by Lauren Esker
"Jack," Casey panted. "I—I can't—I'm sorry—"
"It's okay." He was impressed she'd been able to run as long as she had.
Casey doubled over, supporting herself on a stump while gasping for breath, and Jack interposed his body between her and the oncoming lion. The field of stumps had actually slowed it down somewhat; it couldn't run through them as easily as the smaller humans could.
But the lion could shift, too. Jack squinted down the hill, cursing his myopia for the umpteenth time, as the big tawny blur collapsed into a smaller, vertical pinkish blur. From here Jack couldn't make out anything except enough of a general impression of size and shape to know that it was a large blond-haired guy. Which could have been Roger or either of his brothers.
"You know you're just delaying the inevitable, right?" the man shouted up the hill.
"Where are the rest of your pride?" Jack demanded.
"What, like I'm not more than enough to handle you two?" The man laughed. "They're all spread out, canvassing the island, but I'm the one who used my brains to figure out which way you were gonna go. Not bad for the youngest pride sibling, huh?"
Well, at least now he knew who he was dealing with. Derek Fallon was the youngest of Roger's brothers and sisters. Which meant Roger and Rory were the brothers still unaccounted for, as well as Roger's sisters Mara and Debi.
"Derek, you need to know I'm a federal agent," Jack called down the hill. "You're in a lot of trouble, I'm not gonna deny it, but you don't have to go down with your brothers. I can help you cut you a deal—"
"Oh, we know who you are," Derek called back. He was still coming, not in any particular hurry, strolling up the hill and picking his way through the stumps at his leisure while catching his breath. Jack couldn't help thinking of a cat playing with a mouse. "And we know what you turn into. How do you like our little handcuff trick? How tough is the big, bad bear when he can't shift and he's handcuffed to a useless little prey animal like that one?"
"Since she just kicked your ass a minute ago, I think I got the lucky end of this deal," Jack said. Beside him, Casey raised her head wearily.
A growl rumbled out of Derek's chest. "Luck is exactly what that was, and nothing else."
"Didn't expect the prey to bite back, huh? What does it mean for your place in the pride when they all find out a guy who can't shift and a little cat shifter took you down?"
This time Derek's growl had the vibrato that meant he was on the cusp of a transformation.
"Jack?" Casey whispered. "What are you doing?"
"Shhh. Trust me. And be ready to move when I do." Raising his voice, Jack called, "Derek, I'm going to warn you one last time. I will use deadly force to defend myself and the civilian with me. Surrender yourself now, and I'll offer you whatever help I can after you're arrested. If you don't, I will defend myself by whatever means are necessary."
Derek laughed, a deep rumble. There was only about ten or twelve yards separating them now, and at this distance Jack caught the golden flash from Derek's eyes. He was still man-shaped, but not for long. "You really think I have anything to fear from you? You think you can arrest me?" His voice deepened and distorted until the words were almost incomprehensible. "I'm going to really enjoy tearing you apart."
Jack spread his legs apart and bent his knees, balancing his weight. Casey glanced at him and then copied his stance, though it was clear she had no idea what he was doing, or why.
Derek shifted as he sprang. One minute there was a man standing down the hillside from them; the next instant, a huge lion was bounding over the stumps toward them.
"Jack!" Casey screamed.
"Throw!" he snapped back at her, and then the lion was on them.
This was a terrible plan, and they'd get only one chance at it. On their desperate scramble up the hill, the sharp, upthrust ends of the stumps had reminded him of something, but he hadn't figure it out until he looked behind him, down the hill. That was the point when he'd noticed the resemblance to the sharpened stakes at the bottom of a pit trap, like people used to hunt tigers with, a long time ago.
He didn't have a pit, but the beavers had kindly supplied him with a whole hillside covered with stakes. Because the trees had been growing uphill, leaning slightly into the slope, all of the "stakes" were pointing up and angled inward, at a perfect slant for impaling someone falling downhill.
Unfortunately the only bait he had was himself. And Casey.
