by Lauren Esker
"That my life wasn't all picket fences with one big happy koala family inside? To be honest, Avery, it kind of was. No one ever hurt me or attacked me." Except for me. She picked at her skirt. She hadn't meant to start talking about this. She'd never talked to any of her other boyfriends about it. But Avery was ... Avery. He'd need to know sooner or later. "I'm depressed. I have been all my life. I take medication for it."
She wasn't sure what she was expecting—dismissal, mocking, pointed questions? But instead, he asked, "Is it bad?"
"It was," she said, looking out the window. They were out of the rural doldrums and back into scenery that looked more like an autumn calendar picture, with apple-draped orchards and small white farmhouses set back from the road. "I went through some really rough stuff in my early twenties. I was actually, um, institutionalized for a while because of suicide attempts. These days I think that part is behind me." At least I hope so. "It's sort of like alcoholism—you never really get over it, you just learn to manage it, in my case with drugs and therapy and so forth. And I feel like I manage it pretty well."
"I assume you do," Avery said. "I wouldn't have known from talking to you."
"Well, in fairness, you probably wouldn't have known if you'd met me in uni, either, when I was teetering on the brink of a pretty major collapse. Even my family didn't know until it got to the point where I couldn't hide it anymore. But, for what it's worth, I'm not faking being happy or anything like that. I am a pretty happy person most of the time."
"Except when you're not," Avery said.
"Except when I'm not."
He squeezed her hand. "Thank you for telling me."
She squeezed back, and just held it for a minute, oddly elated. I told him, and he didn't laugh, or think I was making a big deal out of nothing.
The elation passed and was replaced by intense embarrassment and an urgent desire to change the subject. "Do you think Chester's right about the secret government labs?" she blurted out. "Doing experiments on shifters?"
"Believe me, I'm trying very hard to convince myself he's wrong." He sighed. "Speaking as a government employee, if there are labs around somewhere experimenting on shifters, I am going to guess they're private, some kind of small-scale operation. I don't think the government is competent enough to conduct a cover-up operation as effective as it would need to be for the shifter community not to know about it."
"They seem to be covering up the existence of actual shifters pretty well," she pointed out.
"Yeah, but we do that. Shifters ourselves, I mean, not the SCB specifically. I don't think the government would stand a chance of squashing it if we started talking to the media. Honestly, in the modern world, I don't think it's going to be that long before we can't stay hidden anymore. We're already in a sort of gray area, where the only thing keeping us from going full-on exposed is the fact that so many people believe we're a myth. There are shifter message boards operating openly, videos on Youtube ... it's really just a matter of time."
"But the government obviously knows already. How high up does it go? I mean, does the President know about shifters? Does the Army?"
"Above my pay grade," Avery said. "All I really know is that the SCB used to be a Cold War agency for dealing with weird shit the government didn't want to officially talk about. It wasn't specifically for shifter business then. Actually, if you want to get technical about it, it still isn't, but ..."
"We're the weirdest shit the government has to deal with?" she asked with a smile.
"Pretty much. It was just a little no-budget agency that got kicked around from one department to another until 9/11 happened, and everything that followed. The Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, everything getting reorganized, the government spawning new agencies left and right. Our current boss in Washington, Curtis Easton, resurrected the agency as a shifter-affairs bureau, though it still wasn't officially called that."
"So the SCB is pretty new, really."
He nodded. "I get the general impression that it was completely moribund for the previous couple of decades, with the end of the Cold War and so forth. Nearly everyone who works for the SCB now came on board after the 9/11 reorganization, with the exception of a few old friends of Easton's like our regional chief, Pam Stiers. We're still under the Homeland Security umbrella, but that's all I really know about who signs our checks and what our official status is. I don't know who in high places is in the know, so to speak. It could be nobody is. Maybe they still think we're just a little agency that deals with weird stuff."
"They must wonder where the funding for the black helicopters goes." She poked his arm. "Do you have black helicopters? Please tell me you do!"
