by Jessica Sims
“Rational?” Vic Merino roared, the veins bulging in his neck. The big man snarled, his shoulders hunched with fury as he turned to glare at Beau. “One of my clan just turned a human. Do you know what this means? It means I’m now stuck with a fucking human who can’t figure out why she wants to turn into a fucking tiger every now and then. My clan didn’t need this shit.”
“I’m sure things will be fine,” Bathsheba began soothingly.
Vic turned his withering glare on her. “Fine? My clan will be forced to pay reparations to every other clan for breaking the law. Once the other clans find out what mine has done, they’re going to bankrupt us. And we’re also going to have to pay off her parents to keep them silent. We’re fucked.” His eyes grew fierce and wild. “My wife is pregnant with our child. You want me to be calm and rational while that idiot is taking food out of my mate’s mouth?”
Beau stepped in front of Bathsheba, silently protecting her, his glare fierce. “Don’t take that tone with my mate, Vic.”
Vic snarled back at Beau, baring his teeth . . . then dropped back a foot, pacing away. “Sorry. Fuck. I’m just a little stressed right now.”
I discreetly crossed “tigers” off my list. Yikes. I wasn’t sure I could deal with that kind of temper.
A muscle ticked in Beau’s cheek. “I’m just as angry as you are. But shouting isn’t going to turn her human again.”
“And what am I supposed to do? They’ve got me by my fucking balls and my clan by my wallet. Who am I going to complain to?” He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “She already tried to go to the police once, and we had to shut that shit down fast.”
“No human police,” Beau said, not moving from his protective stance in front of his wife. “You know what we have to do.”
That stopped the tiger’s furious pacing. “What do you propose?”
“The law changes today. Here. Now,” Beau said with a slice of his hand through the air. “First the trouble with the wolves and Sara, and now this. Things are getting out of control, and it threatens the safety of everyone. Maybe people think that because I’ve taken a human mate, the rules have relaxed. That’s not the case. Bathsheba’s life was threatened. Her sister’s been under constant attack. If anything, it’s proven to me that humans and weres shouldn’t mix.” The look on his face was grim. “From here on out, we’re moving to a no-tolerance policy. No unapproved turnings. Anyone who does? Can join their newly turned friend in permanent exile.”
Permanent exile?
“Exile?” Johnny said, echoing my thoughts as he stepped out of the conference room, the redhead trailing behind him, her hand clutched in his. He swallowed hard. “We’re exiled?”
“We haven’t decided yet,” Vic snarled. “Why don’t you go show your girlfriend how to control her change so she doesn’t make another fucking scene in public?”
The girl flushed a bright red, and Johnny scowled. He grabbed the girl’s arm, and they made a hasty exit out of the room.
Beau rubbed his face, seeming decades older. The tiger alpha looked like he wanted to ransack something, and Beau shook his head. “We’ll sit on this for a few days before deciding what to do about his disrespect.”
“And the girl—”
“Will be included in his punishment,” Beau agreed. “We have to be firm on this. If it gets out that someone’s gone and changed a human, we’re all at risk. Zero tolerance.”
“But won’t that be seen as hypocritical after you’ve taken a human mate?” Bath asked, her voice quiet. “Your men are lonely.”
“And the men are not acting rationally. I’m not protecting them—I’m thinking of you, of Sara. Of every single human woman that’s going to be hunted and turned into something she doesn’t understand unless we put a lid on this.” He fixed a fierce gaze on all of us.
No one said a thing.
Beau turned to Bathsheba. “I need a list of all packs and clans that have an extremely low female ratio. We need to make sure the males are kept occupied. The last thing we want is a string of human women turned by men who can’t keep it in their pants.”
She gave him a blank look. “I’m sorry, were you asking me as your wife, or your assistant?”
I sucked in a breath, expecting someone to explode.
But Beau only chuckled, leaning in to kiss her cheek. “I’m sorry. Could you please help with this? I promise I’ll look at those resumés for an assistant once things calm down.”
