SEDUCTIVE SUPERNATURALS: 12 Tales of Shapeshifters, Vampires & Sexy Spirits (170 page)

“That’s the standard when we get a call to investigate, but it varies by assignment. Obviously, when I’m not on a special case, I’m training my unit. But my second in command keeps them in line when I’m gone.” Jesse ladled out a bit of cream-colored slop onto his plate, but Evelyn let the big spoon pass her by.

“But the teams don’t sit together? The seating looks arranged by department.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “We can sit wherever the hell we want. If you see the Sentinels sitting together, it’s only because they like to.”

She glanced down at the entrée options and a drop of saliva nearly escaped out of the corner of her mouth. By the look of it, that was real chicken breast in the serving tray before her—not those soy byproduct patties that were so common these days—and next to that was breaded fish fillet. The steamed vegetables were bright and beautiful. It was like what pictures of vegetables looked like before The Great Collision. Where did they even get this caliber of food? Did they grow it themselves?

The server raised a scanner to Evelyn’s wrist and held it there until it beeped. “Officer Vale… How do you do, ma’am? I’ll be evaluating your nutrition and dishing out your meal tonight.”

Evelyn nodded and the man regarded the scanner he’d placed at her wrist. “It looks as though you burn through your calories pretty quickly, and you’re nearly twenty percent under your ideal body mass index. Your energy output is—” he tapped the screen. “This can’t be right. It says—”

Jesse stepped forward and took the scanner from the man, laying it beside the dish of mixed vegetables. “That’s classified,” he said in a low growl. “Next time, just put the food on her plate and keep it down. Got it?”

The man’s ears reddened. “I’m sorry, Commander. I didn’t realize she was…” He pressed his lips together and with a resolute nod, reached for the serving utensils. When he dished both entrees onto her plate along with a generous portion of vegetables, Evelyn could have kissed the man. “I’m also recommending you take the supplements,” the server told her.

She grimaced when he dumped the pills onto her plate. Her chemistry professor at the university had tried the proprietary blend and said they tasted worse than horse manure. Though now that she thought about it…how would he know what horse manure tasted like? “Thank you.”

It was surreal. She was standing in the Special Teams line at the Immortal Bounty cafeteria. They were feeding her perfectly balanced food to help sustain her as an officer in the field, like her body was now their temple. Well…that was actually a depressing thought. That’s exactly what she was hired for, wasn’t it? They planned to use her body. Did they have any idea about what she and her father ate to stay alive? It would be embarrassing to share that information with people in her own neighborhood—who were pretty much in the same boat—much less the elite and highly paid IB Marks.

She followed Jesse when he headed toward the table where his fellow Sentinels dined. The men eyed her with unveiled curiosity. One with a thick jaw and a long red beard stabbed his fork into his chicken and raised a brow. “A new hire? I never saw an ad go out about a new… What is she?”

A man with brown hair cut close to his head and amber eyes stood and stepped close, lifting his nose to the imaginary wind as though scenting her. “Supernatural specialist. Has to be. She’s packing juice off the chart.”

“Investigations,” Jesse nearly grunted. “Gentlemen, this is Dr. Evelyn Vale. Scoot your asses over so she can eat and not pass out while she’s waiting for you to give her the once over.”

“Sit here, Evelyn,” a man with a velvet-smooth voice told her, tapping the vacated seat next to him. When she looked across the table her gaze locked onto his thousand-watt smile.

“Jack,” she said under her breath but didn’t move to sit next to him.

Jesse scowled, which was impressive considering she’d already thought his frown and the crease between his brows were as deep as they could get. “How do you know Jack? Did you meet in the city?”

The men stilled and their faces went politely blank, probably imagining she was another of Jack’s conquests. “A nurse told me about that smile, and from there I guessed.”

Jack laughed, and sure enough, the rich sound of it was enough to melt her panties—just as Darlene had promised. Her respect for the nurse’s intel ratcheted up a notch. Yes, Jack was one Sentinel Evelyn would definitely have to avoid if she wanted to keep it professional at work.

