Free Living Extinct by Lorie O'Clare Page A

for WA, and especially GWAR, the more covert part of the agency, sure got a fine farewell if they didn’t make it back from a mission.
    Not her problem.
    “It’s loading now. Approximate deletion time one minute and thirty seconds.” It had been policy for longer than she’d worked there that two members of WA had to witness the deletion of a file.
    And it made sense. Sort of a checks-and-balances type of thing. The werewolf on the other end of the line stared at the same thing on his screen that she saw on hers. No one werewolf could go around deleting files this way.
    She looked up when she heard Mattie say her name and then point to her. Rose raised an eyebrow as the two werewolves in suits gave her their attention.
    “A file has just been sent to you for deletion,” one of the suits said to her, not making it a question.
    “I’ve got it on the screen now.” She didn’t know why her stomach suddenly twisted in knots.
    “Stop the deletion.” The same werewolf gave the order as if it were that simple a process.
    “What?” she stammered, staring down at the red bar that moved to the halfway point on her screen.
    Forty-five seconds remained until this werewolf disappeared in to the void of Nowheresville.
    “It’s already in progress.” Suddenly she felt as green as some of the other bitches in the office.
    The small picture on the top right-hand corner of her screen caught her eye first.
    Rose remembered the young bitch being in the office just a few days ago. Her caramel-colored skin and long, sleek black hair made her stand out easily. Rose hadn’t spoken to the bitch personally, but she’d overheard her say a few words to one of the other agents.
    The young bitch had a lovely accent. Not an American werewolf. Rose hadn’t been sure what pack the agent was from. Too many of the agents with WA, and especially with GWAR, didn’t belong to packs. Rose remembered thinking the bitch was so young to be living a life of such solitude.
    She glanced at the two werewolves. “I’ve never seen either of you before.”
    “Not surprising.” The older of the two agents offered no further explanation, instead rattling off his identification number to her.
    The second agent did the same.
    Quickly pulling up both agents on a separate screen, she looked at the pictures of the two werewolves, which matched the males in front of her.
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    Living Extinct
    “Are you sure you want me to stop the deletion?” Rose raced to get her thoughts in order and remember the reversal sequence required to stop a deletion. The werewolf, a tall, thin man with graying hair and equally gray eyes, reached around her desk and took the phone from her before she could react. Placing it quietly on its cradle, his smell grew aggressive.
    “Stop the deletion now.”
    Rose’s heart started pounding. She hit the wrong key at first and then quickly struck the backspace key. Twenty-five seconds remained.
    “I can’t,” she began, quickly clearing her voice. There was nothing worse than being intimidated by some werewolf with a God complex. “There is no way one werewolf can reverse this process.”
    She glared at him, gathering her wits about her quickly. What was he going to do, fire her?
    The other werewolf moved around one of the unoccupied desks. “Give me the code.”
    Rose licked her lips. There was procedure to follow here. At the moment, she couldn’t remember for the life of her what it was, but it was clearly written policy somewhere. Nothing happened in WA that wasn’t laid out in written policy.
    Rose heard herself rattling off the code while she clicked on the file, and then found the abort screen. The pretty young bitch whose picture stared at her shouldn’t be wiped out of the system if she wasn’t dead. Rose didn’t remember much about her, but if they’d discovered at the last minute that she’d lived instead of died on her mission, then Rose would do her part to ensure she didn’t go through hell for it. Wiping a