The Wolf at the Door Read online

  A former FBI agent is partnered with the enemy in this suspenseful male/male shifter romance from debut author Charlie Adhara

  Hunting for big bad wolves was never part of Agent Cooper Dayton’s plan, but a werewolf attack lands him in the carefully guarded Bureau of Special Investigations. A new case comes with a new partner: ruggedly sexy werewolf Oliver Park.

  Park is an agent of The Trust, a werewolf oversight organization working to ease escalating tensions with the BSI. But as far as Cooper’s concerned, it’s failing. As they investigate a series of mysterious deaths unlike anything they’ve seen, every bone in Cooper’s body is suspicious of his new partner—even when Park proves himself as competent as he is utterly captivating.

  When more people vanish, pressure to solve the case skyrockets. And though he’d resolved to keep things professional, Cooper’s friction with Park soon erupts...into a physical need that can’t be contained or controlled. But with a body count that’s rising by the day, werewolves and humans are in equal danger. If Cooper and Park don’t catch the killer soon, one—or both—of them could be the next to go.

  This book is approximately 90,000 words

  Carina Press acknowledges the editorial services of Mackenzie Walton

  Coming Soon from Charlie Adhara and Carina Press

  The Wolf at Bay

  Thrown to the Wolves

  For Max.

  Because he would have dedicated it to himself whether I did or not.

  THE WOLF AT THE DOOR

  Charlie Adhara

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Author Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The fact that Cooper Dayton was running down the side streets of Bethesda and not driving back to D.C. by now was proof that his father had been dead wrong. His haircut was plenty professional. Too professional, even. How else could Ben Pultz have made him as a federal agent from thirty feet away and taken off running? Not from his jeans and T-shirt. Not from the weapons carefully hidden under his intentionally oversized jacket. It had to be the bureau-regulation hair. Apparently Pultz didn’t think he looked like a “boy band reject,” though Cooper doubted his dad, Sherriff Dayton, would be swayed by the opinion of a fleeing homicide suspect.

  “Freeze!” Cooper shouted. “BSI!”

  The few people on the street watched them race past with mild interest. Cooper wondered if they’d look more excited if he’d shouted FBI. In that case, some may have even tried to intervene. Maybe stick a foot out to trip Pultz, who at five-foot-five, a little pudgy and apparently unarmed, hardly looked intimidating.

  When Cooper identified himself as a BSI agent, civilians hardly looked twice. Didn’t know what it was. Didn’t care.

  Ben Pultz knew who the BSI was, though. And from the way he leapt, inhumanly graceful, over a fire hydrant and catapulted down a side alley, he cared who the BSI was, too.

  Cooper ran around the hydrant and slowed as he approached the alley. He drew his .38, the feel of it in his hand instantly calming, and turned the corner, weapon raised.

  There was a fence at the end of the alley, a dented High Voltage sign tacked on at an angle. Ben Pultz was a good twenty feet ahead and running straight for it.

  “Freeze!” Cooper tried again. “It’s over, Pultz.”

  If anything, Pultz just ran faster. His stride changed into an odd sort of loping rhythm and he bent over dramatically, his hand occasionally reaching down as if to touch the street.

  Was Pultz about to shift?

  Cooper’s breath, coming fast and hard from running all over the downtown, caught in his throat. He vaguely hoped there was nothing in the alley to trip over because he could not tear his eyes away from Pultz’s quivering form.

  Pultz slowed, his steps came shorter and his whole body tensed up as if bracing for something.

  Cooper stopped running ten feet away from the suspect. His gun hung limply in his hand and he didn’t bother telling Pultz to stop again. Cooper wanted to see. Couldn’t look away.

  Pultz jumped...

  ...and landed, still fully human, clinging to the top of the fence. He quickly climbed up and scrambled over the top, sneakers squeaking and slipping against the apparently non-electric metal.

