Not Bad for an Amateur (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (4 page)

The last man she had sex with told her that although she was a great girl and all, he wanted a tall woman to be his wife. He wanted tall, beautiful children, not short kids that others picked on. Lily could have told him that her father had been six foot three, but if her height was Jason’s objection there must have been a lot more than he was telling her. He did marry a woman that was tall. She was also as African American as he was.

His wife was beautiful and Jason adored her. Lily was invited to the wedding but had only shown up to the reception to drop a present and show the world that she was not bitter or anything like that. In fact she actually liked the woman.

With the breakup and then the anemia problem, Lily had not bothered to try to start a relationship, and especially not now. She could see the scenario.
“Oh, by the way, I hope you don’t have an objection to my being gone overnight when we have a full moon or two nights a month if we have a blue moon because I need to run wild and kill bunny rabbits and other peoples’ pets.”
Yes indeed, that would be easy to explain. Not.

Odd little conversations often filtered through her brain at different times. She had a few friends that no power on earth could force Lily to tell this secret to. Having to reassure her friends that she was housetrained and wouldn’t infest their homes with fleas or ticks just wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have.

Lily knew what the problem actually was, she was lonely. For just over two years she had stayed single and kept contact with her friends to a minimum. Even the scent of perfume made her want to retch. How would she make it through an entire evening drinking and trolling for the perfect man? She had no inclination to find out. For all she knew alcohol might unleash her wolf as the scent of Mrs. Lee’s poodle did regularly. The poodle hated Lily and any other person in the yappy dog’s eyesight.

Lily solved the disappearing-pet problem by learning to camp out in forests and more open places. She kept her gear packed in the trunk of her Mustang and learned the places to avoid and the ones that seemed safe.

Four months after the run-in with Jim and his posse of merry wolfmen, Lily was running in the woods in northern Wisconsin. She ran up a hill and stopped dead in her tracks. Just down the hill behind a fallen log a man sat with a camera and a rifle. He was tracking something with the scope of the rifle. She looked in the direction and could make out four or five large wolves in the distance. There was no way for her to warn the wolves of the predator. She watched in horror as his finger tightened on the trigger of the rifle. The noise of the shot was loud in the trees. Lily looked to where the wolves had been and breathed a sigh of relief when the bullet only hit the dirt near one of the wolf’s paws.

The man was cursing loudly, and in his frustration he continued to fire his weapon in the general direction of the pack of wolves that had scattered and disappeared from view. “Just one of you fuckers, I need only one of you to take into the lab. Come on, one of you murdering bastards, die.” When his finger continued to pull the trigger and no more shots came from the gun, he shouldered the weapon and picked up his camera and heavy backpack. “I had to have gotten one of them, I am sick and fucking tired of this damned woods.”

The man began walking in the direction that he had been shooting. Lily followed. She had no idea what she could do if he discovered her, but she hoped if she ran into a wolf that they could mind speak or she could quickly transform into human to tell them and warn them about the man. From the way he was stumbling through the woods, she knew that the man was not an outdoorsman. He made enough noise to announce his presence with every step he took. Even if his clumsy steps didn’t give away his location, his scent certainly would. The man stank of sweat and desperation.

When they reached the small clearing where the wolves had been, the man began stomping around looking in bushes and behind trees. He was too stupid or thought he was safe because he was talking out loud, assuring himself that the high-powered rifle cost over two thousand dollars and should have hit something. His loud cry of “gotcha, you fucking bastard” scared Lily from her hiding place.

She crept closer and watched as he shouldered his rifle again, pointing it directly at a gray-and-black wolf lying ten feet away, panting from the wound in its flank. The animal made no other sound as if it knew that the man was going to kill it. Lily looked around, hoping to see help in the form of someone or something to stop the hunter from murdering the beautiful animal.

She had to do something. The man was laughing, taunting the animal.”You thought you were so clever, didn’t you? Thought you were too clever to get caught. Well, now you will die and the boys at the lab are going to cut you into little pieces. They want to know what makes you tick, what makes it possible for you to change from man to wolf. I think you all need to die. You are perversions of nature. Now you can say good-bye to this world.” He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and he started cursing again. “Fuck this.” He advanced on the bleeding animal.

He reversed the rifle and raised it to swing on the animal when Lily jumped onto his back with all she had. She had no idea what she would do once he hit the ground and didn’t stick around to find out. She heard a loud crack behind her. She dove into a thicket of briars and went to her belly. She tried to control her breathing. She couldn’t hear anything behind her, so she waited for a minute then turned her head cautiously to see if the man was close. No sight or sounds from the man could be seen or heard.

Lily waited a few minutes more and cautiously came out of her hiding place. She approached the place where the hunter and the wounded wolf were and discovered the man lying on his stomach, not moving. No sound could be heard. She crept to his head and sniffed. He was not breathing. The pool of blood surrounding his head and the proximity to the tree with the rapidly drying blood on its trunk told the story. When she pounced she must have shoved him into the tree, and being the inept dumbass that he was, he didn’t try to save himself from the collision with the unforgiving hardwood.

The wolf stared at her. Lily nuzzled his soft fur and licked his wound but had no real way to help him. She sat next to him and tried to offer comfort as his breathing deepened and he passed out. She tried to nuzzle him awake, but he did not respond, so she began to howl. Long, mournful sounds emerged from her throat until she felt another presence. Her head whipped around as she spied a naked man running towards her. She stood her ground until the man was on his knees running his hands over the gray-and-black body of the wolf lying on the ground with the wound that was now just trickling blood from its flank.

