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Rowan refused to pick her head up, and she groaned again.

“Nuh uh, get up, explain yourself. Who made you sound like a schoolgirl on her first call with a boy she liked?” Louisa sunk into the wingback chair across from her friend, a nail file in her hand, heels long lost somewhere in her office.

Rowan glanced up at the TV and saw the glimpses of Alessandro again. She pointed him out to the brunette.

“No fucking way, you hooked up with the Dragon King and kept it from me?” Louisa gasped.

“Things have been hectic lately.” Rowan rolled her eyes.

Louisa tilted her head and raised an eyebrow as she examined the dragon, “He’s kind of a meathead, isn’t he?”

The disrespect! “He is not a meathead!”

“Did I just overhear that you slept with the Dragon King?” It was Kin’s turn to stand at the door, arms full of his laptop, several hardcover books, colored pens and journals.

Rowan crossed her arms. “Yes, you did. Can you believe she called him a meathead?”

Kin sized the man up on TV and pursed his lips. “I suppose I can kind of see where she’s coming from.”

“What? Those eyes totally show he has so much more depth to him than just his insanely gorgeous body!”

Louisa giggled, “My goodness, what kinda skills must he have to make you so defensive?” Then she let out a gasp of enlightenment. “Wait, how long has it been since you’ve known him?”

Rowan shrugged.

“The dragon I smelled.” Kin gaped. “Was that him?”

Rowan leaned back against her chair, a cocky smirk on her face.

“Did you meet him after the attack on Draconis? You are an easy slut!”

“Worth it,” Rowan grinned as she pulled down the collar of her turtleneck to show the bites and slid the sleeves up to show where he had gripped her.

Kin’s mouth fell open and Louisa’s shaded eyebrows climbed into her hairline.

“Was he hungry?” Kin asked, recovering first.

Rowan waggled her eyebrows. “He was, and he got a full meal.”

“We’re going to have to establish an HR department.” Kin sighed.

“Is that why you couldn’t fight at one hundred yesterday?! How rough was he?”

Rowan frowned at Louisa’s question, remembering that some of her injuries had indeed been a consequence of the coupling.

“Come on, let’s concentrate. I need to get home before the sun sets or my dear husband will have my head on a platter. He was already upset that I spent the night at the Brood compound yesterday.”

Rowan sobered up and nodded, “I see you’ve brought your own materials to class Kin, however, Henrietta Young also pitched in and sent us this.” Rowan tapped the leather-bound book neither of her partners had taken notice of.

It took a second even after she directed their attention to the relic for them to comprehend what they were looking at.

Louisa let out a gasp.

Kin looked as if his eyes had landed on the most precious thing the world had ever beheld.

“Dead Henrietta Young?” Louisa asked.

Rowan nodded.

Louisa’s eyes grew wide with shock, and she covered her mouth. “Rowan, did you kill Henrietta Young so you could get the Elder’s Grimoire?”

Kin saved Rowan the energy from hitting her best friend by giving her a soft smack with one of his journals. “Why are you such an idiot?”

Louisa waved them both off and leaned over the book. “I never thought I would get to see it, let alone touch it.”

“Do it.” Rowan whispered conspiratorially as Louisa paused, her hand inches from touching the cover. As soon as her fingers stroked it, Rowan gave a shout and burst into laughter at the vampiress’ terrified features.

Kin delivered her strike while picking up the grimoire.

Rowan rubbed the back of her head, sure that he had hit her harder.

“Well, I think it’ll be more helpful to your role than ours. Perk up Louisa, time to get into the gossip reels.”

Louisa pouted, “Fine.”

XOXOXOXO

By the time Rowan hung up the phone for her last call, the sun was close to being where Kin would have to leave.

She wasn’t surprised that as he’d researched, Kin had also created a slideshow.

As he set up, Rowan and Louisa took turns looking through the Elder’s Grimoire, trying to find a rhyme or reason for its random entries.

Kin had apparently got it down pat and was ‘testing’ their intellect to see if they could also figure it out.

“It’s impossible.” Louisa groaned, slumped over one of the five bean bag chairs Rowan had littered throughout her office.

Rowan turned to Dew perched on her shoulder, who had made her way in for moral support once she’d closed up the front office for the day. “Do you have any idea?”

“Well.” Dew got shy when asked for input on things she considered way over her head.

“It’s not in any order that would make sense to us, because the Coven keeps their history pretty close to the chest. I think to decode it you would have to know which Elder had it and what events they went through and when they went through it. ”

“Yes, Dew. That’s exactly what it is.” Kin flung a chocolate in her direction and Dew caught it with a giggle.

“Lucky guess.” Louisa grumbled.

“You really need to work on being such a sore loser, Louisa.” Kin motioned to his prepared presentation.

“So, according not only to the grimoire, but also a couple universities that have studied the relationships between shifters, hierarchies are the strongest determining factor in how we act. Hierarchies themselves range in structures between familial, to friendly, to romantic. Over this past year, a new study posed the question of how these hierarchies formed and what the most important factors were. They returned with an answer that the beast hierarchies aren’t determined by race at all, but things such as age, physical prowess and—perhaps most important—magic capabilities while in beast form.

The wolves shouldn’t have affected me because I’m older and my magic capabilities as a kitsune overpower the typical wolf by tenfold, but because they were in a hive mindset, they counted as one giant threat to my beast.”

Rowan didn’t miss the annoyed tone Kin took on as he relayed this last part.

“Still, they couldn’t dominate me. I still maintained a relative humanoid form rather than going full fox, which was probably a mistake.

If I would’ve let the beast take over completely instead of trying to hold on to my human reasoning, I could’ve made my own decisions and not hurt either of you. ”

“Is this hypothetical, or fact?” Louisa asked.

Kin scowled at the vampiress.

“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.