However, every rule had an exception, and Andrea’s father, a hyenawere, had been one. Andrea remembered very little of her father. She once said he had the mental capacity of a five-year-old. That didn’t prevent him from mating with Andrea’s mother, who was a werehyena, or bouda, as they preferred to be called. His blood made Andrea beastkin, and she went to great lengths to hide it. She joined the Order as a human, subjected herself to torturous methods to pass all the necessary tests, graduated from the Academy, and excelled at being a knight. She was on the fast track climbing the Order’s chain of command when a case went sour and got her transferred to Atlanta.
The head of Atlanta’s Order chapter, Knight-protector Ted Moynohan, knew that something was wrong with Andrea, but he couldn’t prove it, so he kept her on support duty. Ted didn’t play nice with shapeshifters. In fact, he didn’t even consider them human. That was one of the reasons I left. Despite it all, Andrea remained fanatically loyal to the Order. For her, the Order meant honor and duty and a sense of serving a higher cause. Shifting in the hospital bed had blown her closet door wide open.
Andrea kept her gaze firmly in her cup. Her face had a strained blank look, her jaw set, as if she were dragging a heavy boulder up a mountain and she was determined to make it to the top.
“The thing with your aunt didn’t go well. Ted had called in reinforcements from everywhere. Twelve knights died, among them two masters-at-arms, one diviner, and a master-at-craft. Seven others were severely injured. The Order conducted a hearing. Since my cover had been blown anyway, I thought it would be a good time to make a case that someone like me could be of use to the Order.”
Now things made sense. This was her crusade. I should’ve seen it coming. We’d talked just before I quit the Order, and Andrea had argued against my quitting. She wanted me to stay and fight with her to change the Order for the better from within. I told her that even if I tried to change the Order, I couldn’t. I wasn’t a knight. My opinion carried no weight. But Andrea was a knight, a decorated veteran. She saw it as her chance to make her mark.
Andrea took a small sip of her coffee and coughed. “Damn, Kate, I know you’re pissed but did you have to put motor oil into my drink?”
“That was the lousiest joke I’ve ever heard you make. Stop stalling. What happened?”
She glanced up and I almost did a double take. Her eyes were hollow and bitter.
“I had one of the best Order advocates in the South. He thought there was a chance we could make a difference. There are others like me in the Order. The not-quite-pure human. I wanted to make their lives better. He advised me to separate myself from the shapeshifters, so I wrote you that letter. I was going to bring Grendel back too, but we had to leave in a hurry, so I just took him with me and went to Wolf Trap.”
Wolf Trap, Virginia. The Order’s national headquarters. Everyone knowing Andrea was a beastkin. It must’ve been pure hell.
Andrea rubbed the rim of her cup, as if trying to remove some dirt only she could see. If she rubbed it any harder, she’d make a hole in it.
“We spent a month preparing twenty-four-seven, gathering documents, pulling all of my records. My advocate spoke for three hours at the hearing and made a very passionate, logical argument in my favor. We had charts, we had statistics, we had my service decorations on display. We had everything.”
A cold feeling sprouted in the pit of my stomach, telling me exactly how this would end. “And?”
Andrea squared her shoulders and opened her mouth.
Nothing came out. She clamped it shut.
I waited.
Her face paled. She sat rigid, the mouth of her line tense. A faint reddish glow tinted her eyes—the hint of hyena sneaking through under pressure.
Andrea unclenched her teeth. Her voice came out completely flat, sifted through the sieve of her will until every last hint of emotion had been scrubbed from it.
“They awarded me Master-at-Arms and retired me due to being mentally unfit for duty. The official diagnosis is posttraumatic stress disorder. The decision is final and I can’t dispute it. I can’t even accuse them of discrimination, because my final orders don’t address the fact that I’m beastkin. They simply refused to acknowledge it, as if it weren’t an issue.”
Those fuckers. They didn’t just throw her out like a piece of garbage, they sent a message with her.
“So.” Andrea took a deep breath and pushed the words out. “I failed.”
For Andrea the Order was more than simply a job. It was her life. She’d spent her childhood in a pack of shapeshifters who reviled her because her father was an animal and her mother was too weak to protect her. Every bone in Andrea’s body had been broken before she was ten years old. Andrea rejected all things shapeshifter. She locked that part of herself deep inside and dedicated her existence to becoming completely human, to stepping between the weak and the strong, and she was damn good at it. Now the Order had made her into a pariah. It was a monumental betrayal.
“Everything is gone.” Andrea forced a smile. Her face looked like it would shatter any second. “My job, my identity. If the cops had looked closer at my ID, they’d see it said RETIRED on it. People I thought were my friends won’t talk to me, like I’m a leper. When I came back to Atlanta, I called down to the chapter looking for Shane. He’d taken over the armory when I left. A couple of those weapons are my personal property. I want them back.”
Shane was a typical knight: no family to tie him down, top physical condition, competent, by the book. He and I didn’t get along, because he never could quite figure out where I fit into the Order’s hierarchy. But he and Andrea had hit it off. They were colleagues. Buddies even.
“How is he?” I asked.
Outrage sparked in Andrea’s eyes. “He wouldn’t talk to me. I know he was there, because Maxine took the call and you know how her voice gets all distant when she is talking in someone’s head at the same time? It was like that. She must’ve asked him if he wanted to talk to me and then she took a message. Shane hasn’t called me back either.”
“Shane is an asshole. I was riding back from a job once—it was raining so hard I could barely see—and he was jogging with his rucksack on. I asked him why. He told me that it was his day off and he was trying to take twenty seconds off his time so he could score an even three hundred on the PE scale. He has no brain of his own— he opens his mouth and the Order’s Code comes out.”
In a real fight the extra twenty seconds wouldn’t help him. I could kill him in one. Shane lacked the predatory instinct that turned a well-trained man into a killer. He treated each fight as a tournament match, where someone was totaling his points. And despite his obvious zeal, the Order recognized it, too. All knights started out as knight-defenders. The Order gave you ten years to distinguish yourself, and if you failed, at the end of your dime you became a master-defender, a rank-and-file knight. Shane clearly aimed higher than that, but he was nine years into his tenure with the Order, and Ted showed no signs of promoting him.
Andrea crossed her arms. “Shane is not the point. I don’t give a damn about Shane. He’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Anyway. After the hearing me and Grendel holed up in my place for a couple of weeks licking my wounds, but I can’t hide in my hole forever. And talking to the fur-face only gets you so far. Also, he eats things that are bad for him, like rugs and bathroom fixtures. He chewed a hole in my kitchen floor. In a completely flat surface.”
“It doesn’t surprise me.”
Just her and the freakishly large smelly poodle hiding in her apartment together. No friends, no visitors, nothing, just sitting there in her own misery, too proud to unload it on anybody else. It was something I would’ve done. Except now when I went home, someone was there waiting for me and he would turn the city inside out if I was more than a couple of hours late. But Andrea had nobody. Not even Raphael—she very carefully didn’t mention his name.
“I’ve got a dog-training book,” Andrea said. “It says Grendel needs mental stimulation, so I tried to train him, but I think he might be retarded. I figured you would want to see your dog eventually, so here we are. He’s probably eaten my dashboard by now.”
If she was lucky. If not, he would’ve also puked on the floor and then peed on it for a good measure. I leaned back. “So what now?”
Andrea shrugged her shoulders in a jerky, forced movement. Her voice was still a matter-of-fact monotone. “I don’t know. The Order offered me a pension. I told them to shove it up their asses. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve earned it, but I don’t want it.”
