by Selena Scott
She was pretty much positive that when he’d voice-memoed her this morning, he hadn’t been trying to make her panties wet. But here they were. The man was walking sex. Sex personified. A living greek god.
What had they been talking about? Him quitting the center? Crap! “No. No. We’re not going to talk about you quitting the center.”
It was the last thing she wanted.
Up until six or so years ago, being a shifter in the United States was basically illegal. The only way to not get arrested if you were found out was to turn yourself in. Which meant living in one of the government run internment facilities that dotted the nation. Basically, it meant agreeing to a lifetime of imprisonment, legal experimentation, zero autonomy, and almost certain separation from one’s loved ones. Not a whole lot of incentive for shifters to turn themselves in. An awful lot of incentive to stay hidden, usually on the outskirts of society.
Orion, and his siblings Phoenix and Dawn, had done one better than outskirts. They’d simply never mixed with society before. Even after the Shifter Liberation Act, which made the internment camps illegal, and no longer required shifters to register with the government, Orion, Phoenix, and Dawn had lived in the mountains outside of Portland, Oregon, almost exclusively in their wolf forms. They’d been a tight pack and might have stayed that way, denying their human forms, if not for the wildfire that had almost killed Phoenix. Orion and Dawn had dragged their brother’s injured body in to town and straight to a hospital, where they’d all been registered in the blink of an eye.
Their plan had always been to slip back into the wilderness and continue living as wolves, but for months after the accident, Phoenix hadn’t been able to shift out of his human form. And then, when he finally could shift, he’d fallen in love with a human, his mentor at the center, actually. And he hadn’t wanted to leave for the wilderness again. Which left Orion and Dawn in limbo, trying to figure out if they wanted to return on their own or stay and form a human version of their wolf pack. So far, they’d stayed.
Needless to say, Diana did not want Orion to quit the center because he and his siblings were in more need of the services they provided to shifters than almost any other clients they’d ever had. Sending Orion out into the world with no safety net was basically begging him to spiral downhill. She’d seen it happen before. Shifters who had no support system easily fell into drug addiction, homelessness. They were exploited by opportunistic humans. She’d be damned if that happened to Orion Wolf. His enrollment at the center was deeply important to her. It was one of the only ways she could ensure that he remained safe and intact and, hopefully, happy.
The other reason she really, really did not want him to quit the center was because his brother already had. Phoenix had signed himself out of the program only two weeks after entering it. She couldn’t exactly fault him for that, considering he did so because he’d fallen in love with Ida, his mentor, and it wasn’t ethical for them to be together if she was still his mentor. But it had caused Diana some grief. This center was run on both private donations and grant money. If she lost another shifter this year, she was in danger of losing the federal grant that funded damn near half the year for her. And she could only imagine how bad it would look if she lost two shifters from the same family. Talk about a red flag.
So, no. Nope. “You’re not quitting the center.”
There was a small tremor in her voice so she put her hands on her hips and pulled her face into a stern expression to cover her emotion.
“Orion, the center is actually a pretty amazing place. Filled with resources and opportunities. If you just gave it a chance, I think you’d actually really like it here.”
He squinted at her. “I do like it here.”
She glowered. “You also like scaring off all the mentors I assign you. Which makes my job harder and means that you don’t actually get to take advantage of any of the services we offer here.”
“Diana.”
Both Orion and Diana looked up at the head that had just stuck itself out of her office window. It was her assistant, Teddy. His perfectly coiffed brown hair didn’t succumb to gravity even as he peered down at them. “I’ve got Kirby Wallace on the line for you.”
“I’ll be right up.”
Teddy disappeared back into her office but she would have bet a hundred dollars that he was crouched down and listening to the end of their conversation. Apparently Orion Wolf and his pursuit of Diana as a mentor was quite the office gossip. Yet another reason why she just wanted him to behave. Diana had absolutely no interest in being the topic of anyone’s water cooler convo.
She turned to him. “I have to go take that. Don’t smoke on the property and no more texting.”
She turned on her heel and strode away, her expensive shoes clicking authoritatively on the concrete. She could feel his eyes on her back, but she didn’t turn.
CHAPTER TWO
“Hey, Rick?” Orion asked as he and his coworker heaved and hauled a dingy couch up two flights of stairs. “How’d you meet your wife?”
“This is what you want to talk about right now?” Rick said through pained, tight breaths. He was red in the face and clearly straining under the weight of the furniture. It wasn’t the first time that Orion had wondered why Rick worked for the moving company. Orion worked for the moving company because apparently, with only a basic understanding of human culture, no ability to read or write, and a very large body, he was only qualified for what Diana had referred to as unskilled labor. He didn’t mind it though. There was something very satisfying about seeing the moving truck completely emptied at the end of the day. And as much as he didn’t really understand human culture’s obsession with money, it was nice to be able to feel like he was providing for his siblings.
“Just curious.”
