Shifting Selves by Mia Marshall

lose a fair bit of our pay if Carmichael followed through on his threat.
    Carmichael exhaled, his relief tempered somewhat by his obvious annoyance. “Now, can you please fill us in on the basic points of the case?”
    She gazed off into the distance, considering. “The shifters are having a couple of bad days.” Considering that update enough, she stopped talking and waited for him to explode.
    Somehow, he held it together. “Are elementals involved in any way?”
    “Other than you asking me and Aidan to butt in? No.”
    He leaned forward, looking earnest and determined. I suspected this was a ploy. “You trusted us once with your secrets,” he implored.
    The foolish man couldn’t know that a woman raised by Josiah Blais was completely immune to emotional manipulation. She’d been taught by the master, and no one else had a chance. If anything, she looked amused. “And word still managed to get out within the FBI. Neither of us are exactly welcome at home these days.”
    This time, she neglected to mention that neither of us felt any desire to return home. Few people could tell partial truths with greater conviction than Sera.
    Carmichael was running out of arguments. I wanted to save him, since he had no real chance of winning against Sera, and the longer he tried, the more foolish she’d make him feel.
    “We can’t,” I said. “These aren’t our secrets to tell. You need to understand that. We’ll wear the white hats and help however we can, but we’re not going to betray the magical community more than we already have. I know you think you have a right to this information because of your new job, but that’s just not true. You’re still an outsider. The best we can do is tell you when there’s information we’re not allowed to share. Let us keep some loyalties, Carmichael.”
    I thought loyalty was a language Carmichael would understand. He sighed heavily. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. We asked you to liaise on a case and communicate your findings to the FBI. We sent you to work on a case you would never have known about without us. Now, you are asking us to continue to employ you, despite the fact that your version of liaising involves telling us almost nothing about the case to which we assigned you unless it suits you and your friends.”
    Sera and I looked at each other. “That’s about it, yeah.” I nodded and gave him a bright smile.
    Carmichael rubbed his hand over his face, scrubbing his own skin in frustration. “Any human involvement?”
    It was one small thing we could give him. “One of the shifters lied and said she was staying with a human friend. I’m not sure the girl knows anything, but you can talk to her.”
    Sera nodded and gave them the name she’d learned from Dana. “Other than that, it’s all shifter families.” She offered Carmichael a small apologetic smile, one honest enough to catch him off guard. Sure, she was happy to bust his balls just for the fun of it, but we were also telling the truth. There were things we couldn’t tell these men without the shifters’ permission, and it took a rare sincere moment from Sera for Carmichael to finally understand that.
    He nodded at her. “Thank you. And, considering that we don’t appear to be doing any work this evening, I’ll take one of those beers now.” He smiled a weak, tired smile, and with it the agent melted away, leaving a man in his place. It was the first time I’d ever seen Carmichael as anything other than the determined, focused agent. It made me think I should call him by his first name, if I had any idea what that was.
    Instead, I walked to the kitchen to grab his beer from the fridge, wishing the whole time that Mac and Simon would join us and there was one less secret I had to keep.
    Days passed, each hour creeping slowly by as absolutely nothing happened. The phone remained silent. I knew Will and his family were continuing to pursue every lead they could find, questioning James’s and