Once Bitten

By Mandy Lee

When Mina wakes up dead after a blind date, she's pissed and determined to hunt down her murderer even if it kills...um...yeah... Anyway, there's hell to pay! 

Mina had a feeling that dating app would be a bad idea, but her friend Lucy said she'd meet some killer hotties, and she was right! When Mina wakes up in the m

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mandy Lee Books
• Release date: Aug 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9780993704567

Mandy Lee

Mandy lee founded her award-winning "angry food blog," Lady and Pups, in 2012 out of sheer frustration after moving from New York City to Beijing. She and her blog have been featured in numerous publications and sites, including Saveur, FoodandWine.com, CNN.com, Yahoo, Food52, and WashingtonPost.com. She currently lives in Hong Kong with her husband and pups.

Book preview

WHAT’S A GIRL to do…?

Mina had a sneaking suspicion using the Love Bite dating app was a very bad idea; she just never thought it would be this bad. If it wouldn’t land her in some government black site as a lab rat, she’d head straight over to her friend Lucy’s house and give her a piece of her mind for recommending it, BUT she was supposed to be dead. Try it, she said. You’ll have fun, she said. Right… Mina could admit that her date was a killer hottie, but now here she was, on the run, leaving everything and everyone she cared about behind. She had never felt so lost in her…life? What WAS a girl supposed to do when she woke up dead?

CHAPTER ONE

WILHELMINA Murray’s eyes snapped open. What the deuce? The world was pitch-black. Oh my god, I’m blind! On a reflex she tried to sit and bashed her forehead against something cold and metal.

Ow! Ow! Ow! Damnit!

She winced and tried to reach up to rub the sore spot on her head and smacked her elbow on more metal beside her.

Yeow! What the hell?

Panicked thoughts whirled in her brain as she felt around inside of the horrid metal nightmare she was trapped in. There was metal all around her. She had no idea how she’d ended up here—wherever here was. Her short-term memory was a blank slate.

She wrinkled her nose as she got a whiff of a horrid smell wafting around her. She slid her had across her chest to fan the stench away. Wait a second...her fingers skimmed across bare skin. What the fresh hell? Her thoughts were flying a million miles a minute, but her body stayed eerily calm. Great, I’m in shock on top of it all… What a shit sandwich. She was buck naked, starkers, in the buff. What serial killer’s freakishly creepy death lair am I in, and how in the ever-loving Hell did I get here? One thought kept repeating as her brain barreled toward a rabbit hole. GET OUT! She latched onto it for dear life, her capacity for rational thought hanging in the balance. It was a solid plan. There was no way she was going to stick around here long enough to meet the twisted psycho who’d done this.

She tried to listen for any sign her kidnapper might be hanging around outside her metal coffin, but no sound seemed to penetrate its casing. She had no choice. She’d have to make an escape attempt and hope the twisted SOB was out getting Taco Bell or something. It would be physically impossible to brace herself well enough to push the sides open, so she’d have to try the top or the foot. She gave herself a mental pat on the back for keeping her shit together. This wasn’t exactly a regular Tuesday, so not being catatonic was a massive win.

She shuffled around to place her palms on the metal ceiling of her prison and pushed, praying to Oprah and Tom Cruise for success. The creaking sound of metal grinding on metal gave her hope. Just a little bit more… The foot of her prison opened with a wrenching groan. The bent metal hung in place for a moment, before dropping with a loud crash onto…a tile floor?

She winced at the noise. If the creep show who brought her here was home, they’d definitely have heard that. She froze. Please, please, please…When there was no sign of a raging psychopath killer about to tear into…wherever she was…to stop her, she very carefully put her hands on the sides and tried to shimmy down. To her surprise her whole body slid out in one smooth move. She seemed to be lying on some sort of tray on casters. Weird. Chalk up another win!

The room she emerged into was cold and sterile, with the strong chemical smell of cleaning solvents. Goosebumps popped up on her skin, and every hair on her body stood on end. She sat up slowly and got her first good look at her surroundings. The room was dark, but she seemed to have no trouble seeing clearly. Dear Jesus melons! It was a morgue. Her brain threatened to go off-line when she realized she was literally sitting naked on a drawer tray. She tried to slide her butt off the cold metal, but that was easier said than done! Her naked backside kept sticking to the metal surface. FML! She finally did a little butt-hop and managed to land safely on her feet. While she was thankful not to be in the clutches of an axe murderer, all she was left with were questions, and it seemed pretty clear that the answers weren’t going to be the stuff of rainbows and unicorns.

As she stood there trying to figure out what to do next, she marveled at her completely inappropriate level of calm, given the batshit-crazy situation. It would have been super fantastic to harness this level of Zen so many times in life…like every time she drove on Highway 401 at rush hour! Douchebags to the left of me, assholes to the right! Shaking her head, she started looking for a way out. She could see the shape of a door outlined by light from the room beyond. Exit. Check! There was just one more thing to take care of before she blew this Popsicle stand.

