CHAPTER ONE
Seattle, 2006
BOYEATENBYKILLERMOTHS.
Susan Michaels groaned as she read the headline for her latest story. She knew better than to read the rest of the article, but something inside her just wanted to feel kicked this afternoon. God forbid that she ever took pride in her work again...
Bred in a lab in South America, these top secret moths are the next generation of military assassins. They are genetically engineered to think their way into an enemy's lair where they bite the neck of the target and infect them with a concentrated poison that is completely undetectable and that will render the victim dead within an hour.
Now they have escaped the lab and were last seen heading north, straight for the central U.S. Be on guard. They could be in your neighborhood within the month...
Dear Lord, it was worse than she'd imagined.
Her hands shaking in anger, she got up from her desk and headed straight into Leo Kirby's office. As usual, he was online, reading some poor slob's blog and making copious notes.
Leo was a short, lean man with long black hair that he always wore in a ponytail. He also had a goatee, cold gray eyes that never laughed, and a strange spiderweb tattoo on his left hand. He was dressed in a baggy black T-shirt and jeans, with a giant Starbucks travel mug at his elbow while he worked. In his mid-thirties, he'd be cute if he wasn't so damned annoying.
"Killer moths?" she asked.
He looked up from his notepad and shrugged. "You said we were going to have a moth invasion. I just had Joanie rewrite the story to make it more marketable. "
She gaped in total astonishment. "Joanie? You had Joanie rewrite the story? The woman who wears tinfoil in her bra so that the people with x-ray vision can't see her breasts? That Joanie?"
He didn't flinch or miss a beat. "Yeah, she's my best writer."
Talk about insult to injury... "I thought I was your best writer, Leo."
Sighing heavily, he swiveled his chair to face her. "You would be if you had any imagination whatsoever." He held his hands up dramatically as if to illustrate his point. "C'mon, Sue, embrace your inner child. Embrace the absurd that lives amongst us. Think Ibsen." He put his hands down and gave another weary sigh. "But no, you never do, do you? I send you out to investigate the bat boy who lives in the old church belfry and you come back with a story about moths infesting the rafters. What the hell is that?"
She gave him a droll stare as she crossed her arms over her chest. "It's called reality, Leo. Reality. You should stop shrooming long enough to try it. "
He snorted at that before he flipped to a blank sheet of paper on his notepad. He set it beside his coffee. "Screw reality. It don't feed my dog. It don't make my Porsche payments. It don't get me laid. Bullshit does that... and I like it that way."
She rolled her eyes at his beaming face. "You are such a toad."
He paused as if an idea had struck him. He reached for his pad, where he quickly scribbled something. " 'Employee Kisses Toady Boss to Discover an Ancient Immortal Prince'... better yet, a god. Yeah, an ancient god"-he gestured at her with his pen-"a Greek god who's been cursed to live as a sex slave to women... I like it. Can you imagine? Women all over the country will be kissing their bosses to test the theory." Then he looked back at her with a wicked grin. "Shall we try the experiment and see if it works?"
She screwed her face up at him in disgust. "Hell, no. And that wasn't a come-on, Leo. Trust me, even with a thousand kisses you'd still be a toad."
He was totally undaunted, mostly because the two of them had been teasing each other this way since they attended college together. "I still think we should give it a try." He wagged his eyebrows at her.
Susan let out a long, exasperated breath. "You know, I would bring you up on sexual harassment charges, but that would imply that you have actually had sex in your lifetime, and I intend to maintain that you are a prime example of what happens to people when they're too sexually frustrated. "
That brought another glassy look to his eyes before he scribbled again. " 'Sexually Frustrated Boss Turns into Screaming Lunatic. Disembowels Woman Who Excites Him.' "
Susan groaned deep in her throat. If she didn't know better, she'd think he was threatening her, but that would involve actual action on his part, and Leo was nothing if not a complete delegator. His maxim had always been why do it yourself when you can hire or bully someone else to do it for you.
"Leo! Stop turning everything into a cheesy headline." And before he could respond, she quickly added, "I know, I know. Cheesy headlines pay for your Porsche. "
"Exactly!"
Disgusted, she rubbed at the sudden pain she felt behind her right eye.
"Look, Sue," he said as if he felt an uncharacteristic wave of sympathy for her. "I know how hard these last couple of years have been for you, okay? But you're not an investigative reporter anymore."
Her chest tightened at his words. Words she didn't really need to hear, since they haunted her every minute of every day. Two and a half years ago, she'd been one of the foremost investigative reporters in the country. Her former boss had nicknamed her Hound Dog Sue because she could sniff a story from a mile away and then run it to ground and bring it home.
And in one moment of gross stupidity, her whole world had come crumbling down around her. She'd been so hungry that she'd run headlong into a setup that had completely destroyed her reputation.
It'd almost cost her her life.
She rubbed at the scar on her wrist as she forced herself not to remember that awful night in November-the only time in her life when she'd actually been weak. She'd come to her senses, and then vowed to never let anyone make her feel that powerless again. No matter what, this was her life and she was going to live it on her own terms.
But for Leo, whom she'd met in college when they'd worked on the staff of the campus paper together, she'd have never worked in journalism again. Not that working for the Daily Inquisitor could ever be construed as true journalism, but at least it allowed her to pay off some of her gargantuan debt and court costs. And though she hated her job, it kept her fed and off the street. For that she owed the little toad.
Leo tore off a sheet of paper and slid it toward her.
"What's this?" she asked as she took it from his desk.
"It's a Web address. There's some college kid who goes by the name Dark Angel who claims she's working for the undead. "
She stared at him. Oh, yeah... her life was definitely a lemon and she wanted her money back-with interest. "A vampire?"
"Not exactly. She says he's an immortal shapeshifting warrior who annoys the hell out of her. She's local, so I want you to check it out and see what else she has to say. Then report everything back to me."
Oh, this couldn't be happening to her, and yet that old internal voice in her head was already laughing at her. "Shapeshifter, huh? Is this before or after she drops acid?"
Leo made an irritated noise. "Why don't you at least try to get into the spirit of the job? You know, it's really not bad at all. In fact, it's actually highly entertaining. Live a little, Sue. Let go of the venom. Enjoy it."
Enjoy it... enjoy being a laughingstock after she'd been working for the Washington Post... yeah. It was hard to Carpe Crap when what she really wanted to do was get her reputation back.