by Lauren Esker
The orcas had moved back so none of them were directly under her, but most of them had jostled over to this side of the boat, watching curiously.
Jack kissed her bare shoulder and then stepped back.
What if I hit my head? she thought. What if I drown? But the orcas were there, waiting to make sure nothing happened to her. And Jack and Eva were on the boat to pull her out, just in case.
It was a very simple leap of faith compared to all the others she'd been making lately. But somehow it seemed like a metaphor for all the recent changes in her life, and the ones she was poised on the verge of making soon.
Close your eyes, fall backward, and trust others to catch you if you don't stick the landing.
It was never going to be easy. She would always want to do things on her own. But, sometimes, it was okay to lean on others. To let someone else share the burden; to trust Jack's strong arms to carry her when she couldn't carry herself.
Slowly Casey peeled first one hand off the gunwale, then the other. Balanced on the edge, she tilted her head back, looking up at the blue, blue sky. She spread out her arms and lifted her feet, and for a moment she balanced there, poised on the edge between sea and sky.
"Look at me, Wendy!" she cried aloud, and she flung herself off the edge.
Author’s Note
Thank you for reading Handcuffed to the Bear! I would love to know what you thought about it; you can leave a review on my Amazon page or email me: [email protected]. You can also follow me on Facebook at laureneskerwriter.
If you’d like to be notified of my new releases, you can sign up for my mailing list by clicking this link: http://eepurl.com/btVi2X.
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About the Author
Lauren Esker is a writer and graphic designer who lives in the trackless wilds of Alaska. Well, okay, not quite trackless—actually she’s on the highway not far from Fairbanks, Alaska’s second-largest city (for certain values of city). She and her husband own eleven acres in a former gold-mining district, and share their home with a variety of pets. She also enjoys reading, gardening, and art, which she teaches at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival.
Lauren writes non-romance science fiction, fantasy, and comics as Layla Lawlor, including the graphic novel Freebird, an affectionately humorous look at life in Fairbanks. She writes m/m romance as Layla M. Wier.
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Cover photo credits: Couple in bushes - © Can Stock Photo Inc. / konradbak. Trees - © Can Stock Photo Inc. / johnnorth. Bear tattoo: © Can Stock Photo Inc. / Ceakus. Tribal tattoo: © Can Stock Photo Inc. / dclipart. Filigree art - © Can Stock Photo Inc. / milinz. Cover design by Layla Lawlor.
Also by Lauren Esker
Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing - Can the big bad wolf and a sheep shifter have a happy ending? Curvy farm girl Julie Capshaw was always warned away from the wolf shifters next door, but Damon Wolfe is the motorcycle-riding, smoking hot alpha wolf of her dreams! This paranormal romance novel is a romantic comedy spiced with action and red-hot sex.
***
Keep reading for a special preview of
Guard Wolf On Duty
(Shifter Agents #2)
Available now!
Avery Hollen is a werewolf without a pack. After growing up in the foster system, this lone wolf has bonded to his co-workers at the Shifter Crimes Bureau because he has no one else, but he's always yearned for a pack and a family of his own. Then a box of orphaned wolf-shifter puppies turns up on his doorstep, with danger one step behind ...
Sassy, curvy Aussie social worker Nicole Yates is one of the world's only koala shifters. She works with other people's children while yearning for her own, but her relationships with human men have a history of ending in disaster and a mate of her own kind is impossible to find, since every other koala shifter is related to her. Then a wolf-shifter federal agent with a box of werewolf puppies turns up on her doorstep ...
Chapter One
Special Agent Avery Hollen was not having a good day.
He was currently the ranking agent on duty in the Seattle office of the Special Crimes Bureau, informally known as the Shifter Crimes Bureau. A particularly virulent flu, nasty enough to knock down even a shifter's resilient immune system, had taken out half the office; the other half were on field assignments, surveillance detail, or otherwise absent. And Division Chief Pam Stiers was on leave with her wife and stepdaughter at an unspecified location with orders to disturb her "only in the event of a total infrastructure collapse or act of God."
