by Lauren Esker
Avery gave Jack a suspicious glare.
"Well ..." Nicole smiled. "All right. I think this might be fun. I've never been on a werewolf hunt before."
They soon had the puppies sorted out, each with its collar and leash. Avery got a bag to carry his clothes in, and brought his cane. "Jack, wash your hands before you touch anybody. With soap. And all of you, remember the building doesn't allow pets. Keep an eye out."
"The irony of you, of all people, living in a no-pets-allowed apartment is not lost on me," Casey said as Jack came back from the bathroom, smelling of soap.
"I'm not a pet," Avery said archly. He handed his cane to Nicole and began to strip, trying not to feel self-conscious. Being naked in front of his SCB co-workers was a relatively ordinary occurrence, but he wasn't used to being the only one stripping, especially in front of quite this many people. He snapped the collar around his neck and handed the bag of clothes to Jack. "Please try not to get me evicted," he said, and shifted.
A minor argument ensued over who got to hold his leash. Nicole and Casey flipped a coin for it; Casey won. "We can trade off," she told Nicole magnanimously.
Nicole bundled up two of the puppies under her coat. Jack took the other two, and they went out into the hallway with enough nervous sideways glances to make it seem like they were heading out on a field op instead of walking a small group of (alleged) dogs down the stairs.
Outside, it was, as Avery had promised, a crisp and gorgeous October morning. Traffic had picked up: the street getting busy, people going to work, parents bringing out kids to take them to school. Despite the annoying tug of the leash on his neck, Avery decided to enjoy the rare pleasure of being able to experience the city as a wolf in the daytime.
Jack was his usual leash handler on the infrequent occasions that they needed him to play bloodhound, but Casey turned out to be reasonably good at it; she didn't yank on his neck and let him walk at his own pace. He crisscrossed the parking lot and circled the building with his nose to the ground in what Jack referred to as his "bloodhound mode". Jack and Nicole strolled a few paces behind, managing the little herd of puppies and talking idly.
Avery kept a wolf ear cocked back to keep track of the puppies ... and to make sure Jack and Nicole weren't gossiping about him. Best friend of ten years plus brand-new girlfriend meeting for the first time—it was a recipe for disaster. Or at least devastating embarrassment. All the more so because Avery had prodded Jack and Casey toward dating each other, and even at the time he'd suspected Jack was going to get revenge for having his love life meddled with.
All they were talking about, though, was work: past cases they'd both worked on, from different ends of the system.
Behind the apartment complex, Avery picked up the scent trail leading back toward the park. He had to lead his entourage around a chain-link fence that, as far as he could tell, their midnight visitor had jumped over, landing on the Dumpsters behind the building. He was starting to rethink his werewolf hypothesis. He was strong and fast compared to a normal wolf, at least when the bad leg was accounted for, but he was pretty sure he couldn't have jumped that fence even with two fully functional rear legs. But if his quarry wasn't a werewolf, then what was it?
At the park, he cast around for a while trying to find the freshest trail leading away. The puppies were delighted to explore the park by daylight, tumbling all over each other happily. If they noticed the werewolf smell, they didn't seem interested in pursuing it; there were too many other new smells to explore.
"You know, bears have sharper noses than members of the dog family," Jack remarked as they trooped back and forth across the margin of the grass. "It's a statistical fact."
Avery huffed out his breath in disgust, between sniffs of the ground.
"Yes, but a bear on a leash is a little more conspicuous, don't you think?" Casey asked. She held out the leash to Nicole. "Here, you should take a turn."
Nicole's hesitation was only momentary before she accepted, handing over the puppy leashes to Casey. Her touch on the leash was much lighter than Casey's. It was like she was hardly there at all—or, rather, as if she could anticipate his movements, starting and stopping as he did, the leash hanging gently slack between them.
"What a beautiful dog," called a lady walking a spaniel along the bike path. "What breed is he?"
"Schipperke and Bernese mountain dog," Jack called back.
"How unusual! I don't think I've seen one of those before."
"And aren't likely to see again," Jack replied, cheerfully oblivious to the look the alleged Schipperke mix was giving him.
