by Anne Bishop
“Nathan ran off a human who had been sneaking toward the Market Square, but the man escaped through the door between the customer parking lot and the employee parking lot,” Blair said.
He hadn’t been told about that either. As the Courtyard’s leader, he should have been told. Then again, he was handling the interviews of the humans Vlad felt had potential—or weren’t obviously unsuitable—so Vlad and Blair probably felt he didn’t need to know about things they’d already dealt with.
“I’m going to put up sawhorses to make it harder for someone to sneak down the access way, and Nathan and Jake Crowgard will handle the Liaison’s Office,” Blair continued. “Marie Hawkgard is going to watch the door between the parking lots. Any human trying to get in that way will get whatever she feels like giving.”
Marie’s talons would certainly make an impression.
“And I’m going to keep watch around the consulate,” Nyx said. “Like a tourist guide, directing humans to where they’re supposed to be—and away from where they shouldn’t go.”
And feeding on every one of them.
For a moment, Simon envied the Sanguinati’s ability to feed so subtly that the prey didn’t know anything had happened. If a Wolf tore off a chunk of meat, it was pretty obvious.
Damn. He needed something to eat before he started talking to all those humans.
“The question was not answered, Wolfgard,” Erebus said. “Why is the sweet blood so upset today?”
Simon thought about Meg and the prophecy cards that indicated trouble was coming. But what if the trouble was already here and had no connection to Lieutenant Montgomery’s pack, despite Montgomery’s concerns about his brother?
Theral MacDonald took care of the medical office in the Market Square and was part of Meg’s female pack. She had run away from her abusive mate, but a couple of disturbing packages had been sent to her here at the Courtyard—proof that the bad male knew where to find her. Unfortunately, the terra indigene hadn’t found him.
It would be so easy for a potential enemy to mingle with the rest of the humans who had a legitimate reason to be in the Courtyard today.
She stared at him, then flew off.
Now Simon looked at Blair and Erebus. “I’d like a few Sanguinati in smoke form in the Market Square and a couple in human form in A Little Bite and Howling Good Reads. Unless Jane is needed in the Wolfgard Complex, have her spend the day with Theral in the medical office.”
“You think that Jack Fillmore might try for Theral?” Blair asked, flickers of red appearing in his amber eyes.
“It’s possible he was the human Nathan ran off yesterday,” Simon replied. “With so many unknown humans milling around, it would be a good time for it.”
“You think that is what the sweet blood is feeling?” Erebus asked.
Simon shrugged. “Trouble might try to hide among the humans at the job fair today. That could be the future that is buzzing under Meg’s skin.”
They parted. Erebus and Nyx shifted back to smoke. She headed for the Market Square while Erebus returned to the Chambers to select the Sanguinati he wanted guarding the stores—and the Courtyard’s residents. Blair headed back to the Utilities Complex to pick up the sawhorses. And Simon hurried back to the BOW to get to Howling Good Reads and select the professionals who were suited to life in a Midwest town ruled by the terra indigene and surrounded by Namid’s teeth and claws.
• • •
Meg watched Jester as he made a pad of blankets to cover a hay bale. Once he was satisfied, he invited her to sit.
Feeling embarrassed about causing a scene, and wondering how much trouble she’d made for the humans who were coming to the Courtyard today, she gave Jester a wobbly smile when he squatted in front of her.
“This is what I’m wondering,” he said.
Did he know his ears were still Coyote-shaped and furry?
“You’ve lived in the Courtyard for several months now, and you’ve been learning all kinds of things during that time. So why are you dumber now than you used to be?”
Meg stiffened. “Jester! That’s not a nice thing to say, even as a joke.”
“I’m not joking.”
She studied his face, his eyes, and realized he really wasn’t joking, wasn’t saying something to create a bit of mischief. Jester being completely serious made her uneasy.
“Humans talk about having a role model, someone they can learn from,” Jester continued. “You know who I think you’ve been using as a role model lately?”
“Ruth or Merri Lee?”
He shook his head. “Skippy.”
Meg stared at the Coyote. “But Skippy . . .”
“Has a skippy brain and has trouble holding on to parts of what he’s learned, which is why youngsters like him don’t usually survive in the wild country. If Skippy chases a deer and gets knocked down and bruised, he should learn that deer could hurt him if he isn’t careful. But what his brain understands is that particular deer could hurt him, so he goes out the next morning and chases a different deer—and gets knocked down again. And maybe this time the injury is serious because he’s still healing from the previous day’s bumps and bruises.
“When the Elementals and Elders struck Lakeside a few weeks ago, you knew you couldn’t stay near the humans who were offered shelter around the Market Square. You came to the Pony Barn—a place where you wouldn’t have to deal with humans and also wouldn’t be alone. You showed sense, Meg. Then Simon and Vlad do this job fair to help Tolya find the workers he needs in Bennett, and what do you do? You spend the whole first day working in the Liaison’s Office—a place you already knew wasn’t safe for you when there are so many strangers around—and get knocked over by the pressure of being close to so many potential futures. And those were Simple Life folk, who should have been the easiest humans to deal with. So what do you do on the second day of the fair? You go into the office and get knocked over harder and faster. But you were still going to open the office today. Why?”
