She found Kyle in a zombielike state in the kitchen, groaning at their ever-expanding walls of pictures while gnawing on a peanut butter bagel. They grumbled to each other in morning acknowledgment.

  “Your tail is showing,” he mumbled as Paige reached for her cereal. She banged her head against the cabinet before yanking

  down her blouse and inching up her slacks in the back. “You also have a hickey,” Kyle added.

  Paige stumbled back to the bathroom to slap more concealer on the bruises on her throat. A pair of green eyes stared back in the reflection.

  “What the hell?”

  She blinked, and her baby browns stared sleepily back, but a familiar vampire was now sitting on the edge of the tub. She turned around, but the bathroom was empty.

  “Sorry to startle you this early,” Mordred whispered from the reflection. “You look nice in green.”

  She glared at him until he pointed at her chest. “I meant the blouse,” he sighed.

  “You never appear unless you want something,” she said.

  “I just need you to run to the bank at lunch. There will be a letter for you to pick up from a Mr. Green, one of my people. The branch isn’t but a half mile from your new office.”

  “Do you want me to pick up your dry cleaning too?” she snapped.

  The image of Mordred blew her a kiss. “I like this side of you, a rún—so feisty!”

  She stopped her fist just shy of smashing the mirror. After one last round of makeup and adjusting, she snatched up her purse and started on her commute. Her Tuesday morning of work consisted of more fliers and small talk from Mitch, as well as an excruciating video explaining how sexual harassment would not be tolerated in the workplace and a mountain of forms from Human Resources.

  “The exciting and dangerous world of a werewolf,” she groused as she started on a second pile of envelopes to stuff. As one of the flaps nicked the tip of her finger, a claw involuntarily shot out. “Damn it,” she cursed as she had to hide her hand under her desk before any of the other sales folks could notice.

  Mitch wandered by right before noon with an eager smile baring his magnificent overbite. “You know, Paige, a gaggle of us were going to pick up burgers across the street, and you look like you could use some rosemary-garlic fries,” he said.

  Paige gave him her best vacuous smile. “So sorry; have to run to the bank. Rain check though!” she said before snatching her purse and hustling for the exit.

  By the time the elevator reached the first floor and she made her way out of the lobby, a terrible realization hit Paige. She looked left and right down the sidewalk but could only see signs for various ATMs.

  “Where the hell do I go?” she muttered as she tried her best to not get run over by the lunchtime pedestrian traffic. She closed her eyes for just a second and listened to the cacophony of horns and motors. When she opened her eyes back up, her left hand was pointing back toward the Chicago Art Institute. She wandered aimlessly for a block or so until her feet led her to a bright red and white sign. She burst into hysterical laughter.

  “Really, the bank?” she snorted before heading into the Greater Chicago Blood Bank.

  Only a couple of the chairs in the waiting room were taken, so Paige was able to saunter right up to the counter. The guy at the desk started pulling out paperwork. “Are you here to donate?” he asked.

  “Just here to pick up a package from Mr. Green,” she said.

  “Sure thing.”

  Paige was rewarded a minute later by a padded envelope addressed to Paige DeMarco. She waited until she was out of the building to slide it open. She quickly snapped it closed as she saw a rather large wad of green tucked in the papers. “I’m a bagman now,”

  she whimpered before hustling back to the office. Once in the relative safety of her cube during lunchtime, she dumped out a bundle of hundred dollar bills, a passport, a Mississippi driver’s license, and a prepaid phone.

  The note on top simply read, “Just in case—L. D.”

  She stared in awe at her picture tucked into a stranger’s identity. According to this bundle she was Paige Presley from Oxford, Mississippi. She shoved the lot in her purse and tried her best to look busy even as her stomach growled. Her other phone buzzed and showed the name Kyle.

  “What is it? I’m at work,” she snapped.

  “Go to CommercialAppeal.com now,” he said.

  “Kyle—”

  “Just do it.”

  She typed in the website for her hometown newspaper on her work machine. It didn’t take her long to figure out exactly what Kyle wanted her to see.

