"So you finally had an off day?" I pause at the entrance to my office and turned to see Mateo; our shifter liaison spoke his head out of his own office next to mine.
Dark loosely curled hair fall all over his face and nearly in his hazel gray eyes, Olive skin and a heart breaking smirk on his face. Compact and ruggedly handsome as shifters tended to be. Six feet of tightly wound muscle that could explode into action at any moment.
A smile lit up my face. "Mateo!" The rogue panther shifter had been gone for weeks. I changed trajectory and went towards him. In the time between my turning towards him he'd stood and waited at his door and I gave him a tight hug. One of the first people who'd warmed to me in the office when I joined.
He took a deep breath as he buried his neck in my neck, it tickled and generated embarrassing giggles and I pushed him a way.
"Are you sniffing me?" I held him at arm's length as he smirked down at me.
"I was actually," his rough baritone, often utilized to lure in bedmates when we went out, reverberated through my body. I rolled my eyes and pushed him away jokingly.
"Stop that."
He shrugged in an I'm-not-doing-anything-wrong way but I shook my head at his antics. Denizen had different ways they used to entice humans to do their will. A vampire either got you through your eyes or through touch. A witch just needed biological material from you to hold you in thrall, shifters used voice and scent.
"You smell different." He finally said and I raised a brow, bending slowly to smell myself.
"It is not obvious or bad just…" he looked away. "Different?" he looked at me and I shrugged, but curiosity got the best of me.
"What does it smell like?" I tried to play it off as if I didn't care either way but his smirk returning told me he had seen through my ruse.
He paused for effect, "You smell familiar. Like I can almost put finger on it. You don't usually smell that way, anything change?"
I couldn't lie, he would smell it so I shrugged and repeated what I told my sister. "Don't know yet, still processing."
He gave me a considering before he nodded and moved back.
"So, your mission go okay?"
He sighed, folded his arms and looked down.
"I winced. "That bad?"
He nodded.
Although we were mainly stationed in Canaan, we were slowly expanding our reach. Oh's plan was to have a chapter in every major city just like the other organizations. Every specie had its dedicated task force dedicated to upholding the treaty, but after centuries, ours was the first that contained all species working together to uphold it.
Everyone was working hard to make it a success, but we were only about seven years old and we were still learning the ropes so to speak, gaining respect slowly, and to gain that respect we had to take every and al jobs the other species sent our way. We absolutely could not fail, if eventually we failed we had to make sure there was no obvious other step we could have taken.
No matter the situation, we had to give our absolute best. In one of the fringe cities, the shifter pack was without order, there wasn't any particular policing and they did as they liked. Until they went too far and killed a human's pregnant wife. Yeah. The guy went understandable crazy and snuck into their pack hearth home and killed himself and three others in an explosion.
Two of the dead were children, and since the denizen valued children more than wealth this caused a conflict between the pack and the local humans when they went to retaliate. Mateo was sent in to resolve the issue. I could only imagine what exactly he'd seen or done.
"Were you able to solve it at least?"
"Not completely." He wiped at his face. He didn't have bags under his eyes or any physical signs of his stress and obvious tiredness, he was a shifter after all but somewhat I could feel the cloud of dejection over him.
"We may need to call in the big guns and relocated the shifters. They started it yeah, but they won't hear anything until they have their restitution."
I rubbed his arms. "I know how you feel, just hang in there. It will sort itself out."
He looked at me. "You handled a case like this?"
"Yeah, almost similar situation involving vamps and witches."
He frowned. "Well, how did you resolve it?"
I angled my head. "I destabilized the power structure of the vamps, they started it. I just had to find someone who was guilty enough about it to help me get the right people to speak out. They were absolutely wrecking each other." I saw the light enter his eyes and I raised a finger. "Remember shifters a little more high-strung, which you should know personally. Y'all have a structured chain of command."
He flashed his fangs at me, "But it takes a while to choose a replacement doesn't it? I just need to get the alpha out of the way and while they deliberate who will replace 'em I can work something better out. Thanks!" He began to move back, towards the exit.
"Don't kill anyone Mateo." I shouted after him and he paused to give me an exaggerated wide eyed look.
"Not even a little?"
"Mateo!" but he disappeared round the bend, his laugh echoing through the room. I shook my head and went into my office