Scratch That:, Judy Colella [best thriller books to read .TXT] 📗

was he getting all hairy and stuff now, when it was only morning? He thought about this for a while, absently stroking one finger along Deva’s side. After a few minutes of this it occurred to him that while the full moon wasn’t visible during daylight, it was still there. The brighter light it displayed at night was probably what would bring out his lycanthropy symptoms in full. Or not.

He heard a hiss and pulled his hand away in time to save it from being bitten off.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Deva demanded, sitting up without bothering to cover herself despite his presence. “And how did you get in?” She frowned. “Did I forget to lock the door?”

“I seem to have grown my own set of lock-picks.” He raised his hands in front of her face. “What did you do to me, Deva?”

She squinted up at him, trying with one of her own hands to block a ray of sunlight smacking her in the face. “I didn’t do anything. Why? And why is your hair bushy like that? Did you get a weave or something?”

He spluttered. He tried to respond, but too many words and phrases attempted to get out at the same time and tripped all over themselves, falling into a soundless jumble of eloquent, wordless outrage.

She nodded. “I see. You think I’m responsible for all that hair and teeth, right? Well, that’s s…ouch! Ow, ow, ow!” Deva had found her fangs, he noted, or more precisely, her tongue had.

“Ha!” exclaimed Vec, his expression smug. “Now you know how it feels!”

Deva glared, pushed past him to get off the bed, and stomped into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Fortunately, he had his back to her during the stomping part.

“Look,” he called, “I’m not saying any of this…” He stopped, hearing the water running. She wouldn’t hear a thing he said now. Sighing, Vec stood and went out into the living room, where he wandered in sad, confused circles for a few minutes. On his fifth go-round, the small white business card on the coffee table that he’d been ignoring made a sudden connection with his brain; he stopped and picked it up. A few seconds later, his brows, which were already closer together than they should have been, met with a silent crash over the bridge of his nose, and he snarled. A real snarl that was so throaty and animalistic, it startled him, distracting him for a moment from the cause of said snarl.

“What did…weird.” He shook his head quickly, trying to clear his brain but only succeeded in rattling it further. Blinking a few times against the headache that had appeared on his cranial horizon, he refocused on the card, and snarled yet again. A really teensy chemical hanging out by the coffee machine in his logic center put its hands on its hips, and told him in no uncertain terms that all this snarling had to stop. He ignored it. More important things were afoot, by god!

“What the hell was Mack doing here?” he asked the room. Then he remembered the phone call, and saw his fellow band member’s request for Deva’s address for what it was – an attempt to hit on her at close range. He must have finally figured out that flirting with someone from behind a drum set on the other side of the room while that person was looking in the opposite direction, was a pretty impractical way to make your feelings known. To be fair, though, he really hadn’t given the drummer a chance to say exactly why he’d wanted the address. But why else? The guy had done an abysmal job of hiding (from the band, anyway) the fact that he was attracted to Deva. On the other hand, maybe he wasn’t trying to hide it –

“Evolution chart.”

He dropped the card, startled. No one had ever said, “evolution chart” at him before, and Deva had just growled it. He stared at her the way one stares at the insane, and asked her if there was a point to her words, a meaning, some kind of –

“Stop burbling!” She stomped one foot, arms crossed (to his semi-relief, she had put some clothes on). “Look at us, Vec! We look like a stupid evolution chart, or we would if Mack were here in his gross wolf body.”

“I’m not sure I get your meaning,” he said with care, not wishing to cut his tongue again. "What does Mack have to do with this, and why was he here in the first place?"

She rolled her eyes. “Pay attention, please. I’m probably as wolf-like as I’m going to get because the King of Stupid only scratched me, so I still look human except for the fang thing. Okay? So put me on the timeline chart of evolution at phase three. Next, there’s you. Because I wasn’t made a full-blown…let me rephrase that. Because I wasn’t made a proper werewolf, my bite didn’t turn you completely, but because it was a bite, you’re more, uh, I don’t know, Lon Chaney, maybe. That’s phase two. Finally, we have our friend Mack, who by moonrise is going to look like the biggest, nastiest real-life wolf there is. Phase three. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go shoot myself.”

“With what?” asked Vec, waxing sarcastic. Her little rant had been, to say the least, disturbing. Mack was a werewolf? What? More specifically, Mack was THE werewolf, the one that had scratched her? What, what?

“Something silver, I should imagine.” She seemed to have figured out the whole fang thing, having gotten through all those words without shredding her tongue.

Vector had the unreasonable urge to call her a word that – considering their present state of being – would have been more appropriate than he’d have liked. “Save some for me!” he called as she went back to her bedroom; he instantly regretted the sibilants. “Oucth! Damn it! Sthupid fangth!” Great – now he was lisping. He went to the kitchen, planning to put some ice in his mouth to soothe it. Well that didn’t happen – someone began a frantic knocking on the front door right as he was passing it, startling the hell out of him. With a fierce growl he undid the lock and flung it open, the word “bloodshed” jumping out in front of his mind and making ugly gestures.