Put that way, it did sound pretty dumb.
“All my friends could do their jobs, even with the job fair going on,” Meg mumbled, not meeting his eyes. “I didn’t want to be different.”
Jester looked bewildered. “But you are different.”
“I don’t want to be the one who can’t cope with something that is easy for everyone else to do.”
“How do you know it’s easy?”
She leaned toward him until they were almost nose to nose. “They’re in the Market Square, doing their jobs.”
“They’re not going to cut themselves to release some of the hornet’s nest of prophecies that are buzzing under the skin. They may wonder what the future holds for those humans, but they’re not going to hurt themselves to find out.” Jester leaned back a little. “You don’t want to be different? I understand that. I’m the only Coyote here in a Courtyard controlled by Wolves. It’s not dangerous for me to be here like it would be for a regular coyote to tangle with a pack of wolves, but I am alone here.”
“Do you wish it was different, that there was someone else like you? Or that you could be like another group of terra indigene, fit in with them better?”
“Being the only one can have advantages. Looking after the ponies and dealing with the girls at the lake isn’t without risk, and I might not have taken that risk if there had been other Coyotegard here to work with as part of a pack. I probably wouldn’t have lived in the Green Complex with Wolves and Sanguinati and a Grizzly, not to mention Tess. But I am the only Coyote in this Courtyard, and I get to poke my nose in all kinds of things my kind usually wouldn’
t see.”
“You’re even more curious than the Crowgard,” Meg said.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
She laughed.
Jester thought for a moment. “What would have happened in Lakeside these past few months if you hadn’t been different from the other humans who work here?”
Meg shifted on the hay bale as she considered the question. Regular humans had worked in the compound where she’d lived. But she wouldn’t have been one of them, wouldn’t have taken a job where other people, where children, were treated like property. Would she? “I probably wouldn’t have traveled to Lakeside if I hadn’t run away from the Controller and followed the visions that showed me how to escape. I—” wouldn’t have met Sam . . . or Simon.
“Simon opened a few of the stores to humans and had human employees for several years before you arrived. They were considered nonedible, but we still saw them as prey. If you, the human who was not prey, hadn’t come along looking for a job, Simon, Vlad, Henry, and Tess wouldn’t have changed the way they thought of the human employees—and some of those humans might have died in the blizzard last Febros. If the females working here hadn’t become your friends, hadn’t become a human pack the Wolfgard and Sanguinati decided to protect, those humans wouldn’t have been sheltered here when the Elders came through the city. If you weren’t here, Simon and Lieutenant Montgomery wouldn’t have had a particular reason to work together, and Montgomery wouldn’t have had a way to prove he was a trustworthy human. If you weren’t here, Nathan would have stayed with the Addirondak Wolfgard for the full time he was supposed to be away from the Courtyard, and Lizzy might not have reached Lakeside because Nathan wouldn’t have been on the train to protect her.” Jester stood up. “All those things happened because you’re different, Meg. Don’t be so quick to want to be like everyone else. Crows and Hawks and Owls can fly. I can’t. I don’t need to jump off a cliff to prove it to myself. Why do you?”
Jester headed for the doors. Then he stopped. “What would you have told another cassandra sangue if she’d pushed herself like you have these past couple of days? Being the Trailblazer means being a role model for the other girls. You should think about that.”
He walked outside. Meg sat on the hay bale, listening to Jester talking to the ponies.
What would she have told another blood prophet, especially a young girl who hadn’t been cut yet and had a chance of escaping the addiction to cutting? She would have told the girl not to go to the office, not to push when she was already feeling uncomfortable. She would have told her to respect her limitations as well as her abilities.
She hadn’t done any of those things for herself.
In the beginning, she hadn’t cared that she was different. She was alive and free, and, thinking she had only a few weeks to live, she’d thrown herself into experiencing as much as she could. But she’d misinterpreted the prophecy and hadn’t died—or her future had changed because Simon and several other terra indigene had saved her. In the beginning, she’d had only a small window into the lives of the humans who became her friends. Now, with some of them living across the street from the Courtyard, she saw more of what it meant to have a human life with friends and family. Some of it was bad, but most of it was good. She saw people doing things that overwhelmed her, and she envied their ability—and she didn’t think any of them felt envious of her abilities.
Had she been trying to prove she could be different from and yet the same as other humans?
Being different didn’t mean she couldn’t fit in. She’d been learning to fit in with the Others since the night she stumbled into Howling Good Reads looking for a job. And now she’d stumbled again by reaching for something she wasn’t even sure she wanted instead of looking at what she already had with Simon and Sam and the rest of her friends in the Courtyard.
All right, so she couldn’t fly. But she was the one who could tell her friends when to stay on the ground because there was a storm coming.
• • •
Simon read through Jana Paniccia’s résumé a second time and decided not to ask how she’d heard about the job fair.
