by Selena Scott
The Director knew what this meant. He hadn’t been rescued by the Minister of Education, after all. It had been the Secretary of Defense. Which meant that he needed to find a way to make shifters indispensable to the act of war. He needed to find a way to weaponize them. And he needed to do it fast.
Luckily, he had agents in the field. Recruits who hadn’t scattered like rats when the world deemed their work immoral. Who’d stayed loyal to him.
And some of those agents had been very busy. There were a family of grizzly shifters in Montana who had just been brought into an assimilation center. What he wouldn’t give for the opportunity to work on some grizzlies. But intact family units were notoriously hard to indoctrinate. And he needed susceptible ones for this to work.
There were a few more prospects scattered around the country. A boar shifter in Michigan who’d come in from hiding after Shifter Liberation Day that his agent there had been keeping an eye on. And a gorilla shifter in Maine who also might be turned to see the light.
But then, there was the prospect he was most excited about. In fact, there were two different agents with their eye on this Phoenix Wolf.
The Director looked down at the two separate agent reports that had been sent to him from his agents in Portland. A large wolf shifter. Angry at the world. Recovering from devastating injury and mourning the loss of his full function. If there was anyone on this earth who was easy to manipulate, it was those in pain. And in this case, the Director wouldn’t even have to inflict that pain first. The world had already done it for him.
Two agents had their eyes on Phoenix Wolf as a recruit for the program. They were doing their best to get close to him.
With any luck, it wouldn’t take long for him to be here, in the Director’s lab, sacrificing for his country.
***
Ida frowned as she looked back and forth from the address she’d typed into her phone’s GPS and the shabby apartment building she’d just pulled up to. Actually, building was a generous term. This was more like a series of apartment shacks stacked atop of one another. Maybe it had been a motel at one point because all the front doors were exposed to the parking lot that sat in the middle of the U-shaped ring of apartments.
This was really the best that MCSS could do for housing? Well, she supposed that none of the three Wolf siblings had jobs or marketable skills and they were purportedly mired in medical debt. But still, this place looked like it should have been condemned in the eighties.
She plastered a smile on her face as she climbed the steps to Phoenix’s unit. It wouldn’t help anything if she acted like his accommodations were gross. And she needed all the help she could get at this point. Things had … not gone well with him yesterday.
He’d glared at her the entire time, unnerving her with his dead eyes. She’d fallen on him and probably aggravated his injuries. She’d made herself sound like someone who was shallow and overly concerned with outward appearance. And she could easily tell that she’d completely overwhelmed him.
The only part of the meeting that she’d actually gotten a kick out of was him candidly saying that he found Rose to be more attractive than she was. Ida knew that many people would have been mortally offended by that kind of comment, but she’d immediately known it to be an unintentional insult. He hadn’t been trying to hurt her. And besides, it was true. Rose was a head-to-toe knockout while Ida was moderately attractive. She didn’t take offense to that. She worked what she had, strawberry blonde hair, curves, and good fashion sense, but she’d never be the lithe goddess that Rose was. It didn’t hurt her feelings that Phoenix had pointed it out.
Besides, she didn’t want a man like Phoenix to be attracted to her. Ida was into nerdy guys who were as clumsy as she was. She liked nice men who wanted to hold her hand at the movies and buy her dinner every once in a while. That was her comfort zone. Her comfort zone was decidedly not devil-eyed hotties who looked like they liked to fuck under a harvest moon, feasting on the heart of a lamb while some forest nymph rode him dirty.
Ida paused halfway up the stairs and panted for a second. It wasn’t from the exercise. It was from the weirdly graphic image she’d just conjured about Phoenix.
“That is not the way to think about a client,” she reprimanded herself. And then there was nothing to do but knock on his door.
There were scraping sounds, a low growling, and then the door swung open. There stood Phoenix.
Ida’s eyes bottomed out on his throat and she had to tip her head all the way back to see to the top of him. She’d only seen him sitting yesterday so she’d had absolutely no idea how tall this gigantor really was. Holy hell. Even slightly hunched over the crutches under his armpits, he had to be well over six feet tall.
Ida gulped. “Morning.”
“You are short.” He looked down at her, apparently just now getting a grasp on her height the same way that she was. If they were standing side by side, she’d be lucky to come up to his collarbones. And that was in heels.
“Yes,” she said, that smile still in place, though she had no idea what the heck her eyes were looking like. She probably looked whacko. “We covered that yesterday.”
She dropped her eyes to his chest.
“I like your shirt,” she told him, and it wasn’t a lie. This one was bright red and had Elmo’s face on it.
“I don’t,” Phoenix muttered. “Feels like I’m a walking bullseye.”
“That could be our fun thing for the day,” Ida suggested. “We could go shopping for some clothes you like better?”
His dead eyes just stared at her. She cracked first and dug through the purse at her side. “The center allows a monthly stipend for expenditures per client and we definitely have enough to go thrifting. Nothing brand new. But still, maybe we could find a color palette you’re more into?”
