Har-har.
The metabolism of a werewolf was much faster than that of a human, and without the concern of cholesterol poisoning and a nasty dose of heart disease, the possibilities were endless.
Four cheeseburgers with a side of onion rings, fries, and cheese curds? Two steaks, baked potato with melted butter and bacon, broccoli with cheese sauce? Go nuts.
Why would anyone want to go back to the way that they’d been?
Alex bobbled the tray but managed to keep all the food from sliding onto her customer’s head. Her thoughts these days didn’t seem like her own.
“Breakfast is served,” she said brightly. It hadn’t taken her long to remember that the more chirpy she was, the more tip she got. Since she’d come here with nothing but fur, Alex needed all the money she could get.
She barely managed to fit all the plates on her tray in front of her customer, considering the guy next to him had ordered an equal amount of food and had five or six plates of his own.
“Anything else I can get for you, Daniel?”
Daniel Finnegan appeared to be in his midfifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a nearly white mustache. He wore a gray tweed suit from an era long past, though Alex wasn’t sure which one, complete with a hat and shiny black dress shoes.
He’d introduced himself as soon as he’d taken his seat, refusing to allow Alex to call him by anything but his first name. “We’re all family here,” he’d said when she tried to call him Mr. Finnegan.
Everyone had the same attitude, introducing themselves as if they were sitting at Alex’s kitchen table instead of her station at the EAT.
They talked to her as if they were sitting in her home, too, as if they were lifelong friends. She should feel bad about that, but every time she started to she merely brought up the memory of her father’s last night in the mountains and all the guilt went away.
“I’ll take a bit more coffee when you get a chance,” Daniel said, tucking into his meal with a gusto at odds with his demeanor.
Alex made the rounds with the coffeepot, topping off the cups of all her customers and Cyn’s, too. She’d discovered years ago that to walk by someone who had only half a cup of coffee while you were carrying a full pot and not offer them any was a good way to get snarled at—and that was before she’d started waiting on werewolves.
Conversations ebbed and flowed. Alex learned quite a bit just by wandering past the tables filling those empty cups. Of course no one admitted to killing a Jäger-Sucher or snacking on an Inuit. Had she really thought they would?
“No,” she muttered.
“No, what, dear?”
Alex had made her way back to Daniel and poured him a refill. “Just thinking aloud,” she said. “So, how long have you been a werewolf?”
Daniel, who had just taken a persnickety bite of bacon, choked. Then he began to cough. Alex began to worry, until the rest of the room’s lack of interest reminded her that while Daniel might be choking, he couldn’t choke to death.
Alex handed him a glass of water.
“Why would you ask that?” he managed eventually.
“Shouldn’t I?” Alex leaned over the divider that hid the workings of the restaurant from the dining room and set the pot on a burner. “Is that ‘not done’?” She made quotation marks in the air around the last two words.
Daniel sighed and took another sip of water, his sober chocolate-brown gaze contemplating her over the rim before he set it down. “All of us agreed to become like this, which meant we had one thing in common.”
“What’s that?”
“Either imminent death, or a very shitty life.”
Alex was glad she’d set the coffeepot down or she just might have dropped it. Hearing shitty come out of Daniel Finnegan’s prim mouth was both shocking and slightly hilarious.
This time Alex choked, and Daniel offered her his water. She took it—no worries anymore in sharing cups, utensils, spit; germs wouldn’t hurt her—and took a swallow.
“Better?” Daniel dabbed at the pristine corners of his mouth with a napkin that did not appear to have been used at all. When Alex nodded, he went on. “We don’t ask one another how we came to be like this because we don’t want to remember what made us choose to leave behind our humanity. It’s never a pretty story.” His gentle gaze became shrewd. “Is yours?”
“No,” she said before she even thought about it.
Her life hadn’t been anything to write home about. Because she’d had no home to write to. No mother, no father, no family left at all. Her life had been death, or the distribution of it, with the certain knowledge that one day she’d find herself bleeding out from a werewolf attack just like her father.