Murder Mittens

by R. J. Blain

  I expected my commentary would annoy the lion, but to my surprise, he made a thoughtful noise without growling at me over my general plan. “Elaborate on temporary microchipping, please.”

  “It’s a pill that doesn’t digest. It usually stays in the body for up to forty-eight hours. I’d take a pill every morning, and you’d track them all. This way, you can track my general pattern.”

  “Would you consent to a general microchipping?”

  “Maybe.” I considered my general situation, our target’s inclination to murder his victims in gruesome fashions after probably impregnating them, and came to the conclusion only an idiot would decline microchipping. “Okay, yes. For this job, I will consent to being microchipped, but I may ask to have it removed after the job is over.”

  “Done. I’ll contact the CDC about getting you chipped tomorrow. And you’ll probably get paid a bonus, as the microchipping technology for agents is still under development and needs to be tested.”

  “I accept bonuses without remorse. Ask about the neutralizers and preventatives for pixie dust and other compounds like it while you’re booking me in for a microchipping.”

  “Anything else you’ll need for the job?”

  “Yes. Business appropriate attire for a woman who will never be anything other than a secretary, and not one of those pretty secretaries who gets bent over their boss’s desk during lunch.” I glanced at Sebastian before fixing my attention back on the road where it belonged. “If you don’t have a desk appropriate for that sort of lunchtime play when we’re at home, I’m going to be forced to use my saddest lynx techniques until we get such a desk.”

  “Luckily for you, I do have such a desk, and I am pleased to help you shop for the appropriate clothes for this endeavor. However, you will have to accept being dressed in at least one outfit suitable for a high-classed secretary, but when I take advantage of you over lunch will be dependent on how cleanly you pull this job off. The scale will be as ruthless as how I plan on taking advantage of you, so you want to be living perfection when you take your target—or targets—out. A single bruise will be punished harshly.”

  “What if I bruised myself during the job? Like if I smack my hard head into his and knock him out that way?”

  “Self-inflicted bruises will not result in punishment, just like you testing the scissors didn’t result in you being penalized. If he hurts you, that’s what I care about. If you hurt yourself giving him the beating of his life? Just be honest about it, and you’ll be appropriately rewarded. I’ll be upset if you break your hand on his face, but I will respect the amount of force you needed to use to do that, and that falls into the reward territory. Fair?”

  “That’s fair.”

  Sebastian leaned forward to play with the car’s navigation system, scrolling through the upcoming roads to see where they went. “We have two hours longer than I thought we would have when I made the reservation and told the hotel when we’d arrive. If you don’t want to be ravished by a lion, keep driving as normal. Otherwise, take me to a secluded location. I wish to hunt a lynx and ravish her.”

  “Oh no! I’m going to be ravished. Whatever shall I do?”

  “Run, and when I catch you, enjoy yourself. I know I will.”

  While I wasn’t a slacker in the size department, Sebastian took the whole majestic lion thing to extremes. While he kept his hair neatly trimmed in a fruitless attempt to dodge the mane jokes, his actual mane demanded my immediate attention, and with rumbling purrs, I snuggled into the thick fur.

  I needed many hours snuggled in front of a fireplace with him and his mane.

  He gave me a few minutes to indulge, before he nipped at my neck hard enough I hissed at him. He roared and swatted me with his paw with sufficient force to knock me over. I screamed at him, unleashing the full potential of my voice, which earned me another roar.

  While torn between shrieking at him and purring, I’d settle for purring after he lived up to his promises.

  Okay. If he wanted to play, I’d play. I inhaled, and let loose my shrillest call, extending it for as long as I could.

  In the wild, female lynxes used such a call to notify the possibly deaf males it was time to be useful.

  Sebastian stared at me, one ear twisted back.

  Poor Sebastian. He was about to learn the only way he’d get me to shut up was if he shut me up. To make it clear he needed to get his game on and start his hunt for an evening treat of amorous lynx, I swatted his muzzle, although I kept my claws retracted. I backed out of his reach and kept on screaming, pausing only to breathe.

  There was an art to minimizing breathing while maximizing the ruckus, and I meant to master it. Practice would make perfect, and who wouldn’t want to practice on such a nice lion? I would have to guard my territory, which annoyed me enough I swatted at my lion’s muzzle.

  He roared at me. I yowled at him, hopping back a few steps and waiting for him to take chase.

  He stood still.

  I spit feline curses at him for daring to resist my advances. If he wanted to be the hunted, so be it. I went for the bushy tuft of his tail and chomped on it. While Sebastian didn’t quite roar, he snarled, spun around, and batted at me with a paw. I rolled, scrambled back to my paws, and lunged for him, mock biting at his mane.

  That earned me a proper roar, and as always, I purred, prancing in place. I swatted his nose, careful to keep my claws in, and ran for the woods, issuing a challenging scream. He answered me with an equally challenging roar.

  Game on.

  The next time Sebastian threatened me with a ravishing, I would understand he meant serious business. I thought he’d given me a full show of his prowess at the spa, but he’d generally left me somewhat coherent and capable of functioning.