Taking another look around, she noticed a pile of white cloth stacked on a nearby shelf. Not planning on being naked a second longer than absolutely necessary, she made a beeline over to snatch what turned out to be a sheet. She wrapped herself up as quickly as she could, hoping against hope that this whole saga was just a very vivid, tequila-induced, totally screwy nightmare that she would wake up from any minute. Either way, something to cover my bare butt. Check!

As she tiptoed over to the door, her sheet kept slipping, turning her journey into more of a modern dance–cartoon burglar mashup. Her makeshift toga would have been cute for Halloween, but on the off-chance this wasn’t just a bad dream, she didn’t want to make a public appearance wearing institutional chic bedding. She poked her head out into the hallway. She blinked rapidly as the harsh fluorescent light assaulted her eyes. The bulb flickered occasionally, making her feel like she was starring in her own personal horror flick. It was just more nightmare fuel for the raging trash fire she was living at the moment. She was still hoping against hope that she could blame all of this on alcohol when she woke up from the most realistic dream ever.

Spying the sign for a locker room for morgue employees across the hall, she darted out lickety-split and burst through the door, slamming it shut behind her hard enough she heard wood crack. The lights were off, but she could see just fine. Out of habit she reached for the switch and flicked it on. Score! There were cubbies along one wall, and inside one of them was a fresh pair of folded scrubs that called to her like a siren’s song. Thanking her lucky stars that someone wanted to be prepared for inevitable gooeyness in the workplace, she grabbed them and slid them on as quickly as she could, letting her sheet couture fall to the floor.

Feeling a bit more human, she went over to the bank of sinks and checked herself out in the mirror. Sweet Saturn! Death warmed over! She was white as the sheet she’d been wearing, barring an angry red line around her neck and smudges of dirt all over her skin. She reached up to pick what looked like dirty, rotten lettuce out of her hair. A sad realization hit. The awful smell she’d smelled was…herself…like the south end of a northbound skunk.

What happened to you, Mina? she asked her reflection as she raked her fingers through her hair, attempting to dislodge all the stray bits of garbage that had taken up residence.

She shook her head and peeled her eyes away from the mystery of her odd appearance. She’d solve that puzzle later. Right now, she was all about stealing the trainers she saw sitting under the same cubby she’d already burgled. Giving her unwitting benefactor a silent thank you, she jammed her feet into the too-big shoes and tied them up tight.

With cheetah-like stealth, she snuck down the hall, hugging the wall all the way to a metal door that would hopefully lead her to freedom. She pushed on the door, but it didn’t budge. She looked more closely and realized it was a key-card exit. The card reader was mounted to the wall across from her, a few feet from the door. Damn it! With a combined sense of desperation and purpose, she launched herself at the door and, to her surprise, she heard something snap. The door swung open hard enough to slam into the wall on the other side. She stumbled out, almost face-planting at the unexpected velocity of her exit. Righting herself, she stood there in shock, staring at the open door for a split second before the blaring of an alarm practically blew out her ear drums.

It was the wailing alarm that finally made it real. This was definitely not a dream. Not wasting another second near this place, she took off running. Trees and houses blurred and blended into each other as she moved. Her eyes seemed to have lost the capacity to focus, but she didn’t care. Every fiber of her being told her to just keep on moving. A sliver on the horizon signaled the coming of the dawn. The weak hint of coming daylight pricked at her eyes as she finally slowed down. Thank Gaia! Finally, something good. It was a familiar neighborhood, and it took all her strength to stop tears of relief from pouring out. She sniffed and stuffed the emotion back in like a champion. She wasn’t about to break down now, there would be time for that later. Wilhelmina was going to do everything in her power to find out what had happened, even if it killed her.

CHAPTER TWO

DETECTIVE Jonathan Harker shook his head in confusion, raking his fingers through already disheveled brown hair as he looked around. This was one of the oddest crime scenes he’d ever seen, and that was saying something. He had a reputation for catching all the weird cases. That’s what you got working the night shift. He gloved up and took a slow walk around the morgue, trying to burn the scene into his memory.

Body snatching wasn’t a call you expected in the wee hours of a Sunday morning. He’d been about to end his shift when the call came in, destroying all hope of heading home and getting some desperately needed sleep. Harker was assigned as lead detective on the case of a woman found dead in a dumpster at the start of his shift. He’d processed the scene, taken statements, and made sure the woman’s body was transported to the morgue for autopsy. Now, said body had vanished a mere five hours after its arrival at this supposedly secure facility.

It wasn’t like he didn’t appreciate the overtime—the cost of living was fucking bananas these days—but Harker was exhausted and just needed to sleep like the dead. He’d always been a night owl, so the graveyard shift was a perfect fit for him. No wonder chasing missing corpses around at the ass-crack of dawn wasn’t his idea of a good time. It looked like he’d be working well into the morning figuring out how to manage this clusterfuck.

Harker, check this out. He turned to Jake Seward, the lead crime scene tech.

They worked regularly together on calls and had become friends, well, as close to friends as you could get when you bonded over murder and mayhem. Nodding, he dodged