Dean and Sam?
The lucid, almost always able to find a reasonable explanation, half of his brain said this number he’d found on the Internet and the crackpot who’d answered was all just a bunch of hooey.
Yet, despite his misgivings about vampires and demons, he’d dialed it anyway. Out of sheer desperation, and with more hair than a pack of Siberian huskies sprouting from his face, his fingers had punched in the OOPS number without ever looking back.
Because his sensible, thinking mind told him what had just occurred after he’d sipped his vitaminwater wasn’t a case of hypertrichosis. Not with the speed in which he’d been affected. It couldn’t be . . .
Not to mention, he was well and truly stuck in this room—under a table. There was no getting out of here—not like this—not at the end of a workday when every one of his colleagues could see him leaving the offices in tumbleweeds of unsightly hair. He needed help to escape quickly and quietly before he was discovered—all hairy and sharp-of-tooth. This OOPS website claimed it could help. It listed all sorts of examples of how they could help.
The tapping of a finger, like the sound of a hydraulic jack in his head, recaptured his attention. “Harrry?”
He grimaced at the throb of pressure Nina’s incessant thrumming created in his head. “Ms. Statleon?”
“Get . . . to . . . the . . . fucking . . . point!”
Harry squeezed his temple with his thumb and forefinger. “I need help. I’m trapped. Can you help?”
There was a sharp cluck of Nina’s tongue and then she said, “Depends on the crisis.”
“Could you be any more vague?” he snarled, baring his teeth. Oh, shit. He’d snarled. And bared his teeth.
“Could you be in a shittier position?”
Drool formed at the corner of his mouth. He swiped at it with an impatient thumb and fought the irrational, uncommon urge to hunt this woman down and rip her head off. “Meaning?”
“Meaning, I’m the paranormal crypt keeper, and if you piss me off, I’ll throw the key to the crypt in the goddamn Hudson.”
Four deep, willing-his-patience-back-into-existence breaths later, Harry realized she was right. “Again, as I said before, Keeper of the Crypt, I’m feeling a little out of control. Thusly, my emotions are erratic.”
“Thusly?”
Harry’s eyes narrowed, awed by the magnification of his eyesight. He was nearsighted, hence the nerd-dweeb glasses. “It means—”
“I know what the fuck it means, Vocab Man. I was just pointing out how dorky it is to use, you know, in this century.”
“Thank you. Your observation is both helpful and, above all, original.” Like he hadn’t been accused of throwing his broad vocabulary around a time or ten million. His sister Donna called it pretentious.
“Yeah. I’m all about enriching lives. So could we get to the reason you called? I’m bored now, and when I’m bored, I get cranky. You don’t want that, Harry.”
Intuitively, he somehow knew he didn’t want this woman named Nina cranky. “Do you have a list of credentials?”
“You mean like a certification from Ghostbusters that says we’re all official paranormal helpers?”
Was this Nina of the unladylike mouth and easily stirred pot mocking him? It made him incredibly uncomfortable when he missed a joke everyone else around him seemed to get. This happened far more often than he’d like to admit. “Well, yes.”
“Yeah. Sure. You wanna call the Paranormal Center for Paranormalness? I can give you my vampire ID number. Once you’ve got that, you’re golden, dude. Then, when you give it to the team of paranormal experts on paranormalness they’ll give you my shiny references from Anne Rice and Team Edward.”
Okay. She was mocking him. His sigh grated on the way out of his throat. “There’s no reason to be so flippant. I just want to be sure I’ve done my homework and I choose the appropriate organization to advise me . . . you know, for this problem . . .”
Nina’s hand cracked against a hard surface, making him cringe. “Christ. This ain’t Carfax, Harry. There’s no one else to compare us to. It’s not like you can call the Better Business Bureau and check on us or some shit. There’s no other group like us around. We’re it—the total shiz.”
According to the Internet, Nina’s shiz really was it. He began to estimate and calculate in his head the kind of money this sort of dilemma would cost. It wouldn’t be cheap, he suspected.
Was he really considering utilizing the services of a group of people who claimed, not only that they were paranormal themselves, but that they could guide him to the other side of the supernatural?