The Accidental Werewolf 2: Something About Harry (Accidentally Paranormal Novel) (22 page)

But Keegan wasn’t done. Yet Mara saw the effort it was taking for him to steel himself against his wife’s tears. “Harder still is keeping our paranormal business from leaking to the outside world. If pack members are all abuzz about this, what if someone slips? It isn’t like employee A slept with employee B and folks are whispering about it behind their hands. That’s harmless gossip about an act with consequences meant only for the two people involved. You created a
baby-making formula
—or at the very least, a formula that produced an actual werewolf. How can I hide that from the council? Pack members will want answers, and as well liked and respected as you are, you have a dangerous mind. What that mind made in a lab with some hormones and whatever else you used to do this will scare the hell out of everyone. I’m scared by it.”

The lump in her stomach hardened until she thought she might vomit. The chaos she’d created had a domino effect she had, in all her smarts, never considered—making the choice she’d been toying with in her head since Keegan had called them up here clearer. “Which is why I’m turning myself in. No guilt. No conspirators. No blame—just me,” Mara said before breaking away from Harry and jumping out of the fourth-floor window to the tune of crashing glass and Harry’s howling roar of protest.

* * *

“
D
UDE!”
Nina roared in Harry’s face as he struggled to break her grip, clenching his wrists so tight he forgot all about the badass he’d been back at the office today with Lloyd.

Fighting a very unmanly wince, he relaxed like he was the one who’d decided to give in, rather than Nina forcing him to submit. “If you don’t sit the fuck down in this chair, I’ll break off your nerd fingers one by one and you’ll never play
Call of Duty
again. Got that, dork?”

Oh, no. Not the dreaded threat. Hah! Nothing would stop him from trying to find Mara.

It’s
Call of Duty
, Harry. Dude—think hard.

Wait. What was happening here? Why was he so enraged about Mara’s sacrifice? You’d think he liked her or something.

Shit. He liked her.

He liked her enough to want an opportunity to see if they could find their way through this together. Maybe date. See a movie. Have a pizza with the kids.

The kids. He was thinking about Mara with the kids.

Harry tipped his head back and grinned up at Nina, fighting the urge to stick his tongue out at her. “But I’m a werewolf, Crypt Keeper. That means I heal quickly. Break away.” Hah, and hah again!

Nina flicked his hair. “Let’s hope your pride heals as fast after I wipe the joint with you, Square Root Man.”

Marty stood before him, one hand on her slender hip, the other holding her dog Muffin like a football under her arm. “Harry? Chasing after Mara is a sure way to garner your own trouble with the council.”

Wanda sat on his lap hard. She wasn’t heavy by a long shot, but she was as strong as, if not stronger than, Nina, judging by the grip she had on his face.

Her usually serene features remained as such. There was little strain in her effort to keep him seated, which was totally affecting his manhood. “Look at me, Harry. Look and listen. You’ll only make things worse if you try to find Mara. Now, hear me, Harry. You’re not going anywhere. We absolutely won’t make things worse for her. There are rules and protocol when addressing the council—rules I won’t allow you to break with your poor imitation of the Hulk. So, we’re going to use our big brains and talk this through rather than Nina it, okay?”

Nina let go of one of his hands and gave Wanda the middle finger. “Fuck you, Wanda. My way gets results.”

Wanda’s gaze narrowed. “Your way gets us kicked out of places and shunned by the socially acceptable. I will not risk Keegan’s status or Mara’s future because Harry’s gone all rage-ish. Got it? No muscle today, Elvira.”

Nina rolled her beautiful eyes. “Fine, but if he keeps this shit up, I’m gonna clean house.” She gave Harry one last shove. “Now knock it the fuck off, or we’re gonna tango. You cool?”

Wanda patted his face and smiled, giving his cheek a pinch. “If I let you up, you have to promise not to bolt. I take a man’s word very seriously, Harry. Plus, I know your ego can handle only so much. Two women dragging you back here by force will only make your self-esteem cry salty tears of regret. So, you in or are you out?”

