The Catalyst (a paranormal romance: Preternaturals Book 3) Read online

  A sick thought entered his mind as he considered that perhaps a werewolf had gotten a human pregnant. It wasn’t common, but it wasn’t unheard of either. It would have to be a very strong wolf to have a human mother and still be born in his fur. Maybe the pup had been the product of a one-night stand, and she’d been out somewhere, had the baby, and freaked out. Maybe she’d just abandoned it.

  If the father had been near her at all within a couple of weeks of conception, he would have sensed his offspring inside her, and wolves tended to be pretty possessive about that sort of thing. But if it had been a one-night stand and they never crossed paths again, he might not know about it. Could the girl have been a local, and the wolf just been passing through? Maybe he was a lone wolf without a pack or family and no interest in one. Z could identify with that.

  Maybe Z’s hunt was a wild goose chase. As cute as the pup was and as much as he liked the little fella, he couldn’t imagine being saddled with the kid until he was old enough to leave. Plus, he could be stuck isolated with no pack, too. A wolf that hadn’t been socialized with other wolves as a pup stood zero chance of being taken into a pack as an adult. If he couldn’t find the family, maybe he should look for a pack to adopt him.

  Z looked up and realized he’d been on auto-pilot the whole trip to the Java Junkie. He glanced over at the courthouse’s big, brick clock tower. Almost nine o’clock. It was Monday, so the coffee shop was about to close.

  The bell over the door went off as he stepped inside. Cherry was behind the counter, just where he knew she’d be. The place was deserted.

  She looked up and gave him her sly, porn star smile. “I’m sorry, I just closed down the register. I was about to lock up. I could give you a coffee on the house, though, if you like. Just don’t tell my boss.”

  “I’m not here for that.” Z, you stupid son of a bitch. Don’t do it. You can’t afford to piss off the keeper of the coffee, and you know her. She likes you too much. She might not be on the same fuck and flee page you’re on. But Z ignored the inner voice and flashed a dark smile, tossing in a wink to garnish the flirtation.

  Cherry’s eyes lit up and she returned a one thousand-watt smile of her own.

  “Lock up and let’s go. Yeah?”

  It took her a couple of seconds to make her head move in a nod, then another few seconds and a throat clearing to manage a breathless yeah in return.

  The barista tossed the washrag on the counter, ignoring the biscotti crumbs trailing down the length of it, and looped her arm in his, shutting off the lights and locking the door behind them.

  Z continued to ignore the inner voice’s ranting. If ever there was a time he needed to get laid, it was now. Fiona was right. He could do nothing but use her and toss her out. And she deserved better than that. No woman’s first time should be with a playboy. It should mean something. The guy should be there the next day. There should at least be the hope of a relationship after, or at least some type of friends-with-benefits package. Z could offer none of the above.

  He gave Cherry his helmet as she hopped on the back of the motorcycle. “Won’t you need this?” she asked, as if she would refuse the gallant gesture.

  “You need it more than me. I’m durable.”

  She laughed. It was the laugh that had amused him, maybe even turned him on a little, but now it set his teeth on edge. Still, he revved the engine and took them to the motel five blocks down the street.

  Twenty minutes later they were in a room. It was clean and nice enough, but still appropriate for a single night with a glorified waitress. It wasn’t where you took your girlfriend, which was good. He didn’t want to send any inappropriate signals. Z peeled his shirt off and reclined on the bed. He couldn’t seem to work up a chuckle or smirk at the way she practically fainted over his physique.

  The female reaction to him had never gotten old. Until now. He stood and paced, feeling like he’d been locked up at the zoo with some stranger gawking and staring and admiring. If this was how he defined freedom, why did he feel so caged?

  Cherry was in the process of unbuttoning her top, and the oppressive, trapped feeling came on stronger, making the room shrink to half its size. He wanted to crawl out of his skin. He wanted to shift and… he didn’t know what. He just had to break free of whatever this was.

