Barbie & The Beast (6 page)

“Your light’s blinking,” Angie said, tossing her purse on the entry table, kicking off her male-magnet shoes.

Stunned, Barbie stared at the answering machine. Her stomach, queasy all the way home from the graveyard, had tied itself
into one big knot. Of course, the blinking light on the machine didn’t have to be from the person she was thinking of. What
had it been, twenty minutes, tops, since they’d left the old part of town. With stopping at the mini-mart?

“Aren’t you going to play it?” Angie padded in bare feet to the kitchen with their shopping bag and dumped the contents onto
the green tile counter.

“Not in the mood.” Barbie kicked off her own shoes.

“You kidding?” Half astonished, Angie ripped open the bag then leaned across the counter waving an Oreo cookie between her
inch-long, fire red fingernails. “You’re going to leave that red light blinking? What are you, insensitive?”

Barbie gaped at her. “Insensitive? How do you come up with that?”

“Poor thing’s trying to get your attention, doing what it was designed to do, and you’re going to make it wait?”

Barbie snorted. “It’s a machine, Angie, not a butler.”

“See? Insensitive.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“Fine. I’ll check the darned thing if it’ll make you happy.”

Barbie suspended a finger over the playback button. Procrastinating, trying to quiet a heart that flopped around as if it
needed a leash, she slowly pressed down.

There was a brief space of nothing, then a voice she remembered as if it had been. . .well, only twenty minutes ago since
she’d last heard it said softly, gently, “Thank you.”

That’s it.
Thank you.
Just thank you. Yet those two words said it all.

Angie, Oreo pressed between her lips, had one artfully shaped eyebrow raised when Barbie looked at her. “You holding back
on the explanations?” she asked.

Barbie shook her head, if a little unconvincingly, while trying not to frown. Rumor had it that if you frowned constantly,
the wrinkles would be permanent. If such were the case, one more frown ought to do it.

“I don’t know who that is,” she said. This was, after all, the truth. She
didn’t
know who he was. She didn’t know anything about him, really, not even his name.

“With a voith like that, you’d want to know who he ith, I’m thinking,” Angie suggested without removing the Oreo from her
mouth.

“Must have been a wrong number,” Barbie said.

The Oreo came out. “Play it again.”

“No.”

“Come on, Barb, play it again.”

“Why?”

“Whoever this is sounds sexy. I need some kind of kick after the night we’ve had.”

Barbie didn’t need much more of a reminder of Angie’s experience. “Oh, all right.” Against her better judgement,
her finger headed for the play button. She felt as though this were all a dream. Why had she left that card? Anyone could
have picked it up. Anyone could have found it. Perverts galore.

Of course, this wasn’t anyone. It was
him
. No mistake about that. Same dreamy voice—smooth, low-pitched, sensual—as if it always spoke from the vicinity of your neck.

She hit play.

“Thank you.”

Barbie held her breath.

Angie squealed, took a bite of her Oreo and said, “Play—”

“No!”

“Oh, you are such a party pooper, Barb. Wrong number or not, that’s a nice thing to come home to. You sure you don’t know
who this guy is?”

“Positive.”

Barbie peered in the mirror over the sofa to see if her nose had grown longer. Nope. Not yet. But it was only a matter of
time, if Angie chose to wear her down. Angie Ward could easily have chosen detective work as a career instead of hair. She
handled an interrogation about as well as anyone Barbie had ever seen on Court TV.

Still gazing in the mirror, Barbie patted her hair. Miraculously, it hung neatly to her collar, not too mussed by the carting,
after all. She did seem a little pale, though. Was she conspicuously short of breath? What she needed was an Oreo, not thoughts
about her caller/stalker/possible pervert.

Making a mental note to purchase a security bolt for her front door first thing in the morning, Barbie sighed. Maybe she’d
get a dead bolt the size of Texas. Two of them. With a voice like this guy’s, she’d need a good deterrent if he ever showed
up on the other side of that door. Something to hold
herself
back.