  “Four-Alarm Fire destroys Collierville Gym,” Paige read. She quickly skimmed the data and found mention of two injuries but no deaths.

  “Paige, Grandpa was the owner on record of that gym. Two of his other businesses under that same identity also had fires last night. Did you just get a message to pick up a package too?” Kyle asked.

  “Kyle, is the Chicago apartment owned by the same identity?”

  she asked.

  “No, but I think it’s safe to assume that someone is making a move.”

  “Gotta go,” she said, slamming down the phone and quickly flipping her screen to a mailing list as the gang returned from lunch.

  “You missed some killer fries, Paige,” Mitch said as he eased onto the edge of her desk. “But there is always happy hour tonight—”

  “I’m sure a guy like you has someone to get home to,” Paige said sweetly.

  “Nah, it’s not for me,” he said. “So, drinks tonight?”

  Paige’s eyes widened as she saw Morgan actually making his face seen in sales. The blond werewolf gave her a little nod toward the break room.

  “I’m sorry; I have plans,” she said with a grimace. “If you would excuse me.”

  She heard a few surprised titters as she followed the puffy guy in glasses and the terrible ponytail into the kitchenette. Mitch visibly gawked as she walked away.

  “Great; gossip,” Morgan muttered as he puttered around the fridge. “You know; I’ve made it nearly three years around here without so much as a second glance—”

  “No, I’m pretty sure they’ve noticed you and been laughing behind your back,” Paige said. She grabbed her own lunch out of the fridge before her stomach could complain too much more.

  “Perhaps, but I’m not threatening to anyone. I’m innocuous here,” he said. He pulled a pack of cleaning wipes out of his pocket and wiped down the table in front of Paige. She set her lunch bag down and watched Morgan wipe down his chair and place setting as well before he unwrapped a sandwich. The blond folded each corner to make a perfect diamond of waxed paper with a gem of a turkey club nestled inside. Morgan took a quick moment to count each slice of meat, lettuce, and tomato before he tucked in.

  Paige watched him nibble his lunch one corner at a time, turning the bread so that no side of the sandwich jutted out or looked uneven. By the end of the first pass, all the crust was gone, and his lunch was a lovely circle to fit snugly inside his diamond. Morgan then proceeded to pull out a bag of gummy bears and sort them by color onto a napkin that he also angled to form a diamond in parallel to his sandwich.

  “What?” he asked as he dropped the lone pineapple one into the center of the napkin.

  “Um, nothing,” she said. “I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I warned my uncle that if he approached someone like you that it would be trouble,” Morgan said. He seemed to be speaking to someone on the floor rather than looking at Paige. He nodded a few times at random as well. “But he didn’t listen, and . . . bad things have happened to you, yes?”

  Paige looked down at the plastic floor tiles but couldn’t figure out exactly who Morgan was addressing. She let him gnaw another round of his club circle.

  “You have a very distinctive eating style,” she muttered before taking a huge bite out of her own roast beef. Morgan stared in horror at the gaping hole ripped out of only one corner.

  “You should eat that properly,” he said with another nod. “The bread is softest in the middle. If you take your time and eat around the outside first, you will get the single most delicious bite in the end.”

  “And you eat all your sandwiches this way?” Paige asked.

  Morgan nodded.

  “But you just ate your tacos the other night like a normal person

  —”

  “A taco is not a sandwich,” Morgan said quickly.

  Paige raised a brow. “No, a taco is a bunch of filling stuffed inside a piece of bread. It is absolutely a sandwich,” she said.

  Morgan slammed his fist on the table, prompting uncomfortable looks from the other office drones trying to have a peaceful lunch.

  “No! A taco is not a sandwich,” he barked, fighting to keep his voice down.

  Paige took one look at the intensity brewing in his eyes and decided to defuse the situation by dutifully nibbling off the crust and corners of her lunch. As she set down a lopsided oval, some of the color drained from Morgan’s face.

  “You have issues, Mr. Wolfe,” Paige said softly.

