Guard Wolf (Shifter Agents Book 2)

by Lauren Esker

  He lurched to his feet and limped into the bedroom, flipping the light on as he went, with Casey on his heels. It was, of course, the ginger-colored puppy; who else? Apparently unharmed by her tumble off the bed, she was now waddling with great determination in a random direction that would eventually run her headfirst into a wall. Avery picked her up before she could get away. She squirmed and made displeased noises.

  The others were awake now, waddling around in random motion on the bed, all of them heading toward the sides and disaster. Avery, with his hands full of puppy, stared in dismay, not even sure where to start.

  Casey snapped into motion and hurried to intercept the nearest of the runaways.

  "Wait!" Avery protested before she got there. "Wash your hands first. With soap."

  "Seriously? Fine, Dad."

  She was back from the bathroom shortly, smelling lightly of Avery's unscented hand soap. By this point he'd corralled all four puppies by shoving the bedcovers into a rumpled mountain range around them, using pillows for extra blockading.

  Casey perched on the bed and reached out to ruffle the stubby ears of a puppy pawing at the edge of its prison. It mouthed at her fingers with its baby jaws. Casey's face softened, her habitual scowl fading into wonder.

  The thought occurred to Avery that this was probably the Casey that Jack knew, the one he'd fallen in love with. Avery only rarely got to see this side of her.

  Casey fondled the puppy's head, then picked it up and looked under it. "Um, Avery, I think one of them peed on your bed."

  "I know," Avery sighed. "They need a bath anyway. Want to help me with that?"

  "Didn't you hear anything I said earlier about not being nurturing?"

  "Come on, Casey, puppies. Everyone likes puppies."

  A few minutes later they had all the puppies trapped in the bathroom with the door shut. Avery ran a few inches of warm water into the tub. The wolf pups, meanwhile, explored the bathroom curiously, poking their noses behind the toilet and into every corner. Avery was glad that a combination of his sharp wolfish sense of smell and his general loathing of clutter and filth meant that he kept the room impeccably clean. He hadn't expected to have to deal with toddlers crawling around on the bathroom floor.

  Didn't you need special shampoo for babies? He dumped a little of his own shampoo into the water. It was unscented and all-natural, and didn't seem to make him itch as a wolf, so maybe it would work for them too.

  Casey extricated a puppy from the space behind the toilet and handed it to him. "You know, Avery ... don't take this the wrong way, but—have they shifted at all? I mean, are you sure they're werewolves and not just wolf-dog hybrids or something?"

  He put the puppy carefully into the water. The expected freakout never came; the water was shallow enough to come up to its belly, and after a little puzzled flailing, it seemed to be okay with its new circumstances. "Oh, they're definitely shifters," he said absently. "Give me another one; I think I can do two at once."

  Casey heaved a sigh that seemed to come all the way from the bottom of her feet as she handed him the small gray puppy. "How do you SCB people do that, anyway?"

  "Do what?"

  "Recognize other shifters. Wendy always said she could, too." Wendy had been Casey's best friend, now dead, and the only shifter Casey had known outside her immediate family for most of her life. "But I can't. What tips you off? Wendy always said it was a smell, but not quite like a real smell, for all the good that does me."

  "I don't know," Avery said. Temple had asked the same question, but it was like trying to figure out exactly what it feels like to move your fingers or wiggle your toes. "You just ... know."

  "Thanks, that's specific."

  "You got me. We're all keeping it a secret just to mess with you."

  "I don't know why I put up with you jerks." Emboldened, somewhat, by watching him running wet hands over the other puppies' fur, she picked up another and lowered it into the other end of the tub.

  Some sort of container would have been useful for this, Avery mused, scooping up palmfuls of water to pour over the puppies' heads. Good to know for next time—no, he scolded himself, there wasn't going to be a next time, because this was just for tonight.

