Object of My Affection (7 page)

Without giving him a chance to respond, I leaned in and pressed my lips very gently against his.

“Goodnight, Elijah,” I whispered against his lips.

“Night,” his voice was a little shaky.

I went to bed immediately after Elijah left and fell asleep before my mind could come up with anything for me to worry about.

—

I felt surprisingly good the next morning. After breakfast, I decided it had been too long since I’d just cut loose and danced. There’s nothing like being home alone and dancing around your house like an idiot. Besides, I had just the CD for the occasion. I am of the opinion that M. Jackson is one of the most incredible dancers the world has ever known. He did for dancing what the wheel did for driving.

When I was cheerleading captain in high school one of my favorite things to do for a pep rally was to recreate the dance routines from some of his videos. I even had a few of the costumes still in my closet. I put on a black sleeveless bodysuit and cranked up the music. The only prop I took from the closet was my black gangster hat. I know every dance from every video the guy ever made and over the years, I’ve gotten to be pretty good. He made what I liked to call ‘feel good’ music. And that was the effect it had on me. It felt good to just dance and not give a damn what anybody thought about how I looked or who I was sleeping with.

I was a lot more upset about all that crap than I let on to Elijah and I needed to release some nervous tension. I straightened up a bit while I danced through some rooms, and in others I just cut loose. By the time I’d worked up a really good sweat about an hour and a half later, I heard a knock at the front door. Since I was moon walking across the foyer anyway, I opened the door fairly quickly. There I found a very frazzled looking Richard.

Richard and I had met about six years ago when I’d rescued him from one of his drunken werewolf colleagues in a local bar. Dr. David Kane was a newly turned werewolf at the time, and hadn’t known that losing his temper would bring on the change. Fortunately for Richard, Kane had flung a chair and knocked him unconscious before he finished his transformation. Richard walked away with a broken nose and David went to anger management counseling.

Richard was around five foot nine, with gentle gray blue eyes and prematurely gray hair. At the moment he looked like one of those mad scientists from a cheesy old movie with his nearly white hair sticking out at odd angles. Only his face gave away the fact that he was much younger than he at first appeared.

If ever I had seen anything bad enough to get Dr. Richard Stacey upset, it wasn’t a good thing. Like I’d said before, he was one of the most easy going people I knew. But looking at him that afternoon, it was no great mystery that he was bothered by something.

“Come in. Are you alright?”

He grinned and pointed at the hat I’d forgotten I was wearing. “You done Thriller yet?”

“Oh.” I removed the hat. “Yeah that was about an hour ago.”

“So, who pissed you off this time?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Do I look angry?”

“No, but every time you break out Michael’s greatest hits, someone has really chapped your ass.”

“If you must know, there is a perfectly rational explanation for that,” I retorted.

“Do tell?”

“When I am faced with a situation I can’t see an easy way out of or something that is out of my control, I revert back to a better time and place. This music helps to take me back to a time when werewolves were something I’d only heard about, when I still saw some good in the world, and when people knew how to keep their fucking mouths shut.” I smiled sweetly.

“At last we come to the point,” he said. “I knew you were angry.”

“Forget that, it’s petty. What’s wrong with you?”

“Before I get started, do you really want to know the answer to that question?”

“No. I was just pretending like I cared.”

He looked shocked.

“I’m kidding. Of course I want to know, why else would I ask? Come on in.” I took a good look at him and added, “I’ll fix you a drink.”

Richard followed me into the kitchen and sat down with a heavy sigh while I took a bottle of chilled rum from the fridge.

I looked at Richard again and took in the circles under his eyes and the fine tremor in his hands.

“You want this straight?”

He seemed to consider it for a moment, but Richard was not a hard liquor kind of guy.

“Better put some coke with it.”

I handed over the drink and took a seat opposite Richard while he launched into what proved to be one of the most unusual stories I’d heard in a while.

“Remember me telling you several weeks ago how weird things were getting at work?”

I nodded.

“Well, they’ve gotten worse. First of all, Mallory is one crazy ass bitch,” he said vehemently.

Richard wasn’t a saint, but for him to use that kind of language showed just how upset he really was. In regards to Mallory, it was understandable. Mallory was about six feet tall with a strong chin, manly voice, plain-Jane greasy hair, and built like a line backer. Unfortunately, her personality wasn’t any more appealing than the rest of her.

“What’s going on?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Why don’t you start from the beginning? When did this, whatever it is, all start?”

“Well, it started a few months ago, at least that’s when I noticed it. Mallory has always been really unpleasant. Well, you’ve met her.”

“Yeah.” I grinned. “And that’s putting it mildly.”

“So anyway, she gets worse, right? Then the next thing I know I start catching the brunt of her frustration.”

That pissed me off. I thought of Richard as an older brother and was very protective of him.

“Why, what did she do?”

“Well, I can’t directly prove she’s done anything except be nastier than usual and, unfortunately, that’s not a crime. But, rumors have been flying about me lately and I’m so sick of it I could throw up.”

“Rumors?”

He leaned forward and I could see small veins becoming visible across his left temple. “They’re saying I’m
fucking
my students!” he hissed.

“What?
That’s outrageous!”

“Tell me about it. You haven’t even heard the worst of it yet. Apparently the last time we took a field trip we were all having an orgy on a nude beach!”

I choked on my ice water.

“Oh, wait! It gets better,” he said nastily.

“You remember Lisa, right?”

Lisa was a friend of Richard’s. She was a former student that was now teaching biology at my old high school. Some of the instructors where Richard worked had done everything within their power to keep Lisa from completing her teaching degree. Lisa was an attractive African American female and it had been the most blatant case of racism I’d ever seen. Of course that had all been brilliantly covered up by the people in charge, but people like Richard knew the truth. People who knew the truth had a way of disappearing. Like another professor who had been forced into an early retirement when he tried to make the issue public.

