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Bad, Very Bad Shifters- The Complete Mega Bundle

Page 56

by Daniella Wright


  Here, I'm treated more and more like a queen. Like someone who matters. Like I have something to contribute when it comes to conversation and sex. Feltan's hands rub over my left breast, and Arula on my right, as he kisses my neck with a smile. I'm drifting under their touches. My body quivers in the dim lighting, in the warm air, the sheets rustling beneath me. Feltan's erection presses against my thigh, and it's not long before he takes first turn, rolling on top of me and pushing into my wetness, igniting the heat there further. I sigh in ecstasy, and Arula kisses my lips, his tongue intermingling with mine as Feltan moves within. I spread my legs further, changing the angle he drives into me, and when Arula starts massaging my bundle of nerves whilst Feltan thrusts, the coiling tension in my stomach intensifies. It's good, because I can't actually come from normal sex – I need the stimulus of my nub, to feel those bolts of pleasure licking through my internal systems.

  It also helps if I like the people I'm with, because I can climax a whole lot faster. I like the way my body twitches and tenses up with the increased stimulus, though I have to keep telling myself to relax, because I know if I tense up too much, my muscles start aching more later. My body keeps wanting to convulse, to coil into itself before releasing like a spring, and these two men know how to elicit the orgasm out of me. My sighs and moans spur them into harder, stronger action, and it feels like every part of my body is being touched, and all of me is crackling with electricity, supercharging the air around us.

  It's nice to feel the different moods with sex. The thrill when it comes to the risqué types, from being blindfolded to being chained, being touched and tickled. Sometimes it’s with the sweet flare of brief pain, brushed over by immense pleasure afterward. Sometimes it's nice just to have lips pressing against mine, to have gentle movement and worship of my body, to see their eyes sparkle as they gaze into mine, and to watch as they come, either with each other, or with me.

  I used to always think three-ways would be too confusing, because how are you supposed to act? Wouldn't one person always be kind of the third wheel, or left out? But it's not like that at all.

  Instead, I find myself in a situation I never expected, but never want to leave.

  Maybe I can find the will to phone up my family again. In a month. A year. A decade. Just to see how they're doing. Just to remind myself that I'm lucky I got out of there when I did.

  When I come, it's with a series of gasps as my body judders, though I'm not done yet. Arula takes his place inside me as they switch positions, and my body, already sweet and sensitive, now vibrates further, tumbling me into a second orgasm, as Feltan rests his fingers on my already slick nub. I'm so impossibly wet down there, gasping with joy, the lust and affection burning me to cinders, though I endure all the same.

  I can't say I arrived here in the right way. I can't say for the first few days I was full of fear and doubt. But I've thought a lot since, and felt things I never got to feel before. My former life has been slipping away, the stresses of daily life almost forgotten under the ease of life in the mountains.

  I can't say this kind of life is for everybody. But it is for me. I feel alive. I feel happy. And that's enough, right?

  Sold To The Nasty Beasts

  ~ Bonus Story ~

  A Steamy Dragon & Werewolf Shifter Menage

  Alyse Manson is a journalist, with a habit of chasing stories – particularly the kind of stories that out bad people. She considers herself a kind of hero in that aspect. A social justice warrior, though others might mock her for that kind of thing.

  However, when she hears rumors of a trafficking ring in the shifter club, Night Vision, she goes there, and ends up snagging something bigger than she expected. A shifter watches her in the club. A man with gray eyes, wearing the tag of the creature he can transform into – a dragon.

  He’s not the only shifter she’ll meet. There’s a wolf one as well, connected to this case. And it’s not long before they’re all in the same boat together, doing things neither of them ever imagined…

  * * *

  Chapter One

  They say that some things are best left untouched. You don’t want to go near the bad stories. The ones where human suffering is rife, where the stench of the dead coats the air, where the streets are full of bombs and the children are full of tears.

