Werewolves Like Pink Too (Pixie Pink Book 1), page 2
And the guy stood up.
My God, he was huge. Possibly over six feet tall, and he could fit three me’s between those shoulders. What was he? A high fae?
No, those felt different. A low fae then—like a nymph?
But that didn’t feel right, either. Maybe a Gifted? A vampire or a werewolf or a—
“Watch your back. It’s a jungle out there,” he said, cutting off my thoughts, and made for the door. He opened it, and the sound of the hallway hit us, reminding me that we hadn’t been all alone in the world like it had felt until now. “And Teddybear?” I looked up into his eyes, and they were wide enough now that I saw the color in them—green, like the never-ending fields of grass at home and those beautiful plants I could never manage to grow. “Always assume the worst.”
Only when he walked out and closed the door behind him did it occur to me that he’d never even told me his name.
Chapter Two
Two years later
* * *
Dominic Dane.
The name made my flesh rise in goose bumps every time I heard it whispered among my colleagues. He came into the office with his chin up, those massive shoulders wide. He strode between the desks and to the other side like we lowly creatures were too unimportant for his attention.
By the time he made it to the door to his office—which he had all to himself with windows and blinds and a whole desk he usually used to rest his feet on—someone would have brought him a cup of warm coffee. He never even acknowledged any of the poor souls who actually fought among one another to be the one to bring him coffee each morning. No sugar, no cream, just black, like his clothes. Like his soul. He just took the steaming cup, walked in his office, and slammed the door shut loud enough for the entire building to hear. A hundred percent werewolf. A hundred-and-one percent asshole. Hence the reason why I called him wolf-ass in my head.
Then, he put the coffee cup on his wide desk, took off the leather jacket he always wore no matter the weather outside, and proceeded to turn the blinds so that he could shut us all out for the rest of the day.
Not that I was watching like everybody else in the office—I wasn’t. I hadn’t in a long time now, but I’d seen it happen so many times before that I knew every single one of his movements by memory—and they never changed. I refused to give him even a glimpse. Instead, I opened my journal to make a small red plus on the calendar under 9 am, just like I did every morning. That small plus meant that I hadn’t budged, hadn’t even darted my eyes his way for a single second until I heard the door of his office close.
My first win for the day.
I was already feeling better.
“Psst,” came a voice from ahead. “Did you hear? Merry from the second had sex with Double D last night.”
The muscles of my stomach clenched, and I looked up at Patricia, her head lowered almost to the surface of her desk as she whispered. The others—Hunter, who sat on her left, and Eva, who sat on my right, aah’ed and ooh’d at the news, like it was the most important piece of information they’d ever received.
“No way,” Hunter said, lowering his head to the desk, too. “I don’t believe it.”
“Why not? Even though he acts like one of these marble pillars, he’s still a man underneath all that sneering,” Eva said, fanning herself.
“I just saw him come in. Trust me—he does not look like a man who got laid last night,” said Hunter.
“He always looks like that.” Patricia rolled her brown eyes extra slowly, like she always did. “That doesn’t mean anything. Merry told Jenna just this morning on the way to work, and Jenna told Arthur, and Arthur told Cecile—we all know Cecile’s got the best info dishes to serve.”
Yeah, there wasn’t much that went on around here without Cecile knowing about it. She was one of the maintenance staff at the ODP Headquarters who worked twelve-hour shifts willingly, but that’s brownies for you.
“I’m stamping it with a maybe,” Hunter said, raising his hands as if he was already exhausted.
“Definitely a yes. Last year he fucked Jennifer, too. You guys remember Jennifer, right?” Eva asked.
“Oh, yeah. She was hot,” Hunter said, wiggling his brows.
“The point is, he does have sex. Werewolves are men, too,” Patricia said, then flinched. “Technically speaking.”
“Why are you so quiet?” said Eva, turning her squinted eyes at me.
