by Lauren Esker
Not for the first time, Noah wished the SCB carried the same kind of clout as a better-known agency. I bet FBI agents don't have to deal with this kind of crap.
"May I ask what you think the problem is?" Bassi asked, starting to sound angry. "This is routine. We handle this kind of situation all the time."
"Just a jurisdictional problem. You and your staff haven't done anything wrong. It should be quick to straighten out." Although maybe not with human witnesses around. He hoped that by the time he found the missing bodies he would have come up with a convenient excuse to ditch his unwanted escort.
The elevator doors opened onto a raised loading dock above the floor of the parking garage. They were on a different level than the one where he and Trish had parked. At the far end of a row of cars, two men in coveralls were loading a gurney with a body bag into the back of a nondescript white van. Both men were nondescript as well: average height, clean-shaven, one with short-cropped hair, the other with his dark hair pulled back in a short ponytail.
Noah tossed Trish his keys. She caught them by the rubber tiger's head on the key chain. "Get my car and block that van."
"Why not my car?"
"Because nobody wants to play chicken with a van in a Fusion. Go!"
She dashed off.
"Agent," Bassi began loudly, "I demand that you—"
"Stay here, both of you." Noah flipped out his badge and jogged toward the van. "Hey, you there! I'm Agent Noah Easton, Special Crimes Bureau. I need to talk to you."
Crewcut slammed the back doors of the van, while Ponytail turned to face Noah—and froze.
Noah stopped too. He'd never been able to quite define the feeling of encountering another shifter, except that he just knew. And right now, this guy was giving him that feeling, but ... different. Weird. Like he was almost a shifter, but not quite.
Maybe-a-Shifter Guy shouted something at Crewcut. Noah spoke French and a little Spanish and Russian, and based on those languages, he guessed that it was something in the Romance language family—Italian? Then both of them drew guns from the pockets of their coveralls.
Everything seemed to go into slow motion.
Noah didn't carry a gun, not anymore. He and his staff weren't field agents; they were PR wonks. He'd requested a transfer out of field work for a reason. And now that reason was staring at him down the barrels of a pair of gleaming semiautomatics.
It was the tiger in him that kept him from freezing, gave him a burst of speed. He spun around, finding Bassi and Zach right behind him, and seized them each by a fistful of shirt. All three of them tumbled in a heap between two parked cars just as the two men opened fire in a deafening fusillade.
Noah tried to get a grip on himself. His heart was hammering out of control, his hands ice cold.
This is why I got out of field work.
He still had a firm grip on each of the civilians, who were both scared silent. He could feel Zach's heart pounding as fast as his own.
The shooting paused, and through the ringing in his ears, Noah heard the roar of a powerful engine. Not the van, but the familiar growl of the Camaro. Trish had arrived.
And she was unarmed and about to go head-to-head with two armed hostiles who had no compunctions about taking out the opposition.
"Stay here!" Noah ordered Bassi and Zach. This time, both of them obeyed him without question. He risked a peek out of hiding just in time to see Trish pull the Camaro in front of the van and screech to a halt. The top was down, so he could see Trish in the driver's seat. Crewcut had disappeared, and Ponytail was hastily reloading while using the passenger side of the van for cover. The van's engine roared to life, which explained where Crewcut had gotten off to.
"Trish!" Noah shouted. "Get down, they're—"
He didn't have time to say "armed" before Ponytail spun around, raising his now-loaded weapon, and snapped off two shots at Trish. She collapsed back against the Camaro's seat.
A sound burst from Noah's throat that was half shout and half snarl. He sprang out of hiding with no idea what he was going to do, fury overriding common sense. His inner tiger was rearing to the surface, canine teeth lengthening in his mouth. He had to fight it back. Couldn't shift in front of a half-dozen human witnesses.
Ponytail snapped off a wild shot. Noah threw himself to the side, reacting with feline reflexes; he was already that close to shifting. He caught himself on the fender of one of the parked cars.
