Chapter 1

Layla screamed down the highway.

Okay, I should explain. No, Layla is not some tripped out banshee, running down the highway with her arms flailing, emitting deafening amounts of sound. Layla is my car. Correction…Layla is my 1967 Shelby GT350 Mustang Fastback. Stark white, with deep black racing stripes. But that's just the outside. Inside, it's all GT500. Eleven inch disk brakes in the front, ten inch drums in the rear. Full racing suspension, my doing, along with the steering. And of course, the heart, a 428 Cobra Jet engine, pumping out 525 small children scaring, earth shaking horsepower.

She was my baby.

So, Layla and I were screaming down the highway. My police cloak was on, so I was pushing it. Stereo blasting, windows down, the wind kissing my face. It was awesome, it was more than awesome. It was incredible. There was one reason and one reason only that she and I were in such a great mood…vacation. It had been a long time coming to see my first vacation, almost three years. And the Agency finally gave it to me.

Okay, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself again. I should probably tell you who I am because you are probably expecting someone else. I'm Jeff Edwards, former FBI agent, current holder of the career record for most terrorists caught, tried, and convicted. You've heard of me, trust me, you probably just don't realize it. Remember that huge shake up in the government that went down after it was discovered that 9/11 was an inside job, more or less? Who do you think found that out? Me. Well me and my teammates, Felicity and Mike.

We work for the SGA, that's the Secret Government Agency. Very creative I know, but it gets the point across. We are the ones who keep the world from spinning into chaos. We have final jurisdiction, we out rank any law enforcement officers there are in this world. Now I'm not talking about money launderers and fraud and your average everyday murder. That's child's play. We deal with everything you think is a myth. Roswell? That was us holding the cover up. I've actually met the pilots of that ship. Never take them on in poker, just a warning for you. Area 51? It's real, although not as alien filled as you think. It's really just a branch office of ours.

But don't think we just deal with the gigantic alien cover-up. That's just one of our jobs. No, we also deal with people bent on taking over the word, evil robotic creatures trying to cause havoc, basically anything you've ever seen in any comic book, fantasy novel, or crazy kids TV show…it's all us. And here's the clincher, it's all true.

Yep, it's genius in its simplicity. The best way to keep a secret is not to. We have a whole division that's in charge of taking our reports and creating the stories that you read and watch every day, from them. You put them out there under the genre of fiction, and people will believe that it's not true. Now I will admit, not everything is us, some of it is true human imagination, but I will guarantee that at least a few of the plots you read came from us.

So how does someone get involved in this? Either have some sort of "superpower" or just be really, really good at what they do. I was the latter. I was known through out the FBI as the one who could put a bullet through a bullet hole. I never took vacation and always caught the guy I was after. My gut was famous. To this day, it has a 95 success rate on what it tells me to do. It got me noticed, unknowingly. I stumbled on this case that was the biggest of the millennium. That's right I said millennium. One guy, not a faction or an organization, one guy was planning something larger than 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma City, and we'll throw in World War 2 for good measure, combined. I knew that if I let this out I'd lose the case, because I was still a low man on the totem pole for the FBI.

Little did I know it was just a test. Over six months I found out everything that the SGA took five years and countless man hours to find. Remember how I said I was good?

But man, they do take their secrecy seriously. I should know, they killed my partner and best friend of two years. Then they killed me. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Jeff Edwards doesn't exist. I basically have no contact with the outside world, and I cannot interact long term with anyone. I'm basically a ghost now. Hey, I never said it was a cake walk. But that's why this vacation is so golden.

Sure, I have to let them know what my itinerary is, keep my communicator and gun on me at all times so that they know where I am, and check in with them on a daily basis, but that's a hell of a lot better than being locked underground watching the world from a few television screens, only leaving to work on cases.

So, Me, Layla….wait…there's something else you should know. I got in by my skills, but what makes me so special now, is that I'm a Para-human. That's a human-animal hybrid, for you non science geeks. See my main partner, Felicity, is, well, was the last known white tiger human on the planet. She was part of a small tribe in the jungles of Africa that were all that way. Until of course, human nature set in, and they were slaughtered. William, our boss, found her underneath a collapsed hut and took her in as a child. Ten years later, let's just say you don't want to piss her off. She's our best agent, and coming from me that's hard to say, but I can't deny it.

So, how does that pertain to me? I'm getting there. See in my first weeks at the Agency, I was still angry that they killed my friends, and basically destroyed my life as I knew it then. But if I left, I would be killed as well. They had paired me off with her for the infamous case, which led to that whole 9/11 debacle, and I, being the headstrong, sometime stubborn guy that I am, went to do some investigating on my own. Stupid decision. I got ambushed, and got shot up pretty bad. I still don't know how, but she found me someway, either that or I somehow got back to the apartment where we were set up. The memory is kind of fuzzy.

Any hoot, she finds me, practically empty on blood, so what does she do? She bites me. Saves my life by transferring her healing power to me, along with other things. If you know anything about lycanthropy, you can probably see where I'm going with this. So I, along with her, are the two only known naturally occurring animal-hybrids in the world. I stress the phrase naturally occurring, you're going to need to remember that for later.

I'm going to take a moment to breathe here. Done.

Okay, so to recap, Layla, my car, and Para-human I were screaming down the highway. A few hours away was seventy two hours of sipping mai tais on the beach, swimming, and taking in the scenery of Key West, if you know what I mean. Not a care in the world.

Then something caught my eye in the sky. It was far away, miles away, one of the many perks of having tiger DNA coursing through your system. But it was still too far away for me to make out any details. From where I was it looked like a flock of birds chasing each other in the sky. But as I got closer, I realized that couldn't be any further from the truth. It turns out that they were not birds, they were kids! Six of them, with wings, darting around a patch of sky. What was making them dart around like that? Flying werewolves. I'll let that sink in for a minute….flying…were…wolves.

It was safe to say, that in my line of work, I had now officially seen everything. I grabbed my communicator, which basically looked like a pen. As a matter of fact, I grabbed a pen first by mistake, and then grabbed the communicator next to it. Maybe they're new and the Agency just didn't notify me yet. I thought to my self, so it was worth a try.

I set the communicator to broadcast all the channels that we exclusively have.

"This is agent Jeff Edwards; do you need assistance in the sky?" Not that I would really be able to help, but protocol is protocol. But I got no answer.

"This is agent Jeff Edwards, do you require assistance?"

Still nothing.

"Hey bird guys!"

"Uh, Agent Edwards, who are you trying to contact?" Came back the response.

I blinked at the communicator. That was kind of embarrassing. It was home base. Since I was broadcasting, not knowing what channel they would be on, they heard it too.

"Do we have anyone on the docket that has wings?" I called back.

"I'll check." There was a momentary pause. "We show no one."

"Okay, I may have a PAS here." Potential agent situation, we love our acronyms.

"Do you need assistance?" The voice asked.

I looked up at the chase scene, which now appeared to turn into a fight scene in the sky, and made an infamous Edwards' gut decision.

"No, I can handle this. You don't even need to take me off vacation status for it."

"Copy that."

They were just kids, I'd talk to them later about possibly joining, but right now they seemed like they could use a little help getting away from the winged wolf men. Now the key thing was, figuring out how to go about doing that.

Actually, truthfully, right now the key was making sure I didn't run over the kid that just took a major hit to the stomach and fell to the ground, twenty feet in front of my still speeding vehicle!