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..........Knight West went back to his office on the top floor and shut the door behind him, ignoring his secretary as she tried to talk to him about something. He walked over to the large window behind his desk and stared out at the view of the city. With his hands on his hips, pushing back his suit jacket, he took several deep breaths and tried to rein in his wolf.Knight was someone who prided himself on his control. The West pack had drummed into him that being in complete control of his baser instincts was what made him strong. As a boy, he had struggled more than the others, finding it hard not to lose his temper or act on his instincts.So it annoyed him that some random woman could walk into the room and rattle his wolf so badly. It didn’t make any sense to him. Well, he would admit the girl was kind of cute with her glasses and dimples, but she wasn’t in the same league as the other women Knight had dated. It just at the moment that woman walked into the room, Knight’s nostrils were a
HR wasn’t a place Sue had been particularly looking forward to going again so soon. The elevator doors opened with a ding and she reluctantly stepped off. She kept trying to tell herself that they had probably only called her back down because there had been a mix-up with the paperwork she had signed that morning or something, and not because she was going to get fired.She rounded the corner to the Human Resources department and stopped in her tracks. Coming out of the office was Knight West, looking unfairly hot in his dark gray suit and pale blue shirt. He looked seriously pissed-off about something, probably Sue, as he ran his hand through his dark hair.Their eyes met and Knight visibly flinched. He looked pained to have to be breathing the same air as Sue, which was just plain rude. She frowned. What is his problem?And without another word, Knight walked past Sue, making sure to keep as much space between them as he could in the hallway. Sighing, Sue shook her head and knocked
There was an all-staff office memo waiting for Sue the next day when she logged into her computer.“Crap.”Sue read the email, cringing and hoping that no one knew it was because of her. It seemed that the HR lady was even keener than Sue had originally thought. The office relations seminar was happening that afternoon.The guy at the desk opposite her, who she had spoken to briefly yesterday, looked over at her.“You get the email?”Sue shrugged, trying to play it cool. “Yeah. Sucks, right?”“You have no idea, newbie.”“Sue Andrew,” Sue told her.“Jake Miller. We had one of these last year, too. It was awful,” Jake told her. “Not only do we have to sit there and listen while she tells us what is and isn’t appropriate conduct for the workplace, but we also have to act out these insane scenarios she dreams up.”“What, like the ‘no means no’ workshops we had to do in high school? Which, by the way, were totally redundant for me.”Jake smirked. “Oh yeah, I remember doing those. I had to
Sue tried to spend the rest of the day burying herself in work. It seemed to her that everyone in the office knew who she was now. As she got on with her work, every so often she would hear the sound of laughter escape from Jake, and when he turned to look at her, Jake would simply shake his head, still laughing, and say, “eyebrows.” She didn’t know why it was still so funny to her new friend. It was nearing the end of the day when she got an email alert. She opened it reluctantly, hoping that she wasn’t once again being called down to Human Resources. She released a tense breath when she saw that it was from Sarah. To: andrew.s@fangandclaw.comFrom: murphy.s@fangandclaw.comCake and coffee? *****This right here was why she loved her. She quickly typed out a reply telling her that she would meet her outside in an hour. By the time she met her, it was raining a very fine, misty rain, the kind that she hated. As she walked through the lobby, she grumbled to herself. Luckily, there
On Sue’s third day at her new work, she made sure to leave her apartment early, seeing as she was biking to work. It felt good to be getting some fresh air so early in the morning, and in her mind, it totally canceled out the cake she had eaten the day before, even though her ride to work was less than half an hour.It was a beautiful morning to be out on her bike and she actually started to feel better about everything. She was sure that she had just exaggerated Knight West’s annoyance to her in her head and that she hadn’t screwed up too badly by sending Sarah that email and then proceeding to humiliate him and his perfect eyebrows in front of all of his employees. She was sure that deep, deep, deep down, Knight had a sense of humor. Sarah claimed to like the guy, but that could have been just because she wanted to fit in with Jared’s family and was secretly lying to herself. That, or the man’s high cheekbones, chiseled jaw and olive skin had mesmerized her so much t
After the disastrous start to the day, things started looking up for Sue. She started doing research on werewolf-only hotels, reading reviews of them online and seeing what humans had to say about them. There was the usual hate-filled crap from humans who had never even stayed there but wanted the world to know how much they hated werewolves.Once werewolves came out, so to speak, they were automatically banned from most hotels. It was hard for Sue to really understand it. She had grown up with werewolf neighbors down the street and werewolf kids in her school. Things had certainly changed. By law, humans and wolves were equal, but in truth, there were always people on both sides who hated the other, who thought that they were better. Hatred tended to spread like a disease, infecting people far too commonly.She was so engrossed in her research that she was startled when Sarah came up behind her and peered over her shoulder.“Whatcha doing?”She jumped high
It actually annoyed Knight that he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Sue all day long. The accident hadn’t been his fault. It wasn’t that he felt guilty about it, exactly, but he still felt off for some reason. Sue had been injured. Knight had smelt the blood, however minor, from her skinned knee. He hadn’t been around humans a great deal, but he knew they were more fragile than wolves.As the day wore on, he found himself wanting to check up on Sue more and more. It was really starting to bother him that some reckless, annoying human, who smelled incredible, was in his thoughts so much.By the time five o’clock came around, Knight had resigned himself to what he was about to do. It felt inevitable that his feet would take him to the bullpen.Some of the people in the office noticed him and instantly straightened up, trying to look like they were doing more work than they actually were. It was a common thing. Sue was at a des
It was so strange for Sue to see Knight West standing in a Howlers. Although it was well known that the West pack, and more specifically the West family, owned the chain of restaurants, Sue didn’t think they actually ate there. Knight seemed more like a guy who enjoyed a nicely pressed tablecloth and napkins that weren’t made from scratchy paper.The restaurant wasn’t particularly busy, but they stood by the podium anyway, waiting for someone to come and seat them. Sue didn’t really know what to make of it all. Knight West offering her a ride home was one thing, but to ask her out of the blue for dinner was something else entirely. She tried really hard not to read too much into it. They were either two people who suddenly realized they were in need of sustenance so they decided to eat together, on a strange date where at least one of them had no idea what was going on, or Knight wanted to get Sue alone somewhere so they could talk about the whole email