by Megan Hart
“I’m sure you do, but what makes you think I’m even interested in him?” Monica crossed her arms.
“Shit, girl, you almost set the bayou on fire every time you looked at each other. You think I didn’t notice?” DiNero shook his head and shot her a grin. “I’ve never seen that man give anything that much attention in all the years he’s worked here, including every animal I’ve ever owned.”
She frowned. “That’s just...”
“He’s got a place near Bourbon Street,” DiNero told her. “And I’d like him to come back. It’s worth another donation to your vacation fund if you can convince him.”
“I don’t hunt people,” Monica said flatly. “If he wants to come back, he will.”
DiNero held up his hands, looking apologetic. “Fine, fine. Again, can’t blame a guy for asking. I guess I’ll just have to beg him myself.”
“No,” Monica said. “You know what... I’ll see what I can do.”
CHAPTER 15
Long days. Long nights. Booze and women and the rich copper taste of rare steaks.
Jordan had glutted himself on all of it. Sex and meat and all the things he tried so hard to deny himself because giving in to the hunger only made it that much harder to deny it the next time. He’d smashed the mirror in the bathroom, and now he took slow, lingering satisfaction in the way the glass glittered on the floor because he hadn’t cleaned it up.
There were other things he could’ve done, too. Crashed a car. Robbed a bank. Gotten in a fistfight with a motorcycle gang. The possibilities for mayhem were endless and alluring, and fuck it all, if he hadn’t had any sense of conscience, he’d have done all of it. Run wild in the streets, howling at the moon.
Instead, he wallowed in his small sins, all he allowed himself to indulge in. Tonight it was a glass of very expensive wine and a steak the size of his head, with all the trimmings. Later, he thought, he would find himself a woman or two or three and spend the night’s last hours reveling in naked flesh.
Except there was already a woman on his doorstep when he got home.
He knew her at once by her scent, and his lip curled. His dick got hard, too, immediately, and he hated himself for that. And her a little, too.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
She shrugged. “A few hours. Where were you?”
“Eating an enormous dinner. Drinking too much. How’d you find me?”
Monica stood when he came closer. She seemed to have been waiting a long time. She stretched, and fuck if watching her body move didn’t make him want to take her right there against his front door.
“I hunt down mythical beasts for a living,” she said. “You have an address and a credit-card statement and utility bills. You were easy to find.”
“What do you want?” He was a little drunk, not so much from the wine and the food but from seeing her again. Smelling her. He wanted to taste her with a real and physical longing.
“You,” she said simply.
Jordan heard his own low rumble in answer. She would think he was an animal for sure at that sound, he thought, but he couldn’t take it back now. Monica took a step closer.
“You,” she whispered again, offering her mouth.
He wasn’t going to kiss her. But there she was, soft and curvy, and that hair, that fucking hair spilling down her back and over his hands, and then she was in his arms and her mouth was on his and his knee pressed between her thighs, and in another second or so, he could be inside her, if he only...let...go.
“No,” Jordan muttered without moving away from her.
Monica pressed herself against him. “Take me inside. Fuck me. Then feed me. Then we’ll talk.”
It was the finest offer he’d ever had, but he hadn’t spent so many years learning to control himself to give in now, just like that. “What the hell do you want, Monica?”
She linked her fingers behind his neck. “I can’t stop thinking about you. I still dream, Jordan. And when I wake up, I reach for you. Not just anyone. You. I don’t know why.”
He reached behind her to unlock the door and push them both inside. He had a moment to feel ashamed of how he’d let the place get filthy. Maybe she wouldn’t notice in the dark.
“I’m not just a curiosity,” he told her. “What do you want to do, study me? Put me in a collection the way DiNero does with his pets?”
She shook her head, following him into the small kitchen, where he poured them each a drink. “No. If I wanted to do that, I’d have told Vadim about you.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. You’re not a freak or a curiosity. But I do want to learn more about you. Not just how you are in bed, which is very, very good, by the way.” She leaned to kiss him again, but briefly. “Jordan...you’re special.”
“Sure I am.”
She put her hands on his hips and pulled him closer to her. “Maybe it’s just sex. Maybe it’s only that. Or maybe it’s something else. I’m willing to see if there’s more to us than that. The best you can do is try.”
He backed her up against the kitchen counter but stopped himself from putting her on top of it and ripping her panties off, pushing up her skirt. Sinking into her heat. He shivered from the thought of it. Made a low noise.
“DiNero sent me here to find you. See if you’d come back.” Monica hopped up on the counter and drew him between her legs. “I told him I’d see what I could do.”
“So that’s why you’re really here.” He slid a hand between them, his thumb rubbing her through her panties. This time, she was the one who made the noise.
Her back arched a little. Her voice became raspy. “I know you love working there. Maybe not the guy himself, but the job? You love it. Don’t let me take that from you.”
“You think you could take anything from me?” He bent to nip at her neck, angry in a way but also so turned on he could barely think straight.
