Page 106 of Hoofin’ It

Dad annoyed me sometimes. The arrangement kept me and Mom from doing anything Dad didn’t want us doing, leaving him to play guard and lead the way. Two hybrid werewolves in the same place were more than most Chicagoans could readily handle, and they gave us plenty of room. A single snarl terrified the woman behind the glass at the ER’s entry.

“Let me,” Pierina murmured, patting my father’s arm and sliding between him and the nurse. “We’re here to see Marian Peterson. She is with my brother, Quinton Saven, and has a broken wrist. We’re family.” The vampire twisted around so she could point at me. “He is her partner, which can be verified by the CDC or through an incubus or succubus.”

The nurse paled enough I was worried she’d faint. “The CDC arrived ten minutes ago,” she squeaked.

“Good. Where are they?”

Pierina took several minutes to cajole the information out of the nurse, who tried to protest we had no proof of our relationship with Marian. Dad looked the other way when the vampire resorted to using her preternatural charms. Mom followed Dad’s lead, but I squirmed in my mother’s hold to watch.

I wasn’t sure what Pierina did, but she stared the nurse in the eyes. Within a minute, the nurse’s posture relaxed, and a dreamy smile spread across her lips. Within two minutes, she was answering the vampire’s questions in a murmur too soft for me to hear.

“They were going to operate on her wrist, but someone intervened; they’ve taken her to a recovery room on the fifth floor. The CDC has a few people here, so they can check your wife’s virus levels and make sure everything’s going well with her shift, Mr. Gibson.” Pierina dared to approach my mother, which made my parents growl. “They’ll also be able to check Gibby.”

My father huffed, and after a few moments, I realized he laughed. “Gibby?”

“Blame my brother. He started it.”

Turning to me, Dad poked my nose with a claw. “We will have a long talk over your choice of friends, pup. And once we are done talking about that, we are going to have another long talk about why you were dining at an exclusive restaurant with your woman instead of coming to visit us.”

While Mom was smart enough to keep her hands out of my reach, cranky, formal-mode Dad either thought I wouldn’t bite or didn’t care if I did. I latched onto his finger behind his claw, clamped down, and held on. He flattened his ears and bared his teeth at me.

I bit him harder.

Pierina cleared her throat. “Perhaps if you wouldn’t poke him, he wouldn’t bite you?”

“He needs to learn to control his teeth,” Dad growled.

“But he’s otterly adorable, Justin. Look at him! How can you resist that face?” Mom lifted me up, forcing me to choose between clinging to Dad’s hand or being the rope in a game of tug-of-war. I released Dad and sighed while my mother rubbed her muzzle against mine. “We should take him and his woman home with us.”

“We can’t take home an FBI agent because we feel like it.” Dad sounded rather disappointed, which worried me—and might benefit me later when I told them I intended to kidnap her so she’d have to marry me and wear tight jeans whenever I wanted.

Then again, if they found out my side of the bet, they might join forces with her. I’d have to be careful about how I presented my case.

“We’ll see about that,” my mother swore.

It took half an hour to cross the hospital; every security guard we met believed they could take on a pair of lycanthropes and win. Any other day, I would’ve found the situation amusing. However, my mother’s hold on me was the only thing between the well-meaning but prejudiced idiots and a very messy death, so I really hoped they got their shit sorted out before someone got hurt.

Dad handled their behavior better than I expected. He didn’t bite a single person. The first security guard to seriously challenge him was a woman who didn’t hide the fact she knew was pretty and thought she could charm my father into leaving until she got a good look down his throat. Brandishing a gun at a cop was stupid in my opinion, and she deserved to have her weapon crushed into a useless hunk of scrap metal.

A lot of bystanders learned a valuable lesson about cranky werewolves: they didn’t need a gun to be dangerous.

“It’s not my fault she pointed a gun at me,” Dad growled. I’d lost count of the number of times he’d presented the same argument.

“It’s probably better she pointed it at him and not you, Mrs. Gibson. We’d be picking bits of security guard out of our hair for months,” Pierina said, grinning at my mother. “I haven’t had this much fun in centuries.”

Another pair of security guards approached us as we neared Marian’s room, both men, both old enough they should have known better, and neither looking happy to see us. “Excuse me, but you’re not supposed to be here.”

Dad twitched and turned to Pierina. “Is everyone in this city stupid?”

“Yes. I’ll handle this.” Pierina opened her mouth, showed her fangs, and hissed. “You’re in the way of a man visiting his future daughter-in-law. He’s very protective and has violent tendencies when provoked. You’re provoking him. He’s also a visiting cop from a different city. Unless you want to be ripped to pieces, remember you have no right to bar visitation based on species alone. I recommend you move, or you will be moved.”

“This is a hospital, not a zoo.”

If I’d been human and able to speak I would’ve begun giving the old man his last rites. Pierina lunged forward, captured the man’s throat in her hands, and squeezed until he choked and gasped to breathe. “Fortunately for you, this is a hospital. If I’m delayed one more moment, you’ll be occupying the ICU ward for much of your remaining lifespan. Should I drag you with me so others might remember lycanthropes aren’t the only dangerous species in this city, human?”

If I’d been human rather than an otter shifter, I would have been a lot more insulted by the way she spat the word, as though every last one of Earth’s problems began and ended with my species. Then again, she made a good point. Humans caused problems for everyone, especially themselves.

Maybe the guards had an issue with werewolves, but messing with a vampire was enough to break the second one’s nerve, and he held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “It’s dangerous for the other patients…”