Free Mischief in a Fur Coat by Sloane Meyers

no need for further explanation. They both knew they were meant for each other. They both knew this was the start of something amazing.

Chapter Eight
    The next few weeks were easily the happiest weeks of Drew’s life. He could hardly believe that a woman as amazing as Hope not only wanted to spend time with him, but loved him as well. They endured their fair share of teasing from the rest of the group, but it was a small price to pay. Honestly, Drew almost enjoyed the teasing. Every jab someone threw at him was another reminder that he had managed to somehow snatch up the beautiful Hope as his own.
    Things were going so well for Drew that sometimes he almost forgot about the horrors going on in the rest of the world. Shifter scanners had become widespread, and almost all of the shifters had either gone into hiding or been imprisoned. No one really knew what the government’s plans were for the imprisoned shifters. Some called for a mass execution, some said they should be forced to do hard labor, and some worried that imprisoning a whole group of people without any trials set a bad precedent for America—even if those people were shifters.
    The rioting and protests continued, and, in the span of just a few months, America had become a divided, bitter nation. Something had to change, or the country was going to implode on itself.
    And then, as if the war on shifters wasn’t enough for the country to handle, a worldwide flu epidemic broke out. Around the world, people had begun to drop like flies from a strange, vicious disease that seemed to mimic influenza. The disease was highly contagious and seemingly impossible to treat. The epidemic had started somewhere in China, where entire villages had been wiped out in days. From there, the disease had spread to the rest of the world with lightning speed. No one seemed to be able to survive the flu once infected, and the world’s population was dropping at an alarming rate. Large cities were quickly becoming ghost towns.
    At first, Drew hadn’t paid too much attention to the news about the epidemic. After all, wasn’t there at least one new deadly disease every news cycle? Someone was always hailing this or that disease as the thing that was going to wipe out the human race. So far, the human race was still standing.
    But this latest disease seemed particularly insidious. Scientists had been trying with no luck to come up with a cure or vaccine. And several scientists had been infected with the disease while trying to study it, despite the numerous precautions taken to prevent this from happening. It was almost unbelievable, but, for a short time, the war on shifters was actually not the top news story. Even the mass hunting and incarceration of shifters took a backseat to the threatened extinction of humans. But this didn’t last long, because it only took a few weeks for the media to decide to blame the shifters for the epidemic.
    Top news channels started claiming that the shifters had created a virus to kill off humanity as retribution for locking them all up. This didn’t make much sense, since the shifters who were in prison didn’t exactly have free access to the kinds of resources one would need to create a virus. Not to mention there was no legitimate connection between shifters and the virus. But little details like that had never stopped the media from airing a story. Soon, the epidemic had been nicknamed the “bear flu,” since most of the shifters in the world right now were bears.
    Drew was disgusted by the way the media was handling the flu, and by the way people were eating up the story that the virus was because of shifters. But he shouldn’t have been surprised. Everyone always needed someone to blame for everything that went wrong. This attitude had been one of the main reasons Drew had escaped to live in the woods in the first place. He didn’t have a lot of patience for people who could never take responsibility for their own actions, or who