“Would you have accepted the Camry if I had offered it to you?”
I thought about that. “Maybe.”
“Don’t you make me turn you over my knee and spank you for lying, little kitten.”
Damn. “I’m telling the truth! Mine’s got more rust than paint now.”
“Milo? Give your sister the Camry, and I’ll take you to the used dealership and sign your soul over to a salesman,” my father hollered.
I sighed. “Just loan me the truck, Daddy.”
Milo, one of the fraternal triplets from my parents’ thirteenth litter, opened the front door and popped his head out. “I don’t want to sign my soul over to a salesman, Dad. Harri doesn’t even like Toyotas. Give her the truck if you don’t want her driving her piece of shit.”
Damn. My little brother was on a roll. “How’d you talk Dad out of the Camry, squirt?”
“I begged and promised to share with Miles and Maurice, and we promised we’d share a place until we’re twenty-one. To sweeten the deal for our old man, we also promised if we got into any trouble, we’d call, even if it meant we had to ask for help with the rent.”
Hah. That would make my parents happy, as they’d done too good of a job raising us to be independent. “Tell Daddy I won’t get mad if my car has an incident while I’m gone if he loans me the truck.”
“Hey, old man. Harri will ignore if you fix her car problems, if you loan her the truck for the next week or two. She’s got to go get girly things done to her, and according to our research, she might come back to us as a lady if we leave her about her business. She’s going to a city ripe with single lycanthropes. Maybe she’ll bring back one she likes.”
“Absolutely not,” my father announced.
“It’s a wolf town, Milo. I don’t want no damned wolf.” My virus hated wolves with a passion, and even if I shacked up with one, the poor male would suffer from rejection for years to come. “My virus likes cats, thank you.”
“Your virus doesn’t like anybody,” my father muttered.
Well, my virus had an unhealthy interest in a bastard of a lion I sometimes ran into while working, but I went out of my way to avoid Sebastian. He roared. I purred. I purred whenever he roared, which meant my virus goaded me into making him roar, and whenever we entered the same room, fur flew. As far as enemies went, I could do worse, but who the hell wanted a CDC liaison breathing down their neck all the time? Last I checked, Sebastian worked with Interpol and one of the international drug organizations to put an end to the nastier drug trades.
While I kept my activities legal, I didn’t need a damned lion poking his nose in my business. It tested me enough as it was that the CDC sometimes assigned him to some of my harder jobs.
I had a strict no-lion policy.
I just liked making the poor bastard roar from frustration. It pleased my virus. I also enjoyed having excuses to purr, and a lion’s roar masked the sounds of my purrs, as I had a reputation to maintain.
“Be nice to Harri, Dad. Just give her the keys to your truck.”
“I offered the car,” our father complained.
Milo frowned, he narrowed his eyes, and he took his sweet time thinking about it. “You might want to take the car, Harri.”
What the hell kind of car had my father gotten? “Why?”
“It’s a convertible.”
“You’re too damned old to be having a midlife crisis, Dad.”
“My little kitten is mean today.”
“Just give me the keys to your truck, please. Maybe I want to go find a mud puddle on the way and splash the truck through it.” Mud puddles made excellent excuses to clean out bloody evidence from the bed.
“You’re going to return my truck filthy, aren’t you?”
“I’ll wash your truck lovingly before returning him. I’ll even wash him by hand, and I’ll wax him and tell him sweet nothings in his ear. If you give me the keys without a fight, I’ll clean his interior, too. If you’re nice to me and hand over your lunch money, I’ll polish the chrome and do the tires while I’m at it.”
My brother snickered and went back into the house. “Harri is here, and she’s stealing Dad’s truck.”
I held out my hand for the keys and smiled. “I love you, Daddy.”
He scowled but handed over the truck’s keys. I removed the keys to my piece of shit from my keychain, gave them a parting kiss, and handed them over. “Have fun trashing the asshole. Just make sure you clean out the glove box and the trunk before you go to town. Milo’s right. I don’t want a Toyota unless it’s their truck, because their trucks are pretty solid right now. But that’d have to be a new truck, and nobody can afford that. Get me something reliable with rust proofing.”
“So, a Toyota.”
Damn it. “Fine. I’ll deal with an antique Toyota, but I’m going to decorate it, and a t-rex will eat our stick family.”
“You’d blow your entire budget getting the stickers needed if you tried that.”
“That’s true. When are you having the next litter?”
“Your ma’s two months in and happy as a clam, if you must know.”
Damn. No wonder Dad had wanted me to come visit. At two months in, they would’ve gone to see a doctor within the past week or two. “Got a head count yet?”
“There’s four of the little rascals, and she’s already picked out names.”
After O came P, which meant my little brothers would be a matched set as usual. Knowing my parents, they’d pick the most common names they could think of to proudly carry on the family tradition. “Peter, Paul, Philip, and Patrick?”
“I see you’ve been paying attention to how your momma likes to name our boys.”
“I will be very unhappy if Philip isn’t actually a Paige.”
“I’ll make sure your momma knows you want a sister named Paige.”
“And if you get an entire litter of girls, they’re Paige, Patricia, Pamela, and Pandora.”
My father laughed. “All right, little kitten. I’ll tell your momma you’ve named the girls should we have a litter of them this go around. Seems only fair you get a chance to name them, as you’ve told us many a time we failed you most bitterly when picking your name.”
“Harri is a boy’s name, and my sisters deserve good names. But you can tell them what their boy names are if they want to use them, and then you’ll pay the legal fees to change them if they want.”
“We did too good a job of raising you,” he grumbled.
I pocketed his truck’s keys and waggled my fingers. “Lunch money.”
Muttering curses under his breath, my father dug into his wallet and handed me a twenty. “We ran the ATM machine at the gas station clear out of money today, I’ll have you know.”
I grinned. “Then you shouldn’t have used poor little Otis to have Uncle Henry attempt to dictate where I go on vacation.”
“Yeah. He’s already prepared to be mugged. He pulled a hundred for you, and he’ll even let you fight him for it. I suggested you might need to work out your virus’s temper, as you’d sounded pretty riled up on the phone upon learning he tried to interfere with your vacation plans.”