by Lauren Esker
"Koala," she said.
The bushy brows went up. "What's that?"
"It's an Australian animal," she said. "That's where I'm from, Australia."
The old guy squinted at her for a little while and then said, sounding slightly puzzled, "You sure you ain't Oriental or somethin'?"
Oh lord. It was going to be one of those visits. "I'm Chinese-Australian," she agreed with a forced and, she hoped, friendly-looking smile.
"You never said if you two was feds."
"I'm with an agency called the SCB," Avery said. "She's a caseworker for an agency that works with children. We're not here to bother you or arrest anyone."
"You're already botherin' me, and—" He shook the rifle. "—you better bet you ain't arrestin' anybody."
"We're here about some children," Nicole said. "Four children. Quadruplets. Wolf children."
"Ain't no children here."
"We can see that," Avery said, and his voice was curiously gentle. "You're all alone here, aren't you? Where's your pack?"
The old man stared at him for so long Nicole thought he must not have heard the question, but finally he said, "Gone."
"Mine too." Avery's voice still held that gentle note.
To Nicole's surprise, it was the old man who looked down, dropping his yellow eyes to the rotted floorboards. A moment later, he lowered the gun. "C'mon in."
"First," Avery said, "I'm going to ask you to put the weapon down, please." He twitched lightly at his jacket, spreading it to show the lack of a holster. "I'm not armed myself."
"You ain't takin' my gun, fed."
"I'm not with the ATF, and I'm not here to take anyone's guns. That said, if I'm going inside the house, the rifle needs to stay outside."
The old man gazed at him, then shrugged his bony shoulders and laid the rifle on one of the couches, pointing away from them. "Had the safety on the whole time, y'know."
"I know," Avery said. "But you should know that pointing a loaded weapon at a federal agent, and I assume it is loaded, is a very good way to get yourself shot."
"I'm seventy-four years old, son. If my ticker don't get me, my diabetes will." He pronounced it dah-betties. "Ya think I'm scared'a gettin' shot?"
"Think about my situation, then," Avery said, his voice lightening with a flippancy that had to be fake. "There's a lot of paperwork for shooting someone, sir."
The old man barked a harsh laugh and held the door open for them. "Chester," he said over his shoulder, which Nicole took a moment to realize was his name. As he turned away, she noticed his gray ponytail, tied with a strip of leather, went all the way down to the middle of his back.
She'd expected the inside of the trailer to be an utter disaster, considering the state of the outside, but it was merely cluttered, not even at hoarder levels, but just "old guy who has a lot of stuff". There was too much furniture for a single-wide trailer: couches and chairs shoved together, a couple of rickety card tables bowing under the weight of boxes of machine parts and stacks of old magazines—Guns & Ammo, Soldier of Fortune, National Geographic. There were a lot of houseplants, most of them dusty but alive, and several more cats; Nicole counted three that she could see just from the door. A strong smell of cigarette smoke covered up any worse odors that might be lurking underneath.
Nicole could also see why he'd capitulated so easily on the rifle. There were weapons everywhere. A large wooden rack on the wall held about a dozen rifles and shotguns of various descriptions. There were even more handguns; it was sort of like a bizarre version of Where's Waldo, trying to spot them in the clutter.
"Sit anywhere," Chester said. He shuffled into the kitchen, which was nothing more than a continuation of the single-wide trailer's living room. There he moved back and forth from countertop to cluttered countertop, while Nicole and Avery looked at each other and then around, trying to find a clear enough space to sit, preferably without any weapons on it.
Chester's favorite chair was abundantly clear from the deep buttock-shaped dents in the cracked leather, the overflowing ashtray next to it, and the fact that it was the only piece of furniture in the trailer that didn't have anything on it. Also, there were two handguns and a very large knife in a leather sheath within easy reach.
Avery found a spot on one of the couches, moving some sort of disassembled gun spread out on newspapers. Nicole had to move a cat to sit down; the cat promptly relocated back onto her lap and began to purr. At least they were friendly, she thought, cautiously petting it.