When five hundred pounds of enraged lion plowed into them, Jack caught him under the jaw and flipped him over backward. He could never have simply thrown him, not in human form, but it was a pretty basic self-defense move, using the opponent's own momentum and lack of balance against him.
Whether or not she realized what he was doing or why, Casey moved with him, raising her arms as he raised his. Derek's claws scored Jack's arm in a blaze of scalding agony, but it was a wild flail and not a calculated hit.
Derek tumbled over backward and rolled down the hill.
Under normal circumstances he'd simply have been knocked off balance, gotten up, and come after them again. But he fell straight onto the upright, gnawed-off tree stumps, rebounded and rolled and hit again farther down the hill. Derek screamed, a terrible sound halfway between lion and human. Thrashing around in pain only made his situation worse.
"Go, go!" Jack gasped, giving Casey a push. At his last glimpse, Derek was still rolling downhill, still screaming, a tumbling patchwork of golden fur and red gore.
"That was awful," Casey choked as they plunged into the trees.
"He was trying to kill us," Jack panted. His left arm was a sleeve of pain from shoulder to wrist. He didn't dare look and see how bad it was. Not until they were farther away.
"It was still awful."
He didn't dare answer her; it would have come from the darkest part of him, and there would have been nothing to say after that. Behind them, Derek's screaming cut off. Jack wasn't sure if that meant Derek had died, passed out, or simply managed to get out of the field of stakes.
"Ow, ow!" Casey gasped. "I have to stop—I stepped on something—"
"Can't stop. Keep going."
"My feet—"
"I know. Stop in a minute."
They finally stumbled to a halt in a small clearing. Casey leaned on Jack, gasping for breath. He didn't want to admit how much of his own ability to stay upright was due, in turn, to leaning on her.
The forest was very quiet. Their crashing through the brush had disturbed the local wildlife, and the only sound for a moment or two was their own harsh breathing and the wind in the trees. Then, slowly, the twittering of the birds began to come back.
Casey's panting settled to the point she could lean over and check her feet. "Oh man," she moaned, coughing. Her legs were badly scratched, and a raw gash ran from mid-shin all the way down her foot. "It felt like something ripped right through me."
"Could be devilsclub or some other kind of thorn bush. We gotta find a way to protect our feet."
Casey looked up and her eyes widened. "Jack, you're bleeding!"
"I know. You too."
"No, you're—you're really bleeding."
Blood pattered softly into the leaf mold around their feet. It was dripping off the dangling fingers of his left hand. "Shit," Jack said. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am." And he sat down suddenly.
Pulled off her feet by the cuffs, Casey sat down hard beside him with a startled, "Ow!"
"Sorry," Jack said automatically. The forest, blurrier than usual, rocked gently around him. His fast shifter healing should be kicking in, stopping the bloodflow. Anytime now.
"No, no, you should—lie down, I think. Yes. Lie down."
"Can't. Lions—"
"Can't stop, lions will eat us, I know, but Jack, you look really pale." Casey’s tan skin had gone ashy, her eyes wide and stark. "If you pass out, I can't possibly drag you, so just lie down before you faint, okay?"
With that, she gave him a firm push in the chest. He lay flat, an
d watched the trees and the sky go around hazily above him, somewhere down a long dark tunnel.
"I tried to give him a way out," he said. Somehow it seemed important.
"I know," Casey said, and Jack closed his eyes.
Chapter Eight
A quiet, intense emergency atmosphere prevailed over the Seattle office of the SCB. It wasn't exactly panic mode, not yet. But as the morning rolled by without a check-in from Jack, the feeling of imminent disaster deepened and Avery's tense nerves screwed tighter.
"This op is blown," he snapped, facing off with Division Chief Stiers inside the half-open door of her office.
"We can't assume that, Agent Hollen. If we go in with all hands on deck, we will blow it, and jeopardize an agent's life."