Mallory Monroe had been one of the people who did her best to keep a diploma from ever reaching Lisa Johnson. Lisa had already been through two schools where they tried their best to ruin her reputation among the other teachers before she even began work before finding her way to the quiet little school where she was currently teaching.

“Sure, I remember Lisa,” I answered.

“Well, I have it from a very reliable source that Mallory is spreading that I’m having an affair with Lisa!” his voice kept rising in pitch.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just stared at him open mouthed.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he continued. “I’m doing all my students and my former students, too.”

“Richard, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Just being able to get this all off my chest is a big help,” he said this just before taking a massive gulp of his coke and rum.

“You might want something stronger than that,” he pointed at my water.

“Why?”

“Because now they’re saying that I’m sleeping with you, too.”

“What?”

I could hear my heart pounding in my ears as my pulse raced with the injustice of it all.

“It’s not enough that these simple minded bastards around here are saying I’m screwing everyone that I speak to? Now some jackass has to start something like this!” I roared.

I began to pace beside the kitchen table. If there was anything I hated more than ignorant people, it was ignorant people who didn’t know how to shut their mouths. I had never liked Mallory Monroe. Indeed, I didn’t like anyone Richard worked with, from the moron in charge, to the slutty secretary that was banging the entire faculty
except
Richard.

My blood pressure’s upward climb halted for a second when I looked back at Richard. He had gone a deathly shade of pale and his eyes were wide.

“What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It ... a ... your, um ... your eyes. It’s your ... your eyes,”

he stammered.

In the six years I had known Richard Stacey it had never occurred to me that he hadn’t seen me change. Although my transformation was only partial, it was still frightening to someone who was not used to seeing anything along those lines.

“I’m sorry,” I turned my head and made an effort to slow my heartbeat. I felt the burning behind my eyes begin to cool before I faced him again.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” I whispered.

“You didn’t, I mean ... well, yeah you did. But that’s ok,”

he added the last part quickly. “I knew about ... everything ...

I just.... “He gulped.

“It’s alright, Richard. I’m not going to eat you,” I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

“I’m not afraid of you,” his voice sounded stronger and very clear.

I looked him in the eye.

“I’m a monster, Richard. What do you think of that?”

“I think I work with the real monsters. You’re just Lilith to me.”

“You really mean that?”

“Of course. How long have we known each other? I knew what had happened to you. It’s just ... this was the first time I’ve ever seen wolf eyes in your face. I didn’t grow up with a dad who hunted werewolves, remember?”

He had a very good point.

“I’m sorry. Under the circumstances, I’d say you handled that quite well. But the question is, do you want to see something really scary?”

He gulped again. “Like what?”

Richard was both a scientist and a self confessed comic book nerd. I knew if anyone would appreciate the unusualness of my situation, it would be him.

“You’re a scientist, what do you make of this?”

As I stretched my right hand across the table toward Richard, I let my claws extend to their full length. They were at least six inches long, straight, and sharp as a razor.

“That’s incredible,” he breathed.

I could see that he wanted to touch them. He reached out, but then pulled his hand back. Another professor he knew was a werewolf, so I assumed he was afraid of infection.

“It’s alright. I’m not contagious.”

“That’s right. I remember you saying that you weren’t actually a carrier of the disease.”

As Richard turned my hand back and forth, examining the claws I repeated for him what Alfred had said about my body mutating the virus.

“And this has never happened to anyone else?” he asked.

“It’s completely unprecedented. Besides, they gave up on the cure years ago. Nearly everyone who was vaccinated turned. No one had the reaction I did. It could have been the fact that the vaccine was injected into my system so soon after my attack. I guess it was just too late.”

“Wait a minute.”

Richard’s eyes lit up. I loved to watch him work. He was a scientist to the core, always coming up with fascinating theories about complicated or obscure things that most people just overlooked.

“If almost everyone who was vaccinated changed, that means two things. First, the ones who didn’t turn had a natural immunity. That’s not that weird.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“Well, most people did change because of the vaccination.

You had that shit injected directly into your blood stream less than thirty minutes after being brutally attacked. From the way you described the attack to me, I’d say a fair amount of werewolf DNA was already coursing through your veins.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“You were infected twice.”

His face said clearly that he understood the significance of this, but I did not.

“Some times people are attacked by multiple werewolves.

Wouldn’t that count as being infected with each individual bite? That doesn’t make sense, Richard.”

“Yes, it does, and no that doesn’t count as a multiple infection. See, you were infected first by a werewolf, the animal itself. Then you were injected with a synthetic version of almost the same virus, meant to fight off the disease. You were infected separately with two different versions of the same poison, so to speak.”

“So what does that make me?”

“I don’t really know ... a mutant of some sort?”

“Gee thanks, Richard. You really know how to boost a girl’s self confidence.”

“It’s not an insult,” he insisted. “It’s a miracle. What happened to you should have killed you.”

“That might be true, but would it have killed a wizard?”

I then explained to Richard about my great, great, grandfather.

“When did you find this out?” he asked at the end of my story.

“A few months ago.”

He sat back and ran a hand through his prematurely gray hair and finished his drink.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Lilith. My knowledge of wizards is very limited. I didn’t even know of their existence until I met you.”

“Yeah, and I’m no expert.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that you don’t know that much about them either, and I only know as much as you know. I’m really not sure if their actual genetic makeup is different enough to cause a mutation like that, or....”

“Or what?”

“Or, if it’s magic.”

“I love good fiction, Richard. But I just don’t know....”