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“Then we can’t know. You could’ve ended up finishing us both off with a swipe of one paw.” Louisa shrugged.

Enormous was a word for the behemoth that Kin was in his full fox form. Not only could he have wiped Louisa and Rowan out if he had lost control, but he would have wiped out the entire bay area as well.

“Is it possible someone is trying to start a war against the shifters? Paint them out to be bad guys?” Rowan asked, moving away from the grim hypothetical.

“Shifters are notorious assholes, present company included.” Louisa eased the mood with a teasing nudge towards Kin. “But they’ve always been protectors, not attackers of the common masses. Still, I found some groups that hold something against them. My first inclination is, of course, the Order.”

Rowan, like most mystic children, had learned of the Order in elementary school.

An organization stemming from an ancient group of monks that tried to justify their murders of Mystics by using the crimes as their proof that Mystics as a species were evil base creatures.

“Over the last five years, the Order has become more active and with a bunch of new recruits when vigilante movies and shows started gaining popularity. Their hate for all mystics isn’t equal. I found a video of a rally which called for special attention to the shifters, calling them the ultimate deceivers because of their relative human forms when out of beast mode. Elves, us vampires, and most other species have distinguishing features that definitively sets us apart, but not them.”

Rowan had yet to meet a member of the Order, but she figured whoever aligned themselves with such a group would’ve had to either be extremely vain, or extremely scared. Scared they were more dangerous, so the elf hoped for the former rather than the latter.

“There is also one more organization. It started off as a support group meeting for parents who had lost their kids to shifters infected with rage lust.”

Rage lust, the name of a condition where shifters lost complete control of their beasts for a longer period than ten minutes. It onset after traumatic events the shifters couldn’t deal with, or degrading mental conditions like dementia.

Four years prior, an unsettling increase in rage lust cases brought Louisa and Rowan’s minor operation to Kin’s familial doorstep.

In those days, it had only been RL Magical Disaster Services. Their office had been a room the Traveling Cabin offered, and they’d been functioning online, tracking down work through different chat rooms.

They’d been out of their depth trying to solve the root issues of these rages, mostly because of the shifter’s tight-lipped attitude toward the issue. But they’d quickly discovered that Rowan’s control over her magic made her an equivalent to an alpha for most shifter beasts. This allowed the inflicted to at least say goodbye to their families and gave them enough time to get set up with new lives in the wilderness.

The hardest cases had been those in which the afflicted took life from another being. Shifter law dictated these shifters to surrender their lives, as they continued drawing blood if just left alone.

Rowan’s ability to dominate them allowed them to choose how to end it with whatever dignity remained.

If she closed her eyes, she could still hear the last gasps of breath that she was sure would follow her to the grave.

When the alpha of the Takamoto Kitsune Clan went into rage lust, they called Rowan and Louisa. Though the two young spellcasters had been making a ripple through shifter kind gossip reels, their odd situation of using a non-shifter to fix such a personal shifter issue had ensured their relative anonymity. An anonymity the clan desired above all.

As soon as they’d phased into the kitsune compound, both felt Kin’s magic. He clearly should have been the actual alpha. In most other shifter societies, his prowess alone would have ensured that title for him. But, the Takamoto Kitsune Clan operated in the fashion of a bygone time that excluded branch family members from taking positions of power.

Rowan found it foolish that they looked down on someone who could have been a formidable asset. They’d been reduced to turning to the unconventional aid of an elf and a vampire.

Still, it had been only with the help of detailed notes Kin left in their room covering happenings around the Takamoto Compound a week prior to their arrival that gave the outside spellcasters the last puzzle piece of the mystery in hand.

At each hot spot location, a storm had preceded rage lust settling in. It only stood out in his notes because he also noted it had marked a low for his relationship with his mate. He’d been so angry at everything Julio had done that even he felt the urge to give into his beast so his heart could have a break.

It turned out that the ley lines in the sky had become entangled to where a simple storm passing through created fluctuating pressures that drove the inner beasts of shifters crazy. If theywere even slightly uncomfortable, they faced the possibility of losing complete control of their beast.

He’d left the notes anonymously, but Rowan and Louisa tracked him down using unorthodox spells aimed at tracking the ink on the pages. They impressed him with their creative problem solving. He’d been shocked by their youth and inspired by their commitment to ensure he got credit and gratitude his family had always deprived him of.

Fixing the ley lines had been a monumental pain in the ass, but after the numbers of rage lust cases got back down to normal—about two every year — they couldn’t say it wasn’t worth the hours they put in. This was especially true because the experience convinced Kin that he wanted to help them get established in exchange for being a silent partner once they got the ball rolling.

It didn’t take long for RL Magical Disaster Services to add a ‘K’. Kin was literally the foundation for legitimizing their business, which had been, in his not-so-humble opinion, on the brink of financial ruin.

Along with the addition of Kin, the business established its long-term goal of creating either a cure or treatment for rage lust.

As tragic as the rise had been, good had come out of the situation. Because they were thorough in their record keeping, they understood the triggers of the condition even better than the common shifter.

They’d come up with a theory for prevention, though they had yet to actually encounter a rage lust onset in time to test it out.

“There was a fear that stemmed from the attacks of their loved ones, and a few of the members formed a compound to live together in what they considered safety from the shifters.They’re pretty strict. They’re not allowed to have any form of relationships with shifters and have kicked a couple of people out for even buying their produce.“

Louisa frowned. “Not violent per se, but they’ve grown more into a cult than a support group. They live independent of any sovereignty by living on unclaimed grounds. A few undercover reporters have infiltrated their ranks and published a few documents of a doctrine the group follows. It underlines the shifters as their mortal enemies and compares them to demons. It’s like they took a page out of the Order’s modus operandi, but only applied it to shifters.”