Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2

Dedication

To all who have supported me in this crazy writing endeavor, especially my husband Jason. He keeps my feet on the ground so my mind can indulge in its flights of fancy, and he’s also a great model for the perfect romance hero.

I’d also like to thank my critique group members Amy, David, Kimberly, and Susan. This novel wouldn’t be what it is without your help and suggestions. Thank you also for rearranging your own critique opportunities to make it possible for me to get this book through the group before my deadline.

 
To Holly Atkinson, my editor and writing fairy godmother—your encouragement and guidance help me be a better writer.

Finally, a huge thank you to my readers for taking a chance on my stories! I hope they’re as fun for you to read as they were for me to write.

Chapter One

People say I’m beautiful, but they don’t see the monster inside.

It was like a fairy tale: a big, beautiful house, a plucky heroine, an evil wizard… But the best friend never fares well, and I didn’t. The heroine got cursed too, but she found true love in the end. I got a lifestyle change that wasn’t a choice and came with no warning. The worst part? I couldn’t even remember the specifics of my first change— only that it was traumatic, so my mind had even less to make sense of.

​Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’m a werewolf. Please hold your applause. It will only make me cry. Big girls don’t cry, and when you’re a predator, you don’t show signs of weakness.

​My part of the story started one rainy February morning. I’d just gotten into the office, a satellite site for the Arkansas Department of Family and Child Services, and snarled at the pile of cases on my desk when the phone rang.

​”Marconi!” my boss Paul barked. “Get in here!”

​I nearly jumped out of my skin. Literally. I had a wicked aconite hangover. No, I didn’t use it recreationally. I used it to “spirit-walk,” or create a spiritual doppelganger so I could roam as a spirit-wolf rather than a physical one. I almost kicked my spirit out of my body again when Paul startled me, but I took a few deep breaths to get everything settled in, like spreading batter into the corners of a pan.

​Evil cake, that’s me.

​It’s hardest for me to control my temper mornings after hunting, and I struggled not to bare my teeth at Paul when I walked into his cluttered office. The piles of files, papers, and dirty Styrofoam cups made me want to gag into the wastebasket. My nose picked up the scent of dried-out, rancid turkey sandwich somewhere under his desk, and I noticed he wore yesterday’s shirt. With his pointy noise, prominent thin ears, and wisps of gray hair clinging to his head, he looked like a sick rodent, and I pushed away the image of shaking him until his neck broke. I had done that to a rat the night before. It had been lurking about, tearing into the garbage bags my neighbors left outside their door, which unleashed an awful mélange of scents into the breezeway and my apartment. I’d complained, but the management hadn’t done anything about either the neighbors or the rat. It was generally frowned upon to hunt down and kill one’s neighbors, so the rat had to go. Paul was
my
management, and he paid me, so I squashed my impulses.

​”Have a seat,” he said.

​”Where?” Every surface was covered with paper.

​He shrugged and sat. “As you can see, we’re overworked and understaffed, but we can’t afford to keep on dead weight.”

​I folded my hands in front of me and pressed my nails into my knuckles. “I’m pulling my weight, Paul.”

​”Right, but where were you last night? I got a call this morning that someone saw you at a club ‘shaking your booty’ and ‘getting shitfaced drunk.’” His air quotes almost made it comical.

​”Not that what I do on my own time is any of your business, but I can assure you it wasn’t me.”

​”Can someone give you an alibi?” he asked and leaned forward, a look of concern on his rodent face. “I don’t want to cut you from my staff, but the higher ups are after me to get rid of whoever I can. You know we have a code of conduct here and strict policies when it comes to dual relationships with clients.”

​I nodded. “I’m aware of them. I was at home watching television, and I turned in early.”
Into a spirit-werewolf
, I added in my head to make it not technically a lie.

​”They said they talked to you, and you recognized them.”

​My eyebrows shot up my forehead.
 

​”Come on, Marconi,” he said and gestured to my face. “You say you turned in early, but you’ve got dark circles under your eyes, and you keep stifling yawns.”

​”I haven’t been feeling well. Look, Paul, I swear to you I wasn’t at any club last night.”

​”That will do for now,” he said and wrote my statement of innocence on a piece of paper. “You didn’t happen to talk to anyone on the phone or anything like that while you were at home, did you?”

​”Nope. I’m just a boring girl, Paul. Did the mysterious caller say I had mentioned their case or even who they were?”

​”No. Fine. Get back to work.” He frowned at me once more. “But be aware I’m watching you.” He dismissed me with a wave of his hand and looked down at the open file on his desk. I took advantage of the moment he looked away to bare my teeth, then turn before he could see me.
No man dismisses me.

​I frowned all the way back to my office and sat to review cases, but my mind wouldn’t focus. Who was the woman at the club? Who looked that much like me? And who called Paul? Probably an unhappy parent.
That part didn’t concern me as much—when you work for the Department of Family and Child Services, you make enemies, especially if you take kids out of abusive homes. That a parent was at a club didn’t shock me. That someone pretended to be me did.

But who hates me enough to try to get me fired?
I wanted to know who she was and how she knew who I worked with.

​I kept my Private Investigator license current to pick up some extra work on the side. Sometimes it came in handy for the job, so they didn’t say anything. It looked like I was going to be doing some extra work on my own time.

