Page 2 of Guarding the Doctor
It was Seth.
The hospital ID around his neck confirmed what my eyes were telling me. I lowered my head to his chest, but there were no breath sounds. No heartbeat. I shone my cellphone flashlight towards his familiar brown eyes. His pupils were blown wide, lifeless eyes staring at nothing.
Wrapping the edge of my doctor’s smock around my fingers, I pressed on his neck, and then his cheeks. Rigor mortis was already starting, telling me that he’d been dead for at least a few hours.
My eyes filled with tears as I realized that my friend was gone.
And somehow he’d turned into a wolf before he died? I didn’t understand. Seth was one of my best friends. I would have known if he was a shifter.
“Hello?”
I heard a voice calling from the front of the lab and suddenly I knew I needed to get out of here. Whatever these experiments were, they were not legal. Not ethical. And definitely not sanctioned by the Institutional Review Board that approved clinical trials with humans.
“Is someone there?”
I needed to get out of here. With one last look at my friend, I slipped out of the room and out the side door, hitting the emergency stairs at a run. I didn’t stop until I was in my car. As I tore out of the parking lot, I sent up a promise to my friend.
“I’ll find out who did this, Seth. And I will make them pay.”
But how?
I knew I should call the police and report what I’d seen. But I knew enough about shifters to know that the police would be no help. Besides, who would believe me? Making humans into shifters sounded like something from a bad movie. And what if Xi had connections in the department? There was no way she was doing this alone. No, I needed to talk to my father first. He’d know what to do.
Darla
“Newbie!”
“Yes ma’am,” Cassie and I responded in unison.
We’d both been working at Sapphic Security for six months now, but our boss Lois still didn’t know our names. My sister Bella told me when I first started that when Lois bothered to learn your name you knew you were off probation and officially part of the team. The newbie thing would probably be less annoying if Cassie and I could tell which one of us she was talking to.
“You.”
Lois pointed one stubby finger at me. It was a cold and rainy winter morning in Seattle, but my boss was in her usual attire: black tactical pants, black boots, and a tight white tank top. Shewas a stone butch, tough as nails, and an alpha wolf shifter who commanded her mostly vampire team with an iron fist. The only softness I’d ever seen from her in the six months I’d worked here was when her mate came to visit.
“Me?” I asked, embarrassed by how my voice squeaked. I’d faced down the toughest generals when I was in the military, but none of them intimidated me as much as Lois did.
“Yeah, Darla right?”
It was a power move on Lois’s part. She only had twenty-five employees, it wasn’t like she couldn’t remember my name.
“Yes ma’am. Darla.”
“Are you ready for a solo job?”
Sensing my sister nearby, I looked over my shoulder to see Bella and our coworker Martha walking up behind us. Bella gave me an encouraging smile.
My older sister had been the one to help me get this job at Sapphic Security. She’d worked here for a few years now. It was a dream job for supernaturals like us who’d spent their entire adult life in the military and didn’t have a lot of transferable job skills.
The Seattle branch of Sapphic Security had been open for about ten years. It was part of a much larger company thatwas founded by a group of lesbians who’d been looking for a new career after retiring from the military. Not everyone who worked here identified as sapphic, but most of the team fell somewhere on the sapphic or non-binary spectrum. We were all supernaturals though. Shifters, vampires, fae, and other supes worked at offices around the world, doing both private security and contract work for the government.
“Solo job? Sure.” Finally, this was my chance to prove to Lois that I could be a valuable member of the team.
“Come with me then,” Lois said, stomping towards the conference room. “The rest of you too.”
Cassie, Bella, and Martha followed me, taking seats at the table as Lois opened a folder, scanning its contents. Our boss was maddeningly old school, refusing to use computers unless she absolutely had to. She made a couple of notes on a post-it note before turning her attention back to me.
“You were a medic in the Army, correct?”
