My Pet Sold Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Who Wants Her
Lara finds her werefox's post offering her for sale to anyone who'll take her, answers it herself, and the offering wolf tells her to bring the papers she never lets Tobin read.
My coworker read the caption out loud to the whole waiting room before I could grab her phone.
"Who wants her? I'll even pay you to take her off my hands."
Four people and a beagle in a cone looked up at me.
The picture under the caption was me, asleep on our couch with my mouth open, in the college sweatshirt I had owned since I was nineteen.
Tobin had taken it three weeks ago.
I remembered, because he had told me to go on and nap, he would handle dinner.
"Lara, I'm so sorry," said Penny, my best friend at the clinic. "I didn't know where else to show you."
"Where is it?"
"Some site my cousin sent me. It's werebeast stuff. He said it's all fake."
Penny's cousin did not know it was real.
Penny did not know either, but I did.
I had known for seven years, ever since a half-starved red fox the size of a spaniel had turned into an eighteen-year-old boy on my kitchen floor and asked for toast.
I took the phone and walked into the supply closet and shut the door.
The post had four hundred comments.
Most of them were from beasts with names like Ironjaw and NightHowl, and most of them were asking how old I was.
One wrote: "Why give up such a good-looking human? She sounds like a great owner. If you're serious, I'll take her."
Tobin had answered him in under a minute.
"Her face is the nice part. She's strict. She makes me wear a collar tag and eat the cheap kibble, and she still wins every argument."
I had never made him wear a tag.
I had bought the good chicken sausage every week for seven years because he said it was the only thing that tasted like anything.
Every year on his birthday I signed his renewal form alone in the clinic office, and I told him it was only a stamp.
He had never read it, and I had never let him carry it.
The username on the post was FoxyBoy_Tobe.
The password to the account, I would have bet my paycheck, was the name of his girlfriend.
The closet door opened, and I almost threw a bag of saline at it.
It was Sable, with a paper tray of coffee in one hand and a limp orange cub bundled in a clinic towel in the other.
"Oh good, you're here," she said. "I didn't want to bring him to the vet by myself. Poor guy ran in front of a bike."
Sable was Tobin's girlfriend of eight months, and she was the kind of person who remembered what you took in your coffee.
She had put three sugars in mine on the first day and had never asked again.
"Is he going to be okay?" she asked.
I looked at the cub, who was a real fox and a real patient, and I put the phone in my pocket.
"Give him here."
I checked his legs, and his gums, and the scrape on his side.
Nothing was broken.
Sable watched me with big brown eyes the whole time.
"You're so good at that," she said.
Then she saw my face.
"Lara? What happened?"
"Did you see what Tobin posted?"
"Tobin?" She said it carefully. "He's been awful lately. He's just blowing off steam. You know how he gets about his collar being so tight. I'm sure he'll take it down tonight."
"What collar?" I said.
I had never put a collar on him in my life.
Sable took a very small step back.
"It's a figure of speech," she said.
I let it go, because the cub was bleeding on my sleeve.
I stitched the cut myself, and I gave Sable a sheet of aftercare instructions, and she thanked me three times.
When she left, she put my coffee on the counter and squeezed my arm.
"Don't be mad at him," she said. "He doesn't mean it."
I stood at the counter and watched her through the window.
She walked to the corner, took out her phone, and started typing before she reached the crosswalk.
Penny leaned in the doorway.
"Are you going to call him?"
"No."
"Are you going to cry?"
"Not at work."
"Then what?"
I turned my phone on.
The post had five hundred and twelve comments now, and one of them was a message from a new account called Urquhart.
It had come through two minutes before.
It said: "I'm serious. Dane Urquhart. Name a place."
Nobody else had answered him.
Tobin had not answered him, either.
My thumbs were steady, and I was glad of that.
I typed: "This is the woman in the photo. Not him. Tonight, nine o'clock, Hennessy's Boxing on Foster. You'll want to see me say it to his face."
Then I stood very still and read it once more.
It was the first thing I had decided in three weeks that I was sure about.
Penny read over my shoulder. "Lara, you cannot meet a stranger from a werewolf site."
"It's fake," I said. "Your cousin said so."
She looked at me for a long moment.
I think she heard everything I wasn't saying.
My phone buzzed against the counter.
The answer came from Urquhart, and it was short.
"Tonight. And bring the papers you never let him read."
I had never told anyone about the papers.
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