The Craving (35 page)

He went to the entrance to the room and shut off the light. Now he could hear the shallow breathing of the person and make out his strong manly scent. It wasn’t Michael; he was positive of that. It was a completely unfamiliar scent. But why was he trying to be silent, as if he didn’t want to be discovered in the brewery?

Simon couldn’t deny that the scent was igniting a hunger in him, the way the scent of the rodent had. He was about to shout,
Hey, who’s there?
when the realization hit:

Someone had followed him here.

S
tephen was in a large dark space with a lot of boxes everywhere, some kind of storage area or something, when he saw lights go on above him. Okay, Simon was upstairs, doing whatever he was doing with whomever. Stephen would just sit tight here for a while, then wait to see what the hell was going on.

The idea that this place was some kind of love shack for Simon and his girlfriend was fading fast. But Simon had something going on here he was trying to hide, that was for sure. Maybe this was some kind of brothel or something. Maybe upstairs there was a madam and a slew of Russian girls. Or maybe it was something that needed to be more hidden away, like a perverted sex club with underage kids.
The thought disgusted Stephen, but the bright side was it would disgust Alison even more. Yeah, it was only a matter of time till she was on her knees, thanking the man who’d rescued her from her sick, child-porn-obsessed husband.

Then the lights went off upstairs and Stephen was in pitch-darkness again. Stephen heard footsteps going up to a higher floor, so, after waiting awhile, he went up to the next landing. He noticed a light on the floor above him, so Simon for some reason seemed to be going floor to floor. Stephen explored the floor he was on with the beam from his flashlight app. It looked like there was lots of dusty industrial-like equipment; well, the place had been a brewery, right?
Hartman Beer.
Wait, it was starting to ring a bell now. Wasn’t Hartman that skank beer he and the frat guys at Colgate used to drink? But they used to call it Fartman. Inadvertently, he laughed out loud.

Well, Stephen wasn’t sure what Simon was up to now. It didn’t seem like an underage brothel was going to materialize here soon. And why was Simon going floor to floor; was he searching for something? Maybe this was a crack den and he was looking to meet his dealer here. That would explain why Alison said he’d been going crazy. Didn’t crack addicts have mental problems?

Stephen was heading back toward the stairwell when the light on the floor above him went off. Stephen cut the light on his phone and was in darkness again. Okay, he’d wait here until Simon went up to the next floor or wherever he was going to go. He was thinking about Fartman beer again, trying not to laugh out loud, and then it was on him.

It
because he had no idea what was attacking him, or what the hell was going on—one second he was smiling in the dark, the next some animal—
animal?
—had him pinned to the floor. It was growling and clawing at Stephen’s face and oh God, the pain in his face. Was it
biting
him? Yes,
it was biting his cheek, his nose. He tried fighting it off, raising his right arm to push the thing off, but then there was sudden excruciating pain in his arms and, Jesus, it wasn’t there anymore, his arm was
gone
. The thing was biting into his neck, his face, and there was nothing but pain, the whole world was pain, and he was screaming, but he knew no one could hear him, and then it didn’t matter because he couldn’t scream anymore anyway.

“W
hat do you got to smile about today?”

Shawn had just walked into Geri’s office at the Manhattan North precinct, where Geri was at her desk, trying to get some work done. Trying, because she was too distracted to focus, and kept seeing flashes of last night with Ramon.

“What’s the matter, a girl’s not allowed to be happy?”

“This the same girl I was with yesterday, I had to keep from trying to attack the police commissioner, the mayor, and anyone else who got in her way?”

“Yeah, well, that was yesterday,” Geri said.

When Shawn left, Geri tried to get back to work, getting some info together on a past case for a prosecutor downtown, but in her mind she was still in bed with Ramon, making love. Oh God, how many times had they done it last night? Did it really matter? There were really
no
times
—the whole night was just one long-lasting experience, like one long orgasm that she didn’t want to ever end. It really was amazing how instantly connected they were in bed because, seriously, when had that ever happened to her before? It usually took being with a guy at least a few times before she even started to feel comfortable, but with Ramon she felt familiar with his body from the get-go and he was the same way with her, touching her exactly the right way, as if he had access to her brain and knew exactly how to turn her on.

And to think, she’d almost canceled and missed out on the most sensuous night of her life.

When she’d left the coffee shop yesterday afternoon and had some space away from Ramon, she wasn’t quite as, well, under his spell as she had been, and she felt stupid for falling for his whole Casanova act. Because that was what she was convinced it had been, an act, because the guy was an actor, right? He had a bunch of lines and, okay, he was convincing at the time and Geri had felt something, but that was what actors did—they made you feel something in the moment, but that didn’t mean the feelings were real.

But every time Geri tried to call him to cancel the date, she couldn’t go through with it. One time she actually pressed send and the call connected, but she ended the call before it rang. As much as she was convinced that he was a player, she kept remembering what it had felt like to be near him, to feel that heat between them. She’d never experienced that kind of intensity with a man before and, even if it was an act, she was willing to be entertained.

They had arranged for Ramon to come to her place to pick her up at seven. At exactly seven the buzzer rang and she buzzed him up. She was planning to give him a quick tour of the apartment—how long would that take? from the front door you could practically see the whole place—and then they’d head out.

Geri had gotten dressed up—well, dressed up for her. She was in a nice pair of jeans, heels, and a low-cut blouse, and she put on makeup, actually taking her time with it. She opened the door just as Ramon arrived, and she was as mesmerized as she’d been at the coffee shop. Just looking at him made her feel hot and a little woozy, as if she were a teenager and he were a rock star or something.

He took her hand and kissed the back of it, the way a sleazeball in a movie would, then said, “You look magnificent tonight.” He even made a corny line like that sound sexy.

