by Dakota West
Quinn said nothing, just sighed unsteadily into the phone. She felt like she was on the verge of tears — here, at last, was someone who knew exactly how she felt.
“People can change,” George was saying. His voice sounded like he was outside or something. “Mom and Dad probably won’t, but their hate is their burden, not yours.”
Quinn nodded, then remembered that her brother could only hear her.
She took a deep breath.
“I need your help with something,” she said. Her hands started shaking again.
“Anything,” he said quickly. “You can come live with us in Denver, I’ll send you money for a bus, just get your stuff and get out. They’re toxic.”
“Thanks,” she whispered. “Right now, I just need advice.”
He paused for a moment on the phone.
“Shoot,” he said.
She cringed at his word choice.
“I think Mom and Dad are planning to kill the lawyer.”
Two hours later, people were streaming out of the Granite Valley police station as Quinn walked up the steps, stomach twisting nervously. A couple people cast glances in her direction — and of those, one or two looked twice, recognizing her — but most of them seemed happy to be getting off work for the day.
Over the phone, George had nearly shouted at her: “Go to the police! Of course you should go to the police!”
So here she was.
“Can I help you?” asked the receptionist, looking bored behind a desk.
Quinn swallowed.
“Yeah, can I, uh, talk to an officer please?”
The woman looked at her skeptically. Quinn couldn’t tell if she was a shifter or not, but she was tall, even sitting down, and had a no-nonsense air about her.
“What’s the nature of your concern?” she asked.
Quinn could practically feel the other woman’s eyes sliding over her face, with an expression she’d come to recognize.
It was the Where do I know you from? expression, and Quinn hoped the woman didn’t figure out that she’d seen Quinn on TV, standing behind her hateful parents.
She put her hands on the counter to steady herself.
“I have information about yesterday’s shooting,” she said.
From the corner of her eye, she could see a couple of uniformed officers turn to look at her, but she stared straight ahead, her eyes boring into the other woman’s.
The other woman’s eyebrows went up, but she maintained her cool.
“I’ll be right back,” she said smoothly, then walked into another room, leaving Quinn in the room with everyone staring at her.
Please don’t go tell everyone in town that I’m here, she thought. She knew how news travelled in towns this size: fast.
Really, she didn’t care who found out that she was there, as long as the church group didn’t, and especially her parents.
Your own parents wouldn’t do anything to you, she thought to herself. They cut off George, but they didn’t kill him.
She took a deep breath. Voices sounded from the other room.
Your parents aren’t the only ones involved in this, she reminded herself. Someone else is doing the actual shooting, and he probably doesn’t care at all about you.
The fist around her heart tightened.
“Get Ash to talk to her,” a male voice said, rising slightly in the other room.
For the second time that day, Quinn found herself trying desperately to listen while acting like she wasn’t listening.
“Ash has a human mate,” the woman’s voice said.
“Exactly.”
“He’ll be soft on her. It’s that wretched Taylor girl. Someone ought to lock her up and beat a confession out of her.”
Quinn’s hands both clenched into white-knuckled fists. She had the urge to run out the doors of the police station, but she forced herself to stay.
You’re doing the right thing, she told herself. Besides, practically any animal could outrun you.
She briefly wondered if sloth shifters existed.
There was the sound of a hand hitting a desk, and then the man’s voice again.
“I said, get Ash. He understands humans better than you do.”
Moments later, the woman reappeared. Quinn pretended she hadn’t heard her propose that she be locked up and interrogated.
“Take a seat over there,” the woman said, indicating a bench across the lobby. “Officer Spencer will be out in a moment.”
“Thanks,” Quinn said, and took a seat.
Please don’t let this be a mistake, she thought.
Five minutes later, another guy with dark brown hair, sideburns, and piercing blue eyes strode up and held his hand out to her.
“You’re the woman who has information on the shooting?”
Quin nodded.
“Follow me, then.”
They wound their way through the police station, the officer nodding to everyone they passed and Quinn trying to avoid their eyes. Finally, he opened a door to a bare room with two chairs, a table, and harsh lighting.
A pair of handcuffs was bolted to the table.
Quinn stopped in the doorway, unwilling to go any further. She had the urge to run again, but she still knew she’d get caught in seconds. Besides, what would it look like if she ran?
“Sorry about the interrogation room,” he said, sliding past her and scooting out one of the chairs. “Standard procedure. The recording equipment is set up in here, all that.”
Quinn tried to laugh off her nervousness.
“Of course,” she said. “Totally standard.”
He sat in the chair with the handcuffs in front of it, stacking them on top of each other and frowning. “We’re not even supposed to leave these in here,” he said. Then he looked up at Quinn. “You know, sometimes it’s amazingly difficult to get police officers to follow the simplest rules, I swear. Don’t leave handcuffs in the interrogation room. Don’t take your cop car home, even just for lunch. Is that so hard?”
Quinn had to smile. There was something totally charming about this guy, and about the way he seemed genuinely baffled that people couldn’t handle following the rules.
