Page 34 of Mytho Investigations: Side Stories

Jake let him hang for a moment and took a sip of his beer. “Do you want to tell me your name first?”

The man stuck out his hand. “Adam.”

“Jake. And no, I’d much rather you came to mine.” It would be safer for both of them, and if this was some kind of weird set up, he wouldn’t get jumped.

But the scent of Adam’s lust couldn’t be faked. It coiled around Jake, and he wasn’t about to turn down sex, no matter how strange the request.

Adam smiled again. “Really?”

Jake leaned in to see if he’d flinch. “I can smell how much you want me.” And that wasn’t what he was used to smelling on humans.

“You don’t think I’m weird?”

He should be asking Adam the same thing, but he’d already confessed to finding werewolves attractive. “Oh, I do, but you seem to know what you want and jumped over numerous human morality barriers to speak to me, so why would I say no? And I like the way you smell.” Which wasn’t a lie. Adam smelled delicious. He hadn’t doused himself in sprays and aftershaves. He’d done his research. Jake slid off the stool and took half a step closer before giving Adam an obvious sniff. “Are you already hard?”

“I am now.”

Jake laughed. “Are you finishing your beer or are we going?”

“I don’t care about the beer, that was just so I could get close enough to talk to you.” Adam wiped his palms on his jeans. He was aroused and nervous and intriguing.

“Is that your usual approach with guys?”

“It depends on where I am.”

There was no way Jake would ever hit on a human, male or female. It was too risky. “So you stalked me for a few weeks and decided tonight it was worth a shot?”

“It’s not stalking if we’re in the same bar…”

Jake laughed, or at least it was what his laugh sounded like now. A low, husky sound that never left his throat. He should be glad he could talk at all. If the werewolves had lost that ability in the collapse, they’d have been in a much worse situation.

“Come on.” Jake led the way out of the bar. “It’s only a short walk to my place.”

Two more stops on the bus and he’d have been home.

Crossing the road, they were officially in mytho central, also known as Creature Hollow. The streets around the suburb were usually safe, but not always. However, few humans ventured into Creature Hollow unless they had business or friends. Even the cops tried to avoid it, which was fine, as every mytho would rather deal with the Knight, anyway. If they needed help with human issues, they had the werewolf liaison officer, Carly Arche.

“So what do you do when you aren’t working, aside from stalking werewolves?”

“It wasn’t like that.” Adam shook his head. “I tried to avoid your kind at first because I was worried what it said about me.”

“You know before the collapse, I looked mostly human.”

“Mostly?”

“I still had yellow eyes and sharp teeth.” He could barely remember what he’d looked like. Not that it mattered. “When I’m not working, I play basketball. Run. Hang out with my pack… my family. The usual. You?”

“Work out.” He grimaced, then sighed. “I enjoy doing puzzles. I’m working on a five thousand piece one at the moment. I put on a podcast or a documentary and chill out. Otherwise, I’m helping Mum take care of Dad.”

“He’s not well?”

Adam shook his head. “Dementia. Half the time he thinks I'm his brother. He died in the collapse… Sorry. You lost people, too.”

Everyone had lost people, and not just in the collapse, but in the aftermath. But he didn’t think that not talking about it made it better. “Yeah. Buildings pushing through, people falling out of the sky… There were a lot of ways to die that day.”

If mythos and humans hadn’t been killed by the arrival of new buildings, they had been when some had fallen over. The earthquake hadn’t helped the situation.

“How old were you when it happened?”