Melissa Barker-Simpson

It was a bitch of a night; cold enough to freeze the balls of a brass monkey. I wasn’t in the best of moods before I left the precinct and now, what little patience I had, plummeted with my body temperature.

“What crawled up your ass?” Conrad said, kicking a mound of snow with his boot.

I thought up a dozen insults in my head, but since my lungs hurt from the cold I settled on showing him the finger.

“You know, I have a ready solution to thaw out that frosty exterior,” he persisted; clearly he had a death wish.

“Dream on, bug boy,” I said, because he hated the nickname. He was an arachnid-demon, so it was about as insulting as I could get.

“What’s the alternative? If you don’t feed soon, you’ll be even more unbearable than you are right now.”

I wiggled my brows at him because…