She elected to walk. The bus was there on the corner, perfectly timed to pick her up as a passenger, but it was a nice day out. She wasn’t exactly itching to get there on time. So, she shoved her hands in her pockets and made her way walking to the Starbucks she’d told him to meet her at. Several people were already out and starting their day. One mom she passed pushed an expensive-looking sporty stroller down the street as she jogged her way down the sidewalk in pastel-colored running gear with the familiar-looking logo.
There were several dogs just happy to be out and about in the sunny air, and even some children ready to play their day away now that the last remnants of winter were gone completely from their minds.
She walked on, wishing she could take in the most of this nice weather as they were, but there was so much blocking her mind from seeing the goodness in absolutely anything. Hands in her pockets, shoulders slumped, head down to avoid talking to anyone, she made her way across town and to the place where she was sure she would end up breaking up with her boyfriend.
She opened the door to the Starbucks and slipped in. He was already there. Of course he was. He sat at a table in the corner looking just as sleep deprived and crazy in the eyes as he did when she last saw him. He tapped out a rhythm on the table, looking around wildly for anything to occupy his gaze or anywhere to put his attention.
Then his eyes settled on her. He looked like a kicked puppy. She wouldn’t let that affect her though. She wouldn’t let him win that way. He’d always been good about drawing her pity right out of her and making her feel like she owed him some sort of apology for reacting to absolutely anything he did. But not today.
“Diego,” she said with measured politeness, like a stranger on a business meeting.
“Hey,” he said.
She didn’t say anything back. She didn’t want him to be comfortable. She wanted him to know the exact type of pain and awkwardness she’d felt waiting all night for him to never show at an expensive restaurant they’d planned out for weeks. He didn’t get to be the victim here, no matter how sorry for himself he felt.
“You’ve got five minutes,” she said. “Convince me to stay longer.”
He took a breath. Then he began. “Okay, so—clearly I’ve not been honest about some parts of me. I’m a shifter. Wolf. I was taught all my life not to tell anyone because shifting in public was illegal and my parents thought I wouldn’t make any friends. I was adopted, you know that part and it’s true. I never met my real parents and my mom and dad were saints for taking in a shifter kid like me. It was like Clark Kent and his Kansas family or something—”
“Okay, spare me the part where you compare yourself to Superman.”
“Anyway. I felt alone and scared, and my parents taught me to hide myself. Repress everything, you know? So I did and I never told anyone. Not my best friends, never my girlfriends, not even my family, like cousins and aunts at Christmas. No one knew. So, don’t feel like you were the only one in the dark.”
“And here I was hoping I was special to you in some way.”
He cringed. “At a certain point, I got tired of hiding it. I mean puberty hit and all I wanted to do was shift. My parents didn’t even like me doing it at home in the backyard or at night; they were afraid the neighbors would see. All that stuff starts to get pent up, like a shaken soda bottle. I ended up just letting out all that tension in the wrong way,” he said, taking a breath and leaning back.
So there it was. A repressed teenager who went rebel in a wrong way and was now dealing with the consequences. Somehow, she felt there had to be something illegal about being a shifter and not telling your partner. She knew there wasn’t. They hadn’t yet progressed so far in the country as to say that shifters needed to wear some kind of badge identifying them. It’d come up once or twice and several shifters argued that nons (the name they used for non-shifters) should be the ones wearing badges. The argument there, of course, was that violence against shifters was a lot more prevalent than the other way around and they were the ones that needed protection.
Would knowing Diego was a shifter change anything for her? If he’d told her on the fifteenth date or after a year of dating, would it have mattered? Probably not. But now he sat in front of her, spilling his secrets about how he lied the entire time they were together.
“So tell me about your little heist,” she said, crossing her arms and leaning back.
His eyes widened, just for a second. His face paled and he cleared his throat. “We’re not looking to hurt anyone. We just want attention. Every time something happens to shifters, they distract everyone in the news with some kind of story about a cat up a tree for God’s sake.”
“So you robbed a place of combustible materials?” she said. “That certainly sounds like a ‘we come in peace’ move.”
“We’re not like the extremists.”
“You’re not?”
“We want equality. Not to be better. The extremists want revenge. We just want to be people. There’s a professor I’ve been in contact with at a university in California. Drake Tekkin. A lot of his writings have inspired me on the kind of man I want to be in this world, the kind of shifter.”
Somehow, she knew this was more honest than he had been in years of knowing him. He looked a little desperate, a little childish. Whether or not the harmlessness of the organization was the truth, he believed it. He wanted it to be true. She knew, deep down, he didn’t have a bad bone in his body. Even if he was lying, even if things weren’t exactly what they seemed, he didn’t want to hurt anyone. He could very well be surrounded by people who wanted to hurt others, but he himself wasn’t a bad person. She knew that about him.
