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And I didn’t trust anyone who wrote emails like Greenwald did, anyway.

Shit.

The urge to swipe all the printouts, highlighters, empty coffee cups, and sticky notes off my desk and onto the floor came over me. Again. My fingers twitched, itching to grab my phone and call Colin, like I always wanted to when I needed a sounding board.

But Colin was too busy to bother with my annoyance over a few emails.

Instead I got up and paced. I had a nice office for junior faculty. Two big windows looking out on the forest surrounding the university, our own small coffee maker, and enough floor space for our giant free-standing whiteboard. All shared, of course, but my office mate almost never came in here, except late at night.

“During the day, they’ll find you no matter where you go, Newton,” Meredith had whispered on my first day here, leaning in close and glancing over her shoulder as if they might be lurking in the shadow of our overstuffed bookshelf—they, of course, being undergrads. “You have to be trickier than they are. Nowhere you can get coffee. That’s like a prey animal hanging out by the watering hole. Always bring a thermos from home. And avoid sources of junk food, going outside, and the bottom floor, because they cut through this building on their way to the gym. They’llhunt you down.”

I’d gone out the next day and bought the little Mr. Coffee that now, a year later, sat stained and half-melted—but still functional—on the filing cabinet in the corner. Meredith had thanked me in an email, and when I unlocked the office in the morning, it usually showed signs of being used overnight.

But I still hadn’t seen her here during daylight since that first day, when she’d come to meet me in person. She’d scrawled her office hours on the door in handwriting so carefully illegible that she had plausible deniability no matter what the students thought they’d read, and the department website was always out of date anyway.

We ran into each other sometimes in the evenings, but I had the office mostly to myself by day—except when an undergrad did manage to hunt me down, and I had to take half an hour to explain to some whiny teenager why you needed a basic understanding of how mixing bleach and ammonia would kill you, yes, even if you planned on having someone else clean your bathroom for you. Spoiled little brats.

I wasn’t the most popular Chem 101 teacher on campus.

I wasn’t even the most popular McEwen on campus.

Speaking of annoying undergrads. I sighed and slumped against the wall by the window, staring out over the courtyard, and the path beyond, and the pine trees past that. Getting a job at the university closest to my family’s pack, the same place where I’d gotten my own undergraduate degree, had seemed like such a great stroke of luck when it happened.

Fiona applying here made sense too, for the same reason.

And then a few weeks ago, a month into her first semester, I’d overheard one of my students saying to another, “Yeah, Dr. McEwen, you know, Fiona McEwen’s brother?”

Because that was what I needed. Yet another reminder that I was and always would be the least interesting, least memorable, and least attractive McEwen sibling, even as the oldest. My younger brother was an alpha were, our younger sister had at least come out a werewolf, and a smart and pretty one to boot, and Fiona, the youngest—well, Fiona was one of only nineteen female alphas of any shifter type in all of North America. Having a female alpha in your family was considered prestigious among shifters, especially among werewolves. Female werewolves were less common to begin with, as our genetics tended to produce male offspring. It meant you had a strong bloodline—and it reflected well on our whole family.

Except for me.

Because my inheritance, from both my alpha-werewolf father and my gorgeous, smart, funny, human mom, added up to being taller than average, intelligent, and awkwardly, irredeemably plain. All the werewolf magic that flowed so freely through my siblings’ veins, making Cara stronger and faster than humans and able to shift—and enhancing Evan and Fiona even more, making them even stronger and faster and more resilient in their turn—had skipped over me completely.

I shook myself out of it and turned back to the whiteboard. Brooding didn’t do me any good, with or without weird emails and a depressing lack of funding.

That exam wasn’t going to write itself.

* * *

“Newton!” I jumped about a foot in the air and spun away from the whiteboard, blinking owlishly. My own reflection blinked back at me from the window. The sun had gone down. When? I wasn’t quite sure. The overhead lights had already been on, since the day had been too dim and gloomy to go without them.

Meredith slipped through the door and shut it soundlessly behind her, turning the doorknob lock button as she did.

“What are you still doing here? It’s nearly eleven,” she said, bustling over to her desk across from mine and setting down a huge stack of papers, which bristled with multicolored neon stickies.

I worked nights as often as she did; I just usually took my work home, or burned the midnight oil in the lab.

“Just finishing the 101 midterm.”

She sighed and pulled a face. Quite a face. Meredith had one of the most expressive ones I’d ever seen, with all her thoughts flickering over her features for everyone to see. I suspected some kind of fox shifter ancestry, what with her reddish-brown hair, pointy nose, and golden-amber eyes, but she’d never said anything. Or offered to let me sequence her genome.

Rude. I mean, if you couldn’t sequence your colleagues in the department, who could you sequence—without offering a hefty fee, anyway—besides your own family?

I had my own genes completely sequenced, of course; ditto both of my parents’ DNA. And my siblings’. And I had a small selection of other samples from shifters, humans who’d mated with shifters, and their human and magical offspring. I’d used a lot of my startup funding for those.

Meredith’s genes probably wouldn’t help me much.

It still annoyed me that she’d never offered, even to trade for mine. Then again, she had grant funding, and she could actually get people to enroll in her studies. She didn’t need to lean on her acquaintances to be research subjects.