When she took his face in her hands and held him still so she could look in his eyes, the entire world shifted. “I don’t know about taking, but I’m hoping you’ll let me try to give you something.”
His throat dried. “What’s that?”
“Me,” she whispered and kissed him again. “It’s really all I have.”
There was no holding back then. Her skirt went to her waist, her panties torn free. He was deep inside her right after that, and her nails raked his back through his shirt. They fucked hard and fast, rattling the cupboard doors. Her body clenched around his, sending him over the edge, and she cried out his name.
Breathing hard, Jordan blinked, a realization flooding through him. He shook his head, not sure what to think. What to do.
“What?” Monica asked him.
“It’s... I’m not...hungry. Anymore.”
She gave him a curious look, then one of understanding. She pulled his mouth to hers again, her hand cupping his chin to hold him there for the kiss. Her other went behind his neck.
“I understand,” she told him. “You feed me, too.”
Later, after a shower and cleaning up the glass and another meal, this time of fresh pasta and salad and bread, they sat at the table together. She’d been quiet, mostly, and that was fine with him. He was still trying to think about where this was going, or what it meant. She’d made him an offer. Just try, she’d said. But could he?
“I didn’t think you’d want this,” Monica said, indicating the plates in front of them.
He looked at her. She wasn’t meeting his gaze, and he thought he knew why. “No?”
“You said you’d had a big dinner. I didn’t think you’d want to eat again,” she said.
He waited for her to look at him, and when she did, he took her hand and pulled her onto his lap. “There’s something you should know about me, Monica. Something that might make a
difference in what you asked me.”
She looked solemn, slightly frowning. “Okay.”
He kissed her hard enough to make her gasp. “Even if I’m not hungry, I can always eat.”
It took her a second or two before the light of understanding filled her gaze, but when it did, she laughed. She kissed him, softer than he’d done. She nuzzled his neck, making him shiver.
“So let me feed you,” she told him. “And we’ll see how the rest of it goes.”
* * * * *
DARK DREAMS
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
CHAPTER 1
Stephanie Adams wasn’t going to wake up.
Not if she could help it anyway, even with the low bleat of her phone alarm begging for her attention. It would get louder. There’d be another. She’d set a total of six alarms on her phone, each progressively closer together. She also had an additional four alarm clocks, the old-fashioned windup kind, set to sound at similar intervals. One of them had been designed for hearing-impaired users and featured a blaring white light that was supposed to sear her eyeballs into opening.
She was not going to wake up.
Not now, not so close to this, the end of things, and surely it had to be the end, didn’t it? Almost six months of work, she’d come so close, and now she was finally going to find him. Crouching low on the dark and shifting carpet of pine needles that were part of her anchoring spot, Stephanie curled her fingers in the prickly coolness. She breathed in, out, each breath a conscious effort because here in the Ephemeros, she didn’t really need to breathe. She sipped at the air instead.
She could smell him. She didn’t know his name. Hadn’t seen his face. All she had was the softly drifting scent of him, not a cologne or a soap or any sort of perfume. It was the tang of sweat and blood and dirt; it was something else all tangled up with that and woven into a tapestry of sight and sound, left behind every time she’d managed to get close.
Everything worked together here in the dream world. Tasting sounds, seeing smells. That sort of thing. For the lucky ones who could control what happened to them and around them, too, the dream world was a playground. For those who couldn’t, it could sometimes be less fun.
“Where are you?” Stephanie murmured as she let her fingers draw patterns in the gritty soil before she stood to dust off her palms on the seat of her leather trousers. Leather—she’d have laughed at herself if she weren’t concentrating so hard on staying here instead of being pulled into consciousness. In the waking world, Stephanie would no more have worn leather than she would’ve slapped a baby. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
The buzz of her alarm threatened to pull her from the dream world, but she forced herself to stay here. Damn it, why had she come so close to catching this creep now, when she’d had to schedule an early meeting that couldn’t be missed? It was the only reason she’d set the alarms in the first place, so she’d be sure not to oversleep.
She’d spent months tracking the shaper who’d been wreaking havoc, using information he’d gleaned here from unwitting shapers in the Ephemeros to empty their bank accounts and run up credit-card debt in the real world. Of all the cases she’d worked, it was far from the worst or most dangerous trick a power-hungry shaper had pulled, but Vadim had been adamant that this was a problem for the Crew to solve. You couldn’t have people taking advantage of what they could do in the dream world. It messed with the balance of things in a way Stephanie would never pretend to be philosophical enough to understand.
Again the alarm pulled at her awareness, but she fought off waking. Here in her anchoring spot, where she was strongest, she was able to hold on to her dream self a lot longer, but even so, the edges of the world had started rippling. Stephanie had spent too many hours asleep and dreaming when she could’ve been living to let go of this now. She had to find him and stop him, before he caused any more trouble.
