One Bite

Chapter 1-2

Here we go, let me know about the drug distribution, cartel kings, fit me for a silver revolver and pink leather holster, I'm ready -

"You're a werewolf," she stated without a blink.

Slack-jawed and eyes pulled wide, I stared at her for a solid minute. My breath stalled in my lungs and thrums of my heart pulsed through my veins. With a clench of my stomach, laughs bubbled up the back of my throat. They tickled the palate of my mouth, ripping out of me in the form of short, sharp barks.

Not at all what I expected.

I had no idea she had a sense of humor.

"What?" I squeaked the word out between hearty laughs. My shoulders pitched so hard, my breasts jiggled and elbows bounced into my mattress.

"You. Are. A. Werewolf." She spoke each word slowly, and deliberately, as if enunciating each helped me absorb them more effectively.

Her efforts fell onto deaf ears, absorbed into the belly-aching laughs that rolled out of me one after another. Anna's unamused expression blurred as my eyes watered. I squeezed them closed, my torso hitching as my laughs pitched higher into hysterical squeaks.

"That-that's hilarious," I choked out with a gasp. As my shoulders heaved and lungs burned, my stomach curled inward and spine rounded. My knees tucked, I was one round of laughter away from falling off my bed.

They're joking.

A sharp pain stitched in my right side, jolting my eyes open. I took a few deep breaths to recover my oxygen level.

They have to be joking.

My knee-jerk reaction was that I needed to join in on the joke. "Like in the movies?" I tossed out, "Watch out for a full moon? Hide your silver?"

"It's not like that," Elena spoke up, her eyes serious as stone. "I'll help you understand the best I can."

Hearing her soft, almost angelic voice, my eyes widened then narrowed as suspicion pitted itself in my stomach. Neither showed any amount of amusement or teasing manner in their expressions; they gazed back at me with eyes set and mouths firm, but jaws relaxed.

They look... completely serious.

As their seriousness penetrated and dissolved my laughter, a shudder trickled down my spine. Silence weighed down on me as I sat up straighter and mouth gaped. "Are you serious? What about the mafia? The pharmaceutical company's... drug front."

The more I spoke, the more I sounded like the ridiculous one. My cheeks cooled and skin tingled, like the blood drained out.

"Mafia?" Elena's furrowed eyes shifted to Anna's.

"Zara," the condescension in Anna's voice was so thick that the shudder lifted up between my shoulders. "Your father's company makes medicines for the country."

My laughs dried up in the back of my throat. "There's no such thing as werewolves."

Unlike diabetes.

Which, since I was thirteen until now, I was told I had. I believed I had it, even from the simple fact I had no other reason to believe otherwise.

"Have you ever known your father to joke?" Anna crossed her arms over her chest.

She has a point.

"No." I looked down at my hands and clutched them together. "So... I don't have diabetes?"

How is that possible? Why all the bloodwork, the tests?