She suspected he was kind of a stickler for them.
“It doesn’t sound that hard,” she said.
He shook his head and sat.
“All right,” he said, getting out a pen and pad as soon as she sat down. “I’m Officer Ash Spencer. You can call me Ash. Can you state your name for the record?”
She cleared her throat.
“Quinn Taylor,” she said. Her voice sounded stronger than she felt.
If he recognized the name, he hid his reaction perfectly.
“Alright, Quinn,” he said, lacing his fingers together in front of himself on the table. “Tell me everything.”
Chapter Seven
Hudson
“I think they’re overreacting,” Hudson was saying. He and Julius were sitting at their dining room table, Chinese takeout containers in front of them, all totally empty. A nearly-empty Pabst Blue Ribbon sat in front of Hudson, a nearly-empty Sierra Nevada in front of Julius. “Teal and turquoise are basically the same color, and if that weirdo hadn’t been looking through our trash for the empty paint cans, he’d have no idea our moulding isn’t up to the neighborhood association’s standards.”
Julius shook his head, idly flicking one fingernail against his near-empty bottle.
“Maybe we should report him for those god-awful dogs he has. I swear I think they’re having seizures every time I drive up.”
“Maybe we could rig something to bark at him every time he drives up,” Hudson said, a smile playing around his lips.
“There’s nothing against motion-triggered recordings in the Neighborhood Handbook,” Julius said.
A mischievous glint came into his eye, and he looked at Hudson.
“There are a thousand things we could do to piss him off that are perfectly within regulations.”
Hudson le
aned back in his chair, grinning. He knew that people didn’t understand what Julius saw in him and vice versa, but it was stuff like this. Julius tempered his worst instincts, and he had a way of bringing out Julius’s devious side.
“Just sign him up for anti-shifter newsletters, wait for everyone in the neighborhood to see them, and then watch him squirm,” he said.
“Blow dandelions into his front yard,” Julius said.
“Throw—”
Julius’s phone, sitting on the table, went off, rattling the cardboard and plastic containers. Julius sighed.
“Just ignore it,” Hudson said. He swallowed the last of his beer and set it back on the table.
Julius was already looking at it, frowning.
“It’s Ash,” he said, and answered it.
Thirty minutes later, they were walking through the halls of the police station. They both still wore jeans and t-shirts — Julius’s from his law school, Hudson’s plain black.
Ash had refused to tell Julius what was wrong over the phone, and Hudson wished that the man would be a little less stubborn. Fuck regulations, he thought. There was almost nothing that Julius handled worse than uncertainty. Not that his mate was controlling, exactly. He just had some pretty strong opinions.
They rounded a corner and knocked on the door to Ash’s office.
“Come in,” Ash’s voice boomed.
“What’s—”
Julius stopped in the doorway, and Hudson had to look around him.
Quinn was sitting there, looking nervous in an old, ugly chair.
Hudson’s bear stirred, and he closed his eyes, trying to fight it down. That was something he’d never been particularly good at.
“Hi,” she said.
“Sit down,” Ash said, waving his hand at two equally ugly chairs, also facing his desk. It was the second time that day that they’d been sitting opposite Quinn.
Sooner or later, this specific arrangement ought to lead to something good, he thought, taking his seat.
“All right,” said Ash. “Before we can do anything, you’ve got to tell them what you told me.”
Julius was sitting stiff-backed in his chair, and Hudson could feel his anticipation mixing with Quinn’s anxiety.
She took a deep breath.
“My parents are trying to kill Julius,” she said.
By eleven that night, they were still in the police station. They’d moved to a conference room, with Ash and someone else drawing on a whiteboard. On it was a pretty bad drawing of the courthouse, even worse drawings of the crowd, and then an approximation of the buildings around it.
Half the police force was there too. Some standing, some sitting, a few quietly talking on cell phones.
“I don’t know,” Quinn kept saying. There was a half-empty and stone-cold cup of coffee in front of her. “I told you everything, twice. Please, let me get back to the motel. They’re going to find out where I’ve been.”
Ash and one of the other officers exchanged looks.
“Can you call them again?”
“They already don’t believe that I’m still window shopping,” she said. “I’ll tell them that I went for a drink by myself, but that’ll already piss them off, if they even believe me.”
The other officer in front opened his mouth, but Ash cut him off.
“Thank you for your help, Quinn. I don’t want to further endanger your life—” here, he shot a look at the other officer, “—since whoever’s willing to shoot this man is probably willing to shoot you too.”
The other officer had the decency to look slightly embarrassed.
“We’ll drive you,” Hudson volunteered.
Julius’s eyebrows shot up, but he ignored it. With everything that had happened in the last couple of hours, they couldn’t spend time with the girl they both knew should be theirs.
Quinn looked nervous again for a moment, but then seemed to remember where she was and why she was there.
“Thanks,” she said.
Ash frowned. “I think that’s against protocol,” he started, but Julius and Hudson both stood.
