by Selena Scott
She was quiet for a long minute. “It was a long time ago. And honestly, I’m lucky that I still had Robert after she passed. If they hadn’t been married, or he hadn’t been up to the task of being a single parent then I might have gotten shuffled into the foster system. Which can be a hard place for a kid. Because of Robert I got to keep on living in my childhood home. He fed me three meals a day. That’s more than a lot of people get.”
Orion scanned back to the way his parents had raised him. Whether they were in their wolf forms or human forms, they’d been attentive and loving, playful, wise, kind, patient, stern. Yes, his parents made sure that he had shelter and food, but what they’d done for him was so much more than that. It struck him as a little odd that Diana made a point to say she was grateful for what Orion viewed as the bare minimum a parent should give.
“He’s… not good at being a stepdad?” Orion guessed, trying to interpret her tone while not insulting her.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Diana said quickly, glancing at him, a reserve in her eyes that he hadn’t seen in a long time, not since they’d started to get to know one another. “I guess, yeah, I already said it. He doesn’t talk very much. After my mother died, my childhood was very… quiet.”
Reading between the lines was something that people with a lot of context were able to do well. Having grown up very far from the human world, as a wolf, context was something that Orion distinctly lacked. He was constantly trying to figure out if something was normal or strange or reasonable or bizarre. And right now? This very moment? He had no idea.
Honestly, the person he was most likely to ask about this was Diana herself and she was the one who was making it so difficult for him to understand. He decided that maybe the best course of action was to observe. Maybe he’d understand more after dinner was over, when he’d seen them together.
“How’d your mother die?” he asked, instead of pressing for more clarification on her stepdad.
“Illness. A long one.”
“Same as mine,” Orion mused sadly. “But a short one.”
“I remember,” Diana said quietly. She had, after all, been the person who’d done their entrance interviews as she’d worked to pair them up with mentors and services when they’d first joined the center.
“I bet you know all sorts of private details about all your clients.”
She sent him a little look across the car, a streetlight painting stripes across her face in the dimming evening light. “Some more than others.”
He smiled, couldn’t stop himself. “You saying I’m special?”
“Oh, quit fishing for compliments. I already called you remarkable not five days ago.”
He remembered. He’d replayed it a hundred times in his head. They pulled up to a house in a neighborhood that Orion had never been to before. There were so many hidden pockets of Portland. The house was two story and looked like it had been plunked down from another century, especially compared to all the other houses surrounding it.
The neighborhood was well-kept and neat, all the garage doors down. But the house that Diana was pulling into had an off-kilter look to it, like someone had pushed it one way and then the other. All the other houses had muted siding on them, but this house was brick with ivy crawling up the side. The front yard, contrary to the neatly kept front yards that flanked it, were a tangle of bushes and trees.
“Those are rose bushes,” Diana said. “When they bloom, this is the prettiest yard in all of Portland. They were my mother’s pet project. Robert does a good job of taking care of them these days.”
Before they had even set foot on the walkway up to the front door, the door swung open and a smaller, heavily bearded man stood there on the porch, waiting for them, his hands in his pockets and his eyes swinging back and forth between Diana and Orion.
“Diana,” he said as she bounded up onto the porch.
“Hi, Robert.” She leaned down and kissed his cheek, being at least four inches taller than he was. “This is my friend, Orion. I invited him for dinner.”
“Okay.” Robert stepped forward and took one of the bags of groceries from Orion. He held out his other hand. “Welcome.”
His words were saying one thing but his face said another. “Thank you for having me.”
The narrowed eyes and complete lack of smile didn’t make Orion feel particularly welcome, but then again, most of Robert’s face was covered in a thick gray beard. Orion didn’t always have the easiest time reading human facial expressions when their faces weren’t completely obscured with hair. He figured he didn’t stand a chance reading Robert’s face.
“I’ll get started on the pasta,” Diana said, bustling everyone inside. “Although I’m gonna leave out the sausage this time, Robert. Orion doesn’t eat meat.”
Robert looked at Orion like he was a dog walking on two legs. But he said nothing. Orion followed the two of them into the house, which was larger than it looked on the outside. There was something whimsical about the way it was decorated, but Orion couldn’t have exactly explained what it was.
He just knew that it looked different from the center, which had a very tidy, almost clinical look about the decoration. And it looked different from his house, which had never been redecorated after Wren’s grandmother had passed away. His house had a lot of pink. And a lot of framed fabric on the walls. And a whole shelf that had nothing but mugs with kittens on them.
No. This house was different than that. He made it to the kitchen and helped Diana unpack the groceries. Robert silently offered Diana and Orion a glass of the red wine that Diana had brought and they both accepted, though Orion had never tasted any before. Then, Robert took a seat at the counter next to where Diana was methodically chopping and dicing.
Neither Robert nor Diana said a word. He just looked out the window and Diana kept her attention on her task.
Orion was starting to understand what she’d meant by ‘quiet’. This wasn’t a low-level volume type of house, this was a dead silent house. This was how she’d grown up? Expected to be this silent at all times? Good grief. This was torture.