This was one of the less embarrassing answers Jack had given to that particular question (usually the word "poodle" was involved somewhere). The spaniel, however, gave them the widest berth her leash would allow, responding to Avery's wolfishness on a level beyond her owner's ken.
Avery managed to find a decent trail eventually, but it turned out to be impossible to follow. Their quarry went from the park into the block of homes next to it and then, as Avery interpreted the loss of the scent trail, took to the rooftops. Or possibly it had gone the other way around, coming down from the roofs to wander the park.
"It can't be a wolf," Nicole said after Avery had demonstrated the nature of the problem by pointing upward with his snout. "It must be some kind of cat, don't you think?"
Casey—a lynx shifter herself—looked up at the rooftops, shading her eyes. "That'd be tricky for most large cats as well. There's a good reason you don't see escaped tigers roaming around on roofs."
"But they climb trees, don't they?" Nicole asked.
"Oh, certainly—but so do bears, and they're not known for their agility." She elbowed Jack in the ribs.
They headed back to the park. Avery was truly having fun. It wasn't often he got to go out in public like this, and his wolf side enjoyed having his friends around him, the closest he got to having a pack. The weather was fresh and gorgeous, one of the beautiful sunny days that Seattleites got to enjoy less frequently as October rolled into November, with just enough dampness in the air to make scents easy to pick up. The sun was warm on his fur, Jack and Casey were managing the puppies ably enough that he didn't have to worry about them, and Nicole, walking beside him with the leash loose in her hand, had a delightfully spicy scent with an undercurrent of sex from last night.
As if sensing his thoughts, she reached out hesitantly and stroked his head, running her hand down the silky fur between his ears. Although wolves didn't typically wag their tails, Avery offered a brief wag just for her.
At the park, he picked up another trail. This one was more promising, winding along the verge of a residential sidewalk, in and out of front yards. He kept losing it when it crossed onto private property, but was able to pick it up again on the other side. It turned abruptly down an alley, crossed behind a strip mall, and stopped at a large storm drain. The iron grating had been pulled off and was tilted carelessly to one side.
"Well, shit," Casey said.
"Literally," Nicole agreed.
The puppies poked their blunt noses curiously through the bars of the grating.
"It's never good when the monsters go into the sewers," Jack sighed. He coughed discreetly into his sleeve. "I hate it when they do that."
Avery stuck his head inside and sniffed cautiously. It wasn't an actual sewer, but a drain to the ocean. He could smell mud and garbage and the salt tang of the sea.
He pulled his head out and looked around. They were in a quiet cul-de-sac where the alley dead-ended at a chain-link fence and a narrow strip of park. Avery sat down behind a concrete barricade buttressing the storm drain, made sure he was out of sight of the road, and shifted.
Jack passed him the bag of clothes. "Well?"
"I don't think it's a good idea to keep trailing without better equipment," Avery said. "For one thing, I don't think humans will fit down there. Or bears, for that matter. Shifters my size and smaller only."
"So is it a wolf?" Casey asked
, going down on her knees to look into the dark interior of the drain. "Or an alligator?"
"Hey, I think we just found the perfect job for Mendoza," Jack said. Vic Mendoza was an SCB field agent who shifted into a crocodile.
"It's not an alligator," Avery said. "Not a crocodile either. I can't tell if it's a wolf, but wolves don't normally frequent the sewer system. I don't know what the hell it is."
As he started to pull on his sweater, he realized Nicole was still holding his leash. She blushed cutely and dropped it. Avery unsnapped the leash from his collar and coiled it for later, then tugged the neck of his dark turtleneck up to hide the collar from view.
"In conclusion," Jack said, "we now know about as much as we did before, namely, there may or may not be a werewolf around, it may or may not actually be a werewolf, maybe it knows these kids and maybe it doesn't, and oh by the way, it lives in the sewers."
"Or just uses them to get around." Avery glanced over at the puppies to see if they seemed to be interested in the strange werewolf's smell, but they were being completely unhelpful; tired out from the morning's exertions, they'd fallen asleep in Casey's lap.
"Do you think it's in the Underground too?" Casey asked. Seattle's Underground, the old sublevels of the city beneath the current downtown, were famous as a tourist attraction.
"Oh Lord," Jack said. "I can see the headlines now: Tourists massacred by werewolf in Seattle Underground. I'm sure that's exactly the kind of publicity the Chief will love."