His eyes took in the man and his condition then he looked at her closely. “I don’t know where you came from, little girl. But you have my thanks for saving my friend. He has a wife and three children at home. You can come with me if you like, I will speak for you in front of the pack if you are named a rogue. We owe you a debt of gratitude for this day’s work.” He picked up his furry friend and started to walk in the opposite direction of where he came. Lily could see two other men fifty yards or so ahead.

She should go with the men, but something about their scent gave her pause. It was not something she could put her finger on either. The scent was not bad, it just wasn’t right. Lily made her decision and slowly let the man carrying the wolf move farther ahead of her until she melted into the trees. He didn’t look back to see if she was still following, so it was easier to hide and then make her way back to the campsite. Once there she went into the tent and changed into her human form. At least after two years of being a shifter she had finally got the shifting thing down, and it became easier to assume her wolf body each time.

Lily got dressed and broke camp. She was getting proficient at that, too. She packed everything into duffel bags and plastic totes and kept them in the trunk of her Mustang and checked to make certain that she left nothing behind, Even the trash was placed in a plastic bag and then into her vehicle. She drove out of the forest and noticed a ranger’s truck leaving the office, heading in her direction. The ranger nodded his head when they passed each other and kept going.

Lily held it together all the drive home and even kept herself busy justifying her actions. There was no way for the ranger to know that she had accidently killed the man. And even if he somehow did know it was her, there was no proof. She had not left footprints, and the wolf’s body was not there. She searched her brain for a small bit of remorse for killing the man and still felt nothing, He was deliberately trying to murder a were. Not only murder one but planned to take the body with him to some lab to have it dissected.

At her apartment Lily unpacked her camping gear and made a nice bloody steak and a salad for dinner. Before she became a wolf once a month she refused to eat a steak if it was pink inside. The idea of eating bloody meat turned her stomach. She tried to eat steak after her first transformation and cooked it as she normally would. The taste and texture of the meat gave her indigestion. The meat sat in the pit of her stomach for hours like a lump of hard dough. The next time Lily cooked steak, the scent of the warmed, bloody meat was so attractive there was only time to heat both sides of the steak before the craving overcame revulsion and she devoured it.

After showering and pulling on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, Lily sat at her computer to check her e-mail and do some work. She was fortunate that she could do most of her work from home. Most of her work leaned towards forensics nowadays. The companies that she contracted with seemed happy that she did not require an office or extra electronics that they would have to provide, so they didn’t mind paying her fees. Even before the economy tanked, she had saved two of her clients millions by discovering attempts by employees to pilfer from their employers.

She finally shut down her computer system and watched the four monitors go blank. The discovery that someone was actively trying to breach the firewall on her personal computer shouldn’t have surprised her. It had to happen sooner or later. Almost everyone in the world had an attempted internet invasion at one time or other. She routed the invader into an internet porn site. She grinned as she imagined some hackers surprise when he finally breached the flimsy firewall protecting the site getting all excited when it opened to the first page of the site “Men with Farm Animals.” Three men were performing sex acts on the hapless animals. The site was registered in Europe and at ten dollars per minute the site owners would bill the hacker’s IP instead of direct contact.

Lily went to bed at two a.m. At six she was awake, the face of the hunter haunting her brain. The malice was palatable, and she kept seeing his sneer as he stared at the wounded wolf. No matter how she played the incident back over and over in her mind, she couldn’t have done anything different to help the shifter. The death of the hunter was not her fault, even if she was the root cause.

She wondered why, after all this time while she hunted for a friendly pack of weres, did she sneak away? No, they hadn’t smelled like Jim Logan had, but then she had never given it a thought that different packs would carry a different scent. Or the male’s individual scents. It confused Lily. Maybe she should go back to the cabins and talk to him before the week of the full moon.

By eight o’clock Lily had the bathroom cleaned and the kitchen spotless. She wrote a grocery list and planned to go shopping later in the afternoon.

There were several systems she needed to check on for her work, so she booted up the bank of computer equipment and her personal computer, too.
Well, what have we got to play with today?
Merrill’s CEO had contacted her personally and wanted to keep her work secret until she found the person that was selling secrets and who those secrets were going to. Merrill’s was a major player in research and development mapping genetics. Every small advance in research was considered gold in some circles, so they had to keep the information as closely guarded as possible.

So far Lily had isolated the recipient of the information, now all she had to do was isolate the sender. It shouldn’t take much longer since Merrill’s only employed seventy-five people. The company was worth millions in intellectual property alone. With the patents and other income worthy information, the company was worth close to a billion or more, and Mr. Merrill was on edge.

While her work computers were filtering information, Lily checked her personal computer. She remembered the attempted breach that she discovered last night and grinned, wondering if the hacker had enjoyed the reroute. The large red V marking a virus-infected e-mail pissed her off a little bit. No doubt the hacker now viewed her IP as a challenge and was trying to retaliate for her playful interruption of his access to her personal information. She always had four lines for just this purpose. The IP the hacker had gotten was now dormant and he would scramble to find out what she had done. He had no idea that she always backed up everything and then wiped the hard drive of personal information every two days. It was a bitch to keep up with and unnecessary, but she was determined not to allow some unknown basement dweller into her personal life. She sent the virus back to where it came from with a small, encrypted note.

There are easier ways to meet me. My info, four feet eight inches tall, one hundred ten pounds, age forty-two, white male. I like short walks on the beach, tall redheads, and am into Goth.

If the hacker was dumb enough to believe that once he got the encrypted message deciphered, then she was dealing with a very naive person indeed.