Page 12 of Delivered to My Humans

Marching over to the phone, I decided to call up my friend Bonnie. She was a black-footed cat, or as some called them, a small-spotted cat. Her kind was rare, and a shifter of her kind, almost extinct. She understood my defensiveness when it came to humans.

She agreed to lunch, but only if it was a burger and fries. We didn’t have lunch very often, maybe once or twice a month, but it had to be burgers and fries.

Traditions mattered.

Bonnie slid into the booth thirty minutes later. “Did you order?” she asked. “I’m starving.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, laughing. “Double cheeseburger. Fries. Strawberry milkshake. Two of each.”

“Good.” She took off her jacket and pulled her multi-hued hair up into a bun. “Tell me what’s going on with you.”

“Can’t a girl just want to have lunch with her friend?” I scoffed.

“She can and sometimes she does, but you forget, I’m a tone and attitude savant. I notice every change in a person and a room—instantly.”

Bonnie grew up in an emotionally abusive home. She knew, the second her parents came into the room, what their attitude was. She noticed the slightest change in facial expressions. Tones. Gestures. Words. And because she was a shifter, she could smell anger and fear a mile away.

“Fine. There is something I wanted to talk about. Someone who hasn’t already formed an opinion.”

Bonnie rolled up her sleeves as our food arrived. The girl was serious about her meals. “Shoot. I’m all ears.”

I told her everything. About the app. About the pairs I’d been matched up with and finally, the three humans I’d been matched with this morning.

“How did they make you feel? I mean, it’s only pictures on a screen, but you didn’t immediately reject them like the others.”

I hadn’t.

“It doesn’t matter how they made me feel. They are humans.” I leaned forward and whispered the word. We were in public with humans all around us.

Bonnie put down her fry, and her shoulders tensed. When that girl put down food, you knew something profound was about to happen. “You and I both know how cruel and unkind humans can be. Thoughtless. Abusive. Angry. Rageful.”

“You’re not making the case for these guys,” I said.

“I have two points. One: not all humans are like that. In fact, I’ve found that only a small portion of them are. It seems like more because most times they are the loudest. But humans, in general, have kind hearts and they try to do the right thing. Your mom…that was horrible what happened to her. Those humans represented the worst and most horrible segment of their species.”

I bit back tears. The humans that threw my mother away like trash were the scum of the earth, and they fueled my mistrust of humans, even to this day.

“And two?” I asked after taking a bite of the burger.

“My other point is, even shifters can be cruel. It’s not a trait exclusive to humans. Or demons. Or monsters. Or any creature. We all have the potential for good and bad and kindness and acts of horror.” She picked up a fry. “Now tell the truth, how did they make you feel?”

Leaning back in the noisy booth seat, I recalled to her how my heart beat. How my cheeks heated. How I found them to be the most attractive males I’d ever seen.

“You’ll never know unless you take the chance, Audrey. Never.”

Chapter Twelve

Idris

A notification sounded as I was drying my washed hands for the three hundredth time.

Leaning against the counter, I plucked my phone from my pocket and checked it. “What’s Mail-Order Matings?” I asked no one specific, mainly my phone, since the email detailed having a match for a service I never signed up for.

“Why are you asking?” Hale looked over at me. He sterilized the tools, taking them from the machine, but something changed his scent slightly.

Lachlan walked in at that moment and cocked his head. “What did you say?”

“Some app called Mail-Order Matings. It says we have a match? Who is we? This must be bullshit. I didn’t sign up for any…” Before I could finish my sentence, Hale bolted across the work area and grabbed the phone from my hand.

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