"No," he sighed. "We have a decommissioned Coast Guard helicopter and a pilot named Wild Bill."
"I take it the helicopter isn't black."
"It's mostly bright orange. With stripes."
"Inconspicuous."
"Hey, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and nobody expects spooks to fly around in a former search-and-rescue chopper that could melt your eyeballs at a hundred paces."
"Shapeshifting spooks."
"If only shapeshifting could solve all our problems." Avery grimaced. "I keep feeling like I've got a bunch of puzzle pieces that just don't go together. We have missing persons, kids showing up out of nowhere, a street werewolf who may or may not be one of the missing ones, and people breaking into your office, which might not even be related. Heck, maybe none of it is related; maybe the reason why I'm having so much trouble is because it's a bunch of different mysteries I'm approaching as one."
"Maybe you just need to stop thinking so hard about it and let your mind work. I know I come up with the best solutions to my problems when I focus on other things and come at it sideways."
"Maybe," he sighed.
Chapter Eleven
Avery dropped off Nicole for her four o'clock appointment, promising to come back with the kids in time for the five-thirty meeting with the foster family.
It was good to have a little time alone in the car. The meeting with Chester had left him unsettled, anxious, his wolf instincts a crawling presence under his skin. He couldn't even figure out what was disturbing him so much. Some of it was being reminded of his childhood, and the life he'd left behind. Chester's trailer in its rural isolation was a painful glimpse of an alternate future that had almost been his. He didn't know how to feel about it. His wolf side yearned for the cool solitude of the forest, the miles and miles of trees where he could run and hunt. But the human in him, the part of him that had grown used to the SCB and the fast pace of city life, couldn't help thinking how stultifying he would find it, now, to go back to living in a rural werewolf compound where the only people he saw, day in and day out, were his pack.
I couldn't live like that anymore. The thought made him flinch. But it was true.
And then there was the mystery of what had happened to Chester's kids. The idea of looking for wolf shifters among the homeless population of the city had never even occurred to Avery. The close-knit nature of werewolf society meant that no one could ever be so lost and alone they would have to live on the street, with no family to take them in ... or so he'd thought. Now he was forced to admit that a werewolf who couldn't take the rural isolation would have the deck stacked against them. Nothing in their upbringing would have prepared them for a life in the city among non-shifters, and with their family many miles away, possibly even shunning them for leaving, they wouldn't have the support system that Avery had always considered inevitable among wolves.
He'd actually never realized that wolf shifters left their packs and moved to the city at all. Of course some must. Werewolves were individuals, just like any other kind of people. But the local packs didn't talk about it, and Avery didn't know them well enough to have stumbled across the phenomenon before. He also hadn't previously run into wolf shifters in the city, homeless or otherwise. There was only one other wolf shifter in the entire SCB that he knew o
f. They simply didn't have much to do with outsiders. So clearly, there couldn't be that many of them.
Unless there were entire urban packs no one knew about ...
Possibly living on the fringes of urban society just as they did in the forest, in places like the Seattle Underground.
It was ridiculous. There couldn't be packs of werewolves roaming the Underground. Surely someone would have noticed!
Or maybe they wrote it off as hysteria, because the sightings happened around Halloween and the wolves were sharp enough to make themselves up like movie monsters ...
Okay. Now I'm getting into paranoid conspiracy territory. It didn't even make sense anyway. Shifted werewolves looked just like ordinary humans. If they wanted to blend with human society, they could do it with no trouble at all.
Well ... no physical problems, at least. Social problems were a different matter. Unschooled and possibly even illiterate, they might find it overwhelmingly difficult to find and keep jobs. And where does that lead us? Back to homeless werewolf packs!
The idea fascinated him. The kids could even have come from a secret pack of urban wolves, if such things existed. He needed to talk to Cho. She talked to everybody, and her current project of getting to know the city's shifters made her the person who'd stand the best chance of being able to find out.
