Chapter 30
30
SETH MAYS
Is it bad if I hate working with my brother?
ELLIOT CRANE
That depends.
Why do you hate working with him?
He’s a bossy knowitall.
Also, I feel like a potato could do this job.
Important question.
Is your brother a potato?
I’m not doing what he’s doing.
And no. Last I checked, he’s a wolf shifter.
I might be a potato.
Last I checked, you definitely weren’t.
That was before I got Arcana.
I have never met a potato shifter before.
Seems dangerous.
How?
Someone might try to make you into fries.
With that tasty cheese stuff.
If I go out as pimento cheese fries, I will die happy.
It has to be better than this shit, anyway.
My poor baby.
I was killing time, waiting for Quincy to join me. I’d gotten to Dot’s early so that I could snag a table at the patio and drink half my body-weight in coffee while munching on a double order of toast—no butter—I’d slathered with orange marmalade. She’d begged for me to come out with her to do something , anything. I’d agreed to brunch, even though I probably couldn’t afford it on my new, horrifyingly-low hourly pay.
I’d been working with Noah at Hands and Paws for about three weeks. Noah, whose job title of ‘Coordinating Director’ meant he did at least a little of everything, managed volunteers, secured donations, organized fundraisers, coordinated with political groups fighting for Arc-Arcanid rights, and even helped to arrange housing and line up work and start-up kits for homeless shifters. He’d done it for Taavi, when he’d first arrived in Richmond—well, once Taavi had managed to get back into person form, anyway.
I was not nearly so skilled at or knowledgeable about all of the things Hands and Paws did.
I also had a few different hats, and all of them were equally boring, if necessary. I stocked the shelves of the food pantry from the mostly-pathetic donations we got in and then sent off the list of staples we still needed with one of the staff who did the Costco shopping for the rest. I sorted through donation items—socks here, shirts there. I used the paper-cutter to cut out flyers once.
Nothing they asked me to do was too physically taxing—which was good, because while I was getting better, I was only around sixty, maybe sixty-five, percent—and required exactly zero knowledge about anything having to do with the day-to-day operations of the organization. Which I also didn’t have.
The worst part about working with Noah was not, as I’d suggested to Elliot, that he was bossy, although he was. I was used to that, and it mostly didn’t bother me. What bothered me were the pitying looks he sent my direction when he thought I couldn’t see them.
I’d been given a literal pity-job, and that rubbed me wrong about seven different ways, even though I know that giving shifters pity-jobs was one of the core parts of the Hands and Paws mission.
I just hated it.
Just like I hated pretty much everything else about being a shifter, including my substantially-increased grocery bills. For instance, I’d already eaten breakfast before coming out to meet Quincy so that I’d only eat a little more than what a normal person would eat.
And I absolutely felt guilty for thinking about it that way, because who’s to say who’s normal?
Ugh.
I took another sip of my diner coffee, liberally dosed with more sugar packets than I wanted—but they didn’t have non-dairy creamer, so I compensated for the lack of almond- or oat-milk with more sugar. I wasn’t a fan of sweet over creamy, but it would do in a pinch. And this was a pinch.
I drained the last of the cup, grimacing a little at the grit of un-dissolved sugar, then added three packets before pouring more coffee into the classic white diner mug.
“Hi! Sorry I’m late!” Quincy slid into the chair across from me.
I smiled at her, settling my mug between my hands. “No worries. How are you?”
She grimaced. “Aaron is having an existential crisis.”
“What about?” I asked her.
“He says it’s nothing,” she informed me, putting three sugars in her cup followed by am Irish Creme-flavored creamer and then adding coffee. “But I’m pretty sure it’s actually the whole Arcana thing.”
“The fact that you had it?” I asked.
Quincy frowned. “I can’t tell,” she admitted. “It might be that, but it might also be the fact that my job isn’t as safe as he always assumed it would be.”
I felt my eyebrows rise. “We work in crime investigation,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but we’re not cops,” she said. “We aren’t usually in the line of fire—we just come in after the messy part is over.”
I snorted. “Usually, yeah,” I agreed. “But unfortunately not always.”
She pulled a face. “Let’s talk about something more pleasant,” she said. “How’s it going with your long-distance hunk?”
