by Selena Scott
According to the physical therapist that Phoenix had started seeing three times a week, the New Day Center was the best shifter assimilation center in Portland, Oregon and he and his siblings had lucked out with their placement here.
It did not make Phoenix think highly of shifter assimilation centers if the best one there was didn’t know better than to put him in a cage. Well, a cage with couches and a bowl of fruit but still. A cage was a cage.
The door juddered as it was pulled open and all three Wolf siblings swung their heads to see who was coming in.
It was that Diana woman again. The one who wore her hair tight enough to make Phoenix’s scalp ache just looking at her. Apparently she was in charge around here and Phoenix could understand why. She had a real bird-of-prey thing going on, eyeing everyone with barely masked suspicion, ready to strike with speed and accuracy the moment she scented danger.
Orion rose up as Diana stepped into the room. Dawn shrank back against the couch. Phoenix didn’t move a muscle. He badly wanted to rise to his feet and stand alongside his brother. He wanted to show that he was not caught unawares. That he would protect his siblings at all costs. That he was fit and ready for whatever came next.
But the frustrating truth of the matter was that he was not fit. And not only could he not protect his siblings right now, he was a total liability to them. Not to mention the fact that in order to rise up and stand alongside Orion, he’d have to grab the most-hated crutches that leaned against the side of the couch and drag his aching ass up. Only to then limp across the floor.
No. He’d rather look like he didn’t care than appear wounded. He lifted his hands and folded them behind his head, letting his eyes go dead as he stared at Diana. He kept his expression blank as three people filed in after her.
One of them was a male. Large, though nowhere near as large as Orion. From the scent coming off of him, he was a shifter as well. Black bear maybe.
Phoenix desperately wanted to rise to his full height in the presence of this unknown male. He gritted his teeth and bit back a growl. Dawn shrank back even further.
The other two people were females. One had dark, almost black hair and was pretty. The kind of woman that Phoenix would go for if he were trying to mate for the evening. The other had short red hair and leopard print glasses that looked like they weighed a half pound. He sneered and looked away, not in the least understanding why humans chose to adorn themselves in such ugly, useless fashions. Did that woman honestly think that she could adequately flee from danger with those things sliding down her nose?
“Orion, Dawn, and Phoenix, I’d like you to meet your mentors.” Diana stepped aside and swept a hand toward the three new people. “As I explained before, your mentor will be on call and at your disposal for whatever you might need over the next few months. They are trained to help you assimilate into human culture and to help you cultivate and stick to goals for your future.” Diana cleared her throat. “Dawn, we’ve matched you with Quill. Phoenix, we’ve matched you with—” please not the goofy redhead, please not the goofy redhead, please not the goofy redhead. “Ida.”
Damn. They’d matched him with the goofy redhead. Who was smiling nervously at him while she wiggled her fingers around in what he supposed was some rendition of a wave. Waving in general was a human tradition he was familiar with. Whatever the hell this woman was doing with her hand was not something he’d seen before. He glanced at her hand and then back at her face. Whatever expression he was making, it made the redhead drop her hand and shift on her feet.
“And Orion, you’ll have Rose.”
Lucky bastard. His brother got the attractive one—
“I thought you were going to mentor me,” Orion cut in, his blunt-featured face pulled into a slight frown.
“Me?” Diana asked in surprise, her professional demeanor slipping for the first time since she’d stepped into the room. “No, no, no. I don’t mentor shifters anymore. I run the center. No, no. Rose here will be a great match for you.”
Orion looked wholly unconvinced.
“I’ll trade you,” Phoenix said, looking at his brother lazily. “Yours is more attractive than mine.”
There was a sudden tremor that rocked over the humans in the room and Phoenix became immediately aware of the fact that he must have committed some kind of faux pas. Humans had a very different way of communicating with one another than wolves did. Their rules of etiquette had more layers than a tree had rings and Phoenix didn’t understand a fraction of them.