​Oh, I had my suspicions. Apparently the events of the previous summer hadn’t resolved yet, and there was only one person I could think of who resembled me enough to impersonate me. I needed to know why Kyra Ellison, former alpha female of the Crystal Pines pack and fellow tall brunette, had come out of the mountains and into Little Rock, and even more, why she was posing as me. I also wondered if it was even her. We shared certain characteristics, but no one thought we were similar once they’d interacted with us.

“You two don’t look anything alike,” Joanie, former best friend of a certain social worker werewolf, had told me. “One glance is all you need to see how she’s mean and spiteful, and you’re not.”

Yet my spite had ended our friendship.

At the end of the day, Paul caught up to me in the parking deck.

“Going out tonight?” he asked and curled his thin lips into a shape between a sneer and a leer. “I can’t imagine a girl like you spends too many nights in.”

“No,” I told him. “At least not to a club. Again, not that it’s any of your business.”

“Budget cuts,” he said in an ominous tone and tapped his nose. He walked to his ancient hatchback, which had rust spots starting to show through the beige paint. I chose to ignore the pheromones he exuded and the insinuation he was doing me a favor. Men had that response to me now that I had a true animal side, and I hoped he wouldn’t cross the line into sexual harassment. Yes, the thought of his attentions repulsed me, but I also liked him as a supervisor because he mostly left me alone, and I would hate for him to get fired over it.

Or for me to.
His warning about our department’s financial situation played back in my mind.

I shook my head, not blaming him for nibbling at the drama like a rat gnawing on chicken bones for a pitiful bit of marrow. It was amazing how these government jobs, especially the ones where we supposedly take care of others, sucked the life and soul out of people. On his desk, Paul kept a picture taken during fishing trip he’d been on just after starting here. It showed he had been straight-shouldered and with a full head of wavy brown hair. Now he was stooped and graying, and the rest of his life seemed to have stopped on that day. Even more reason for him to want to create a little drama with the social worker who seemed to be falling down on her job.
And who doesn’t seem to be withering in it. It’s not my fault my family ages well.

I drove my similarly ancient but in much better shape green Jeep Cherokee back to my apartment off Chenal Parkway, but when I got home, I sensed something was not right. At first glance, the building looked the same—a two-story, four-unit brick building with lit stairwell between the units on each floor. Dusk was falling, and the lights had just started flickering on, but there was something wrong with the shadows. I squinted and flared my nostrils. An unfamiliar tropical scent rode the top of the breeze. It threaded through the layers of stale cigarette and the bruise-like decay of takeout containers in the bag of trash by my neighbors’ door.
Lazy asses
. The new scent, if it had a color, would be fuchsia over the grays and browns of ordinary life, and a shiver tiptoed down my spine. Whether it was of fear or excitement, I didn’t know.

One by one, the lights in the stairwells buzzed, popped, and flickered out. That could only mean one thing—a wizard—and my previous encounter with one had left me with this little werewolf problem.

Okay, fear it is. Whatever you do, don’t show it. Just get into the apartment.

Sure they had seen me, I played nonchalant and grabbed my purse off the passenger seat. I left the files I’d been planning to work on once Giancarlo passed out after his second bottle of wine. He was due over in half an hour and I needed to make sure he wasn’t in danger. Sure, he was an alcoholic, but he was a cute one, and his problems worked for me on a practical level, although my constantly wondering if I was enabling him didn’t work for me on an ethical one. I was going to get help for him eventually, but he didn’t want it at the moment, so there was no point. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.

The internal twisting and folding inward sensations told me the aconite hadn’t quite worked out of my system from the night before, although the swill that passed for office coffee had kept my frontal lobes jazzed enough during the day to fight the effects.

“No, we’re not going to change now.”
Sometimes sternly addressing my animal side worked, like I had to constantly reinforce I was the alpha of my own mind, especially with the aconite hangover. That was a different kind of fear—it seemed the aconite was taking longer and longer to wear off each time. The animal part of my brain scrabbled in my skull, wanting me to change and hunt down whatever the threat was.

“Down,”
I told it.
“Maybe the rat I killed last night has a vengeful family?”

“No, whatever it is, it’s bigger than a rat and is watching you.”

I shivered and cursed under my breath.
“Thanks, really. No showing weakness, remember?”

“So change.”

Sometimes these conversations I had with myself were useful. Most often, not, and I was left wondering whether I was insane, and maybe all the werewolf stuff was a wicked psychosis.

I held my keys in my right hand and my pepper spray in my left. My inner wolf scoffed at my puny defenses, inferior to fangs and claws. Each light I walked under flickered back to life, and a warm breeze followed me. Again, the scent of fuchsia, both the color and the flower, came to me.

Someone’s toying with me. They know I’m aware of them. Why don’t they show themselves?

I reached my apartment and looked around before I stuck my key in my lock. Again, nothing visible, but
something
was out there watching me. I ducked into the apartment and closed the door behind me, breathing a sigh of relief when my lights switched on without flickering or flashing. I put my purse on the counter next to the postcard reminding me that it was time for my physical and I was scheduled for blood work the next morning. My phone buzzed with a voicemail. The call hadn’t rung, although it should have. I touched the little icon and listened to Giancarlo’s lilting tones. His cheerful voice sounded odd in the context of my strange experiences.

“Lonna,
Bellissima
, I am so sorry, but something’s come up at the restaurant, and I cannot make it. Know you will be in my heart tonight.”