else would Layla get a job with a super-secret organization like the DCO? It wasn’t as if Layla could just walk into the personnel office and fill out an application.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll get you an interview with the director.”
Silence. Then, “Seriously?”
“Seriously. I’ll text you the directions to the main office in DC.”
“Thanks,” Layla said. “I owe you big for this, Kendra.”
“It’s only an interview,” Kendra said. “You have to get the job.”
Though something told Kendra that wouldn’t be a problem. She stifled a groan as she hung up. Ivy was going to kill her.
She dropped her phone back in her purse and walked into John’s office. As she’d suspected, he was more than willing to talk to Layla.
“Just because she’s a shifter doesn’t mean she’s a field operative, John,” Kendra reminded him.
He peered at her over his reading glasses, his mouth quirking. “I heard you the first two times you told me. Don’t worry. I won’t ask her to do anything she doesn’t want to do. Now go before you miss your flight.”
Actually, Kendra still had an hour before she had to meet Tate and his team at the airfield, but she could take a hint. Telling John she’d see him in two weeks, she left and headed over to the lab. The facility had gotten a complete makeover, thanks to the DCO’s new fascination with hybrids.
Six months ago, nobody knew what a hybrid was. There were the DCO’s natural-born shifters and that was it. Kendra’s very best friend in the whole world, Ivy Donovan, was a feline shifter, but no one would know it just from looking at her. Sure, when Ivy wanted to, the claws and fangs came out and she could be deadly as hell. But most of the time she was a normal woman. The other DCO shifters were like that, too—Clayne Buchanan and his wolf traits, Trevor Maxwell with his coyote abilities, Declan MacBride and his massive physique to match his bear DNA.
Then Ivy and her husband, Landon Donovan, had investigated Keegan Stutmeir, the former East German intelligence officer turned arms dealer. Everyone had thought he’d been kidnapping scientists and doctors to make a new bioweapon. They’d been wrong. He’d been creating man-made shifters, using science to shove animal DNA into humans. Everyone called them hybrids.
While they might share animal traits, hybrids were nothing like shifters. Shifters blended perfectly into normal society. You’d never notice them if they didn’t want you to. Hybrids, on the other hand, were bloodthirsty, violent, enraged creatures almost all the time. It had taken a small army of DCO agents along with a group of completely unauthorized Special Forces soldiers from Landon’s former team to take down Stutmeir and the pack of hybrids he’d created out in Washington State.
Unfortunately, two of the doctors responsible for creating the process had gotten away. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the DCO ran up against the hybrids again.
The official company line was that all the new high-tech equipment at the DCO training complex was to help them “understand” the threat the DCO faced, but that was crap. The assistant director, Dick Coleman, was pushing their doctors not only to understand how Stutmeir had created his hybrids, but to also replicate the process.
All Kendra could say was thank God for Zarina Sokolov. She’d been one of the doctors Stutmeir kidnapped, and had decided to work for the DCO to make sure people like Dick could never replicate Stutmeir’s hybrid process—without anyone realizing it, of course.
The Russian doctor looked up from her microscope as Kendra walked in, her reading glasses perched on her nose and a pencil stuck in her messy blond bun. Zarina said something to the gray-haired man beside her, then slid off the stool and came over.
Kendra shivered. “I don’t know how you all put up with this place all day. It’s freezing in here.”
Zarina laughed as she pushed her reading glasses up on her head. “Is that your subtle way of asking if we can do the status briefing outside?”
“If you don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind.” The doctor grabbed her coat from the wooden rack beside the door. “I could use a break.”
Once outside the lab, she and Zarina walked along the sidewalk until they were too far from the building for anyone to overhear—although with shifters on the property who had exceptional ears, there could always be someone listening in. They stopped at a section that overlooked one of the complex’s training areas. Even though it