“Please,” Angie said, helping herself to another Oreo, tossing
one to Barbie. “Don’t erase the mysterious dreamboat. We can listen to it again later, when we’re high on sugar.”

Barbie separated the cookie’s sides, exposing the good part of the Oreo, the white frosting. She stuck her tongue to it and
turned the cookie around slowly, counterclockwise, letting her tongue gather all the sugar it could. The icing made her think
of the guy’s voice. Rich. Sweet. Both icing and the mystery man produced a comparable high, one somewhat forbidden. The pitfalls
of Oreos were their calorie content and relationship to diabetes. The pitfalls of picking up strange men were. . .too numerous
to consider.

“Milk?” Angie asked, shaking the rest of the package of Oreos onto a blue floral dish and slapping the dish on the counter.

“Make yourself at home,” Barbie joked. But when she turned, she caught her friend’s expression.

Angie stood with her hands on her hips, staring over the counter. “I’m not only a hair stylist, I’m psychic. I know acting
funny when I see it, Barb, and you’re acting funny.”

Barbie mentally calculated how long she’d have to work out the next day to burn off the cookies she would probably consume
that very night, then decided playing the message again would be the only way to appease her friend.

“You
know
that guy,” Angie insisted, listening intently.

“I don’t.”

A best-friend glare passed between them. The one where each person tries to see beneath the other person’s skin, all the way
to Truth Central. It was critical in this moment not to break eye contact first. Barbie held on resolutely.

“Okay,” Angie said, conceding way too early. Nevertheless, she didn’t look away. “Maybe you don’t know the guy. Silly mistakes
happen. Wrong numbers and stuff.”

Barbie sagged onto her couch and reattached her tongue to the icing of an Oreo.

“You have some milk in here?” Angie repeated, padding back to the refrigerator.

“Always have milk,” Barbie muttered.

“Clean glasses?”

“Dishwasher.”

Barbie stuck the two sides of her Oreo back together, minus the icing, and popped the cookie into her mouth whole. Couldn’t
talk with her mouth full, could she? Angie wouldn’t dare expect that.

When she looked up, Angie was all but lying on the counter, inching the Oreo plate toward the couch with a slightly demonic
expression on her face.

“What are you doing?” Barbie asked, swallowing a clot of crushed chocolate.

“Plying you with delights,” Angie said.

“It won’t work. I don’t know the guy on that tape.”

“You might by the time this plate is empty.”

“I won’t.”

“Damn, you’re tough.”

“You’ve got that right.”

Show. . .all show, Barbie thought, moving her buttocks away very carefully so Angie wouldn’t see how many fingers she had
crossed and hidden under there. Everyone knew that crossed fingers absolved you of a multitude of sins. Everyone also knew
the children’s chant playing inside of her head, too loud for comfort.

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

Some people just never thought it would apply to them.

Darin had to run. Nature called—although, altogether different from the usual way the phrase went. Nature caused his skin
to prickle and his lungs to ache. The full moon, merely three hours closer than the last time he’d calculated, sang from behind
the clouds. The song was old as the ages. . .and twice as freaky.

Hours
, she sang.
Only hours until you are mine.

Darin felt the dryness of the small rectangular paper in his hand. Barbie Bradley’s phone number was on that card. Truly,
the world was a mysterious place.

It had taken him five full minutes to work up to making the call, and all he’d gotten for the effort was Barbie’s answering
machine. This wasn’t altogether unexpected, but a disappointment all the same. It seemed that Barbie Bradley liked games—as
long as they didn’t go too far. Barbie Bradley had some substance to her, and possibly a keen imagination. However, he reminded
himself, she was more than likely a normal young woman. One who had been issued stern childhood warnings about fraternizing
with strangers.

Darin chuckled over that. He was, after all, a parent’s worst nightmare. Still, his desire to see Barbie Bradley again was
all he could think about. His desire to confirm her as
“the one” seemed paramount at the moment, overriding his need for secrecy. The distance now separating them did nothing to
dilute the desire.

“Sappy sot,” he whispered, borrowing his acquaintance Walter’s upper-crust English phrase. “Hooked like a fish. Look at me.
And, to my credit, I’m not exactly the worst of the things that actually go bump in the night. Right, Walter?”

