Tempting Danger Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  Teaser chapter

  Irresistible

  It was the way Lily refused to see him, as if she could pretend she didn’t feel the pull as long as she didn’t look directly at him. He took two steps closer, stopping near enough that her scent welcomed him, even if the rest of her did not. The jump of his heartbeat warned him to make this quick.

  “Yes, we’ll go,” he said. “But first . . .” And he leaned in to plant a kiss on her frowning mouth.

  He expected a punch, and not just from the kiss. He’d already decided to let her connect. But he didn’t expect to land on his butt in the dirt.

  Rule stared up at her, astonished. She’d hooked her leg behind his knee, pulled—and down he went, before his mouth even touched hers.

  “Ask, don’t assume.” She opened the car door. “Oh, and you can give me that explanation,” she said, climbing in, “on the way back.” And she slammed the door shut.

  Books by Eileen Wilks

  TEMPTING DANGER

  MORTAL DANGER

  BLOOD LINES

  Anthologies

  CHARMED

  (with Jayne Ann Krentz writing as Jayne Castle, Julie Beard,

  and Lori Foster)

  LOVER BEWARE

  (with Christine Feehan, Katherine Sutcliffe,

  and Fiona Brand)

  CRAVINGS

  (with Laurell K. Hamilton, MaryJanice Davidson,

  and Rebecca York)

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  TEMPTING DANGER

  A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / October 2004

  Copyright © 2004 by Eileen Wilks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09912-4

  BERKLEY SENSATION®

  Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY SENSATION is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to my agent, Eileen Fallon, who hung in there through thick, through thin, through writer phone calls. Just want to say, “Hi, Eileen—this is Eileen. It wouldn’t have happened without you.”

  ONE

  HE didn’t have much face left. Lily stood well back, keeping her new black heels out of the pool of blood that was dry at the edges, still gummy near the body. She’d seen worse when she worked Traffic Division, she reminded herself.

  But it was different when the mangling had been done on purpose.

  Mist hung in the warm air, visible in front of the police spotlights, clammy against her face. The smell of blood was thick in her nostrils. Flashes went off in a crisp one-two as the photographer recorded the scene.

  “Hey, Yu,” the officer behind the camera called. He was a short man with chipmunk cheeks and red hair cut so short it looked like the fuzz on a peach.

  She grimaced. O’Brien never tired of a joke, no matter how stale. If they both lived to be a hundred and ran into each other in the nursing home, the first thing he’d say to her would be, “Hey, Yu!”

  That is, assuming she kept her maiden name for the next seventy-two years. Considering the giddy whirl she laughingly called a social life, that seemed possible. “Yeah, Irish?”

  “Looks like you had a hot date tonight.”

  “No, me and my cat always dress for dinner. Dirty Harry looks great in a tux.”

  O’Brien snorted and moved to get another angle. Lily tuned him out along with the other S.O.C. officer, the curious behind the chain-link fence, and the uniforms keeping them there.

  Spilled blood draws a crowd as easily as spilled sugar draws flies. The members of the public attending this particular crime scene probably didn’t come from this neighborhood, though. Here, people assumed that curiosity came with a price tag. They knew what a drive-by sounded like, and the look of a drug deal going down. The members of the public craning their necks for a glimpse of gore were probably customers of the nightclub up the street. Club Hell did attract a distinctive clientele.

  The victim didn’t look as if he came from around here, either.

  He lay on his back on the dirty pavement. There was a Big Gulp cup, smashed flat, by his feet, a scrap of newspaper under his butt, and a broken beer bottle by his foot. Whatever had torn out his throat and made a mess of his face had left the eye and cheekbone on the right side intact. One startled brown eye stared up at nothing from smooth skin the color of the wicker chair on her mother’s porch. Name-brand jeans, she noted, the kind you find in pricey department stores. Black athletic shoes, again an expensive brand. A red silk shirt.

  The silk of the right sleeve of that shirt was shredded over the forearm. Three deep gouges there—defensive wounds. That arm was out-flung, the hand lying palm up with the fingers curled inward the way a child’s will when it sleeps.

  His other hand lay about twelve f
eet away, up against one of the poles of the swing set.