“Come in, I’ll show you my place,” she said, aware that she was so flustered that her voice was unsteady.

Normally Willy and Wonka were curious about visitors and came over to at least sniff them, but when Ramon entered, both of their tails immediately stiffened, as if they were in danger, and then they darted under the couch.

“That’s so weird,” Geri said, “they never get like that.”

When Geri turned around, Ramon had moved closer to her, invading her space. But instead of getting creeped out, she liked it. He craned his head lower, as if to kiss her, but didn’t. He just stayed like that, looking in her eyes, so close she could feel his breath on her face. She knew what he was doing. He was teasing her, making her want him, but knowing what was going on didn’t make her want it less; it had the opposite effect. After a while, when her desire for him was almost unbearable, he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, and they stayed there for the rest of the night.

Now, at her desk at Manhattan North, she heard herself actually moan. Okay, this officially had to stop. Thankfully no one had heard her.

She went down the corridor to the kitchen area, poured a cup of black coffee, and gulped some of it down. Fatigue wasn’t her problem, though;
the problem was that she was dying to see Ramon again, and that couldn’t happen. She had to break away from whatever hold he had over her before it did serious damage to her career. He was a potential witness, or even a person of interest, in a series of possibly related murders and one disappearance, for God’s sake. Getting involved with him on a personal level was wrong and could even be a violation of her ethics as a police officer. She had to figure out a way to break away from him and forget that last night had ever happened.

Back at her desk, she finished getting the prosecutor what he needed, then tried to distract herself with more work. One problem was that she no longer had a current major case to focus on. She had been obsessed with the Washington Heights shootings and now she had nothing to focus on except Ramon and how goddamn sexy he was. She didn’t even know what was going on with the Washington Heights case. She’d been avoiding Dan all morning, and she knew that getting an update would be frustrating whether they were making progress or not, because if there was a hot lead she would want to be a part of the investigation, and if the trail had gone cold she would want to get out there to find the son-of-a-bitch killer.

Geri hadn’t even read the papers this morning, or read anything online about the case, because she didn’t want to know and because she didn’t want to relive the humiliation of having to take a fall to save Dan’s ass. It had felt so awful to have to get up there in front of all of those reporters and basically lie. Even worse, she’d had to act like it was her fault to Carlita Morales’s family—well, her brother, anyway.

Something about the encounter with Carlita’s brother had stuck with Geri. It wasn’t just how angry he’d been; there was more to it than that. For some reason Geri had a feeling she’d seen him before, and she rarely forgot a face. But she’d been intermittently racking her
brain and had been unable to remember where she’d seen him. Eh, whatever, she thought. She’d probably just seen him on the street or someplace random and it had no connection to anything.

Moments later, she was back, fantasizing about Ramon. The flashes seemed so real, it was as if she were practically there. She tried to rid the images from her mind, but, really, what was the point?

She knew she had no choice; this was the new her. She was going to keep obsessing about Ramon, maybe forever, but she decided to just go with it.

T
he human scent was getting stronger; maybe the man was afraid, or maybe because Simon was just so tuned in to it. The scent was everywhere—it seemed to fill up the entire brewery—and Simon sensed that the man, whoever he was, was an enemy and was out to get him. Could it be a police officer? If so, it wasn’t Detective Rodriguez, because Simon had no doubt the scent belonged to a man.

Then Simon heard the attack. A werewolf was growling ravenously, relentlessly, but how was this possible? Werewolves—or at least all the werewolves Simon had encountered—had strong, definitive scents, but the only scent Simon could detect was the scent of a human body, and now of his blood as well. Then there were a couple of faint, agonizing wails of a man being mauled to death.

In an instant—or it seemed—Simon had descended the flight of stairs. In the pitch-darkness, he knew exactly where to go and he was trying to free the man from the werewolf’s grasp, but the werewolf whipped its arm back at Simon with tremendous force, and he slammed against something. Perhaps the impact ignited something in him, triggered a fight-or-flight mechanism, or his own anger was the impetus, but he was suddenly transforming. He felt the now-familiar
pains in his face and extremities, but unlike the other times when it seemed to take about a minute to go from human to werewolf, this time it happened within seconds. Several yards away from him, the attack on the man was still taking place and was more ferocious. The growling was louder and more violent, and the scent of blood much stronger and more prominent.

Simon leaped onto the werewolf, digging his claws into its hairy back. He wanted to attack it, kill it, but then the scent of the human blood ignited something else in him. The potential meal was so close, and the thought of indulging was more enticing and alluring than a juicy steak dinner. He didn’t just want to devour that body and taste the blood, he
had
to do it, and then, without giving it any more thought, he sank his fangs into the man’s side, biting off a chunk of salty flesh. But it wasn’t enough—he wanted more, he
needed
more, he had to fill his body up. He felt as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks, and he wouldn’t eat in weeks, and for all he knew this was the last food he’d ever have. But the other werewolf was ravenous as well, and, like two seagulls attacking a fish that had washed up on a beach, they competed for the meal. Simon took another bite of the man’s side, and then another. Then he worked on the arms, found some tasty meat there, then worked up to the neck and face. The other werewolf was lower, biting through the man’s jeans, over his crotch. Simon was swallowing faster than he could chew, digging his fangs into the flesh, spitting out bits of bone, tearing the body apart, knowing, as he devoured the man, that this meal alone wouldn’t be enough. It could never be enough.

S
imon opened his eyes, but he was still in the dark. He prayed that what he’d just experienced had been a nightmare, that he had never returned to Michael’s brewery, but this hope faded fast, as the scent of human blood was everywhere and he could tell by other scents that he was still in the room with the brewery equipment.