Stiers was a tall, angular woman in her late forties, her graying blond hair cropped close to her head. Most shifters reflected their animal form in some way—Jen Cho, for example, was recognizably gecko-esque, though her twelve-cup-a-day coffee addiction probably also had something to do with it—but there was nothing owl-like about Pam Stiers. If Avery hadn't known her shifter type, he'd have guessed an eagle or a cheetah: something regal, serene, swift, and deadly.
Of course, owls were swift and deadly too, and you didn't see them coming until they dropped on you out of nowhere, borne on silent wings.
"Look, Avery," Stiers said, her voice shifting to a softer register. "You know I'm not going to hang Jack out to dry. But you also know that he's not always the best at remembering he's working with a team. If he's running his own game on the inside, the last thing he'd want us to do is come in with guns blazing and blow his cover."
As much as Avery wanted to argue with her, he couldn't. Jack had been written up more than once for missing check-ins or failing to take the overall plan into consideration when an opportunity presented itself. He was a damn good field agent: smart, resourceful, and skilled. He just wasn't a team player by nature.
Intern Rosen tapped lightly and stuck her head in. "Ma'am? We got word back from Canadian Customs. The Lion's Share cruise ship didn't cross the border. Coast Guard says it's heading back now and should be in port soonish. Do you want to send anybody to intercept it?"
"Not directly," Stiers said. "But I want Eva Kemp's team standing by when it docks. I want to know exactly who gets off that ship, and where they go."
Rosen nodded and withdrew.
"We're going to find him," Avery said, as much to himself as to her.
"Of course we are." She gave him a ghost of a smile, and Avery caught a glimpse of the concern for her missing agent that lurked under her severe demeanor. "Right now, the best way we can do that is by staying calm and looking for him under the Fallons' radar. No sense in bringing trouble down on him if he hasn’t managed to do it himself yet."
"Do you want me with Kemp's team?"
"Not right now. Since you're Ross's point of contact, I don't want you potentially out of touch. Check in on Cho and Rosen, see what they need."
It felt like being given busywork, even though he knew she was right. He didn't even get the satisfaction of stomping out of her office. She was doing everything she could, and he saw her pick up the phone as he left, probably to get in touch with another of the agencies where she had contacts. She was on his side. He just wished he could do more to help.
Damn it, Jack, if you've decided to go cowboying off on your own this time, I'll strangle you.
He found Cho in the main conference room, poring over a huge nautical map of Puget Sound, pinned down on one side with a large mug of coffee. The conference table was covered with detailed marine charts of the coast from Seattle to Alaska.
"Oh hey," Cho said, waving him over to the table. She twiddled a red marker between her fingers, tapping it idly on the map. The Lion's Share Software's cruise route from past years was marked in various colors. "As far as we can figure from the marine radio chatter and the Coast Guard, nothing out of the ordinary happened last night. The boat toodled around the San Juan islands like always, and then headed back."
"Any places someone could have gotten off along the way?"
She gave him a Well, duh look. "Oh, gosh, anywhere? It's not exactly the open ocean. They could easily have put in for a little while at any of the islands, or rendezvoused with a boat."
"Damn it, Jack," Avery sighed. He could imagine, all too easily, Jack coming upon some sort of rendezvous or clandestine meeting, and taking off in pursuit without telling anyone. "We should've put in a big cat shifter. Less likely to be caught out as a spy."
"They don't grow on trees," Cho pointed out. "Dev was on another case, and Noah won't do field work, you know that."
"He's still an agent," Avery muttered. "Where is the Director's golden boy, anyway?"
"Over in Idaho with everybody else. He's running the official cover-up operation." She shoved a box of push pins into his hand. "Stop letting your head spin around the worst-case scenarios, and start marking potential harbors along the route."
"We don't even know he's still on the U.S. side of the border. If Jack left with someone, they could've sailed right across while it was dark. Customs wouldn’t even know about it."
"Seeing how we know absolutely nothing so far, including whether anyone is missing at all, Avery, stop being a worry-wolf and push some pins."
An intern came in with a coffeepot and a stack of cups, and Cho brightened. "Nice job," she said, and the kid beamed. "Although we're going to need sugar and creamer, too. Lots of it."