Chester came in from the kitchen with three cups of coffee, a package of cookies, and a cardboard box of sugar on a plastic tray that looked like it had been liberated from a hospital. "If either of the two a'you take milk, goat's milk is what I got. Fresh from the goat."
Nicole's desire for white coffee nosedived. "Just sugar is fine, sir," she said politely, accepting a cup.
The coffee was absolutely terrible, gritty with a dishwatery flavor that suggested the grounds had been boiled multiple times. Avery went poker-faced as soon as he took a sip, and he reached for the sugar box and dumped a ludicrous amount in. Nicole disliked sweet coffee, but another cautious sip convinced her that sugar had to at least mask the worst of it. After all, it couldn't get worse, could it?
.... Yes. Yes, it could.
Chester started to sit down, then jolted back upright. "Oh, hang on. I got cake."
He shuffled back into the kitchen. Nicole leaned over to whisper to Avery, "He doesn't get many visitors, does he?"
Avery shrugged, and whispered back, "That, and werewolves like taking care of people. Feeding people and whatnot. It's part of the pack thing."
She winked and whispered, "Does that mean you'll cook for me?"
He did that blushing thing she was coming to find adorable. "If you like. I'm no gourmet chef, though. Don't get your hopes up too much."
"Judging from the coffee, it's got to be an improvement over Chester's cooking," she whispered, her voice dropping to inaudibility as their host came back from the kitchen with a plate of what turned out to be something more like zucchini bread than cake, very dry and very stale.
"I'm with the SCB," Avery said, showing the old man his badge. "It's an agency that handles shifters' affairs."
"SCB, FBI, CIA, don't really matter. All'a those alphabet soups takes their orders from the same people," Chester explained.
"The President?" Nicole asked.
Chester laughed and slapped his bony knee. "Ah, no, ma'am. The Illuminati! They own the TV too. That's why I don't have one."
Nicole made wide expressive eyes at Avery, who was still maintaining his poker face. "Well, I appreciate you being willing to invite me into your home," Avery said.
"Son, you might'a gone over to their side, but you're still a wolf. An' I ain't talked to other wolves in a real long time. Who's your people, boy? What pack you come from?"
"I don't know," Avery admitted quietly. "My pack broke up a long time ago. I think I'm the only one left."
Despite Chester's age and Nicole's doubts about his mental health, his yellow eyes were sharp, and they never left Avery's face. "Where you from, then, your pack? Not 'round here, I reckon."
"Oregon, over near the Wallowa Mountains."
"Ah, yeah, don't know too many wolves down that way. Ain't many packs left around here, though."
"I know," Avery said. "It's getting too citified for werewolves. Too many people. A lot of the packs have gone over the border into Canada."
"Guess you ain't out'a the loop all the way, then."
"I try to stay up on what the packs are doing." Avery picked up a piece of stale zucchini bread and took a bite. Nicole was impressed by his lack of reaction as he chewed on it. "Right now I'm looking into a peculiar case. Four kids that none of the packs will lay claim to. They turned up in the city two days ago. No pack worth its hunting grounds would let even one child go missing, and now I have four of them. What do you make of that?"
Chester's face hardened. "I don't know nothin'
about no missin' kids."
Avery raised his hands. "That's not an accusation. I don't believe you're involved at all." He indicated Nicole with a gesture. "Like I said earlier, Nicole is a social worker who is handling the children's case. What she and I are trying to do is find their family so we can return them."
"Well, they sure as hell ain't mine."
"I heard from some of the other packs that you might have had children living at home who are no longer here."
Chester's bushy eyebrows shot up. "Sure. Grown kids. Kids in their twenties and thirties. How old are these ones?"
Avery looked sideways at Nicole. "Less than two years old," she said.
Chester gave another of those harsh, coughing laughs. "I look like I got babies running around? Got me a twenty-year-old sweetheart out in the shed, maybe?"
"Not really," she had to admit.