She gave him a mollified smile and nodded. That was the thing I never got used to with shifters. They preferred it when their women talked back.
“But—” Johnny began.
“No excuses,” Beau clipped as he jerked around to fix the man in his gaze. His teeth bared, and I realized he was furious. Barely controlled, despite his loving manner with Bathsheba. “No one else is turned, or they’ll be exiled permanently.”
My heart dropped into my throat, and I very quietly scratched out “were-anything” on my list.
That just cut down my list of available choices . . . considerably.
After all, I was trying to get someone to turn me.
Chapter Two
My mother died when I was eighteen. She gradually withered away, going slowly mad from a disease that had the medical people baffled. It’s called fatal familial insomnia, and it’s exceedingly rare.
I remember thinking nothing of it when I’d wake up for school and find out that my mother had been up all night, watching reruns on TV, unable to sleep. She’d laugh it off and say that she’d nap during the day. No one in my family thought too much of it at first. After six months, my father began to worry. She tried taking pills and medications to help her sleep, but they only made things worse. She went to see specialist after specialist, only to be told that no one could help her. When they made the final verdict—fatal familial insomnia—we realized what was in store for her. She was going to die a slow, painful death, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Mother deteriorated more quickly than we anticipated. Within months, she began to see things. When her hallucinations grew so strong that she had a hard time discerning reality, she had to be hospitalized. And from there, she went downhill. We watched, numb, as the illness took her mind and she turned into an insane, brittle husk of the vibrant woman she once had been. My poor, distraught father kept vigil at her bedside, holding her hand even as she slipped away.
How could you die from simply not being able to sleep? The doctors explained that there was something in my mother’s genetic makeup that wouldn’t allow her to get restful sleep, and it slowly took a toll on her mind. By the end, she was mad with exhaustion, and half the time she didn’t recognize me or my father.
It was devastating.
Then the doctors insisted on testing me, since I shared the same DNA. They were interested for scientific reasons, of course. I was interested because I wanted to know if I was going to end up with the same death sentence.
I wasn’t prepared to find out the truth: I was a carrier for the same disease. It might hit me but it might not, the doctors reassured me. Most people didn’t see an onset of it until they hit their forties, and by the time I hit that age, surely they’d have a cure for it. They patted me and reassured me, and in turn, I patted and reassured my father, who was still reeling from the loss of my mother. Plenty of time yet before his only child might be affected. And there was always a chance that the disease would never kick in.
But I knew my fate as soon as I heard the verdict. I knew that slow, tortured death would eventually come for me.
So I lived with the specter of my death looming over my mind, hovering like a silent reminder that my days were numbered. It colored everything I did. If you knew you were only going to live until forty or so, it’d affect your life, too. I’d always been a fairly withdrawn, silent teenager, but after my mother’s death and my diagnosis I withdrew even more. Lost touch with all my friends after graduation and remained solitary all through college.
>
I saw how much grief my father went through, and I vowed not to let that happen to another person I loved. Caring for someone and getting close to them only brought pain in the end. Much better to go through life alone and isolated so you didn’t shatter someone else when you left.
So I didn’t date. I got good at deflecting men’s attention. I avoided places where men might hang out trolling for women—bars, clubs, singles groups. What was the point? I was going to die horribly in the prime of my life. Every time I met a man I was interested in, I kept seeing my father’s face at my mother’s bedside. Did I want to do that to someone else?
No, I did not.
So I’d politely turn down any invitation to dinner or a movie. And if I felt lonely, well, there was always my father’s company. Dad and I grew even closer after Mom’s death, going out to dinner, to movies, to museum openings together. We went on vacation to England and toured castles. I went to poker night with him and his friends. Everything was just fine.
Until my lonely, still-young-at-fifty father met Posey.
I hated Posey.
