by Jade Alters
When he did, the girl—for that was what she was, not a woman—couldn’t even move her legs at first. Gently, I drew her knees together. Dragging them up, she curled in my lap like a child. Lee whipped off his field jacket and spread it over her. “I gave an order,” he said proudly, sitting next to me on the bed.
Over the top of the jacket, I was rubbing her back soothingly while I rocked the shivering girl back and forth. “You’re supposed to give orders,” I scoffed. “You’re a petty officer.”
He was being silly for the sake of the girl. Her mouth was red and swollen, her lips cracked from the gag and the gag itself wet with saliva. It must have been in her mouth at least twenty-four hours. Her wrists also showed the signs of long-term restraint. They were raw and badly scraped from struggling. She had squeezed her eyes shut when she’d climbed up on my lap, but she opened them to study him briefly. Something approaching a smile crossed her face.
Lee was still pleased with himself. “But I don’t usually have a chance. The captain’s always around.”
“The captain is investigating. Let him investigate.”
I unsnapped the water bottle from my waist and trickled a little liquid on her tongue. She licked at it and I gave her a few drops more. “They raped me,” she forced through her lips, her body shuddering. “The eyes. The eyes watched while they raped.”
Lee glanced toward the dead men. All the heads had been turned toward the back of the hangar, their blank eyes staring, mouths gaping in horror. Lee rumbled, his chest hair thickening. “Outside with it,” I warned.
He decided he could control himself, especially since the enlisted men had returned with blankets. I wrapped the girl up like a baby in bunting, murmuring soothing words to her, although the real thoughts in my head would have made a sailor cringe. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen. She had the high-boned, blushing cheeks of the Haida. If we’d lost her, she would have been just one more missing indigenous person. She deserved more. She deserved much more. I rocked her gently, listening to the terrible soundlessness heaving up from her chest.
I felt almost reluctant to turn her over to Lee. I understood what she had been through, and she needed reassurance. She needed someone to hold onto, and right now, she was clinging to me. With his magnificent shoulders and powerhouse arms, however, Lee was far better equipped than I was to carry her down to the dock and the waiting boat.
Josh had done all the investigating he felt needed doing, especially after learning we had just picked up another miracle witness. Denisovich was making a habit of leaving girls behind like breadcrumbs, never once imagining they would be found alive. If Captain Josh had not been on patrol the night they’d burned down the cabin, neither of us would have been found in time. He ordered the team back onboard, sent copies of the photos along with coordinates for the ship to the admiralty, and went to the ready room to brood. Roy and Darkhorse joined him but Lee remained in the first aid room with me while the on-board medic supplied fresh clothing and blankets for our young victim, and carefully cleaned some of her wounds.
The town of Ketchikan was only twenty minutes away. Pete made an emergency call to the hospital so the medics would be at the docks the minute our feet touched land. Lee and I followed and stayed in the waiting room while they examined the girl and put her on life support. The attendant who came out, several hours later, was also Haida. She was nearly as tall as I was, with gray streaks in her ponytail and a pair of glasses that didn’t quite fit properly on her nose. “Are you a relative?” she asked.
“No. I…” I stammered. “I’m a friend.”
She turned to Lee. “But you’re family.”
“We have the same totem.”
She gave him a penetrating stare, then made a check on her clipboard. “That’ll work.” She scribbled a few notes before looking back up at us. “She’s badly dehydrated. We have her on life support now simply to restore her fluids. She was kept in one position for at least forty-eight hours. She has bruises over eighty percent of her body, three broken ribs, and a dislocated jaw. One more day and she wouldn’t be alive.”
The horror of what that girl had endured was beginning to sink in. It felt like an overflowing septic tank, giving me the same almost insurmountable desire to retch. “Is there anything else we should know?” I asked, swallowing.
“You’re not family.” She turned and tapped Lee on the elbow with her clipboard. “And the Athabascan and the Haida are not the same tribe.”
“I’m a state trooper,” I offered.
She gave me a sardonic look. “Where’s your badge?”
