Accidentally Catty Read online

  Casey’s eyebrow lifted in a scornful arch, unperturbed. “You do know I’ll set your skinny ass on fire first, don’t you?”

  Wanda whacked a rolled-up issue of the very kooky paranormal magazine Nina spoke of against her desk, making everyone still. “This! This is exactly why I bought into doing this in the first place. Because I just couldn’t bear the thought that someone might be suffering the effects of a Nina-like person who’s cranky enough already without the supernatural ability to take on the entire NFL single-handedly. Or someone like you, Casey!” Wanda pointed to her sister with a pink fingernail. “Someone who still needs to get not only her anger and levitation under control but her wise cracking mouth. But really, what was I thinking? How could we possibly hope to help someone if they called anyway? The way you two behave, it’d be like the blind leading the blind.” She threw the magazine on her desk with a disgusted grunt for emphasis.

  Nina stood with a satisfied smile. “So does that mean this is a wrap?”

  Marty jumped up from her chair, shoving Muffin under her arm. The jingle of her bracelets clanked together with a tinkle. “Jesus, Nina! You’re so damned insensitive. Sit down and shut it. Please.” The sigh she let go was colored with her aggravation. “Look, Wanda, maybe we should just have the calls rerouted to our cell phones or something? This way, if someone does call who needs our help, we can still aid and abet, we just won’t have to sit around staring at four empty, very drab walls, I might add, while we do it.”

  “I hung up a poster to brighten the place up,” Casey muttered. “Isn’t it in your color wheel, Marty?”

  “Dude, it’s a poster for Just Say No to Drugs. Not so colorful. Just fucking stupid,” Nina remarked with her trademark dry sarcasm.

  “It was the only thing I could find from my teaching days, you wretched wench. I don’t recall you offering to decorate and brighten things up,” Casey shot back.

  “What dungeon do you know of that needs decorating?” Nina waved a hand around the dark space they’d rented—the space with one grimy window and no heat.

  They each fell silent again.

  Wanda was the first to rise, smoothing her pencil-slim skirt and straightening the bow on the collar of her prim mango-hued silk shirt. “You’re right, Marty. I think that’s exactly what we should do. I have a book to write. Casey’s got classes to attend and a teenager. You have little Hollis and Bobbie-Sue, and Nina . . . well, Nina has innocent people to brutalize. So let’s scram,” she said, defeat clear in her tone.

  Chairs scraped against the cement flooring as they all rose in unison to file out.

  The phone rang with a shrill cry. Each woman stopped short at the door where Wanda’s hand rested on the door handle.

  Wanda let go of the rusted handle with a purse of her lips. She looked over her shoulder at her sister and friends with a question in her gaze.

  “Oh, c’mon, Wanda,” Nina crowed. “It’s probably just another ass-a-holic crank call. I wanna go the hell home and watch reruns of Matlock with my man.”

  Marty’s eyes grew wary. “But what if it isn’t and we leave, and someone’s breathing fire as we speak but doesn’t know why? Alone and terrified. Remember that feeling, Nina? Oh, wait. No, you don’t because you weren’t alone! Wouldn’t you feel like the mean shit you are if that happened to some innocent?”

  Casey let her shoulders flop with a tired sigh. “I hate to ever admit Nina’s right about anything, but seriously, do we want to beat our heads against the wall just one more time for old time’s sake? Not me, people. I’m tired of having questionably sane people call to ask me if I’ll light their stupid barbeques.”

  Wanda’s low ponytail shook. “But what if . . .”

  Nina threw up her hands. “Fine, for Christ’s sake—I’ll get it, and I’m warning you, Wanda. If it’s another stupid ass who wants to watch me drink blood and flap my bat wings, I’m gonna hunt his ass down and knock him from here to next year. Deal?”

  Wanda’s head hung low, letting her chin drop to her chest. She waved a hand at Nina. “Fine. You answer.”

  Nina groaned while she made her way to the desk and snatched up the receiver to the matching phones they’d all bought as an OOPS team at Costco. “This is Nina Statleon and you’ve reached OOPS. Which I thought was a totally stupid name for this crazy venture, too, but I was voted down by my pansy-ass waffler of a friend, Marty. I’m a goddamned vampire. If you called to razz me about that shit—c’mon over and I’ll show you my fangs while I beat your head against this stupid, cheap, piece-of-shit desk I was talked into buying at Wal-Mart as part of my show of good faith. Really, it just means I was bamboozled into doing something I didn’t want to do in the first place, but my friend Wanda the Werewolf used pretty words and stupid friendship euphemisms to steamroll me into this. So name your paranormal emergency and it better be good. I live in a castle. That takes a buttload of time to clean. Now spew, and make it fast.” She finished with a smug smile in Wanda’s aghast direction.

