1. Daxton

Chapter 1

Daxton

I cringed as I poked my fingertip and squeezed out a drop of blood onto the slide. I kept running these tests as if I knew what I was looking for, but I didn't. How could I? The things that were happening at AIDEN weren't the kind of tests I'd learned about in college. They were the kinds of things hidden away—the ones people thought were conspiracy theories at best, the talk of a mad man at worst.

The more I learned about what my employer was doing, the sicker I felt every day that I showed up for work. From what I'd been able to glean from all the research Willy and his friends had gathered over the years, nothing going on down in the basement laboratories was medically sound or ethical. It was evil. Pure evil.

It was all being done for profit, power, and prestige. They didn't even pretend it was for the benefit of mankind or any other bullshit. I didn't know how they slept at night.

Unfortunately, in all the decades they'd been running tests and sacrificing people and shifters, they still hadn't stabilized anything. They got the outcomes they wanted now and then, but it was dumb luck when they did. Everything that had been accomplished in the labs were the results of failed experiments and unintended interactions between cells, chemicals, and hitting the jackpot with the right DNA. But it was those accidental successes that had them plowing forward.

Apparently, some of those failed experiments had a significant and direct impact on my conception.

Not just mine either. Willy, too, and probably lots of others like us. That part we weren't too sure about yet. But we were going to find out.

My life over the recent months had definitely been wild. First of all, Willy was like me and could become a fly. I thought that was the best news I'd ever heard in my life.

It meant I wasn't some lone weirdo, I wasn't a freak of nature, I wasn't always going to have to hide who I was—I wasn't alone. There was someone else on this planet who could relate to me. But then, learning that there was more than just fly DNA inside me was a bit of a mind fuck.

It just didn't make any biological sense. Or scientific, either. It was like something out of some sci-fi movie written by someone who ascribed to the write-drunk philosophy. And try as I did to wrap my head around what I'd uncovered, I couldn't.

And that's why I started doing my own experiments. Well, attempting to do my own experiments. I still hadn't had much success. I refused to let that deter me.

I scooted back from the little makeshift laboratory in my pantry and rolled into the hallway. My apartment was relatively spacious as a living space, but it wasn't designed to have a genetic laboratory hidden inside. The pantry was the only space I could be close to a water source in case of an emergency and had a closed door for privacy. I could see my landlord now if they saw my set-up. It would not go well.

Stretching my neck from side to side, I realized how long I'd been sitting there hunched over. I was far too young to have a stiff neck. I stood up and arched my back, stretching out after crouching over the microscope for the past—I glanced at my watch and cringed. Fuck, how it already been four hours? No wonder my stomach was growling. Now that I shifted into my larger animals more often, I was always hungry.

Willy warned me that letting my apex predators out would result in being famished most of the time, and he was right. When I planned to spend time as a bear or a wolf, I had to keep several pounds of meat on hand just to have the strength to shift back. Apparently, that would ease up over time. Once my body got used to always changing forms, my metabolism would regulate better, and I wouldn't always feel like I could literally eat a horse. My polar bear pushed forward inside me, begging to come out and find a horse.

Not today, buddy. I've got work to do.

And not a horse either, but we'd cross that bridge when we got to it. When my wolf ate a rabbit or a fox, no one noticed. I highly doubted we could take down a horse and not have people be up in arms and hunting for us. They wouldn't think polar bear, obviously, but they'd be on the hunt, and as dangerous as my beasts were, humans were scarier. Always.

I made a boring sandwich and grabbed an orange soda, then went back to my pantry lab. I needed to get some grocery shopping done, but when I had spare time, I was always in my lab. But a man couldn't live on sandwiches alone. Or at least this one didn't want to.

My lab wasn't close to what I wanted it to be. I was always having to use make-shift supplies and dumpster finds. And while it wasn't as well stocked as I wanted, I had pilfered enough throwaway items from work that it was getting there.

The day my boss told me to take a box of outdated microscopes and mass spectators to the dumpster, I was beaming like it was Christmas morning. That box went directly into my trunk and was making the difference between me just fumbling around with drops of blood and saliva and actually starting to notice some changes in my blood and saliva when I was shifted.

And it wasn't just the animal DNA I was finding, but…something else.