She sent out a small push of energy to reshape the landscape around her. Out of her forest, into what she thought of as the dark desert. Ringed by black mountains, the sky permanently the color of tar, this space was as close to emptiness as she could manage to shape without losing herself in the void. Just beyond the mountains, which would always be miles out of reach no matter how fast she ran toward them, blue-white lightning sliced apart the sky. Once, she’d seen a face peering through the cut in the atmosphere. Big fingers, pulling apart the edges. Fathomless eyes. Just the once, but that had been enough, because she’d never been able to convince herself she had not glimpsed the face of some god.
Now Stephanie pushed again, a nudge, sending out small tendrils of her will to draw the rogue shaper closer to her. Like a flower tempting a bee, she thought as the next steady, blaring throb of an alarm began pounding her ears. Come closer, she thought. Come and find me.
She’d flown in this world. Leaped high and floated down. She’d sunk to the bottoms of oceans without fear of drowning. She hadn’t faced much in the Ephemeros that scared her, and yet her heart now beat faster as at last she felt the answering push-pull of the other shaper. Anticipation, not fear, though she clenched her fingers into a fist and straightened her back, squaring her shoulders. Ready to fight.
The dreamers who’d faced him in their nightmares had described him as various entities. Vampire, werewolf, dark wizard. He’d played upon their fears to wrangle their personal data, which he’d then used in the real world to access their bank accounts, credit cards. Identity theft, and nearly untraceable because he hadn’t actually hacked into anything. He simply forced them to give him what he wanted to use, and in the dreams, they did.
“Come here,” Stephanie whispered again. She shaped a park bench. A stone path. A tree. She sent out small and seeking threads of her will and felt the Ephemeros respond around her.
And then...there he was.
A shadow. Tall, lean, but unmistakably male. No features that she could make out, but he wore an outfit that looked similar to hers. Leather pants, jacket with a flare at the tail, or maybe it was a shirt with a vest. Hard to tell against the black of the mountains behind him.
Stephanie straightened. “Come here.”
“Who are you?” The voice, low and raspy and rumbly, sent a vibration straight to the core of her stomach and then upward to the pit of her throat, making her feel sort of sick.
He wasn’t trying to push her or even to shape anything around them. Stephanie let her forefinger make a small circle, sending a spiral of sand spinning into a dust devil that danced toward him but fell apart before it made it even halfway. The other shaper, the one they’d been calling Mr. Slick, didn’t even move.
So, he wasn’t threatened by her. Okay, then. Well, she’d faced worse than some dude with a boner for charging up other people’s credit cards to keep himself living in style. She’d faced shapers who killed the sleepers they attacked in dreams. This guy was going to be a piece of cake.
Chocolate cake, thick with fudge frosting, a cherry on the top, ice cream nestled in the layers, whipped cream, candy, French fries, no, soft pretzels, pretzel sticks dipped into the sweetness, salt and sweet, and oh my God, she was so hungry, what was this in front of her, a plate, a tray, a trough, and Stephanie was going to dive face-first into the decadence and eat and eat and eat and...
White light blasted her eyelids, painting them with a reverse sort of lightning. She woke with a start and a low cry, her hands moving to shove her mouth full of all that d
elicious food, which of course was not really there. She sat up in bed, the blankets tangled at her waist, and let out a muttered curse.
“Bastard,” she said. “What a dirty trick.”
Then she let out a long series of sputtering laughs, because damn. How had he known exactly how to push her so she wouldn’t know she was being pushed? That hadn’t happened to her in a long, long time.
Sitting up, she swung her legs over the bed with a small groan. Then, scrubbing at her face and yawning, she stretched. Her phone rang and she glanced at it, thinking she wouldn’t answer, but it was Vadim.
“Hey, boss.”
“Terry says there were ripples last night. Are you just getting up?”
Terry was working a case in which the shaper was killing sleepers in the dream world. It didn’t always kill them in the real world, though it caused comas, heart attacks and strokes. If there were ripples, Terry would be sensing them, for sure. But Stephanie’s case wasn’t nearly as serious—it was important, as they all were, but it wasn’t going to kill anyone.
“I got close. Saw him. Spoke with about six potential victims who said they’d been approached by, in turn, a scary clown, a ventriloquist dummy, a shark, a vampire, and two said it was their ex-wives.” She laughed through another yawn. “Funny what really scares people.”
“Did they give up their information?”
“The frightened husbands did.” She chuckled again. “I’ll add it to the data sheet. I have a meeting with Kent this morning. I have to get going.”
They signed off. Stephanie scribbled down the information she could recall from her dream. She’d have to tell Kent she’d gathered this data from “sources” and let him think it was something to do with computer searches and stuff, but that was the nature of her job. It wasn’t as if she could stroll into his office and tell him she’d met these people in a dream, after all. He’d think she was nuts.
CHAPTER 2
Kent Gordon woke with a start, just before the sound of his alarm. He rolled with a groan to turn it off, then buried his face in the pillows. He did not want to get up. He wanted to stay in bed all day long.