“So,” he said. “That’s all I have.”
She thought about her plan to break up with him. She still thought it was the smart thing to do. He was a liar and now a wanted man. He was potentially dangerous and no doubt surrounded by dangerous people. But could she really abandon him? He looked ready to cry at any moment, a grown man in public. She could see years of desperation hiding there. His sob story about his lonely shifter adolescence was a true story. What would she be in the story if she abandoned him after finding out the truth?
But she needed time away from him. She needed to sort through all these feelings and all this strangeness. She needed to know that he was capable of giving her space and letting her make her own decisions, not just throw puppy dog eyes her way—God, literal puppy dog eyes.
“I need some time to think,” she said. “I don’t know what’ll be waiting on the other side of me thinking. But I will take the time and I need you to give me that space.”
He nodded. “Right. Sure.”
“I mean it. Even if it takes me three months to talk to you again, I need you to back off for a while. I will get back to you, I promise. I just need to do it on my own terms.”
“Yeah. Of course. Let me know.”
I will.
Chapter 4
She didn’t just fill her time with thinking and pining. She filled it with research. She decided she would learn everything that she had ignored over the years about the shifter culture. She went back to the beginning, to the first evidence of shifters in society, all the way back to the time of the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of western civilization. They had existed there, according to hieroglyphs and cave drawings and recordings on stone tablets alongside stories like Gilgamesh and tales of the gods. Many of them were shamans and warriors during this time.
It wasn’t until the medieval time and the Renaissance that opinions on shifters turned into something far less positive. They were once seen as contributing members of society but now they were outsiders. Something had snapped during this time. She saw a word in the glossary of the one book she was reading: Knights of Sang.
She googled them.
“The Knights of Sang—roughly translated to the Blood Knights—were a group formed in Romania in the sixteenth century after an unknown wolf shifter attacked a local village. The Knights
formed as something of a rudimentary neighborhood watch for the small village. They were the first anti-shifter organization in history and, as a result, grew in popularity with many unofficial ‘chapters’ popping up in villages across Europe. The organization grew rapidly over the next fifty years and became an officially sanctioned group by the Holy Roman Empire in 1670, tasked with keeping order specifically among shifter populations. As a result, several hundreds of shifters were rounded up in European towns over the next decade in what many consider to be the shifter equivalent of the Salem Witch Trials—”
She stopped reading after that. As dense and fascinating as ancient shifter history was, she was more interested in what was going on now. These groups seemed bent on creating a culture of fear. Diego said that extremists were something else, people who wanted shifters to get vengeance, to use their abilities to subdue the ones around them they viewed weaker. She read up on that too.
Several news articles talked about one man: Damien Orlando. He spoke at several shifter rallies that showed up on YouTube when she looked up extremist groups. He had hard, dark eyes, a heavy, sharp brow, and a long scar across his left cheek. He was like the poster child for how the far right wanted shifters viewed by society. She wondered if he knew that and he effected his look as a result. He was an eloquent speaker, she’d give him that.
“I have been hopeless,” he said in one video. “As you all have. But knowing there are others out there who feel as you do, who see as you see, makes us stronger. You are not one in a million, you are one of a million. Together, we rise.”
Something about him unsettled her. Did Diego buy into his particular brand of propaganda? He seemed like a much angrier man than what Diego’s soft eyes could ever be capable of. Who was that other one? The professor he mentioned.
Drake Tekkin. She googled him too. He was an early-thirty-something man who dressed like he was the bad boy in an eighties teen movie. He taught several classes on shifter culture and had been involved with several projects over the years for shifter awareness. He seemed as clean as they could come. But there was something in those eyes as well, something like a quiet rage. It was ambition waiting to strike, like a coiled snake.
She read one of his papers, “The Shifter as the Everyman.” It was smart, it was impressive. There wasn’t a hint of Orlando’s rage in the words. In fact, he even spoke against the terrorist movements on the shifter’s part, claiming they weren’t truly human if they were willing to kill their fellow man to get what they wanted. She had to imagine that was met with a fair bit of anger when it was first published.
By the time the sun had gone down, she felt like she’d filled her skull right up to the brim with shifter knowledge and it was ready to burst. What to do with it then? Tell Diego that she now had a working knowledge of his life? Tell him that she read enough articles to talk with him analytically about his goals?
She would never know his life. For all those college papers and speeches told her, it didn’t tell her what it was like to hide oneself, to feel incredibly. Diego had been adopted when he was young and it was a spot of softness for him for as long as she knew him. He didn’t like to talk about it. Though he claimed he didn’t remember his real parents, she was certain he must have some memory of them for all the ways his eyes grew hollow and a little bit scary looking when they were mentioned. And on top of that, he was seen as some kind of monster by the world, even by Andrea, for a time.