  Only the brave and the stupid would risk their lives to try and grab those stories. Then you have me, who is neither brave, or stupid. Just ambitious. These are the stories people want to read. Not the ones where some celebrity got a boob job somewhere, or those scroungers who have never worked a day in their lives. No, those stories come and go like mayflies. They flit in and nip at you with their empty headlines, their filler words, and then they vanish out of sight.

  But then there are stories like the mass genocide in Rwanda. A child crying his heart out, covered in dust and blood from the bombs that wrecked his city, his eyes with that haunting, half dead stare. They grip you. It transfers you into a place of horror, and leaves you gasping at what you’ve seen.

  And as an investigative journalist, those are the kind of stories I want my hand to produce. The ones that remind us of just how fucked up our world is – and the heroes that do everything they can to clean it up. I’ve hit a few good ones in the time I’ve been working for The Sun Express. I was first on the scene when the mass shooter started popping bullets into a shopping complex, and I seized some of the footage on my phone, and interviewed the relatives of the dead, and the brave souls who tackled the gunman head on. I broke a few sex trafficking rings by going undercover as a potential prostitute, and my latest hit’s been the tale of a cancer sufferer, who had all their funds stolen by an embittered relative, who then splurged it all on drink and drugs.

  I had some good reviews for that one, and a lot of anger, too, because no one likes to imagine that someone they thought they trust would stab them in the back. But they do. Every single day. Generating thousands upon thousands of stories.

  I examine myself in the mirror, where my brown hair is tucked up into a high ponytail. My brown eyes – a boring color, honestly, but hey, not everyone’s blessed with fabulous genes, right? – stare out and flick around my untidy room. Clothes lie on the floor, and I keep meaning to get around and go to the laundrette at some point. I put it off, because I feel tired after coming back from the press office, or I’m hungry, or I want to catch up with the latest season of whatever I’m watching, or I just can’t be bothered to lift my ass off the sofa or from my laptop screen long enough to deal with the shit-pile of clothes.

  I’m already chasing another story, as well. I neaten my dark green top and black jeans, and check how my black handbag looks. I have my word app on my Samsung Galaxy f5, and an attachable keyboard so I’m not pressing with my thick fingers onto the tiny screen. I don’t look like I’m seeking a good time, but I look like the kind of person you might sit next to and enquire about their life. And I have a lie on my tongue – that I recently broke up with my boyfriend, that I’m just trying to escape from the house, and maybe talk to a friendly stranger to air out my woes.

  I don’t have a boyfriend, because the last one I had left me four years ago for a girl who had barely hit puberty. Like, you know, I’m not old. I’m twenty-five. Still in my prime. Still ambitious and climbing up the work and social ladder. But for some reason, my boyfriend turned out to be a pedophile, so I have that going for me.

  I apply incarnadine lipstick and pucker up, making sure nothing’s smudged. With a last layer of eyeliner and long lash mascara, I’m ready to go and hunt my next story.

  My plan is to hit the shifter exclusive club downtown Phoenix, and probe carefully into their lives. There’s been rumors of women disappearing, and some people, usually the racist blowhards, have been pointing their grubby fingers at the Night Vision club. Word of mouth has it that there’s an actual slave trade ring, right in the heart of this sophisticated, equality focused club. If I can tease out the roots of this story and find an element o
f truth in it, it could blow up relations between shifters and humans as we know it in Phoenix. If shifters – and humans, because there’s always some bastard looking to profit out of sex and child prostitution – are operating in this club, then the outrage will boil over. Just like all that shit with Backpage.com, where no matter how many lawsuits are filed against that site for advertizing and blatantly promoting child prostitution, their lawyers keep bouncing off the complaints and winning lawsuits by throwing money around like it’s unlimited. It’s disgusting, but it’s exactly how all ultra-capitalist societies work.

  You don’t have the money, you’re fucked. So it’s up to people like me to uncover the truth for them. If women and girls are being scooped up under our noses, I will discover it.

