by Selena Scott
Bodies shimmied and shook all around them. A new song came on and everyone threw their hands in the air, shouting to one another in excitement. Dawn, however, could only blink up at Quill in confusion. He had his hands crossed over his chest as he glowered down at her.
They were in a cave of strangers, surrounded by people while also simultaneously alone. The moment was sweaty and anonymous and also weirdly… intimate.
A bead of sweat slipped down Dawn’s spine. She didn’t want to dance anymore. She could only look up at Quill’s hard eyes, that beautiful face of his, his broad shoulders, his frown. Self-consciousness started to creep in. She was certain that her feelings were written all over her face. That she thought he was handsome and maybe she had a crush on him that she had no idea what to do with.
His expression seemed to soften as he stared back at her, his arms falling to his sides. She didn’t let her eyes fall from his. She felt awkward and self-conscious and exposed, but she was who she was. She wasn’t going to hide it from him. If he had a problem with it, he could bring it up himself.
Meanwhile, she wasn’t going to let him drag her away from her good time. She took a deep breath and moved around him, headed back toward Ida.
“Dawn,” he said in a low voice, that hand on her shoulder again.
She paused, but just like in the kitchen, his eyes shuttered down and he said nothing, dropping his hand and letting her pass.
***
Ten minutes later Quill was bursting out of the club and into the crisp night air. He was practically jogging to his car.
Why the hell had he even come along on this stupid outing? He’d told himself it was because it was in his best interest to get to know the brothers better. But he could see now, clear as day, that he’d heard the words “club” and “Dawn” in the same sentence and he hadn’t been able to accept the invitation fast enough. He’d wanted to see her dolled up. He’d wanted to see her dance and laugh and have a good old fashioned time.
Well, he’d seen it and now he only had himself to blame.
He slammed into his car and dug his phone out of his pocket, dialing a number before he could think twice about it. He was breathing hard when the Director answered.
“Yes?”
“We have to act now,” Quill said, barely recognizing his own voice. “They’re ready. It has to be now.”
The Director was quiet for a minute and Quill knew he’d surprised him. “ You want to bump up the timeline?”
“Everything is in place,” Quill replied. “If we wait much longer, we risk something coming along and ruining everything. The time is now.”
“But the boss, this Diana woman, you’ve said that she isn’t convinced yet. That she could talk them out of participating?”
“I’ll take care of it. I’ll make sure she doesn’t stop them.”
There was another long pause. “If you’re sure, I’ll rework the plan. Send you the details in the morning.”
“I’m sure,” Quill said, his hands tightening around the steering wheel.
The Director clicked off and Quill sat in the parking lot, staring at the side of the club. His own voice echoed in his ears. It has to be now.
What he hadn’t said out loud was that if he waited any longer, had any more moments with Dawn, he wasn’t sure he could go through with it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Do you guys need a ride over to the lab today?” Dawn asked Orion and Phoenix as the three of them ate bowls of cereal at the breakfast table.
As different as their three jobs and respective schedules were, it was rare that the three of them got to have breakfast together. As such, Orion was enjoying the quiet company of his siblings so much that he didn’t even register Dawn’s words for a few seconds after she said them.
“Yeah,” Phoenix muttered. “Ida was gonna give me a ride but apparently she had to pick up an unexpected shift at the center this afternoon.”
“What’s this?” Orion asked. “What are we talking about?”
“Our meeting this afternoon at the lab.”
He stared at his sister blankly. “What lab? What meeting?”
She pursed her lips and gave him quite a look. “Jeez Louise could you be any more clocked out these days? I know you’re all in love with Diana and everything but I’ve never seen you so spaced out!”
“I’m not spaced out!” Orion argued. He was. He was totally spaced out. Ever since the club a few days ago Orion had been on cloud nine. He’d been seeing Diana every chance he got and loving every single minute of it. Something had changed between them at the club. They were closer, sweeter. The walls had come down.
Dawn said it best. He was in love.
“Whatever,” Dawn said in a perfect little sister tone of voice. “Just promise me you’re looking both ways before you cross the road. You’re liable to get hit by a truck mooning around town like this.”
Phoenix cocked his head at his brother. “Seriously, dude. Even I didn’t get it this bad for Ida. It’s embarrassing.”
Orion flicked a few cheerios at his siblings. “What lab? What meeting?” he repeated.
Now, Phoenix’s brow pulled down. “The government grant thing. The loan forgiveness medical study thing. Did Diana seriously not tell you? She’s so organized I figured she’d have made you sit through an hour long presentation. I assumed it would be her version of foreplay.”
Orion leaned forward to cuff his brother over the head and grinned when Phoenix dodged him. It was good to see him moving so freely, without pain.
“She mentioned something about it a few days ago, but I didn’t think we’d signed on to anything yet.” In fact, he distinctly remembered her saying that there was something funny about the whole thing. That had been the whole reason for getting Dawn and Quill to the club together, so that Diana could figure out if there was something between them and if that was the thing that had been ringing her alarm bells. But they’d lost track of Dawn and Quill in the crowd and then soon after Quill had left. The experiment had failed. That was as much as Orion knew about anything. Diana certainly hadn’t mentioned that she’d given this government grant thingy the thumbs up. “Hold on, lemme give her a buzz.”