To make things worse, it was a week before Halloween, which meant the SCB, as the government agency that dealt not only with shifter-related crimes but also with everything inexplicable that other federal agencies didn't want to handle, was hip-deep in the usual array of seasonal strangeness that fell into their laps. Things didn't actually get weirder around Halloween, at least not in a supernatural way; it was just an unfortunate side effect of the public's belief that things would get weirder, along with the inevitable side effects of a lot of people pulling pranks and running around in costumes.
So far today, he'd dealt with nine ghost reports, two Bigfoot sightings, and an outbreak of so-called werewolf activity in Delridge. Avery himself was a werewolf—wolf shifter, more accurately—and he knew for a fact that werewolves looked like normal humans or normal wolves, not like the bipedal monster with a wolf head, straight out of a Lon Cheney movie, that two anxious witnesses had reported. From the sound of things, it was some teenage kid using a Wal-Mart werewolf mask to hide their identity while they ran around committing acts of vandalism.
And now the SCB's lowest-ranking intern had managed to break the office email system.
"How did you do this?" Avery demanded, staring at the list of bounced emails on the screen, half-hidden by a swarm of suspicious-looking popups. His emails were bouncing. Everyone's emails were bouncing. No one had been able to successfully send an email in hours. He was too impressed by the scope of it to even get upset. "Mayhew, please shift back. I'm not going to yell."
Though he made no promises about Stiers.
The large jumping spider perched on the keyboard stared up at him. Jumping spiders had a natural tendency to look startled and woeful. This was also one of Intern Pete Mayhew's habitual expressions in human form, usually after destroying something expensive.
"Or ... don't." He might not be able to. Most shifters needed mental calm to control their shifts. Mayhew had turned out to be as good at this as he was at everything else, which was to say, not very. He'd once shifted while leaning over the conference table to hand Stiers a file and fallen into her cup of coffee. Fortunately it was lukewarm at the time—due, if Avery remembered correctly, to Mayhew permanently changing the coffeemaker's settings somehow.
"If only we could harness that kid's ability to screw up technology and use it against the bad guys," Avery's partner Jack Ross had once remarked while trying to get the elevator unstuck. Mayhew, of course, had been trapped in it, along with another intern, falcon shifter Rivkah Rosen.
Rivkah, a tall, thin woman with a cascade of dark hair, was just now striding in the door. "Agent Hollen, I talked to the techs. They said don't touch anything. It looks like someone accidentally installed malware on one of the computers that turned our main server into a spambot."
"Really," Avery said, leveling a look in the direction of the guilty-looking jumping spider. It hopped off the keyboard and scuttled behind a can of pencils. "Someone. You don't say."
"So now our emails are bouncing because a bunch of different mail hosts have blacklisted us as spammers. Oh, and the techs said to tell everybody not to go on our website 'til they can fix it. Looks like it's serving viruses, too."
"Meaning?" Avery asked.
"Meaning every time someone goes to our website, they could get a virus."
"Our official website," Avery said blankly. "Our official, as in, 'we represent the government of the United States of America' website."
"Yup."
"Oh
, my God." Stiers was going to kill him first, and then kill Mayhew. Or maybe the other way around.
His phone picked that moment to ring.
"If this is another werewolf sighting ..." Avery muttered, glancing at the screen. JENNIFER CHO, the ID read. Thank God, someone with sense. Agent Jen Cho had spent the day at Pike Place Market, trying to pick up some leads on a shifter thief who had been working the tourist areas.
"My email's not working," was the first thing she said.
"The techs are aware of that." He left Rivkah to see if she could coax out Mayhew out of hiding and limped to the coffee machine, which fortunately seemed to have escaped Mayhew's mayhem for the time being. He didn't usually bother to use his cane to walk around in the office, but he'd been standing too long, leaning too much weight on his bad leg, and the traumatized, atrophied muscles screamed protest.
