Flirting Under a Full Moon - By Ashlyn Chase Page 0,61
them. Nick kept an eye on Sly. Suddenly he disappeared and Nick felt a slight wind rush past him. Then another. He could have blamed the first on a breeze, but the second was more like a gust of wind. That’s odd. He couldn’t have moved so fast that he’d be in and out already, could he?
Sly suddenly reappeared in the parking lot, but he wasn’t alone. He was lying atop a flapping body, which held a linen sack.
“Get off of me, you jerk.”
Nick couldn’t believe his eyes. A rail-thin body covered in gray fur lay pinned to the pavement. Its voice sounded like a woman who’d been smoking for forty years.
“What is it?” Lupo asked.
“I have no idea,” Hunter answered. “In my twenty years on the force, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s strong,” Sly said, as the stick figure struggled.
“For fuck’s sake, I’m not an ‘it.’”
“What are you?” Nick asked.
The figure let out a defeated sigh and after a long pause answered, “I’m a whirling dervish.”
“A whirling what?” all three werewolves asked at once.
“Whirling. Dervish,” the figure enunciated.
“I thought that was some kind of Turkish dance,” Sly said.
“The dance was named after us. We’re not well-known in this part of the world.”
“No shit,” Lupo said.
Sly glanced up at the captain. “So what should I do with him? Or are you a her?” he asked the dervish.
“I’m a female, and you should let me go.”
“Why were you robbing the bank?” Nick asked.
“What else am I going to do to get money?” she asked. “There aren’t many jobs for blenders with fur.”
“Why do you need money?” Sly asked.
“I just want to go home. I was captured back in Turkey. We live in some pretty inhospitable mountains, but a group of determined hunters managed to sneak up on us. They caught me and shipped me in a crate to this—this place. I was in some kind of a lab, but I escaped. Now I need the money to ship a crate home—with me in it.”
“How did you know the bank would be open? It’s a Sunday,” Captain Hunter said.
“I didn’t. I was hiding up there.” She pointed to a stand of leafy trees that would have provided cover. “And I was waiting for the bank to open. It had to sometime, right? And what’s a Sunday?”
Nick couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor dervish. How frightening it must have been to wind up in a crate and be shipped across an ocean. He shuddered to think about what the lab was going to do to her.
“How did you learn to speak English?” Captain Hunter asked.
“The night lab technician taught me. He seemed different from the rest of them. Kinder. It was as if he knew I was someone, not something. The others were classifying me as some new kind of animal.”
Each wolf glanced at the others, probably all thinking along similar lines. They had been treating a fellow paranormal creature as a human would have treated them, if the unthinkable happened and they’d been captured in their alternate form.
After a long silence, Sly cleared his throat. “I hate to repeat my question, but what are we going to do with her? I can’t spend days or weeks lying on top of her while someone decides.”
“I guess we’ll have to help her get home,” Captain Hunter said.
Nick thought he heard Sly let out a sigh of relief.
“But how will we do that?” Lupo asked. “And what if she escapes again the minute the vamp stands up?”
“The ‘vamp,’” Sly said tensely, “will tackle her again. But I doubt she’ll take off if she knows she’s going home and not just back to the lab.”
“We can’t afford to have a paranormal being in a human lab,” Hunter said. “If they discover what she really is, we’re all at risk.”
“Hello? I’m right here,” the dervish interrupted. “Do I get to voice an opinion?”
“Of course,” Nick said quickly. He was well aware of the way cops thought. They might not even listen to her if they believed they knew what to do. The plain truth was that no one knew exactly what to do. Five minutes ago they didn’t even know what she was, but together they might come up with a viable plan.
“The guy on top of me is right. If one of you big lugs will help me get home, I’ll be more than happy to cooperate.”
After a brief hesitation, Captain Hunter said, “You can get up, Sly. We’ll help the lady get home