by Lauren Esker
"We'll get them," Avery told her. "Everything's going to be okay." His face was drawn with tension, despite the reassuring words.
"Roger's a lion," she told him desperately. "A very large one. I—I don't know what Eva is, but she might not be able to fight him."
Avery smiled. It was a quiet smile, but there was something sharp in it nevertheless. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about Eva if I were you."
***
Jack hadn't known he had one last shift left in him until Casey screamed. Then it came without his conscious intent, the feeling of bear sweeping through him, picking him up and carrying him along.
He wasn't actually trying to knock Roger into the water, and he was only half conscious when they hit. He went beneath the cold waves. Water filled his jaws.
Swim, said an inner voice that sounded a little like Casey and a little like Avery. Swim!
He kicked, more by reflex than anything, and his head broke the surface of the water. He gulped a desperate breath. The boat was nowhere to be seen in the smeary blur of his nearsightedness. He couldn't tell if the thumping in his ears was an engine or just the beating of his own pounding heart.
Something latched onto his hindquarters, dragging him down. Water closed over his head again, and he struggled to free himself, swiping at his assailant with paws slowed by the water and his exhaustion.
He and Roger grappled in a sort of slow-motion ballet, ripping at each other with teeth and claws in a dark, silent, aquatic world. Blood roared in Jack's ears, his vision dimmed, and suddenly he didn't care if he drowned as long as he took this bastard with him.
But Roger, sensing his suicidally deadly intent or just running out of air, tore free and kicked for the surface. They broke out of the water mere feet from each other, the bear and the lion, gasping for air.
Between the damage Casey had done to his face and the ravages of Jack's assault, Roger was looking somewhat the worse for wear. He was still in much better shape than Jack, though. There was no way to victory Jack could see that didn't involve his own death. But the alternative was to die here at Roger's claws and fangs, his death serving no purpose.
Casey, I'm sorry ...
He wished he could see her one last time. He hoped she'd be all right against Derek on the boat.
And then he lunged forward, driving himself with a powerful thrust of his legs. Roger saw him coming and readied for defense, but all Jack was trying to do was get a firm enough grip that Roger couldn't get away. He didn't care if Roger hurt him anymore.
He sank his teeth into Roger's shoulder, wrapped his muscular legs around the lion, and sank them both.
Too late, Roger realized what he was trying to do. He struggled wildly to free himself, but his thrashing only made them sink faster.
Jack barely felt the pain as Roger tore at him. Nothing mattered now but holding on. And so he did, as they sank through the dark water, tangled in life as their bodies would be in death.
Something huge came out of nowhere and slammed into them.
It was as fast as a torpedo and big as a submarine. Shocked, Jack found himself drifting free, staring as an enormous orca closed its jaws around Roger. It arched its body and pulled him down, his tawny limbs fluttering like those of a rag doll. And then it had vanished into the murky gloom, and Jack was alone in the dark water.
That was Eva.
They found us.
And that was his last coherent thought. He didn't have the strength left to swim for the surface. All he could do was drift.
He was dimly aware of something large coming up from beneath him. It bumped him gently, and then bore him upward.
***
Avery leaned over the edge of the boat, heedless of his own safety. Above him, Dev and Mila were pulling Casey inside the hovering helicopter.
The boat was still drifting aimlessly with the waves. In the gathering darkness, the helicopter jagged first one way, then another as it tried to maintain a relatively steady position above.
"Jack!" Avery yelled.
Nothing answered but the lapping of the dark waves, glinting in the helicopter's searchlight.
Then something lurched out of the water, a dark lump like an island breaking through the waves. It moved purposefully toward the boat, and as it got closer, he could make out Eva's long black-and-white torpedo shape just under the surface. Jack was draped over her back in bear form, a huge, limp, sodden mass of fur. He looked dead.
"Jack!"
Eva bumped against the boat, rocking it. Avery sank both hands into Jack's fur, trying to get a grip, but he could no more move that mountain of sodden grizzly bear than he could fly.
