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1
Agent Cassandra Sparks couldn’t believe she volunteered to work with Agent Grayson Stone again.
The Avian Soaring Security and the Furry United Coalition—ASS and FUC—never mixed well. Though Cass and Grayson’s last mission in Toronto back in 2012 ended well—in a manner of speaking—both agents had vowed to never speak to each other again. At the time, both agencies were new, and Cass and Grayson wanted to prove themselves valuable assets. In that, they succeeded. They’d caught their bad guy, but they were at each other’s throats by the end of it. ThatwasCass’ fault. She cringed at the memory of telling Grayson he’d have to “eradicate the hick” in himself to be her boyfriend. Ouch.
The Cass back then stuck with Grayson for the great sex but worried what people back home would say. She wouldn’t have been the first avian to opt for a mammal, but it would have been particularly difficult to justify Grayson to her persnickety flock. He didn’t have “the look,” as her mother would say, with his penchant for wearing cowboy hats and boots all the time. Cass’ mother would take one head-to-toe glance in his direction and the squawking would begin... and probably never end. Mother could be a tad overbearing, a worried mother-hen. And the more upset she was, the shrilled her voice became.
Mother had always wanted Cass to settle down in a traditional home, hoped she’d choose a harem for herself. Unfortunately, Cass found the idea nauseating. She’d never enjoy being one of a handful of peahens who fell in line behind an attention-starved peacock. Living the life of a party—a group of peafowl—was not her idea of a good time. If Cass was going to lay eggs for any man, she was going to have him all to herself.
For a while, she’d actually thought Grayson was going to be that man. She just needed to clean him up a little. Put a little polish on the hound. Make him just a smidge more presentable.
How laughable she’d been back then. Not only for thinking that changing his wardrobe would make the party accept him but also for believing that the loyal and honest canine would be up for a makeover. Grayson was nothing if not true to himself, unable to pretend he was anything else. Asking him to change—no, make thatdemandinghe change—had been telling him he wasn’t good enough. That he didn’t deserve her love.
What a bitch she’d been.
She only understood that now, though, after she’d had to walk through the depths of hell and back.
During an ASS mission, Cass had been following a suspect in a highspeed car chase when she was hit with a bioweapon specifically made to target shifters. It not only caused her to crash into a utility pole, wrapping her car around it at over 100 km per hour, but the chemicals leached into her system, inhibiting her shifter regeneration abilities and leaving her to heal at a snail’s pace. She didn’t know how humans dealt with it. Even now, a mere papercut took a week to heal.
The accident had changed her views about essentiallyeverything. It opened her eyes to how petty she was. Not at first. No, right after the incident, it felt like her world was crumbling. In fact, she had considered ending it, putting herself out of her misery and suffering. She’d been led to believe that, without her looks, she was a plucked bird. No one wanted to see that. Or at least, that’s the image her mother reinforced with her incessant chirping.“You’ll never grace the stage again for another beauty pageant!”was what her mother wailed at the side of Cass’ hospital bed.
While Cass had been processing everything, trying to embrace gratitude for beingalive,her mother’s world still revolved around how everyone looked and what they wore.“Eww, those shoes were so last season,”her mother would say about an offending pair of heels. Or,“That dress doesnothingfor her figure.”She was relentless and brutal. Mother would find something wrong with practically everyone.
And those damned beauty contests. From a young age, Cass was thrown into child pageants, practically learning to walk in heels as a toddler. But the pageants didn’t only teach her that beauty and grace were everything, they also molded her into someone with a cutthroat competitive side. As her mother would say,“If you don’t come in first place, then you didn’t win.”
While it may not have served her in every aspect of life, that way of thinking had certainly helped her as she fought to overcome her injuries and get back to her life. She had to at least be thankful to her mother for giving her that.
Cass was lucky to be alive, but it didn’t feel like that at first. She’d been stuck in Hell, looking at a reflection that wasn’t her own. Trapped in a body that wouldn’t move as she wanted. Now, as she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, getting ready for the day, she knew that many other people in accidents such as hers didn’t live to talk about it. Cass might have scars on her face, but she could cover them with foundation, as she now did, carefully blending so that the freckles she had come to love were still visible. She’d come a long way since right after the incident, when her face was covered in stitches and bandages because a malfunction had prevented the airbag from deploying. Her cheek had been crushed when her face impacted with the steering wheel, and the doctors had grafted a portion of bone from her left hip onto her cheekbone to reconstruct her face.
Thank gods for medical advancements and technology.