  The voice on the other end of the line stuttered momentarily, then blurted out, “I think I—we—us, uh, we have a paranormal emergency . . . I mean, I know we do. Please. We need help. Fast! Yes, we need fast help. Like, super fast!”

  INGRID eyed her boss from across the room while she tried to explain what had happened to the grumpy beast who’d answered the phone at the number she’d gotten from her favorite magazine Vive La Paranormal. “Yes. No. Oh, geez, I dunno. I just know we’re in a serious pickle here. No. It’s not me. It’s my boss. No, I can’t explain the symptoms. It’s not me who has them. It’s my boss!” she cried, pressure situations never having been her strong suit.

  She paced the floor in front of the examining table, scrunching her eyes shut, running a trembling, ring-covered hand over her forehead. “You want to talk to her? I don’t know if she can talk-talk. You know? She’s had a serious incident here. I mean, she has—has . . .” Ingrid stumbled over her words, clearly unable to express what her boss “had.”

  Skirting the metal examining table, Ingrid scurried past it as though she’d never seen anything in her life like what was lying on the table.

  Katie had to wonder, though the wondering was vague and distorted by vision so clear it made everything almost magnified, if her trusty receptionist had ever been to the zoo.

  Ingrid approached her with obvious caution, holding the phone at arm’s length. “The lady”—she held her hand over the earpiece—“and I use that term a bit loosely because she swears like a Navy SEAL—”

  “Sailor,” Katie corrected, surprised she still had the capability to think with any remote precision.

  Ingrid’s head bobbed in furious confirmation, the multicolors of her hair in pink and stripes of green, flashing painfully before Katie’s sensitive eyes. “Yes. Like a sailor. She said she wants to talk to you, the person who’s experiencing the paranormal phenomenon. So that’s you, Boss, the paranormal-ee.”

  Apparently, that would be her. Katie eyed the phone with huge amounts of skepticism when Ingrid put it back to her ear, listened for a moment, then said, “Ohhh. I’m sorry I said you weren’t very ladylike.” She paused. “Absolutely. I swear I’ll be more respectful in the future.” There was another pause as a worried look flitted across Ingrid’s face. “Look, lady! What do you want, a major organ?” Ingrid stopped short, her face going from mildly agitated to complete disbelief. “What do you mean an organ’s useless to you?” There was another hitch in her breath, and then she said, “I’m sorry I asked, and I already apologized!” More silence and then, “Sorry, sorry, sorry. You’re right. I’m just a little edgy right now. Okay, so here’s my boss. Her name’s Katherine Woods. Dr. Katherine Woods. Noooo, no, no, no. She’s a veterinarian—like DVM, not a doctor-doctor.”

  Katie frowned at the irony of Ingrid’s statement. Funny, her mother had said the same thing when she’d told her parents she was going to veterinary school. Looking back now, proctology didn’t seem at all as boring as it had when she was twe
nty. In fact, a field of hairy, white butts wouldn’t at all upset her right now.

  Ingrid practically threw the phone at her, backing away with wide eyes. “The lady, and I do mean lady, wants to talk to you.” In her rush to get away from Katie as though she’d contract the cooties just by virtue of osmosis, she bumped into the examining table, letting out a horrified squeak she attempted to hide by covering her mouth with her hand.

  Katie’s sigh didn’t come out like the sighs of old. It sounded more like a low grumble. And it was resonant, if nothing else. Resonant and rumbly-tumbly. “Hello? Yes, this is Dr. Katherine Woods.Yes, it’s true. I’m experiencing something, though I can’t, with any amount of certainty, say it’s of a paranormal nature.” The fight to keep her professional decorum intact was punctured with fractured stabs of sheer terror.

  “Can, too,” her intern Kaih chimed in with bored disinterest from his desk in the corner. “I was raised by people who talk about this stuff all the time, Doc, but I didn’t ever believe it until now. You got a problem, Dr. Swims in the River of Denial.” His eyes zeroed in on her with a critical glance. “A big one.”