  A playground. Someone had ripped this guy’s face off in a playground, for God’s sake. There was a hard ache in Lily’s throat, a tightness across her shoulders. She’d seen death often enough since she was promoted to Homicide. Her stomach no longer turned over, but the regret, the sorrow over the waste, never went away.

  He wasn’t young enough to have enjoyed those swings recently—mid-twenties, maybe. She put him at about five ten, weight one eighty. Weight lifter’s shoulders and arms, powerful thighs. He’d been strong, perhaps cocky in his strength.

  Strength hadn’t done him much good tonight. Neither had the .22 pistol he’d apparently brought with him. It rested near the severed hand, as if it had fallen from those fingers once death relaxed them.

  “Careful, Detective. Don’t get your pretty dress dirty.”

  Lily didn’t look away from the body. She knew the voice, having taken the man’s report when she first arrived. “More crime scenes are contaminated by police officers than civilians. You have a reason for bringing your big feet over here, Phillips?”

  “I’m ten feet from the body, for Chrissake.”

  Now she looked at him. Officer Larry Phillips was one-half of the responding unit. Lily hadn’t run across him before, but she knew the type. He was over forty, still on the streets and sour about it. She was female, twenty-eight, and already a detective.

  He didn’t like her. “Believe it or not, evidence has been found more than ten feet from the victim. What do you want?”

  “Came to let you know none of the helpful citizens over by the fence admits to having seen anything. They were partying at the club, left together, and saw the pretty lights flashing on the squad cars. Came over to see what was going on.”

  “Club Hell, you mean?”

  “That’s where you’ll need to look for your killer. The lab won’t learn squat about this one.”

  “There are other types of evidence.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, maybe he dropped a calling card. Or maybe you agree with my partner. He thinks a puppy dog did it.”

  She glanced at the gap in the chain-link fence that served as an entry, where Phillips’s partner—a young Hispanic officer—was one of the officers handling crowd control, taking names and addresses. “Your partner’s a rookie?”

  “Yeah.” Phillips took a wrapped toothpick out of his pocket, peeled the cellophane off, and stuck it in his mouth. “I explained about puppy dogs and how they don’t usually bite a hand off in one chomp.”

  Phillips wasn’t stupid, she acknowledged. Just annoying. She nodded. “A fit man can usually fight a dog off. Not much sign of a fight, and there’s that pistol. . . .” Which the victim had probably been carrying, though it was just possible there’d been a third person at the scene. She shook her head. “The beast must have hit him quick.”

  “They’re fast, all right. Poor bastard probably didn’t have time to know his hand was gone.”

  “He had good instincts, though. He tried to pull his head down, protect his neck. That’s when he lost some of his face. Then it ripped out his throat.”

  “Now, now. You’re not supposed to say ‘it.’ We have to say ‘he’ now, treat ’em like people. Full rights under the law.”

  “I know the law.” She glanced up at Phillips. Way up—he was a long, stringy man, well over six feet. Of course, Lily had to look up to meet almost anyone’s eyes. She’d almost persuaded herself that didn’t irritate her anymore. “This is your turf, Officer. Can you ID the victim?”

  “He’s not from the hood.”

  “Yeah, I got that much. Maybe came here for a little action—dope, sex, maybe the slightly more legal entertainment of Club Hell. If he’s a regular, you could have seen him around.”

  He shook his head. The toothpick seemed glued to his bottom lip. “This wasn’t a drug killing, or pimp punishing a john who didn’t pay. Not even murder, really.”

  Three years ago a case like this would have been handled by the X-Squad. Now it went to Homicide. “The courts say otherwise.”

  “And we know how smart those bleeding heart judges are. According to them, we’re supposed to treat the beasts like they’re human now. That mess at your feet proves what a great idea that is.”

  “I’ve seen uglier things done by men to other men. And to women. And the scene still has to be kept clear.”

  “Sure thing, Detective.” Phillips gave her a mocking grin, turned, then paused and took the toothpick out of his mouth. When he met her eyes, the mockery and anger had faded from his. “A word of advice from someone who put in fifteen years on the X-Squad. Call them whatever you like, but don’t mistake the lupi for human. They’re hard to hurt, they’re faster than us, they’re stronger, and they like the way we taste.”

  “This one doesn’t seem to have done much tasting.”