  “Shit,” Cooper said, running toward the fence again, as Pultz neatly dropped to the street on the other side.

  Pultz paused and looked back at Cooper. He was young. He looked even younger than he probably was due to his wide eyes, blotchy pink skin and fine blond hair, which gave him a baby-faced look. A look he’d obviously tried hard to counteract with the angry band T-shirt covered in jagged lettering and snarling skulls and a multitude of cheap chains sporting various tokens hanging from his jeans. Cooper thought he looked like an idiot. But still, a young idiot.

  Pultz started to say something through the fence. “I didn’t—” He dropped like a stone. Spasms ripped through his body once, twice, and before Cooper could even register what was happening, Pultz’s body stilled. He lay unmoving on the concrete.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Nah, just me, kid.” Jefferson stepped out from behind a Dumpster, Taser gun in hand.

  Cooper was torn between being glad for the backup and being embarrassed Jefferson had been there to see him freeze and almost let their suspect get away. Jefferson wasn’t his mentor anymore. He was his BSI partner and shouldn’t have to be picking up Cooper’s slack.

  “Nice drop,” Cooper said instead, holstering his weapon and climbing over the fence. Not quite as agilely as Pultz, but quickly enough. Having a wiry frame not overburdened with bulky muscle had its benefits sometimes. Sometimes.

  He dropped to the other side as Jefferson roughly cuffed the suspect. “I didn’t do anything. Let me go,” Pultz complained loudly, already recovering from his shock. The Taser guns the BSI issued were specially made to be stronger than any other on the market and could put a human man twice Pultz’s size out of commission for hours at least. Pultz had shaken it off in seconds.

  “If you didn’t do anything, why’d you run?” Cooper asked.

  “’Cause you’re BSI. I heard what happened in Syracuse.”

  Cooper’s eye twitched. Goddamn Syracuse. Did everyone know about that?

  Pultz was still talking, though he didn’t struggle when Cooper helped Jefferson haul him to his feet, hands cuffed behind his back. “You’re not going to do that to me, man. I’m not going to let you hunt me down.”

  “Like you hunted down Caroline Tuscini?”

  “Aw man, I barely knew that chick.”

  “I didn’t say you knew her. I said you killed her. Tore her up and spit her out,” Jefferson said.

  “I didn’t—”

  “Benjamin Pultz. You’re under arrest. You have the right—”

  “Wait a minute. Are you shitting me? Arrested for what? No way you have anything on me.”

  Cooper privately agreed. They didn’t have anything on Pultz. They’d technically just tracked him down to a fast food joint to question him. But Pultz had been seen arguing with t
he victim a day before she turned up in the river with her throat torn out. And he’d run. As Jefferson said, when a chicken gets killed and there’s a fox in the henhouse, you don’t have to waste a lot of time and fingers checking his teeth for feathers.

  “Let’s start with resisting arrest and leave the rest for Bethesda PD,” Jefferson said. He pushed Pultz along while Cooper trailed behind as backup. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, the deep scars across his belly were beginning to burn and he kept an eye on Pultz’s cuffed hands, ready for the slightest hint they might turn deadly. But his fingers stayed blunt-nailed and slightly pudgy, twisting around each other anxiously. Under the handcuff he wore a wristband for a local arcade.

  “How old are you?” Cooper asked without thinking.

  Pultz glared over his shoulder. “Nineteen. The fuck do you care?”

  Cooper shrugged. “Young.”

  “Yeah, but who knows how old that is in dog years.” Jefferson laughed.

  * * *

  Cooper watched the streetlights come on as Jefferson maneuvered the car through D.C. traffic. He felt out of sorts. He’d spent the entire two days in Bethesda anxious to get back home and now that he was nearly there, he wanted to be back in Bethesda questioning Pultz.

  Why had he killed Caroline Tuscini? Why had he paused after dropping to the other side of the fence when he could have gotten away? What had he been about to say?