He set the résumé aside and studied the Jana. Taller than most of the female pack, but not as tall as the males in the police pack. Brown hair, brown eyes. Looked vigorous and healthy. Smelled clean.
She’d been nothing but polite since she’d sat across the desk from him for the last part of the job interview, but she reminded him of a small predator who believed it was larger and fiercer than anything around it—and managed to make larger predators believe it too.
“You want to work for the police?” he asked.
“No.” One of her hands smoothed her skirt, the first sign of nerves she’d shown. But her eyes showed a hint of anger, not nerves. “I don’t want to be a dispatcher or a secretary. I don’t want to work for the police; I want to be a police officer. They let me attend the academy, let me pay for all the classes and training, let me believe I could be hired for the job. I put up with all the crude comments about wanting to grow a pair of balls. I spent hours at the shooting range to learn to be proficient with firearms. I took more self-defense classes than any of my male classmates. I bought extra books about the law and law enforcement and studied them on my own. I passed all my courses and graduated in the top five percent of my class, but I still can’t be a serving police officer because I have breasts instead of balls.”
Simon waited for her to regain control of her emotions. Obviously he’d stomped on her tail by asking what he’d thought was a simple opening question. And he wondered just how much teasing she had received—and why human males would train a female to shoot a gun and then tease her into being angry enough to shoot them.
“I’m sorry for speaking so crudely,” the Jana finally said.
But not for being angry, Simon thought. “You want to be a police officer.”
“Yes.” She pointed at the paperwork. “You can see that I’m qualified.”
“You realize the job is in a town in the Midwest, which is under the terra indigene’s control?”
The Jana nodded.
“The new sheriff is a Wolf. You would be working as one of his deputies.” Maybe Virgil’s only deputy. “You understand that?”
She nodded again.
“Before we send you to Bennett to talk with Tolya Sanguinati and Virgil Wolfgard, I want the police here to confirm your skills.” She didn’t look happy about that, so he added, “Can you ride a horse?”
The anger vanished from her face and her eyes brightened. “I could be a mounted deputy?”
What was it with human females and horses? “That would be something to discuss with Tolya and Virgil.” He noticed that she hadn’t said she knew how to ride a horse, but that would be Tolya’s problem if he wanted her to stay.
He and Vlad had agreed it was best to send all the job candidates on two trains so that no one would be traveling alone. He’d have to nip a few people to get the Jana on the second train.
“Your skills will be reviewed tomorrow,” Simon said. “If everyone agrees, you can catch the train the day after. Will that be a problem?” Humans always seemed to need considerable time to leave a den.
“Not a problem. I can fit my clothes and personal items into two suitcases. That and three boxes of books are everything I own.”
He wondered if that had always been true. He looked at her résumé again. Nothing about her family pack. But she was here in the Courtyard looking to work in a place far from the Northeast. Maybe her family pack had supported the Humans First and Last movement and she’d been driven out because she hadn’t. No way to know, and it really didn’t matter. But there was one other thing on the résumé that caught his eye because so few of the humans had mentioned other skills beyond the professional ones.
“Writing is your hobby?” he asked. “What kind of writing?”
“Fiction, mostly. I’ve sold a few short stories to magazines, but lately I’ve been writing . . . observations.”
Simon tried to keep his ears from shifting to Wolf to show interest. Officer Debany grumbled about the lack of news from his sister. With so many humans migrating to Bennett, other families would be grumbling as well. Maybe having someone like the Jana writing observations, whatever those were, that could be published in the Courtyard’s newsletter or Great Island’s newspaper would make the humans who were left behind feel easier about the ones who were leaving. Something to discuss with Vlad before passing on the information to Tolya.
Saying nothing more about the writing, they agreed upon a time the next morning when she would come to the Courtyard.
The moment Vlad confirmed that the Jana had left Howling Good Reads, Simon placed a call to Captain Burke, asking him to come to the Courtyard.
• • •
Douglas Burke read the résumé and transcript a second time before handing it back to Simon Wolfgard. He owed the leader of this Courtyard, but there were some things he couldn’t do.
“We need to know if the Jana is really qualified to be a police officer,” Simon said.
“On paper, she’s certainly qualified.” Burke sighed. “Whether it’s fair or not, women aren’t hired for positions as serving officers. They are not on the street.”
“That’s your rule, not ours,” Simon replied. “In a pack, males are the enforcers because they’re bigger and stronger. But females are important in a hunt because they’re lighter and faster. They can run the prey until it tires, and then the males bring it down.”
“That may be, but I still can’t hire her.” Although if the Others were so set on having a female police officer working with them, maybe the new mayor and police commissioner would be willing to bend the rules, which would set a precedent for other women who wanted to go into active police work. Hiring Ms. Paniccia also would solve the problem of finding a partner for Officer Debany.
Simon growled softly, as if warning off a rival. “We want to hire the Jana to go to Bennett and be a deputy. We want you to confirm she’s properly trained to do the fighting and hunting.” He paused, then added, “But you don’t have to test if she can ride a horse. Someone in Bennett will do that.”