“Yeah, Teddy. Why are you so quiet?” Hunter asked, folding his arms in front of him.
“Believe it or not, I have much more important things to think about than whom Dominic Dane beds,” I said, a bit more bitterly than I’d have liked.
They all watched me for a beat.
“Like what?” Patricia asked, completely serious.
“My job,” I said, rolling my eyes, though not as slowly as she did. “That’s what we’re all here for, aren’t we?”
“But we hardly ever hear rumors about him,” Hunter whispered, like he really didn’t understand what I meant.
“Are you serious? You talk about him every single day.” I should know—my ears kept suffering because of it.
We all knew about his incredibly bad manners, his gigantic ego, and his unmatched track record. We all heard about his heroics—how he killed a berserker once, all by himself, and trapped within hours a family of kelpies in Jersey who were eating human children, and how he saved the inhabitants of an entire neighborhood in Queens who were being held against their will by a pack of boggarts.
The problem was, they all believed the rumors. I worked in a wide area with fifty-two carrels spread out in eight perfect rows, with fifty-one other agents ranging from twenty-one to sixty years old. They all believed the rumors about Dominic Dane, no matter how impossible they sounded.
Berserkers were monsters, twice the size of an average man, with claws and sharp teeth and a thirst for blood like no other. Of course, he didn’t kill one by himself. It was common sense. And kelpies were terrifying—when they infested any kind of water, they reproduced really quickly because they believed in strength in numbers, and it took a lot of planning and brute strength to actually capture and kill them.
And boggarts?
Well…yeah, maybe that one was true. They had no strength to speak of, and they weren’t that smart.
But everything else was bullshit, and every time I’d tried to tell my friends so, they’d waved me off like I was talking nonsense. So now, I didn’t bother. I just stayed out of their conversations about him altogether.
“Yeah, but not about that stuff,” Eva said with a grin. “C’mon. He’s so hot he kills my braincells. I literally can’t even talk to him.”
Patricia snorted. “Like he’s ever going to talk to you.”
Eva flipped her the bird.
“Honest to God—I want to hate his guts, I really do. But he’s just so dreamy,” Hunter said, looking up at the high ceiling with a goofy smile on his face.
I slapped my hand on my forehead. My friends were idiots. Why in the world did I have to claim a desk near them?
He’s a self-absorbed prick who’ll pretend he doesn’t know you when you go to say hi the day after you practically force him to smile—and makes a fool out of you in front of all your colleagues.
I said that in my head but not out loud, thankfully. I’ve talked to myself since I was a little girl, so it had been a hard habit to kick. Still, I’d worked on it hard since arriving in Manhattan and working in the same place with fifty other people who can hear you perfectly if you, say, talk to the computer or your journal or ask the freaking clock to move faster. The reminder made me flinch. They put all kinds of names on me—crazy, bipolar, schizophrenic, delusional—but I learned my lesson fairly quickly. Now, I only talked to myself when I was all alone in my apartment. The rest of the day, my thoughts remained locked inside my head.
“Anyway, did you hear about Lark?” Patricia continued in that hushed voice again. “He was spotted at a vamp party last night.” She gave us all a knowing smile.
“No way,” Eva whispered.
“Lark? Really? I didn’t think he’d have the balls, to be honest,” Hunter said with a nod, like he was actually impressed that someone would be so stupid as to attend a vamp party. We all knew what happened in those—you got bitten, and the fang venom of vampires gave you the highest high there is, and then you went back a second night and a third and a fourth…until there was no more blood left in you to drink.
“I keep telling you guys, we should try it,” Eva said. “C’mon, you chickenshits! Let’s go get bitten!” Her eyes sparkled as the mischievous smile spread on her face. “Let’s do it tonight.”
Patricia and Hunter were actually considering it.
“You guys, do I need to remind you what happens when you run out of blood?” They all blinked at me. “You die.”