Harry lifted his chin, yanking it from Wanda’s grasp, and puffing his chest outward like any man who’d just cried uncle to two women would. They knew these council people better than he did. The last thing he wanted to do was rock the boat for Mara. “I’m in. I apologize. I’m still dealing with my hormonal surges. Sometimes they get the better of me.”

She ran her finger down the length of his nose, popping the tip of it. “I get it. So, let’s put our heads together.” Wanda hopped off his lap and smoothed her hair from her face.

As the women kept a cautious eye on him, they scattered to different areas of Mara’s cottage, settling in for some brainstorming.

But Harry couldn’t sit still and let Mara take the hit for him. He also couldn’t go back on his word to the girls. At all costs to their personal and even professional lives, they were always there for him.

Instead, he paced the floor of Mara’s cottage while Nina taught Carl the art of duct-taping his limbs back on if the need should arise, frantic with worry about this council that Marty had flat out refused to allow him to surrender himself to.

Damn Mara and her sense of honor. If she could have just held out for a little longer, maybe they could’ve found the person who’d ratted her out and stopped this all before it got any worse.

He could have made something up for this crazy council, and kept them from ever knowing Mara had anything to do with it.

And now, she’d been gone ratting herself out for over four hours. He was going to lose his mind.

Yet, here everyone was, all in a huddle of support for Mara. Christ, he admired their unity.

Marty sat on the couch, hugging one of the million pillows Mara had flung all over while Wanda held Muffin, Marty’s poodle, and the catalyst for this whole string of accidents.

“Anyone hear from Keegan?” Harry asked, fighting the lump in his throat.

“Nothing yet. Hey, Harry?” Wanda called out. “Come sit, would you? You’re going to wear a hole in the floor with all this pacing, or wear me out in the process.” She reached over the back of the couch, holding her hand out to him.

Harry squeezed it before dropping to the raised hearth in front of the fireplace. “We need to figure out who sent Keegan that anonymous tip.” He was damned if he even knew where to begin. He’d never been in trouble in his life, nor could he remember anyone hating him so much they’d want revenge. He was a nerd, for Christ’s sake.

“Swear it, as sure as I sit here before you, Harry, if I find out who did this, I’ll kill them myself. Pack laws be damned,” Marty spat, running a weary hand over her eyes.

His head throbbed when he dropped it into his hands. “I keep going over and over it in my mind, and I can’t even come up with one person who could have seen what happened that night. The whole damn place was deserted. Even Cal had gone home for the night,” Harry said, referring to the janitor at Pack. “I saw him on my way down to the lab.”

“I’ll tell you this much, dude. Whoever the fuck this is, it’s the same assclown who took the kids and Carl. I can smell it,” Nina said, pulling Carl to the small window seat and handing him the duct tape to practice.

“It makes sense, but it doesn’t make any sense. Where did this grudge for me and Mara, or whatever we’re calling it, suddenly come from?”

“Hey, Harry?” Marty’s head popped up. “Question? Did we ever ask you why you were in the lab? I mean, you’re in accounting. What were you doing in the lab to begin with?”

Huh. He’d never given thought to that. How could he have missed it? “I was meeting Jeff Grandy. He texted me and asked me to meet him there so he could pass on an expense report to me. Said he was too wrapped up in a project, and didn’t want to leave the lab. You know how the lab group is—always wrapped up in one thing or another. They get in deep. Jeff and I worked out together all the time at Pack’s gym. He was always talking about his projects.”

“And where was Jeff when all of this went down?” Wanda asked, her hand cupping her chin. “Where is Jeff now, for that matter? Did you ever see him that night?”