  The fourth puppy, feeling left out, stood up with its paws on the edge of the tub, looking in. Casey scooped it up and put it in too, which resulted in a free-for-all of wriggly, wet puppies, trying to bite each other while their laughing and increasingly wet caretakers scrubbed soapy water through their short, fuzzy coats. They seemed to have been fairly clean before their adventure in the rain, Avery thought. There was some mud and other filth from being out in the box in the rain, but they weren't matted or fundamentally dirty.

  "Oh, that's weird," Casey said suddenly. "Look at this."

  She held up the puppy she was working on, cupping a hand under its chest, and lifted one of its paws to show Avery. "There's a bald patch. See?"

  Avery fingered its small foot. The bald spot was on the inside of its lower left foreleg, a rectangular strip about an inch long, too regular to be natural. "Looks like it was shaved," he said. "Do any of the others have that?"

  It turned out they all did. Same leg, roughly similar-sized shaved patches. On two of them, the ginger puppy and one of the brown ones, the fur was starting to grow back. The gray puppy had some visible bruising, small purplish pinpricks on the exposed pink skin.

  A prickling sensation crawled up Avery's spine. "Needle marks," he said, staring at it. The words emerged as something like a growl. "Those are needle marks. Someone shot these kids up with something."

  Casey touched the puppy's leg. It tried to squirm away, not from pain so much as general discomfort with being held in Avery's tightening grip. "That is what that looks like. .... Whoa, Avery, calm down."

  She laid a wet hand on his arm. Avery forced his fingers to unclench and let the puppy, which had begun to make high-pitched squeaks of distress, rejoin its siblings. His vision was hazed around the edges with red.

  "Kids, Casey," he snarled.

  "Kids who might have been sick or had something wrong with them."

  "They seem healthy enough now," Avery said darkly. The gray puppy was wrestling with another one, splashing in the bathtub without a care in the world.

  "Yes, they are, which means whatever happened to them, they don't seem to have been seriously hurt or traumatized, you know? We'll figure it out. The SCB is on the case."

  His body had begun to thrum with the start of a transformation, reacting to the rush of adrenaline and fury. Avery soothed himself back from the edge, reaching out to touch wet baby fur and reassure himself that, whatever had happened to these children in the past, they were all right now, in the moment.

  "I should've taken them to Dr. Lafitte. I should take them there right now."

  "Running off to the clinic right now is just going to upset them, wouldn't you think?" Casey countered. "And I don't see why the doctor needs to be called in at night. If they start acting sick, you can take them in, but right now it might be better to just keep them here and let them fall asleep, rather than uprooting them again. At least, that's what I think I'd want in their situation."

  He forgot, sometimes, that Casey had been an orphan too. She, like Avery, had known childhood upheaval and the uncertainty of being shuffled around to different homes. Casey had ended up living with her grandmother as a child, while Avery had gone into the foster system, but he had a feeling she was speaking from experience.

  In the meantime, the water was cooling off and the puppies were getting tired of this new, strange game. One of them started howling. Avery hastily turned the shower on, drenching himself and Casey thoroughly in the process, to warm them up and rinse off the soap. Casey fetched all of his towels, and they dried the puppies as thoroughly as possible.

  In the bedroom, Avery dragged off the soiled comforter, heaping it on the floor. He and Casey sat on the edge of the bed with towel-wrapped, drowsy puppies in their laps.

 
; "You're right, you know," Avery told her. "There's no point in hauling them downtown in the middle of the night as long as they're doing okay. Which they seem to be."

  Casey ran her thumb over the shaved leg of the puppy in her lap, fuzzed with regrowing fur. "Looks like it happened to each of them at different times."

  "Or they're recovering at different rates." All shifters healed fast, but strong, healthy ones healed faster. The gray puppy was the runt of the bunch, so maybe he wasn't healing quite as fast as his stronger siblings from whatever had been done to them. "It could have been as recent as yesterday or this morning."

  "I'm trying not to think it, but ..."

  "No. I've thought it. They might be escaped lab subjects." A shudder went through him.

  "I hope we didn't wash off vital evidence."

