The room held a circle of folding chairs, with about a dozen people scattered around. A woman with dark hair and glasses sat at the front, holding a notebook. She looked up when I entered and gave a small welcoming nod.
“Come on in.”
Every head in the room turned briefly toward me.
The instinct to assess the room arrived immediately. It was habit.
Positions. Movement. Threat levels.
There were none.
Just shifters. Different kinds of shifters.
A bear shifter sat up front, arms folded across a massive chest. A fox shifter leaned sideways in her chair, one leg tucked under her. In the center, two wolf shifters were talking softly.
And Connor.
When he spotted me, his eyebrows rose in recognition. He grinned and waved me over. I walked across the room and sat in the empty chair beside him.
“You came,” he said.
“I did.”
Connor leaned back in his chair. “That’s how this works. All you have to do is show up and be willing to learn.”
The woman at the front of the room clapped her hands softly.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get started. My name is Mira. For anyone new here, this group is a place for shifters to talk about things that are harder to manage on our own.”
Her gaze moved around the circle briefly before landing on me.
“No pressure to speak if you’re new,” she added. “You can just listen.”
I inclined my head. That felt manageable.
Mira gestured toward the man sitting beside her. “Why don’t we start with check-ins?”
The man cleared his throat. “Name’s Dwayne. Bear shifter.”
Several people nodded.
“I’ve been working on the anger management stuff we talked about last week,” he said. “Turns out you can’t just shift and punch a tree every time someone annoys you.”
A few people laughed.
Dwayne rubbed the back of his neck. “My wife says she appreciates the effort.”
“That’s progress,” Mira said.
The conversation moved around the circle.
Each person spoke for a few minutes, about small things, big things.
A fox shifter talked about sensory overload in crowded places. A wolf shifter admitted he had been avoiding phone calls because the stress triggered his shift response. Another woman described the struggle of managing instincts when her human coworkers didn’t understand what she was dealing with.
I listened, and recognition slowly settled inside me.
The patterns in their stories felt familiar—too familiar.
