by Lauren Esker
And he really was trying, which was, in a way, the worst part. More sources of funding dried up every year, and to Nicole Yates fell the thankless job of attempting to address the special needs of the shifter community while trying to keep their very existence a secret. In the process she'd cultivated a reputation as the branch office that dealt with "difficult" cases. Sometimes this meant dealing with kids who turned into tigers and tried to eat their parents, but at other times they were not shifters at all, just regular human children who had been through so many abusive situations that other caseworkers didn't want to deal with them.
"I have an appointment tonight, but I'll try to pull some figures together after that, okay?" After all, who needed to eat? Or sleep? "JJ, I have to go. Call you back later, yeah?"
Without waiting for an answer, she hit the button to switch lines, but whoever it was had already hung up without leaving a message.
I really hope that wasn't important.
It was almost five anyway, not that she ever managed to get out of the office at five, or even close to it. Allowing herself to fudge the time a bit, she flipped all the phones to voice mail (rerouting the emergency line to her cell as usual), hung out the CLOSED sign, and pulled down the blinds on the door. Then she steeled herself and went back to the email—a follow-up on a home visit that hadn't gone well. She had another scheduled for tonight at seven, the only time she'd been able to fit it in. She was exhausted just thinking about it.
Her cell went off: her sister, who was also her landlord. She thought about ignoring it, then put the phone on speaker and set it next to the computer so she could keep typing. "Not the best time, sis."
"Hi to you too." In the background, Nicole could hear the cheerful babble of life in the Leung-Yates household, as Erin's two kids competed with the TV to see who could be loudest. Erin talked over the top of them without seeming to notice. "I just needed to know if you're working late tonight. Should I set another place at the table, or put aside a plate for you?"
"Erin, you don't have to. Tonight's going to be another late one. I can microwave something at the office."
"Uh-huh. Because ramen cups are great fuel for someone who works ninety hours a day. Speaking of, are you sure—I know how you get when I ask about this, but I know you're not sleeping a whole lot, and I promised Mom I'd make sure. That you aren't. You know."
Nicole gritted her teeth and bashed the keys a lot harder than she meant to. "Erin, I'm fine. Really. I monitor my mental health. I'm not going to push myself too hard."
Erin's voice dropped to a whisper. "Are you taking your pills and everything? Because I counted the ones in the bathroom and—"
"You counted my meds? Seriously?"
"I was worried!" Erin said defensively. "I just wanted to make sure! Because whenever I ask about it, you do this."
"Because I'm tired of people micromanaging my personal life! Not to mention treating me like I'm going to crack if they look at me funny!"
"It's called taking care of you. Someone's got to."
"You know I'm a big girl and can take care of myself, right?" She shouldn't have moved to Seattle for a fresh start. She should've moved to ... to Turkey. Or Antarctica. Anywhere her family was not. "I'm taking my meds, I really am getting enough sleep, and I am not going to fall apart just because the job is stressful."
"You don't have to bite my head off. I'm just looking out for you."
Nicole took a deep breath and massaged her temples. "I'm sorry."
Somehow whenever this happened, she was the one who ended up apologizing to Erin, even if she didn't want to. She was, after all, a guest in Erin's home, and no matter how many times Erin reassured her that she was a full member of the household, no matter how often she reminded herself that she pitched in on rent and no one minded having her there, she still felt like a freeloader. Especially these days, when she was too busy to help with household chores, let alone scrape together the time and money to look for a place of her own.
"De nada," Erin said, an Americanism she'd picked up and was now obnoxiously running into the ground. "And since an unfed Nicole is a cranky Nicole, your dinner will be waiting on the top shelf of the fridge."
"Thanks, sis," Nicole sighed. Retreat was often the better part of valor. "Love you."
Somehow a summer at her sister's place in the U.S. to get her head screwed on straight had turned into almost a decade of being the poor relation living in her sister's spare bedroom. She wasn't entirely sure how much more of Erin's sisterly concern, however well-meant, she could put up with, though.