  Taking a deep breath, satisfied with what I see in the mirror, I go to my cellphone and phone up my friend, Marvin. He’s going to be my fake gay wingman. The wingman being the fake part – not the gay. He’s agreed to do so, as long as I buy all the drinks, because he gets uncomfortable around shifters. I phone my friend, and he picks up after two rings.

  “Alyse, hey. Are you done? I just need to grab some bread from the corner shop and stuff my face, then I’ll be over.”

  “Hi Marvin. And yeah, great. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Of course! Alright, laters, ho.”

  “Laters, bitch.” I grin and hang up, buoyed up and ready to go to war. There’s a story to be found. It’s in the air, and I can taste it. I visualize how the newspaper will look, with the black ink printed out. I smell the fresh, burnt aroma of it, feel the rustle of the paper under my fingertips. I imagine thousands upon thousands of people stopping to glance briefly at the headlines. Some of them scooping the paper, mouths open in astonishment, others shaking their heads, walking by, then casually relating what they saw to a friend later on.

  It excites me, to know the power my words can have. To uncover the truth. And I’ll be damned if I don’t smell something in the rumors that float around our beloved city.

  But first, I need to make sure I’m convincing enough to look like I belong there. Shifter groupies are an eccentric type. They’re the non-conformists of society, the ones who like rebelling against their parents to such a degree that they’ll flirt with danger or go to things they shouldn’t. I don’t look rebellious, and I’m slightly older than the average crowd age, but my backstory should serve the purpose.

  Meeting up with Marvin, who is all smiles and tussled dark hair and red pinstripe shirt, I leap into his car and take a ride to the Night Vision club, my heart pulsing strangely. I’m hoping I’ll be able to sell it off that I’m just looking to have a good night out. I can’t be seen writing away in there, not unless I engage well with a shifter and they’re willing to tell me more information than what I’d take for granted. Marvin cracks me some terrible puns as he drives and we wait at the red traffic lights, and I zone out and put on my Pokémon Go app, just to try and swipe some of the stops and any spawns that I might be speeding past. I don’t like the game so much myself, but it can be fun to see a new critter appear on the map. I mostly log on to get my first catch and first stop of the day.

  When we park nearby Night Vision, it takes us a few minutes to walk to the entrance. Right now, it’s still a drinking place – and in fact, it’s a little out of odds with what I’m used to, because the main focus is on drinking, on the arcade games, the pool table and the darts board, with only a small area for dancing, so it could hardly be called a club. The dance area doesn’t open up until after ten. Marvin and I sit at the main bar, where two people are fronting – and we can’t help but notice that both of them are shifters. One wears an otter tag, and the other wears an eagle tag.

  Pretty diverse segment of shifters.

  “Can I help you?” The otter tag man says, and he gives me and Marvin a tentative smile. He doesn’t have a name sewn onto him, so I can’t address him by it.

  “Can we try the house drink?” I ask, rewarding a smile back. “It’s my first time here. I like seeing the cocktails places like this come up with.”

  “Coming right up,” the otter shifter confirms. “Want it on tab or to pay upfront?”

  I purse my lips. “Pay upfront. I’m terrible at tracking my money otherwise.”

  The otter shifter nods, and he scoops up two small bottles, both labelled with something in a different language, and hands them over. “We prepare a few of the drink on hand. It’s a type of cherry flavored beer grown in the monasteries of western Belgium. Not the strongest we have to offer, but we’re not trying to get you drunk in one glass.” He flashes a charming smile, and I laugh and pay him five dollars, which strikes me as a reasonable price for something exported from so far away.

