Doggone Mess: a Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count) #20

On the surface, the job is simple. For a period of three days, she must keep Wayne Barnes from returning to the New York City area. The owner of the corporation determined to reduce her apartment complex to rubble has a reputation of being straitlaced and playing for keeps. Worse, her virus is ready to roll over to have her belly rubbed and enjoy some positive and intimate attention.

But with twenty thousand on the table and a chance to get ahead for once in her life, she’s prepared to get her hands dirty no matter the cost.

What she doesn’t know will change her life and plunge her into the murky depths of the black market, where secrets are worth more than money, life is cheap, and anything can be purchased for a price.

Doggone Mess is book twenty of the Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count) series.

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From Chapter One…

Shortly before the events of Plaidypus…

After a long week of work, I couldn’t really blame anyone for grabbing fast food on the way home, but did everyone in Long Island have to visit my specific branch of McDonald’s? From vanilla humans, lycanthropes, practitioners, and centaurs to devils, demons, and even an angel, everybody wanted a hit, and they wanted me to give it to them.

I questioned the angel. How did they eat without a head? Did they eat? Why did an angel want nuggets? Why did everyone want nuggets today?

If I judged from the angel’s rather feminine voice, my thoughts amused her. After handing over her meal, her promise of better days to come startled me. Had it been a calmer shift, I might have spared more than a moment to contemplate her words. But as a moment was all I had to spare, I filed her words away as empty politeness and went back to work.

While all the lines were busy, mine had twice as many people, and I doubted I’d survive to the end of my shift in an hour.

I considered asking some divine for help, but I opted against the idea. With my luck, the Devil would join the mayhem and give me one hell of an order.

One close brush with the divine was enough for me.

The nuggets held the place as the day’s reigning champion of sales, with the smart people ordering twenty, as it was approximately fifty cents more expensive than ordering ten. Burgers took the second spot of the day, and the underdog salad came in a close third, resulting in general mayhem in the back, as we hadn’t prepared for a salad bender.

Oddly, the lycanthropes led the charge on the unexpected salad bender. Had someone slipped pixie dust into our dressing when I hadn’t been looking? I could use a hit of pixie dust, and I held no doubt my fellow lycanthropes could use a dose as well. While filling an insane order consisting of a hundred and sixty nuggets, ten fries, and enough soda to float a boat, I checked one of the labels to make sure.

Nope, no pixie dust.

I fought my urge to sigh. For some damned reason, the CDC got cranky when those infected with a contagious life-altering disease became snuggle fiends. My driver’s license specifically barred me from ingesting any pixie dust without a prescription, the cruelest of blows in my life outside of my unwanted lycanthropy infection. Pixie dust turned me into a snuggle fiend out on a mission to love everyone, making me a high infection risk.

The CDC would consider removing the flag after I mated, as they believed I would become a snuggle fiend with my mate, something they viewed to be acceptable. If I could resist the urge to cuddle with everyone, pixie dust would be legal for me again.

I’d been tested once and only once, and I had tried my hardest to get affection and hugs from anyone to cross my path. The concern I would be lured off by a user and abuser influenced their decision to bar me from the substance.

I hated the CDC, especially as my virus agreed with their idea and appreciated their caution. I bet my terrorist virus just wanted me to settle down and used pixie dust to her advantage, although I’d resisted her wicked ways thus far.

Damn it, I needed a vacation. I also needed more than three days off before my next chain of thirteen days of twelve hours a pop. If I worked fourteen days in a row without a break, the labor board might get upset. I should have complained about the low pay and long hours, but I needed the money to pay my rent. I kept smiling, bagged the boxes of nuggets, triple counted boxes to make sure I wouldn’t have a cranky lycanthrope storming back complaining he’d been shorted, and went about my work with the same general efficiency and life as the average robot programmed to be the perfect public servant.

No matter what, I couldn’t afford to join the ranks of the unemployed. As a confirmed lycanthrope, jobs came few and far between, and I didn’t have a pack.

Single lycanthrope women in packs didn’t stay single for long, and I refused to have anything to do with the local packs, especially since I had no idea which one of the mangy bastards had infected me in the first place—or if I’d been the victim of an unidentified hot spot.

Considering how I’d spent a long time in the hospital thanks to some asshole, I’d been infected by a mangy bastard. Judging from my virus’s reaction to some men, she hated anyone who resembled the asshole who’d stolen my humanity almost as much as I did.

The CDC wanted to do tests to determine if I had a known strain, but I’d refused. The way I figured, I was better off not knowing. However much I disliked the organization, I appreciated the freedom to decline those tests.

I’d suffered enough, and they did their best to limit unnecessary anguish. Some people liked closure, but I cared little for the identity of the asshole who’d infected me and more about making the most of my changed circumstances. Before my infection, I’d had choices. One of those choices had involved crawling back home to my parents to beg forgiveness for having run away as a teenager.

They might have forgiven me for that, assuming I put away my practitioner tricks and never spoke another word about magic, but they would never accept me as a lycanthrope.

