Cautionary Note: I regret to say that the next chapter's rating will jump more so to 16+. However, I'm fifteen and writing it--so do with that as you will. Basically, a few adult words/things will be mentioned/implied. I just wanted to say that before you go on and flip to chapter three and get a shock.
///
CHAPTER TWO
While Angela had a headache the next morning, she felt more upbeat than usual. She had Jae on board. They could kill the monster and leave and she probably wouldn’t see her mother’s half of the family for a few years or at least until some important holiday like the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter--the sort of things you got roped into attending even if you were the cast off middle-child.
However, listening to the voicemail on her phone reminded her why the deaths near her brother, Jeffrey’s house, had even gotten on her radar. She tended to stick to the north. Her fellow monster exterminators were territorial--like feral tomcats. They also tended to bite and have diseases like feral tomcats. She tried to avoid them if possible. In fact, she only knew a handful of her fellow Ghost Buster wannabe brethren. One of them was Jae.
Jae was the only one she talked to.
Basically, she stuck to her part of the country, the delightful and monster-filled US of A, and tried to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes--even Jae’s. Jae could kill you if he wanted, after all, and no one would probably ever find your body. It was a fact of life. Same went for her. She could understand why he never liked it when she called him up. It wasn’t her fault they happened to work overlapping areas. It just happened and if they didn’t talk, who knows what would happen? She didn’t even like to think of what could happen. It went from as basic as wasting two silver bullets on the same werewolf to her somehow falling to a watery grave or ending up in a wheat thresher.
He was just difficult.
However, back to the voice mail, there was her mother’s all-too-chipper tone chirping through the house. Angela turned to look at the black mobile phone resting on dark-stained wood of the bulky piece of furniture that guarded the way to the bathroom; a behemoth that made it impossible for more than one person at a time to walk into said bathroom. She wasn’t sure what to call it, but she just laid whatever she wanted on it. Currently it had the phone, bills and mail, a rotting apple core, and a jacket on it. For a second she wondered if she should move the apple before she got ants, but then she snapped back to attention.
Her mother was gushing.
It made her uncomfortable and reminded her about the fact Jae was likely to strangle her once he realized he might have to do more work than normal.
See, about the showing up on the radar thing--her sister was getting married. Big sister Michele with the perfect bod, shampoo commercial dark brown hair, and completely straight smile that blew her lopsided grimace thing right out of the water. Chele was marrying some weird business guru, some carbon-copy of Tom; the man who had been the only father Angela had ever known and who Chele probably thought was her father. His name was something weird and reminded Angela of a wizard’s name--Lucas Richards. He also made her think of the smarmy workaholic type that always turned out good in the end in movies.
She didn’t think he would find any redemption.
So, Michele would go from being Michele Browne, with Angela’s mother’s new-and-shiny boy-toy’s surname, to Michele Richards in a matter of weeks, more or less, and it left a sort of acidic taste in Angela’s mouth.
She hoped that she didn’t get her mother’s genetic defect of chasing worthless men. Angela was pretty sure she didn’t, because she’d dated cops, psychiatrists, and one older pre-med student once and did the mature thing of letting them off the hook when they deemed her crazy for believing in monsters. She hadn’t married any of them. She was pretty sure Chele would have married one of them. That had to count for something.
She listened to the mobile telling her she had no new messages and then looked at herself in the mirror--haggard, blank face, body looking lumpy under a pair of sweats and 80s-style off-the-shoulder top, and Medusa hair.
It was definitely time to get another coffee and a muffin and then have a talk with Ty, the resident mechanic. She needed to drop her anvil-heavy woes on someone else who wouldn’t back out of helping her hunt down a supposed-werewolf once they realized they were probably going to get thought of as Angela’s-latest-boyfriend-who-we-all-hope-makes-lovely-babies-with-her by all her relatives. Well, most of them.
They were a creepy bunch. She’d had half a mind to wonder if they were zombies or something of the like but they didn’t fall to bits, continued to reproduce, and didn’t seem to have been exposed to hoodoo.
She still found it creepy.
Anyway, it was either Ty or Jae and since Jae was the one who should be concerned about old aunts asking if he was going to marry that sweet girl Angela and make her an honest woman he obviously wasn’t the one to talk to.
She needed to make more friends.
***
With a cup of black coffee in hand and making that hand feel like it would catch fire and a muffin top--magazines were always bashing them, but they were amazing--held in her mouth by her teeth, like a wolf expecting a pack mate to steal their hard-earned shredded elk meat, she opened the door to the waiting room of the mechanic shop. While she questioned whether or not she’d need to wash her hand even though she had used her sleeve to block some of the germs of doom on the door handle she also wondered what a grammar nerd would think of her thought process--probably die of shock.