Harry bolted off the hearth, startling Carl. Shit. “I never saw him that night. I’d just finished working out, which is why I had the vitaminwater. I dropped into the lab to find all the lights on, but nobody home. Went to Jeff’s desk to see if maybe he’d left it there, but nothing. That was when I drank the baby-making juice by mistake.”

Marty sat up straighter, tucking the pillow closer to her chest. “And have you seen Jeff since that evening? Since you’ve been back at work?”

Shit. Sounds of alarm clanged in his head. “No. No, I haven’t.” He reached for his phone with hasty hands, scrolling back to the texts for that night. It had definitely come from Jeff’s phone.

Whether he’d been the person using that phone was another story. “Let me text him now and see if we get a response. I forgot all about it with everything else going on.” He sent off a text to Jeff and waited, clutching his phone with tight fingers, pacing once again.

Marty scrolled her phone, her brow furrowed. “I’m checking to see if Jeff’s been in this week.”

Shit, shit, shit. Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner? He’d been so wrapped up in his own bullshit he never considered he hadn’t seen Jeff since this began.

His phone remained silent. Damn it.

Marty slid to the end of the couch, the pillow dropping from her lap. “Jeff hasn’t been in since the night of your accident, Harry.”

“Christ,” Harry murmured, running his hand over his jaw.

“But wait,” Marty interjected, her face smoothing from a frown to a smile. “Jeff has the flu, according to his mother who called him in sick. Phew. Okay, then. All’s well. Bet he’s just in bed and not answering texts. That makes sense, right?”

“Well, it would.”

“I feel a fucking ‘but’ coming on, Harry. So say it,” Nina ordered.

Harry took one last hopeless glance at his phone before shaking his head. “But . . . Jeff’s mother is dead. She died when he was in college.”

* * *

M
ARA
laid her head against the cottage door before opening it, loving the smooth surface of it, the reflection of the lights pouring through the oval stained glass in the center.

All of her hard work, all of the long nights she’d spent renovating a space to call her own would be replaced by a dank, square cell in werewolf prison, if the news from the council was even close to correct.

Maybe she could be like the Bill Nye version of Martha Stewart while she served out her sentence? Teach her fellow inmates about DNA strands and evolution? Because learning was so popular in prison.

Her ears caught the sounds of Harry, Marty, Wanda, and Nina, voices raised in panic and anxiety, filtered through the door.

She just needed a second to process where she stood, and then she’d face the next hurdle. Just a second . . .

Snowflakes began to fall, dusting her nose and cheeks as tears welled in her eyes. She’d really done it this time. For all the times she’d been as close to perfect as she could get, mostly because her brother Sloan had been so out of control, and Keegan was always caught up in dealing with his antics, she’d made up for it on one fell swoop.

She’d trashed Harry’s life, and now it was in total upheaval. He couldn’t go home. He’d been taken from his children because someone had lured them away, and that was probably indirectly related to her, too. Worse, he didn’t want to even consider the idea he’d remain a werewolf. No offense, of course.

When she made snowballs, they turned into avalanches.

There’d be no babies, no strollers in the park, no midnight feedings, no scouring baby name websites.

There’d also be no Harry, and that hurt so hard she almost couldn’t breathe from the pain. Despite his wildly swinging moods, and his resentment toward what she’d done, she still liked him. His deep sense of honor, his love for his sister’s children, his work ethic were all things she admired in a man—in Harry.

He’d really stepped up to the plate for her today, leaving her not just grateful, but even more deeply enamored than she’d already been.

Which wasn’t good, considering she was going to end up clanging a cup against some cell bars, and he’d probably go on to accept his fate, find a rich supermodel werewolf who was five-ten and gorgeous, marry her, and live on her private island where Mimi and Fletcher would body surf and be homeschooled by the natives.

The voices behind her door rose, forcing her to wipe her eyes and set about confronting whatever was going on inside.

Mara closed her eyes one last time before reentering the madness that had become her life.