But Cho was out of the office, back to working on her pickpocket case. Jack and Casey were out in the field investigating a Bigfoot sighting. (God, he'd be glad when Halloween was over.) The only person he could find in the main office was Rivkah, who was staffing the phones. "If you're looking for the puppies," she said, "they're in the break room with Mayhew."
Oh no.
It was better than it could have been. He opened the door and caught Ginger in the process of making a getaway, her fur frosted with couch stuffing. The break room looked like a tornado had swept through it. There was nothing in sight that didn't appear to have been broken, torn up, or chewed on. Somehow one of the lamps appeared to have become embedded in the ceiling. Mayhew was sitting helplessly in the middle of the mess, imploring Sophie to "Please ... don't chew that ... no, that's probably expensive ..." Sophie ignored him utterly.
Remembering the state of his own apartment, Avery decided not to get too self-righteous about it. All four of the puppies were in sight, and looked just fine, if festooned with the results of their escapades. "Relief shift is here," he told Mayhew.
"Oh, thank God," Mayhew gasped, scrambling to his feet. "I mean ... they're total darlings. Really really sweet. I'm not used to babysitting, I guess."
No, really? Avery managed not to say. "Only child?" he asked neutrally.
"Oh, no, I've got five brothers and sisters. They're all older than me. I was the baby of the family."
Also thoroughly unsurprising. "Think you could help me get them to the car?" Avery asked.
The puppies were still wearing the colorful collars Jack and Casey had bought them, now with shiny new dog tags giving the SCB's main line as the number to call "if found". It made Avery flinch a little, but he had to admit it would be practical if one of them wandered off. Human parents would probably gain a little peace of mind from doing the same thing.
And the collars made them easier to hang onto, which was handy, since they were actively resistant to being confined in the airline kennel. A chorus of high-pitched howling and a lot of struggling greeted the adults' efforts to stuff them in, and Mayhew managed to break the plastic holding the kennel's door on, leaving it dangling askew. He hadn't even pushed it that hard, as far as Avery could tell. He just happened to hit a weak place in the plastic.
"Man, you have a gift," Avery said.
"You're telling me," Mayhew said unhappily. "I swear I come within ten feet of a piece of technology and it breaks. It sucks. You don't think it's a shifter thing, do you?"
"If it were a shifter thing, it would happen to all of us." Ginger was still howling miserably, even though she was no longer in the kennel. Avery picked her up; she kicked her legs wildly. He nuzzled her, but this only produced more howling. "Hey, kiddo, calm down. Nobody's putting you in the mean box, okay? Heck, we can't put you in the box because it's broken. So just settle down and try not to—whoa!"
He almost dropped her, because he was suddenly holding not a puppy, but a plump little girl with a mop of curly strawberry-blond hair, naked except for a slender crimson collar. Her face was screwed up and turning purple. She switched from howling to wailing without even taking a breath.
For a moment all Avery could do was stare at her. "Ginger?" he said stupidly. He knew she was a child, intellectually, but he'd gotten used to her as a puppy.
Ginger stopped crying, sniffled, and stared back at him. Possibly she was startled by the sensory shift, because puppies and humans saw the world in very different ways. The color spectrum would have changed for her; smells would be different, and sounds too. She looked confused. Her tear-glazed eyes were brown. He wasn't great at guessing children's ages, but Willa Lafitte had estimated the kids were around a year or two old, and that seemed about right.
"Can you talk?" he asked. Ginger sniffled and screwed up her face again. "No, no, don't cry." He brought her close to his body, trying to find a comfortable way to hold her against his chest. Toddlers were different to hold than puppies, with legs sprawling all over the place. He found a comparatively comfortable way of holding her with his arm tucked under her butt, and her scruffy mop-top head against his chest.
"That better?" Avery asked the top of her head. She snuffled and stuck her fist in her mouth.
"Cool," Mayhew said.