He rose from the table and did just that, frowning when her phone went straight to voicemail. It never went straight to voicemail.
“Well, Phoenix and I are heading over at 11 am, but I’m pretty sure all three of us are supposed to go. Quill said that that would be the best way for us to get chosen.”
“Get chosen. What does that mean?”
“They’re looking for specific candidates to study and apparently three siblings is a hot ticket item. They’ll examine us, figure out if we’re eligible and if they choose us then we’ll participate in the study for a few days.”
“In exchange,” Phoenix cut in, “All that medical debt goes bye bye.” He licked his spoon clean and rose to dump his dishes in the dishwasher.
Even though his brother moved quickly, Orion didn’t miss the expression on his face. Guilt. He wished he could erase that weight from Phoenix’s shoulders.
Phoenix had been the reason that they’d come down from the mountains, assumed their human forms, and wracked up all that medical debt in the first place. He’d been caught in a forest fire and badly burned. He’d spent weeks in the hospital, recovering. And then months of physical therapy had added to the bill. Dawn and Orion had accrued a small amount of debt themselves, just from the requisite medical work-ups they’d been required to participate in when they’d registered at the center, but it was nothing compared to the mountain of money they owed on Phoenix’s behalf.
Orion really, really wanted to talk to Diana about this whole thing, but he also didn’t want to screw up a chance at getting Phoenix’s debt erased. The world would open up for his brother if that could happen.
“I won’t let you guys go alone.” Especially not if his absence would screw everything up for them.
“Great!” Dawn said brightly. “Q
uill texted me the address and everything this morning so I’ll pick you up from work and we’ll go?”
“Sure.”
For now though, Orion had to get to work. Especially if he was going to have to take an unexpected half day off, he really didn’t want to be late. Which was a bummer because normally, if Diana’s phone had been off and he had an important thing like this to run past her, he would have wanted to run by the center, talk to her in person, but he just didn’t think he could squeeze it in. He didn’t want to lose his job.
Orion worked the morning through, convinced his boss to let him take a half day and jumped in the car with Phoenix and Dawn. He frowned at his phone. Diana hadn’t called him all morning and her phone was still going to voicemail. Her office phone just rang and rang. When they’d woken up this morning in his bed, she hadn’t mentioned that anything would be out of the ordinary about her day.
Something about this really didn’t feel right.
“Where the hell are we?” Orion asked a few minutes later as Dawn drove through the outskirts of town. He’d never seen this part of Portland before. They pulled into a strip mall where a large white tent had been erected on one end of the parking lot.
“I don’t know exactly,” Dawn said. “But this is the address that Quill sent us.”
“Is Quill meeting us?” Orion asked.
Dawn shook her head. “No.”
He glanced at her. There was something about her tone of voice that sounded off. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. He’s busy. We haven’t been spending much time together lately.” She slammed the car door and started striding off toward the white tent.
Orion and Phoenix strode after her, exchanging meaningful eye contact. Up ahead, in the tent, Orion could see people scuttling around in matching uniforms, clipboard and tablets in their hands. Three different trucks were backed up into the tent and they were the kind of vehicle that he’d seen parked around town before. They looked like a truck on the outside but the inside was kitted out as a mobile clinic. A big sign was plastered on the side of all three trucks. He recognized it as the government’s medical symbol.
“Are you three our 11 o’ clock?” a smiling man asked as he approached them with his clipboard out. He glanced down at it. “The Wolf siblings?”
“That’s us,” Phoenix said, eyeing the strangers, the three trucks.
“Great! Let’s get started then.”
They followed him toward a folding table where he presented them with three sets of matching paperwork. Dawn filled it out for all three of them while the man smiled innocuously at them.
“Busy day, then?” Orion asked.
“Hmm?” the man said.
Orion nodded toward the trucks. “Lotta trucks for just three shifters.”
Dawn looked up from her paperwork and squinted at the trucks, then at the man sitting across from them. “Oh, yeah. You must be seeing a lot of potential participants if you need three trucks just to accommodate them all.”
Orion could tell, just from using his nose that he and his siblings were the only shifters for about half a mile. The three different mobile clinics seemed like overkill to him.
“Oh. Right,” the man said, his smile faltering just a bit. “We’re expecting to get busier later. Lots of people want to be involved in our program you know!”
He stood and cleared his throat. Orion could smell his nerves.
“Should we get started?”
He led the three of them over to the trucks. “Phoenix you’ll be in this one. Orion, you’re there. And Dawn, you’ll be in the middle.”
“You’re splitting us up?” Phoenix asked, though his voice was so low and sinister, it barely registered as a question.
“If we do your exams simultaneously, we can get it all done faster,” the man explained. “Besides, if you’re in the same room, your hormones will interact with one another and screw up the test results and we don’t want that.”
