“I’m starting to think this is a bad idea,” Sue said as their car sped down the highway.“You’re just nervous,” Knight tried to appease her. “You’ll be fine.”“I’m not nervous,” Sue insisted in a petulant tone. “I just think we should do it another day. My mom might not even be home. Joey’s probably out with friends or something. We should just go home and come see them another time.”Knight glanced over at his passenger with a concerned frown. As someone who loved his family and never went more than a few days without seeing them, Knight couldn’t really understand why Sue was so freaked out by the fact that they were about to visit them.“What’s really going on?” Knight asked. “Is it me? Are you nervous about me meeting your mom?”“No,” Sue said a little too quickly. “She’s just never been completely okay with the way I've live my life.”“What do you mean?”“Well, any time it comes up, she changes the subject and acts like nothing happened,” Sue explained.“Well, it’s going to be pre

Sunday family dinner at the West pack house was crazy on a typical Sunday, but throw in the fact that the women in the house were in full-on wedding mode, and that Joey was with them, and things got a lot crazier.“You’re grilling?” Knight asked his grandpa as he came out onto the porch with a couple of bottles of beer in his hand. It wasn’t unusual for his grandpa to fire up the grill, but usually Sundays meant a roast of some kind from his grandma.“I needed an excuse to get out of the house, and your grandma’s busy,” Lenard explained. He held his hand out for the beer that Evan had brought him. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Jared, I just don’t want to have to give my opinion on napkins and chair covers.”Knight smiled at that and perched himself on the railing. “I don’t think Jared does, either.”“Oh, really? You’d be surprised,” Lenard told him with an amused twinkle in his eye. “I heard him arguing with a florist the other day on the phone, saying that if the peonies weren’t

Knight wasn’t someone who was used to waiting. As the boss of his own company, people waited for him, not the other way around. He supposed it was good for him, every now and then, to get a lesson in patience.While he waited in the car, he tried to train his hearing, to find Sue and listen in, but the apartment must have been at the back. All he could hear was a baby crying with a woman singing to it and a lot of different TV sets blaring different things.He tried not to think about his real dad, but it was hard. He had the name in his head now, and he felt as though he at least needed a face to go along with it. He pulled out his phone and pulled up his browser app before typing in the name, Charles Garcia. He felt a swell of nerves go through him as he waited for the page to load but it soon turned to dread as a thousand or so different Charles Garcias showed up.Thankfully, he was spared having to think on it any further. Sue and, surprisingly, Joey came out of the apartment bloc

Over the days that followed the revelation about Knight’s real dad, Sue had seen the internal struggle going on inside him. Knight had told her about the conversation he’d had with his mom and the fact that he had even looked him up to no avail. However, when Sue had offered to help search for him, having far superior Internet skills, Knight hadn’t been sure and told Sue that he needed some time to think about it.Of course, Sue wasn’t one to wait, or to do as she was told, so she had been looking for this Charles Garcia ever since. She told herself that she was just going to find him in case Knight wanted to meet him, that way he wouldn’t have to wait around. She also wouldn’t have time to change his mind.Her article about the bombing had gone over well, and she had decided to write a follow-up. She had been busy leaving messages all over the Internet looking to interview someone who had either been a part of a humans-first movement in their past or were close to someone who was.S

Sue had asked the mysterious F to meet him at the café across the street from the Fang and Claw building. The oversized clock on the wall behind the counter said that it was coming up to three thirty. She was sitting at a table by the window, watching the people walk by, wondering if any of them were F. She had gotten there a little early, wanting to make sure they had a table to themselves so that they wouldn’t be disturbed. On her phone was a list of questions she wanted to ask F about life inside the humans-first group and what had happened to make him, or her, get out.Sue sat nursing her coffee, her eyes darting to the clock every few seconds. She had her book bag with her with a rough draft for the article she planned on writing. She was about to get it out to read over what she had so far when she heard someone approach her table.“Sue Andrew?” a man not much older than Sue said as he stopped at the table.Sue looked the stranger up and down. He was in his late twenties with a