Heat Wave.

I was sitting at my desk, feet up and close to falling asleep, when I realized that I needed more coffee. We hadn’t received any new calls and had finished all of my paperwork for the day and it was only 3:00pm. I was bored and a bit antsy and anxious for something to do. I swung my feet down and walked towards the window, peeking out the blinds to see if, by magic, someone would appear. My boss, who was also my uncle, was behind the door and I could tell he was on the phone with someone. He preferred using his cell phone over the office phone, only allowing that for me since I worked as his assistant in the day time. At night, I would usually do nothing but watch TV and feed my cats Midnight and Tom, watching him prance around at unseen forces or maybe some dust bunnies. I wished, for a sad minute, that I would just be home instead of being here with nothing to really do, but this job helps me pay the bills, plus I got to work with some cool people. I sighed out loud and just then the phone rang, I walked quickly to answer it.

“Walker Investigations,” I said into the phone.

The voice on the line was high pitched and squeaky, almost like a child’s, but the urgency was real.

“I need to talk to the investigator in charge,” the voice said hurriedly.

I took out my pad and pen, asked for her name and what this was about.

“My name is Selena Warren,” the voice said, “And I need to investigate a missing werewolf.”

Yes, you hear that right.

Walker investigations has been investigating strange and paranormal oddities for about twenty years, I’ve only been on the job for two of those. Since the world came out on the existence of vampires and other creatures that go bump in the night ( and day, yes day), law have been put in to make sure that the bad guys and good guys mind their Ps and Qs. It was only thirty years ago that the existence of the supernatural became known and made to the public. Being fairly new, the vampires and were animals faced a lot of discrimination and some were even murdered just because they were different. Being twenty-five years old, I grew up when the laws were being made and saw a lot of horrifying things happen to some of my friends and family members (some of whom were turned into werewolves). My uncle, Simon Walker, went through a lot of discrimination when he became a werewolf after saving his partner’s life back when he was a cop from a rogue werewolf attack.

Though the police agency is not supposed to discriminate against people who are were animals any more than they would by race or age, the council for the paranormal research institute thought that were animals could be unpredictable and dangerous in certain jobs on the field, so they fired my uncle because they were afraid of him. Now, more research has justified that it is only the newly turned that may be dangerous because they have to get used to their new identity and it could take anywhere from two months to a year before they learn to control their beast, but, again, most people in the council don’t really think on the basis of these new findings. My uncle still looked onto the laws of these findings and, quite accurately, felt that being kicked of the police force was unjustified. He made his case, but it still got thrown out, citing that they could pay for them to control their best for up to a year. And so, my uncle became a private investigator and hired me to be his assistant after raising me when my parents died.

I’m Beth Walker and I’m still human.

Well, sort of.