The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf Read Free Page A

you, no, you can’t kill someone and make it look like an accident? Now, would you two please sit down and drink this tea before it gets cold?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” we chorused sheepishly, taking seats at the table.
    “Way to go, you got us into trouble,” I grumbled.
    “I wasn’t the one planning the cold-blooded murder of a complete stranger,” Mo stage-whispered.
    “No, you only plan cold-blooded murders when someone takes the last chocolate chess square without asking.”
    “A girl’s got to have her priorities,” Mo insisted.

2
     

     

I’m a Loser, Baby . . .
     
    B Y THE TIME I arrived at the Glacier, I’d worked up a pretty good head of steam.
    I’d done a little bit of research on Dr. Nicholas J. Thatcher, and my Google results were disturbing. Mo was right. Thatcher wasn’t your typical lonely tech geek who fancied himself a paranormal investigator. He was calling himself a “zoological anthropologist.” He’d already decided that werewolves existed; now he just wanted to know how we came to be, how we lived. This was just the type of guy who would blindly stumble into proof of our existence, sell it to National Geographic, and send my whole family running away from scientists bearing tranq guns and skull saws.
    Here’s the thing. I loved being a werewolf. I couldn’t imagine living in just one skin. And I was lucky to be able to turn into such a cool animal. I could have been stuck as a were-skunk or something equally lame. (They do exist. Poor bastards.) Werewolves changed day or night and had the most complete, dependable changes. And we had the stable pack structure, led by an alpha male mated to the female of his choice, who becomes the alpha female. Unless the alpha male handed his office over to, say, his much cooler and wiser younger sister.
    And don’t believe all that crap Hollywood tries to peddle about being bitten and cursed by the full moon. You had to be born into our little club. No matter how many times we bit someone, that person would not go furry. They’d probably bleed a lot, though, and maybe get an infection.
    Humans had no idea that we existed. Sure, we were the subject of lame movies, and every Halloween, we put up with little kids running around with fur glued to their faces, yelling “Grr!” But humans would freak out if they realized that they saw us every day at the grocery store, in their schools, in the woods. Hell, some wildlife experts could see us in wolf form and would never know they were looking at anything but a large, but otherwise normal, wolf. A picture of my cousin Samson made it into National Geographic the year before with a caption calling him a “magnificent specimen.” He’d been carrying the damn article around in his wallet for months, using it to impress werewolf chicks.
    Basically, we’d gotten by undocumented with cunning and a lot of dumb-ass luck.
    If people knew, really knew, that the things that go bump in the night existed, we’d be hunted. Simpleas that. Our children would be taken from us and put in special detention centers. We’d be studied, dissected, chased.
    Nick Thatcher would be lucky to leave Grundy with all his parts intact.
    I took a deep breath and let myself wallow in the delicious, happy noise of the Blue Glacier before I had to get down to business. My cousin Evie owned the saloon, which was part diner, part bar, part dry goods store. The dining room was lit by picture windows and obnoxious neon beer signs. The scent of smoke from the black iron woodstove and potatoes fried in peanut oil had pictures of double cheeseburgers and apple-raisin pie dancing behind my eyelids.
    Evie’s husband, Buzz, had churned out plain old burgers and fries from the saloon’s kitchen until Mo came along with her magical spatula. She overhauled the menu, started baking desserts from scratch, and turned out to be a bit of a marketing genius to boot. For instance, she figured out that while her new neighbors found “shepherd’s