He wasn’t exactly chatty, but he wiggled against the urge to say something. Anything. For a few, horrifying, moments he was sure he was going to accidentally blurt out something inappropriate just to hear someone speak. When he’d first started at the center, his very first mentor had gone over a few worksheets with him. They were all about etiquette and which words were appropriate to say and when. He’d watched the mentor, beyond amused, as she’d had to read aloud a huge list of inappropriate words so that he’d know not to say them aloud except in very intimate company. Those were all the words he wanted to say right now. Fart! Shit! Boobs!
He was just opening his mouth to say something, anything, when he got a racing up his spine. A creepy-crawly feeling that only happened when he knew that something, or someone was watching him.
He hadn’t survived for thirty years in the wilderness for nothing. Orion always listened to his instincts. He turned on the barstool he sat on and scanned the room behind him. It was darkened, but he could make out the couches and the armchair that made up the living room. No one there. He took a deep sniff.
Cat.
Squinting, he caught a faint movement, the swish of a tail on a bookcase in the far corner. And then, when the cat moved, the reflective orbs of the animal’s eyes caught the kitchen light.
He sniffed for more information, his nose telling him more than his eyes ever could. He caught the scent of territorial fear. So, not just any cat. But a confused cat.
Bailing on the awkward scene in the kitchen, Orion rose and walked to the threshold between the kitchen and the living room. He crouched and made a low sound in his throat. Much the same way that he had the other morning with Diana, he didn’t consciously control the sound. It just kind of happened.
He heard the sound of the cat jumping down in the dark and then silence. He made the sound in his throat again. The scent of the cat intensified and then, regal
ly, an orange cat strutted out of the darkness and over to Orion.
Knowing better than to push his luck, he neither made the sound again or held out a hand to the cat. This wasn’t a dog after all, they were either going to be friends or they weren’t, and the cat had likely already made his decision. There was no persuading a cat.
So, Orion held perfectly still while the cat twined around his crouched legs, rubbing his face into Orion’s knee, flicking his tail back and forth. The cat yowled and Orion scooped him up, tucking him under one arm and petting his pretty head.
“Hi,” he said. “Soft fur, you’ve got there, little guy.”
“How’d you do that?” Robert asked, still sitting on the barstool, his eyes as wide as coins.
“Do what?” Orion asked.
“Get Romeo to trust you like that?”
“His name is Romeo?”
“Yeah.”
Orion shrugged. “I’m good with most animals. Most shifters are.”
Robert’s expression altered. Not in a good way or a bad way. It just altered.
“You’re a shifter.”
Orion’s eyes went to Diana. “Yes.”
“He’s my friend from the center, Robert,” Diana clarified, dumping pasta into the boiling water and adding herbs to a pot.
Robert said nothing in response to that, his eyes flicking between Diana and Orion again. But then his gaze landed on Romeo in Orion’s arms and his face softened. “Romeo’s got a sister around here somewhere. If you can tease her out from under the bed then I’ll be truly impressed.”
Later, Orion would realize that -as humans so often did- Robert had been speaking rhetorically. But as he saw it, he’d just been given an opportunity to not only clear out of the weirdly tense room, he got a chance to meet another cat.
He disappeared from the kitchen and came back three minutes later with a small, green-eyed black cat under his other arm. He was flanked in house cats. Phoenix would laugh his ass off if he could see his big brother now.
As it was, Diana was the one who burst out laughing. “Betcha didn’t see that coming, did you, Robert.”
Robert turned on his bar stool and his mouth dropped flat open. “She came out from the bed? And she let you hold her?”
Orion tried not to preen, but he didn’t try too hard. “Like I said, animals mostly like me.”
“I guess the vegan thing makes a little more sense now,” Robert said after a minute. “If animals take so kindly to you, I suppose it would be harder to eat them.”
Orion hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms before, but he supposed that, yeah, that was one way to put it.
“So. Orion. What do you do?”
Orion had long since learned that as vague as this question sounded, when a human asked it, they really only meant one specific thing.
“I work for a moving company. Diana found the job for me. I can’t read or write, but I’m strong.” He shrugged. “She thought it would be a good fit for me. She’s right. I like the work.”
“You can’t read or write?”
Orion shook his head, vaguely aware that Diana’s attention was bouncing back and forth, keeping close track of the conversation, her eyebrows raised.
“Nope.” He shook his head. “My siblings and I lived in our wolf forms for most of our lives, up in the hills. We came in to Portland last year, after the wildfire up there. My brother was injured, we incurred a hell of a lot of hospital bills. And now, here we are, trying to figure out how to be human.”
“Well, I’ll be.” Robert scratched his chin. “You must know the mountains pretty well, then. I’ve spent some time up there myself.”