  He shrugged. “Something interrupted him. Don’t forget that they’re only legally human when they’re on two legs. You run into one when it’s four-footed, don’t arrest it. Shoot it.” He flicked the toothpick to the ground. “And aim for the brain.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. Pick up your toothpick.”

  “What?’

  “The toothpick. It’s not part of the crime scene. Pick it up.”

  He scowled, bent, snatched it from the ground, and went away muttering about brass-balled bitches.

  “Don’t think you made a friend there,” O’Brien said cheerfully.

  “I’m all torn up about it, too.” She paused. The car pulling up behind the ambulance was from the coroner’s office.

  Better get it done. “Looks like our victim will be declared legally dead soon. You finished with the pictures?”

  “You need to get a closer look?”

  The words were innocuous, the tone of voice casual, but she knew what he meant. O’Brien had worked with her enough to know it wasn’t a closer look she was after. He wouldn’t say anything, though. It wasn’t illegal to be a sensitive, but it could be complicated. The department’s official policy about such things was, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  This wasn’t pure prejudice. Irreproducible data was not admissible in court, and a good defense attorney could rip an officer’s testimony to shreds if there was a whiff of the paranormal about the investigation.

  But cops tend to be pragmatic. The unofficial policy was to use whatever it took to catch the bad guys, even if you had to do it under the table. Which was why Lily was in a slum studying a corpse instead of fending off Henry Chen at her sister’s engagement party.

  Which just proved there was a bright side to everything. Lily met O’Brien’s eyes and nodded.

  “Go ahead,” he said and shifted to stand between her and the crowd by the fence, fussing with his camera.

  He wasn’t big enough to completely block anyone’s view, but he’d made it hard for them to see exactly what she did. Lily appreciated it. She set her backpack on the ground and moved closer to the corpse, then knelt, careful of the way her skirt rode up. And reached for the dead man’s hand.

  It was limp. No rigor mortis yet. Skin waxy. His hand looked blue, and his face had a purplish cast. Lividity minimal. None of it was conclusive, but it did suggest he hadn’t been dead long when dispatch received the anonymous tip at 11:04.

  He’d kept his nails short and clean. They were square, the fingers short for the size of the palm, which was broad and flat. Partially healed scrapes across the knuckles . . . he’d been in a fight a few days ago. Pale nail beds. No rings on the fingers.

  And no response in her own flesh.

  Blood had run into his palm to dry in a blackish brown patch that cracked slightly when she tilted the hand to catch the light better. That blood had trapped a tuft of mottled hair. Lily touched it.

  It was like touching the concrete after the sun had set and finding the lingering heat. Or like the moment after releasing a drill, when the flesh still held the memory of vibration.

  Though it
wasn’t really heat or vibration she felt. Lily had never found a word to describe the sensation of touching something that had been touched by magic, but it was unmistakable. She’d tried to explain that to her sister once—the younger one, Beth, not her perfect older sister. If everything you touched all day, every day, was smooth, the second you touched roughness you would know. Even if it was only a tiny bit rough, as was the case tonight.

  No, Lily thought, setting the hand down gently. The lab crew wouldn’t learn much about this killer. No more than she’d learned from touching the hairs he’d left behind in his victim’s blood. She stood.

  “So, was the beast chaser right?” O’Brien asked. “Am I wasting my time collecting samples?”

  She gave him a sharp look. “You’ll do things by the book.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I need you to tell me how to do my job.”

  “Sorry.” She exhaled, pushing her emotions away with the breath. “Yes, Phillips was right. The victim was human, but the killer’s a werewolf.”

  “Lupus, you mean.” He waggled his eyebrows at her. “We got a memo about that. Lupi is plural, lupus is singular.”

  “A killer by any other name . . .” She shrugged, impatient with PC-speak, and glanced at the onlookers by the fence. “Looks like I’ll be paying a visit to Club Hell tonight.”

  FIFTEEN minutes later, the coroner’s assistant had declared the victim dead, and Lily had an ID: Carlos Fuentes, age twenty-five. The address on the driver’s license was 4419 West Thomason, Apartment 33C. Phillips was running the license. Lily went to talk to the helpful citizens.

  There were six of them, four women and two men. Leather and body piercings seemed to be the dominant fashion theme for both sexes. And skin.