  “Stop,” he said, to try to calm the chaos in his mind.

  “What? Is something wrong?” Cherry looked at him with a mixture of concern and apprehension.

  “I can’t do this.”

  Her eyes flashed. It was time for the anger portion of the evening. He was batting a thousand tonight. Maybe he could try to piss off a nun next.

  “You know I’ve been sending you signals for months. You take me up on it, and now you’re rejecting me? Is this some kind of game to you?”

  Z suppressed a growl and pulled his shirt back on. “No. No game. I just can’t do this. Whatever you think, it’s not personal.”

  “Like hell it’s not personal. You get your fucking coffee elsewhere from here on. If you come into the Java Junkie again, I’ll tell my boss you’ve been starting trouble. Half of our patrons would back me. You give them the willies. There’s something not right about you.”

  Z just shrugged. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, Cherry. It would have just been tonight, anyway.”

  “It’s worth shit, is what it’s worth, you son of a bitch.” Her hands were shaking, part in anger and part due to embarrassment, as she was probably wondering if there was something wrong with her and her desirability that had caused his inability to bring himself to sleep with her. She buttoned the last few buttons, sent him an evil glare that he wasn’t sure didn’t come with a curse attached, and slammed the door behind her.

  He followed her outside, his shoes abandoned in the room. “Do you want a ride back? It’s dark out.”

  “Screw you!” she shouted over her shoulder, disappearing down the street and into the night. As angry as she was, any thug would steer clear.

  Z shut the door and flopped back on the bed to fall into a fitful sleep.

  Chapter Four

  Jane stood motionless in a white room, her eyes glued to several video monitors. She jumped and turned at the voice of her adjustment angel. For a heavenly being, he was short, bald, and quite surly.

  “You should go enjoy heaven, it’s not healthy to stay in this room,” Rodolfo said. He looked nothing like a Rodolfo.

  But it was her room, the room that let her see what she knew she should let go of and close the door to. There were two monitors in particular that her eyes had been riveted to for months. On one, the image rarely changed, and at times she wondered if it was up-to-date—if it was working.

  Cole sat with his head in his hands, a bottle next to him. She’d watched him lose himself so many times inside that bottle. The den was littered with dozens of paintings, all of her bleeding to death. He’d gotten a vision too late, and thought the pup had died, too. He’d searched for her body, but it had already been taken by a wild animal.

  When he’d returned, he’d painted the vision over and over, as if it were penance, as if painting it just one more time would bring her back to him. After that, while he’d been strong enough to shift into his wolf form, he’d huddled in the bed and whimpered for days. As he stopped eating enough to shift, he’d turned to alcohol as his last option to mute the pain.

  He was useless to the pack like this. The only remaining sign of his alpha status was the black tribal tattoo around his arm. The beta had all but taken over while her mate mourned. Their baby was still out there, and Jane was the only one who knew about it.

  Her eyes flicked to the other screen: her baby wolf with the panther therian and now the witch. Jane’s life had been a strange one: born human with vampire blood, tormented by the bloodsuckers, rescued by a werewolf, and made into his mate. The magical blood that had damned her had later set her free in Cole’s arms. And now here she was, in the land of the dull. Her former incarnations were somethin
g she couldn’t process or think about at the moment. She was too attached to this most recent lifetime. All she cared about right now was getting back to the man she loved and their pup.

  “Please, I have to go back. You have to send me back.” She’d had this conversation with the angel daily, sometimes multiple times a day.

  “I’ve told you a thousand times,” Rodolfo said, “You can reincarnate, but your memories won’t hold together. It’s a gamble if you’ll remember anything worth knowing. And the time line is off. Being reborn now won’t help your pup and your mate.”

  Jane’s hands clenched and unclenched at her sides. He was such a wanker. She wanted nothing more than to punch him in the mouth, but violence wasn’t allowed here. “Why give us a room like this?”

