Dakota Cassidy - The Accidental Werewolf 2 - Something About Harry

Because his sensible, thinking mind told him what had just occurred after he’d sipped his vitaminwater wasn’t a case of hypertrichosis. Not with the speed in which he’d been affected. It couldn’t be . . .

Not to mention, he was well and truly stuck in this room—under a table. There was no getting out of here—not like this—not at the end of a workday when every one of his colleagues could see him leaving the offices in tumbleweeds of unsightly hair. He needed help to escape quickly and quietly before he was discovered—all hairy and sharp-of-tooth. This OOPS website claimed it could help. It listed all sorts of examples of how they could help.

The tapping of a finger, like the sound of a hydraulic jack in his head, recaptured his attention. “Harrry?”

He grimaced at the throb of pressure Nina’s incessant thrumming created in his head. “Ms. Statleon?”

“Get . . . to . . . the . . . fucking . . . point!”

Harry squeezed his temple with his thumb and forefinger. “I need help. I’m trapped. Can you help?”

There was a sharp cluck of Nina’s tongue and then she said, “Depends on the crisis.”

“Could you be any more vague?” he snarled, baring his teeth. Oh, shit. He’d snarled. And bared his teeth.

“Could you be in a shittier position?”

Drool formed at the corner of his mouth. He swiped at it with an impatient thumb and fought the irrational, uncommon urge to hunt this woman down and rip her head off. “Meaning?”

“Meaning, I’m the paranormal crypt keeper, and if you piss me off, I’ll throw the key to the crypt in the goddamn Hudson.”

Four deep, willing-his-patience-back-into-existence breaths later, Harry realized she was right. “Again, as I said before, Keeper of the Crypt, I’m feeling a little out of control. Thusly, my emotions are erratic.”

“Thusly?”

Harry’s eyes narrowed, awed by the magnification of his eyesight. He was nearsighted, hence the nerd-dweeb glasses. “It means—”

“I know what the fuck it means, Vocab Man. I was just pointing out how dorky it is to use, you know, in this century.”

“Thank you. Your observation is both helpful and, above all, original.” Like he hadn’t been accused of throwing his broad vocabulary around a time or ten million. His sister Donna called it pretentious.

“Yeah. I’m all about enriching lives. So could we get to the reason you called? I’m bored now, and when I’m bored, I get cranky. You don’t want that, Harry.”

Intuitively, he somehow knew he didn’t want this woman named Nina cranky. “Do you have a list of credentials?”

“You mean like a certification from Ghostbusters that says we’re all official paranormal helpers?”

Was this Nina of the unladylike mouth and easily stirred pot mocking him? It made him incredibly uncomfortable when he missed a joke everyone else around him seemed to get. This happened far more often than he’d like to admit. “Well, yes.”

“Yeah. Sure. You wanna call the Paranormal Center for Paranormalness? I can give you my vampire ID number. Once you’ve got that, you’re golden, dude. Then, when you give it to the team of paranormal experts on paranormalness they’ll give you my shiny references from Anne Rice and Team Edward.”

Okay. She was mocking him. His sigh grated on the way out of his throat. “There’s no reason to be so flippant. I just want to be sure I’ve done my homework and I choose the appropriate organization to advise me . . . you know, for this problem . . .”

Nina’s hand cracked against a hard surface, making him cringe. “Christ. This ain’t Carfax, Harry. There’s no one else to compare us to. It’s not like you can call the Better Business Bureau and check on us or some shit. There’s no other group like us around. We’re it—the total shiz.”

According to the Internet, Nina’s shiz really was it. He began to estimate and calculate in his head the kind of money this sort of dilemma would cost. It wouldn’t be cheap, he suspected.

Was he really considering utilizing the services of a group of people who claimed, not only that they were paranormal themselves, but that they could guide him to the other side of the supernatural?

Really, Harry?

Oh, hell yes, he was. There was no other alternative. He was trapped with no chance of escape, and the option of calling 911 went out the window when his hairline had drastically changed.

“Harrrry,” Nina singsonged into his ear. “I’m getting bored. I explained bored, dude, right?”

Right. Bored made Nina cranky. Do not make the Nina cranky. Forewarned was forearmed. “And what do you charge for said services? By the hour? Pay as you go?”

“Well, if I was in charge, we’d charge. But I’m not. I’m just the muscle.”

His ears pricked—like really pricked. There wasn’t a sound around him that wasn’t overly exaggerated. “The muscle?”

“Yeah, you know, like when crazy-assed lunatics are making super vampire serums and some bent-out-of-shape nutjob djinn wants to steal a title from a nice kid who was accidentally turned into a genie? I’m the muscle they send in to take care of biz.”

Vampire serums and title-stealing djinns. That would take longer to process than . . . No. He couldn’t process that. Harry shoved the ridiculousness of that statement aside and plowed onward. “So, Muscle, who’s the brains in your organization? Maybe I should talk to him?”

Harry heard Nina’s chair scrape against the floor, and it wasn’t a nice scrape. It was an angry one. How he knew that, he didn’t know. He only knew that now he’d done it—razzed the beast.

“What makes you fucking think the brains belong to a man, you sexist cave dweller?”

Damn. He’d offended her. If he was clueless about general fodder and a good-natured ribbing, he was even more clueless when it came to women and their sensitivities. In other words, he often had no choice but to just shove his foot in his mouth before a conversation even started. It was sure to end up there anyway if he was left to captain the Good Ship Small Talk.

So he began again. With an apology. Because his sister Donna had always said that was the best way to make nice when you’d tripped over your tongue. “I’m sorry, Nina. It was a simple slip of a pronoun. One I regret. I just thought, in light of the fact that you claimed muscle as your title, a job sure to keep you a busy little bee, there would be someone else who’d claimed the other titles.”

“And you naturally thought that someone would be a man.”

Sexist pig here. “How not-of-this-century of me.”

“Look, I’m gonna get to the point here. First, in one way or another, we’re all the muscle. We’re three women with mad-ass ninja skills because we’re paranormal. Not that I wouldn’t cut a bitch before all this happened to me. I was tough enough already without the vampire shit added in. Anyway, sometimes we get the occasional mad-ass specialty ninja in to consult, but it’s mostly just us three chicks. And I’m the only chick you got right now. And we don’t charge. We’re non-profit, which means we personally bankroll this nutball scheme. And if Marty puts one more bullshit pair of shoes down on her expense report as necessary to meet and greet clients with? I’m gonna beat the feet right off her.”

“Marty,” he mumbled.

“Forget Marty. Just tell me what the problem is before I go all Girl, Interrupted on you.”

“I have a lot of hair.” Everywhere. Just everywhere. He held his hand up in the dim lighting and cringed as the confession spilled from his lips.

“Gillette.”

“What?”

“Gillette. They make good razors. Nice and sharp. Marty and Wanda highly reco.”