I was frantically rummaging through my brain for a good reason why I didn’t have my badge, without spilling the whole I-was-captured-while-at-a-party bag of beans, when Captain Josh and the rest of his crew clip-stepped down the hospital aisle in full dress uniform. I had never seen the captain in anything but his sloppy clothes or his bear rug, so it just didn’t occur to me how knock-down gorgeous he was when he was all cleaned up. I had to whip my tongue back to keep it from hanging outside my mouth.
His effect on the attendant was just as high voltage. She clasped her clipboard primly to her chest and pulled up her glasses, and quite spontaneously lifted a hand to loosen her hair. He stopped in front of her and gave a slight bow. “Captain Joshua Banks, Coast Guard, SRS, Special Division Ursa. The young lady was picked up on a search and rescue mission. We need access to all her medical files, and we need to question her as soon as she is able to communicate.” He showed her a document. “By order of the governor.”
Wild horses couldn’t stop her tongue from wagging now. She tucked an arm confidentially through his and explained in a deeply troubled voice, “She was raped repeatedly. We’ve picked up the DNA of three different men. This is consistent with the bruising made with fists and boots—three different sizes.”
He patted her hand to let her know how deeply he sympathized and how reluctant he was to keep this on a purely professional level. “We’ll need the DNA samples of the perpetrators. How soon can we see her?”
The gravity in her voice caused us all to draw close. “Her body will heal. She was tortured, but the injuries were not life-threatening. But mentally… she’s been severely traumatized. It may be a long time before you can make any sense out of her at all.” She gave me a penetrating look, as though to see if I would object. “That’s why we called the shaman.”
A shaman would not have been the first person I would call for a mental health issue, but the captain appeared satisfied and I’m not one to criticize people’s beliefs. How could I? I was living with four shapeshifters! In some places, I could go to the looney bin for saying that. Fortunately, not in Alaska.
The captain and the attendant were still signing forms when a small, somewhat stocky man appeared seemingly out of nowhere. He had a moon-shaped face, with an upturned mouth and giant crow’s feet that crinkled away from the corners of his eyes into laugh lines. He wore a sky-blue, elaborately embroidered shirt, a large ivory necklace, a bracelet made from small jade stones and a multi-colored, hand-woven belt to hold up his jeans. His long braid reached all the way down his back and his head was covered by a bowler hat sporting a single peacock feather.
“Flashy, isn’t it?” he asked when he saw me studying his hat. “I was looking at these feathers in the India store down on main street and I asked myself, why be a raven or an eagle if you can be a peacock?”
“Why a peacock?” I asked. Shaman were supposed to be wise, so I expected a profound answer.
“Why not a peacock? Are you against peacocks?”
“Of course not.”
“There you go,” he said, apparently completely satisfied.
His attention shifted sharply to Captain Josh, then Darkhorse, Roy, and Lee. He sniffed the air and walked around them. “Hey-ya!” he said, boxing at the air next to them. The team appeared unperturbed.
“Well, that’s over with,” he sighed, unfolding a woven ceremonial robe that had been sittin
g on a chair for I didn’t know how long. I hadn’t seen it appear. It was decorated in the traditional bright red and black colors of the Haida.
With the robe draped over him, he did look more like a shaman. The air became quiet, the way it does when someone lights a candle. He crossed his arms and stood in the semi-circle of the team. “Bear clan, I welcome you. Your spirits will make her stronger.”
I would never again dismiss the stories and legends of the spirits that wander through the north. That night was even stranger than the first time I saw a shapeshifter—not as frightening, but stranger. The room was lit only by the heart and breathing monitors next to the bedside, and by a single candle in the window. The shaman bent his knees in a shuffling dance, holding something. I couldn’t quite catch what it was, but it seemed to emit a vapor so light, it was like a fleeting spirit.
The dance continued, his robe creating an odd motion picture. He chanted. The shadows flickering over the walls looked like the flight of wild geese. There was a rush of air followed by a long faint howl of the wilderness. I heard music floating up over a murmuring ocean. I heard bird calls. A forest sprang up within the shadowy dance and four massive creatures stood erect, their ears rounded, their snouts tilted to sniff the air.