More staring.
Ida shifted on her feet. “We have to stop by your financial planner as well and figure out your money situation, so that won’t be as fun, but at least we can cross it off the list.”
Dead eyes.
“Would you like to show me around your house? That’s a pretty standard human custom when someone comes over for the first time.”
Blackholes for eyes.
Ida lost her patience. “Hello?” She snapped her fingers in the air and finally his eyes switched from boring holes into her glasses to boring holes into her snapping hand. “Are you alive in there? Have you been boarded by aliens? Is this a men in black thing? Is your face going to swing open and I’ll discover a little green man at the controls in there?”
He clenched his square jaw. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“And I have no idea what you’re thinking because you’re not talking.”
His jaw clenched again and Ida let her eyes linger there. It really was remarkably square. His facial hair was in bad need of a trim and so was his hair. And the Elmo shirt really wasn’t his style, but even so, his feral attractiveness practically megaphoned off of him. She almost didn’t want to get him new clothes. This man didn’t need a single other weapon in his attractiveness arsenal.
“That’s where I have to live while I recover,” Phoenix said after a minute, pointing over his shoulder. “It’s not my house. I don’t have a house. I’m a fucking wolf. But for right now, I live in this shithole. It’s tiny. It smells weird and you don’t have to come in because you can see the whole thing from here.”
Well. That wasn’t the most friendly house tour she’d ever gotten, but at least he was trying. Ida leaned against the doorjamb and poked her head inside. In fact, he was right. She could see the whole thing from the door. There was a messy twin bed in one corner, a kitchenette in the other, an armchair, a kitchen table, and the door to what she assumed was the bathroom. There was a back window and a front window but they were tiny and dirty and so the light was almost as dingy as the stained beige carpet that lined the floors.
She immediately added a whole list of things to do with Phoenix.
As soon as she evaluated the state of his health, she was really going to work on getting this man a job. He needed money and he needed it fast. No one could be expected to heal and grow, physically or spiritually, in a place like this. He needed new digs.
She let none of that show on her face, however, as she stepped back and beckoned him outside. “Thanks for showing me. You ready to get our day started?”
He grunted unintelligibly, but crutched forward to meet her outside. She tried not to stare.
She hadn’t seen him move yet, as she’d only seen him sitting or standing, and it was quite a sight. His left side was stiff, but moving, and there was a strange grace to the awkward movements. His shoulders rolled, despite the tightness of the shirt, his positioning of the crutches assertive and confident. She could feel the pain he endured, simply because of the tightness on his face and Ida made a mental note to get in touch with his physical therapist to see about adding in some yoga classes. Or meditation at the very least.
For the first time, his eyes staunchly avoided hers and she instantly understood how hard it was for him to be observed right now. She wondered if he’d conflated his injury with weakness. How could she make this man understand that if there was one thing he wasn’t, it was weak. She could feel the power emanating from him as tangibly as a scent.
But also as he crutched past her, she caught his actual scent wafting off of him as well. And dang he smelled good. Something organic and indescribable. It smelled … the way apples looked in their brightest, fruiting apex. It wasn’t a fruit-like scent. No, it was much more mannish and organic. But there was something zippy and fresh and colorful to it as well.
She pulled his door closed and he locked it, turning to crutch toward the stairs. She frowned as he pulled the crutches away completely to just sort of stiff-leg himself down one painful step at a time. Without giving it too much thought, Ida ducked under his free arm, and pressed his hand to her shoulder. She would have wrapped her arm around his waist to support him, but she wasn’t sure of the extent of his injuries and she didn’t want to hurt him.
He immediately stiffened against her and she guessed that he was about to refuse her help, so she took it upon herself to distract him.
“We’re gonna have to roll the passenger seat all the way back to accommodate you, big guy. My Honda wasn’t built to drag Giants all over town. It’s the little blue one over there. Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll actually fit, but still. You’ll be the biggest person I’ve ever driven around! I’m a great driver. I had to get a chauffeur’s license for this job so that I could legally drive clients around and the driving test was so fun! I had to dodge all these cones and moving dummies posing as pedestrians. The written test was hard though. I almost failed. But no worries. I’m still very competent.”
As soon as they were at the bottom of the stairs, she ducked out from under his arm and started walking toward her car, purposefully not looking back as he arranged the crutches back under his arms.
She unlocked the car but didn’t open the door for him, figuring that the stairs had been a hazard, but the car door would be an insult.
She slid in and after a minute of scrabbling around with the door and the crutches, he did the same, grunting as he sat down.
She started the car and winced as the girly pop music she’d been listening to on the way here immediately blared from the car’s speakers. Quickly turning it off, she turned to find him staring at her in that blank, black way and she shrugged her shoulders. “It’s happy music!”
Surprise, surprise, he said nothing.