“We met the usual way.” Rick made a pained groan as they finally set the couch down in the living room of the walk up. He tumbled down and parked his ass right in the middle cushion, breathing heavily, his face still red.
“What way is that?” Instead of resting, Orion just crossed his arms as he stood tall in the middle of the room.
Rick rolled his head to look at him. Orion knew his coworkers thought of him as weird. He also knew that they didn’t press him on it, whether it was because they knew he was a shifter or because they knew he was new to human culture he wasn’t sure.
“The internet.”
“Oh.” As someone who exclusively used the internet for occasional porn, this answer illuminated exactly nothing for Orion.
“A dating site,” Rick clarified. He cocked his head to one side. “Have you seen one before?”
Orion shook his head.
“Well, they’re these websites that you go on and post your picture, a few sentences about yourself and you see if you can catch any fish.”
Now Orion was thoroughly confused. He’d never heard of anything like this. “You use it to catch fish? And then you attract women based on how many fish you were able to catch?”
“No,” Rick said with a laugh. “The fish are the women.”
“Oh.” Orion had never met Rick’s wife before, and he was fairly certain that she was a human and not a fish of some kind. But there was some pretty odd porn out there that had made Orion realize that there was a whole world of human sexuality that he might never understand. “Huh.”
He made a note to ask Diana about this. Because as short as she was with him about him wanting to be her mentee, if he ever had a real question about human life, she always patiently and thoroughly answered him. Something about her calm demeanor never made Orion feel stupid.
Rick cocked his head to one side, eyeing Orion as if he knew that Orion was confused about the information he’d just presented, but when he opened his mouth to speak, he was interrupted by a chirping sound coming from Orion’s phone.
Orion pulled it out of his back pocket and couldn’t help but smile at the alarm that was going off. Instead of being labeled with words that he wouldn’
t have been able to read, Diana had helped him program it with two little cartoons that she’d called emojis. One was of a round, yellow orb and the other was of a wolf.
“Bruce is going to have to help you get the remaining boxes,” Orion told Rick, referring to their coworker who was on break downstairs.
“What? You’re bailing? It’s not quitting time yet.” As weird as the guys considered Orion to be, he was also easily the strongest amongst them and they definitely didn’t mind having him there to run a blitz on the end of any moving day.
“Gotta go,” Orion said, shaking the ringing phone at Rick. “Full moon rises in an hour, I already talked to the boss about it.”
All the color slid out of Rick’s formerly ruddy face. He stood up quickly and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Right. Right, right. Cool, man. Yeah, cool. Whatever you need to do. Do your thing.”
Sweat formed on Rick’s brow. Sweat which hadn’t even formed when he’d been red in the face and dragging a couch up multiple flights of stairs. But mention anything about a full moon and he was suddenly melting the collar of his t-shirt a darker shade of blue.
Orion nearly sighed. He should be used to this by now, the raw fear that some humans felt when confronted with an in-the-flesh shifter. Rick, pretending to play it cool, was suddenly rocking on his heels and whistling an aimless tune, looking anywhere but at Orion.
All because he, what?, thought that Orion might at any second shift into a vicious wolf that might tear his head off.
What a joke. Having spent the vast majority of his life in his wolf form, he was easily more tame as a wolf than he was as a human. As a human, Orion was sometimes thrown off by the complicated emotions and instincts that rose up in him. He was often startled by his own strength. Didn’t Rick realize that if he was worried about anything, it would never have to be Orion’s wolf form?
No. No, Rick didn’t realize that, because he’d never, ever ask about it. To him, and most humans, Orion’s wolf form was something to be delicately skirted around in conversation, politely ignored.
Diana had once explained to him that being politely ignored for being a shifter was pretty much the most he could hope for. There were very few people like her, and the other employees at the center, who had no fear or hatred toward shifters. The rest of the world was a real mixed bag. Honestly, even the shifter world itself was split down a million fault lines. The predators were uneasy around one another, the prey uneasy around the predators. The shifters that had been interned at the internment camps held resentments for the ones who’d managed to evade the camps. The shifters who’d been living in hiding in order not to be interned had to live with everything that came with years and years of keeping a monumental secret about who and what you were.
And then there was Orion, Phoenix, and Dawn. Who hadn’t been living in secret, exactly. They’d just been living completely separately from the human world. In their wolf forms except for maybe one or two day days a month, their lives had been simple, instinctual, meditative.
And now, a year since entering the confusing world of Portland, Oregon, Orion was left to wonder whether his coworker could possibly be married to some kind of fish. What a world.
Orion waved goodbye at Rick and left the apartment building.
He was about to flag down the city bus that was approaching the bus stop in front of him when a car horn beeped behind him.
“Ry!”
He knew that voice. Orion turned on his heel to see his sister, Dawn, grinning at him from behind the wheel of a tiny red car.
“Dawny!” Orion said with a laugh as he walked a circle around the car. He legitimately wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to fold his gigantic body into the passenger seat. “You’re driving!”
