by R. J. Blain
“I don’t get it,” Jake confessed after the second time I nipped him.
Dr. Howards likely found the situation interesting, which meant he spent far too much time around the Thomas home. “From a psychological standpoint, it’s very simple. She doesn’t trust any of us. While she’s tolerating the situation admirably, there are limits. Currently, her limit is around four feet. If you stay out of that range, I suspect she’ll leave you alone. It’s a ‘if you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you’ type of situation.”
“So what do we do?”
“When she’s ready to approach someone, she will. Until that point, whether she’s human or fox, allow her to pick her own pace. She’ll either come around or she won’t. There’s no forcing a situation like this. All circumstances considered, you and your parents will have the hardest time reestablishing any form of trust with her. Strangers will have the easiest time. Your mother may never regain her trust, and you should be prepared for that.”
“She really is sorry,” Jake muttered.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it, not in a situation like this. An apology can’t erase months of suffering, uncertainty, and what was essentially psychological warfare. While Fenerec can readily understand your mother’s perspective, Karma is at a distinct disadvantage. At this stage, even if pack bonds were offered, I don’t believe she’d accept them. It’s a matter of trust, and while you can sense your mother’s remorse, she can’t. And even if she can smell emotions like Fenerec can, I suspect she’s too young and inexperienced to know what her nose is telling her.”
Huh. Given a little more time, I might actually like the damned psychologist. Then the reality of my situation settled in. I flattened my ears. A year ago, even the hint of being welcomed would have excited me. Now, I wanted them to let me go so I could try to rebuild some form of life, one without wolves in it.
Alone seemed better than part of a group filled by those who didn’t want me. The first chance I got, I’d see what I could do to add even more distance. As a human or a fox didn’t matter to me.
I would find a new path for myself outside of the FBI, outside of law enforcement, and as far away from Fenerec as possible.
“What can we do?”
“Give her time, give her space, and show her you trust her. The rest will fall into place or it won’t. No amount of therapy can guarantee anything, especially when she’s not ready. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
Jake sighed but nodded. “All right. Whatever it takes.”
“I only hope you won’t regret that later.”
Eleven
They are a reflection of my opinion.
I stayed a fox for two weeks, and I only shifted to human when everyone left the house, locking me inside. As a human, I could have unlocked the door and ventured out. I should have. Leaving would have simplified a great deal for me.
Instead, I dressed in clothes Jake had brought to his parents’ house, all of which were too big on me, hunted down the stack of papers Dr. Howards thought would help fill the time, and read. It contained a large part of the Greenwich case files, and as I finished with each sheet, I folded it into a paper airplane and sent it winging across the living room in the general direction of the hallway.
The hours slipped by, and I learned nothing new about the mercenaries who had tried to take my life, had shot Jake, and otherwise haunted me. I’d learned more from the black market, and I wondered if I could somehow get in touch with Amelia so we could resume our work.
We might actually get somewhere.
My fleet of paper airplanes covered most of the floor by the time I heard the alarm system beep and the front door open.
Jake laughed. “What are you doing?”
I folded the sheet I had just finished and launched it across the room. It winged its way into the hallway, crunched its nose into the wall, and flopped to the floor. Picking up the next sheet, I began to read, pretending he didn’t exist. When his parents followed him, I heard them both sigh.
“Let this serve as a reminder why we shouldn’t have another puppy anytime soon,” Sebastian muttered. “Between the two of them, I’ll be surprised if the house survives.”
“If you could convince her to go home with him, then you wouldn’t have to be worried about our house.”
Jake growled.
Since witnessing yet another dispute between the Thomas trio was low on my list of things to do, I folded the briefing page and launched it at Jake, smacking him in the head. “Stop picking fights. It’s annoying.”
“But I’m picking the fight on your behalf.”
“If I wanted to pick a fight, I would do so.”
“Dare I ask why you’re making so many paper airplanes?”
“They are a reflection of my opinion.”
“About?”
“Reading paperwork I’ve read countless times before.” I scanned the next page, folded it up, and sent it on a pitifully short flight before it crashed to the floor.
“Find anything interesting?”
“Nothing new. Should I find something, I’ll let you know.”
The Thomas trio stayed put, staring at me while I worked. Their scrutiny annoyed me, and after I made five more planes, I clenched my teeth. “What is it?”
Jake sighed. “I don’t know about them, but I’m a bit surprised you didn’t need a nudge back to human after being a fox for so long.”
Maybe if they hadn’t written me off as an inferior species unworthy of their pack and lives, they’d know more about me. Then again, had I been included in their lives rather than excluded, I may not have figured out the trick to shifting without help. I shrugged and scanned over the next page to confirm there was nothing new.
I crumpled it and chucked it into my airplane fleet.
“The last ten pages contain the material you haven’t read yet,” Pauline offered, dodging around my airplanes on her way towards the kitchen.