  “We let people say goodbye in their own time. I shouldn’t have indulged you so long. Sometimes we just have to take the room away.”

  The idea of losing the window into her old life put her in a full panic. Jane’s face was tear-stained by the time she found her voice again. “Please. Please send me back.”

  He ignored her plea, instead staring at the monitors, a thoughtful expression on his face. Such a smug bastard. As her adjustment angel, he was there to help her get her bearings in heaven and to act as her tour guide.

  Except for the official tour, she’d only spent a little time outside her mansion. It was what she’d always been told Christian heaven was like. The reality of it made her shudder. There were streets of gold and lots of worshiping and prayerful meditation. Everyone wore glistening white gowns, and the birds would never shut the hell up with their happy songs. Her surroundings were perfect, idyllic. But it was so… boring and empty.

  A couple of times when she’d been walking beside the ridiculously clear river, she’d caught the gaze of someone who she could have sworn shared her misgivings. But nobody questioned. She knew why. If heaven was as it had been described down to details like golden streets, was hell’s description equally accurate? And what would happen to them if they asked questions? Would they be sent there?

  She’d managed to pry the knowledge out of Rodolfo. Hell was where she’d been. Jane supposed it was all about perspective, because heaven was inside the warmth of Cole’s arms. This was hell.

  In heaven, everybody had their own mansion. It was frivolous and pointless. Husbands and wives lived next door to each other and waved and said hello on occasion, but the intimacy they’d shared in their human lifetime was gone. It never got dark. There was no weather. No one slept. No one had sex. They ate sometimes, but that was the only genuine pleasure. Still, it felt muted against the backdrop of too much agonizing perfection.

  And some dark part of her longed for the struggle.

  She scrubbed the tears off her face with her arm. “They need me.”

  The angel turned, as if perhaps she’d suffered enough to satisfy some quota only he was aware of. “There is a way.” His voice was beguiling, going up a register on the last word.

  A devil’s bargain was something struck in a seedy motel or in some murky corner behind a dumpster. If the devil didn’t have literal horns, he’d at least be wearing a black coat and have two days worth of beard growth, and a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. But wasn’t the devil a fallen angel? And if he could fall, this Rodolfo character couldn’t fare much better.

  Although Jane and the angel were in clean surroundings—too clean if you asked her—the warning light flashed in her mind. Even so, she latched onto the lifeline he’d tossed. She didn’t care what she had to do—accept some awful punishment, walk across hot coals—if there was the smallest hope of being reunited with Cole and their child, she’d do it.

  “You would never be able to return to heaven, of course,” he said, laying the trap.

  She fought back the sarcastic retort rising in her throat. No way to return to this? Oh, sign her up for the exit door, please. She’d take an eternity stuck in hell where at least there were challenges, things to do, something worth fighting for, instead of the maintenance of the unmarred status quo.

  “There is no guarantee he’ll want you,” he continued.

  “Why wouldn’t he want me?”

  “You’ll be a demon, a succubus.”

  Jane swallowed around the lump forming in her throat. On the one hand, the idea of being such a powerful being, of never being able to be killed or be someone else’s victim again, was heady. But she knew there must be things he wasn’t telling her. There seemed to be a nudge-nudge, wink-wink in there she wasn’t grasping.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “You don’t think that’s the catch? My, my Miss Tanner, how you ever ended up here is a great mystery.”

  “Mrs. Riley,” she said, annoyed.

  “Last I checked, werewolves don’t get married, so you are Miss Tanner according to our books and scrolls.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Demon me up. I need to get back to my mate and child.”

  The angel smiled. Not a friendly smile.

  ***

  Cain was in his tent draining the life from a woman when he felt another of his kind enter the world, fresh and new. He shoved the girl to the floor and stood, alert, looking around for his pants.

  “Well, you just got a reprieve. I suggest you stop following strange men home from here on out,” he said, spotting his pants behind the large cushion he and the girl had been sprawled on.

