Lily Nawassa looked up from the microscope and rubbed her neck. It was sore from being in one position too long. She let out a growl of frustration when she didn’t get the results she wanted. Lily took a long slow breath in hopes it would calm impatient frustration. “Understanding before correction,” a soft voice chuckled from behind her. It belongs to her mentor, friend, and colleague. Veronica gave her a ghost of a smile as she stood there with her hands behind her back.
Like all vampires, she had a deathly pale skin tone that her reddish brown hair made stand out even more. Her clothing while was modern made was fashioned during the time she had been alive, the Victorian era Lily assumed though she knew little of history and even less of fashion. Her light brown eyes with a touch of the vampiric red tint twinkled with her amusement at Lily’s impatience.
Lily blew out a puff of air causing her black hair to lift away from her face before she complained, “it’s just we’ve made so little progress in all this time.” Veronica gave her another smile, only slightly showing the fangs hinted to the dangerous predator she could be. Lily supposed for a dead woman Veronica didn’t feel the need to be impatient as she had all the time in the world.
“Actually I think we’ve done quite well considering how incoherent Doctor Thompson’s notes have been. The wolf guarded his work as a mother would her newborn babe. You can’t expect to unravel his life work in a few years,” she explained to her with her mentor tone.
“I know, I know” she replied, leaning back in her chair. The old frustration warmed her blood and made her anxious.
“Go on Lily, it’s late and you’ve been here all day,” Veronica told her with a dismissive wave. She didn’t need to be told twice. Lily stood up from her chair and rubbed her sore shoulders. She sometimes wondered if their lack of progress wasn’t a sign from God that maybe it was better this way. Three years ago, Lily was just an average everyday human except for her adoptive family were werewolves, her father being the alpha but his beta/pack doctor Xavier Thompson had changed all that.
Xavier didn’t agree with werewolf thinking of survival of the fittest and decided to change things. He took those he decided were “special” and changed them into the ultimate creature. James Lacrosse was his first. He took the werewolf boy of thirteen and twisted him until his wolf side turned into a monstrous beast worthy of any Hollywood horror flick. To bring James out of his self-proclaimed exile and back to pack territory, Xavier purposely caused the death of one of the packs teenagers and near-kidnapping of a second twenty years later.
During this time, Xavier decided to better control James he would create a mate for him. That’s where Lily came in. She was the bride to James’ Frankenstein. To this day she still didn’t know why he’d chosen her. She and James never got along very well. At some point, Xavier decided that wasn’t enough and decided to change her into something even worse, a hybrid of werewolf and vampire. She had the power to shift between being a monstrous werewolf to a vampire. While in the pure form of each species, she looked no different from normal vampires or like James’ beast shift.
She could also change the dominance between the two, like a sliding scale. Through some practice, Lily had found a good mix of the two that made her almost feel normal. She still clung on to the hope that she could one day fix what Xavier had done to her and become a human again. After three years, though, she was starting to lose faith and it was the thought of her son that kept her going. A. J. had been conceived after her change and she feared nonstop that he may have inherited her condition.
In fact, the little boy had been tested with every test her and Veronica could think of to indicate if he was a hybrid like her, but so far the test only indicates the beastly werewolf mutation that she and his father carried.
Lily still periodically tested him and would so until either the tests results showed more, she found a way to reverse what had been done to her, or A. J. went through his first shift and stayed a normal healthy werewolf boy. Werewolves though didn’t go through their first shift until they hit puberty so she still had plenty of time, but she had never really been one with much patience.
Lily left the lab and walked down the empty hallway and out of the large sterile looking building that served the Montana Aequivalere research laboratory. The Aequivalere organization was a compilation of most of the supernatural creatures that in existed in this world/planes of existence. They played referee between the species making sure they more or less behaved themselves and kept the human population blissfully unaware of their existence.
Lily started working for the Aequivalere once Xavier had been dealt with and they offered to hire her on in attempting to decipher the research. She jumped at the chance, not only because she wanted to learn a way to reverse what Xavier had done, but she also needed away to get away from James. Guilt and something else Lily didn’t wish to name washed over her when she thought of James Lacrosse.
As much as she wanted to be able to claim the wounded party of their not so friendly parting Lily knew she couldn’t. She found him to be irritating, a little cocky, and a general pain in the ass but with distance and time, Lily saw she didn’t come close to giving him a fair chance. She had blamed him for things that he had no control over or simply wasn’t his fault. At the time she didn’t care about any of that, she just wanted him to be the bad guy so he was.
Hunching up her shoulders against the cold air that blew around her, Lily pulled her coat tighter. Three years, she thought to herself gloomily, and I still can’t stand this cold! It’s not even November yet, she continued to silently complain. Her body refused to adapt from the milder Midwestern temperatures to the cold of Montana. Instead of walking home like she usually did Lily walked towards a small bar with a weather worn sign that read “Big Al’s.”
The smoky air made her sensitive nose crinkle in disgust, but at least it was warm. She scanned the bar then walked over to the corner table where a lone man sat hunched over a bottle of beer. Lily grabbed a chair and moved it over next to him. “Hey handsome,” she greeted and rubbed the top of his head, mussing his short brown hair.
He shot her what she assumed to be a confident and sexy look with a crooked smiled that would win over most women, but it only moved her to laughter. She sat down and took one of the untouched beers sitting on the table and took a long drink from it then let out a satisfied sigh. “Hey Lily,” he greeted her back, his tone cheerful but she could detect the sad undertones. “Today is the day,” he added with a sigh, dropping all pretenses of cheerfulness and she could easy see the pain that still haunted him reflected in his muddy brown eyes.
“Yeah I know,” she said, her own tone somber. “It seems so long ago yet I remember it all just like it was yesterday.” She lifted her bottle. “To Lacy…” she started but he shook his head.
“No,” he told her, his bottle remaining on the table. “Sorry, Lily but not this year or ever again. I’m done mourning her, feeling guilty for her, or any of that bullshit,” he spoke bitterness overtaking the sadness in his voice. Lily set down her own bottle and gave him a small nod.
“Yeah, I guess your right Chris. Three years have been more than she deserves” she replied. Lacy, her adopted sister, and Chris’s mate. She tried to kill Chris and then tried to get Lily to turn her so that she could claim James as her new mate. She had tricked, bound, and beaten Lily when she had refused. Lily eventually turned the tables on her sister and planned to give Lacy back to her father, but the vampire Bianca killed her first.
Chris lifted his beer and took a drink. “It’s been three years and I think it’s time to stop looking back and start looking forward,” he told her and a small sheepish grin spread across his face.
“Oh really? So does that mean that you and Xin Qian…” she asked and now his face lit up and showed her a small bite mark on his bicep with a small Chinese character in the center of it.
“Who would have thought it was possible,” he said, letting his sleeve fall back in place. “But Xin Qian and I’ve been talking about it and I don’t think Lacy ever really was my mate. I think Xavier did something to us to make us think we were. He must have known…” he explained, pausing looking a little sick before finishing. “That she’d hate me and would do anything to get rid of me.”
Lily shook her head with a slight scowl. “I wouldn’t put it past that bastard,” she said, almost growling but then smiled at Chris. “But I’m glad Xin Qian is so persistent,” she finished, taking another drink and causing him to laugh. Lily hadn’t known the little werewolf-witch for long but it was enough to know that Xin Qian was the most cheerful, kind, and thankfully annoyingly persistent person she’d ever seen.
Lacy’s rejection and death had left Chris, a broken man, but Xin Qian somehow had managed to piece him back together again. He still had his moments, but Chris was almost back to the same old laid back and the carefree man she had known before Xavier shown his true colors.