The passenger door of the van opened from the inside. Ponytail threw himself into the seat and the van lurched forward, taking some paint off the Camaro's fender as it veered around the other car.
Noah squinted at the license plate, memorizing it and trying to soak up every possible detail of the van before it roared out of sight. Then he ran toward the Camaro as fast as he could.
"Trish!"
She'd collapsed between the seats. Her hand was clamped to her neck, bright blood spurting between her fingers. But her eyes were open. She was alive.
"We're right next to the hospital!" Bassi shouted. "I can call 911!"
"I'll drive her over to the ER!" Noah shouted back. He maneuvered Trish into the passenger seat as gently as possible, and lifted her other hand, placing it over the one already clutching her throat.
He needed to be in three places at once. This whole situation was a worst-case shifter discovery scenario waiting to happen, and it was going to be a dozen times harder to cover up after the city cops had crawled all over the place. And someone had to go after that van and the sons of bitches driving it.
But Trish's life was more important.
Noah floored the gas pedal and roared up the parking garage exit ramp. Dr. Bassi was right, they were smack in the middle of a medical complex, but because of Trish's shifter nature he didn't dare take her there. He was going to have to drive across town to the Evergreen Clinic, the one place in town that she could get medical care from people who knew what she was and wouldn't raise eyebrows at her rapid healing and possible tendency to shift into an antelope under stress.
If he could do it without signing her death warrant.
But he didn't think so. Trish looked like she'd been dipped in scarlet paint, and the vintage seats of the Camaro would never be the same, but the blood pulsing between her fingers was already slowing from a flood to a trickle. This was the sort of situation that shifter healing was tailor-made for. Shifters rarely bled to death. Their accelerated healing was able to repair damaged blood vessels before catastrophic blood loss could occur.
Shock was still a possibility, however.
"Don't move." He had to stop at the parking garage's exit gate—the van had already vanished, damn it—and took the opportunity to lean over her and recline her seat. Trish gave a small gasp as the seat flattened out. "Stay down. I'll have you at the clinic in a few minutes." He fumbled in the glove box for his emergency flasher, which he'd almost never had a chance to use, and slapped it on the dashboard.
If I were a real fucking agent, I would've been armed. It never would've come to this ...
"Who where they?" Trish whispered as Noah tore out onto the street.
"I don't know." But he was damn well going to find out.
Gripping the steering wheel with one hand, veering around delivery trucks and cyclists while his siren split the air, he fumbled for his phone and punched the preset to take him to Stiers' direct line.
"Chief's office." Stiers didn't have an administrative assistant, as such; the position was handled by whichever intern was available at any given time. This sounded like Rivkah Rosen, and he breathed an internal sigh of relief. She was smart, organized, and level-headed in a crisis.
"Rivkah, it's Easton. I need to talk to Stiers. Top priority."
"She's running live-fire field exercises this afternoon, I'm afraid." Which was SCB code for shifter training, i.e. everyone was in their animal bodies and no one was carrying a phone. It also meant she'd be outside the city, in one of the shifter-owned farm fields or stretches of woods
that the SCB had available for practice. "I can call down and have her get back to you as soon as she's available."
"Do it, but I'm going to need more than that. We have a crisis and possible discovery situation." He glanced at Trish in the passenger's seat. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her skin ashen beneath its bronze tan. Blood welled between the fingers clamped tight against her neck. "I need a response team sent out to Harborview for a cleanup detail on the morgue where those bodies turned up this morning. Oh, and put out an APB on a white van—" He had to pause briefly to dredge up the license plate from memory and rattle it off to her. "Two suspects, armed and dangerous, white males, possibly foreign, one possibly a shifter. There are two human witnesses at Harborview who need debriefing, a Dr. Bassi—I didn't get her first name—and a, I don't know what he is exactly, an assistant or orderly named Zach. There may be local police on the scene when they get there—damn, Rivkah, sorry, I'm at the clinic and I have a medical emergency, gotta go."