So what should she do? Coddle him and tell him everything would be okay and she forgave him for the heartache of the past day, for all the lying he did the entire time they were together? She couldn’t make excuses for him. If he wanted to be treated like any other person, then she needed to respond to what he did as if he were any other person, tragic backstory be damned.
#
Her choice on what to do came a lot sooner than she expected. She’d gone several days without a word from Diego. He’d respected her boundaries and her need for privacy which she honestly found surprising considering he was never so attentive about her telling him to back off before. But the six o’clock news was faster.
“Believed to be the same group responsible for the break in last week, another store has been vandalized and robbed…”
Andrea felt her stomach curdle just a bit. So that was that. Diego had taken their several days apart to plan more heists to steal more things. This time, it was from a sporting goods store and Andrea was more than a little terrified at the possibility that they would report they’d stolen firearms or bullets. In fact, she expected that to be the case. But when the news came back, it was nothing more than hiking equipment and some leftover snow gear. It wasn’t good, and it didn’t bode well. But it was better than nothing. And better than the worst possible scenario.
She watched the newsreel several times and wondered what she should do. She could call the police, tell them she knew the identity of at least one of the men responsible, and that there were others. She could call Diego and tell him to knock it off or she would call the police on him. She could ignore the whole thing, invite Charles back over, and never speak to him again. While she sat there and waited to figure out what to do, the newsreel just kept playing and playing, and she felt more and more helpless.
In the end, she went out for a jog; something about the movement helped her think. She managed to get almost three miles in with all the churning and cog turning her mind was doing. It certainly distracted her from the burn in her legs by the end of the second mile, and the way her lungs were ready to give out by the end. She found herself jogging by his apartment, looking in from the outside and wondering who he was there with. What he was planning.
And then suddenly, she was angry. Didn’t he know that he could get hurt? Didn’t he know that it was so ungodly dangerous? Didn’t he care that he could die doing this, that it would hurt his mother, his family, her? All that running had worked her up a great deal and now she glared at the window she knew led to the kitchen. She recognized the small Mexican flag hanging in the window. Before she could stop herself, she walked over to the door and hit the buzzer on his apartment for several long seconds, far longer than a polite stranger might.
Naturally, it didn’t warrant a response. He was a fugitive, an anonymous fugitive, but one nonetheless. He wouldn’t answer his door for even the pizza man. So she kept going, buzzing and buzzing until he’d have to do something—unlock the door, send down security, whatever.
“What?” he spat from his end of the communicator on the wall.
“Let me up.”
She didn’t need to say more. There was only about five seconds of a pause between the end of her sentence and the door clicking unlocked in a familiar way. She pushed it open quickly before he could change his mind and let it shut and lock again on her. She went up to his apartment. She thought about all the things she would say to him, all the ways she would yell at him. A few of these sentences were ways in which she would convince him to knock it all off, to stop everything he was doing and let it go.
She would rip him a new one over all the things that had been building up over the past couple of days. She would make him her punching bag.
“Are you alone?” she asked when he opened the door.
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
She stepped into the apartment. He closed the door behind him. Then he was up against it. She was flush to his body, pushing him into the solid wood of his own front door and not letting his lips get an inch of their own traction as she controlled every part of their kiss. At first, he was stiff, not responding, but then he loosened up, and allowed her to move all over him. Her hands pressed against him hard but felt across every muscle and every valley of his body that she could. She wanted to push him through the wall, but she’d settle for this.
Eventually, she started the biting. She started first with forcing her tongue in his mouth, pushing his own back and forth like it was her own pliable toy. She was in charge here. Once he gave her access and
didn’t fight back, she moved her teeth forward to work on his body lip, worrying with her teeth so hard she thought it might bleed. Part of her wanted it to. She wanted to draw blood, to taste it, to make him see the error of his ways.
She’d never been one for the punishing kind of angry sex people had in books and movies. They’d never fucked their way through an argument. But this was a new level of disagreement. He’d lied the entire time they were together, and now he was planning God knew what with an illegal terrorist organization. If anything warranted hate sex, it was this. And it had been building up in her for so long that it wasn’t too difficult to just let it out.
He was entirely willing, allowing her to demolish him from every angle she could get at. He let her sink her teeth into every part of him, leave marks across his usually flawless caramel skin. It was mixed with the red and raw color of irritation now. She’d left marks across him that he couldn’t hide, at least not easily. She’d both marked him and warned him. This was what happened when he lied. This was what became of her without him.
She wanted to tell him then about Charles. She wanted to talk about how she’d fucked another man all night, but this was so much better. But even in her euphoria, she knew that would ruin the mood, ruin their current trajectory. Nothing would be a buzz kill more than admitting to her partner—well, still officially her partner—that she cheated on him out of anger a few nights ago. Who knew all it would take was one missed day and an apparent few years of complete lies to result in Andrea breaking her one rule with relationships.
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