She sat next to Jesse, unwrapped her fork and knife from their fancy little napkin roll, and dug into her food. When everything you ate came out of a can, this stuff was absolute heaven in comparison. After she finished, she washed her supplements down with a bottle of water and only then did she notice the men were staring at her. She pursed her lips and her cheeks heated. She’d finished her entire meal while some of them were still on their main course.

“I ate like that when I first got here, too. Don’t feel bad,” red-beard told her.

“I…um…” If her cheeks burned any hotter, someone would have to throw water on her face to put out the fire.

The man with the closely clipped hair and amber eyes ran a hand over his stomach and shoved his plate to the center of the table. “I’m stuffed. Anyone want this chicken?”

When the men simply shrugged, still working on their own meals, Evelyn nodded. What would her father say when she brought this food home and told him she got the job? It would be worth any embarrassment she suffered tonight.

“Take it,” the man said. “My name is Gage, by the way.”

She carefully wrapped the chicken in her napkin, her gaze glued to the table. “Thank you, Gage. It’s for…my pets at home. They don’t get to eat real meat very often.”

Gage winked, and she wasn’t sure if that meant he believed her little story or he didn’t.

“So what’s the assignment?” Jack asked Jesse.

“I can’t share it. Not this time,” Jesse said.

That got everyone’s attention. Some even put down their forks.

Red-beard turned in his seat to get a better view of Evelyn. “It’s classified? You’re taking a new recruit on a classified job? How is that even possible? What’s Clark up to?”

Jesse picked up his and Evelyn’s dinner trays and started to rise. “Time to go, Doc. We got shit to do.”

Jack smirked. “It’s going to be like that, huh?”

Jesse nodded, walked toward the trashcan, and tossed their trays on the top of the lid. “Yep.”

“Asshole,” Jack called after him.

“Born and raised,” Jesse called back, but when he turned toward the door, he was smiling.

Immortal Possession: Chapter Three

“Are we really taking your motorcycle?” Evelyn asked Jesse, hustling behind him to the parking structure, trying to prove her shorter legs could keep up with his ground-eating stride.

“Not this time. I rethought it, and with you being a woman, I figured you wouldn’t be able to carry all your girly stuff on the back of my bike.”

“Wow, is being sexist in a Sentinel’s job description?”

Evelyn almost stumbled when they entered the large structure. She’d never seen so many shiny cars in her life. Forget heaven. This job was it. She might even be able to buy a car one day.

“It’s not sexist. I have a couple of women in my unit that I swear have more testosterone than I do. But you…” He scanned her up and down as he made his way up the cement lane, past another row of fine cars. “You have the black stuff on your lashes, the slim skirt, and those ridiculously tall shoes. You’re the definition of a girly-girl.”

She snorted. “Do you really not know the name for what a woman puts on her lashes, or is that part of the macho front?”

“Macho is the front, the back, and the whole of me, Doc.”

He pulled keys from his pocket and walked around to the passenger side of a cherry red Mustang. It was practically an antique—a true fossil-fuel-guzzling, barely-legal monster. And she loved it. She loved it so much her cheeks flushed in delight when she slid onto the plush leather seat.

Jesse sat in the driver seat and turned the key in the ignition. “Buckle up.”

She squinted in response to the loud rumble of the engine and the rock and roll music blaring from the car’s speakers, then one long glance at the dashboard just about curled her toes. “Oh my God. There’s no navigation retrofit in this car. It has manual steering! Do you have a permit to drive this?”

He looked over at her and raised his brows in apparent offense. “Cut me some slack. I wouldn’t take you in this car if I didn’t know how to drive it.”

She leaned back further in the seat, trying to get acclimated to the vibrations of the growling, gas-powered engine. “Um… Sorry.”

Yeah, she probably needed to relax. It was just that this day was like nothing she’d ever experienced. She was pulling out of the IB campus with an actual Sentinel, driving home in an early-American car to break the news to her family that she’d finally made it into the Immortal Bounty ranks…and she wasn’t coming back any time soon.

Her parents had always thought she was destined for greatness. They’d received word in elementary school of her joules ratings before the possessions had really started, so there had been a window of time when they’d thought they’d birthed a true prodigy. Even after that “prodigy” had been taken into protective custody due to excessive possession for the eleventh or twelfth time, they had still looked at her like she might get over it, like it was nothing more than a stomach bug and she’d turn out to be something really special. Of course, her mother, bless her soul, saw the truth of it now.