"I'm on it, Noah," he heard her say as he hung up.
He skidded to a halt in front of the Evergreen Clinic's back entrance. As first responders for the local shifter community, most of whom avoided regular hospitals and ERs if possible, the clinic was prepared for patients in crisis, and there was already a nurse hurrying toward the car as Noah opened the passenger side.
"I need a gurney out here," he called. "Hurry!"
He helped them load Trish and followed the medical team into the building, gripping her arm. "You're gonna be okay," he told her.
Trish managed a slight nod.
"You'll need to wait outside," the nurse told him, and he stumbled back to lean against the wall, watching the gurney vanish.
His fingers were sticky. Looking down, he shuddered at the blood on his hands, his jacket. There had to be a bathroom somewhere around here. Thankfully the first one he found turned out to be the kind with a locking door. He threw the lock and scrubbed and scrubbed at his hands in the sink while he succumbed to a fit of shivering. His skin crawled with self-loathing.
Anybody would freak out about getting shot at, he tried to tell himself. But it wasn't that, not exactly. Going into a fight situation didn't scare him.
It was having people rely on him.
It was knowing that if Trish hadn't shown up, the gunmen could've killed him and, worse, both the civilians he was responsible for, because he wasn't a proper field agent and he didn't have a gun. And then Trish herself had been shot, perhaps killed, because he couldn't protect her.
I don't have a gun, but I have a tiger. I could've shifted ...
But he hadn't been able to make the decision. And that was always the problem, wasn't it? That was why he wasn't a field agent. He couldn't think properly in a crisis. Don't shift in front of witnesses had been the only thing that seemed to matter, although now he thought it might have been one of the few times when an unsanctioned shift was warranted.
Think of the paperwork you saved yourself, he thought, and managed a sickly grin at himself in the mirror. Stiers demanded reams of paperwork for an unauthorized shift in the field.
"Okay, that's enough for the freakout," he murmured to himself as he scrubbed at the blood on his jacket with a handful of paper towels. "There are two gunmen running around the city with a couple of stolen shifter bodies in a van. Where are they going next? Where would I go, if I had a ..."
His voice trailed off.
Peri Moreland.
She knew about the shifter bodies. She'd put pictures of them on her blog. Whoever these people were, and whatever they were trying to cover up, they'd most likely go after Peri next—if they hadn't already.
Noah's breath hissed between his teeth. He wrenched open the door of the bathroom and reached for his phone as he jogged back out to the parking lot.
"Agent Easton," Rivkah said when she picked up, "I've dispatched a response team to Harborview and I'm working the APB angle now."
"That's great." He threw his jacket in the backseat of the Camaro, stared for a moment at the bloodstains in the front, then shook himself out of it. "I need you to get me an address for Peri Moreland."
"Peri Moreland the conspiracy blogger? Are we arresting her?"
"No, we're protecting her."
"Give me a minute." Computer keys clattered in the background.
With the phone tucked into the crook of his shoulder, Noah opened the trunk. The rest of the car was kept as immaculate as possible, highly detailed and polished to a shine, but he had to shove through a clutter of tools, spare workout gear, and emergency equipment to find the lockbox tucked into the spare tire well. He took a deep breath and unlocked it.
Disassembled but well cared for, the parts of the Glock 9 gleamed at him from their protective foam casing.
He hadn't checked out a service weapon from the SCB lockers for years, but he still carried his personal weapon with him, and he still had a valid carry permit for it. His hands knew the motions to put it back together. By habit he cleared the weapon when it was assembled, sighting down it with the action pulled back, and let it snap into place. His hands, he noticed distantly, were shaking again. He closed his eyes, let out a long sigh from the pit of his stomach—a meditation technique his mom had taught him—and then he opened his eyes again and sighted down the weapon. His hands were rock steady.
Rivkah spoke in his ear, making him jump. "I've got that address for you."
"Go."