  Marvin examines the pinkish drink distastefully, unsure if he wants to try it out, but I insist, winking, even as I scout the current crowd. We came here at around nine in the evening, and the crowd isn’t what I expect at all. I mean, I suppose I kind of have this image of shifters in my head looking like the animals they turn into, though I know it’s hard to distinguish shifters unless they’re wearing the tags that display their animal identity. The otter bartender doesn’t look like an otter at all, no droopy face or sort of dignified, noble expression, or a whiskery mustache.

  I do notice, however, by tracking the tags in the room, that there’s a lot of predatory shifters in this establishment. Lion. Tiger. Wolf. My eyes almost pop out of my skull when I spot a dragon shifter, and a lindworm. The dragon’s a four legged, winged, snappy beast. The lindworm’s a two legged, wingless, serpentine beast, possessing a similar kind of body to eastern mythology dragons. The faces the tags are attached to aren’t bad, either. If anything, most of the shifters have something appealing to them. I don’t know if it’s some kind of animal lure, or just a hardwired fascination built in the human brain, but I find it hard to take my eyes off most of them.

  The dragon shifter has a fearsome presence in the room, the kind that creates a one meter space around him, and he doesn’t walk – he prowls with purpose, holding a dangerous gleam in his eyes. I can’t tell their color from this distance, but they’re light. Not brown, like mine. So they could be blue or green or purple like a Targaryen for all I know.

  “Is it just me,” Marvin says, nursing his drink, clearly uncomfortable and possibly regretting his decision to come out with me, “but is there a disproportionate number of men here?”

  It’s true. For every women, there’s at least three men. Another thing, all the women are human females, too. Human males like Marvin are quite rare, but I see a few, enough to know that we won’t be pinpointed and suspected as to our true purpose – which is to gather information. I soak in the establishment with my senses. I hear soft conversation and faint background music, though I don’t recognize the band. The stools beneath us have a soft pad and a bar to rest our feet upon, but we’re all forced into forward slumping positions in the end. The beer has the tangent odor of alcohol, along with a sickly sweet fruit aura, and when it tumbles down my throat, the sweetness fills me up. I have to concede it’s not bad. Not bad at all. Enough to consider making this my second drink as well, and I can tell the alcohol content will allow me to drink a few of these before I start sinking into the drunken realm of no return.

  I certainly can’t lose control here. Not with so many predators around, which is making little alarm bells ring. I wonder if it’s a correlation that predators might have something to do with the rumors of disappearances. Maybe it’s not just trafficking. Maybe it’s meat hunger.

  Though I can’t be certain.

  “So, what should we do with your thing?” Marvin at least has the grace not to say “investigation” out loud, but I put on a sad face anyway, exaggerating my sorrow.

  “Oh, I don’t want to talk about Jeff. He’s the worse. I just wanted to get out of the house because I’m piling up the tissues and I think it might be nice to remember other people exist!” I let out a huge sob for good measure. Marvin tries very ha
rd to not smile or crack a rib from laughter as he leans over to pat me on the back.

  “It’s okay, Alyse. It’s about time you got yourself out that house. Jeff isn’t the end of the world, don’t let him get to you. Look, we might meet some amazing people tonight, yes?”

  “Jeff… you know, he took my flat-screen television. He even took Mr. Tibbles the cat, and left me with the month’s rent to pay, all by myself. I don’t know how I survived that month.”

  “But you did,” Marvin said soothingly, rubbing my back, shaking silently from impulsive mirth, but otherwise going along with the act. We continue our fake conversation for a few minutes, and using my peripheral vision, I spot that there’s about eight or nine shifters listening in interest – including the dragon, and two tigers. When I stamp in the “gay best friend” act, I figure that the bait’s set. It’s far more effective to approach people myself to seem confident, but I know that the pimps and suspicious types are usually the ones to do the approaching, because they have to scout out the crowd. I look relatively young in my outfit, and people still mistake me for an eighteen year old, even though I’m hitting my mid-twenties. There are no conspicuously younger women in this joint that make you question their ages, but there’s enough high schooler types for me to think they’re striking out in their rebellious stage.

 

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