The chanting lowered and grew softer. Slowly, the images melted away. The shaman stood over the girl and whispered intently, then touched her head. “She will sleep well tonight,” he said, ushering us out of the room. “She will dream she is safely in the village with her family. She will dream of the things that make her happy. Tomorrow, you can ask her your important questions.”
He walked with us to the exit door and lit a cigarette. After he smoked half, he handed it to Josh. “To get rid of the bad medicine,” he explained, waving the smoke around. I wrinkled my nose as it hit my nostrils. He grunted. “You, too. When we pass around the little smoke, he can’t tell one of us from another. We’re all the same to him then.”
He watched Josh take two drags then hand the cigarette to Darkhorse. Leaning leisurely against the wall, he lit another. “You are chasing a very bad man, Captain Banks. It’s not for me to say,” he began, lowering his voice and drawing us closer. The smoke wasn’t all tobacco; it was slightly intoxicating. In the smoke-filled circle, his voice sounded like it floated from the deep hollows. “But show him no mercy. You can’t hide from me. I know what you’re doing. For all of us, show him no mercy.”
Josh
Normally, I don’t have much trouble controlling my shapeshifting, but damn, that woman gets me hot and bothered. I see her and my temperature automatically goes up sixty degrees. There are only two solutions when I’m pumping that much adrenaline: sex or shapeshifting. I prefer the sex, but there are matters of propriety, especially concerning senior officers in the Coast Guard Services and what’s acceptable to the public. What I wouldn’t give for the good old days when everyone was tribal, and shapeshifters were considered a hot date. You can’t win them all, but I would sure like to win one argument with Natalia.
She was right. She was always right. If she hadn’t come with us, we probably would have bungled it when we found the girl, especially since Lee found her first. Lee’s a good kid, but he has all the tact of a musk ox. He probably would have terrified her to death before we could get her on the boat.
I didn’t like it, though. I didn’t like her coming ashore land. If there had been one shooter and that shooter had come close to hitting her, I think I would have ripped the entire lodge to shreds getting at him and, consequently, destroying all our evidence.
We had a lot, enough to make our case for murder in any court. I don’t think Denisovich knew we were riding so closely on his tail or he would have been more careful about cleaning up. He clearly didn’t think it mattered. He thought his Valdez crew had wiped up their island headquarters. He had no way of knowing, because nobody had returned to Valdez. There had been no one to sound the alarm. And since Natalia had never showed up either, there was no reason for anyone to get suspicious. At least, not right away. And right away was all that mattered.
Only one person, besides the admiral, knew our destination, and that was the Sitka harbor master. He was trustworthy. I radioed him, confirming McCarthy’s death and the deaths of his top officers. I knew it would cause a major rumble, but it wasn’t something we could keep under our hats forever. People needed closure.
The next morning when we went to check on our victim, she was cranked halfway into a sitting position, awake and sipping water through a straw. She drew back when she saw me, so I stopped at the door, leaving it open to reassure her. Darkhorse and Roy remained standing behind me, and only Natalia and Lee went inside the room.
The girl was more receptive toward Natalia than she was toward Lee. She turned in her bed and reached for Natalia’s hands, mouthing words that would not leave her throat. Natalia knew what to do. She pulled up a chair so that she was sitting so close, her woodsy, spruce-trees-and-wildflowers scent overrode the smell of hospital antiseptics.
“It’s okay,” she said kindly. “You strained your throat. The doctor said it’s better if you don’t try to speak right now.”
The large, slightly tilted dark eyes, no longer sparkling with innocence, shifted urgently as though trying to spill her story from them and hoarse sounds once more gurgled up from her throat.
“The nurse said you have been writing down what you want to say.”
The girl nodded, so Natalia handed her a pad and pencil. “I’m Natalia. This is Lee. Do you mind if he is here? He’s the one who found you.”