He generally didn’t care when he broke some arbitrary human rule, but this time, because of what he’d said, the redhead had ducked her head and let her hair fall in her face. Her shoulders were tucked in a bit.
A strange instinct whipped through Phoenix. A protective one. He’d hurt the woman, inadvertent as it may have been, and now he found himself angry at himself for his ignorance and his carelessness. Maybe it was because the woman was small and fragile looking, like his sister, but Phoenix felt an unexplainable need to make up for the pain he’d caused her.
He just had absolutely no idea how to do that. If he spoke, he might make it worse. And there was no human custom he knew of to right this wrong.
He felt helpless.
There was almost nothing he hated more than feeling helpless.
But then, to his great surprise, the redhead lifted her head, her hair fell back from her face and he saw that she wasn’t shrinking in on herself, the way that Dawn often did. No. This woman was quaking with laughter. The other humans in the room looked distinctly uncomfortable, but not her. No, she was laughing and smiling and shaking her head, the glass in her glasses catching the overhead lights and going a blank white as she turned her head.
“I’ve never worked with a true shifter before,” she said in a surprisingly pleasant voice. She took a step toward him. “You have no social filter, do you? You’ll just say whatever pops into your head?” She rubbed her hands together. “This is gonna be fun.”
Fun?
For Phoenix, fun was wrestling the hell out of his brother when their energy got too pent up. It was racing, low to the forest ground, trying to beat Dawn and failing every time. It was howling, loud, adjacent to a campsite and scaring the shit out of a bunch of campers drinking beers and roasting sausages over a fire. That was fun.
Spending time learning how to pay his bills and vacuum his floors with Glasses over there? Yeah. Not his definition.
But he’d already gotten a taste of what it might feel like to hurt her and he had no ambition to do it again. So, holding her eye contact, he merely nodded.
“Right,” Dawn said with a quick clap of her hands, as if she was anxious to move past the awkward moment. “Let’s get you all started.”
Phoenix watched as the redhead made her way across the room to sit between him and Dawn on the couch. She moved extremely inefficiently, he noticed, with a swing in her hips and a tilt to her head, her hands fluttering up to fix her hair. He tried to look around her in order to watch this Quill person approach Dawn, but at the last second, right as she approached him, the redhead tripped on absolutely nothing and came tumbling toward him.
His reflexes shot his hands out to her shoulders, steadying her, and his whole left side lit on fire with the unexpected movement. He grimaced against the pain, his eyes boring into hers at close range, unable to control the rage and fury and helplessness he felt in the face of pain this extreme. Her eyes, a light brown, went wide behind her glasses as she stiffened where he touched her.
Phoenix unceremoniously dumped her over onto the couch where she bounced against the cushions.
“Ohmygosh,” she gushed, inexplicably sucking air in through her teeth and making a face like she was the one in excruciating pain, not him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t hurt you did I? I can be really clumsy. Something I’m working on, but apparently all the adult ballet classes in the world can’t help you make a good first impression.” She pushed her glasses up and gave him an expression he
couldn’t interpret.
He had no idea what she was talking about.
But she was looking at him in that way that humans did when it was apparently your turn to speak. He cast about for something to say. “Maybe it’s the shoes.”
“My shoes?” she blinked down at the hot pink monstrosities strapped on at the ankle. They had about four inches of heel and made her foot arch in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. “What’s wrong with my shoes?”
What was wrong with them? Where did he even begin? It was all so obvious. There was no way she could run from danger in them. They made her foot point in a way that was obviously going to deform her at some point. They were a completely impractical color, she could never camouflage herself in shoes like that.
How was all of that not obvious to her?
Oh. He understood. Maybe she was dumb. Maybe Diana had figured that teaching Phoenix to be human was totally futile so she might as well assign him the dumb mentor and not waste someone else’s valuable time.
The redhead was still looking at him like it was his turn to talk. “For starters,” he grumbled. “You can barely walk across a room in them.”