He received no answer, because Walter wasn’t there. And since his own excitement over finding Barbie Bradley was getting the
better of him, the only way Darin could see to ease the excitement and let off steam was with good old physical exertion.
Sprinting ought to do it. Feeling the wind on his face and the grass under his feet might help. No cold showers. He hated
cold showers.

He took off, racing over the grass, the curb, the asphalt of the parking lot, and several city blocks; then he slowed as he
realized that someone might see him and call the cops. A man in a dinner suit and no shoes running for all he was worth, and
as if his life depended on it? Dial 911. Wouldn’t those cops be surprised to find him, Darin Russell, at the heart of the
complaints—if they ever caught up with him—since he was the person the cops usually called when bizarre complaints rolled
in?

Hoping to find someone caught, as he himself was, between worlds, between senses, between shapes—that was what had made him
take the Miami PD gig, even though cops classified as bizarre anything merely inexplicable.
Paranormal
wasn’t in their vocabulary or on their radar. He had been dispatched on two occasions in the past month. Bad news was that
so far he’d had no success in the supernatural department. Most monsters were of the purely human variety. Tempers, alcohol,
drugs, stress, and tightly packed cities seemed to bring out the worst in people. Maybe he should
bite them all. Show them what trouble really was, and then how to overcome it?

Well, he’d thought he knew how to overcome his furry little problem. His plan had been to become a loner. To stay away from
crowds and a full moon. But now, he had a sudden craving for company. And the practice of biting others to get them to grow
up wasn’t viable. There were so many of those people, he doubted his teeth would last. Nor would everyone be cool about the
wolf thing. Some animals you just couldn’t tame. If a bad guy were inadvertently initiated, then what? Darin made a mental
note to ask Walter.

Of course, worries of bad wolves did little to prevent Darin’s wondering if somewhere out there, in all those buildings, on
all the streets, there wasn’t one other person with a similar affliction. If a wolf had made him what he was, surely that
wolf or the wolf’s buddies had made others. A werewolf female, maybe? Imagine!

Which brought him back to Barbie Bradley. What would she do if she found out about the sudden infusion of furballs into his
genetics?

“Ah, crap,” Darin barked. “I can’t think logically about this. Why don’t you answer your phone, Barbie?”

City blocks blurred as Darin again ran. Very few cars passed. Finally he stopped beside a lamppost, barely breathing hard
but wondering why he cared whether or not Barbie answered her damned phone. Other women found him attractive. Other women
would appreciate his call.

“Yeah. Hosts of women,” Darin remarked aloud. “Outside of a few character flaws which unfortunately include claws, fangs,
and a furry hide, I’m a pretty great guy.” He bent down and flicked a piece of glass from his bare baby toe—a hazard of running
barefoot, though his wolf genes wound heal the tiny wound in about five seconds. “Some of the women I’ve
dated were very fine,” he continued, straightening. “Some of them I even dated more than once!”

But never for more than a month, his conscience nagged. And never seriously. His cyclical disappearance always freaked them
out. His secrets drove them crazy. Plus, none had been “the one.” He knew that.

“Why should I fake interest merely for the sake of sex?” he asked the lamppost he leaned against. Then he laughed aloud. Talking
to inanimate objects. What next?

The sound echoed faintly between the tall narrow buildings as he laughed again. “That last bit didn’t sound very manly, did
it? I mean, what man doesn’t like sex any way he can get it?”

The lamppost didn’t have a reply, so Darin explained: “The truth, though you must promise to never tell anyone, is that I
prefer not wasting time. What’s the point of the typical date ritual when I’m not a typical date? Where’s the fun, when I
would scare those women to death with a popping button here, a bit of fur there, or canines that get in the way of French-kissing?”