  This time when Morgan nodded, it seemed appropriate to the scenario.

  “You were right,” he said to the floor again. “I am obligated to help you. I find myself cleaning up after my uncle a fair bit. Just know that if you do anything to hurt the people here or to draw attention to me, you won’t like the result.”

  “I’m not—”

  Morgan stared over Paige’s shoulder and snarled. She turned around to see the retreating form of a sales guy in a shimmery, stylish suit. “Attention is the enemy,” Morgan spat out. “You’re distracting. I’ll help you . . . but I don’t want to.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Paige muttered. She gave him a nasty smile and then purposefully took an uneven wedge out of her lunch. She plopped the uneven entrée right in front of him and said, “Oh look, I made Pac-Man!”

  Morgan took a deep breath and cracked his neck. Slowly, methodically, he pulled out a receipt from his pocket and wrote down an address. “Tonight at eight. Wear something comfortable,” he muttered.

  Paige scarfed down her food and tossed away her trash before Morgan could have an apoplectic berserk moment at the sight of uneven eating. Sure enough, as she was wandering away, he was wiping down the table once more.

  Mitch didn’t wait for five seconds before rushing to her desk.

  “Please don’t tell me that your plans include the Abominable Accountant,” he said as he sat on her desk.

  Paige grinned sheepishly and sighed, “Well, he did ask nicely

  —”

  “That guy has total lives-with-his-mom-serial-killer vibes coming off him.”

  Paige just shrugged and laughed. “It’s just dinner,” she said. “I think.”

  “I bet you that he like goes to all those comic book conventions and argues who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman

  —”

  Paige had just started into her latest spreadsheet as Mitch continued, “Paige, the man rides a bicycle to work and still weighs like three hundred pounds.”

  Paige spent the rest of her afternoon hearing just how terrible Morgan was, complete with comments from the Sales department peanut gallery. She wasted no time packing up her stuff as the clock turned five.

  “Paige, babe, you are way too nice,” Mitch said as she was shutting down her computer.

  “Careful, Mitch. If you keep talking him up like that, I just might have to spend the night at his place,” she drawled before sauntering down the hall.

  She hurried home and found Kyle staring at a padded envelope similar to the one she’d picked up at lunch. He flipped up his Kentucky ID and pointed to the picture. “Of all the pictures Grandpa must have of me, he had to use the one where I had a huge zit on my nose,” he moaned.

  “Have you found out if everyone is OK?” she asked.

  “Well, the problem with hiding from everyone you know is that it’s not easy to get in contact with people—”

  “Kyle!”

  “Kayleigh is a computer genius. If I call, she’ll trace that I’m in Chicago, and it won’t be very hard for the rest of the pack to find us. I did call Collierville Baptist Hospital to see if anyone we knew had checked in there, but for all we know, they are using fake names too.”

  “I’m going to meet up with Morgan tonight. I don’t know how, but I’ll get some answers. Maybe I can convince him to tell me why his uncle attacked me or what my dad has to do with this or anything else useful.”

  “Something in my gut tells me to start packing,” Kyle said.

  “Grandpa wouldn’t send out emergency kits without good reason.

  I’ve got one more round of poking at the alma mater, but otherwise we should lay low. So how exactly are you going to convince some creepy feral werewolf to help you, by the way, because he’s a pretty big unknown?”

  “I have no idea. Look, if anything really weird happens, why don’t you head back to them?”

  “Hey, I promised Grandpa—”

  “That was before things started burning down. If anything does go wrong and I don’t come back tonight, don’t come after me. Go back and tell Nadia and Lorcan every tiny bit of evidence you’ve found. Hopefully, though, we’re just being paranoid, everything will be fine, and I’ll be able to come back with you and get this chunk of a vampire out of my head, right?”