Her face pinched down, her lips poking out. Phoenix had just enough time to notice that they were actually a pleasing shade of pink before she was talking again and all thoughts of her appealing-ness went right out the window. “But they’re so cute. And I need to wear high heels. Without them, I’m a munchkin.”
He stared at her.
“Oh. You probably don’t know what a munchkin is, do you? Basically, it just means short.”
He cast his eyes from the top of her head, down the dress thingy she was wearing, to her bare legs, and finally down to the ridiculous shoes. Yes, he supposed that without the shoes, she would be short. Even for a human woman. But why someone would wear something so impractical just to unsuccessfully and ostentatiously augment a physical aspect of their body was completely beyond him.
He looked back at those light brown eyes, trying to ignore her chunky glasses. “Short doesn’t matter,” he informed her.
She opened her mouth, then closed it. After a moment, she tipped her head to one side, making the ends of her red hair touch one shoulder. “What does matter?”
“Fitness,” he answered immediately, without anticipating just how vulnerable it would feel to answer her honestly. “It matters that your body is in working order. Everything else is not worth worrying about.”
“Ah.” An intelligent light came on behind her eyes, as if she saw everything he wasn’t saying. As if she could see into his brain, into every humiliatingly painful hour he’d spent healing in a hospital bed. All the changed dressings, all the sympathetic looks from doctors and nurses who’d handled his broken body. All the excruciating hours of physical therapy it had taken just for him to hobble into this center, an invalid.
He immediately rethought his theory about her being dumb. She was strange and he didn’t understand her, but she definitely wasn’t dumb.
He waited unhappily for her to say something nice to him. Everyone was always saying something nice to him about his injury. Reassuring him that he was healing fast. That tomorrow was a new day. That once he was done healing, his body would be different, but not necessarily worse.
He hated nice.
Nice made him furious. Nice made him want to crack thick human skulls together.
But Glasses didn’t say anything nice. Instead she lifted her arms to either side of her head and made two fists. “I am fit,” she told him. “See? I’m strong.”
He looked at the slight shadow that ran the middle of her arm as she flexed. Yes, he supposed that for a human woman, she had admirable arm muscles. But still, they looked measly and impotent to him. What did muscles matter if she couldn’t even walk across a flat surface without tripping on her own feet?
He said nothing.
“Right.” She dropped her arms and chewed on her bottom lip. “Well, I haven’t had a chance to go over your case file yet, so I’m not sure what will be on our schedule for the next few weeks. But is there anything you’re particularly looking forward to?”
He stared blankly at her.
“Maybe getting you some new clothes?” Her eyes dropped to his shirt.
This woman and her fashion hangups. What did he care about his clothes? They fit fine and sure, his bright blue shirt was not camouflage material and it had these dumb googly eyes on it. But it really didn’t matter what he wore right now. If something or someone attempted to attack him, his clothes would not be the problem. His bum left side would be the problem. Clothes mattered naught to him when he was dead meat anyhow.
“No?” she said, reading his expression. “Then maybe trying some new foods? Or getting to know other people? We could go to a bar and try to make some friends?”
“I’ve been to bars.” A handful of times. They were where he’d met the handful of women he’d slept with. He had no idea why Glasses would want to take him to a bar to meet women. He frowned. Actually, he didn’t like the idea of her in a bar at all. She’d probably trip on her ridiculous shoes right into some pervert’s lap. Her glasses would fly off, she’d have no idea where she was and she’d happily hold his hand as he escorted her somewhere he could get her naked.
He frowned, hating the image that had just appeared in his head.
“Okay. Well, I guess what I’m saying is that it won’t be all work-work-work with me. I’ll make sure we do fun stuff everyday as well.” She glanced down at the lit up brick of a phone in her hand. Phoenix didn’t restrain his sigh. Humans and their phones. Another thing he’d never understand. Who wanted to be contactable at any moment? Wasn’t the whole point of peace that you were truly alone? Quiet and alone and peaceful?