Shaking his head, he strolled around a corner. Beneath a floodlight designed to keep a typical city’s predators at bay, he
stopped again, suddenly, and dropped to a feral crouch. His skin crawled, the initial warning system every predator possessed
that warned of prey—in this case, Barbie Bradley. She lived in one of these buildings. On this block. In one of these little
apartments, behind dark windows in the rows of stucco and pale brick. What were the odds of that, and of finding her so easily
without really looking? It had to be a sign.

“Where are you, Barbie?” he called softly as his skin danced pleasurably over his bones.

He glanced up past the rooflines at the sky. His senses were
sharpening, yes, but not entirely due to the moon. This skin ballet was more on account of being near to a chosen female,
a mate recognized by both man and wolf.

A chill wafted up his neck, followed closely by a rush of heat. The other female in his life—the round, silver one gleaming
ominously behind the clouds—had to wait her turn. The beast might be yipping at the door, but it hadn’t yet come through.
Though his humanness was slipping, there remained a ray of hope. He still had a few hours to find the woman he sensed so strongly.

Wanting a woman this badly was a totally new sensation. He had tracked her here, to this block, without realizing how he’d
managed it. He’d never even come close to feeling like this before, and had to act, had to speak to her before the opportunity
passed. Barbie Bradley was special. Even a beast had a right to happiness, right? Surely there was room in the everyday world
for a man such as himself to find love?

“Barbie.”

The slow slip of her name through his teeth was like mink on bare skin. The fine hair on his arms bristled. Fine hair? For
now. Time was not on his side. Soon enough, when the moon performed her unusual trick, his body would alter. Light brown fur
would spring from follicles. His face would morph. Speech would be impossible. He wouldn’t be able to talk tomorrow night,
if Barbie waited that long to pick up her damned phone. He wouldn’t be able to see her for the next three nights. Even if
he could trust her to maintain interest in him for that time, he was like a kid in a candy store who couldn’t reach the jars
on the counter. Now that he’d found his mate, he didn’t want to wait or be restrained. He wanted satisfaction
now
.

“Have to reach her,” he whispered with another glance at the sky.

Real connections in this day and age were transient. Yes,
he had to reach Barbie while he could still communicate, while he maintained some control and she her interest. He had to
reach her before his transformation began. And, damn!—he had to reach her before he went out of town on that police gig he’d
accepted. That would postpone his time with Barbie for a couple weeks more. If she would just answer her phone. If she would
only give him a chance. He had a very short window of opportunity in which to make her see reason.

“Damned bloody moon!” he snarled. “Damned bad timing!”

He sagged against the warm brick of a building. “Don’t think about that,” he told himself. “Think positively. If this is meant
to be, Barbie will answer.”

What he had to do was concentrate real hard, see if he could sniff her out. He could actually knock on her door. Either that,
or else he could call his buddy at the police department for a favor. Her address? The police were always happy to oblige
someone they trusted. And if the police trusted him, so could Barbie—at least for a few hours more.

This isn’t presumptuous, Darin assured himself. Barbie was interested; he had felt the spark. There remained a very good possibility
their meeting in the cemetery had been pre-ordained, even. Destined. Somebody up there in the big sky and endless universe
was smiling upon him at last, and though he’d never believed in that before, hell, if there were such things as beasts and
other darker beings that went bump in the night, why not divine intervention of some kind? Why not believe that Barbie was
the one to accept what he was? Fate was perhaps more than wishful thinking. Maybe there were such things as miracles. Maybe
dreams could come true.

Not one peep. Barbie hadn’t uttered one peep when he’d temporarily abducted her. This suggested an inner confidence
in her ability to perceive and separate danger from adventure, he guessed. Unafraid. She’d joked about cemeteries, with no
odor of fear emanating from her, only those crazy female pheromones. She was perfect.

Stop, he told himself. He couldn’t really know her for sure, could he? Other than this strangely powerful attraction between
them, he had no idea what Barbie was made of. Hopefully she wasn’t just sugar and spice and everything nice. With luck she
was a bit more. . .. Well, he wasn’t so keen on slime or snails, himself. But puppy dog tails were mandatory.

He eyed the street, blew out a sigh. Good thing he hadn’t lost his sense of humor over all this.

Good thing Barbie Bradley had one.