But Eva did something with her flippers, bucking her body, and Jack rolled across the railing, flopping on the deck.
"Hey, man," Avery murmured, desperately trying to find a pulse in the loose skin under the bear's great jaws. "Don't make me do CPR on a grizzly bear. Trust me, that's not a bonding experience we need to have."
Jack saved him from that fate by coughing hoarsely and then vomiting up several gallons of seawater onto the boat's deck.
"You with me, buddy?"
Jack stirred weakly, then slumped down. It was an answer of sorts.
"Can you shift?"
A pause, then the shaggy head moved slightly in a negative.
"Well, this complicates things," Avery muttered. With an arm thrown over Jack's bulk, he shouted up to the helicopter, "He can't shift. How are we going to get him in?"
Eva's sleek black-and-white orca head thrust through the waves. She pushed herself upward with a thrust of her tail, then shifted in mid-leap, so her human hands caught the railing and she pulled herself gracefully aboard. It was as neat a maneuver as if she'd practiced it a thousand times. "What's wrong?" she asked.
"Jack's too hurt to shift and I'm not sure how we're going to fit him into the helicopter."
"Well, that's easy." Eva contemptuously nudged Derek with her foot; he glared back at her. "Don't forget we're going to have the perps with us—some of whom are still at large. Mila and I can stay here, guard the one we've got and see if we can round up the others, while the rest of you get these two back to base."
"Mila and you, huh?" Dev had arrived, lowered on a rope, just in time to hear this. "I get to miss the fun? And the possibility of explosions? Did I piss in your Cheerios lately, boss?"
Eva snorted. "Sorry, tiger boy, we need your paramedic skills on the helo a lot more than we need your, I admit well-practiced, talent at making things blow up."
"Awwww," Dev said. He handed her a bundle of clothing.
"If you're good, Dev, we'll blow something up just for you," Mila called down.
"What about Fallon?" Avery asked. He had not missed the one we've got reference to prisoners. "Roger, I mean. Did he get away?"
Eva glanced up from pulling on her tac vest. "Not ... exactly. Let's just say that when orca meets lion, lion loses."
Dev gave a sharp laugh, even as his hands worked busily, checking Jack's vitals. "And you people call me a loose cannon. Stiers is gonna love you, Kemp. And the paperwork you cause." Looking over Jack's bulk at Avery, he said more quietly, "We need to get him evac'd, Hollen. Right away."
Mila called down, "Hey guys, Bill says he doesn't think it's a good idea to transfer a passenger that large from one moving vessel to another. What say we land first, and then figure this out?"
"Fair point. Let's roll." Eva took hold of Derek by the scruff of his human body and hauled him below to get the engines started.
Avery gripped a handful of Jack's thick, wet fur and gave it a little shake. "Hey, stay with me, okay? You hung on all this time on your own. Checking out now—that'd be just plain rude, man."
***
Jack drifted in and out. The next thing he was aware of, he'd shifted, suddenly and without warning. His body bucked in a seizure. He heard a babble of voices, people sounding worried and frantic.
Then time skipped again, and he was huddled under a pile of blankets. A low
thumping echoed through his chest, and he came back to himself enough to understand that it was the steady chop of a helicopter, carrying him somewhere.
They came for us.
But close on the heels of this realization was a new concern. Casey! Had they gotten her out, too? The last time he remembered seeing her, she'd been injured and trapped on the boat with Derek. Was she all right?
"Casey," he tried to say. "Casey!" It came out impossibly garbled.
"Hey, hey, settle down. It's okay."
Something moved on his shoulder, squeezing lightly. Through the weight of the blankets, he hadn't noticed there was a hand resting on him.
Squinting, Jack followed the hand up a jacket-clad arm to Avery's face. Avery was sitting on the floor next to him, his bad leg stretched out. The helicopter seats had been moved forward to make space for Jack on the floor. There was another pile of blankets next to him, with an IV on a portable stand above it.
"Casey," he managed to say, more coherently this time.