“Look, I hate to bail on you, but I actually have a meeting with another client lined up right now. So I’ve gotta jet. Are you free tomorrow morning? Say, nine o’clock? I’ll get your address from your file and meet you at your place? I’ll have read up on you by then and together we can make a plan for how we should proceed. Sound good?”
He blinked at her. No. That sounded terrible. He didn’t want to do fun stuff with this woman. He didn’t want to do boring stuff. He didn’t want to do human stuff. He just wanted to heal enough to be able to shift back into his wolf form and get the hell out of Portland. Across the couch, Dawn caught his eye.
She was painfully shy around strangers, having never spent any time with anyone but her brothers. But with Orion and Phoenix, she was actually quite fiery. She narrowed her eyes at him as if she sensed that he was about to be rude to Glasses and tell her not to bother coming around. Dawn’s eyes were a warning to him.
They’d agreed, as a pack, a family, to give the human thing as good a shot as they could. If only because it would increase the level of care he received and they could all go back to being wolves even faster.
He sighed. “Sounds good,” he muttered to Glasses.
“Lovely!” She shot to her feet with the tiniest wobble on her heels and suddenly she was leaning down, shoving herself into Phoenix’s space. He pressed himself as far back into the couch as he could, breathing hard and tensing at her attack, but all that happened was that her warm lips pressed into his cheek for a brief second. “See you tomorrow then!”
She pulled away from him, did that silly wagging thing with her fingers and turned away. He watched her lean down, kiss Orion’s mentor on the cheek, and then do the same with the male. Quill.
Phoenix’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t trust this Quill guy and the cheek kissing wasn’t helping. He’d seen humans kiss one another’s cheeks before. But never quite as freely as Glasses was doing. She scuttled out the door of the room and was gone, leaving Phoenix feeling itchy and uncomfortable and just wanting this day to be over.
CHAPTER TWO
The Director peered over the top of his glasses as he stared out the window at the jungle-ish green that almost swallowed the entire view. God, he hated it here. He w
anted to return home to the bustle of a big city. He hated the constant, chirping noise of the wilderness around him. These days, even taking a stroll through the labs, just to hear the mechanic hum of the machines, the pained groans of their … residents. Even that wasn’t cheering him up the way it used to.
As a rule, he tried not to think back to the glory days. The days when his passions had been government sanctioned and government funded. When the internment camps where they’d mandatorily housed shifters had been the most glorious place on earth. Why, it had been nothing short of grocery shopping for him every time he visited a shifter camp.
Have hankering to see how a lynx shifter’s digestive system differs from a mountain lion shifter’s? Why, hop on down to a shifter camp, pick up one of each, bring ‘em back to the lab and get to experimenting. It had been as simple as that.
But the funding had dried up with the public’s sentiment. Sure, there were still plenty of people who still feared and hated shifters, and he supposed it might not be too hard to stir them up into a frenzy, and he still certainly had a good handful of politicians on his side. But it all seemed like so much work. And he missed the days that he’d been lauded as a leading man of science. When he’d been hailed as a defender of this great country through all the shifter research he was doing. He was protecting the general population by making sure that they understood all they could about how dangerous shifters really are.
Then Shifter Liberation Day had happened and suddenly the entire nation clutched its pearls when it was revealed what was actually happening in his labs. Torture, they called it. Inhumane. Sadistic.
The only person who’d understood, who still appreciated him was the current Secretary of Defense. Which was why he wasn’t in prison right now.
Instead, he was in a prison of a different sort. Locked away in the rotting, festering rainforest in hated south Florida, running on a shoestring budget and trying to work with a hatchet trembling over top of his neck. The Secretary of Defense had made it very clear to the Director that until he came up with some sort of good reason to continue his research into shifters, his research would have to remain an utmost secret. No one could know what he and his tiny team were doing back in their lab.