by Selena Scott
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 any 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.
Some people called their kids on Sunday nights. Some on holidays or birthdays. Robert called Diana on full moons and she knew it was because his thoughts were full of Toni as well. As ill-matched as Toni and Robert had always seemed to Diana, he’d never remarried.
Sure enough, she was just sit
ting down on her back porch, a glass of wine in her hand and her eyes on the full moon when her cell phone rang next to her.
As it always happened these days, her heart skipped annoyingly, her subconscious slyly suggesting that it might be Orion calling. But of course it wasn’t. She was staring at the full moon, wasn’t she? That meant that right that very second, he was somewhere in the forest in his wolf form. Something she’d never seen before from him, his shift. And something she could barely admit to herself that she wanted to see.
She picked up her phone and restrained a sigh. Family was family. “Hi, Robert.”
“Diana.”
A long pause. Two people clearing their throats.
“You all right?” It was the same question he always asked her.
“Yup. You?”
“Just enjoying the evening. Sitting on my back porch with a beer.”
Diana softened a bit. Things might be awkward with Robert, and they might not be the two most compatible people on earth, but she had to admit that she was similar to the man who’d raised her up from age seven. “I’m doing the exact same thing. But with a glass of wine.”
“Huh. Any news from work?”
The conversation stuttered on for just a few more minutes before Diana put them both out of their misery and begged off. She’d bring dinner around his house sometime next week and they’d have this same conversation with one another but in person. What was it about him that made it so hard to connect to him?
Diana sighed and leaned her head back, taking a sip of wine and eyeing the moon. Loneliness struck her acutely, as it always did at the full moon. How silly was it that she and Robert were doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, sitting on their porches with a drink and mourning her mother, yet they insisted on doing it separately. She should call him back, invite him over. She knew without a doubt that he’d say yes.
Something stopped her hand. “Not tonight,” she whispered to herself. And didn’t ask herself why.
CHAPTER THREE
“I’ve been telling you for months, my dude,” Wren said the next day as she took an enormous spoonful of the ice cream in his bowl. “You’re coming on too strong for a woman like Diana.”
Orion sat in the kitchen of his house with the two closest friends he’d made since he’d joined the human world. Wren, who was technically also his landlord, and Ida, who was technically also his little brother’s girlfriend. The two women had been best friends since they were babies, but Orion had recently started counting himself among their group. He just sort of fit with them.
The one year anniversary of when he’d first met Diana was fast approaching and Orion decided that it was time to kick this courtship into gear. He decided to stop casually inquiring after his friends’ expertise and call a real meeting. He’d started by explaining the cigarette trick he’d used two days ago and her insistence that he not quit the center.
“I haven’t been coming on strong at all!” Orion insisted. “I haven’t even told her how I feel!” He scowled down at his ice cream, half eaten by his friends. “Ida talked me out of that.”
“And thank god you listened to me,” Ida said. “Or else you’d really be sunk.”
“Wait, what’s this?” Wren asked, looking back and forth between Ida and Orion. “I missed that part.”
“About two months ago he asked me how to tell Diana that he loved her and wanted to be her husband.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Wren responded, face-palming and making her ice blue hair tumble over her forehead. She was attempting to grow out her spiky locks and hating every minute of it. “Orion, you’re a maniac.”
He frowned and leaned back in his seat. “There’s some things about human culture that I’ll never understand. Like how all of you never say how you actually feel.”
“We say how we feel!” Ida insisted.
Orion raised an eyebrow at her. “How long did it take you to come clean to my brother about how you felt?”
Her pretty face drew into a scowl, her red hair tumbling to one side. “Okay, okay, so maybe people who grew up in human culture play more games than people who grew up in the wilderness.”
“That may be true,” Wren cut in. “But Ida was right to talk you out of saying that to Diana. She would have had you committed.”
He cocked his head to one side. “That’s what I want. To be committed to Diana.”
“No, that’s not what that phrase means. It means she’d send you to a mental hospital to have your brain examined,” Wren explained. “Because only crazy people tell someone they’re in love and want to be married before they’ve ever even kissed the person.”
And here they were again. These humans making things so much more complicated than they had to be. “I don’t have to kiss her to know how I feel.”
Wren rolled her eyes. “Yes, my friend, you do.”
Orion rolled his eyes back at her but apparently he didn’t do it right because both women burst out laughing at him.