She brushed on her eyeshadow and plopped on a set of fake lashes. After applying red lipstick that matched the cool, rosy undertones of her medium-brown skin, she preened in the mirror. It probably seemed silly to others, and maybe even the opposite of her “beauty isn’t everything” revelation, but Cass still enjoyed makeup. After the reconstructive surgeries, it had helped to bring her back to life, in a way. At first, makeup was a comfort, hiding the scars to forget the terrible crash that marred her body. Makeup could change the way people looked at her, the way she felt. Eventually, though, she learned she didn’tneedmakeup, but if she still wanted to use it, that was okay too. It was artwork; a choice. And it was one aspect of her hectic life that she could control. That much she’d learned when she’d been stuck in the hospital bed and her friend Bianca would bring a wide selection of polishes in so Cass could pick a color and Bianca would paint her nails. It was a small choice she controlled, but it made a difference.
Now, she rubbed some coconut leave-in conditioner on her curly hair to help keep her unruly red locks tame, giving them an extra fluff as she admired her crown. The new Cass had worked herself up from rock bottom, learning that beauty wasn’t everything, which had been a difficult thing for a peacock shifter—and past beauty pageant winner—to recognize and accept. For all the days and months when shecouldn’tdo her hair, she’d learned that it hadn’t made a difference in who she truly was. She’d had to find confidence and value in herself without the outer wrapper and discover that true beauty wasn’t what was on the surface; it was what was inside that really counted. A cliché most learned at a young age, but it hadn’t been in her mother’s book of childhood lessons.
She slipped on her favorite pair of rhinestone-encrusted stiletto heels, smiling as they sparkled in the sunlight that streamed through her window. Okay, maybe everything about her hadn’t changed after the accident. If anything, three months in bed—“non-weight-bearing” as the doctors put it—with a broken pelvis had given her plenty of time to dream about shoes. So had the following weeks of learning to walk again when she was only allowed to wear sensible orthopedic shoes. Almost a year went by before Cass could walk without a limp and return to wearing her favorites.
It had been longer than that for her to accept her new reflection and become a warrior who was proud of her scars, who looked at them as a testament to how far she’d come.
Would Grayson notice she’d changed? When his name came through on a request from FUC to ASS, Cass had insisted she handle it personally. At first, she couldn’t believe it. She’d kept tabs on Grayson and knew that he’d retired from the field to become a full-time instructor at FUCN’A—the Furry United Coalition Newbie Academy—but it appeared he was getting back into the action now that his students had been targeted in a kidnapping attempt.
FUC had only wanted help in identifying the red-tailed hawk shifter who’d been involved in the event, but Cass had other ideas. She jumped on the chance to head to Canada and work with Grayson on the case. Whenever avians were involved, ASS had a right to demand FUC let them in on the mission, whether they liked it or not. She had no idea how to patch things up with Grayson or prove that she was different than the woman he once knew, but working with him for the first time in over a decade seemed a good place to start.
Cass picked her cell phone up and dropped it inside her designer handbag. She slung its leather straps over her shoulder. After adjusting her hot-pink pencil skirt, she waltzed out the door of her room at the local bed and breakfast to head to WANC—the Working and Administration Networking Core—which was the main building on the FUCN’A campus. The Furry United Coalition Newbie Academy was where all the new cadets were trained to be proficient FUC agents. Who didn’t want to be a talented FUC?
She’d surprised Grayson by showing up in his office the night before. She hadn’t been sure what she’d expected, but she supposed having him insist they set up an official meeting for the next day was reasonable.
As she opened the door to her candy-apple-red sports car, the summer sun glistened on her glossy nails with the rhinestones embedded in them. Okay, maybe Cass still enjoyed flashy things a bit too much, but she could think of worse vices to be a slave to. Besides, weren’t people always saying, “Do what makes you happy”? Cass felt glitter and glam did just that for her. She hunted down bad guys while looking fabulous, and last she checked, there was no rule against that.
Happy memories of the time she spent with Grayson sent her heart fluttering, but they faded behind the visions of her last fight with him. How she’d wronged him. She hoped he wouldn’t be misguided by her fancy exterior and would see she’d matured. This assignment gave her the chance to accomplish that. But there were other obstacles as well. FUC had an abrasive relationship with ASS. They’d be starting off on the wrong paw and claw. She hoped Grayson could see this peahen had changed her feathers. Figuratively anyway.
2
Grayson paced the meeting room, fearing he’d wear a hole in the soles of his cowboy boots. Cass was late. As usual. She probably got distracted staring at her reflection. Or couldn’t decide what pair of heels to wear.
He’d already been worked up about the case. His students had been under attack, targeted by an evil scientist. Dr. Smith’s body had been recovered, but his accomplice, a red-tailed hawk shifter, was still at large.
Alyce Cooper, director of FUCN’A, had been ready to take his report and send it off to a FUC field office for them to handle. That wasn’t good enough for Grayson. He knew how things like that went. FUC had bigger fish to fry, and they’d never get to this one, which meant, if he wanted to ensure the hawk was hunted down and captured, he had only one choice: pick up the case himself. Go back to the field after years of happy retirement.