Taking a deep breath, she sent up a wish,
I don’t care what happens to me. Put me in the clinker, leave me to rot in solitary, whatever, but please, please, please, keep Harry and the kids safe.

CHAPTER

15

“How could I have missed the fact that Jeff was absent from the lab?” Mara groaned into her hands. Harry was crammed into the driver’s side of her Smart Car, his large body filling the small space, navigating the back roads of Buffalo behind the Jeff Gordon of the paranormal world—aka Nina. The race to get to Jeff’s house was on.

Every nerve in her body screamed for relief from the tension she felt just thinking something had happened to Jeff. Who would use his phone to text Harry and summon him to the lab if it wasn’t Jeff?

“How were you supposed to know it had anything to do with this, Mara?”

In exasperation for her selfishness, coupled with yet another blunder on her part, she snapped. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry! He’s a coworker. He works closely with me in the lab, and I didn’t even realize he was out for almost a whole week? I’m as selfish as they come. Always too wrapped up in some chemical for a product we’re creating to pay attention to the people I respect and work with on a daily basis!”

“Baby-making juice can be distracting and taxing.” His smile glowed against the rush of oncoming headlights.

Mara turned her body to face him, angry he was making light of yet another aspect of her brainy paranormalness. “Being reminded is taxing.”

He gave her a look of apology. “I’m just trying to lighten things up a little.”

“Stop lightening at my expense. I wanted a baby. Is that a crime?”

Harry reached over and stroked her arm. “No. It’s amazing. What you did, aside from the trouble it seems to have cause with your family and this council, was amazing and brilliant. And it worked.”

She rolled her eyes. “We don’t know if it worked. You’re not craving formula and baby strollers, are you?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “In the beginning, I had a twinge of a craving for those pureed carrots in a jar. Who’s to say what the long run will bring?”

She couldn’t even giggle. Instead, she buried her face in her hands again.

“It’s not like you were wrapped up in you, Mara. You were wrapped up in me and the kids and Carl being taken.”

“And why am I wrapped up in you, Harry? Because I created you. That’s why!” She tugged on her seat belt, snapping it back into place.

Harry reached over, grabbing her hand and running his thumb over it in circular motions meant to soothe. “I’d like to think there are other reasons now.”

She couldn’t address her other reasons at this point, her stomach was too twisted in knots. “What if something’s happened to Jeff? Why didn’t I think to ask you why you were in the lab? Who am I, Harry? I’m usually smart and intuitive and I can always figure out whodunit on
CSI
. Why can’t I figure this out?”

“You’re not the only smart one in the Smart Car right now, Mara. I’m just as guilty.”

His joke whizzed right past her. “You’re supposed to miss things. You’ve been traumatized. By me! I did this!”

As they pulled into the driveway of Jeff’s small ranch house, Harry flipped the car into park and reached for her with hands she didn’t even see coming. Even in the midst of her worry for Jeff, she had to admire how he was growing into his abilities.

Pulling her close, Harry mumbled into her hair, “We still have to talk about the council. What happened?”

Tears stung her eyes, and the comfort of Harry’s embrace was so tempting. It would be so easy to focus on her fears, tucked against him. “We have a fellow geek to find. We’ll talk about it later.”

Kissing the top of her head, he let her go and popped open the door just as Nina approached them. “It’s goddamn dark out here. What is it with you dorks and the deserted locales?”

“Smaller radius of stupid people in a square mile,” Harry joked on a chuckle.

Mara ignored their banter and made a beeline for Jeff’s red front door. The house was entirely dark except for the small LED lanterns along the paved path to his house. She ran up the small set of steps and rapped her knuckles on the door. “Jeff?”

Nina was right behind her, grabbing her hand before she could knock again. “Shut the fuck up,” she hissed in Mara’s ear. “You wanna tell the world we don’t know where the fuck your fellow nerd is? Lay off.” Nina shoved her out of the way, cupping her hands around her eyes to peer into the small arched window above Jeff’s front door. “It’s damn dark in there. Looks like stuff’s been knocked around.”