  The woman’s eyes were still glassy, the lust he’d induced in her not yet abated. She looked like she was going to cry, desperate for him to keep touching her.

  Oh for God’s sake. “Enough,” he said. He hadn’t been hungry. He wasn’t sure why he did this. On the outside he was a happy hedonistic incubus, but inside, empty. And all the demon gluttony in the world wouldn’t solve it. But now wasn’t the time for self-pity. He had a new demon to initiate into his world.

  The anger boiled inside him. Fucking angels. They turned demons and left them to fend for themselves with no knowledge of what to do or how to survive—messes for Cain to clean up.

  The memory of his own turning—eight thousand years old as it was—still burned fresh in his mind. Nobody had been there to help him. He’d had to figure it all out on his own. The only thing they’d given him was directions to his newly-created dimension, intel they chose not to share with any other new demon. No, that was the burden they’d always make Cain bear, finding them and bringing them to safety.

  He glanced down at the woman on the cushion with disdain. She crawled toward him, reaching for him.

  “Stop it, we’re done,” he said. When she still seemed hypnotized by his erotic thrall, he reached for a glass of water and threw it in her face. That brought her back to her senses.

  “You asshole!”

  “Yeah. That’s right. I’m an asshole. Stop going home with pretty monsters, you stupid trollop.”

  Sure, he’d used the thrall, but not until he’d already had her by more natural means. If she hadn’t followed him out of the bar like some lost puppy, he might have left her alone. Probably not. But maybe. There was that thin hope. She’d still followed him of her own free will outside into the darkness with no witnesses. That was stupid, and Cain felt compelled to punish stupidity.

  She reached for the brandy and was about to chuck it at him in her temper tantrum over the idea that she wasn’t the most important thing in his world after only an hour in her company. Oh no she didn’t. That was the good stuff.

  “Sleep,” he commanded. She slumped onto the cushion and the alcohol dropped safely out of her hands and onto the soft, fluffy fabric.

  On his way out of the tent, he scooped her up and passed her off to another demon, ordering her to be returned to her town. Beyond that, she was on her own. If some other nasty got her, well, that’s what happened when you went home with dark and alluring strangers. Let that be a lesson.

  Considering the fact that he’d just pulled her memories of the night with the order to sleep, she’d be right back
in that bar acting stupid again tomorrow night. Maybe he’d just kill her. Such a waste of DNA. No one needed her to reproduce. It would be his gift to humanity. Survival of the fittest was yesterday’s story. How about survival of the smartest for a change?

  He grabbed a blanket on his way out of the dimension. He never knew the state the new demon would be in. They could be in shock or traumatized. It always pissed him off the way they were brought to him. Could the angels not make the transition more humane? Were they not supposed to be the good guys?

  As evil as demons were purported to be, at least they took care of their own, which wasn’t any different from humans who cared little for other species besides themselves. So why did humans get so many chances?

  Cain’s dimensions had multiple portal points allowing them to enter the human world easily. Portal charms could be used if necessary to open a portal where one didn’t exist, but Cain didn’t like to do it too much. He worried that it unsettled the magic.

  The dimension was protected, given that the portal recognized the essence of demons like computers recognized thumbprints and only let demons pass. With the exception of Cole—Cary Town, Washington’s werewolf pack alpha. Cain had given him a portal charm—several in fact—allowing him and his pack free access to escape the police state forming in their city.

  It wasn’t that Cain was a big humanitarian or… theriantarian as it were. Cole had helped him once. A witch had bound him in a glass bottle. It was humiliating. All it took to break the spell was shattering the bottle, but she’d put it in a protected place so no matter what he did, he couldn’t shatter it on his own.

  In an odd twist of fate, Cole had stumbled upon him, and in exchange for a portal charm, freed him. It was one of those things so embarrassing that he’d been willing to do Cole favors for the hush money factor as much as anything.