Someday soon I will take some of that massive pile of vacation time I've built up, she promised herself. I'll shop around for apartments, and maybe even go home to see Mom and Dad. I just can't do it now, because we're heading into the holiday season. Maybe in January—no, that's when Kathryn is having her baby, so I'll have to cover her caseload. Maybe this spring ... oh, who am I kidding.
She tried to buckle down and finish up the email, and got a whole two more lines before someone knocked at the office door.
"Oh, for the love of Christ! Can't you read?"
They knocked again, louder.
If they weren't giving up, it might be important. Life-and-death important.
Or it could be her supervisor had dropped by to talk to her in person. Technically, she wasn't closed yet. By the clock, it was still 4:58.
All she wanted to do was stomp over, wrench the door open, and yell at them. Instead, she firmly schooled herself to calmness, ran a hand over her head to try to get at least some of the frazzle back where it was supposed to be, and then managed to walk, not stomp, to the door. "JJ, if this is you—" she snarled under her breath, and peeked through the blinds.
It wasn't JJ. It was a handsome young man she'd never seen before, dressed in the semi-casual way that passed for business attire in Seattle: dark jeans and a light gray sweater under a black wool coat. More curiously, he had a large cardboard box wedged between his chest and the wall, and he was trying to stuff a puppy back into it without dropping the entire box.
I know I will regret getting involved in this, she thought, but she was already unlocking the door.
When the door opened, he looked up quickly. His eyes were a clear grayish-blue, and dark hair flopped over his forehead. "Hi!" he said, giving her a smile that was slightly distracted due to another puppy trying to make a break for it. "Are you Dr. Yates?"
"This isn't the ASPCA," Nicole informed him. Then she took a closer look at the puppies. "Wait, are those—"
"Wolf," he said. "Werewolf to be exact. I'm Agent Hollen of the SCB. I'd show you my ID, but I've kinda got my hands full at the moment."
As if to demonstrate his point, a third puppy started to slither over the edge of the box. Nicole caught it just as it made its getaway, scooping it up. It was heavier than it looked. She noted in passing that it was a girl.
"Have they eaten?" she asked.
"No. One of our agents found them in this box at the Market—"
"Come on in," she said, against her better judgment.
Agent Hollen hesitated briefly, then followed her. He was limping badly, but didn't seem incapable of carrying the box, so she didn't offer to take it. Instead, she kept the puppy she had picked up. It squirmed, but settled down somewhat as she petted it.
She led Hollen through the outer office, where Kathryn and Mike, the two caseworkers who worked under her, would normally be.
"Everyone out today?" Avery asked, glancing at the empty desks. He sounded sympathetic.
"It's been a day, Agent Hollen. Definitely a day."
She saw him looking over the child-friendly decor. Cubicle walls attempted to give an illusion of privacy to the clients consulting with Mike and Kathryn, and beside them was a small waiting area adorned with bright rugs, several boxes of toys, and a child-height bookcase stocked with picture books that she'd picked up from garage sales and library book remainders. She'd done her best, often using money out of her own po
cket, to try to make the tiny suite of offices as inviting and friendly as possible. She had painted over the institutional beige walls with bright colors, and had picked up colorful child-sized furniture from garage sales, cleaning and repairing it in Erin and Tim's backyard.
The smaller inner office, which accommodated Nicole's desk and was used by all three caseworkers for private consultations, was similarly geared toward attempting to set her young clients and their troubled families at ease. Her sister's kids had helped her paint the bright mural of rainbows on the wall. As well as furniture to accommodate adults and kids, there were a few items with hidden uses that would only be apparent to fellow shifters like Avery. The playpen, for example, was useful not only for toddlers but also for the containment of shifted children. A big plexiglass tank, held steady with brackets screwed to the floor to keep children from pulling it on themselves, had an assortment of nice rocks, soft sand, and pieces of wood for little snakes and rodents to hide behind. It also had a few toys, because non-shifting children or their parents were generally curious about it, so making it look like a sandbox was an effective way of hiding it in plain sight.