  Katie waved him off with a shake of her head while she listened to the list of symptoms the woman on the other end rambled off. “Did you say blood?” She blanched, fighting back the turn of her overly sensitive stomach. “No. I don’t want to drink blood. And might I add, though I’m not a medical doctor of the human variety, certainly drinking another’s blood can’t be good for your immune system.”

  Now she, too, was pacing, hot and uncomfortable in her heavy sweater with the organdy lace around the cuffs—even with the big hole in it right under her breasts. “No. Forgive me. I didn’t mean to lecture or declare I know any such thing about being a fuc . . . a vampire. Call it a hazard of my profession to spew unwarranted advice. Please, continue.”

  The next words out of the woman’s mouth made her stop cold in her tracks. Okay. This had gone from slim hope to decidedly certifiable. End conversation. She clicked off the phone, placing it at the edge of Kaih’s desk.

  “Boss?” Ingrid asked. “What happened?”

  “She asked me if I could shoot fireballs from my fingertips or,” Katie cleared her throat, “float like one of those big fucking balloons in the Macy’s parade. Then there was a bit of a scuffle on the other end—which I imagine had to do with her mother taking the phone from her. A mother I’m hoping had the common sense to ground her for life, so I hung up.”

  Ingrid’s eyes took on that wide, terrified look again. “Oh, Dr. Woods! Why would you do that? Who else can we turn to for—for—help?”

  Help. How odd that she was the one who needed the help, when typically, she was the helper. Physician, heal thyself. Or was that sentiment reserved for real doctors?

  The harsh glare of the lights in examining room one, coupled with, well, with her issue, or issues, depending on how many hairs you wanted to split, began to make her head swim.

  The world was falling away from her, right out from under her feet—or was she falling into it? She stumbled, tripping over Yancey, her office cat and one of many strays she’d collected over the years.

  Ingrid ran to her side, reaching out to her, then snatching her hands back to shove them into the pockets of her oversized lab coat. Her petite frame came in and out of focus when she heard Kaih yell, “Ingrid! She’s going to hit that floor like a ton of bricks! Stop acting like she has the plague and grab her, you spaz!”

  There was a loud shuffle of feet, the wheels of her examination table scurrying against the cold tile of the floor, and then there was the floor.

  Cool and refreshing against her cheek.

  Okay, so the crash to the floor and the subsequent bruising blow she took to her cheek wasn’t pleasant, but the black void of nothingness was A-okay.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Oh, I’m so glad you came! Thank the universe you’re here!” Ingrid cried, her excited voice screaming through Katie’s ears.

  Katie heard a door open and shut. She saw two pairs of shoes, completely different in fashion statements, pass before her eyes. One set, a ratty pair of red sneakers, the other, a high-end opentoed heel in classically basic black. She clung to the edge of the couch she felt beneath her and fought to keep her powers of observation focused.

  There were strangers in the room. It wasn’t just that she clearly heard them, either. It was that she sensed them. Smelled them. And their scents couldn’t just be attributed to perfumes and body lotions. Literally, Katie noted their gender, the blood coursing through their veins, the odd mixture of the scent of a human and something else . . .

  Next she filed away their gasps in the disbelief category of her brain, assessed them as incredulous, and really, if they were seeing what she thought they were seeing, incredulous was perfectly acceptable.

  “This is the subject?” a woman with soothing tones and perfect diction asked.

  “Ye—yes. That’s Dr. Woods,” Ingrid stammered.

  “Well, duh, Wanda. Look at her. Of course she’s the subject,” a scathing, husky voice, one much like the one Katie had heard on the phone, chastised.

  “Oh. My.” The sweeter of the two women exhaled the words.

  Though her head swam and her limbs felt like tree trunks, Katie fought to sit up. Kaih rushed to her side, sliding to position her on the couch. “Doc, don’t get up. Take it nice and slow.”

  “But the patient . . .” She shook her head. “I mean, you know the thing, uh, cougar, on the examining table. It needs me.” Duty first and all.

  Kaih patted her arm. “Oh, it needs something, but you took a pretty hard fall. Stay put, and stop worrying. I gave it another couple of cc’s of that stuff you knocked it out with before. It’s sleeping like a baby.”