"She's doing okay. Better than you, probably. How do you feel?"
"Been better," Jack whispered. Everything hurt. Even his throat and sinuses, the one part of him that hadn't hurt before, were a fresh source of pain now that he'd tried to inhale the ocean.
Avery squeezed his shoulder again. "We're headed home. Since neither of you were on death's doorstep once we got you warmed up, and we've got the fuel for it, we're going all the way back to Seattle. That way we don't have to try to explain shifters at a regular hospital."
"Nice rescue," Jack whispered. "Good timing."
"Yeah, we specialize in nick-of-time rescues around here." But a certain tightness in his voice attested to how close it had actually been.
The other pile of blankets stirred, and a small hand quested out of it. Casey's cuffs had been removed at last, leaving a ring of scraped, reddened skin around her wrist.
"Jack?" Casey asked hoarsely.
"He's right over here," Avery said, raising his voice above the helicopter's engines.
Casey continued to grope for him, making a distressed noise. Jack moved enough to get his own hand over to hers. His fingers laced through hers, comfortably familiar after all that time they'd spent holding hands on the island. Casey relaxed immediately, squeezing back and then settling down.
Something tense in him relaxed, too. It felt good. It felt right. With Casey's fingers securely in his, and the light pressure of Avery's hand to anchor him, Jack closed his eyes and let himself slide away.
Chapter Seventeen
Casey drifted back from a warm place. It was so nice to be warm. Her whole brain seemed to be wrapped cozily in soft, insulating cotton.
As she peeled open her eyelids, she became aware she wasn't alone. There was a woman with her. Casey squinted blearily at the female silhouette, head bent over a phone as her fingers worked busily. Short hair ...
"Wendy?" she whispered.
The woman's head came up. "Sorry, hon, I didn't catch that."
The voice was a stranger's. Bitter grief, for a moment, took her words away, and tears sprang to the corners of her eyes.
But the storm of sorrow passed as quickly as it had come, dark clouds blowing through, leaving her strangely empty and tired. She'd lost Wendy a long time ago. She just hadn't known it for sure. And now she'd found her again, in a way.
I'll go back to that island and bring you home, Wendy. Or someone will.
The unfamiliar woman smiled at her. Definitely not Wendy. She was Asian, with a light spatter of freckles across her nose and a narrow, pretty face.
"Do you remember me? I introduced myself when you got out of recovery, but you were kind of out of it."
Casey thought about it. She shook her head.
"I'm Jennifer. Special Agent Jennifer Cho. You can call me Jen, or Cho. I was just texting down to update Jack on your condition." Her phone vibrated in her hand, and she laughed. "Three guesses who that is, and the first two don't count."
"How is he?" she whispered.
"He'll be all right. He's a tough old bear. As for you, you've had surgery for your leg. Do you remember?"
She thought about it. Memory drifted back, hazy and blurred: waking up in recovery, feeling like she was falling and unable to catch herself. She had been very cold. A nurse had piled blankets on her, and then things went confused again.
"I think so," she whispered.
Cho scrolled across her phone with a flick of her finger. Everything she did was quick. She's a shifter, too, Casey thought. Something fast. A falcon, or some kind of cat maybe ...
"Ha, no, this one's from Avery, I think," Cho said. "Using Jack's phone. Listen: Cho, I took his phone away. He's supposed to be resting. Don't make me come up there."
She began typing busily with her thumbs, then stopped and cleared it with a fast swipe. "Here," she said. She put the phone in Casey's hand. "Send a text and let them know you're okay."
Casey stared at her, frozen, the phone sitting in her lax fingers. Her wrist, she noticed in passing, was bandaged: a bracelet of gauze where the handcuffs had been.
"I don't know what to say."
"Make something up." Cho picked up an insulated mug with a straw in it, and shook it. "Your ice cubes are melted. I'll go get you fresh ones." And with that, she was out the door before Casey could say anything.
Some kind of bird, Casey decided. A busy, energetic one, like a sparrow or finch.