  That wasn’t really their job, though. The old-fashioned investigative work Cooper had dreamed of doing when he got recruited to the FBI wasn’t really applicable these days. Motive didn’t have a lot to do with bloodlust, Jefferson would say, and shake it off, ready for the next case. But he was used to it. He’d been working for the BSI for five years. Almost as long as the BSI had existed. Cooper had only been there for six months and wasn’t yet comfortable walking away before an investigation was technically closed. After cases like Bethesda he felt like a glorified bounty hunter, and that wasn’t why he’d wanted to get into law enforcement. All that time in school, training, everything he’d given up at home, the fights with his dad, for one reason: to join the FBI. And he’d only gotten to stay a few years before moving on to, well, this. And all that this entailed.

  But it was too late to get out now.

  He’d been warned. Once he accepted a position with the BSI, he couldn’t return to the FBI.

  “It would present a conflict,” his supervisors had informed him. How, he didn’t understand. They both worked for the same government. Both went after bad guys. BSI was technically an offshoot of the FBI. Where did the conflict come in?

  But he hadn’t asked those questions.

  After Cooper had woken up in the hospital missing six and a half feet of small intestine, with a tube draining his stomach contents out his nose and an invitation to discuss “possible promotion opportunities” at the mysterious BSI headquarters, the only question he had was what the hell had happened.

  The BSI told him they could answer that if he agreed to join their team.

  “Isn’t that blackmail?” Cooper had croaked, his throat still sore from the intubation, though thankfully the doctors had removed the nose tube and started him on a nutritional IV.

  “The U.S. government doesn’t blackmail. Unfortunately, the answers you want involve extremely sensitive information that is a matter of national security. Ordinarily, you would get the same cover story as your partner did. But you’ve showed promise.”

  So he’d made promises.

  And when his recovery was complete he found himself signing away his life in the hushed office of Jacob Furthoe, Director of the secretive Bureau of Special Investigations.

  “Monsters are real,” Furthoe said, accepting his contract like a pin-pulled grenade and pointing to the chair across the desk.

  “I’d rather stand, sir, if that’s all right,” Cooper had replied. It had taken a month before his rearranged guts started accepting solid foods and he was let out of the hospital, and the weight loss still showed. Cooper didn’t want his new boss to think he was weak. Besides, he was too on edge to stay still. What kind of idiot agreed to a job before even knowing what it was? “I’ve had the pleasure of putting away a few monsters already.” He’d seen people do terrible things during his three short years in the FBI. Had grown up with a sheriff for a father who didn’t know the difference between home and work, never mind not talking cases at the dinner table. “I’m afraid I already know they’re real.”

  “No, you don’t. But you will,” Furthoe said. “What do you know about werewolves?”

  Cooper frowned and shifted his weight, awkwardly. “Is that a gang, sir? I’m not familiar—”

  “No. Werewolves. Sometimes a man, sometimes a wolf. Or woman, too, of course.”

  “Sir?”

  Director Furthoe leaned back and pointed at the chair again. “I really think you should take that seat now.”

  Cooper sat. And listened, numbly, as Furthoe revealed the best-kept secret of the government.

  Werewolves were not just in books and movies, cartoons and games. They were real and they had “come out” five years ago to governments around the world, represented by a group that called themselves the Trust. The Trust had explained werewolves had always existed, living amongst humans, but due to persecution had slipped quite intentionally into hiding and mythology.

  Until now.

  They’d revealed themselves to the government in order to request certain rights that were increasingly tricky to work around in the modern age. The ability to decline certain antibiotics, avoid certain tests, receive certain allowances that would help them continue to move through the world without public detection.

  Because, as the Trust explained over and over again, most wolves lived totally normal lives. They were teachers and writers, doctors and secretaries. They ate the same food, watched the same TV, had families, and looked like everyone else. Most of the time.

  The eensy-weensy difference was they could shift their human bodies into wolves’ bodies whenever they wanted.