They embraced their vanilla human lives to an extreme degree, and my very existence broke their precious rules.

When I called, magic answered—and I suspected that magic had played a significant role in my survival when I’d been attacked by a rogue lycanthrope.

My virus and I agreed on little, but she disliked that I hadn’t been a willing victim with a male on hand to cater to my every need. My virus wanted me to find someone—anyone—to scratch my various itches, and I considered myself lucky that wild part of me didn’t push too hard.

I figured the CDC’s perfume helped with that.

As the restaurant’s token wolf, present to serve those who were either willing to risk infection to get their food faster or were also confirmed lycanthropes, I’d stay hired as long as I kept my work performance up and didn’t complain I only got three days off every thirteen or so days.

In reality, my boss worked hard to make certain I worked myself to death, preferring if I forgot I was entitled to time off work. The jackasses in upper management understood my situation a little too well.

I needed the work, so making a peep about the abusive hours would win me precisely nothing. In exchange, returned meals made their way to me more often than to others. My co-workers never complained about the slight favoritism.

They did everything in their power to avoid working my shifts, afraid of contracting the virus.

While a little exposure could spread the virus, the wise lycanthropes took great care with those around them.

According to my nose, only a few in my line were infected, and to my disgust, right before I was scheduled to escape, Wayne Barnes proved to be one of them. Thanks to my wolfsbane perfume, a gift from the CDC to keep my status as an unmated lycanthrope female hidden, most customers assumed I was the sacrificial lamb, chosen by the managers to deal with the cranky lycanthropes, using the perfume to deter infected customers from making a move on me. As far as Wayne was concerned, I was the annoying holdout in what would one day be his apartment complex, refusing to move out so he could purchase the building.

I bet the bastard had come to my workplace to make yet another offer to get me to move.

I worked through the orders until it was his turn, and bracing for the worst, I went through the ceremonial greeting and asked for his order.

My virus wanted me to take a moment to enjoy his presence, and I had no idea what she saw in his brown eyes, but she adored him and waited with bated breath for him to speak. From our first meeting, she’d fixated on his soft tenor.

I could understand why; I’d been attacked by someone with a deeper voice, one with a gravelly edge.

I questioned what my virus remembered that I didn’t, but one thing came across as a certainty: Wayne Barnes was as different from my attacker as it could get.

“Busy night, Joyce,” he commented, regarding the menu as though he hadn’t just spent twenty minutes waiting for his turn. “I can’t decide, so pick your favorites, give me six orders worth of it, and surprise me for the drinks. It’s to go.”

For fuck’s sake. His statement took my virus out, and she did the equivalent of writhe on the floor from pure joy. One of these days, he’d really kill me, but I went to work tapping in my dream order, which involved two different salads, a Big Mac, six chocolate chip cookies, two regular cheeseburgers, three grilled chicken sandwiches, and twenty nuggets. As his nose couldn’t tell if I had the virus thanks to my perfume, I’d play as an uninfected human for a while. I gave him unsweetened iced tea, and then I duplicated the order six times before submitting it and gesturing to the digital display. Then, as I still had receipts showing I’d purchased everything recently, I showed him the proof.

He chuckled, submitted his payment, and checked my receipts. “I’m impressed.”

“You asked me for my favorites. I just happen to have a lot of favorites, so I give myself variety.”

I was sure the businessman could afford the bill, which was about average for a lycanthrope during a virus spike. My blessed perfume kept my food bill tolerable, although I could eat through a shameful amount when my wolf wanted some action.

At the moment, a spike would break my bank account and force me to take on more shady work, including picking up a bounty or two from the legalized system. With Wayne Barnes in my territory, I’d be hitting up the system once I got home, accepting the inevitable.

When he came around, my virus got rowdy. Inevitably, we’d take our irritation out on lycanthropes on the wanted list, tossing them to law enforcement when we were finished with them.

None of them came close to Wayne in my virus’s eyes. In a way, I appreciated her picky nature. Had she found every man interesting, I would have reached the end of my rope already. 

He checked the receipt a second time, as though marveling at what a human woman could pack away. “So I did.”

I trusted the perfume to hide the truth, but I’d learned attitude and bearing told the most lies. If I played at a human woman, he would believe until his nose told him otherwise.

As the payment processed, because my co-workers would kill me if I didn’t help make sure his monster order went through without a hitch, I left the register and began gathering what I could, tallying off parts of the order as they finished and triple-checking everything. I bagged everything as efficiently as I could, although I expected the lycanthrope would make two trips to his car.

At least the rest of the customers understood lycanthropes could eat a ridiculous amount; nobody peeped a complaint. I counted that as a miracle. Within five minutes, thanks to more miracles in the back, I sent Wayne on his way. I breathed a relieved sigh when he left.

My virus whined, as she recognized Wayne as a single lycanthrope of the appropriate species—a safe one, one she could trust.

I needed a new life, but rather than bitch about it, I went back to work and thought curses rather than muttering them.