Desired, Alisa Woods [ebook offline txt] 📗

Lucas leaned his elbows back on the bar and pulled in a full draught of the human pheromones and perfumes swirling in the air. Musky fragrances mixed with sweet sweat, underscored by a tangy taste of arousal. And that was just the women. The males were overly scented as well, at least the human ones, as if they didn’t understand the power of their own natural scent. The blue-neon sign outside the nightclub called it The Deviation. Inside, lithe human bodies pulsed to a techno rock beat coming from the live band on the stage. It was a ripe hunting ground for shifters and humans alike. Prey, his inner dark wolf panted, but Lucas backhanded that thought into the recesses of his mind. He may be hunting for a pleasurable companion for the evening, a temporary relief from the ghosts that haunted him, but he wasn’t that kind of predator.

Not that there weren’t plenty of those in the room.

This was neutral territory. He was rogue now, but even if he had a pack, he wouldn’t make trouble in a closed environment filled with humans like The Deviation. The throng pushed right up to the bar where he stood, leaving not much distinction between those dancing and those watching. Cutout panels behind the band let in beams of purplish light that stabbed through the tight crowd and washed everyone in a deep otherworldly glow. The shifters were indistinguishable from the humans, everyone dressed in the same tailored silk shirts and curve-hugging black dresses that comprised the nighttime uniform of web entrepreneurs and their groupies.

Indistinguishable for most. But Lucas recognized a few.

Three shifters from the SocialHacks pack were in the thick of the dancing, hands running free over their female companions. His father’s pack allied with the SocialHacks early on, their social media startup pairing well with his father’s internet business development firm. Nearby was a trio from Red Wolf, another company that cultivated the dot-com businesses of Seattle and helped match them with investors. They were his father’s bitter rivals—not only did they skate close to that invisible line shifters didn’t cross, the one that kept the normal human citizenry of Seattle unaware of the wolves in their midst, but they were as ruthless in pack matters as they were in business. Lucas had seen more than one omega from the Red pack end up in a dingy alley missing a few vital organs. Tonight, the Red pack was hanging at the fringes of the crowd, watching. Like Lucas.

But that was all they had in common.

“How are you doing here, sir?” The soft voice behind him belonged to the female bartender. He could tell by her scent before he turned around: slightly musky with the dampness of the nightclub, but with a light woodsy taste. It wasn’t a perfume, which Lucas had an instant appreciation for.

He turned and gave her a smile. “I’d like another, please. Vodka, neat.” She wasn’t one of the celebrity bartenders who drew patrons to The Deviation, but he wasn’t the type to drink the latest fad cocktail, either. In fact, he rarely was in a club long enough to finish a drink before a companion for the night found him. And having full command of his faculties, especially with a human, was key to leaving her satisfied, not sliced to ribbons.

The bartender gave him a fleeting smile, then dropped her brilliant blue-eyed gaze, brushed her long black hair out of her way, and reached under the bar for a bottle. He hadn’t been to The Deviation in a while, but he guessed she was new—to the club, maybe to bartending as well. Her all-black uniform—slim dress pants and collared shirt—had turned purple with the hazy light from the stage, but it fit her feminine curves in an understated way. He appreciated that, too, but bartenders weren’t good prospects, not least because they might remember him the next time he came hunting.

She poured his drink, and he noticed her hand quiver. The liquid sloshed but not enough to escape the shot glass. He frowned and looked up, but she was already moving on, down the bar, to another customer. She gave that guy the same fleeting smile, but Lucas could see something wrong in it now. Something off. Her lips were slightly parted, her breaths shallow. She was panting, and not in a good way. The girl rushed through a bourbon-and-seven for her customer, then shuffled to the end of the bar, where her fellow bartender, a male, stood flirting with one of the female patrons. The girl had a quick, whispered exchange that Lucas couldn’t hear over the pounding music, and then she slipped around the end of the counter and into the crowd.

Lucas straightened, looking for her over the sea of bobbing heads and waving hands. She was a tiny black-haired rabbit weaving through the weeds, tall enough to poke above them when she wasn’t ducking under drinks held high or flailing arms. He wasn’t sure why, but he couldn’t stop tracking her.

He left his drink, untouched, and slid along the bar, keeping her in his sights. She broke free of the crowd near the back wall, where blue neon signs bulged with the letters of the club and the outlines of spilt electric drinks.

It was the same wall where the three Red pack members lounged.

The girl threw open a door which had been invisible a moment before, probably because it fit seamlessly into the black matte of the wall. Then she was gone, the door slowly easing closed behind her.

The Reds had watched her all the way out.

Lucas froze at the edge of the crowd, his unblinking stare trained on their bent heads and moving lips. Not my territory, he told his snarling inner wolf. Not my pack.

But he didn’t look away.

Mia sucked in the cool night air of the alleyway outside The Deviation and nearly moaned with the relief. Jesus, the smells in that place. She’d been on since ten o’clock, and usually she could make it through to the end of her shift at two: she just had to breathe through her mouth and take frequent bathroom breaks for fresh air. But tonight… it was as if all the college girls had decided to flash mob the club with a synchronized perfume attack. And the dot-com wannabe-billionaire guys either came straight from the gym and overcompensated with Axe spray or somehow that was their normal smell. Add in the usual background eau de Deviation, and the alcoholic whiffs from the drinks she was serving just weren’t enough to ward it off. She had to get fresh air, or she was going to lose her dorm dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes—and it wasn’t that good the first time around. Her sensitive sense of smell loathed closed spaces and aromatic people, and The Deviation had more than its share of both tonight.

Sometimes being a shifter well and truly sucked.

Who was she kidding? It sucked all the time. Mia had yet to find the hidden benefits of being able to transform into a wolf on a whim. Sure she could smell the anxiety of her roommate while she studied for an econ test. Or the lecherous arousal of her English prof when he tried to “help” her during office hours. But she didn’t count those as benefits. And an acrid stench of fear would constantly surround her if anyone found out her secret—not to mention no real company would ever hire a shifter.

She could tolerate a few more smelly shifts at The Deviation, if that’s what it took. Other than the stench, it was decent. Not too many slobbering drunks. Plus she was twenty-one now, so she could serve, which meant better tips. She needed to keep this stinky job so eventually she could get a real one. One that paid well enough to get her mom out of that rat-hole apartment on Jackson Street and into something better. Somewhere Mia wouldn’t have to worry about the crackheads shooting up the place and where the gangs hadn’t ousted the police as the major power players in the neighborhood.

There were shifters in the crack gangs of Seattle, she knew that. Everyone did, though no one talked about it. And if anyone knew she was a shifter… well, that was all that would be left for her, too. Which was why she worked her tail off in community college and transferred to the University of Washington as a junior, as soon as she could wrangle a scholarship. But even the crappy dorm food cost money, so she had to keep her job at The Deviation if she wanted to graduate and get her mom out of the hellhole that was 12th and Jackson.