Page 77 of Dozer

“You got an interest in working there?”

He shrugged. “I get that I’m not physically threatening like you and Bubbles, but I’m good with people, and I think I’d be good at figuring which girl to assign a john, when to be understanding and nice to the girls, and when to point out they have a job to do and they should get their ass in gear and do it.”

“There’s a lot of legal shit you’ll have to learn before you can do that job, but yeah, I can see you’d be good at it. Slick does a great job of being the emotional support they need, while at the same time expecting them to do their job without drama. I mostly tell them to suck it up and get to work, when I’m stuck working there.” That wasn’t completely right. “Actually, I mostly patrol and act as security. I’m only on the counter when there’s no one else on the premises capable of handling it.”

“You only have one black dude with a patch, and two of us tryin’ to prospect in.”

“Your point?”

“You trying for diversity? I don’t want to be a number. A boost to your stats.”

“We give zero fucks about shit like diversity numbers. Wearelooking for more non-wolves, so we have more people to man our businesses during the three nights of the full moon, but we won’t let anyone in we aren’t a thousand percent comfortable with.”

“All humans who prospect in are made wolf, right?”

“Most are.” Horse is too powerful to turn just anyone, and bears don’t survive as often as wolves, anyway. Wolves have the best survival rate of the apex predators. Plus, we’ve gotten quite good at teaching control since Ghost learned some tricks from Bran a while back.

“You have to know it’s hit the gossip channels that Cora is meeting with some of the prospects.”

I hadn’t known, but it was good information. Randall had only required he vet any wolves after they were turned and had been taught control, but Cora wanted to meet them before we turn them, and she’d been adamant about it when we negotiated terms for existing in her territory. Overall, she hadn’t been difficult to coexist with, so we’d set a meet with her for the day before we were due to vote them in. If she didn’t think someone was wolf material, there was no sense in us taking a vote on them.

“How often do you fly?” I asked him.

“My sister braids my hair, but it takes a couple of hours to do it if she does them fat, and about six hours to do the skinny braids all over. It needs to be redone somewhere between two and three months, and I usuallychangeand fly a few nights in a row, to give my owl as much time in the air as possible between times, but I always time it so she can rebraid my hair before I have to be around people too much. When ya’ll needed me to go to owl last month for some recon, Lexi and another chick did ittogether, two working on me at once, and they did the skinny braids I have now in just under three hours. Lexi’s faster than my sister.”

“It’s possible we’ll need to keep that in-house in the future. Don’t want your sister talking about your hair needing to be braided again if an alibi is dependent on you having braids.”

When he didn’t respond, I asked, “That gonna be a problem?”

“As long as she still does it every couple of months, it shouldn’t be. We’re close, and she’s done it for years.”

Nice that he had a sister he was that close to. So many people who prospect in don’t have much of a family.

“What made you decide you want to be part of us?”

“At first? You’re badasses, right? But then, once I started hanging around, my reasons changed. Some of ya’ll need a family, I think, but that isn’t it for me. I have a family, but it’s all women — my grandmother and my mother raised my sister and me. My mother has a sister who moved to New York to be a dancer, and she isn’t a star or anything, but she lands enough jobs she’s made it her home, and we rarely see her. I like having brothers, men to hang with, and you’re right — skin color isn’t as important as animal. I didn’t expect that. And it isn’t like skin color don’t matter, which is stupid because it’s part of who I am, and ya’ll get that. Idiots who say skin color don’t matter have no idea that’s a slam.”

“So, your mom’s an owl? Your grandmother?”

“And great horned owls aren’t African, right? My grandfather was biracial, or dual-heritage, or whatever the fuck they’re calling it these days — white and Latino, but as far as what it means for me, the DNA says he was white, and doesn’t care what his first language was. He was a great horned owl. My grandmother was a Verreaux eagle-owl, whicharenative to Africa, but the magic picked great horned for my mom andher sister. My grandfather was fifty-six years older than my grandmother. At seventy-four, he looked like he was in his thirties, which was still too old for his eighteen-year-old bride, but I guess times were different back then. Mom didn’t have me until she was in her thirties, and my grandfather only made it to ninety-six, so he was gone long before I was hatched. He died young for a shifter, but he went out as the owl one night and never came back.”

“And your dad?”

“Human, and he freaked when he found out what she was. The vampire made him forget being told, and mom told the vampire to send him to another city, make him fall out of love with her, and make him forget she was pregnant. She wanted to be clear to me that he hadn’t abandoned his children, but to my mind, he did. Doesn’t matter, though.”

“Birds usually have a lot more than two kids at a time.”

“It’s the most common number for great horned owls. It can be one to four, but it’s most often two, followed by three, then one, with four being rare. In the wild, the natural ones might occasionally manage five, but not shifters, for some reason.”

“You consider yourself black, and not biracial?”

“My grandmother, mom, and dad are all black, so I’m, like, seventy-five percent African, assuming there weren’t any other white people farther up the family tree. The important point is I look black and not biracial. I mean, I’m not as dark as Ghost, but not many are.”

“Knife says you learned fast in the slaughterhouse.”

His scent told me he wasn’t a fan of working there, but his voice remained casual. “Ain’t rocket science. Kill’em fast — before they know to be scared and dump all the fear chemicals into their bloodstream — hang them by their back legs, get all the organs and such out, and then turn what’s left into steaks and such.”

“Still, he’s a hardass about doing it right, and he sends more people away than he keeps, so kudos.”

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