  Lions on the hunt lacked consideration. Once he finished with me, which had removed my base ability to even walk, I discovered lions could drag their prey long distances without tiring, and that the scruff of my neck made an excellent place for him to grab hold of me with his teeth.

  If we hadn’t been lycanthropes hopped up on the virus, I might have minded the rough treatment. Rather than complain, I discovered it was possible to catch a nap while being relocated at my lion’s whim.

  I questioned how Sebastian had the energy to shift, whistle and strut, and goad me into shifting back to human, but he did. As I lacked the energy to do anything, he helped me into my clothes. I scraped together the motivation to crawl into my car of my own volition, although the seatbelt proved to be more than I could handle, so Sebastian took care of the details while chuckling over my state.

  “I like this. Not only did I get to enjoy my lynx, I get to drive the car now. This is great. This is how we’re changing drivers every time we go on a road trip now.”

  How would I survive if driver changes involved being relentlessly ravaged? Whatever. Life would be good until my lion did me in. “I now understand my mother a little too well, and this makes me feel somewhat dirty.”

  “I’m just doing my part to make sure you have an endless supply of lion roaring. I have been advised you get very sad at the end of the mating season, because you are just like your mother, and you are not happy without little ones underfoot. And your father was disturbingly forthcoming about the general requirements for that to happen. This was a test drive of my prowess. I’m feeling fairly confident in my abilities right now. Unfortunately, your father also warned me you may be like your mother, and your mating season may start early or end late depending on my prowess. Their second litter was several weeks early, and several litters were after it appeared when she was out of season, so lynxes may actually be in season longer than the expected two months. Your parents take precautions to keep the litter numbers low.”

  “Precautions? They do? What precautions? Condoms don’t work on them. They break them. Every time.”

  “Your dad confessed he now hires an incubus to make sure all litters are planned appropriately, and he indicated unless we always want litte
rs underfoot, I would be wise to do the same. The CDC provides the incubus free of charge to them because of their situation. They also get supplementary payments to help care for the litters. He gave me the complete rundown on the situation, because he thinks you are your mother’s daughter, which you absolutely are.”

  “With my bounty hunting and your handling, will we need CDC assistance?”

  “I know how much it costs to feed an entire litter now. I don’t know if we’re going to need it, but we are going to accept it. What doesn’t get eaten away will go to schooling costs. We’ll ultimately have to confess what your real job is, though. We’re going to need babysitters when we’re on a job.”

  “We can do that when we drop off the first litter and have bad people to kill. This is not talk about work time. This is the time to talk about how I will never be able to move again.”

  “Did I tire my lynx out? How sad for you. You’ll just have to take a nap and be forced into a bubble bath with me before being tucked into bed. I might even ravish you again if you’re lucky.”

  “If you kill me tonight, please write on my tombstone I died very happy.”

  Fourteen

  Formal business attire now means naked and in my bed.

  Money and connections could buy almost anything, and Sebastian called the CDC on his quest to find a room at a luxury hotel or spa near where we would hunt our victim. With the worry of two—maybe more—pregnant women at high risk of death if the pattern continued, the organization pulled out all of the stops and managed to acquire a room for us at a posh hotel a few blocks away from the skyscraper Stefan Loureni worked at most of the time. The hotel had a spa in it, and Sebastian went to town booking us in for a retreat for the evenings of the first three days of our stay.

  From everything we knew about Loureni, it would be unlikely he’d make contact for a few days. I would play the part of a secretary traveling for work, and due to my appearance, I made myself scarce when my boss, in this case, Sebastian, was entertaining various important people. As part of our ruse, we painted Sebastian as somewhat sleazy, insisting his poor, overwhelmed secretary share his fancy suite with him, taking the second bedroom. Sebastian claimed it ‘enhanced efficiency’ but everyone understood it sent a message stating I could be taken into the hotel room of a CEO-type and used however was desired.

  Any other day, any other man, and I would have answered with my fist. My virus wanted to find out how Sebastian meant to play the role, and she hoped he’d make use of the big tub for his secretary-using exploits. If he didn’t plan on exploiting his position in the tub, I’d be the aggressor. Fun times in the tub were on my schedule, and I’d play dirty to get what I wanted.

  Thanks to Sebastian’s ravishing of my person, my virus spiked hard enough I earned a scolding from the CDC rep in charge of making sure I was prepared for my mission to take out a serial killer.

  Spiking viruses made it harder for their concoctions to work, but it also meant I would burn off anything unwanted, like high-grade pixie dust, in record time, especially with their medications helping me. Not only did they safeguard me from pixie dust, they gave me three sets of prescription neutralizers disguised as blood pressure medication, an iron supplement, and an anti-anxiety prescription so I could have extra protections.

  Then, for a final layer of defense against a probable rapist asshole, the CDC called in an incubus and a succubus to fiddle with me. When they were finished, for a period of three months, my reproductive system belonged to me and only me, which meant my reproductive system offered access to Sebastian and only Sebastian. Anyone who wasn’t Sebastian would get a really nasty surprise in the form of a curse. The curse would cause infertility and an inability to have intercourse until reversed by an incubus or succubus—and the creator of the curse, some devil imported from the depths of hell itself, promised he’d know immediately if someone tried to reverse it, who had done it, and that such a reversal would be punished harshly.