  "If there was anything on them, I'm glad it's washed off." He wished, now, that he'd sniffed them more thoroughly before washing them. Maybe it would have been possible to identify who'd handled them lately. They'd been passed around so thoroughly by the SCB interns that it was unlikely he could've picked anything out, though.

  "If they are from a lab, that might explain how they came out of nowhere like they did," Casey said. "Because, I don't know much about werewolves, but you guys are really family-oriented, right? Four kids aren't just going to go missing without someone raising a fuss."

  "Yeah, family-oriented hardly begins to cover it. On the other hand," he added, running his palm over a pair of fuzzy, folded ears, "we're also insular and have an intense distrust of authorities, so the odds of the kids being reported missing is slim. I guess talking to the local werewolf packs is the logical place to start."

  "Are there any around here?"

  "Not close," Avery said. "I know of a few in the Cascades and some more down in Oregon. Most of them probably don't have phones. It's going to be a lot of legwork." Which he very much wasn't looking forward to. He was the most likely candidate in the SCB office to act as liaison to the packs ... but the question was whether or not they wanted to talk to him.

  "Do you think they're from the same, uh, litter?" Casey asked, rocking slowly while her lapful of puppy melted and drooped over the edge of her thigh. "Do werewolves do that? Or is it some sort of fertility treatment thing? Quadruplets are vanishingly rare, normally."

  Sometimes Avery forgot that most people didn't know all that much about wolf shifters. Most werewolves kept very much to themselves. Of course, most of what he knew about it he'd learned secondhand. "Multiple births are normal for werewolves. Single births are rare for us. Mostly it's twins or triplets. Four is pretty rare, but not unheard of. They might be two unrelated sets of twins, but since they look about the same age, I'm guessing brothers and sisters."

  Casey glanced at him. "Do you have brothers and sisters?"

  "No," Avery said testily. It was not a topic he wanted to discuss.

  She was still looking at him, and now her usual frown had morphed into a more concerned variant. "Avery, you know these are somebody's kids, right? You're just taking care of them until the SCB can find their relatives or a suitable foster home."

  "Why would you think I don't know that?"

  Casey sighed and shifted her position on the bed, sitting crosslegged so the puppy could settle into her lap, curling up like a little comma. "I know you know that in your head. It's just ... I know what it's like, saying goodbye." She was looking down at the puppy, not at him, and petting its stubby little ears. "The more attached you get, the harder it is. That's all."

  "I'm not getting attached. For God's sake, I've only had them here for a couple of hours. How fast do you think werewolves bond?" Now it was his turn to scowl. "What has Jack been filling your ears with? Because he's not a reliable source on my kind, you know. The only werewolf he knows is me."

  "I know. But ... he does know you." She sighed, and transferred the puppy gently to the bed. "And speaking of Jack, I'd better get home and see how the patient is doing."

  "Thanks for the help," Avery said, looking up at her as she rose from the bed. "And the advice. Really."

  Casey nodded to the comforter lying in a heap on the floor. "Do you have a laundry room here? I can stick it in a machine on my way out, and the towels too."

  "That'd be great. It's on the ground floor. You don't need a key to get in. And there's a jar of change in the kitchen. Take as much as you need."

  After Casey was gone, the apartment seemed very quiet, the only sound the slow breathing and tiny snores of the sleeping puppies.

  Am I doing the right thing, keeping you here tonight? Not rushing off to give you a medical checkup, knowing what I know now?

  His fingers twitched to call Nicole Yates and ask her. But she wouldn't appreciate being bothered, especially when she probably didn't have answers either.

  Hunger finally drove him to get up. He left the puppies sleeping on the bed and went into the kitchen. There was a large value-pack of steaks in the freezer. Avery microwaved it for a few minutes to start it defrosting, then shifted and ate it on the floor as a wolf, crunching down the half-frozen raw meat.

  A part of him knew he shouldn't do this; he should eat properly as a human. Innate lupine paranoia and an obscure sense of guilt kept him glancing nervously around as he gulped down the steaks, too hungry and too anxious to bother chewing them. After eating, he shifted back and used a handful of paper towels to mop the blood off the floor, and off his own face. In human form, the raw meat made his stomach hurt. He dropped the dirty towels in the trash and shifted back.