Mack, who by this time was probably getting used to having doors flung open in his face, nonetheless leaped backward, eyes wide.

“YOU!” Vector bellowed, a word he could yell quite easily without damaging himself.

“Er, yeah. Me. Oh, lord, I was right.” He looked down, appearing sheepish in an amazing display of irony, if anyone had been paying attention.

“You were right? About what?”

“Deva bit you, you said, and I kinda knew what would happen. Did she – ”

“You knew, all right, you…you…” he searched for a word both adequately withering and minus the letter “s”; he failed, and tried something else. “Get in here!”

“Well, yeah, that’s why I came by.” Mack shrugged and entered. “Look, Vec – ”

“Quiet! I’m…not happy at all about…about being a, uh, yeah! A NEARwolf! Got that? You didn’t bite Deva, and her biting me ended…in (trying to talk without using any kind of “s” sound whatsoever was really hard) me not really, fully turning into what you are, while…Deva…aw, crap.” They were in the living room by this time and he threw himself onto the sofa in disgust.

“Hey, man, I’m really sorry, okay?

“Is that the best you can do?” asked Deva from the arched entrance to the room from the hallway.

Mack turned toward her, saw her fangs, did a massive double-take, and groaned. “Oh, man, this is nuts!”

“Don’t say that word around me, please,” she begged, squeezing her eyes shut. “Ew,” she added in a small voice.

Mack scowled. “You know, I’m feeling a bit ganged-up on here, guys.” He took a deep breath, lifting his chin. “Okay, guys, pay attention.” He glared from Vec to Deva and back again. “Some bastard werewolf bit me while I was minding my own business. It was painful and didn’t heal for days, and then the night of the full moon came and I turned into, well, what Deva saw; I had no real control over my mind after that and I think I remember eating raw things with fur and enjoying it. When I woke up the next day, I might have convinced myself it had been a bizarre dream, had I not found myself lying naked on my front lawn with neighbors staring at me and...and laughing, and...right. So anyhow, I had to admit that it had been real and went on-line to look up lycanthropy. I didn’t like what I saw, especially what I didn’t see, which was a cure for it.” He looked up at Vec. “I don’t suppose you can imagine how hard it was to have to tell you guys that I had other commitments on those full-moon nights when Mr. Let-Me-Give-You- A-Dumber-Name-Than-You-Already-Have booked us somewhere. In fact, all of you almost fired me the third time it happened, remember?” He turned back to Deva. “As for you, I admit it. I am totally besotted with you, in case you hadn’t noticed – and I think you hadn’t noticed at all, really. But the point here is that in my desperation, I figured if I could make you like me, we’d be together after that, only when I saw you in the park, you looked so delicate, I was afraid to bite you. I mean, I wasn’t trying to kill you, Deva, and did what I figured was the next best thing – I scratched you. So yeah, I’m freakin’ sorry, all right? I made a huge mess of everything, and now the three of us are infected, only a little differently, it appears.” He crossed his arms and sat down.

“What would happen if I bit you?” Deva asked.

“I’d bleed.”

“Yes, of course, but would it change you in any way?”

“And would it hurt?” Vec added, hopeful.

“No, I sorta don’t think it would – change me, that is, but it would hurt, certainly.”

Vec smiled, showing his own alarming new set of teeth. “Good. Deva, bite him.”

“Don’t think I’m not tempted.” She came further into the room. “Trouble is, I’m getting hungry, and might not stop. You see, Mack, ever since like three days after the scratch attack, I’ve been craving raw meat. That’s why I bit Vec – I was about to make a meal of him. Nice, huh?” She gave him a sour look. “At this point, I honestly wouldn’t mind munching on an arm or something, which I hope is a craving that goes away when the full moon does. I also think, as I mentioned to Vec, that this is as wolf-like as I’m going to get. What does that make me, Mack? A cannibal?”

“You could eat squirrels,” he offered.

“Squirrels.”

“Well, yeah. Then you wouldn’t be a cannibal.”

“Uh-huh. How about cute little bunny rabbits while I’m at it? Maybe a hamster or two for dessert?” She was growing unmistakably irate.

Mack shrank back deeper into the chair cushions.

“Come to think of it,” Vec put in, “I don’t think I’m going to change a whole lot more, either. Looks like I’m stuck being Hugh Jackman for a few days, while you get to be Jacob with a vampire up his ass.”

Mack gave him a blank stare.

“Great,” Deva muttered. “What the hell am I now? Dog Woman? Wolferella? Bitch on a Stick?”

“Only when you have sex,” Mack blurted out, giggling.

Deva and Vector glared at him in outraged disbelief, and Mack gulped. Cramming himself deeper into the chair as if trying to become a part of it, he made a small mewling sound and closed his eyes.

“What are you doing?” asked Vec, enjoying his band-mates terror.

“I’m waiting for the feel of teeth clamping onto some tender part of my anatomy and wondering how long it would take you