smooth, generous figure, but didn’t linger. Long hair flowed in a thick wave past her shoulders and swirled around her face thanks to a gentle breeze. Abby batted it away and smiled while using the back of her hand to nudge the boxy plastic frames of her glasses farther up onto the bridge of her nose.
Cole smiled effortlessly at the sight of her. “Yep. Here I am. You look great.”
Abby immediately shook her head and pulled her over-shirt closed. “I’m in the field, which means I need to wear dirty clothes and these things,” she said, placing both sets of fingertips on the edges of her glasses.
Reaching out to smooth her hair back, Cole told her, “I think the glasses are cute.”
“No you don’t. Nobody does.”
“Did you change the color of your hair?”
“Yeah, I’m going back to the red. Actually, the box says Intense Auburn, but that’s a little too dramatic for me.”
“Well, it looks nice.”
“You’re only used to seeing me on a webcam, so you don’t know any better,” she added, “but thanks. Are you hungry?”
“Starved. All I’ve been eating is road trip food.”
“Burgers and trail mix?”
“More like beef jerky and candy bars,” Cole said. “Your road trips sound healthier than mine.”
Cole had met Abby through Stu, his regular MEG contact, and chatted with her at any opportunity. Phone conversations and the occasional picture weren’t anything like the real thing, however. “We don’t have to do this if you’d rather not,” she said.
He leaned forward to place a simple kiss on her cheek. Grinning as if the gesture had been more of a playful joke, he said, “Let’s just eat.”
Chapter 2
Abby’s table wasn’t tough to spot. It was the only one in the quaint little restaurant that looked like a miniature base camp for a surveillance operation. Her laptop was situated upon a chipped wooden table complete with a wireless signal booster, battery pack, and extra hard drive connected to it. A worn black satchel with MEG BR 40 stenciled on it in white lettering was under her chair. Among all that technology, the cup of iced tea and sandwich looked more like an afterthought.
“So have you seen the latest?” she asked as she sat down and curled a leg beneath her.
Cole moved the other chair at the table around so he could sit closer to her. “I don’t know. The latest what?”
Tapping the icon at the bottom of her screen, Abby enlarged a window that filled her screen with a page from the website of a news station local to the Kansas City metropolitan area. One side was filled with photos that had either been taken by locals or leaked from any number of official cameras set up around the city. Unlike the first batch of images he’d seen right after the incident in KC, these were cleaned up enough for the Half Breeds’ gnarled teeth, gangly limbs, and knotted muscles to be seen. One of them even managed to catch a fairly good glimpse of a werewolf’s intensely wild eyes as it ran across a street.
“No,” Cole said. “I haven’t seen these.”
“The story is a riot. Apparently, some of the carcasses were rounded up and taken in for testing. And here I thought you guys cleaned up after yourselves.”
Cole glanced at the other people in the restaurant, who didn’t seem too interested in who he was or what he was doing there. While more and more pictures of the Kansas City werewolves were popping up online, most of them were attached to half-assed speculation or outright lies. “We cleaned up what we could. Paige didn’t seem too worried about the rest.”
“Well, read on and see for yourself.”
Skipping the editorial comments on the chaos surrounding an “urban riot that was all too indicative of troubled times,” Cole found a definite lack of scientific jargon. He scrolled through the story again and said, “This only mentions some tests done on animal remains and hair samples.”
The way Abby leaned toward him was promising, but she only said, “They’ve concluded the remains are canine and that’s about it. Supposedly, those canines were too messed up after the cops shot them to pieces or ran them over with their patrol cars for them to find any more than that.”
“Didn’t they find any blood? There was plenty of it flowing that night from human and werewolf alike.”
That caught the attention of a skinny lady behind the counter who smirked and then whispered something to a bearded, barrel-chested man sitting on one of the stools at the counter. When Cole turned back toward Abby, he accidentally got a face full of her hair. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but ended quickly when she gathered it up and tied it back using a band that appeared like a cheater’s ace from out of nowhere.
“Sure they did, but it was a mix of human and canine,” she explained. “They’re writing that off to contaminated evidence at the scene. There’s still plenty of crackpot stories floating around, but the official word coming from the police and Humane Society is that those animals were a breed of large dog suffering from an exotic disease. Once that was released, most of the bigger news affiliates have been focusing on the possibility of an outbreak. Some are even saying that disease got passed from the sick dogs on to us as this Mud Flu thing. They’re wrong about that right?”
Cole nodded. “They can only spread their disease when they’re alive, and it sure as hell isn’t the flu.”
The barrel-chested man swiveled around to ask, “You know that for certain, do ya?”
“That’s what I read.”
“You a doctor?”
“No.”
“My granddaughter caught that damned Mud Flu, so it ain’t no joke.”
When Cole fumbled through a quick apology, the man’s gray eyebrows clumped together to make it clear that Santa had found a new name for his naughty list. Grumbling something about another bunch of know-it-alls, he swiveled back around to scoop up some more of his Salisbury steak.
“So,” Abby whispered. “Do ya really know that for certain?”
“Yes,” Cole assured her. “If Half Breeds could strengthen their numbers through anything as simple as a bite or some sort of airborne disease, there would be a whole lot more of them running around. Have there been any more dog attacks lately?”
Abby shook her head and pecked away at her keyboard. “There have been a few sightings of weird animals digging up backyards in a KC suburb, but that sounds more like people just being nervous. If you want the full details, you should watch our new cable special. It’ll be on next month.”
“I’d be nervous living in KC too,” the bearded man at the counter grunted. “Buncha damn fools runnin’ around lootin’ and givin’ the cops hell while some rabid dogs tear loose.”
“I heard it wasn’t dogs at all,” the woman behind the counter said. “I read somewhere that it was some sort of new tiger that was bred at a private zoo.” Leaning across the counter as if she’d just seen Cole, she asked, “Can I get you something, hon?”
“How’s your chili?”
“Ain’t it too warm for chili?”
Pointing to the metal pot behind her, he replied, “Then it should be too warm for coffee.”
The woman looked back, conceded the point with a shrug and lifted the lid to one of the larger pots next to the coffee machine. “How about some beef stew?”
“Close enough,” Cole said.
It didn’t take long for the stew to be ladled onto a plate over a few slices of white bread, but it was more than enough time for Abby to collect her things and pack them into her satchel.
“So tell me,” she said after Cole’s stew had been placed in front of him. “How’s everything with you and Paige? I heard she was hurt in KC.”
“Her arm’s still in a sling. At least, it was the last time I checked. She had to go back there to wrap up a few things.”