Oh well.
For the record, she did not have A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. She really didn’t have anything medically wrong with her (or so she hoped). She blamed a yet to be discovered genetic glitch or the fact she tended to make so much adrenaline on a daily basis her body thought producing enough for her schedule even when she was not working was appropriate. It was wrong.
Nonetheless, she took the time to a) wipe her hand off on her jacket front before putting a hand under the muffin top so it wouldn’t fall to a filthy-floor-related doom and b) look around the waiting room before springing off to find Ty. She didn’t want to choke nor scare him to the point he accidentally somehow caused a car to land on him.
The waiting room was sort of generic. It had that blue, white, and gray color scheme all mechanic shops seemed to have. It also had a few dusty plastic plants sitting in ugly pots in the corners. A few metal and fake-leather chairs clustered around a low, 70s-style coffee table littered with magazines. They appeared to be mostly on cars and cooking with a few on fishing to confuse people. She frowned in distaste.
It would appear that unless she went to a library she would never find interesting magazines.
Well, there was that one ritzy dentist office that had that book on coffee tables or whatnot which was sort of meta and supposedly off some television show, but in all honesty she just didn’t care that much about coffee tables.
What she really needed were magazines on the feeding and migratory behavior of animals, predators in particular; newspapers that held odd, insane stories, stories told in a jokey manner but that caused blips on that radar of hers and got her a gig (and hopefully a paid gig). Alas, no one was quite as curious as her about--well, a lot of things.
She glanced down at her muffin top. Half gone and her coffee was getting cold--just how she liked it. She noted with happiness the rest of the pastry only had one clump of blueberries, not paying mind when the noise of paper being shuffled started up behind the costumer service desk. See, blueberries had a weird texture, but their taste was superb--hence, she had no real idea why some sweets had so many blueberries in them. It made no sense. Anyway, she was also aware the guy was Ty, because the other guy he worked with was a middle-aged overweight guy that breathed like a car alarm. The fact the only sounds were the tread of feet on carpet and that shuffling of paper explained everything.
“Angela?”
She turned, eyebrows raising as she took in a sweaty, exhausted-looking Ty. “Hi.” He was in that blue jumpsuit but it would appear a shade darker than usual and it looked like a can of oil had decided to attack it--and his face and that pretty-boy semi-long hair he always kept.
A grin came to his face and his eyes lit up. “Hey! What’s up? Your Cordoba giving you trouble again?”
“Heck no,” she said, before taking a sip of her coffee and walking over to the desk. “Actually, I’m going out of town for--eh, two weeks. I was wondering if you could keep an eye on my place?”
Fun fact--Ty lived one story and two apartments off from hers. It was awesome.
His face did that confused-scrunch thing it did, but he nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “What’s up? Nothing bad, right?”
She snorted. “My sister is getting married.”
Ty blinked across the counter and he leaned forward a bit, arms bracing him on the lower counter that was behind the counter she could see. It was sort of odd--like mind-frick. “That could go either way, though, right?” he said, with a quick smile, a flash of teeth there and gone.
“Very true,” she said. “I’ll tell you which it is once it’s over. I might end up dealing with both a Bridezilla and zombie businessman, or a groomzilla zombie businessman. I wouldn’t put it past Lucas. He’s evil.”
Ty smirked. “How evil?”
“Cthulu evil.”
“I highly doubt that.”
Angela shrugged and took a long swig of her coffee. Warmth and static-caffeine flooded her veins and she automatically felt somewhat better about what she was driving off to do tomorrow. She took time to notice the fact that oil had been rubbed against Ty’s cheekbone and up into his eyebrow.
“Anyway, you think you can manage to keep me from getting robbed? I mean, I could put out catnip but I’m not sure that’s super effective at keeping away cat buglers.”
Ty shot her a look. “Ang?”
“Hm?”
“Act sane, customer at twelve o’clock,” he said.
Angela turned her head. Yep. There was an old woman and some middle-aged guy walking up the sidewalk. “Actually, two customers at four o’clock.”
“Stop being so literal,” Ty said. He sounded bemused, though, so she was probably okay. She adjusted the scarf around her neck and gave Ty her best puppy eyes.
“Thank you,” she said. “Now, wish me luck because I’ll be driving down with Jae? You know how he is.”
Ty’s face did something then. She wasn’t sure what to call it, but it brought Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain to mind, except she highly doubted there would be extreme battles resulting from Ty’s facial expression.
“Dude, you okay?”
“Fine,” he said. “You got any plants to water or pets to feed or anything? I mean, do you want me to get your mail?”
“No, no, and no. Who knows what you’d find?”
Ty seemed to take that as a joke.
Poor sod.
