Preview of The Wolf’s Surrogate

“You bastard! I knew it! I knew you were a cheating piece of shit!” the woman screeched.

She had come out of nowhere. One moment, Claire was sitting there with her most recent Tinder date and the next, there was utter carnage. She sighed. It had not been going well to begin with. He was obviously another self-absorbed rich guy who talked only about himself and spoke only to her cleavage. Still, it didn’t have to devolve into a Jerry Springer episode.

Claire’s eyes widened as the woman began flogging her date with her designer handbag and calling him every name she could think of. A quick glimpse around the posh French restaurant revealed that everyone else was watching the drama unfold as well. She wanted to climb under the table and disappear beneath the floorboards or, at least, slink away before the woman noticed her sitting there and turned her wrath toward her.

“And you!” the woman spat out in her direction, her face a mask of rage that blended in with her flame red hair, obviously not a naturally occurring color. It was more Jessica Rabbit than Isla Fisher, but from the looks of her, there wasn’t anything about her that wasn’t fake.

Too late, Claire thought to herself as the woman approached her side of the table.

“Leave her alone. She has nothing to do with this,” Claire’s date said, rubbing a badly scratched place on his cheek where the metal embellishments on her handbag had caught him.

Oddly enough, Claire realized that she couldn’t even remember his name. That is how little interest in him she had developed since they met. She had to wonder if he had hired someone to write his online dating profile. It had been full of intelligent wit and made him seem down to Earth. He wasn’t either of those things and his photo was definitely from a couple of decades ago.

“Nothing to do with this? She’s on a date with a married man, for fuck’s sake,” the woman screeched.

“What?” Claire replied, considering hitting him a few times herself now. “Listen, I met this asshole on Tinder. I had no fucking clue he was married to you or anyone else, for that matter.”

“Married to me? No. He’s not married to me, honey. You know why? He won’t divorce his piece of shit ex because he has no balls. I’ve been living with this asshole for five years while he promised to file for divorce and what do I get? Nothing but grief!”

Claire was already in the process of collecting her bag for a hasty exit from this circus of theirs, but now found herself stopping, bewildered. It was hard to decide if her disbelief was more about their situation or the fact that a woman would stay with a man so long when he treated her this way. They were both idiots, in her book. So, perhaps they deserved one another.

“You’re fucking kidding me. He’s married, but not to you. He’s married and cheating on the person he’s cheating on his wife with?”

The woman looked at her indignantly, as if she was offended. Claire shook her head in disgust and stood up, putting her purse over her arm and smoothing out her dress.

“If ever two people deserved one another, it would be you two,” she said.

A waiter stood nearby, holding an expensive bottle of gin and two glasses that her date had ordered for the two of them only moments before chaos ensued. Claire grabbed one of the glasses, filled it to the top and drank it as she walked toward the exit, sitting the empty glass on the host’s podium before walking out the front door. She pulled her phone from her purse and called her friend Sharon to tell her about the date as she made a hasty retreat down the sidewalk.

“I’m never getting on Tinder again. Every date I’ve had from that shit site has ended in disaster. One guy stalked me, another tried to scam me out of money and now, I’ve got a dude cheating on his wife . . . and his girlfriend! It’s not worth it. I’d rather be alone or turn into an old woman with a bunch of weird pets like chickens and armadillos.”

“Don’t you think you’re going a bit overboard?” Sharon asked.

“No. Not at all.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Walking to the subway.”

“What? Why not just grab a cab home. It’s been a long night already from the sound of it.”

“I’m too broke to afford one. The only reason I can get on the subway is that I still have some money on my metro card.”

“You’ve got to find a better job,” Sharon said.

“Girl, I know -” she began to say as she crossed the road, but everything suddenly went black.

***

When she woke up, she was in a hospital. Her head was pounding and her leg ached like a son of a bitch. Her mouth felt like cotton as she tried to speak. She wasn’t surprised when only a croak came out. She tried to look around for the button to call a nurse, finally finding it and pressing it. A voice came on the intercom behind the head of her bed, from a box in the wall.

“May I help you?”

“Yeah. Where am I?” Claire replied weakly.

There was no answer to the question, but a nurse turned up by her bedside within seconds and began checking her vitals and asking her questions. Claire assumed they were to determine whether she was brain damaged or something. She couldn’t remember what had happened to her, but she knew it wasn’t good, whatever it was.

“Well, your eyes are focused, and you seem alert for someone who just got hit by a car tonight.”

“Hit by a car?” Claire creaked out.

That certainly explained why she felt like she had been hit by a car. The fact that she had actually been hit by one would have that effect, she supposed. In fact, it explained a lot. The headache, the stiffness. She was alive, so it couldn’t be too bad, could it? A horrible thought occurred to her. What if she was paralyzed or disfigured. She began looking around for some sort of mirror but found none.

“How bad is it?” she moaned at the nurse.

“Not too bad. Some scrapes and bruises with one pretty deep puncture on your leg where the bumper caught you at a bad angle. The doctors have repaired it, but you lost a lot of blood. We had to give you a couple of pints from a donor, not an easy task.”

“What’s not an easy task?”

“Finding blood isn’t easy with a blood type like yours. We were lucky to find a donor who keeps his number on file in case anyone shows up and needs his type. We had one on hand that he donated previously, but we needed a second, so he came in for a direct transfusion.”

“I have some stranger’s blood running through my veins, then,” Claire replied a bit distastefully.

“That stranger’s blood saved your fanny, so you should be grateful. There aren’t many people like that in the world.”

“I’ll write him a thank you note,” Claire muttered, feeling a bit faint.

“Just rest. You’re weak, but you should be better tomorrow and we can send you home.”

“Okay,” Claire said, already fading away, back into the blackness that had surrounded her since the accident.

As she slept, she dreamed of running up a mountain, climbing higher and higher to where the air grew thinner and the sky grew closer. She stood at the top and looked up at the moonlight and then a strange thing happened, she opened her mouth and howled, realizing she was no longer a woman, but some sort of dog. No, not a dog . . . a wolf.