Avery looked down at him. Mayhew had Sophie in his lap; the brown and gray puppy had stopped howling, at least, now that no one was trying to kennel her. "This complicates things, you know."
"How?"
"I'm holding a naked little girl, Mayhew, in case you hadn't noticed. I don't even have diapers for her, let alone ... what does a baby need? Clothes, to start with. A car seat. Shit, how'm I gonna get her over to the foster home?"
"You probably shouldn't say shit in front of a baby."
Also, Avery reminded himself, Ginger had been just as naked five minutes ago and no one had cared. Even he was starting to do it—think of the kids differently when they were wearing human skin. She was still the same little girl she'd always been.
And he also had an idea of how to get her to shift back to a shape that would be less problematic for transport. Avery set her down carefully on a couch cushion. She seemed to able to sit on her own just fine. As soon as he pulled away, her face wrinkled up to cry.
"No, wait," he said, hastily shedding his sweater and unbuckling his pants. "Hold on, don't cry, just ... do this."
And he flowed into wolf-shape.
The child's incipient bawling stopped as suddenly as if a spigot had turned off. For the first time, she grinned, showing little white nubs of teeth. "Woof!" she said, and there was a fluffy reddish-gold puppy where the little girl had been.
Oh Lord, they could talk. Which meant they could understand what was said around them, even if they might not be old enough to process it yet. He found himself hastily replaying a number of recent conversations in nervewracking detail.
"Agent Hollen?" Mayhew said nervously.
Right. Still wolf-shaped. He licked Ginger's face, which made her wag her short brush of a tail, and then shifted back.
So did she. This time, one of the other pups followed suit—the smaller boy, Hunter. He turned out to be a thin, anxious-looking child with dark hair and large, worried brown eyes.
Crud.
Avery shifted back to his wolf body. Ginger followed suit, wagging her tail in delight. She clearly thought it was a game. Rather than shifting himself, Hunter stared at her and began to wail.
All the commotion drew Rivkah in from the main office. "What in the world is going on here?" she asked, leaning in the doorway, just as both Avery and Ginger shifted back to human together.
Hunter was squalli
ng in earnest now. The other boy pup, Gael, began to howl.
"I'm trying to get them all four puppy-shaped again," Avery said. "Rivkah, Mayhew—shift, both of you. Help me out here."
"I'm a spider," Mayhew protested. "They'll eat me! Or—use me for a chew toy, or something."
"Climb a wall, then."
Rivkah was wearing a one-piece dress, which dropped easily away from her thin body as she shifted to her peregrine falcon form. All four puppies were instantly fascinated. Rivkah spread her wings; like most falcons, she had an enormous wingspan compared to the relatively small size of her bird body, and it was difficult for her to fly indoors. She managed to flutter to the back of a half-destroyed couch, and perched there, where she began to preen a wing.
Avery shifted back to wolf. This time, both the human-shaped children followed suit. He backed toward the door, while the puppies were fixated on Rivkah, and shifted again, then held up his hand before she could do anything. "Don't shift yet! Give them a minute to lose interest. Mayhew, have they eaten recently?"
There was no answer, and nothing visible of Mayhew but a pile of clothes. Spider. Right. Avery couldn't even see where he'd gone. "Never mind. Rivkah, see if you can keep them interested while I feed them."
The care package Nicole had put together for the puppies, now severely depleted, seemed to be following them around from babysitter to babysitter, and it had picked up some cans of puppy food now. It wasn't the good stuff Avery had been feeding them, but, he reluctantly admitted, it would do. He opened a couple cans and poured them into coffee mugs, for lack of anything better.
The puppies were more than happy to take advantage of the offering, and while they were eating, Rivkah shifted. Sitting naked on the back of the couch, she crossed her legs. "What was all that about?"
"Apparently they're shifting now," Avery said, pulling on his sweater. "Which is making me realize how woefully unprepared we are for dealing with them as human kids. Mayhew, you can come out now."