Mara’s stomach began to flutter with nerves. She tugged her beret down over her forehead with nervous fingers.

Harry trotted up the steps, putting his hand at Mara’s waist again. “His car’s in the garage.”

“So what do we do now?” Mara asked, turning to Nina for an answer.

“We break the fuck in,” she said, popping the door open with a quick flick of her wrist. It creaked as it opened, revealing the landscape of what was supposed to be Jeff’s living room. But it looked more like a disaster area.

Four computers littered several tables, all turned off. Printers held reams of paper with Jeff’s notations along the columns of numbers in black ink. His furniture was toppled over as though there’d been a fight. But no sign of Jeff.

“So either he was a total slob or some shit went down. I smell shit, you, Short-Shot?”

Mara lifted her nose and sniffed as she made her way to two of the bedrooms in the back of his house. “Something’s not right. That’s all I can smell. His bathroom’s clean as a whistle,” she said, giving the guest bath a once-over.

Towels in earth tones neatly lined an organizer over the toilet, and the soap dispenser and a small plant lay squarely on either side of the sparkling white sink. This was the Jeff she knew. Orderly, calm, not the Jeff of the living room full of toppled furniture.

“So what do we do now? Sift through his personal belongings?” She scoured the bathroom one last time before making her way back to Harry, turning to him for advice. She found him with his mouth open, swinging like it was hinged.

“Harry? What’s wrong?”

“Jesus,” he whispered, holding his hand in front of his face. “It’s like having night vision goggles. I can see
everything
. I don’t think I realized it until just now. We don’t even need to turn on a light. I think I can see sounds.”

Mara smiled up at him, ticking off another pro for team werewolf. “I told you so would be trite, wouldn’t it?”

Nina clapped both of them on the shoulder. “Lovebirds, quit with the starry-eyed bullshit and let’s roll. Your fellow nerd was a slob—look at this place.”

Harry’s gaze said he was skeptical. “Truthfully, I didn’t know Jeff outside of the Pack gym and work. We didn’t go out for beers or whatever. I was too busy with the kids to get out much. So I can’t say for sure if he was disorganized.” His gaze went to Mara in question. “Mara, were his work habits like this?”

She shook her head. No. Jeff was meticulous, not only in his research, but his physical belongings at his desk and at his worktable in the lab. His beakers were always crystal clear, his portable scale shiny, and all of his acid-base indicators aligned. “Jeff was neat as a pin at work. That’s not to say it wasn’t just for show, but he was pretty thorough. His desk and lab space were always pretty neat.”

“Lovebirds?” Nina called from the kitchen just adjacent to the living room.

Harry and Mara’s eyes shot across the room where Nina stood by Jeff’s shiny, silver fridge. She held up another of those now familiar slips of paper.

Mara’s heart began to crash against her ribs in a painful beat.

It was the same handwriting, the same lined notepaper torn from a spiral notebook.

“Tell Mara and Harry I see them.”

* * *

M
ARA
tucked her hair up in a knot on the top of her head before placing a knitted cap over it, trying to shake off the fear eating her alive.

For now, because Jeff had been missing for over forty-eight hours and he was a human, they’d filed an anonymous missing person’s report, realizing the police would eventually show up at Pack and question his coworkers.

Harry had been the voice of reason on Jeff’s disappearance. Their chances were better if the police didn’t immediately put Harry and the kids together with Jeff’s vanishing. How did you explain that since you’d become a werewolf, your wards and one of your coworkers had gone missing all in the space of a week? Not to mention identical messages had been left both with the kids and at Jeff’s place—key pieces of evidence.

The common denominator in all this was Harry.

But they were only buying more time at this point. The police would have to show up sometime, and if they were smart, they’d eventually string together the relationships between Harry, Jeff, and the children, and then the heat would be on.