Avery toyed with the head of his cane, running his slender fingers over the polished wood. "Chester, I don't want to bring up anything you don't want to talk about, so you don't have to answer this question. I'm not asking in an official capacity, just asking as a fellow wolf. What did happen to your pack? Your kids, and your other relatives."
"What happened to yours?" Chester countered.
Avery didn't answer immediately. Nicole glanced at him and saw that he'd developed a sort of nervous twitch, jiggling his good leg. "I can go outside, if you like," she offered. "If this is the kind of thing that only wolves can hear."
"No," Avery said, and his face firmed as if he'd come to a decision. "It's not. My pack was broken from the start, Chester. We were isolated like this, and those of us who hadn't left were held under a reign of terror by my father. We were beaten, neglected, and abused. For the first seven years of my life, I had to survive mainly by hunting. Something I could only do when I wasn't locked up—" He broke off, teeth clenched, and Nicole was hit with a sudden flash of memory: his reaction to the pet kennel in her office. Had he been locked in one of those, as a child?
Chester watched him quietly, not interrupting, until Avery went on. "I was about seven when we finally got on the county's radar, mainly because the neighbors knew there were kids back in the woods who'd never been to school. After my dad and aunt chased anyone who showed up off our land at gunpoint, a social worker came with some people from the sheriff's department and took me away. I learned later that my dad ended up getting killed in a standoff with police a little later, and my aunt went all-wolf to live wild in the hills. I think she's probably dead now, because the all-wolf don't usually live any longer than wild wolves do."
He finished speaking and the trailer fell into silence. The only sound was the hum of the old refrigerator in the kitchen. At last Nicole, overcoming some unexpected barrier inside her, reached out and clasped Avery's hand. His cold fingers were still in hers for a moment, and then gripped back tightly.
"Well," Chester said. He coughed uncomfortably. "It was nothin' like that with us. You know, I tried to do right by my kids. Made sure they got educated an' that. But the pack's been getting smaller over the years. I had four brothers and sisters, but they're all dead now. My oldest girl left first. There's no work out here, an' the nearest pack she coulda married into is up near Darrington. I told her we can live just fine on our own, maybe talk to some of the other packs about combining with 'em, but she wanted to try out life in the city. An' then my boys went to join her, one by one. And now they got jobs in the city and don't write no more."
His craggy face drew down in lines of deep and awful sorrow, so profound that Nicole found herself hurting for him. Strange as he was, it had to be terrible to be so isolated, for werewolves perhaps even more than for other kinds of shifters.
"Your kids work in the city?" Avery asked. "In Seattle, you mean? Doing what?"
Chester recovered himself, surreptitiously wiping at his eyes. "Helena wanted to be a nurse. Went to school and everything. Thought maybe she could come home and be a live-in helper for some of the old people around these parts, the human neighbors, see. She said it's a good career an' she liked helping people. But it was hard for her in the city. Everything cost so much. She got some papers from the gov'mint to get money for school, but she was living on the street. Her twin Jimmy went to stay with her, thinkin' he could work and they could keep a place together. Then the little one died—little Edith, she an' Gordie were the younger twins. Not mine, really. My sister's kids. But I raised 'em as mine, and Gordie took it real hard when we lost Edith. Real hard. He went to stay with Helena and Jimmy in the city."
"What happened to Edith?" Nicole asked quietly.
"Accident. Hit by a car up on the highway, out riding her bike." The old man dashed at his eyes again.
"So Jimmy left, and then they stopped writing?" Avery said. "Do you think something might have happened?"
Chester slammed a fist on the table beside his chair, rattling the guns and making Nicole jump. "Course I did! Got me on a bus and went all the way into the big city. Helena wasn't going to school no more, and I don't know where they went. I looked for the young 'uns. I did."
Nicole could imagine how that had gone down. Trying to find three adult and possibly homeless werewolves in a city the size of Seattle, who were probably not in the system at all aside from Helena's financial aid ... it would have been like hunting for a needle in a haystack, even with a keen werewolf sense of smell and pack. Especially since Chester probably wouldn't know about the resources available to him, such as filing a missing persons report, and might not have wanted to avail himself of the option even if he had.
