Strangers of the Night: Touched by Passion / Passion in Disguise / Unexpected Passion

She kneels next to him without bothering to check for a pulse. You can maybe survive a wound that leaves your trachea hanging out of your throat, your bones poking through the skin, but only with immediate medical attention. It’s very clear that her father went down alone. He won’t get up again.

She tries to cry and can’t. Later, she thinks she ought to have tried harder. He raised her, after all, in the absence of a mother. He did the best he could. But she thinks he wouldn’t have wanted her to weep, not because it was a sign of weakness, but because he’d passed from this life and into the next. The one he’d always taught her was the better one.

The rest of the house is empty. There are signs, left behind by other safe house users. A code—something like the symbols used by transient hobos in the thirties to distinguish friendly homes from those where a man looking for a meal and a hot shave would instead get a serious thrashing. This house, she reads, is no longer safe.

“No shit.” The words leak out of her on a tongue sore from being bitten.

In the kitchen, she finds no signs of struggle. In the fridge, a gallon of milk hasn’t turned, and she gulps it greedily although she doesn’t like milk. Her stomach bucks a protest, but she keeps it down. She spits a few times into the sink. Pink. Again. Clear this time. She puts the jug on the counter and both hands on the rim of the sink, gripping hard as the floor tips and tilts. When she’s once more gathered her balance, she uses the sink to wash her face and rinse her mouth. She watches the water swirl away the blood and bits of fur.

She stands there so long, she realizes the light outside has gone from night to day.

She’s lost time again, but this time remembers coming into the kitchen. Drinking the milk. Going to the sink. She remembers her father is dead, and that someone before her tried to warn them that this house was not safe, but she still can’t recall what brought them here.

She remembers she hadn’t spoken to him in months, though. Before this. How they’d had a final falling-out—he wanted her to keep moving with him, and she wanted to find a place, settle down, keep a job. Have a life. They’d parted on bad terms.

With a gasp, Samantha shakes herself awake again. The faucet is still running, the water ice-cold. She turns it off. Closes her eyes.

Did she kill her father?

No, no, that can’t be. She runs a fingertip over her teeth, careless of the gore still grimed into her skin. She wouldn’t have done that. And it doesn’t explain the fur.

She will never fully remember what brought her to this house, or what happened inside it. She will find the text on her phone from her father asking her to meet him at this address. Nothing more than that. But she does learn what happened to him, and that is because several days after burning that house to the ground in the hopes she can prevent anyone from finding out it had been a haven for the people her father had believed in, a man named Vadim approaches her in a coffee shop two towns away. He sits at the table outside, where Samantha is turning a lukewarm paper cup of shitty coffee around and around in her hands without being able to drink any of it. He says nothing, not even when she recoils as though she might hit him.

“I know what happened to your father,” he says in the calm and steady voice Samantha will come to learn so well. “If you want to know, come with me.”

So she does.

* * *

Jed was dreaming.

He knew it, of course, because in the waking world he would not be dancing slowly with Samantha. Her head would not be on his shoulder. His hand would not be on her hip. He surely would not be moving with her to the strains of some classical waltz, both of them keeping perfect time as he led her around the floor.

He would not be kissing her.

But this was a dream, and he had them so rarely that he was not willing to give this one up. Aware of being watched, knowing they would be monitoring him, it didn’t matter because the press of her mouth on his was too good. The slide of her tongue along his, too sweet.

He groaned when she aligned her body with his. Softness. Breasts and hips and the curve of her ass under his hands. His cock ached. She rubbed herself against him. She slid a hand between them. Stroking.

“Kiss me,” she said.

He did. Then again. She shivered and tipped her head back to give him access to her throat. Her collarbones. She was naked, all smooth skin and warmth. She pulled him down onto a bed—where had a bed come from? He didn’t know. Did not care. All the mattered was moving his lips and tongue over every part of her body.

He found the salty heat between her thighs. He parted her. Found the small spot that made her writhe and sink her fingers into the meat of his biceps. He licked her, soft and slow and steady. When he felt her body tense, he moved up and over her to sink inside her.

It’s a dream, he thought. None of this is real.

He couldn’t stop it, though. Pushing his cock inside her heat was better than anything he’d ever imagined possible. He pushed deeper, deeper, pleasure consuming him.

In the way of dreams, some of the details were blurry. Her face, though. Her smile. Her body, welcoming him. All of that was clear as anything.

He moved faster, and she moved with him. Everything around them faded away until it was only the two of them. Naked, skin on skin. Mouth on mouth. Heat and wetness and friction, building up and up until he couldn’t hold back anymore.

He woke a second or so before his climax. Fingers clutching the sheets, body tense and straining, he gave up to the rush of pleasure. His cock was so hard it had slipped free of the waistband of his scrubs, and hot fluid spurted onto his belly in a series of forceful jets that left him spent and breathless.

Let them watch, he thought, blinking at the ceiling. Let them get their jollies, if they did. Let them monitor him, make their reports.

He was still alive, and his body was still his, no matter what they did to him. They couldn’t take that away. And they could never get inside his head.

Chapter 14 (#ude717567-7d12-5712-ab10-47a0b9cc06fa)

“We’ve arranged for you to switch shifts with the other nurse,” Vadim said via video call. “It seems she and her husband were the lucky winners of a weekend in the Poconos, and they haven’t had a real vacation in years. She was quite beside herself with excitement.”

Samantha had come in from a run, still sweating, drinking from a tall bottle of fruit water. She tipped her chair back to eye the computer screen. “It’s happening? You have confirmation?”

“Bentley cracked the encryption on the transfer orders. It’s going down tomorrow.”

“And if it doesn’t? If it’s a decoy?” Samantha didn’t like the sound of this. Most of the work the Crew handled dealt with the research and occasional hunting of creatures. Sometimes hauntings. Not double agenting for secret private organizations determined to raise an army of telekinetic soldiers. She was confident in her skills, but it all still depended on accurate information.

“Then we’ll arrange for you to switch shifts again.”

She laughed at that with a shake of her head and swallowed another gulp of water before capping the bottle and setting it on the desk. She leaned forward, wrists on her knees, to look closer at the laptop screen. She swallowed again, this time against a slightly bitter aftertaste that didn’t come from the drink. “Do you know how they plan to do it?”

“As the nurse on duty, you will be asked to give him an additional amount of sedatives in order to keep him calm when they come for him.” Vadim looked serious.

“And I’ll palm it?”

“No. You’ll have to give it to him, of course. He needs to be compliant when they take him out. No chance of him using any of his abilities, should they not have gone latent the way they believe. He’ll need to be controllable until you can get him to us, where we can keep him safe.”

This didn’t sound right to her. “But if he knows I’m there to help him...”

“He killed three men with nothing more than a twitch of his fingers, Samantha.”

“Years ago,” she countered. “And I’m willing to bet they deserved it.”

“We can’t risk him getting out of control. You could be hurt or even killed.”

“He wouldn’t do anything to hurt me,” she said, thinking of all these last months, of the scent of lavender, the tickle of fingertips at the back of her neck. Of the guard who’d been harassing her, the one who’d been put down so easily by something unseen.

“You can’t be certain of that, and we won’t risk it.”

Samantha frowned. “I don’t like the idea of drugging him, Vadim. It will make it too hard to work with him.”

“All you need to do is take care of the guards and get the van to the rendezvous point. We’ll be there to help.”

She still didn’t like it, but there was no point in pushing it. “Fine. So I give him the drugs. Then what?”

“They take him. You follow. Dispatch the guards. Take the van.”