Delilah had an apartment … of sorts. Wolves weren't really all that good at things like rent and damage-deposits and utilities. Not your average wolf anyway. That's what Alphas were for. Alphas took care of the pack. Told them where to live, found the food to take down…the members of an Alpha's pack were, in a way, his children. In werewolf society, especially in the Kin, the Alpha of a particular pack would buy up a building or two—yeah, they had that kind of money—and take care of the power and water. Then their pack would move in. They might settle in one corner of a warehouse or they might settle in a series of apartments, moving from floor to floor every month or so. It depended on the wolf.
They always looked abandoned from the outside with blackout curtains or blinds on the windows to keep up the impression. The doors were also kept chained, but if any homeless happened to be smart enough to find another way in … well, yummy manna from doggy heaven.
Delilah's place had once been a school. There was a rusty chain-link fence and graffiti everywhere. Old graffiti. Any newer aspiring artists wouldn't do any better than the homeless. She used the key to open the chains and relocked them through a small hole fashioned in the steel-bar-enhanced safety glass. Sniffing me quickly, she nodded. "Come."
Before we'd gotten within ten blocks of the place, she had produced a small spray container, like a tiny perfume bottle, and squirted me liberally with it. "From the puck," she had said. And I remembered it from our previous run-in with the Kin. "Will make you smell different. Not like you. Not human food. Not Auphe." Not human, because someone might want to join in on the meal. And not Auphe, because…hell, that didn't need explanation.
She had chosen a room on the third floor and we made our way quietly up darkened stairs, stopping if she heard any other wolves. I might not have the scent of a human or an Auphe, but I had to be something, and if they saw me, they would know it wasn't wolf. Managing to avoid that, we reached her place. It was a big room that had once been two. A wall had been knocked down with a sledgehammer from the looks of the ragged concrete frame. The institutional walls had been painted an umber color, smoldering in the low light of the occasional lamp. The shades were light reddish brown glass run through with hundreds of random fractures, Tiffany in a postmodern world.
There was no couch, only cushions. A nest of six large cushions made up what I guessed to be the equivalent. Three feet by three feet, they were forest green, deep brown, rusty red.
"Nice place," I said politely and then got to the point. "You don't eat people, do you?" For nutrition, I meant. I knew the vast majority of the Kin did as well as some non-Kin wolves. "I might have issues with that."
"People." She slipped off her jacket, then her shirt. She wasn't wearing a bra and suddenly people pitas seemed a little less important than they had been. But I held on, because it was important. I wasn't Auphe and I wasn't sleeping with someone who would do the things Auphe would do. "No challenge," she dismissed. "I am a hunter. Hunter. I am not jackal like some Kin."
Okay, that was good to know. There was another pile of cushions, slightly larger across the room, and they were white, every one of them—the barest shade paler than Delilah's hair. "You sleep as a wolf, don't you?"
She peeled my jacket off me in one smooth motion. "Wolf dreams." Her eyes were bright. "They are richer, sharper. You taste, smell, hear, touch. The very same as this world here." She shrugged, which did interesting things to very interesting parts of her. "Maybe that is the world. Maybe this is only the dream."
"Dreamtime." I considered the holster, then slipped out of it. Robin would no doubt say she'd like me to keep it on. Kinky and all, but shooting off your own balls during sex is more kink than I cared to think about. And was I babbling in my head nervously? Yeah. So what? It was my second goddamn time. I could be nervous if I wanted. "Sounds similar to something that Aborigines in Australia believe. Nik told me about it once, said it was…" Great, I was babbling outside my head now.
But it was the last word I said that night as I was tackled to the floor. Last string of coherent words anyway. I did say a few single explosive ones. Delilah was no nymph. She wasn't soft and slow, meandering and mild. Delilah was a whirlwind of wants and needs and demands, and before the night was over, she taught me how to be the same.
I was glad, though, that she couldn't smell me through Robin's concoction. Couldn't smell the lingering doubt under the savagely sharp pleasure. The faint remorse beneath the sheer holy shit spine-knotting euphoria.
The touch of guilt behind every bite, thrust, and caress.
The regret.
19
The New York Metropolitan Museum was big. I knew that. But it was something I knew in the back of my head…like that the sky is blue. That fire burns. That a man can't get it up in fifty-degree water no matter what Robin thought. Basic, commonsense knowledge.