  “Is that what we’re calling what we just saw in that room? I don’t know about you, but I ain’t never seen a baby like that,” the sarcastic woman from her earlier phone call remarked.

  Brushing aside Kaih, Katie ran her good thumb over her eye. The thumb that wasn’t . . . Oh, Hail Mary. She stopped herself mid-thought. Determination made her grit her teeth. Sort of. Her teeth and the ability to grit them were a work in progress. A glance upward, one that allowed her a panoramic view of each woman’s pores, gave her the chance to give them the once-over. “Who are these people, Ingrid?”

  Ingrid backed away, still in a state of perpetual horrification. She situated herself behind one of the most beautiful, enhanced by nothing but soap and water, dark-haired women she’d ever seen. “They’re the OOPS people. The people you talked to on the phone. They’re here to help.”

  The other woman, dressed in simple clothes with a tailored, elegant cut, moved toward her with measured steps. Her face, not as exotic as the other woman’s, though just as lovely, had a Grace Kelly air to it. Cool, calm, serene. “I’m Wanda Jefferson. We’re from OOPS. Your receptionist told us you were experiencing a paranormal phenomenon. We can help.”

  Short and to the point. Katie admired that. Yes. She was experiencing . . . Something paranormal? Not likely. “Thank you for coming. I know Ingrid asked you to come, but there’s obviously nothing you can do for me.” Though who could do something for her was out of her medical scope. “I hope we didn’t make you go out of your way.”

  The dark-haired woman snorted, leaving the residual tremble of her tonsils ringing in Katie’s ears. “Lady, we drove three freakin’ hours to get here from the island. You live in a place right outta Deliverance, and you obviously got some shit goin’ down. Me and Wanda here, we’ve seen shit. We’ve lived shit. You need help with that shit. If we go home, your ass is as good as the Titanic.”

  Katie’s eyes shuttered, her thoughts piecemeal. “Titanic?”

  “Sunk,” she replied. “Oh, and I’m Nina Statleon. I’d say it’s a pleasure, but I’m thinkin’ you feel anything but pleasurable right now.”

  Katie nodded her head in agreement as she took in the irony of Nina’s T-shirt that read “Don’t Curse.” “
The vampire, right? Wasn’t that what you called yourself on the phone?”

  “That’s what I am, lady. I know, I know. I’ve been through this a time or two.You don’t believe. Hang on for a second, and I’ll make you a believer.”

  Wanda reached out, snaring Nina’s slender arm in her long, tapered fingers. “Do. Not. I’m warning you, Nina. Do. Not.” Her jaw clamped shut so tight, a tic began to pulse.

  Nina shrugged her off. “Don’t be such a tard, Wanda. If I don’t show her, then we’re gonna go a few rounds with the ‘oh, my God, I can’t believe it’ bullshit. I’m just not up to the game, dude. It’s the same old song. I’ve done it three solid times now, not counting myself. So I say we just get it on, let the weeping and wailing commence, and then get to the biz at hand, which is figuring out what the fuck happened to her.”

  The rational doctor in Katie’s brain, the one who functioned like clockwork, considered a diagnosis of impulse control for the brunette Nina. The thwarted, freethinking side of her brain admired this woman’s foul mouth and direct nature.

  But that still didn’t mean they could help.

  Katie Woods didn’t need their particular brand of help.

  She needed an orthopedic surgeon and maybe some maxillofacial tweakage.

  “Dr. Woods?” Kaih’s soulful black eyes sought hers. “I’ll say it again, where I come from, you know, like my tribe, beliefs like these aren’t uncommon, but the one with the dark hair, uh, Nina,” he whispered low. “I have to be honest. She scares the shit out of me. Plus, she thinks she’s a vampire. Scared shitless plus vampire equals I wanna go home.”

  “Hey, Runs with Mouth,” Nina poked Kaih’s burly arm. “You shoulda listened to your tribe. I am a vampire, and if you don’t shut your trap, I’ll show you exactly what that means without so much as a heads-up. Feel me?”

  Wanda threw her hands up, her black purse sliding to the crook of her elbow. “Why, for the love of Jesus and all twelve, didn’t I ride with Casey and Marty? Oh, wait, I know. Because no one wants to spend three minutes in a car with you, let alone three hours. Nina! Back off or you’ll be on phone duty until your ears fall off. Now, don’t make me say it again—back up, and let me do the talking. Can your impatience this instant.”