MoonRise Read online

  Chapter 2

  There comes a time in every girl’s day when she’s just gotta sit down and scratch. Make that in every bitch’s day, when she’s just gotta…even if her ass hurts like a sonofabitch. I’ll spare you the details.

  See, I’m a werewolf.

  Scratch that. No, it’s not supposed to be a pun. Never mind. Okay, strike that. I’m technically a lupine. A lycanthrope, some might say.

  I had researched the subject after my first change, and gorged myself on as many werewolf tales as I could get my hands on. In my favorite, the goddess Hera was supposed to have made twin girls into wolves to protect a Thracian poet as he wandered the Earth spouting prophecy and oracles to the masses, until they fell prey to the wiles of Romulus and Remus. Something like that anyway. Hey, I’m not a big reader of the classics.

  Well, there isn’t any Thracian poet in my life, and the only oracle I consult is my daily horoscope when I want an uneasy laugh, and I’m sure not wandering the Earth as much as I’d like to right now. No, the closest thing to any Thracian poet I know is my editor, and he’s not too happy with me lately as my galleys keep coming back redlined with chunks of text missing.

  See, I’m a travel writer. Ashlee Marie Scott by name and pen. Twenty-nevermind years old, and terminally single according to my dead mother. Unlike, that is, my vacuous sister Amber Michelle, who got married young and had a son before deciding she wanted to bat for the other team. I might have that out of order, but you get the idea. They divorced and then she fell in love with a lesbian chief-of-police-turned-high-powered-city-attorney. Makes her, well, whatever. In love, I guess. I wouldn’t know. Never really been. Not for sure.

  I, on the other hand, specialize in luxury health spas of the high seas and high mountains, the cities and the coasts. My latest find had me in a third-world country, also known as Idaho, with a wicked staph infection and an HMO surgical team determined to turn a pound of flesh into an ounce of cure. Thus, as I mentioned before, I am now grounded, stuck in my hometown of Knightsbridge, California, staying with my sister, her partner and my five-year-old nephew in a house that could be photographed at any time of the night or day for Good Housekeeping.

  Not my idea of comfortable living: a place for everything and everything in its place. I’m more the bra-on-the-doorknob kind of girl, at my loft back in the City.

  Did I tell you that I hate my sister even while loving her? No, really I do. She’s perfect. Even my parents think so. Except for the fact that she’s bisexual in a lesbian phase, but they’re slowly coming around to that, too.

  Oh, did I tell you I’m also a werewolf? Right. I did. Must be the medication. Snort. Wonder how that one’s gonna go over with the in-laws? Oh, right. I don’t have any. Never mind. So, let’s just say, at certain times of the month, Mother Nature’s even more of a bitch with me than with most women.

  I’m sure you’re wondering about that bullet wound, so I’ll tell you a long story short before the short story gets long.

  I was doing a piece on Pacific Northwest spas. Hardship, yeah, but the job paid diddly squat so I might as well enjoy the expense account. Besides: cold, bad. Heat, good, and every now and then I meet a cute guy. I mean, I can rock a bikini with the best of them, and nobody expects me to have perfect makeup in a spa.

  But I digress.

  For the story I got the full package, comped for the magazine of course. Steak and lobster, Eggs Benedict, and one of everything on the spa menu. It was glorious. I took pictures and my editor got his five thousand words, for which he paid me almost nothing, but that was the deal. Live high on the magazine’s dime, cheap on my own.

  The resorts all knew who I was, of course, and were happy to oblige. How else would I get the freebies? And I wasn’t writing exposés after all. My job was to sell magazines, whether print or online editions, which sold advertisements to paying customers.

  Long story short, yeah, yeah.

  So I worked my way through lockers, changing rooms and the amenities therein to the pools. I did a full set of lap work to check the workout box for the day and then, ah, the fun started. Sauna, cold dunk, heat lamp, cold dunk, steam bath with herbal infusion, and so on. Wonderful. After that came a mud bath, hot rock massage, lunch at the wine bar, mani-pedi, facial – you get the picture. Most fun a girl can have alone.

  I spend a lot of time alone, I guess.

  On the afternoon in question, I hurried upstairs to my room and banged out a rough draft, quick and dirty because tonight was MoonFall; that is, a full moon, which for me makes the usual girl’s monthlies seem hella tame. Anyway, I packed my day pack – okay, night pack – with the stuff I’d need – change of clothes, wipes, water and food, handheld GPS – what a godsend – and so on.

  My usual MO was to hike to a landmark before sunset, like a mountaintop or tip of a lake, load it into the GPS, clip the little unit to a collar and put it on. Then I’d have a nice dinner, a tiny fire if I could, get naked and wait for the change.

  After doing it for years, I was pretty lucid in wolf form, but I could easily get distracted, which was where the GPS came in, just in case I changed back somewhere other than the campsite. It would help me sneak in the buff across country to my stash. Either way, I’d clean up and get back to the other twenty-seven days of my life before the next change.

  This time, though, someone had shot me with a tranquilizer dart, in the middle of the night no less. Who does that? No idea, never found out, don’t want to know. Narcotics don’t work well on me in wolf form, by the way, which was why I didn’t go down. Nothing less than a bear dose would probably do it. I managed to make it back without trouble.

  The next morning I did the steam room, and then the infection showed up. I made up a story about a hunter’s ricochet and went to the ER expecting to be sent on my way with antibiotics, but they said it was a drug-resistant strain so boom, straight into surgery. From the way it felt afterward, the surgeon used a steak knife and an ice cream scoop to excise the necrotizing tissue. They told me they got it all, and shot me full of the latest thing, gave me pills to take and orders for a regimen of bleach baths for the next three weeks.

  I was able to get three more free days at the resort by hinting that the infection was their fault, caught from the steam room bench, but eventually I had to go recuperate where assistance was near. Among my relatives, Amber was my best choice. I really do love her, you know, even if we are like oil and vinegar. We may taste great together but we still don’t mix very well.

  Want to guess who’s the oil, and who’s the vinegar?