Even after a year of getting acclimated to the human world, it was still a shock to see his siblings doing distinctly human things. Like driving a car.
“Surprise!”
He opened the side door and jammed himself into the car, his knees practically heimliching his ribs. A humongous smile on her face, she shoved a small piece of plastic into his hand. It was one of those state ID thingies that Diana had made them all get a while ago. Although he could tell this one was even newer because the picture of Dawn was with her new short haircut, her dark hair around her chin instead of in a sheet covering her face the way it used to be.
“What’s this?”
“A driver’s license! Quill helped me get it. I wanted to surprise you guys.”
Quill was Dawn’s mentor. And he was a shifter himself. At first, Orion had had distinct doubts about him, he hadn’t thought that Quill was nearly patient enough to crack the elusive little oyster that was his sister. But then he’d taught her how to read and it was like Dawn had never stopped blooming from the inside after that. There was a sun in her heart and Orion couldn’t get over how brightly it shone. She devoured book after book these days and the human world had opened to her. She understood more about human culture than Orion or Phoenix ever would, just from reading about it. And apparently the bureaucratic world was open to her as well. Because she’d braved the government building he knew you had to go to in order to get a card like this, and that involved no small amount of bravery.
“So,” Orion said, grinning at her as he handed the card back to her. “You can legally drive this—“ he looked around at the tiny vehicle, did this qualify as an automobile? “car?”
“Yes!” she chirped before pulling away from the curb with a lurch and merging with the traffic on the main street with a speed and confidence that nearly left Orion’s lunch behind. He quickly buckled himself in.
“This is amazing,” he assured her, and then promptly went to his happy place in his head -the cave where he and his siblings used to hunker down in bad weather- while she wove them through Portland traffic at a shockingly high rate of speed.
She needled through some traffic and then out into the more secluded outskirts of Portland. It wasn’t too long before they were bumping along familiar back roads. Back roads that brought some pretty stomach-turning memories with them.
This was where Ida, Phoenix’s woman had been kidnapped last year. This was the last place they’d seen Watt, the man who’d done the kidnapping. Phoenix’s supposed best human friend.
They didn’t come back for the stroll down memory lane, however. They came back because this wasn’t only the last place they’d seen Watt. This was the last place anyone had seen Watt.
They rounded the last bend in the road and there was Phoenix, standing alone, a frown on his face. Which wasn’t unusual. He was a frowny type of person. But this was the type of frown that showed just how deep in thought he really was.
“All right?” Orion called as he and Dawn unfolded from the car. Apparently Phoenix had been let in on the driver’s license secret before Orion had because he didn’t look shocked to see them in the tiny vehicle, or Dawn behind the wheel.
“Yeah.”
“You been here long?” Dawn asked.
“Ida dropped me off about twenty minutes ago. You two cut it close with the moonrise.”
It was true. In exactly five minutes, the full moon would rise and they would be compelled to shift into their wolf forms. They had more control over their shifts than most shifters, and for them, the full moon was a very pleasurable experience. They weren’t scared of the animals they’d become nor were they deeply regretful to leave them behind when it was time to shift back into their human forms. They could switch back and forth at will, at any time in the moon cycle, but the full moon was one that even they couldn’t control.
“Eh,” Dawn said with a shrug. “Worst case scenario, we would have just pulled the car over and run the rest of the way to you in our wolf forms.”
“Catch any scent?” Phoenix asked Orion.
Orion had been the hunter when they’d all lived in their wolf forms because he was known for having the best nose out of the three of them. Honestly, he was pretty sure he had the best nose of a
ny shifter he’d ever met, but he didn’t like to brag.
He closed his eyes and took a deep inhale, letting the many layered scents of the forest each vie for his attention. To his disappointment however, just like every full moon for the last six months, he caught no scent of Watt.
“No.”
Phoenix’s expression fell. “Dammit. We better branch out and look for him.”
“Phoenix,” Dawn said carefully. I know this is important to you, but I wonder…” She cleared her throat. “I wonder if we did find him, what you’d want to do with him.”
“Dawn, he kidnapped Ida. All to get to me. All to get me to join some cult or whatever the hell it is. I want answers. I want to know if Ida is still in danger.”
“If you’re still in danger as well,” Orion reminded him.
“That too, I guess. I just want to find him.”
“Well,” Dawn said, raising her face toward the moon that was just starting to rise in one corner of the sky. “We better get to looking then.”
The siblings all let the shift come, grateful for it. For the snap of bone and stretch of muscle. Grateful for the shiveringly good sensation of letting your body be exactly who it wanted to be.
And then they were three wolves in the moonlight. A pack. A unit. A family.
And off they went, together, searching for their enemy.
***
There wasn’t a full moon that passed that Diana didn’t think of her mother. And there wasn’t a full moon that passed that she didn’t get the prerequisite call from her stepfather.
