Wild Side (Dark Side Series: Book 2)

Twenty-One

With my monstrous stalker assuming the shape of my dead boyfriend, sleep, it seemed, was just not in the cards tonight. I sat up wearily. Zakar sat beside my legs. Igor grumped and kneaded the sheets down at my ankles. Her scraggly tail curled around her snout. Yellow eyes leered up at me then blinked closed as the demon's hand fell between her ears. Of course the shadow cat would hate Caelan and settle against Zakar. That was one case, I thought, where maybe my beloved pet was not quite the best judge of character.

But she probably sensed a strange kinship with the slinky demon patting my thigh.

"Speaking of monsters," I began, eager to change the subject lest thoughts of Caelan resulted in another trip into the woods in death's form. "Why's Rhetta different from me? We're sisters."

"Not very close though, are you? Not very kind of her, either, trading you in to skip town with her baby daddy."

Too tired to do more than stare, I flicked his hand off my body and drew my legs to my chest.

Even in the dark, it was incredible to watch a creature steal another man's charming smile and twist it into an ugly sneer. Everything about his movements, the way he lifted his eyebrows, the way his hands moved, the little fidget Luc would do when he was getting comfortable, it was all there, and yet, it all seemed just slightly off in a way I couldn't pinpoint. "What are you depends on how you died, little lightning bug. You gave yourself to me. Your sister didn't. Poor, hapless Rhetta. A pup with three legs in the grave before she even realized the horror of the filth she'd become. The wolf had taken that tiny body and was dying inside it. There was no reset button at that point. I had to claim her as a werewolf if I wanted to claim her at all."

"Why did you?"

A toxic sense of apprehension lingered in the air of his pause. "Are you familiar with what's been said about creatures very old? How time passes for them, how they wait, how they slumber, how they plan?" He reached across me, leaned his face, Luciano's face, a breath from mine. His thin hand caressed my book's spine. "Be mindful of what you read, Mirelle. Historians can only rely what they've found."

I slapped his cheek. My palm connected; there was a sharp clap like thunder, and then Igor and I were alone on the bed. But there was a low, rumbling chuckle all around, a receding sound that made my skin crawl. Zakar's presence finally ebbed into the shadows. A pair of green eyes vanished into the wallpaper with a faint, "Watch your back tomorrow night. Man didn't domesticate the werewolf."

*

In some sense of the word, I found sleep. Time passed between pulling Igor into my arms for some much-needed shut-eye and sitting in the back seat of Caelan's car with my arms in a deathgrip around the cat while my coffee cooled in the cupholder. I just didn't remember it. I just zombied my way through the morning until we'd packed and stopped at the nearest Dunkin Donuts.

We'd tried me sitting in the passenger seat with Igor in back. Got about as far as a mile when she grew bored of pawing at clicky plastic seat belts and decided to become offended. She leaped into the front, got her claws dug into Caelan's lap and pawed all up and down the dash. So I grabbed her, got my skin handed back to me for my troubles, and since she wouldn't stop yowling at the werewolf, we stopped the car and I headed for the backseat. It didn't make much of a difference; more or less just let the man concentrate on the road and not worry about being sideswiped by a thickly bristled wall of angry Maine Coon.

"You have to board the hellion," Caelan was saying over his shoulder.

"Where?"

"It's your monster," he continued, rubbing the pinpricks of daylight she'd torn in his leg. "You find a place willing to take that on. I would've left it with Rowtag."