Nicole marched past the toys and into the adjoining kitchenette and bathroom. "Put them down," she instructed Agent Hollen. She returned the puppy to its siblings, and began looking through cabinets for what she needed.
Hollen looked over her shoulder as she bypassed the plastic bins of clothing, the care packages of toiletries for homeless teens and battered women, to pull out blankets, baby bottles, and packaged formula.
"It's not uncommon to deal with people who can't go home for some reason, or don't have a home to go to," she explained, passing items over her shoulder to him. "So we try to keep things on hand for every eventuality."
The puppies started howling, a high-pitched squeaky chorus. Hollen winced.
"They were doing that in the car, too," he said. "And wouldn't stay in their box."
"Well, of course. They're babies. They're cold, hungry, and scared. They don't understand being shoved into a box and ignored." She began mixing formula according to the instructions on the box, and used self-assurance to cover the fact that she hadn't actually done this very much. She did not often deal with extremely young children without a parent, nurse, or someone else better qualified to care for them than herself. Speaking of ... "Where are their parents? Do you know?"
"No, like I said, they were found on the street. We don't know who the parents are. Yet," he added.
"You had better stop that ankle-biter there." Nicole jerked her head at the kitchenette doorway.
"Oh, for—"
One of the puppies, the same ginger-colored one Nicole had caught climbing out of the box, was currently waddling for freedom as fast as she could. Hollen's longer legs overtook the puppy easily, even with his limp, and he hesitated briefly before scooping her up. Nicole watched out of the corner of her eye, but after a moment's awkwardness he cradled the puppy to his chest, tucking her blunt snout into the crook of his arm to shut out sensory input. The puppy settled down, nestling against him.
He's naturally good at it, she thought, filling the bottles. He was awkward enough around these kids that she guessed he didn't have kids of his own, but he seemed to be able to intuit what to do with them, even lacking base knowledge to draw upon. Some people, when handed a child, were miserably inept. Agent Hollen seemed to be the sort of person who could understand and anticipate their needs without realizing he was doing so.
Which was, she discovered, a remarkably attractive quality in a man.
"So," Hollen said, depositing the puppy back in the box, where it started plaintively squeaking again. "Since I've dropped these off with you, I need to be getting back to—"
"Oh, no you don't." She shoved a bottle into each of his hands. "I'm only one person. It'll go twice as fast with help. We need to get these little ones fed and comfortable, don't we?"
"I don't know how to do this," Hollen said, staring at the bottles as if she'd handed him live grenades.
"Who does? No parent alive, let me tell you. Everyone starts on a learning curve."
She folded herself cross-legged on the floor, going down with a speed and grace that belied her heft. Nicole wasn't a slim woman, but she started every morning with a half hour of yoga, and had the flexibility to prove it.
"Come on," she urged him. "They won't bite. Well, even if they do, it's only a minor hazard of the job. They're old enough that they might already be eating solid food, but I thought it would be best to start with formula, since we don't know when they last ate or what they're used to eating."
Hollen transferred both bottles to his left hand, gripped the countertop with his right, and lowered himself down that way, extending his right leg stiffly in front of him. It was a smooth and practiced move; she could see he'd done it many times before, which let her know he hadn't simply twisted an ankle or given himself shin splints while jogging. Whatever was wrong with his leg, he'd had time to adjust to it, time to learn all the little workarounds that people used for such disabilities.
And it's none of your business, she scolded herself.
Sitting on the floor, Hollen stared anxiously at the seething box of puppies. Nicole plucked one out, plunked it deftly into her lap—on the continuing assumption that confidence covered a multitude of sins—and stuck the bottle into its mouth. It immediately latched on.
Rather than asking for instructions, Hollen watched her do it, and then picked up a puppy of his own, considered it briefly, and settled it in his lap. He tucked the bottle into its tiny jaws.
