolf. He yelled, going for his tranq gun.

  The other guard unholstered his own gun and sighted the wolf.

  But another wolf leaped out of the room, jaws gaping. It sprang onto the guard, sinking teeth into his neck.

  Blood spurted.

  The guard’s eyes widened. He let out a little squeak. And then the light in his eyes went out as he fell to the ground.

  Larry struggled to free his gun, gaping at his fellow guard’s body.

  The wolf on him swiped his face with one paw.

  Red, bleeding welts appeared on Larry’s cheek. Larry made a strangled yell.

  The wolf closed its jaws around his face and bit down.

  Larry’s face folded in half, blood and brain matter oozing through what was left of his nose.

  The woman at the desk stood frozen in horror, her hand at her chest.

  The wolves bounded over the dead guards. They ran for her, snarling.

  The woman turned and ran for the door.

  She tried the knob, but it was locked.

  Seeming to remember that she needed to swipe her badge, she fumbled for it where it hung around her neck.

  She shot a look over her shoulder.

  The wolves were only a few feet away, still coming.

  She jammed the badge into the slot by the door.

  The door opened.

  She scrambled through, just seconds ahead of the wolves.

  But she couldn’t get the doors closed in time, couldn’t get the wolves closed in there, safely locked away.

  Instead, the wolves hurled through the door behind her.

  Outside the prison wing, she was trapped in a small alcove. The elevators were in front of her.

  She turned away from them immediately and pushed open the door to the stairs.

  A swinging door.

  No way to close it.

  She screamed then. She hadn’t made noise before, but now a throaty cry ripped from her throat.

  She started up the stairs.

  The wolves were at her heels.

  They snarled, baring their long, white teeth.

  She took the stairs two at a time, gripping the railing, her breath coming in gasps.

  A wolf closed its mouth around her foot.

  She shrieked.

  But it was mostly her shoe. There was only a little blood. She aimed a blow at the wolf’s face, kicked the shoe off, heaved herself upward.

  She made it two more steps before her feet tangled themselves up.

  She tripped on the step, going down with a painful umph.

  Turning, she came face to face with the wolves’ dripping fangs.

  She screamed again.

  Screamed and screamed as the wolves bit her, breaking into her flesh, dragging out her organs.

  Screamed until her breath cut off.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Waking up was like madness passing through Dana’s body, like shaking off the the last dregs of a bad drunk—or so she imagined. Dana hadn’t drunk alcohol sinc
e she was a teenager. It was against SF policy, considering that wolves need to remain vigilant to keep their wolves in check. Plenty of werewolves who didn’t work for the SF drank alcohol, with apparently no ill effects, but the SF didn’t think that it was wise for those people working there to do so.

  She shifted back into human form, shuddering and sobbing. She remembered everything that had happened while she was shifted, but while she’d been in wolf form, she’d had no control over herself. She’d been taken over by a raging animal, an animal that had killed.

  Over and over again.

  Once she and Cole had gotten to the top of the steps, they’d come out in one of the offices up there. What they’d done could only be described as carnage.

  Eventually, the remaining SF workers had managed to get out of the office room and lock up the door, closing both her and Cole inside.

  Still, she and Cole had tried to escape, slamming their wolf bodies up against the door, howling for release.

  And now, it had passed.

  Dana stood up. Her bare body was splattered with blood. It was on her face. It was in her mouth.

  She whimpered, her fingers going to her lips.

  Cole was on the opposite side of the room, behind an overturned office desk. He’d been trying to get out one of the windows.

  The entire room was chaos, ripped papers fluttered over the floor, soaked crimson.

  There were… five, no six bodies lying in various places. Two on the floor, face down. One splayed out over a desk chair, throat ripped out and glistening. One with a silent scream of terror frozen on her face.

  Dana convulsed and vomited right on the carpet there.

  Cole was picking his way across the room towards her.

  She turned to him. “We killed these people.”

  He was just as blood-stained as she was. When he opened his mouth to speak, she saw that his teeth were stained red.

  She turned back and vomited again.

  “Dana, you need to calm down,” he said in a soft voice.

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, feeling hysterical. “Calm down? Calm down? Cole, we killed so many people.”

  “Not on purpose.” He patted her back gingerly.

  She couldn’t look at him. “Why weren’t we in control? You taught me to shift and to control myself. Why didn’t it work?”