If the FBI had only gotten ten new pages since I had walked out of Jake’s home, then the case was either dead in the water or they didn’t trust me with all of the material. I suspected both, as the file on the warehouse hostage situation probably had at least fifty pages dealing with me and Amelia storming the building alone.
It didn’t surprise me, nor did it bother me all that much.
I had no intention of returning to the FBI in any of its branches, and I couldn’t have cared less if the group came and finished what they had started in London. The missing pages made no difference to me.
Trust was a two-way street, and since I had no intentions of working at it, I held no expectations anyone else did, either. When would they figure it out and let me move on?
“People at work have been asking about you,” Jake said, picking his way across the living room to flop onto his father’s armchair.
“How many of them are in your pack?”
“Most of them,” he confessed.
“They’ll just have to wonder, then. As soon as I’m out of here, I’ll be finding work as far outside of the scope of the FBI as possible.” I almost said humanly, but I wasn’t human anymore and never would be again.
“What do you want to do?”
I shrugged. Returning to my mountain and the den I had left behind seemed like the best idea to me, although I understood I couldn’t. Jake knew where it was. I’d have to find a new place to call my own.
I’d pick a boring, tedious job that paid well enough to get by and be satisfied with it.
“We could really use you.”
I had heard those words before, spoken by the CARD team that had delegated me to serve as the anchor of a sinking ship. “I find that highly unlikely.”
“It’s true.”
“Nothing has changed, Jake. We’re still through. I’m only here because none of you will let me leave. I’m not stupid. If you had actually needed me, you wouldn’t have discarded me when I was no longer convenient. If you had actually needed me, you wouldn’t have relegated me to basic
support. Been there, done that. Didn’t like the ride, so I’m not getting back on again. Find someone else who has a single fuck to give, because it’s not me.”
One week later, I got my wish. Either Jake’s parents had tired of my unwillingness to bend or someone had convinced Jake the only way for me to move on was to move on, but I had the keys to an apartment in New York City and a bus ticket to get there.
It hurt him, but I refused to change my mind. Maybe one day I would reconsider.
If he were wise, he wouldn’t hold his breath.
In an agreement I loathed but had no choice about, I ended up with a conditional pension. As long as I made myself available if someone needed to ask me questions, I’d receive a monthly payment sufficient to cover my expenses if I pinched pennies and took care. In what I classified as a victory, I managed to convince them to communicate by email.
My first act as a free woman was to move from the apartment they assigned me, and I picked the cheapest part of town to make my home. Then, because I was an asshole determined to stay independent, I refused to give them my address unless I was given a guarantee nobody would visit me in person.
I was granted my request along with a promise all contact would remain by email and my address would be kept in a confidential file that required special permission to access.
It would do.
Unlike in Baltimore, there’d be no marked cars to help keep everyone in line, but I didn’t care. I had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, and if someone wanted to pick a fight with me, I’d be happy enough to oblige.
No one was stupid enough to bother me.
At least my former career in the FBI was useful for something; my resume landed me interviews at most places I applied to, and with my pension, I didn’t need to worry about money. I ultimately failed to avoid law enforcement, taking a secretarial job at a law firm. Thankfully, I would avoid court most of the time unless one of the lawyers required an extra pair of hands.
My job involved managing appointments and making travel arrangements for a team of ten attorneys. It offered me one thing the FBI never could: a fixed schedule.
I arrived at work at seven-thirty and left at five. If I needed to stay late or arrive early, I knew at least a week in advance. I got an hour for lunch, which I took at two every day. The novelty of knowing how every day of my life would go wore off within a week, and the numbness settled in again.
In my first month in New York City, I heard from no one, and I questioned why I checked the email address I’d been assigned. After the second, I stopped caring. I deleted my login information, got a new phone number, and opened a new bank account. My secretarial job paid for everything I needed.
In the large law firm, I disappeared in the crowd, able to limit my communications to the attorneys I managed, and most of them preferred to shoot me an email rather than waste their precious time talking to me. I was the only one in the office who wasn’t at least a paralegal, which suited me fine.
I could survive, but instead of alone in the woods, I’d be alone in the city.
Winter ended, spring came and went, and half a year of my life slipped away. History had a tendency to repeat itself, and while I recognized my descent into a holding pattern, I remained helpless to stop it. Unlike my last stint in New York, when I’d served as an anchor, I had nothing holding me in place.
There was no hope of being added back to an active roster. My days in the FBI were over, and I wondered what had become of the woman who had been so determined to make a difference.
Ah, right. She’d been shot by her ma.
The scars no longer hurt, but my heart did whenever I caught a glimpse of one of them in the mirror.
I thought about seeking out my pa’s grave. He couldn’t talk to me anymore, but I could tell him about everything that’d gone wrong. Maybe he could do what the psychologist had failed to accomplish. He would’ve told me to get my head out of my ass and get back to work, but he wouldn’t have cussed while doing it.