Patricia and Hunter both shuddered and shook their heads. “Stop talking out your ass, Eva. I am not getting bitten by those people, no matter what,” Hunter said, rubbing the sides of his neck. Thank God.
“I hate you,” Eva spit and kicked the leg of my desk with all her strength—which wasn’t much. She, like Patricia, was a witch, and enhanced physical strength was not in their list of abilities. Though they weren’t fae, they had an affinity to magic that most humans didn’t possess. Some were stronger than others, and they cast their spells through sigils—marks that enabled them to suck the energy from something and transform it into whatever they wanted. Mostly, they did it from plants, which was why pixies were paid good money to grow things with magic. The more magic the plant held, the more powerful the spells of a witch.
That’s why Patricia had three small planters around her at all times—a cactus my mother had sent me for her, a peace lily, and the snake plant by her desk’s legs. Eva didn’t care much, though. She only ever used magic when she absolutely had to. Said it drained her body’s energy way too much to be worth the perks, and she relied on the plant supplies of the ODP when she was called out in the field or to do spells for the crews.
I only grinned.
“Okay—I got one more, and then we can go back to work,” Patricia said. It made me want to smile. She always came in fully loaded with rumors every morning. I suspected she came early just to talk to Cecile before she had to actually sit down at her desk. For some people, coffee did the trick to have them awake and functioning. For Patricia, it was rumors. It’s why Hunter called her a rumowhore.
“Apparently, Chief Randall had a meeting with the high-ups last night. Something about some high fae getting involved with some humans, stealing some confidential information, and getting about two dozen people slaughtered in the process.”
“Ooh, slaughter,” Eva said, licking her lips. “I like that word.”
“What kind of confidential information?” I asked. “Whom did they steal it from?”
But Patricia shrugged. “No idea, but it’s obviously very serious. The high-ups rarely call the Chief for personal meetings.”
That was true—hence the reason why I was curious. The high fae owned and operated the ODP—Orion’s Department of Protection. It had been around for over four hundred years, back when the borders of Earth and Faeya, the fae dimension, somehow fell out of existence, and all the creatures of Faeya were suddenly able to cross here. We still had no idea how many fae species truly existed, but I was one of them. Pixies were said to have been tiny in Faeya, but when they arrived on Earth, they mutated, just like every other kind of fae. We grew bigger and lost our wings, but we kept our strange colors and our need for isolation from everyone else who wasn’t pixie. We also kept our love for nature still.
But pixies—and brownies, nymphs, banshees, and the likes—were considered low fae. And the high fae, the unearthly creatures who seemed to have kept most of their true nature, were the only ones who got to travel between worlds now, after the original founders of the ODP put the locks in place again. They rarely stayed on Earth from what we knew, and Patricia was right—they almost never called Chief Randall, who managed our division, for in-person meetings.
That meant that whatever had happened, it was big. It was huge, completely worth all the time in the world, every single effort. It was a purpose all by itself.
And the type of job I could never even come close to.
The familiar stab in the chest came over me again. I’d left my home, had traveled halfway across the world to be here, had defied my parents, my entire clan, had probably humiliated my family for life—and for what? To sit behind a desk for two whole years, taking calls and filling out reports, never once given the opportunity to go out there, do some real work, save some real people from the monsters hunting them?
It was not fair.
“Hey, chin up, Pink,” Hunter called, as if he could read the emotions on my face. “You’ll get your shot. I know you will.”
I groaned. “You know I hate that name.” Why did he love making me miserable? We were supposed to be friends.
“And that is why I’m going to call you that until the day I die,” he said proudly.
“That day might come sooner than you think,” I muttered.
“Aw, you’re so cute when you get mad and make threats,” Hunter said, and Patricia nodded with a sweet smile plastered all over her face.
Cute. If there was one word I hated more than pink, it was cute.
But, apparently, the more I tried to stop them calling me those names, the worse it would get for me. So, I let it go with a sigh.