  Kyle looked at her skeptically until her left hand gave a reassuring OK sign. He sighed and pointed at the potential suspects on the left. “If it’s your great-grandfather that’s after Grandpa, he’s already had plenty of chance to kill you, so you might be in luck just so long as he doesn’t realize that Grandpa is hitchhiking. If it’s Mina, she doesn’t kill people, but she might make you wish you were dead if she discovers—”

  “I get the idea—no telling anyone that I have the vampire in my head! Now I want to get changed and ready for whatever Morgan wants to do tonight. Check out this address while I change, all right?”

  Paige quickly slipped into her baggy workout pants and a T-shirt. She dumped her purse into a duffel bag, careful to hide the cash under a towel.

  “It’s not a question of whether you are paranoid; it’s whether you are paranoid enough,” she whispered. She peeked out the bedroom door as she could barely hear Kyle whispering on the phone. She closed her eyes and listened to the words, “No, she doesn’t suspect,” before a harried, “Gotta go.”

  “Were you talking to someone?” Paige asked as she padded into the room.

  Kyle picked up a menu. “Just getting some more deep-dish. You going to eat before or after facing down the wild werewolf?”

  “I’ll get something. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Oh, I looked up that address you gave me. It came up as a computer repair shop, but the number was no longer in service.”

  “OK; thanks!”

  “Be careful,” Kyle called as she hustled out the door.

  She caught the reflection of Mordred in the elevator door. For the first time ever, his face held a look of concern instead of snark.

  “Now I’m really freaked out,” she muttered.

  - 20 -

  Paige tried her best to wander casually in front of the boarded-over storefront of Mr. Fix-It’s PC Repair. She looked at her phone—seven-thirty. A couple of guys gave her a look as they passed, but most of this aspiring hipster neighborhood seemed too busy hustling for a latte or discussing indie music to pay her any mind.

  Just as she started her fifth pacing lap to the corner liquor store and back, she heard a pointed throat clear. She whirled around to see Morgan dismounting a bike, looking especially nerdish with his blue and white TARDIS bicycle helmet. She could smell his sweat even over the mix of cigarettes and apathy in the air.

  “You like to be early too—good!” he said as he walked his bike to a vestibule three doors down from the boarded-up storefront.

  “Is that from Dr. Who?” she asked, pointing to his helmet.

  Morgan nodded furiously. “My, um, buddy, Bernard, made it.

  You a fan?”

  “I used to watch it with my dad,” she said wistfully. “So we aren’t getting a computer repaired?”

  Morgan looked over her shoulder before unlocking the door. “I try to never give out my real address, and the mailman still delivers there.”

  “So your personnel file wasn’t correct?” she teased as she followed the bike up a filthy set of stairs. Morgan kept his shoulders in and never touched the splintered banister.

  “Well, it’s close enough,” he said as he reached the second-floor landing. “This is the place that I bring all the girls I can’t trust; don’t you know?”

  Paige followed him around the stairs to a rather innocuous apartment—2C. Despite the murky, dingy exterior, Paige could smell pine and lemon wafting from this door.

  “Wow,” she said as he opened the door to reveal a page right out of 1950s Better Homes and Gardens.

  She couldn’t see a single fingerprint in the chrome banding around his diner-style kitchen table. Every black and white tile glistened and gleamed, and the linoleum looked fresh from the showroom. He parked his bike in the laundry alcove and slipped off his shoes before daring to walk farther in. He motioned toward her feet.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you have any idea what is thrown on an average Chicago sidewalk on any given day?” he asked with a little shudder. “I don’t want any of it sinking into my hardwood floors.”

  Paige dutifully slipped off her sneakers and tucked them next to his. He motioned to the rather quaint living area with old-fashioned striped wallpaper and a sofa covered in a plastic slipcover.

  “I shed from time to time,” he confessed.

  “Your mother isn’t here, is she?” Paige asked as she noticed honest-to-goodness doilies on the mantel and a rocking chair in the corner.

  Morgan’s face darkened instantly. “My mother is dead,” he said flatly.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Paige said.

  “It was twenty-five years ago,” Morgan growled. “Long enough for me, I suppose, but only yesterday to the creatures that killed her.”

 

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