Ten years ago, Avery had been a young soldier in Afghanistan when an RPG fired into the convoy vehicle he was standing next to had left him with a medical discharge and a lingering disability. Werewolf healing had helped him survive, and he'd proven himself as a field agent for the SCB, but he still tended to get desk duty more often than not.
He could hardly argue with it. Even as a wolf, he was not a fast runner, though he'd developed a relatively speedy three-legged gait to make up for his lame rear leg. But increasingly, working around his disability meant babysitting interns and handling minor disasters while everyone else did the field work that was the whole reason he'd wanted to be an agent in the first place.
Cho was still talking. He could barely hear her. She was outside, and there was a lot of background noise.
"Avery? Are you listening?"
"I think I caught part of that," he said, holding the phone in the crook of his neck while pouring a cup of coffee. "What was the last part?"
"Puppies, Avery, I said puppies."
"You ... had puppies?" Most of the SCB's employees were shifters, so it wasn't completely out of the question, but Cho was a gecko shifter. It seemed unlikely.
"No," Cho said impatiently. "I have puppies. Someone found them in a box beside a trash can."
Oh. Whew.
"Poor little things," Avery said sympathetically. "There are some good rescue and adoption organizations in town. I can have one of the interns look up—"
"Avery, you dink. I'm talking about shifter puppies. Babies. Wolves, I think. They look more like Husky puppies to me, but wolf shifters are just about the only kind who come into their shifting abilities this early."
"Wolf shifter puppies?"
"Yeah, I'm bringing them in, all right?"
"Yeah—ow!" He'd overfilled his cup, splashing coffee over his hand. This day just kept getting better. "Yeah, do that. And by the way, don't go on our website."
"The SCB website?" Cho asked in a distracted tone. "Why?"
"Just ... don't."
***
Cho showed up a half hour later, toting a large cardboard box with PLEASE TAKE ME HOME in large, sloppy black letters on the side. She plunked it on Avery's desk, on top of the form he was filling out on the latest not-Bigfoot incident.
"Hey!"
"You've been sitting in a nice warm office all day," she said, leaning her elbow on the edge of the box. "I've been walking my feet off and freezing."
When she left the office that morning, she had been wearing a stylish tan jacket against the October Seattle chill. Now she was dressed only in the sweater she'd had on under it. The jacket had been draped over the top of the box. Occasionally it was pushed up from underneath by a suspiciously squeaky lump.
"They looked cold," she said defensively. "And kept trying to climb out."
Avery pulled off the jacket and looked in. A dirty white blanket had been used to make a sort of nest, and four chubby puppies were crawling around and over each other, trying to climb out of the box. One was reddish blond, two were brown and gray, and one was small and dark gray with smart white paws.
And they were definitely wolf puppies, and definitely shifters. They might look like Huskies to Cho, but some atavistic sense of Avery's wolf side pinged them immediately.
For a moment his brain simply whited out. He wasn't used to being around kids, and in particular he hadn't been around children of his own kind since he was a young child himself. It wasn't even that he couldn't handle kids. He'd dealt with ordinary shifter kids, and human kids, on cases and at the SCB company picnics.
But he was one of only two wolf shifters, that he knew of, in the entire organization. Werewolves didn't leave their packs, unless, like Avery, they had no choice.
And now there were children of his own kind on his desk, and his brain locked up.
Cho stared at him and then swooped in. "Rosen, Veliz, do we have towels? It's raining out there, and these poor kids are freezing."
Fortunately, the puppies were an instant hit with the interns. Soon all four plump balls of fuzz were out on the floor and being passed around between laps, dried off with handfuls of paper towels by enthusiastic young people.
Avery had relaxed enough to help Cho dust the box for prints. There wasn't anything to find; the box was damp rather than soaked, but cardboard didn't hold prints worth a damn even when it was dry. The blanket was just an ordinary white sheet, now filthy and stained from the puppies' incarceration. Avery bundled it into a bag for Forensics to look at.
"Are you okay?" Cho asked quietly.
"Why wouldn't I be okay?"