“We promise not to kill her, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said.
“We’re not even finished,” Ash said.
“We’ve been going over the same thing for an hour now,” Julius said. An edge of irritation was starting to creep into his voice. “SWAT guys watching all the roof access, officers stationed throughout the crowd. Body armor. Quinn’s listening to everything her parents say. Hudson’s absolutely not attending this event.”
With that last statement, he turned his head and shot a look at his mate.
Hudson tried to look innocent. Like hell Julius was keeping him away, but there was no point in fighting.
“What else is there to figure out? We’re going home,” Julius said.
Then he stood and walked from the room. Hudson gave the collected officers a what are you gonna do? shrug and walked out behind him, Quinn trailing.
When they got to the steps of the police station, Julius stopped for a moment. Then he gave himself a good, long shake.
“AAARRRGGHHHHH!” he shouted.
Quinn’s eyes went wide.
Then Julius took a deep breath and turned to them.
“You want shotgun?” he asked Quinn.
Hudson could tell she was about to decline, so he slid into the backseat of Julius’s Prius before she could.
As Julius pulled out of the parking lot, there was dead silence. Then Quinn spoke up.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. Hudson could still smell the anxiety rolling off of her, a potent mixture of fear and uncertainty.
And... something else.
“I know that doesn’t mean much,” she said. “Given what I do and all, but I’m moving out. I’m done. I can’t stand them anymore. My brother in Denver is going to let me live with him while I figure stuff out.”
“You came forward at risk to your own personal safety,” Julius said. His voice sounded just a smidge too proper to Hudson, and he could tell that his mate was fighting with his desire for the girl.
“Given your parents, I’m just glad you don’t want us dead too,” Hudson said, leaning forward in the back seat. That put his face practically on Quinn’s shoulder, his knees already up against the seat in front of him.
Once more, he wished that Julius hadn’t insisted on buying a Prius. The car just wasn’t built for people their size.
There was shock on Quinn’s face, which transitioned quickly to embarrassment. Then she shook her head, looking down.
“I can’t believe they’d do this,” she said, quietly. “I mean, I can, but... they were pretty regular parents, you know?”
Tears began to gather in her eyes. Hudson had the urge to comfort her, wrap his arms around her, hold her tight and tell her that no one would ever be shitty to her again.
Instead he did nothing.
You can’t have her, he reminded himself.
“They went on about how awful shifters were a lot, but they also checked my homework and baked cookies and got excited at my college graduation,” she said.
A single tear made its way down her face, and Hudson bit the inside of his lip, forcing himself not to wipe it away.
“We don’t choose our parents,” he told her. “God knows I didn’t.”
He exchanged a look with Julius in the rear view mirror, wondering if he should go on. He didn’t like to talk about his past lives too much — not the one where he’d been a drug-running biker, and especially not the one where he had shitty parents.
Quinn half smiled.
“How are your parents fucked up?” she asked, softly. There was a hint of camaraderie in her voice, and before he knew it, Hudson was telling her the whole story.
“I was born in Oakland, before shifters came out,” he said. “Most shifters live in the woods, you know, but my parents lived in this one-bedroom apartment in the city because that was all they could afford, between my mom’s prescri
ption drug problem and my dad’s drinking.”
Quinn’s eyes were wide, drinking in his story.
Then she frowned.
“Don’t most shifters have three parents?” she asked.
Hudson nodded. “That’s how it’s supposed to work,” he said. “Mine weren’t really even mates, though. They had a one night stand when they were both trashed at a dive bar one night, and I got made. And back then, you got married if you got knocked up.”
“Oh.” Quinn paused. “I’m sorry.”
Hudson shrugged. He knew it wasn’t a fairy tale.
“So they were both with the wrong person and pretending that they weren’t shifters. I think the strain of not shifting put a lot of stress on them both.”
She looked quizzical.
“It’s not healthy for shifters not to shift,” Julius explained. “It’s kind of like if you were trapped in a little room all day. Makes you crazy.”
Quinn nodded.
“My mom was mostly high and my dad was mostly bouncing from job to job, drinking with his human friends, coming home and shouting at us and then falling asleep on the couch.”
He paused, but something in Quinn’s face spurred him on.
It doesn’t matter if she knows, he thought. She’s out of your life soon enough.
“My earliest memory is climbing on the kitchen counter and going through all the cabinets, trying to find cereal,” he said. “My second earliest memory is of my dad, coming home drunk and trying to teach me to fight.”
By now, his hand was holding onto the seat, next to Quinn’s shoulder, and she glanced at it.
Hudson started to move it away, but not fast enough.
Quinn put her hand on his.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes staring into his.
Her touch nearly tingled, it made him feel so alive.
He managed a smile.
“I got a lot of black eyes until I learned to fight back,” he said. “But they never tried to assassinate someone, so I guess we’re even.”
He winked, and managed to get a smile out of Quinn.
“At least you turned out okay,” she said encouragingly.