She read it off while Noah located his shoulder holster in the trunk. It was an SCB-designed harness that would break apart during a shift. He had to let out the straps a little; it had been years since he'd last worn it.
"Got it. Thanks, Rivkah."
"Do you need backup?" she asked. "We're skeleton staffed this afternoon because of the field exercises, but I might be able to pull someone off Harborview."
"Yeah, sure, if you can." Which sounded less desperate than Yes, please!
"Roger that. I'll send them your way when I can find someone. Oh, I've got Agent Ross on the other line. Gotta go."
She hung up, and Noah loaded the Glock from the box of ammo in the glove compartment and tucked it into the holster. He rolled his shoulders, getting used to the weight and the constriction of the straps.
So much for getting out of field work.
Now he just had to hope that, when push came to shove, he'd be able to do what needed to be done.
Chapter Four
Peri was having a leisurely lunch downtown in the company of her phone, with one hand on a tasty banh mi sandwich and the other checking messages and answering comments on her blog. After the morning's radio spot, there had been a flood of them.
"Good luck covering this one up," she muttered, typing a one-handed response to people with online handles like RememberWaco1967 and BigBrotherIsWatchingYouShower. She was getting a bunch of retweets, and already a few other sites had started linking to her article. Maybe if she kept flogging it, she could get some mainstream media coverage, on the coverup angle if nothing else.
She also had a stream of tweets going with her followers about Easton hassling her outside the radio station, although she'd decided to leave his name out of it. (For now.) Her initial tweet about the SCB's harassment had produced a slew of sympathetic "hope u ok!" and "sue his spook ass babe! <3" responses, as well as the handful of abusive and/or skeptical ones that she'd come to expect ("u had it comin bitch", "deets or it dint happen").
"Deets coming this afternoon," she typed. "Watch the blog!! & remember VPNs r ur friend! OH HI NSA. ;)"
"God damn it," she muttered, as she sent it off. "I really am turning into Dad."
She swirled her straw around the bottom of her Coke and left a generous tip. As she left the restaurant, she couldn't help noticing one of the other patrons getting up too, tossing a wad of cash on the table, and heading for the door at a casual pace.
Following me?
It was possible, she knew, to be overly paranoid. (As opposed to the usual level of paranoid that befit
ted a blogger with her specialty.) She stopped, leaning against the wall of a nonprofit save-the-whales place two storefronts down, and pulled out her phone to fake-check her messages while watching the door of the restaurant out of the corner of her eye.
The guy came out. He was a big, broad-shouldered lumberjack type, with a Seahawks cap jammed down over his face. He glanced up and down the street—was it her imagination, or did his eyes pause briefly on her?—and then turned the other way and went into the coffee shop next door to the Vietnamese place.
Maybe he just finished lunch and had a sudden urge for a latte.
Or maybe he was waiting for her to move so he could follow her.
Peri pulled up Twitter again. "Think I have a tail," she typed. "Govt maybe? idk. Hang on, pix comin."
With her phone held near her shoulder, she sauntered past the coffee shop display window. The big guy was right inside, leafing through free newspapers in a rack beside the window. He glanced up as she went by, just as Peri tilted her phone to snap a picture.
She intended to slow down and get a good shot, maybe even step inside and confront him, with a coffee shop full of witnesses to give her courage. But that was before she saw his face.
Peri had heard people described as having "dead eyes," but she'd never actually seen it. He stared at her through the window with dark eyes reflective as glass. It wasn't that there was no one home; it was more that something was missing, the sense of camaraderie and fellow-feeling that she always got when she looked into another person's eyes. His eyes were as flat and cold as a reptile's, and when he met her gaze, she felt a chill ripple down her back. The worst part was that he was so close. She hadn't expected him to be right in front of the window. Not three feet separated them, and she had a sudden horrifying premonition that he was about to punch through the window—he was certainly big enough—and reach through to grab her.
Instead of slowing down, she sped up, snapping two quick pictures with taps of her fingers as she passed. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him start to move, heading toward the door.