"Avery, when you looked in that box, you went whiter than that sheet. You'd think I just handed you a severed horse's head instead of an armful of babies."
Where to even begin. "My childhood wasn't great," Avery said. Understatement of the year. "And wolf shifters are highly social. It was just ... a shock." Some kind of empathy feedback loop, he guessed. His instincts wanted to connect to the kids, but didn't know how, and everything else in him recoiled screaming from the thought.
Downright pathetic if he thought about it too hard. He refused to meet Cho's eyes, afraid she was looking at him with sympathy or, worse, pity.
"Are you entirely sure they're shifters?" asked Brit Temple, one of the other interns, holding the gray puppy in her lap. She was a non-shifting human who sometimes jokingly referred to herself as a quota hire in the mostly-shifter SCB.
"Yes," Cho, Avery, and Rivkah chorused, and then looked at each other.
"But how can you tell?"
"You just know," said Yesenia Veliz, a chinchilla shifter intern.
Cho nodded. "I could tell as soon as I saw them. I don't even think I could tell you how."
"Why don't they shift, though?" Mayhew asked.
"No clue," Avery said. It was a reasonable question. Did wolf shifter puppies customarily spend their early childhoods in their shifted form? He had vague recollections of being four-legged a lot when he was young, but there had been extenuating circumstances, and most of his early childhood was a vague blur anyway. He'd always blamed that on the abuse, but now he wondered for the first time if it had more to do with being a wolf a lot, and might be perfectly normal.
"Well, in any case, they seem to be in pretty good shape." Yesenia held up the gray puppy, which squirmed unhappily until she cuddled it against her chest again. "I'm a volunteer at a pit bull rescue in town, and a lot of the ones we get are much worse off than these guys. Thin, dirty, covered with fleas. These pups are damp and hungry, but that's about the worst of it."
Something in Avery's chest unclenched. He'd been afraid to look too closely at the puppies, he realized now, in part because he was afraid of what he'd see.
He crouched down at the edge of the circle of interns, not quite touching the puppies, but making an effort to stop treating them like unexploded bombs. "Do you think this is related to the shoplifting?" he asked Cho. She'd been on the trail of a shoplifter—or possibly more than one—whose shifted form was a small coyote or jackal. Pretending to be a stray dog, it wandered in and out of stores, quietly removing items, stealing
purses and the like.
"No way to tell unless we actually catch him or her," she said. "My best guess is whoever I'm after is a street kid, so it could be a very young wolf, I suppose. If it is a wolf, it certainly isn't old enough to be these ones' mom. It's possible we're dealing with an organized gang of shifter street kids."
Great. "Anyone heard anything about something like that?" he asked the assembled interns. He'd learned not to discount the interns as a source of information as good as any of the agents' cultivated street contacts. This time, though, there were a bunch of headshakes.
"I wonder how long they were out there," Rivkah said. She lifted a pup to her shoulder. It squirmed against her neck, nestling under the dense curtain of her hair. "Oh! Poor babies."
"It stopped raining early this morning, and then started drizzling again around the time I found them," Cho said. "So they weren't out overnight. Otherwise they'd be soaked."
"No more than a few hours, tops," Yesenia put in. "If these were actual puppies—I mean, non-shifter puppies, I'd guess they're about three or four weeks old. So they would need to eat pretty frequently. And they're hungry, but not starving. Oh, sorry, baby." She gently detached the pup from its attempts to nibble on her fingers. "I'm not your momma. We need to find you a momma, huh?"
"What we need to do is call Child Protective Services," Avery said. He reluctantly allowed his fingers to drift to the soft coat of the puppy in Rivkah's arms. It tried to chew on his fingers with sharp puppy teeth. "Who's our shifter contact over at CPS?"
"I'll look it up." Brit Temple started to get up, then sat back down. "Except I can't. The server's down."
"I've dealt with them before," Cho said. "It's a Dr. Yates, I think. Nicole Yates. She's a good egg. I'll text you her office address."