Okay. Hate’s a pretty strong word. I had an intense dislike for Posey. She was the epitome of Southern gentility. She had big blond hair that she wore in an enormous teased pouf of curls. She wore pink. Lots of pink. She sold Avon and wore high heels with her capris. She coordinated her purse with her earrings. And she talked. Loudly. And she flirted heavily with my father.
And he fell for her. The next thing I knew, my dad was dating. Well, good for him. He was so tired of being lonely. And even though I wasn’t a fan of pink, loud Posey, my father adored her and he wasn’t sad anymore.
That was good. I was busy with my new job at Midnight Liaisons, since my bachelor’s in French language wasn’t doing much for me, so I was glad that Dad had someone to spend time with. It was when they went on vacation to Vegas that I started to feel left out. And when they went to Hawaii together. And then took a cross-country trip. They were having a blast just being together, and I began to feel even more isolated and lonely. Maybe at twenty-eight, I was letting life get away from me. Maybe I should have been dating, too.
But then I started having trouble sleeping. At first I thought it was stress. After a week, though, I knew. My mother’s first symptom had been insomnia, and I was a carrier.
I was dying.
I tried to deny it at first. I saw doctors and had them prescribe sleeping pills. I kept my problems from my coworkers and my dad, sure that it was controllable. I did everything I could to “fix” my sleeping problems. I bought new pillows, and then a new bed. I went to meditation therapy. Hypnosis. Acupuncture. Had sleep tests done.
But nothing worked. My brain wouldn’t shut down. Wouldn’t go to sleep. The fatal familial insomnia had kicked in.
I panicked at first. I didn’t want to die. Especially not as a faceless, dateless, twenty-eight-year-old who hadn’t lived enough. I thought I was prepared for the inevitable, only to find out that I was in no way ready for this. It took only a day or so before the realization kicked in—I could use the agency to help my situation.
Sara unknowingly provided the inspiration. I was at my desk, desperately trying to hold myself together by working extra hours. I was setting up a client with a were-jaguar, and Sara was sitting across from me. Suddenly she laughed and instant-messaged me with a dating profile. Check it out.
I pulled the link up on my computer: Joshua Russell. Handsome as hell, and judging from his picture, he knew it. “What am I looking for?”
“His dating list. Look at how long that is! You’d think people would see through his flirting, but he gets away with murder.”
I clicked on his history, and sure enough, it seemed like Josh had dated just about every shifter in our database. “He’s probably riddled with every disease known to mankind,” I commented dryly. “They’re welcome to him.”
Sara snorted. “Man, you’re hard on men. And of course he’s not diseased, silly. He’s a shifter.”
She emphasized the last word like it should mean something to me. “And so . . . ?”
“And so shifters don’t get diseases. They have crazy immune systems that keep things running like a race car.”
And . . . just like that, I had an idea.
I was going to get a shifter to turn me. Maybe a vampire. I wasn’t picky.
I was not going to die young. Not if I could help it.
Chapter Three
Of course, first I had to find someone to turn me. Not as easy as one might think.
I drummed my pencil on my desk now, looking down at my list. No shifters, if Beau’s new rule was ironclad. But there were still vampires. They didn’t necessarily follow the same laws that shifters did. They had their own set of rules, and even Alliance vampires didn’t necessarily follow the same playbook that the shifters did.
And some of the vampires were quite good-looking. I thought of one that had come into the agency recently. He’d been handsome, with sad eyes and crazy hair, but very attractive. Young, too.
“Hey, Ryder,” I called across the small office. “Who was the vampire with the sexy, frothy hair? Your client?”
“Valjean,” she replied, not looking up from her computer.
Ah, that was him. I entered his name into the database. IN A RELATIONSHIP, the screen said. Tabarnak. Damn, that was fast. All the good ones got snatched early. So much for the hot new vampire.
I chewed on my lip, then changed my search criteria to “vampire only” and studied the profiles it brought up.