  Thus prepared, I finished my preparations at a big box store to buy the sort of laptop a secretary might have, one issued by her work expecting performance. Sebastian helped with the purchase, which cost so much I asked six times if he was sure that was what was needed.

  I had thought secretaries would have gotten crappy computers, but no. A secretary needed to perform. Sebastian also bought the appropriate software I needed, and he got the CDC to provide some populated spreadsheets and data, and they hooked me into a calendar system so it looked like I was actually managing a busy CEO in Chicago.

  The second day of the venture, dressed in the type of blazer and skirt I expected would result in Sebastian wanting to bend me over something, I headed for the coffee shop where Loureni worked and began the tedious task of monitoring everyone going in and out of the shop. To help with that, I had a camera hidden in a necklace and a ring the CDC had provided, which took pictures at the press of a button on my phone or laptop. It took a little practice to get the ring, which was on my right ring finger, to capture the images I wanted. The auto-focusing features worked like a charm, and to my delight, the CDC’s system automatically processed facial identification whenever it could.

  The minutes flew by while I diligently worked on the various systems, and I even squeezed in some time to check the bounty hunter database for jobs I could do in the evenings if Loureni didn’t play into my trap.

  Coffee shop life suited me, and I made a habit of getting something to nibble on and drink every thirty minutes or so, waiting for when the shop wasn’t as busy so I could head to the bathroom as needed. Packing everything up every thirty minutes and setting it back up annoyed me, but I mastered the art, offering the illusion I worked hard for my boss.

  In the afternoon, not long after lunch, Stefan Loureni came in, and in a lot of ways, he reminded me of Sebastian, wearing a perfectly fitted suit, handsome enough he shouldn’t have had any trouble finding a woman to be his wife, and armed with a ready smile, which he shared with anyone who got within five feet of him. The way he chatted with the others in the shop led me to believe he came often, and he took his time to build his appearance of an easy-going, friendly man.

  I texted Sebastian I had a sighting of him and asked him to play the boss for a while, requesting that he give me a call asking about his schedule for the rest of the day, as he was a CEO who needed his precious secretary holding his hand.

  My phone rang, which caught my target’s attention. I made a show of checking the screen before I answered, “How can I help you, sir?”

  “Is he watching you?” Sebastian asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Tell me what’s on my agenda for the rest of the afternoon, and I also need to know when my precious secretary will be back in my room where I can make good use of her.”

  Pervert. I checked my computer. “You have a call in twenty minutes with a Mr. Heilekal of the CDC regarding certifications for products. At three, you have a meeting at the Willis Tower. At four, you have another meeting with a different company in the same building.” I tapped at my laptop. “I have sent you an email reminding you of the specifics of where you need to be in the tower for each appointment. After the meeting, you will return to the hotel and prepare for dinner.”

  “You’re coming to the dinner meeting.”

  Duh. If he thought I’d play the ruse without him feeding me dinner, he’d get a very rude awakening. “Understood, sir. The dinner will be formal business, and I will make certain I am dressed appropriately and wear my makeup.”

  “You don’t have to wear anything at all,” he growled. “Formal business attire now means naked and in my bed.”

  I liked his definition of formal business attire, but as I had to play the good secretary, I said, “Understood, sir. The dinner is scheduled at six, and I have already made arrangements for our transport. Do you need anything else?”

  “If he touches you, kill him.”

  “Yes, sir.” I hung up and set my phone down, resuming my work without hes
itation, although I adjusted my screen on the laptop so I could take a picture of Loureni.

  As soon as my call finished, he resumed working the crowd, although he kept glancing at me while he waited in line with the crowd of people wanting an afternoon hit of coffee, before returning to the daily grind. He ordered a coffee with some cream and sugar, saluted those he’d been talking to with it, and left.

  I texted Sebastian that the target had left the shop, and he wasted no time calling me. “Yes, sir?”

  “I could get used to that. Can you come back to the hotel now? I’ve been doing my part, and I have some interesting data for you. I’d like to hear your observations.”

  “Of course, sir.” I closed my laptop, stuffed it into the elegant leather bag Sebastian insisted was appropriate for a secretary of my level, and gathered the rest of my things while staying on the phone. “I’m headed back to the hotel now.”

  “Good. Stay on the phone, because I don’t trust that asshole as far as I can throw him.”

  I bit my lip so I wouldn’t inform Sebastian he could probably toss Loureni fairly far. “Sir.”

  “We are so going to have an evening where you seriously play my secretary, because that’s some serious flirtation, Wells.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Sir.”

  “You’re using your customer service voice on me, and this is definitely attractive. Consider me seduced.”

  I left the shop, spotting Loureni talking with someone in the lobby of the building. He stared at me when I left the shop, and he frowned when he spotted me on the phone. “Are there any other meetings you will need to have rescheduled, sir? I am on my way to the hotel, and I will handle the required rescheduling when there so you can give your opinions on the alternatives.”