She wrote down, “Silly man.”
Natalia grinned. “That’s the one. The doctor tells me your name is Amy and that your parents will be here this afternoon. They matched your identity to a missing person’s list. You’ve been missing four weeks. Where did they pick you up?”
She wrote down, “Visiting in Seward.”
“Was that before or after they got the Coast Guard vessel?”
“Before,” she wrote. “First, I was on a big fishing boat with two other girls. We stopped once and they picked up two others. One more stop and we all transferred to the Coast Guard boat. Then to the big house and waited.”
Lee stood a respectable distance behind the chair and kept his big mitts laced in front of him. “Was anyone in the big house when you got there?”
She shook her head. He lowered his voice and asked, as gently as he could, “How many girls are there?”
She wrote painstakingly, “Twelve. There were fifteen. Two died, and now I’m gone.”
Natalia was becoming emotionally involved. I stepped forward to intervene, but Natalia had already asked the question. “Who died?”
The girl shrugged. She was becoming tired and the questions were starting to invoke unpleasant memories, but Natalia pressed one more time. “Why did they leave you behind?”
She wrote, “Because I escaped.”
Natalia’s eyes filled with tears and the big blubber bear next to her pawed at his cheeks. She leaned over the girl, taking her hands and kissing them. Restoring some of her composure, she said hoarsely, “I escaped from the group they picked up in Valdez. They abandoned me on an island. I was there with a friend named Rhoda.”
“Rhoda’s alive,” wrote the girl. “I heard of you. We thought you were dead.”
“Well, I’m not and neither are you, so we both got lucky. I know you’re tired, but if you can think of anything else to share, contact me at this address.”
Natalia wrote an e-mail address on the pad and the girl folded it up carefully. “Wait!” she squealed in her damaged voice as we started to leave. “I know where they’re going.” The effort caused her to wheeze heavily. We waited as she sucked in extra air, then breathed out, “Vancouver.”
Vancouver! He had a marine class boat that could slide through the water like a fish out to sea and that could hide anywhere among the hundreds of islands along the U.S.-Canadian coastline. He had a three-day head start on us. I called the
team into the ready room for a brain-storming session. Of course, Natalia joined us. You couldn’t pry her loose with a crowbar.
I spread out several large maps of the island chain and leaned over them. “What have we got? We know for a fact they hit Seward and Valdez. There was one more destination before Ketchikan.”
“Juneau?” suggested Natalia.
I shook my head. “Too risky.”
“Glacier Bay,” said Darkhorse positively. “It’s ideal. Heavily forested yet close to the Southeastern hub. No one would think twice about a Coast Guard cutter.”
“We know they’re well-organized,” added Roy. “Everything was timed. They knew when McCarthy and his team were going on vacation and where they were going. They used a fishing vessel for the first part of the operation, then transferred to the stolen cutter in Valdez.”
“They had an inside man,” Lee pointed out, forever one to state the obvious. “The lieutenant.”
Darkhorse leaned back, folding his arms over his chest. “They’ll probably ditch the cutter before entering Canadian waters. You know how ruffled the Canadians get when they see us crossing their line.”
I looked at the myriad possibilities dotting the map. “Then we need to find them before that happens. We’re nearly at the end of the line.”
“Maybe we’re too late,” suggested Lee, wincing at the disagreeable thought. “They’ve got a head start. They weren’t in a hurry when they left, which means their transport was probably already lined up. Maybe we’re at the end of the line.”
I allowed my bear hairs to slither out enough to prickle against my clothes. “Not until we recover the boat. The boat is U.S. property.”
It was a weak loophole, but one I knew the Canadian government would back. This wasn’t about fish. It was about criminals. If necessary, we would turn to Interpol, but in matters this delicate, it was better to keep as few people involved as possible. I hoped I wouldn’t have to involve anyone else at all, but I knew Canada may not be as eager for our form of justice as the harbor master and the shaman. Not that I consciously planned to maim, maul, and kill anyone, but these things happened in the course of violent confrontations.