  Seemed like a pretty major difference to Cooper.

  “That’s not all that’s different, of course,” Furthoe had explained. “You see, they don’t have to completely change shape to grow claws or fangs, and that is what makes them so dangerous, as you well know, Agent Dayton.”

  Cooper’s hand twitched to his stomach. The stitches had been removed but the skin was still raw and tender, and the indigestion daily. His doctors said they had “high hopes” that what was left of his small intestine would adapt. And if it didn’t? He wasn’t ready to talk about that. “What does the BSI do exactly, sir?”

  “Simply put, we specialize in wolf crime. Any crime the FBI picks up that’s flagged as peculiar gets passed on to us. Our home office will either confirm or disprove wolf involvement. As a BSI agent your job is to track down and bring in the guilty wolf. Track and capture.”

  And that’s what he’d done with Benjamin Pultz. So why did he feel so dissatisfied?

  Cooper ran a hand through his hair. His dad was right, it was a little long on top and had a tendency to flop into his face. It certainly didn’t look federal. So what had made Ben Pultz look up from his cup of fries and stare with such horror and...fear? Why had he run?

  Guilt, Cooper supposed, could make anyone see things that weren’t there.

  Jefferson interrupted his self-reflective pity party. “You’re quiet. Stomach bothering you?”

  “I’m fine,” Cooper said quickly, which of course his guts belied immediately with a painful twinge. Jefferson was always checking in on his injury. Cooper appreciated it, he did, but still wished he would stop bringing it up. At Cooper’s last checkup his doctor had told him there was no medical reason he should still be experiencing sharp, burning pain in his belly. Then he’d referred him to a psychologist. Cooper had not gone, stopped the checkups with h
is doctor and not told anyone about the whole thing, including Jefferson.

  “What’s on your mind, Dayton?”

  Cooper shrugged and watched the people swarming the crosswalk. A typical D.C. Friday evening crowd of business folk and government employees. A sea of black and gray heading home. The troubles of the workday already locked away for the weekend.

  He wanted that, to be able to leave the job behind. But when your job changed your entire outlook on reality, how could you ever walk away? What would they think, these suit drones, knowing mythical beings walked and worked amongst them?

  The public could never know about werewolves, though. That was one of the few things the BSI and the Trust agreed on. The panic, the prejudice, the senseless violence that would surely come if the truth was revealed, it was too much to contemplate. So Cooper’s job mattered. Even if it didn’t always feel...right.

  He realized Jefferson was still watching him, waiting for an answer. “Just thinking about Pultz, I guess,” Cooper said finally. “Why do you think he did it? Kill Caroline Tuscini, I mean.”

  “Motive is the least important factor, you know that,” Jefferson said. His hairline was receding, but the color was still a stubbornly dark brown and his face looked younger than forty-six when he smiled, which was often. He had been Cooper’s first and only partner at the BSI, and almost everything Cooper knew about wolves he’d learned from Jefferson. He was lucky to have him. “What I may think constitutes a good motive isn’t going to be the same as what Pultz thinks. Or even you, for that matter.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Cooper sighed. “I know. It’s just, it’s got to be him, right? I mean, it’s not some other wolf or—or whatever,” he finished lamely. Or what?

  “He’s the only wolf who came into contact with Caroline Tuscini,” Jefferson said, giving him a strange look. “We got him, Dayton. And if Bethesda PD find it’s not him? There must be another wolf and we’ll go back.”

  “Right,” Cooper said, looking out the window again. He knew the deal. Nine times out of ten in a wolf killing, the closest wolf was the guilty one. Jefferson didn’t like wasting a lot of time proving it. It worked out most of the time. Only in a couple of cases had they needed to go back and rework the case. It wasn’t the most efficient process, but then neither was a job recruitment that couldn’t explain the details of the job until after the contract had been signed. It made for a limited number of new agents. The BSI was stretched thin. This was the best they could do.