Relinquished

I was trying to avoid any werewolves in my life, and now I have to live with one?

I want to worry about human things like how to dress for the first day of a new job or how to sneak a silver dagger past the metal detectors when I get there. But when you’re working in a company run by vampires, human concerns become trivial. What’s not is figuring out why my undead bosses are trapping and killing werewolves. But that might not be the only secret hiding in the walls of the WWL Corporation, and what I soon discover could turn the supernatural world on its head (and land me on my back). And to cap it all off, somehow Tobias Somfield, the English werewolf I rescued from moon madness last summer, is now my roommate. All he does is brood and mope and wind up my worst instincts, constantly reminding me of how very un-human I really am. Tolerating him is darn near impossible, and the growing pull I feel toward him? Completely insane.

In the past month, I’d thoroughly kicked the asses of a pseudo-slayer and a b**** of a vampire. But today, my ass had been kicked.
By an Organic Chemistry final.
“I swear to God, I’m never going to need to know so much about carbonyl compounds, like, ever.” I let gravity pull me back into the cushy confines of the overstuffed armchair.
Bubbly and blonde, Amy Popowitz, my fearless roommate & only close friend in Chicago, rounded the kitchen island, poking a spoon into a bowl of bulbous black orbs. “Told you Org Chem was Satan's B****.”
Amy was the type of girl you’d swear was all about sales at Saks & rating the best mani-pedis along Michigan Avenue, while secretly being the smartest person in the room. At least, book smart. When it came to relationships, she flunked every subject, dating a parade of losers that made the Chicago City Council look like angels. She’d just broken up with her latest flavor, Victor, the week before finals, when he’d dared study for his architecture exam instead of her own flying buttresses.
I hitched my head up. “Is that why they say the Devil smells like sulfur?”
“Do they say that?” A stream of whatever gluten free, organic, no soy chia seed sludge she’d learned from Gwyneth Paltrow this week dribbled from her mouth. “I thought it was brimstone.”
“It is brimstone. Brimstone is sulfur. You seriously didn’t know that?”
Her face drooped. “What, I’m supposed to be smart about religion now, too?”
A clomp, clomp, clomp preceded Kim into the room, bringing a scowl to Amy's face and a smile to mine. I had to admit, Cody's cousin had grown on me. Once you got over the fact that her combat boots only came off when she laid down to bed each morning, Kim drew you in with her unabashed refusal to be anyone other than herself.
In Amy's eyes, this was also Kim's worst flaw.
“Geri, I thought I heard you come in.”
An obviously fake and overly accentuated wink pumped up the level of awkward in the room. Kim was a werewolf, and I was a hood. She sensed me as soon as I got out of the elevator, just as I had picked up on her vibe from down the block. Amy knew that Kim and I were keeping something secret from her. Given that the shewolf only appeared to my roomie as a very butch woman who slept in my room all day and could drink her under the table every night, however, Amy had newborn suspicions on why I wasn’t as interested in men as she thought I should be.
“How did the last final go?” Kim asked.
“It went, and for the moment, that's all I care about.”
“She aced it. That's what Jeri does with all her exams.” Amy's confident comment could have been sincere, or, as I suspected was actually the case, was an attempt to win me back from Kim. For a huey, my roomie threw out more territorial markers than a new alpha.
Luckily, diplomacy was a skill wolves cultivated from childhood. Otherwise, they’d be in constant honor battles to the death.
Kim's grin stretched wide, pride beaming. “Geri's always been great in school. She was our valedictorian, you know? And Cody was the salutatorian. It was so cute when they got up to give their speeches and they kissed instead of shook hands.”
A PDA that almost set my mother on the prowl, if I hadn’t convinced her the Paradise Pack alpah's son had done it deliberately to tick her off.
Amy's eyes went wide as the bowl clanked unceremoniously to the tiled counter. “She kissed a boy in front of a whole crowd of people?”
The shewolf grinned at her superior knowledge of my past. “They had just started dating at the time. And ‘crowd’ might be an exaggeration. If I remember right, they were the only graduating students that year. Our entire school had less than fifty students all together.”
“Boyfriend?” My roommate examined me with the eyes of a stranger. “There was a boyfriend? How could you not mention a boyfriend?”