"Feds got to 'em, mostly likely," Chester muttered. "Prob'ly locked up in some damn secret gov'mint lab."
Avery let that slide. "I can put the word out and see what I can find. Can I get names, ages, and descriptions? Do you have any pictures?"
"Don't have no pictures," Chester said, which made Nicole blink, thinking about how Erin and Tim were constantly taking pictures of their children. "But I can get the rest of that for you."
It turned out he wasn't certain exactly what year his kids were born, either, but he was pretty sure Helena and Jimmy were around thirty, and Gordie was about twenty-three or twenty-four. Avery took descriptions with hair color, eye color, and approximate height and weight.
"And tell me if you hear anything about any children missing from one of the packs, okay?" Avery said, as Chester escorted them to the door. He scribbled on the back of one of his business cards. "I know you don't have a phone, but here's my private number just in case, and an address you can write me at."
As they walked back to the car, Nicole looked over her shoulder at Chester waving at them from the porch, surrounded by the detritus of rural poverty. When they first arrived, she had been looking analytically, assessing the area from the viewpoint of a social worker. Now she just felt bad for him, out here all alone, his children having either abandoned him or fallen victim to some big-city evil.
Lost in her thoughts, she was silent until they'd rejoined the main road. Then she said, "So. Werewolves."
Avery heaved a sigh. "You can see why I wasn't that crazy about you meeting my people."
"Are they all like that?"
"Chester, I will admit, is out on the fringe. He's been living alone for awhile, and even by our standards his pack was pretty isolated. Mostly, werewolves are .... well ..." He shrugged. "They're decent folks, but they're also about what you'd expect when a bunch of people who hate outsiders move to the middle of nowhere and intermarry for a few generations. A lot of shifter families used to live like that, but most of them mainstreamed better than werewolves did."
"Do you think Chester's kids just wanted to cut ties with Dad, or do you suppose something happened to them?"
"I ... don't know." He sounded like he'd started to say something else, then changed directions. "I want to say that no werewolf would voluntarily give up on pack. But who knows. And I want to believe that Chester's as invested in his kids as he wants us to think, but again, who the h
ell knows? There could have been all kinds of abuse going on out here before Helena and Jimmy and Gordie finally had enough and took off."
"Is that what you think?"
"No," Avery said, biting his lip and staring out the windshield. "I think something happened to them. I don't think any werewolf, even an abused one, would cut ties with their family if they had family left alive."
"It's not just werewolves," Nicole said quietly. She'd seen children come from horrifically abusive backgrounds, the sort where she was infinitely grateful she'd been able to get them out, only to receive as much anger directed at her as at the abusive parents. For some people, cutting off their family was the only way to live a happy and healthy life, but it wasn't easy for anyone.
"I know, but with us it's ... hard to explain the depth of it, I guess. Maybe the doc is right that it's like the way children bond with their parents. I don't even know what that's supposed to feel like, since it all went screwy with me."
"Someone must have loved you and taken care of you when you were young," Nicole said gently. "Avery, I work with abused children every day, and I can tell the difference between children who were severely neglected when they were very young, and those who weren't. You had a loving caretaker at a young age."
Avery ran his thumbs over the steering wheel in a slow, sweeping pattern. "I don't remember."
She laid a hand on his arm, stroking it lightly. "However you got here, whatever the road was that brought you here, you're a wonderful person, Avery, and I really like who you are. Nothing that happened to you was your fault."
"Well, obviously I know that," he said, a bit snappishly. "Blaming myself isn't the problem."
"Sorry." She pulled her hand back, but he caught it and held on.
"No, I'm sorry. I didn't meant to take it out on you."
"You weren't," she said. "I'm the one talking like ... well, like the kind of therapist I wouldn't go to more than once. I know how much I hate it when people say things like that to me."
"Did something happen to you?" His look was quick and sharp, an electric flash of his blue-gray eyes. "No, check that. I don't mean to pry. I just hadn't realized ..."