Not that I was trying to hide how I felt. They all knew how frustrated I was that the Chief never even considered me for any of the bigger missions that would require me to be out there in the world, instead of locked here, underground, ass glued to a chair. A very uncomfortable chair, at that.
“I don’t get it,” Eva said. “Why would you even want to be out there?” She pointed at the ceiling. “You get paid exactly the same as Mr. Hottie Hot over there, but you get to sit here and not risk your life at all.” She nodded ahead, at the line of offices. I knew very well who Mr. Hottie Hot was. “It’s a pretty sweet deal, if you ask me.”
“Some of us don’t want desk jobs all our lives,” Hunter said, widening his eyes at Eva opposite him. We’d rearranged our carrels to face each other—me across from Patricia and Eva across from Hunter. It kind of gave us the feeling that we were more isolated from the rest of our colleagues. We really weren’t, but it was the feeling that counted, I guess.
“I don’t mind at all,” Eva said with a shrug.
And I envied her, I really did. But these past two years for me had been death. A very slow and very painful death. Every week when I called back home, I died a little more. Every time I lied to my parents I became a little less confident. Just how much longer could I stand it until it got too much and I hopped on a plane back home?
“Enough talking,” Patricia said. “Let’s get to work. Phones on, on three, two, one…”
We all pressed the red buttons on our landline phones next to our computers.
“See you for lunch, gang,” Hunter said when his phone rang, and he picked up.
And so, we got to work.
Chapter Three
The ODP dealt with all kinds of problems caused by the fae on a daily basis. We dealt with the Gifted, too. They were creatures who didn’t come from Faeya, and nobody really knows how they were created, just that they exist. There were only six kinds of them: werewolves, witches, vampires, wraiths, revenants, and loups—and they liked to cause trouble just as much as fae, so our hands were always full.
My title was agent, but I was basically a call center agent. What I did was answer calls and organize different crews who specialized in dealing with all kinds of things, while I sat at the desk for nine long hours every single day.
The ODP Headquarters was a large building in the middle of Manhattan, but most of the floors upside the earth were empty. The building went three floors underground, too, and that’s where we did most of our work. I was in the first underground level. The second had spaces for crews, equipment, vehicles, training, and God knows what else. The third level were the holding rooms—reinforced with so much steel and magic, it was impossible to get out of them. They were like a prison, meant to hold all kinds of monsters and creatures who misbehaved and caused trouble out there. The actual prison for the supernaturally enhanced—like some called it—was on an island somewhere, and it was said that it was impossible to escape it because the waters around it were guarded by an actual kraken. Anybody with a head on their shoulders would choose to be locked away for eternity if the only other option was to get eaten alive by a kraken. Just the thought of it made me shiver.
But lucky for the world, krakens were rare, and most creatures we dealt with here weren’t half as dangerous.
As the day went by, I filled my log sheet with all the jobs I’d accepted and completed: a lutin infestation in Harlem; a hobgoblin attack in Hell’s Kitchen; a magical explosion-- possibly from knockers (the little uglies loved to make things explode)—on the East Side that burned two cars to a crisp and wounded five people; another lutin infestation; and the possible sighting of a gorgon. Out of all of them, the gorgon was the only dangerous thing. Not that the rest couldn’t cause death—they could. They just didn’t do it often. Lutins were tiny creatures, possibly three inches tall, that broke into apartments and made food go bad, stole things, and cut the hair of humans while they were asleep. They didn’t kill. And hobgoblins were nasty, and they sometimes attacked humans because they felt they looked at them wrong or said something inappropriate, but again—they didn’t kill. Knockers were a bit more dangerous, though. Like most fae species, they were tiny, too, but they loved to make things explode. It helped that they had an uncanny sense of smell and a keen understanding of acids. They loved to test all kinds of mixtures and made their own bombs by stealing from supermarkets and pharmacies. Their explosions sometimes killed people, too, but not often. And not on purpose, I guess.