They first had to go to meet with his financial planner and even though her instincts told her that things would go better if she sat in on the meeting, he insisted she wait in the waiting room. Wanting to respect his privacy, she did so, but chewed her fingernails the entire time, wondering what accidentally rude things he was saying to the poor woman who’d looked mighty nervous when she’d escorted him back to her office.
He emerged half an hour later, a file folder folded in half and shoved into his back pocket and a surly frown on his face. The financial planner followed him out and Ida couldn’t help but notice that she had literal sweat stains circling down from the armpits of her blazer. He’d made a middle aged woman sweat through a jacket.
In a way, it was comforting to know that she wasn’t the only one whom Phoenix scared the bejeezus out of.
“How’d it go?” Ida asked brightly as they made their way out to her car. She sucked on one of the suckers from the bowl in the waiting room.
“I have negative money and no job,” was his succinct answer as he slid back into her car, creasing the folder in his pocket under his bodyweight and not seeming to care.
“Ah. Right. Would you like a job? I could help with that.”
He glared at her. “I want to be a wolf. Where money isn’t something I ever have to think about.” His eyes dropped from her glasses to her mouth and he reached over, grabbed the sucker from her mouth and studied its neon-pink color for a moment. He sniffed at the sucker and then popped it into his own mouth.
“What?” he asked after a moment, when he realized that she was staring at him with an open mouth.
“You just stole candy from my mouth and ate it!”
He groaned and leaned back, staring at the ceiling of the car. “Is this another stupid human thing?”
“You mean to tell me that wolves don’t care when another wolf snatches food from their mouth and claims it as their own?”
He smirked slightly at that, as if he were momentarily conceding her point. Then he took the sucker out of his mouth and brandished it. “This is not food.”
Still slightly stunned at his actions, all she could do was protest. “Of course that’s food! What else would it be?”
He shrugged. “If it were food, I wouldn’t be starving right now.”
“You’re hungry?”
“Always.”
“All right. Let’s go get something to eat. And we can see how you like it when I snatch it out of your mouth and eat it all up.”
He scoffed. “You can try, human. But there’s no chance you’re faster than a wolf.”
Twenty minutes later, he proved himself right when he casually batted her hand away from his plate without even looking. She tried from another angle and he thwarted her there as well. She tried three more times before she sat back and crossed her arms over her chest in a huff.
“Either way, you owe me a sucker.”
He said nothing, just lifted his plate to his nose and sniffed. “What is this.”
It was barely a question. And it was the exact same thing he’d said when she’d led him in to the trendy restaurant and ferried him into a corner booth. “It’s brunch,” her answer had been then. “It’s huevos rancheros,” was her answer now.
Both of her answers had won her nothing but a skeptical stare. As if he were reminding her that she was just saying words that made no earthly sense to him.
She figured that when you were a wolf shifter with little to no contact with the outside world, the word ‘brunch’ would be just as stymying as Spanish.
“You’ll like it,” she reassured him.
He sniffed again, frowned at his utensils, and dug in to his food.
She hadn’t expected good table manners, but this was a little like that scene in Beauty and the Beast when he first eats porridge in front of Belle.
He hunched his shoulders down around his plate and used only his spoon, shoveling food into his mouth before he’d even swallowed the last bite. He didn’t look up once and when, thirty five seconds later, his plate was completely clean, he grabbed his glass of water and chugged it dry. “What?”
“That … was really something to see. Apparently for the entire restaurant.” She gestured around at the various patrons who were all gaping at the show Phoenix had just put on.
He shrugged, looking a little uncomfortable. “I was hungry.”
“So am I, but I’m not going to l
ick my plate clean. It’s bad manners.”
If she’d thought that Phoenix’s stare was cold and dead before, it was nothing compared to now. It was almost as if her words had thrown some cosmic emotional switch within him and she watched as he completely shut himself off from her, from the restaurant, from the entire world. He stared at a point over her shoulder and gritted his teeth.
She tried a few different times to draw him back into conversation, but he wouldn’t even look directly at her.
She finished eating, paid the bill and led him back out to her car.
This was really not going well. She couldn’t remember the last time, if ever, a client had just completely shut her out.
“Phoenix.”
“I hate it here,” he said gruffly, his face turned toward his window, staring at all the other parked cars. “I hate this world. Human culture. There’s nothing good here for me.”
“I didn’t take you for a Debbie Downer, Phoenix.”
He rolled his head to look at her. “Should I even ask what a Debbie Downer is?”
“There’s good stuff here in the human world. Really good stuff.”
He raised an eyebrow skeptically and she took it as a challenge. “We’re about to go buy you some new clothes! You’ll love them.”
“I don’t care about clothes and I have no money to spend. I hate being in public.”
She inwardly wilted at each point he made. He was hard to please, but he wasn’t wrong. Part of what made her good at her job was her ability to predict which things would work with which clients. And he was probably right that dragging him into a thrift store right now and making him try on clothes was not likely to brighten his mood.
