Dancing With Werewolves Read Online Free PDF Page A

with vague guesses and promises of intravenous fluids and constant care and a phone call if anything changed.
    Sunday night I stood in a fluorescent light-glared room and they told me he was terminal.
    “Never seen anything like it,” the weary-faced vet said. “So fast. Blood poisoning.”
    I pictured small defensive teeth sunk into a bony undead ankle, and sobbed. Achilles lay dead to the world on a steel table, a beautiful dust mop of pale hair just barely breathing. My own breath came raggedly. Getting Achilles had been the first thing I’d done after leaving college and getting a job. He was the first and only creature to ever give me joy and affection. We’d been together for three years. I felt like I was strangling on poisoned cotton candy.
    What did I want to do? they asked. Leave the body with them, like a CSI corpse? Or send it to Smokerise Farm for incineration? Rotting in a common grave, or reduced to ashes on my mantel?
    What I wanted to do was leave with my dog.
    Not . . . possible. I asked for a lock of his albino-white hair and opted for Smokerise Farm, where, I was assured, the ashes I received were guaranteed to be really his. I could select a suitable . . . vessel from a book of photographs. I chose one of an Asian shape, with a five-toed Imperial dragon on it. Achilles had been royalty.
    Imagine, some people might pass off any old ashes on a bereaved companion.
    Achilles was of a breed that had guarded Tibetan holy men for centuries. What if some of their masters’ reincarnation mysticism had rubbed off on the dogs? Maybe I was just trying to dull the ache, but I somehow felt that Achilles and I would meet again some day. We might be in different forms, but we’d know each other.
    Meanwhile, tomorrow was Monday, not Maybe. I had to go to work again. I felt like the walking dead. In fact, it would be a miracle if I didn’t stake Undead Ted on the six o’clock news.

Chapter Five
    I hadn’t expected life at work to be pleasant after kicking out anchorman Ted, but it seemed he’d been busy over the weekend while I’d been losing my dog.
    For one thing, when I entered the studio Undead Ted the Splitting Toad was canoodling with Sheena Coleman by the blue screen. For another, the news director, Fred Fogelmann, called me into his tiny windowless office for a little two-person conference.
    “Sit down, Delilah. What’s the matter?” He must have just noticed my maroon eye-circles (a problem with tissue-thin pale skin), so this conference was about something else. “You look like hell.”
    I tried to dredge up a patina of perky. Looking bad was a mortal sin in the TV biz.
    He rolled right on before I could defend myself and my raccoon eyes. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
    That was even worse news, but I still couldn’t gather any words or gestures to fight my way into a good mood.
    “Er, there’re some changes in the hopper.” Fred was formerly a newspaper City Editor and he still talked like someone with a dwindling pint of rotgut whiskey in his bottom desk drawer.
    “Ted’s eager to get out on the streets.” I bet. “To use his reporter skills again.” Again? Really? As if he’d ever had them. “You’ve done a great job with the ritual crimes beat, but he’ll be taking that over. And Sheena wants some street cred too. She’ll be doing that ‘pornanormal’ spot you thought up. Fresh face, you know.”
    “You mean ‘blond and anorexic’,” I said, finally peeved enough to growl a little.
    “Ann or Rex who?” He shrugged. What a with-it guy on women’s issues!
    I saw the strategy. Ted had grabbed the juicy beats I’d made mine. What’s better to cover than sex and violence? Especially exotic sex and violence. Who did Ted think he was, his journalistic idol, sob-soul brother Geraldo Rivera? Really! Vampires and Geraldo are so over! And what did I get in exchange?
    “I have something new for you,” Fred said.
    It was a good thing I was still feeling too down to