"Nicely done," Nicole said.
Hollen looked up and flashed her a quick smile, and it was a good job she was sitting down, because her knees went suddenly weak. He had a nice face to begin with, handsome although somewhat cool; this was a man who kept a lot locked up inside. But his smile—a true smile, not the small polite one he'd given her earlier—was beautiful. When he smiled, it was like standing in a sunbeam, her face turned up to the light.
To cover her reaction, Nicole turned her attention to snuggling her puppy down in her lap so that she could hold the bottle with one hand and pick up one of the remaining puppies with the other—the active, ginger-colored escape artist. She quickly got a bottle into its mouth before it could get away, as it was clearly trying to do.
The remaining puppy was the small gray one. Too little to climb out of the box, it wailed in misery at being left behind.
Nicole raised her eyebrows and cut her eyes pointedly at the box. With each of her hands feeding a puppy, it was not as if she could rescue the poor creature herself.
Hollen shifted the one he was feeding into the space between his legs, and leaned over carefully to pick up the gray one. Then some juggling ensued—Nicole tried not to laugh, but may have snorted a bit, as he wrestled with the two puppies and eventually got them lined up in a row, nestled in his lap and sucking away happily.
"Whew," he said, and gave her another of those gorgeous, melting smiles.
Nicole had to look down at her lapful of puppies. She had enough to keep her busy: having finished her bottle already, the ginger puppy decided to go exploring.
"No, no," Nicole said, tucking little Ginger back with her brother, who was still eating. The puppy yawped unhappily and then draped herself over Nicole's leg and fell asleep with her stubby snout propped on the cuff of Nicole's pants leg.
"Why won't they shift back?" Hollen asked, idly petting the puppies in his lap. "Is that normal?"
"If they were abandoned, I assume they've been through some kind of trauma. They might feel safer in their wolf shape. Agent Hollen—"
"Avery," he said. "You can call me Avery, Dr. Yates."
"I'm not a doctor of anything, just a social worker. I don't even have a PhD, so you'd better call me Nicole. In any case, could you hand me the can of formula there? I don't think little Ginger is finished yet."
It was oddly peaceful, sitting here on the floor with him, the puppies con
tentedly finishing their dinner—like an island of calm in the whirlwind of her day.
"So what happens now?" Avery asked. "Where will they go?"
"Ideally, to one of our foster families who have volunteered to be on call for emergency intakes." She looked down at the puppies, frowning. "That's going to be a problem in this case."
"Because they're shifted?"
"Yes," she said. "They can't go to a regular foster family, and we have an extremely limited number of shifter families, who I think are all full up tonight. Just a minute, let me check." Not wanting to disturb the puppies by getting up, she got out her phone and logged into the office system.
Avery waited patiently while she checked, and checked again, and then triple-checked by calling the one family she thought might be able to do it. They couldn't. Nicole tipped her head back against the wall.
"They can't go to Animal Control," Avery said tightly, cupping his hand over the gray puppy's small head.
"No, of course not. Don't suggest such a thing. I could take them myself for a night—I've done it before—"
He looked up, hopeful.
"But I have a home visit tonight," she finished. "And it's going to have me out late. Agent Holl—Avery, can you take them for one night?"
The hopeful look changed to shock. "I don't have kids. I don't know anything about kids."
"You don't have to. No one gets a user manual. You're doing fine, and I'll give you supplies. They'd certainly be better off with you than any of the other situations I can imagine depositing them into. I'll work on getting them into a more permanent placement tomorrow."
"This can't be legal," Avery protested. "Your office doesn't make a habit of dumping children on random strangers, do you?"
"Of course not. But right now, you'll note, they're legally dogs. That's the problem, after all. And working as an unofficial liaison with the shifter community means, by necessity, the ability to flex. You're an SCB agent, which means you're the best I've got. Do you have a stable living situation? No potential sources of abuse or harm to the children?"