My slide took a turn for the worse at an office party; had I been paying more attention, I would have known it featured my arch-nemesis, pepperoni pizza. After the first slice, every memory I had suppressed haunted me, I made my excuses, and I retreated to the safety of my studio apartment, barren of anything beyond the necessities. If anyone came inside, there’d be no way of knowing who lived in the place.
Once upon a time, pictures of the life I had thrown away had decorated the walls, my trophies, belts, and medals from kickboxing had been tucked away in hidden corners where I could enjoy them without prying eyes knowing they were there. A bowl with my ammunition had waited by the door.
Nothing remained.
The ghosts of my past kept me company.
I locked the door, pressed my back to the wall, and slid to the floor. I choked back a sob, biting my knuckle in an effort to keep my tears at bay. The pain didn’t help.
Why was it I could last so long without a tear but a piece of pizza spelled my undoing? Everything about the party reminded me of Jake—of Jake before he had turned his back on me, when there had been no one else I wanted watching my back.
No one watched my back anymore, not even me; I tried not to think about who or what might be following me. I hadn’t been involved in kickboxing since my transfer into CARD. If someone attacked me, I doubted I’d present much of a challenge to them.
It would be better for everyone if I disappeared completely. Every day was the same. I woke up, I went through the motions, did what was expected of me at work, did more than what was expected from me at work to fill the time, came home, and slept. I ate enough to keep going, skirting the line between functional and too tired to think.
Even if I wanted to rebuild the bridges I had burned, the places I longed to return to no longer existed. The dead couldn’t come back to life, and everything worth living for had been buried in the ground with my pa.
I didn’t even know where my pa had been buried. Had they laid my ma to rest beside him, or had they put her elsewhere?
If I hadn’t been born, they’d still be alive. They would have adopted another child, a human one, one who wouldn’t have chased them from their Georgia home to Vermont. They would have filled their home with unwanted children and loved them without my existence sickening my ma, turning her into someone capable of killing my pa.
Nobody had told me the fate of the fosters, but I could only hope they’d been placed elsewhere before they’d been hurt, too.
Jake would have been free to find someone of his own kind—or at least someone who didn’t need what he couldn’t give me.
Why did I even bother? I curled beside my front door in an apartment devoid of life, and I questioned everything I had done, who I had been, and why I still insisted on going through the motions as though what I did mattered.
I came up with one answer: I lived because my ma had wanted me to die.
I would make it be enough until I had time to figure out the rest.
When I showed up for work the next day, dressed in my usual black slacks, blazer, and white shirt, my boss was waiting for me at my desk, a full half-hour before he was supposed to arrive at the office. For an attorney, I liked Mr. Desjardins, although he made the other lawyers in the firm seem like harmless guppies compared to his shark.
Behind his flint-gray eyes was a steel trap of a mind, and winning meant everything to him, second only to his daughter.
“Miss Thomas,” he greeted, patting a manila folder sitting on the corner of my desk. “I trust you’re feeling better this morning?”
“Yes, thank you,” I murmured, scooping up the folder on my way to my chair. After dumping my purse on the floor near my feet, I set it in front of my keyboard and flipped it open. “You’re in early.”
“An issue has come up with the Hemshaw case. I wanted to pick your brain. You’re familiar with FBI investigations, correct?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied. While I knew the Hemshaw case was scheduled to open in cour
t in the afternoon, I hadn’t thought there would be issues with it; unlike a lot of the cases through the firm, from my understanding of the situation, it should have been an open-and-closed divorce trial. “I’m under the impression the Hemshaw case is a divorce settlement?”
“It has become complicated. Our client wishes to file criminal charges against his wife in addition to the divorce proceedings.”
“Doesn’t the trial begin today?”
“Mrs. Hemshaw assaulted our client last night. Mr. Hemshaw sustained minor injuries. Their daughter is in critical condition in ICU. I wanted to find out how the FBI would be involved in the case.”
“They won’t be; the local police department would handle the investigation. Domestic violence cases are under standard police jurisdiction, sir.”
“Mrs. Hemshaw took their daughter across state lines.”
I grimaced. CARD would have become involved, then. The law firm I worked with rarely handled full criminal proceedings, instead handling civil and familial law issues. “I see. The first appearance in court should happen within seventy-two hours following arrest, at which point the judge will determine if there is sufficient evidence to order the case to proceed. During this time, the FBI will gather all relevant evidence and present it to the attorneys for use in court. If Mr. Hemshaw wishes for you to try the civil elements of the case, the evidence will be submitted to you and the courts for your use during the trial. You and your client will also be responsible for submitting any additional evidence regarding the case. The length of time it’ll take to gather evidence and proceed to the arraignment phase of the trial varies on the case’s complexity. If a plea bargain isn’t submitted and agreed upon, the case will move on to the discovery and motion portions of trial. The discovery portion will be where more evidence and information is gathered. The FBI will attempt to, within reason, provide any information available during the discovery phase. You know the rest of the system far better than I do.”