“We’re not splitting up,” Orion asserted. This was absurd. Why did they need to make things go faster? There was no one here but them. They had all the time in the world.
“Guys,” Dawn said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Can we not make this difficult? The faster we get this done, the faster we can go home.” She leaned in to her brothers. “Quill worked really hard to organize this for us and, honestly, we can’t afford to screw it up. We’re talking a hundred grand in debt just disappearing. Let’s just do what they say.”
Orion didn’t like it, but he could already see Phoenix caving, the weight of the money nearly breaking him.
“Fine.” Without another word, he strode up to his designated truck and got in.
Dawn turned on her heel and did the same.
Orion was left, pausing. But he really didn’t want to be the reason that this whole thing fell apart. Not when it was so obviously important to his brother. He climbed the stairs to his trailer and opened the door. There was a man in scrubs and a medical mask waiting inside. Next to him was a metal table lined with medical instruments and a row of tanks and screens. Some machine was beeping quietly in the background.
“Hello,” the man said, rising to his full height. Almost as tall as Orion. “If you’ll just step over here we can begin.”
The door to the truck slammed closed behind Orion and he could have sworn he heard a lock click into place.
The man in the scrubs bent over a table, straightening some of the tools and Orion caught a flash of something silver at his waist.
“Are you a nurse?” he asked the man.
The man paused, apparently weighing his words. “Physician’s assistant,” he said after a moment.
Orion wasn’t sure why, but he was almost completely positive that the man was lying.
“Why,” Orion said carefully, standing up to his full height, “would a physician’s assistant need to be wearing a gun?”
The man glanced at him, both blanching and pulling his shoulders back, like he was readying himself for a fight he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to start. “No offense, pal, but you never can be too careful with shifters. All of the medical staff are armed today.”
A familiar sound caught Orion’s ear. The sound of an engine turning over. A telltale rumble slightly shook the ground. The truck next to them had just started. There was a slam and another slam. Someone shouted something from outside. The sound of gravel spitting from under tires.
He made eye contact with the man across the truck before he decided he didn’t give a shit about a gun and lunged for the door. A loud bang and a searing pain in his thigh barely stopped him.
Because he didn’t know what the hell was going on but he knew a trap when he smelled one and he was almost positive someone was driving away with his siblings.
The man behind him shouted something, their truck kicked on, and as Orion scrabbled at the door, the truck lurched and sped out of the parking lot.
***
“Really, I’m so, so sorry, Diana,” Quill said for the nineteenth time that morning.
She pinched back her annoyance at him. It hadn’t been his fault that in their staff meeting that morning he’d spilled an entire bottle of water on her phone and destroyed it. But it was kind of odd. He wasn’t usually a clumsy sort of person.
In fact, he’d been acting oddly the entire staff meeting. He was usually quiet and stoic. But today he was quiet and… nervous.
That was it. She’d had it. She was tired of dancing around the issue and waiting for him to confide in her. After the meeting, Diana resolved that she would drag him by the ear to one of the private conference rooms and have it out with Quill cage-match style.
There was something going on with him and she wanted to know what the hell it was. She wanted to help for god sakes!
But unfortunately, she did not get to do that because Quill ducked out of the room to use the bathroom toward the end of the meeting and about three minutes later, there was a huge scuffle breaking out in the main room.
/> Diana burst out of the meeting to see not one, but three different clients had shifted and were posturing and dancing around one another, looking like some bonkers episode of a National Geographic special where a mountain goat, a cougar, and lynx all went at it. Quill, across the room, shifted into his grizzly form to play the referee and make sure things didn’t get out of hand. By the time Diana got everyone to shift back to their human forms and separated into other rooms, she was sweating, flustered, and internally scowling at the number of incident reports she was about to have to fill out. The center was abuzz with strange, tense energy. Following protocol, she did what she normally did in situations like these and sent all the clients home. With this much adrenaline zipping around they were bound to have another incident like that one unless they all got some space from one another. She ordered her staff to stick around for the debrief and turned on her heel, desperate for half a second alone to gather her thoughts.
She slammed into her office and flopped onto her chair. What a freaking day! And it wasn’t even 11 AM yet. She reflexively reached into her pocket for her phone and frowned. Right. Her phone was dead. She frowned. She really needed to talk to Orion, just to hear his voice would be enough. The man was addictively calming. Her own personal glass of red wine.
She picked up her office phone to call him and frowned when she didn’t hear a dial tone. That was weird. She hung it up and tried again. Still nothing.
“Diana?”
Ida was peeking her head around the door.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
Diana waved her in and Ida closed the door neatly behind her.
“Look,” she started. “I know we’re all supposed to stick around for the debrief of the fight this morning, but they’re about to get called in for the lab testing any minute and I’d really like to be there with Phoenix if that’s all right. He doesn’t have the best relationship with doctors and I really think it’ll calm him down if I’m—“
Diana held up one hand to stop Ida and squinted at her. “Hold on, what are you talking about?”
