Page 16 of Whiskers on Kittens

“Are you going to keep the receipts for my feeding bill?”

“Absolutely, although yesterday was on the house. After prison food, I needed those frou-frou steaks and roast.”

Between the two of us, we hadn’t left a scrap of leftovers.

“Is prison food half as bad as they say?”

“It’s even worse. I thought about sparing myself from eating, but I realized I needed to keep my virus fed. What’s worse? I had to eat so much more of that awful slop than the uninfected prisoners. I put some serious thought into crying in my cell, Easton. Me? Cry? Hah! But that food was so bad I thought about crying. What had I done to deserve that?”

“You mean beyond trying to steal a multi-million dollar collar?”

“I really thought it was a fake, too! That’s the best part. I could have pulled off such a good heist, but no. I thought it was a fake and got distracted by the catnip and pixie dust. I don’t know if I’m actually getting a supply of that, but I sure hope so. I’ll save it to celebrate getting those kittens home for the holidays.”

“Or you can have it in the evenings so you don’t get any burning urges to participate in criminal mischief.”

Ah, the goody-goody made his reappearance. “It’s just a little criminal mischief. If I didn’t find forced community service to be to my liking, I might be a little less inclined to cause trouble.” Shrugging, I added, “It would help if society wasn’t so damned boring.”

“You could always buy yourself some toys. You have plenty of house space to bat a ball around. You’d have a blast.”

“I’d destroy my entire house running into things.” When I shifted, I tended to cause ten times the trouble in half the time. “I don’t think you appreciate the glory that is me when displaying my feline perfection.”

“I’ve met most cat lycanthropes. Unless you’re a lynx, you’re hardly going to be much in the way of trouble. Sure, the Barbary lions can cause a great deal of property damage, as can the tigers, but they can be calmed with a belly rub, a steak, and ear scratches.”

“How dare those lions and tigers bring such disgrace to the feline race! They should have held out for chin scritches, too.”

“Most are too wise to put their hand so close to a predator’s mouth, Kelsie.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Then again, I weighed in at a big, bad thirty-five pounds when shifted, which put me at ten whole pounds over the average weight of a mundane clouded leopard. I polished off my plate and went to work cleaning the dishes while the cop inhaled his food. “How much do you weigh in as a wolf and as a hybrid?”

“One-fifty as a wolf, eight-ninety as a hybrid.”

I stopped, blinked, and considered just how much manly lycanthrope I could handle if he weighed in at almost nine hundred pounds. It took me a solid minute to recover, and I placed all the dishes in my sink before turning to face him. “Excuse me, but did you say eight-ninety? On that diet?”

He grinned at me. “I’m a little taller than average but rather muscular. During my last evaluation, it was determined that I have a higher bone density than normal with a heightened resilience against suffering through breaks while in my hybrid form. I also have more muscle than normal to go with my particularly thick double coat.”

Ugh. My feline wanted to demand he shift for us as she wanted to get a good feel for his fur—and the rest of him. At thirty-five pounds, he’d dwarf me, although I’d likely pack on weight and size if we were to take leave of our senses and form a permanent relationship. Then again, I might not.

My virus liked the idea of rough handling as long as it was the goody-goody cop doing the handling. With eight hundred and ninety pounds of raw hybrid to work with, I expected a great deal of rough handling should we get our hands on each other.

“I was not anticipating having to feed eight-ninety worth of hybrid. You must shift and scare the piss out of most around here.”

“For some reason, the criminals I’m engaging tend to change their mind and come quietly should I have to shift.”

The idiots in charge of the CPD would drive me crazy before I closed the cop’s case, I was certain of it. Rather than let my irritation fester, I took out my frustrations on the dishes, finishing the job while Easton ate his plate of bacon. Before he could help, I stole his dishes, vanquished them, dried them, and put them away. “All right. Let’s get this show on the road. While you drive, I’ll be doing some basic research into child trafficking on the internet and in the CDC’s databases to see what I can scrounge up that might help us. Do you have any direct experience with the rings?”

“No, I don’t. I’m usually on patrol with the CPD, and I helped handle theft and arson prior to my transfer.”

Well, that explained the judge’s general confidence in the cop’s ability to handle me. While I hadn’t participated in any arsons, he probably had a good idea how people with sticky fingers operated. “For the record, I specialize in petty but humorous counts of theft. If the judge isn’t laughing by the time my trial is over, just from the absurdity of what I was getting into, I didn’t do my job.”

“A multi-million dollar collar is hardly a laughing matter.”

I snickered. “But the catnip and pixie dust certainly was—as was my absolute cluelessness that the collar was real. I really thought I was lifting some fake bling as a dare. Admit it, Mr. Goody-Goody, that’s hilarious.”

He snorted in an attempt to hide his laughter, shaking his head. “Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better, Miss Winfield.”

Yep. The wolf wanted to play. If he wanted to play, I’d teach him the error of his ways. “It sure does, Asher.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’re going to bite off more than you can chew, kitty.”