They’d also searched Jeff’s house, something she, Nina, and Harry had done before letting the police in on his disappearance. Nothing.

Absolutely nothing, other than the scattered furniture, said this person who was snatching people up had wanted something important from Jeff’s personal research. Jeff was a respected scientist, but to her knowledge, he wasn’t working on anything for Pack that would change the world.

After a lengthy discussion, they’d all nixed the idea that Jeff’s kidnapping had anything to do with his work, and had everything to do with his connection to Mara and Harry and that damn lab. What had Jeff seen that would make someone want to tear his place apart or worse, hurt him?

Jesus. At this point, was Jeff even alive?

Mara’s stomach coiled into a tight knot of fear. Someone had lured Harry to the lab, and that someone had seen what had gone down that night. There was no escaping that.

She’d worried all last night about Jeff, wracked her brain to find his connection to this, other than that he was a convenient way to get Harry to the lab.

She’d notified Keegan and the council about Jeff, who was very human. If Jeff was hurt, or even if he wasn’t, the council had been clear, this revelation could lead to more charges. The only solace she took was in Keegan’s words that he’d do whatever it took to find Jeff.

She sighed, forcing her fears to quiet. Today, Mara was determined to enjoy Mimi and Fletcher for their short visit to tube along the hills behind her cottage. It was a rare opportunity for Harry to spend some time with them in this madness, and it was important.

With nothing else to go on, no clue where to look for Jeff, they’d entered the frustrating land of limbo.

And if she didn’t find something else to focus on, she’d go crazy.

Mimi’s and Fletcher’s excited voices drifted in from the living room where Nina made them hot chocolate with marshmallows and explained why Carl was such a strange color and couldn’t speak. She didn’t balk at their questions. She didn’t chastise them for being curious.

She invited them to ask her anything and everything to create an open dialogue about his differences, yet alleviate the fears they surely experienced upon seeing him for the first time.

“Fear created chaos” was Nina’s motto, and while she didn’t exactly tell them the truth about Carl, she was as honest as the situation allowed, telling them only that Carl had been in an accident that left his skin a different shade than what was considered normal and his limbs stiff and difficult to use.

As they giggled and chatted, she’d encouraged them to hold Carl’s hand, and when he’d grunted his pleasure, they’d all gone about their giggling and chatter like they hadn’t just met a real, not so alive, zombie.

“I have to give it to Nina, she’s an amazing guide to parenting,” Harry said, wonder in his voice. “The kids have accepted and moved on to the topic of what would happen if you woke up and there was an alligator on your floor.”

“We can all only aspire,” Mara said on a forced smile.

He grabbed her hand to prevent her from avoiding him, warm and reassuring. He stroked the skin between her thumb and index finger. “So we still haven’t talked.”

She squeezed it, loving the feel of it, the calm strength of it. “We will.”

“When?”

She didn’t want to spoil this precious time with Mimi and Fletcher. Avoiding his eyes, she said, “Soon.”

His handsome face filled with admonishment. “You said that last night after we got back from Jeff’s.”

“And I meant it. But I was so tired from the day’s events, I passed out. Sorry.”

Harry eyeballed her, and it was full of his skepticism. “No. You’re avoiding.”

She gave him a shy smile. “And I’m good, right?”

“So good I almost believed you were actually passed out last night when I got into bed—or not.”

She’d feigned sleep when Harry had finally stopped trying to figure out what the note meant and whom it was from and had come to bed. He hadn’t pushed about her meeting with the council, just gathered her in his arms and stroked her hair until she’d fallen into a fitful sleep.

She loved that he’d come to her room without hesitation, as if their lovemaking hadn’t been only rise-of-the-full-moon related. Whatever the reason, she’d treasure that memory. It was clear, strong, and easy to recall how he held her like no other man before him.

If she had the power to freeze that one moment in time with him—stay in his arms forever, she’d have made it so. “I had a headache.”