Excerpt Continued…

Any minute she was going to start hyperventilating. This was not good. She was miles from home and the safety of her sealed lab, which wouldn’t protect her now anyway. In order for the contained chamber to work, you had to enter the damn airtight room three days prior to the full moon. The three days were necessary to ensure her scent would dissipate.

“I hate full moons,” she snarled. Quickly glancing around the compound, she ran the options through her mind.

Nothing. There wasn’t a damn thing she could do about the situation now.

“Your stepfather is a werewolf, sweetie. How can you be so ‘One Race’ about this?”

Eve turned on the tall, elegantly effeminate male. “Charles,” she said in a tight voice. “You and I have been working together for three months to create an inoculation that will give one group of Others a chance to have live, swimming sperm. In any way, does this point to me being a member of One Race? No,” she said before he could comment. “This puts me at the top of their Human Enemy Hit List. Yes, my stepfather is Were, my half-brother is Were, my sister is married to a Vampire—one of the leaders of the Others. I am not prejudiced, I just do not want to chance meeting up with one of the shaggy beasts tonight, and have him think I smell like wifey,” she enunciated clearly.

Dragging her hands through her cropped, black as midnight hair, Eve nervously checked the compound again before stepping up to her glide. Her heart was racing. She smoothed sweaty palms over her softly curved body and regretted that she hadn’t taken the time for her morning run in the last month. Like that would help if she were scented. Her amber eyes were narrowed, cautious. Her body poised for flight.

“Do you want me to follow you home?” Charles offered uncertainly.

Eve snorted. “Why? You know as well as I do if I’m scented and marked, I have no choice. The Lupine Act took care of that.”

After one more look around, she sighed, “Go home, Charles. It was my fault I didn’t realize that tonight was the Lupine Moon. I can only pray that there is no werewolf out there genetically tuned to my scent. I do not need a husband right now.”

Eve settled into her glide and programmed it for home. She waved half-heartedly at Charles and leaned her head back, closing her eyes. The ride home from the lab would take exactly fifteen point six minutes in the airglide. Its quiet imperceptible motion wouldn’t disturb her thoughts.

Gee—what to think about? The fact that she made a huge breakthrough in the development of a serum for Vampire males. A serum that would give them a window of opportunity to impregnate their warm-blooded mates. Or the fact that the development of that serum would probably get her killed by the One Racers? Nah, let’s go with the fact that for the first time since she turned eighteen—which was almost twenty years ago—she wasn’t safely locked in an airtight room a full three days before LM!

Eve winced. Lupine Moon. It was the one night a month when lycanthropes everywhere were forced to change, and if they were “of age” and unmated, they hunted for a mate. Only during the full moon, from sundown to sunup, could the wolves’ scent and trace their genetic mate.

Over two decades ago it was her grandfather’s work that helped prove the fact that Werewolves had a true genetic companion. His scientific studies led to the Lupine Act. This inter-species law meant that it didn’t matter if you were a shape-shifter, human, or warm-blooded Other—if you were scented, found, and cornered for mate-marking before daylight—you were mated without recourse.

It didn’t matter if you wanted a mate or not. The minute the furry beast found you and bit your shoulder—marking you for life—there was no legal, religious, or physical way out. You became part of a mated pair.

And Were-folk mated for life. She frowned. Well, at least werewolves mated for life. She had no idea if other shifters did. Like the cat shifters. Did they mate for life? Or the dragon shifters? There weren’t a lot of dragons, or at least, there weren’t a lot of dragons who let it be known to the human community that they were dragons. The Lupine Act was specific to Lycanthropes. Did that mean that other shifters didn’t need the same rights?

When she finished with this project, she might do a little research and see if anyone had ever studied other shifter species, and the question of lifetime mates?

But for now, she carefully watched the city streets, on the lookout for the big, bad, wolf.

What she said to Charles tonight was the truth. She wasn’t prejudiced. The problem was, she didn’t want any male cluttering up her life. Not a human, not a vampire like her sister’s husband, and definitely NOT a werewolf!

Males tried to change you. Just as her mother had changed. With a human or Other, you could JUST SAY NO. However, thanks to her grandfather and the Lupine Act, saying no to a loup-garou, was against the law.

Please, dear Lord, do not let a werewolf catch my scent tonight…