He must be one of the new recruits, since Avery didn't recognize him. He looked sixteen, but he had to be at least eighteen or he wouldn't have been allowed in the op center for liability reasons.
"Who are you, anyway?" Avery asked him, waylaying him before he could rush off on Cho's command.
"Intern Pete Mayhew, sir!"
The kid made his prey instincts twitch, not to mention that just looking at him made Avery feel exhausted and unbearably old.
"Okay, I gotta ask," Avery said. "What's your shifter animal?"
"Jumping spider, sir!"
.... oh. He would've guessed squirrel.
"Why is he running coffee errands instead of doing something useful?" he murmured to Cho after the kid scurried off to get the coffee mix-ins.
"Because he is amazingly, spectacularly incompetent at everything else," she murmured back. "At least this way, Rosen and the other interns don't have to keep cleaning up his filing errors."
"When did we hire him?"
"Three days ago."
"And why did we hire him?"
"Because everybody's got to start somewhere, Avery. I'm sure you remember what it was like being that age." She took a sip of her coffee and made a face. "Well, I guess we can add another item to the list of things he's not good at."
"When I was his age, I was in the Army." His leg twinged a reminder. "Which worked out wonderfully for everyone involved, so yeah, point taken."
Cho gave him a sympathetic look. "That's where you met Jack, isn't it?"
"He saved my life." Avery set down the coffee cup; he'd lost his taste for it. "I'm going to look for their hunting grounds again."
They still didn't know where the Fallons took their victims: whether it was one place or a lot of places, private land or public. Their informant thought the Fallons owned private hunting land somewhere, but didn't know where it was. So far, a search of property records had turned up nothing, just a handful of different vacation homes in assorted urban locations. If the Fallons did have some private land somewhere rural, they must have hidden it somehow, under a different person's name or under the name of a company they owned. Trying to find it was like looking for a needle in a haystack—a Canada-sized haystack, at that.
But if Jack was there, he had to try.
Avery got up and lurched off to start digging through property records.
***
By early afternoon, he'd accomplished nothing other than finding a lot of places it wasn't. And Jack still hadn't cal
led in. Shortly after Intern Mayhew brought lunch (with half the orders mixed up, but at least there was enough for everyone), Rosen leaned in to report that Eva Kemp and her team were back.
"Before you ask, Agent Ross wasn't on the ship, and that's all I know. They picked up our informant when he got off. Eva's down in Interrogation with him now."
Eva was an orca shifter. She looked every inch the predator: sleek, tall, and lethal, her long black hair pulled back in a severe braid with a single white stripe down the side. Avery found her looming over the lion shifter who had been sending them inside information from the Fallons' organization.
"I told you, I don't know," he was saying as Avery slipped into the room as quietly as he was able. "I'm just doing routine security work, right? Hell, Mara's on the outs with me anyway. Nobody tells me anything."
Eva rested her fists on the beat-up metal table and added some extra threat to her usual looming. "Look, we know our guy got on that boat yesterday, and so did all of the Fallons. Today, our guy doesn't get off, and neither do most of the Fallons. What did they do, jump out and swim?"
"If I knew, I'd tell you!"
Avery wasn't sure whether to believe that, but he spoke up quietly. "If they did leave the ship at some point during the cruise, where might they have gone?"
The informant shook his head. "I don't know."
"You don't seem to know much, do you?" Eva asked.
Avery said, "You told us earlier that you thought the Fallons had some private hunting land somewhere up north. Is there anything else that you can tell us about that?"
"I told you, I've got no idea. I just helped clean up after they got back."
"Canada side of the border?" Eva said.
"Maybe. I kinda always thought it was pretty far. Sometimes they'd use a helicopter to get there. They had their own private one."
Cho was waiting outside the interrogation room when they came out. "Anything?" she asked.
"Nggghh," Avery said.
"Well, I came down to tell you there's a big storm system tracking in from the Pacific. We've got access to a search and rescue chopper if we need it, but if the weather gets bad, we might be grounded."