Maybe I needed someone that was a bit more desperate to date. I wasn’t good at flirting, and I had no amazing bed-play to entice a man. I was great at jigsaw puzzles and bingo, but again, not the way to get a man. But if a guy was desperate, he wouldn’t mind, would he? I pulled out my compact and studied my face, wondering if it’d appeal to a vampire. “Hey, Ryder? Would you say that I’m cute?”
This time, she peered over her computer at me, her gaze wary. “That’s a loaded question. Why?”
I shrugged. “Just curious.”
“Well, let me think,” she said, getting up from her desk for another cup of coffee. Ryder mainlined caffeine like it was going out of fashion, which was probably why she was so wound up all the time. “I’m going to say no, I’m afraid.”
I scowled at her. “You’re a shitty friend, you tête de cochon.”
“See, there’s reason number one. Girls with a potty mouth are never cute. Daring, yes. Cute, no. The French is a nice touch, but not quite enough. Number two, you can’t be cute if you keep wearing that eyeliner.”
I eyed her perfectly made up face.
“I’m serious,” Ryder said, stirring sugar into her coffee. “Throw that cheap garbage out. It makes you look like you have massive circles under your eyes.”
Well, I did have massive circles under my eyes from lack of sleep. I’d thought the eyeliner would distract from it. “So you wouldn’t date me?”
At my wounded look, she waved her hand at me. “Get a haircut. Do something with those bangs. Ditch the glasses. For God’s sake, wear something other than a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. And pluck your eyebrows. After that, we’ll talk.”
I frowned, then squinted at my reflection in the monitor. My eyebrows were fine, damn it. “Okay, let me rephrase. Do I look cute enough for a desperate vampire to date?”
She sat down at her desk and took a sip of coffee. “I don’t know. You’re really not much of a people person. What’s your blood type?”
“O positive.”
“Then yes, that makes you cute to every vampire out there.” Her perfect, lovely gaze narrowed on me. “And again, whyyyy?”
I shrugged, then dared to ask a question of the only person I trusted. “If I set up a date with a vampire while I’m supposed to be working, will you cover for me?”
Her jaw dropped.
“With the whole sunlight thing, this has to be at night, and since we work at night . . . ”
“It’
s against the rules,” she hissed. “Humans have to be cleared to date through the boss. And you heard what Beau said about shifters earlier.”
“I know. That’s why I want a vampire. I want one to turn me.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you crazy?”
I was starting to think so.
• • •
Despite Ryder’s protests, I wouldn’t be deterred from my plan. I put up a fake profile on the dating agency site and left it vague. My fake name? Minnie Michigo, cousin to the otter clan of Michigos. I’d be in a hell of a lot of trouble if a Michigo came in and found out the profile existed, but I’d cross that bridge when I got there. Anyhow, Minnie’s profile stated that she loved vampires, late nights, moonlight, and was open to exploring new avenues. If that didn’t bring them crawling out of the woodwork, I didn’t know what would.
Sure enough, Minnie got a hit at one in the morning from a vampire. Did she want to go out on a date tomorrow night?
Hell, yeah, she did.
Could Minnie send a picture of herself?
Damn. I ran to the bathroom and quickly took a picture of myself with my phone, removing my glasses and striking what I hoped was a sexy pose, then sent it back.
He accepted. Must have been sexy enough.
I replied quickly and named a spot that wasn’t on the usual Alliance list of date hot spots. Nice and safe.
The next night, before going to work, I picked out a sweater to go with my jeans and put on lipstick. I was date-ready.
Once I got to Midnight Liaisons, I told Ryder I had a date with a vamp and begged, “Pleaaaase will you cover for me?”
“No,” she said fiercely. “Absolutely not. Not while everyone’s all ultra-pissy about the new girl shifter. If you really want to date a vampire, and God knows why you do, do it next month when everyone’s got the stick out of their asses.”
I couldn’t wait a month; I didn’t know how long I had. My mother had degenerated over a year, but my case had kicked in early. What if its course was accelerated? I clasped my hands under my chin and gave her sad eyes. “Pleeeeeease, Ryder?”