I laughed. “I don’t know that ‘hunk’ is the right word,” I told her.
“He’s not hunky?”
It was my turn to make a face. “‘Hunk’ implies a kind of brainless, gym-rat kind of physique that he definitely doesn’t have,” I told her.
“Not muscley?”
“Not that kind of muscley,” I said. “He has the kind you get from throwing around heavy furniture and building things, not the kind you get from lifting weights.”
“Even better,” Quincy remarked, and I nodded my agreement before taking another sip of my coffee. “So how are things with you, then?”
I shrugged, setting my mug back on the table. “They’re the same,” I said. “I just… It doesn’t seem like a good idea to try to start anything from a thousand miles away. Noah is here, you’re here, and he lives there.”
“And he wouldn’t move out here? You said he knew Hart.”
I shrugged again. “I think his family is from there.” I’d not gotten the impression from Elliot that he would be at all interested in moving, especially halfway across the country. Even if Hart did live here.
“And you wouldn’t think about moving there?” she asked me.
I blinked. “It hadn’t even occurred to me,” I admitted. “Noah’s here.”
“Noah has a… partner, right?”
I nodded, my lips twisting a little. Lulu wasn’t my favorite person. “Yeah, Lulu.”
“You don’t like Lulu?”
“Lulu’s okay,” I hedged. “Noah could probably do better, though.”
Quincy snorted. “Aaron could do better, too,” she said. “But he says he doesn’t want better , he wants me. ” She let out a laugh. “I’m still not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult. ”
I chuckled. “I’d take it as a compliment. Better all around that way.”
She grinned at me, but then the server came over to take our order. French toast with blueberries (for me) and biscuits and gravy (Quincy) requested, Quincy grinned at me again.
“Serious question,” she said, her expression suggesting the question was anything but.
“Yeah?” I asked, feeling the infectiousness of her smile pulling at the corners of my lips.
“Just how many of those muscles have you seen?”
I felt my whole neck turn red, and Quincy burst out laughing.
Of all the mindless and asinine jobs I did at Hands and Paws, I minded stocking the food pantry shelves the least. I liked order, and being able to put the cans in neat rows with the labels facing out, organized by type of food—fruit, vegetables, beans, soups, meat and fish—at least satisfied that particular itch. It was helping people, too, which at least meant that it wasn’t pointless, even if a potato could do it.
After cans came boxes: stuffing, macaroni and cheese, crackers, pasta. Containers of cocoa, instant coffee, boxes of tea bags.
There were refrigerator cases, too, for things like milk and eggs and butter and cheese, although those were things that most people didn’t donate. Most people gave canned goods or boxed goods—even though we had signs and announcements on the website asking for things like juice, bread, dairy, and so on.
Hands and Paws also took clothing donations, shoes, and pretty much any kind of houseware you could think of—dishes, cookware, towels, bathroom shit, you name it. One of the biggest things Hands and Paws did, in addition to providing food and connecting shifters with employers willing to hire them, was working with low-income housing to provide low-rent apartments to homeless shifters, along with the basics that they needed to actually make (or remake) a life out of it.
I believed in what Hands and Paws did—really believed in it. They’d kept Noah and I off the streets, ensured we were fed, and gave us what we needed to make it on our own. When they needed volunteers for things like Thanksgiving or Christmas, I was here with Noah, happily doing whatever they needed. They got the clothes I hadn’t worn in two years, the kitchen stuff we hadn’t used, books we’d bought and weren’t going to read or read again.
But I didn’t like working here. And it had nothing to do with the people—who were perfectly nice—or the mission or even what I was doing. It had to do with what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t doing the thing I’d trained to do—forensic science. Biochemistry. I was stocking shelves. It wasn’t like I thought I was too good to stock shelves, I just didn’t want to be stocking shelves. If I had to stock shelves, here was where I wanted to do it, but I actually wanted to be doing my real job.
The job that had fired me for being a shifter, which this job would never, ever do.
But every day that I put cans in rows or mopped a floor or helped carry furniture or boxes of stuff into a low-rent apartment set up for someone to start their life over, all I could think of was the fact that I desperately wanted to be doing something else.