Chapter 1: Sue’s First Day at Work

Sue Andrew waited patiently outside the Human Resources office for the person who was supposed to come and show her to her desk upstairs. It was her first day working for Claw and Fang magazine and she felt a strange mixture of excited, nervous, and apprehensive.

When she had dreamed of being a writer in her teens, she had pictured herself travelling the world, searching out hidden gems, and uncovering exciting secrets. She saw herself writing for a newspaper or at the least a travel magazine, but nowadays, even newspapers were filled with photos of celebrities caught cheating on their partners and tips on how to lose weight before the summer season starts.

Coming to work for a werewolf lifestyle magazine felt a little bit like selling her soul, but she had to eat, and working freelance so that she could write whatever she wanted wasn’t exactly going to pay for her bills.

Actually, she was very lucky that her best friend Sarah had an in with the higher-ups and had helped her get the job.

“Sue Andrew?” A pretty, petite, Asian woman approached her with a bored expression on her face. She had long, straight dark hair that was so shiny she wondered if she could see her reflection in it. She was wearing a pale gray skirt suit with a dusky pink blouse underneath, topped off with a chunky collar necklace.

Sue had put her hair in a bun. She was also wearing a pair of black converse and a simple graphic black T-shirt.

“I may not be dressed right,” she finally said as she pushed her black-framed glasses up the bridge on her nose. At least she was wearing her good jeans, the ones her friend Sarah said made her legs longer.

The bored woman just turned away from her and started walking.

“Uh,” she said as she watched her go toward the elevator. “Okay, I guess I’m supposed to follow you.”

The elevator ride was made in silence while the bored Asian chick, checked her phone.

“Because of you, we’re now both late to the staff meeting, which means I’m going to have to waste someone else’s time asking them to get me caught up,” the woman said as they stepped off the elevator.

“Yep, sure, that’s totally my fault,” Sue agreed with her sarcastically. “You know what else is my fault? Global warming and J.F.K. All me.”

She turned and gave her a look. She knew that look well. It was the look that said, “you’re weird.”

“Just find a seat in there and keep your mouth shut,” she told her before opening the door to the boardroom. She went in ahead of her, darting off to an empty seat to the side. There were around twenty people all sitting around a large oval table. At the head of the table were two people, a man and a woman, who were clearly leading the meeting.

The editor-in-chief and the features editor.

Sue had done her research online before accepting the job. The company belonged to the West pack, a powerful pack of werewolves on the west coast, ironically.

The magazine was just one of their many businesses, and the alpha’s grandson and granddaughter were the ones put in charge.

Cousins Knight and Leslie West. Both tall, gorgeous, and intimidating as hell.

Knight West was in the middle of talking about the magazine’s next issue when Sue entered the room. She looked around for an empty seat, but there wasn’t one. She decided that the best thing she could do was go to the back of the room and stand against the wall, trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible.

As she walked, though, she began to realize how tight a fit it was between people’s chairs and the wall. She accidentally knocked more than one person with her arm, earning tuts and groans as she went.

As she finally reached the back of the wall, she noticed that Knight West had stopped talking and the whole room had plunged into silence. Sue turned reluctantly, knowing that they would all be looking at her when she did.

While Leslie West seemed amused by her accidental interruption, Knight was outright glaring at her. The man’s dark eyes bore into her, making her feel like she had to hide behind something. Or else...

Leslie put her hand on her cousin’s shoulder and took over for him, going back to the topic at hand.

“As Night was saying, we want a new twist on the festival season issue. If we see one more proposal about cute rain boots and flowers in your hair, we’re going to lose our shit,” Leslie said. “There’s also the rise in werewolf-only hotels springing up. We want someone to pitch us an idea for that. Is it right, is it wrong? Should we really be segregating ourselves after all the hard work to give us all the same rights?”

“Doesn’t your pack own one of those hotels?” Sue heard herself saying.

Everyone in the room turned and looked at her again.

“We do,” Leslie said. She waited for her to continue speaking and she found herself wishing that she should had just kept her mouth shut.

“Well, why don’t you send one of your human staff writers to go stay there for a weekend and write about how they felt?” Sue said. “I mean, eighty years ago, when the world found out about werewolves, everyone went insane. Neighbors turned on each other. The government introduced all these new laws that now seem ridiculous and barbaric to us. It was the humans who wanted to separate themselves from the werewolves, and now that things are finally good, the werewolves are opening up places like this.”

Leslie seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say, while Knight was just still full on glaring at her.

Wow, she thought. Way to piss off your boss on your first day, Sue.

“So you want to write about how it feels to be on the other side of that discrimination for once? You think it’s the same thing?” she asked.

“No, not at all,” she insisted.

Back when the world had first learned that werewolves had evolved right alongside them, there had been camps set up to round them all up, which didn’t go well.

Werewolves were stronger than humans, which frightened a lot of people and made them feel unsafe. It was the second World War, and the part the werewolves played in it, that changed things. Suddenly it wasn’t humans versus werewolves. It was right versus wrong. When faced with invasion by the Nazis, werewolves were no longer the things giving people nightmares. It had begun with werewolves volunteering to be part of specialized infantries and ended with them fighting alongside their human brothers. When a person found their lives threatened it didn’t seem to matter who had your back as long as they had it. The end of the war had seen the world go back to normal, or at least a new kind of normal.

“But, to be honest, you don’t know what it was like back then, either,” Sue pointed out. “You weren’t born. None of us were. All we know is what our grandparents told us and what we were taught in school. There will probably always be some hostilities between our two species, but things are nothing like they were back then.”

Leslie seemed to think over what she was saying before she finally nodded. “Okay. You need to go with a wolf, so I’ll try and set that up for you sometime next week. Just make sure you go in with an open mind.”

Sue nodded quickly. With that, Leslie went back to talking about something else and Sue found herself sinking back against the wall. Her first day and she had her first assignment. Plus, she was going to get to stay at a nice hotel and try out all the facilities. She wondered if she could get her friend Sarah to go with her when she got back to town. She worked in the fashion department and was in New York buying clothes for a photo shoot she had coming up with Drake Collins, a hot werewolf movie star.

Smiling to herself, she glanced back at the front of the room, only to find that Knight was still looking at her. His glare had sort of morphed into a pained look, as though having Sue in the same room with him was physically painful for him. He didn’t know what the man’s problem was, but it was starting to piss Sue off. He didn’t care how gorgeous the other man was. There was no excuse for being a dick.

The meeting didn’t last much longer, and when it was over, the bored Asian chick came up to her.

“Follow me,” she said, sounding beyond fed-up that she had to speak to her again.

As she exited the room, along with all the other people milling about, she couldn’t stop herself from glancing back over at Knight West. The werewolf was putting things away in a folder, his thick, dark eyebrows drawn together.

Maybe it’s not just me he doesn’t like, Sue thought to herself. Maybe he has an unnatural hatred of folders, too.

She was led down the corridor to what looked like a bullpen, with fifteen desks all dotted about the space.

“That’s yours,” Bored Asian Chick told her, pointing over to a desk in the back. With that she turned to leave, not offering up any further instruction.

“Uh, I’m Sue, by the way,” she told her. She smiled at her, hoping to get something back. The woman just looked her up and down and huffed.

“I know.”

With that, she left, leaving Sue to make her way through the throng of desks to the back of the room.

.........