Something About Harry(5)
He growled his discontent—low—feral. Oh, Jesus. “Like?” he spat, his back arching with a tight snap while his limbs reared upward.
“Like how the fuck did this happen?”
“I don’t know, Crypt Keeper. All signs point to the vitaminwater I drank. It was the last thing I did before thissss happened,” he gritted out, marveling that one’s head really could perform spinning Exorcist-like acts. He knew. Because right now, his eyeballs were looking directly at the wall his back was pressed to.
Oh, hell.
“Harry, vitaminwater?” Nina repeated with a dull tone. “What the fuck kind of lame shit is that? If you’re one of those conspiracy nuts that thinks the FDA’s spikin’ shit with their special juice so they can create a super race of killing machines, just remember, I can sniff you out. I’ll beat yer ass just ’cus I can. Got that?”
As his head did a total three-sixty on his neck, and he was once again looking at the far wall as opposed to the wall he was flush with, he fought a sissy scream of terror.
“No tinfoil hats here. Ssswear,” Harry choked out, clenching his free hand on the corner of the wall to steady his wildly thrashing legs. The moment passed, and for a brief second, his body was calm.
Stretching his arms outward to ease the tight tension of muscle and skin, he said, “But I do know, this is . . . er . . . what’s happening to me, is very real. If my head flopping and turning around on my neck like one of those bobbleheads is any indication.”
“Shut the fucking front door!” Nina yelped just as the thrum of vibration reentered his body with an intense force of heat.
Harry, at war with the clothing peeling from his body, frowned. “Huh?”
“Dude, your head spun around on your flippin’ neck? Truth?”
“Yes!” he all but roared as he lost the battle with his trousers and they split apart, falling away from his lower body, leaving small clumps of thread.
There was excitement in Nina’s response—he smelled the emotion as sure as he smelled someone’s AKC registered Rhodesian Ridgeback but two miles away. On a farm. Yes. It definitely lived on a farm.
“Jesus Christ and Linda Blair. No fucking way. Marty can’t do that shit. I’m all atwitter, Harry. It’s like Dracula’s birthday and a Stephanie Meyer’s hootenanny all at the same time.”
“To have piqued your interest leaves me humbled and awed, Crypt Keeper. So does this mean you’ll come help now?” Hell. He hoped so. If someone didn’t help him soon, there’d be no sticky-hair-remover-device in the universe big enough to clean up the pile of fur he was leaving in his wake.
“Only because it sounds like you got some new whacked ability Marty doesn’t, and it means I can poke the shit out of her with it. But that’s the only reason, Harry. Otherwise, I’d just call Wanda to come brush out your hairy ass and throw you a sirloin. So where are you, my brotha?”
When the crunch of bone began and his fingers sprouted long, black claws, things began to get fuzzy. Heh. Fuzzy. What an ironic play on words. “Like my location?”
Nina’s response was full of exasperation. “Duh, dude. Somebody has to come out and investigate this shit. But I’m gonna remind your ass one last time, so don’t say I didn’t warn you, if you’re fucking with me—even though my vampy senses lean toward not so much—I’ll kill you from a hundred paces. Like boom, baby.”
The screech of metal ripped through the large room when Harry fell forward on his knees, knocking into the heavy table and toppling it. His eyes scanned the room with a hazy red film covering them, gripping the phone to his ear like a lifeline.
Nina’s urgent tone jolted him from the wonder of his uncanny vision. “Dude! What the hell is going on? Give me your location!”
The last words he was able to mutter before his face did sort of split apart and he acquired a gen-u-ine muzzle were, “Pack! I’m at Pack Cosmetics!”
CHAPTER
2
“Hoo boy,” Mara Flaherty heard her sister-in-law, Marty, mutter just as she jumped off the elevator. She was skimming her phone and probably the urgent tweets she’d received from Nina, who, according to Marty’s text to Mara, was manning the OOPS phones.
Mara skidded to a halt, stopping just short of her sister-in-law, scanning the halls to be sure Astrid, one of her closest friends at Pack, hadn’t followed her. When Marty had texted there was trouble in the lab, she’d said Mara should come alone.
She huffed a breath, peering down the maze of halls leading to Pack Cosmetic’s labs. “What’s with all the hush-hush? I was just down here an hour ago, and everything was fine. What’s wrong?”