break room, right here.” She walked a few more steps, then opened a closed door and motioned for him to follow, which he did.
“Coffee’s fine with me,” he said right away, “but why am I really here?” He looked around. The room was a bit larger than the exam room and had a few small tables clustered in its center, a fridge on one side and a counter on the other where a large coffee maker sat.
The smile she sent up to him was pretty, as well as ironic. “I’m that obvious? Well, you’re right. I don’t want us to leave Drew alone for long, but I wanted to ask how things are going at Ft. Lukman. Does anyone there know why Drew hasn’t shifted back? What are they doing to help him? I figure that, since they wanted Jonas there, they must be working on that elixir, since I know he’s a medical doctor and has helped Drew before with that stuff.”
“You’re right, and I know they’re hoping to come up with some new formulation of the elixir that’ll help.” But from what Liam had heard, no one had any good ideas yet about why Drew hadn’t shifted back despite clearly wanting to, or what kind of adaptation could be made to the elixir to help him. They’d even given him some more of the current version of the elixir to lap up, but that hadn’t helped.
“Okay.” Rosa turned her back and headed to the coffeepot, where she poured some into two foam cups that she got out of the cabinet below. She handed one to him. “Milk? Sugar?”
“Black,” he said. “Thanks.”
She went to the fridge and added a few drops of milk to her cup. She turned again toward him. “We’d better get back to Drew.” She seemed to hesitate. “Do you know anything about the formulation of the main elixir?”
“Just generally,” he said.
“Then what do you do in Alpha Force? For one thing, I assume from what you said before that you’re a shifter.”
She said that very matter-of-factly, as if she knew about and accepted their existence, as she’d implied earlier, which fit with the little Liam knew about Melanie Connell’s assistant vet.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.” He thought he caught just the tiniest hint of a reaction in her expression. Maybe he was wrong, and she was good at hiding what so many regular humans who knew that shifters were real actually thought about them. Just to bug her, he asked, “Are you?”
Her brief laugh sounded genuine. “No, though I’ve worked with quite a few over the years.” She paused. “Do you do anything special for Alpha Force? I mean, do you handle some of their special ops–type assignments, or do you do something besides train for the future at the base?”
Somehow, he wanted to impress her, which made no sense. He had no intention of flirting with her. But it wouldn’t hurt to tell the truth. “Well, I do train for the kinds of special assignments we’re sent on,” he said. “But I’m also the chief technology officer.”
Those pretty brown eyes of hers widened. “Really? What does that entail?”
He didn’t want to tell her about the stuff he had seen online making claims of injuries and worse, caused by shifters last night during the full moon. From the little he’d seen here in Mary Glen it had all been false, anyway—he hoped. If all was going well, Denny was continuing with the solution.
So instead of being fully honest, he said, “I just scout around to see what technology is out there that Alpha Force may be able to use to enhance its already fantastic and covert abilities.” That probably sounded good, and it wasn’t entirely false, since he did that along with the rest.
“Interesting.” Rosa pulled her gaze away from his face. “Now, let’s go back and check on Drew.”
Checking on Drew was exactly what Liam wanted to do. And he was glad to see that the wolf with the silver-tipped, thick brown fur sat up on the towel-covered table as they entered and began observing them with his wide, golden eyes.
What was he thinking? Liam would try to find out.
“Hi, boss,” he said. “Rosa and I just got some coffee, but the caffeine wouldn’t be good for you right now. But I want to bring you up-to-date on what was going on at the base.”
That everyone in Alpha Force was scrambling around trying to figure out what happened to him. Liam would tell him that, but word it a bit differently.
Also, as the commanding officer of their unit, Drew would be the first person Liam would normally tell about the kind of online social media fiasco he’d discovered—under other circumstances. He wouldn’t now, of course. Giving Drew further information that would torment him wouldn’t help him shift back any faster.
And would it do any good at all for even a tech expert like Liam to do research online about what had happened to Drew? Shifters weren’t likely to post anything about problems in their shifting, let alone what to do about it.
Plus, Alpha Force had its own unique take—and elixir—that would render most comments inapplicable.
Just in case, though, Liam would take a look later.
“How are you feeling now?” Rosa moved around Liam as if taking charge. She approached Drew and patted him gently on the head between his pointed, moving ears as if he were a pet canine. That irritated Liam a little—although he had a passing thought that if she wanted to touch him that way, or any other way, he probably wouldn’t mind at all, shifted or not.
Drew actually did seem to try to communicate with her some, growling slightly, then shaking his head.
“Do you feel bad physically?” Rosa asked. He stopped moving. “Or are you just frustrated that you haven’t changed back?” He nodded.
Good. At least he seemed to be using human cognition and showed no sign of growing wilder, wanting to attack. He was a human in the guise of a wolf, but for a much longer time than Liam was aware any shifter had remained that way without choosing to stay shifted.
So how were they going to bring him back?
Almost as if he heard Liam’s thoughts, Drew gently pushed Rosa away with his head. He lay down on the table and stared at Liam.
“I think he wants you to bring him up-to-date, as you said.” Rosa looked at Liam with a wry grin on her lovely face, her brown eyes looking both interested and sad. She seemed to really care about her veterinary patient. She probably knew him as a person, too, since she worked for his wife. Liam wished he had something to say that would make her smile.
And Drew, too. Wolves could smile, after all. At least shifters could, somewhat, while in wolf form.
“Okay.” Liam sat down on one of the chairs. Rosa remained standing beside Drew at first, her eyes examining him as the wolf regarded the other man in the room. “Now, here’s the situation—and if you have any ideas we’ll have to figure out a way for you to convey them to me.”
Drew nodded as he continued to lie there. Rosa moved to the chair beside Liam.
“First,” Liam said, “Jonas and Melanie—and maybe Rosa, too—” he looked at her for an instant and saw she was regarding him steadily “—may already have asked you this, but do you know why you haven’t shifted back? I gather this wasn’t your choice. Was anything different this time from one of your regular shifts?”
The