“Dinner’s ready.” Diana started plating the food and Orion set the cats down to wash his hands, join the two of them in the dining room. The cats sat at his feet the whole meal as he and Robert talked about the wilderness that surrounded Portland. All the ways the landscape had changed over the year. It wasn’t the most scintillating conversation ever had, but it was better than the dead silence of before. Orion wished that Diana would chime in. She never did, though.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“How the absolute frick did you do that?” Diana asked the second they were pulling down the driveway and back toward Orion’s house.
Orion screwed up his eyebrows. “I told you already, animals like me.”
“No, no. Not the thing with the cats. I’m asking how the hell you charmed an entire conversation out of Robert like that.”
“Oh.” He pulled his brow down. “I just talked to him.”
Diana shook her head and stared out the windshield. She didn’t even know why she was surprised. Orion wasn’t the first client to want to spend extra time with her. He was just the first to successfully do it. There was something about this guy that made the people around him soften up. Open up.
“He loves you, you know,” Orion said after a minute.
“I know,” Diana said. “I think I just remind him of my mom. And that makes it hard for him to be around me. He misses her a lot still.”
“So do you.”
“Yes.”
It had rained while they were in Robert’s house so everything had a dreary, dripping paint look as she drove them through side streets to get back to Orion’s.
“Is the house still decorated the way your mother had it?” Orion asked.
Diana looked over at him when they pulled up to a spotlight. “How did you know that?”
He shrugged. “Nothing in there really looked like Robert to me. He seems like a pretty simple man. But all the stuff on the walls, the furniture, even the colors of the paint, it all seemed like someone else had chosen it all.”
“Yeah. My mother had a very specific… vibe.”
He rolled his head to look at her. “You know I have no idea what that means, right?”
She laughed and it sort of ended on a long, rolling sigh. When she spoke about this with other people, she used loose terms, euphemisms, tried to soften the reality of it a little bit. But she couldn’t exactly do that with Orion. First of all, he’d never understand what the heck she was hinting at, as he probably didn’t even know that people like her mother existed. Second of all, she really didn’t think that he was going to judge her, or her mother, the way so many people did.
“My mother was a witch.”
“What?”
“Well, sort of.”
The light turned green and she kept driving, grateful for a place to put her eyes.
“You mean, like, black hats and black cats? I saw some on Halloween.”
She laughed and shook her head. “No. I mean, yes. Those are witches. That’s what people usually think of. But my mother wasn’t quite like that. She was part of a religion. It’s called Wicca. She was Wiccan. And considered herself to be a witch.”
“Oh.” Orion’s brow furrowed and he didn’t say more.
Diana waited. And waited. Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe he was someone who was going to judge her mother—
“Do they get naked and do stuff in the woods?” he asked suddenly.
Diana’s eyebrows rose. “Some of them do. Yes. At really important times of the year. Or for special ceremonies.”
Orion nodded. “Phoenix and I saw a group of them maybe ten years ago. We often see campers and hikers in the mountains. Most of them are so annoying. They leave a bunch of trash behind or build huge fires that make the mountain reek for a week. But those ladies, the witches, they were really respectful.” He was quiet for a second. “They were the first naked women Phoenix ever saw.”
That made Diana grin. “But not the first naked women you ever saw?”
He pinched his lips and gave a sweet, innocent version of a smirk, devoid of any arrogance. “I’m older than he is. And my interest in that sort of thing… developed earlier.”
She laughed. Now who was talking in euphemisms? She already knew, from their entrance interview, that he’d slept with women but hadn’t had any relationships. He and his brother
used to come down off the mountain in their human forms a few times a year to find women to sleep with. When she’d spoken to Phoenix about it, she’d gotten the impression that his view of sex had been very narrow, not especially creative. But she figured that was Ida’s problem, not hers. Orion, however, had been very soft when he’d spoken about his former partners. Though they’d been a means to an end for him -a solution for horniness so that he could go back to the mountain and live in peace- he’d genuinely enjoyed each woman’s company, learning from them, connecting with them, if only for a night.
At the time, Diana had thought it was sweet, respectable. Now though, it kind of made her want to spit nails. She didn’t examine the feeling very closely.
She cleared her throat. “They were doing some sort of ceremony?”
“I guess. They were dancing in the full moon. We had shifted to our human forms so we didn’t watch very long. It felt different than watching in our wolf forms.” He knocked his fist against his leg. “So those kinds of decorations, the pictures on the wall and all the stuff dangling in the windows, that’s Wiccan stuff?”
“A lot of it. They were charms and spells that she’d made. For happiness, for protection, for luck. That kind of thing. She didn’t dabble in any of the negative side of it. Some witches will try to bring bad things down on other people. But that wasn’t my mother. Mom was a very positive person. Despite…” She cleared her throat again.
“Do witches usually marry people like Robert?”
Diana laughed. “I don’t know. I’m not sure what witches normally do. I’m not one of them. But, yeah, I understand your question. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why Robert and my mother got married. What they liked about one another. They were so different. There was genuine love there, even now, he still grieves for her. But yeah, they were kind of an odd match.”
“She was very beautiful.” He glanced at her. “I noticed in the pictures on the walls. You look just like her.”