She looked down at Cho's phone. It was enclosed in a custom phone case, bright green with cheerful pink swirls. Cho did not otherwise remind her of Wendy, but there was something Wendy-like about the phone. Wendy would have enjoyed having one like it.
The text window was open. She began to type, laboriously, one letter at a time, too fuzzy to bother with niceties like proper capitalization except when the phone itself helpfully provided it. Hi, this is casey. Jen said i should tell you im okay. Her finger hovered over the send icon, and then she added, Im glad youre okay.
She sent it before she could think better of it.
Cho whisked her way back in with the insulated mug in one hand and an enormous steaming coffee cup in the other. "Here. Ice water. They said you could have as much to drink as you wanted."
Casey hadn't realized she was thirsty, but the cold water felt wonderful on her sore throat. Cho positioned the mug's straw and helped her hold it. She was still terribly weak in a strange, lethargic way.
"You're going to be starving soon, once the drugs clear out of your system," Cho said. "That's a shifter thing. Have you ever had to heal from anything serious? Broken bones, that kind of thing?"
Casey shook her head.
"Well, take it from me: it sucks. For standard-issue humans, I understand, it sucks less in the short term but the sucking lasts a lot longer, so that's probably a plus. To being us, I mean."
The phone vibrated in Casey's hand, making her jump and almost drop it. She looked down and read: Hi Casey! Glad you're back with us. Jack's asleep, but do you feel up to visitors for a little while?
She hesitated, then typed OK and sent it before she could change her mind. "Here," she said, passing the phone back to Cho before any more people could text her on it.
Cho glanced at the exchange and grinned. "If you're not okay with your room turning into Grand Central Station, I'll chase 'em off for you." She hopped up on the edge of Casey's bed, tucked her feet under her, and curled her hands around her coffee cup. "Conversely, if I'm bothering you, I can be outside for awhile."
Her presence in Casey's room finally made sense. "You're guarding me," she whispered, and pushed herself a little higher in the bed. "Is there ... something to be afraid of?"
Cho caught the insulated mug before it fell and helped Casey get it resettled in the crook of her arm, where she could drink from it without having to work too hard on lifting it. "Sorry to alarm you. We've arrested the Fallons—and we got all of them, we think. This is more of a debriefing than anything else. We need to get a statement from you. I just
didn't want to attack you with it as soon as you got out of recovery."
"Oh." She considered that, and took a sip from the mug. "I'd like to give a statement, yes."
"Right now?"
When Casey nodded, Cho set her phone on the bed and switched on a recording app. She stated the date and her name, then said to Casey, "This isn't going to be admissible in court. It's more of a guideline for us, knowing what happened to you as we put together the details of the case. Just to warn you, over the next few months you'll probably end up telling this same story to so many different people you'll hate everyone who asks you about it. Especially because of any parts that might be terribly personal or painful."
Bones in a cave ... "I might as well get started then, right?"
She was just telling Cho about Jack knocking Derek down the hill when the door opened and Avery came in, accompanied by a very tall woman with light brown skin and a long white stripe in her dark hair. Avery was walking with a cane, and casually dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.
"Hi, good to see you again," he said to Casey, and she lost the thread of her story and flustered to a stop. It was a little too uncomfortable remembering exactly how he'd last seen her.
"We needed to take a break anyway," Cho said, scooping up her phone. "So far, everything she's told me agrees with Jack's account exactly. Not that I'd expect anything else," she told Casey, with a wink. "Hey, I'm gonna go find the doc so you can get poked a bit and maybe get something to eat, okay?"
"Okay," Casey agreed. She was, paradoxically, both more tired than when she'd started talking, and less lethargic; it felt like the fogginess was wearing off, and she could sense a deep and vast hunger lurking somewhere around the edges.
Avery dragged up a chair, while the tall woman remained standing. "Hello, Casey," she said, putting out a hand. She had an unexpectedly soft voice for her height. "I'm Eva Kemp. I was there when we pulled the two of you off the island."