  This isn't healthy, you know.

  He'd spent half his childhood being essentially feral, and the other half desperately pretending to be a normal human child, hanging onto sanity by his fingertips. Now he felt as if Avery, the real Avery, was lost somewhere between the two extremes, and all he could do was shuffle back and forth between them, trying not to let too much of himself fall into the cracks. The extent of the difficulty he had integrating the two sides of himself was something not even Jack, his best friend in the world and the person he'd told more about his childhood than any other living being, knew about.

  Since he was wolf-shaped anyway, he did a last investigative circuit around the apartment, giving the hated kennel a wide berth, and then jumped up onto the bed. He picked up one of the sleepy puppies in his mouth, gripping its fat body gently in his jaws, and hopped down again, catching himself on his good legs as the bad one tried to buckle under him.

  The bedroom closet had a folding door, which made it comparatively easy for a wolf to operate. Avery pushed it with his shoulder and opened just enough of a gap to slip inside. He sometimes used the actual bed, but mostly it was for show. Here was the real bed: a rumpled comforter and some pillows pushed up against the back wall of the closet. He deposited the puppy in the middle of it, and made three more trips. Then he dragged the closet door shut with a practiced shove, leaving them in a darkness not even wolf eyes could penetrate.

  Peaceful. Safe. No one could find them here, and he could open the closet easily by throwing his weight against the folding hinge in the middle of the door.

  In the dark, he scraped up the comforter and pillows until he had them arranged just so, and then curled in the middle, wrapping his lean wolf body around the pups. One had strayed, so he nipped it up with his teeth and dropped it into the U-shaped curve of his body. The pups wriggled contentedly into the warmth of his belly.

  Werewolves were not meant to sleep alone. He'd been doing it since he was seven years old, but that never made the den less cold and empty. All he had ever managed to do was learn not to think about it. And now, he had warm bodies to lie against; he had the sound of their soft breathing to fill the emptiness in the closet.

  Someone else's kids, he told himself. Someone else's kids.

  He fell asleep with that mantra running through his head, hoping if he said it often enough, the wolf part of him would believe it as much as the human part did.

  Chapter Four

&nb
sp; At seven in the morning, Nicole had already been up for an hour and a half. She did her yoga routine, took a shower, and ate cereal and toast under the potted eucalyptus trees in her sister's glass-roofed sunroom while filling out paperwork on her laptop. As the household began to stir, she remembered guiltily that she'd had good intentions of making a proper breakfast for everyone before the rest of the family got up. But now she had to go, since she had a particular errand to run before starting her official day of casework, client meetings, and home visits. She said a quick hi and goodbye to Erin's family, vowed inwardly to be a better houseguest tomorrow (as if) and raced out the door.

  After a quick trip to a Starbucks drive-thru, she found herself climbing the stairs to a perfect stranger's apartment with two cups of coffee in her hands.

  It's just a home visit, she told herself. You do them all the time. The fact that she'd placed four kids in a completely unknown living situation had nagged at her all evening. She'd had no choice, and he was an SCB agent, so it wasn't like she'd dumped them on some random stranger off the street. And they wouldn't be there long, just until she could find an approved foster home for them. But she still needed to stop by and see what kind of place she'd dumped them into. Was it clean? Was it dangerous? Would the children be safe here?

  The neighborhood, in Lake City, was neither excellent nor terrible, and the apartment was on the second floor of a generic blocky building with a small, feebly landscaped courtyard. With a professional's eye, she assessed it as the kind of place people lived when they were willing to trade convenience—it was some distance from downtown—for affordability and still get something relatively decent out of the deal. Few people were around at this hour, and the ones she saw seemed to be solidly working-class. A group of young men smoked cigarettes on the corner while waiting for a bus, and a handful of men and women were stumbling in from their night jobs as all-night liquor clerks or sanitation workers or cab drivers. Not a bad place, not a good place, mostly just a place people lived.