Page 3 of Murder Mittens

Two years ago, they wouldn’t have been wrong, but I’d found a new purpose in life. Not a single one of my brothers would approve, my mother would have yet another litter of kittens, and my father would be so disappointed.

Personally, I thought it was obvious. I worked in customer service. I was a prime candidate to become a murderous asshole. I did so legally, on behalf of the government and other legal entities, and I did so for a filthy amount of money.

Smiling stretched my scars, but I did it anyway. “If anyone needs any extra hours, I can afford another day or two off,” I offered. “I can take up to a week unpaid. I’ve been saving up to take some time off if any opportunities allowed.”

It would delay paying for the expensive procedure required to piece my face back together and remove the evidence of the fire that’d almost killed me as a child. It took a lot of magic to convince the lycanthropy virus I wasn’t supposed to be a scarred wreck.

A lot of magic cost a lot of money, and I figured I might have the several million dollars needed within five years if I landed a bounty every weekend and took on some of the more dangerous jobs. While I waited for my boss to mull over my offer, I considered the various jobs on offer.

I liked hunting other lycanthropes. Unmated males were easy catches, and the fugitives usually brought in a pretty penny. The last one I’d bagged as a live capture had added fifty thousand to my bank account.

Then again, if I landed an entire extra week, I’d make up the lost hours with a single small bounty, and anything else would be extra cash in my savings account.

My boss grunted, signaling he’d come to a decision. “I’ll keep that in mind and pitch the offer. I’ll email your personal and work addresses if there are any takers plus text your phone.”

“Thanks, sir. Have a good evening.”

“You, too.”

He hung up, and before something could go wrong, I clocked out, filed my paperwork for my final call, and logged out of the system so I couldn’t be sucked back into doing even more work.

If all went well, I’d be a hundred grand richer by the end of the week and that much closer to being able to look in the mirror without wincing.

To keep my brothers straight, I kept a list of them by litter, and I even made special notes to help me identify the identical twins, triplets, quadruplets, and quintuplets, of which there were twelve sets across my parents’ fifteen litters. I belonged to litter number eight, and my identical twin brothers, Hugh and Harvey, had been born almost an hour before me. I’d hated the idea of eviction into the real world. In reality, I’d been a complication from start to finish, and not much had changed since birth.

My parents viewed me as a miracle. Unlike my healthier-than-ox brothers, I’d been conceived several weeks after them, which had put me into the premature category while my brothers had barely squeaked to term. Superfetation didn’t happen often, and my existence had startled everyone.

I’d been missed on the first two ultrasounds, and by the time I’d been spotted, my mother refused to accept anything other than welcoming me into the world along with my brothers, despite the problems associated with the gap between our conceptions.

To add to the fun, my twin brothers couldn’t look more alike if they tried. The only way for me to tell them apart was to grimace. Hugh tensed while Harvey growled, sprouted lynx ears, and prepared to rampage. Even if Harvey kept his temper, he still sprouted the ears, the first sign he would one day gain control over the prized hybrid form.

Hugh had picked up the ability to sprout ears, too, and my entire family kept a close eye on me to see if I’d follow the trend. In reality, thanks to some close calls and more desperation than one single lycanthrope woman needed in life, I could mostly control my hybrid form, which classified as borderline. I could exchange my weak, human legs for a modified version of a lynx’s, including huge paws tipped with lethal claws. With a little work, I could transform my forearms and hands, too.

Sometimes I sprouted ears, sometimes I didn’t, and sometimes a tail made an appearance, too.

On a good day, I grew in a plush, fur coat.

I never hunted as a hybrid; it was bad enough when a male lycanthrope sniffed me out as a human, when my virus tended to be somewhat dormant. If anyone found out I could control partial shifts, I’d be the one hunted by every damned infected male in the country. The hybrid form alone would make me a prize. Add in my species, a member of one of twenty lynx clans scattered across North America, South America, and Europe, and I’d never hear the end of it.

According to my nose, as of last week, there were twenty single lycanthrope males, three of which were felines of some sort, sniffing around my turf trying to identify who the single lycanthrope female in the small town was.

Damned determined males, making a mess of my weekends and forcing me to sneak around to keep from drawing their attention.

Hissing at my shit luck, as I’d scare off any suitors the instant they caught sight of my disaster of a face, I put away my work headset, shut down the computer, and began preparing my home for a week or two away. I really hoped someone else wanted my hours.

An extra week might land me enough to put down a deposit to remove the scars that’d haunted me since childhood, the result of a fire at a camp for girls, the first and last time I’d gone away for the summer. I’d spent a month in the hospital, and the night that had almost ended my life had dumped me into a living hell I would soon be able to escape.

Unfortunately for me, I’d been too young for my lycanthropy virus to do me any good, and by the time it kicked into high gear, it believed my scars were natural and went out of its damned way to preserve them.

Sometimes, surgeons—or even the CDC—would accept a payment plan with a sufficient deposit for the work. It wouldn’t take much to convince someone my scars prevented me from leading a normal life. Then they’d have a challenge kicking my virus to the curb long enough to tear into my face, do a skin graft, and convince my body to avoid scarring.

Assuming my virus could be contained, the procedure took an hour or two. Had I not been infected with lycanthropy, it would have cost me a few hundred dollars and a day off work.

Sometimes, life just wasn’t fair.

To my disgust, my surgeon thought he might cut the costs down to five hundred thousand or less, which I could afford, if I found myself a lycanthrope male willing to put up with me for life. After laying claim to a male, my virus would go into remission for a while to recover, which would allow the team needed to do the operation with minimal risk to them while also requiring less heavy-duty magic.

Or something like that. I’d tuned out most of the specifics about what a man might do to help with the procedure, as I had no intention of claiming a mate for such a reason. It seemed wrong to use a man to fix my face, so I dodged that whole problem by avoiding the males of my kind and making sure they didn’t get too close while sniffing around my territory.