“What is it with you Wolf boys and kissing?” Ida inquired. “Phoenix was very kiss-negative when I first met him and now it’s pretty much his favorite thing to do.” Her cheeks colored. “Well. It’s one of his favorite things to do.”
Wren leered at her best friend. “Do tell, little mama. I’ve been trying to pry these deets from your greedy little mind for months.”
“Nope. Nuh uh.” Ida mimed locking her lips with a key. “My sex life is not on the table tonight. We’re talking about Orion’s sex life. Or the distinct lack thereof.”
Wren burst out laughing. “God, I love when Ida burns people.” She pointed to her own spiky/floppy blue hair and the row of tattoos that lined her arms from one hand all the way to the other. “Me? People expect it from. But her? They never even see it coming.”
“Are you talking about how much of a sniper Ida is with the insults?” Quill Chabon asked as he strolled into the kitchen, his hands in his pockets. He was a mentor at the center just like Ida was, his mentee being Dawn. And he often popped by the house where the three Wolf siblings lived.
“Dawn!” Orion bellowed, his head tipped toward the stairs, making all three of the other people in the kitchen jump.
“Jeez Louise,” Wren muttered using her fingers to test her hearing. “Warn a girl next time.”
“What?” Orion asked. “Quill’s here to see Dawn.”
And I didn’t want him to go looking for her in her room. Orion didn’t not like Quill, but the few times he’d stumbled upon them in her room together, something in Orion’s gut had tightened. Dawn was a competent person, no question. But she was also the most naive in their family. Especially when it came to men. When Orion and Phoenix had integrated themselves into the human world last year, they weren’t complete novices. They’d wandered down to neighboring towns a few times a year -in their human forms of course- and sown a few oats here and there.
But Dawn? She’d never even spoken to a man who wasn’t one of her brothers before the wildfire that had forced them to integrate into the human world. It’s not that Orion wanted to keep her in a bubble free of all testosterone. Not even close. He’d love for Dawn to meet someone and light up the way that Phoenix had for Ida. It was just that there was something about Quill in particular… He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. But yeah. He didn’t want Quill in his sister’s room.
Dawn bounded down the stairs. “What?”
She skidded to a halt in the kitchen.
“Oh. Hi. I didn’t know we had a meeting today,” she said to Quill, her head cocked to one side.
“We didn’t. I just wanted to stop by and drop some stuff off with you.” He held up a canvas tote bag.
“Let’s take this outside,” Dawn said, her eyes passing over the ice cream party that was happening at the kitchen table. “We wouldn’t want to interrupt girls’ night.”
Quill laughed and followed Dawn out onto the front porch.
Orion frowned after them but was quickly drawn back into his conversati
on with the girls.
“Operation Mentor is a no go,” Wren informed him. “It’s dead and gone. Mourn it. Move on. Get over it.”
Orion blinked at her. “But the plan to make Diana my mentor is pretty much the only plan that we’ve had. You want to scrap it?”
Ida was the one who fiercely nodded. “Just because it worked for me and Phoenix doesn’t mean it’ll work for you and Diana. I agree with Wren. I actually think you need to go the opposite route.”
“Opposite of getting her to be my mentor? I already told her I’d quit the center. She hated that idea.”
“Exactly,” Wren said, pointing her spoon at him.
Orion blinked back and forth between the two women. Once again, he was lost.
“Don’t get her to be my mentor,” Orion said slowly. “And don’t quit the center.”
“Exactly,” Ida said, and this time she was the one pointing the spoon.
“Maybe it’s time for you to pick a mentor, any mentor,” Wren clarified. “And be a good little boy.”
Orion frowned. He distinctly did not appreciate that characterization.
“Seriously, Ry,” Ida cut in. “I think at this point, Diana thinks she understands all of your moves. The only way to surprise her at this point is to follow the rules she laid out. Be a good mentee, follow the rules of the center, quit trying to get her attention all the time, and see if that gets her attention.”
“I guess it would show her that I respect her wishes.” Orion could see the logic of the plan. He just didn’t want to do it. Who wanted some mid-twenties human trying to teach him how to do his taxes when he could have Diana there beside him, guiding him through his new life as a human.
“Yes!” Ida chirped, tossing her hands to the sky. “Finally, he gets it.”
“And,” Wren added with a wry little grin. “It might show her that her wishes are stupid.”