“Still living at 3528 Quaker Avenue?” Jesse asked.

“Do you really not know the answer, or are you just being polite?”

“Do you like to answer questions with more questions?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her sideways. “Well, that’s going to be a pain in the ass.”

“Not
yes,
I always answer questions with questions—yes, I still live at that address.”

He chuckled quietly, gripping the steering wheel in both hands and staring out the window with crinkly eyes.

“What?” she demanded.

“Nothing.”

“It’s got to be something. You’re laughing, assuming that’s what that wheezy sound is coming from your lungs. Most people would usually accompany that with a smile. Not you, I guess.”

He did smile then. “I just didn’t think it was possible, is all.”

“What was possible?”

“To get paired with someone who’s more defensive than I am. We either need to get you drunk or work on your people skills, Doc.”

She gasped and clutched her wrapped chicken breast tighter to her. “My people skills? I get some of the best tips at the café! I’ll have you know, I’m a customer favorite. Almost a store mascot.” She paused. “No, never mind that last part…about the mascot.”

Another snicker, then he somehow trained his lips into a less mocking expression. “So why does a lady with a PhD still work at a café, making coffee all day?”

“She does it to pay off her school loans and feed her family. But I taught a class last semester, too. I was working towards teaching full time until the Immortal Bounty job came through.” Not that there had been any fulltime teaching jobs anywhere in California in her specific field, but still…

“So you’re pretty excited, huh? A dream come true?”

She could hardly deny it. “Yeah. I know—” she swallowed and glanced over at the huge man behind the wheel, “—I know I’m not the ‘ideal’ candidate. I’ve heard it before. But I want you to know that I’m going to do my absolute best at this job and prove to the steward that he made the right choice in taking a chance on me.”

“You’re gonna try harder, huh?”

“Well, yeah.”

“A woman with a possession threshold so low she probably can’t even walk to the grocery store without bringing a leech home with her?”

“I…” Her voice drained out. He wasn’t wrong. She couldn’t argue that fact. “But I guess that’s crucial for this case, right?” And it made her absolutely sick. Her weakness was being exploited in a whole new way. She was letting Immortal Bounty turn her into a spirit slave. But just this once.

“Forget it. That was shitty of me. But just so you know, if you listen hard enough on campus, you’re going to hear worse.”

“Do you seriously think I haven’t heard it all already? I’ve been living with this condition most of my life. How easy do you think it is to make friends in high school when you’re there one minute, and someone else is in your body the next? Try liking a boy and getting possessed during your first date. Try spending the night at a friend’s house, manifesting the spirit of a dirty old man, and waking up to find the girl’s dad punched you in the face to get the ghost to shut up. Trust me, you don’t get invited back.”

Jesse released a deep breath and shook his head. “Well…shit.”

Evelyn laughed bitterly. “So thanks for the warning, Commander, but I’m not joining Immortal Bounty to make friends. I’m there to work, and I’m going to do my damnedest not to blow this.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

They drove the remaining distance down the freeway in silence. Jesse passed the nicer part of town with the new virtual reality theater and the clothing shops and kept driving. Unless his GPS was feeding directly into his earpiece, he’d already mapped the route.

“Do you get into Sweetwater very often, or do employees usually stick closer to South Ashland?” Her voice was loud in the relative silence, but she wasn’t just asking to make conversation. There was nothing she didn’t want to know about Immortal Bounty and what it was like to work there.

He shrugged and turned onto 8th St, leading them into the seedier part of town. People and spirits were thick on the streets, swapping stories, drugs, or energy, she didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

“I get around. I had a case last month on 9th and Viewpark.”

Her mouth dropped open. “The sweater factory? That was you?”

He only nodded, downplaying what was a bust so big it had made the regional evening news. She wanted to tell him how cool that was, that she only got to see the small stuff on her bounty hunter shows, but she really couldn’t tell him that without highlighting what a newbie she was. “Huh,” she said instead, like he hadn’t just impressed the crap out of her.