Going Nowhere

Chapter 1 - And so it begins

"What in the everloving fudge did you do?"

"Nothing," I said, wishing I didn't sound so guilty suddenly.

"You got fired from the cushiest dog-walker job in the whole state. You clearly did something."

"I did not," I said, switching quickly from guilty to defiant.

And yeah, that was pretty much a lie but seriously? The dog had totally started it.

"Is Pookie still alive?" Elsa asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

Elsa. The sweetest girl with the biggest heart in the whole world. My best friend.

And a unicorn.

At least when she wants to be one, which isn't very often. Elsa works in a library and having a huge, white unicorn stomping around would make her boss give her a death-glare over her glasses. Or shush. Since no one glares and shushes like a librarian, most of the time she's just a regular homo sapiens like me.

Except, of course - I'm a witch.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in no way the gnarly, grey-haired and wart filled kind of witch. They live over in Hanksville. I am a white witch from the covenant of Nim, which means that I have no warts at all.

I have black hair, a tall, willowy body, translucently white skin and dark brown eyes.

Or, yeah. No. But I should have.

The thing is; my witchiness comes from my mom but my dad is a huge, white-haired werewolf of Scandinavian descent, and his genes were pretty dominant in the whole creation of me, probably because he's a pretty dominant kind of guy. And since I'm partly a wolf, I got brownish, wavy hair, green eyes, and skin that tan quickly in the summer. There's a faint band of freckles across my nose, and no one in their right mind would call someone with my booty willowy, although that could have less to do with my wolf part and more with the fact that I deal with all the shit life keeps throwing at me by gobbling down unfortunate quantities of anything Reeces. And cookie dough.

"Of course the stupid thing is alive," I snapped.

"How in the hell could you get sacked, Kitty? You're a dog yourself."

That last bit came from Joel, my other best friend.

Joel is a widget, which is the coolest thing because they are super rare but also super useful. And popular, which isn't much of a surprise since widgets communicate with anything controlled by computer code, and changes that code as they wish unless it's protected by another, stronger, widget.

"Am not," I snapped

"Half dog."

I opened my mouth to protest, but we'd had that particular argument since the three of us met en route to detention, outside the principal's office in Saint Honoria of the Immaculate Transformation High School, so I shut it again and glared at him.

He glared back.

When this had gone on for a while, I gave in.

"I just growled, okay?"

I'm not a shifter like daddy, and the three spawns of Satan also known as my brothers, but I have enough wolf in my blood to heal quickly, run fast - and growl in a way that scares the bejeesus out of virtually anyone.

The only animals in our part of the world that don't leave an embarrassing puddle behind when the wolves growl are bears, so of course my darling daddy had to go and get re-married to one. I love my stepmom Janie to pieces, but it would have been a lot easier to get away with shit if he'd picked, say, a fox-shifter or even one of the cats.