"There aren't going to be any massacres," Avery said testily. "Wolf shifters aren't dangerous, Jack; honestly, you of all people ought to know that."
"Haven't there been werewolf attacks around the city lately?"
"No! Have you read the actual incident reports? It's not a werewolf, it's some joker in a rubber mask that looks like a movie werewolf, and he's not actually attacking people, just scaring them ..." Avery trailed off, unrolling and rerolling his leash in a nervous habit. "The Underground. How extensive is it? Do any of you know how far the tunnels extend?"
The other three looked at each other. Nicole shrugged. "My sister took me on a tour once. I didn't get the impression there was that much of it."
"A lot of it isn't open to the public," Casey said. "Homeless people go down there sometimes, in the unrestored parts."
"Yeah, but where?" Avery asked. "The main entrance to the tours is under Pioneer Square, isn't it? And that's just, what, a twenty-minute walk from Pike Place, right?"
"Oh." Nicole's mouth rounded.
Casey looked up from her lapful of puppies. "What's the connection?"
"The Market is where the puppies were found," Nicole said.
"Cho's been looking at security footage to see if she can get a look at who dropped them off," Avery said. "But I don't think she's going to find anything, because I don't think they were on the street. They were under it."
Nicole jumped as her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen and sighed. "It's one of my caseworkers. She's messaged me about fifty times this morning. I'm late anyway; I need to get moving."
"The kids," Avery said. He'd managed to temporarily forget; now the imminence of the puppies' reassignment to their foster family came crashing back down on him. "Are you taking them with you?"
She shook her head. "To work? Can't. The meeting with the foster family is at five-thirty, after work, so I'll pick them up then. I'm sorry to stick you with this for another day."
Casey grinned. "I think they're actually pretty popular around the office. All the interns love them. Playing with puppies beats paperwork any day of the week."
"Yeah, it shouldn't be too hard to work out a rotating intern schedule for the rest of the day," Avery said. Instinct wanted him to spend the day with the puppies himself. He firmly squashed it; he had more than enough to do. "I'm going to talk to Cho about the Underground thing—she might have some ideas—and get to work on talking to the local werewolves, see if anyone knows a pack that's missing its kids."
"You'd think if four kids disappeared, there would be a missing persons report," Casey said.
Avery sighed. "You don't know werewolves."
"I'm going to run on ahead, then," Nicole said. She was typing a message back to her caseworker on her phone. Tucking it away, she hesitated, then gave Avery a quick peck on the cheek. "See you this evening?"
"Yes?" he said. It seemed to be the right answer. She flashed him a bright, dimpled grin and hurried off, her chestnut-tinted curls bouncing.
Avery realized that Jack and Casey were both looking at him.
"Sooooooo," Jack said, drawing it out.
"I appreciate your restraint in not just blurting out the question you obviously wanted to ask in front of her," Avery said dryly. "Not that it's really your business, but yes, we are ... together, in some sense, though I'm not exactly sure if we're dating or not. Happy?"
"Yep," Jack said, and punched him in the arm. "Good for you."
"Men," Casey sighed. She scrambled to her feet and parceled out the still-drooping puppies between the three of them. "She seems nice. I like her accent."
"It's Australian," Avery said, as they started walking back to his building. He'd ended up with the puppy temporarily named Hunter, the one that had almost been Jack, nestled into the crook of his arm. Jack had two of them; Casey had the fourth. Avery had decided to stop worrying they were all going to catch Death Flu—if they'd been exposed, they'd been exposed. He would talk to Willa Lafitte about it later, though. And maybe feed everybody some orange juice, if puppies could consume that sort of thing.
"Just let me know if you need any advice," Jack said cheerfully.
Avery boggled at him. "From your extensive experience of being in a relationship for three months? No offense, Casey."
"None taken," Casey said. "I knew what I was getting into with Mr. Commitment when I bought the package."
Despite the joking, it had been obvious to Avery from the beginning that the two of them were in it for the long haul. They were already developing an assortment of long-time couple traits—not quite finishing each other's sentences (yet), but Avery had noticed the way they casually glanced at each other before either of them answered a question, the little touches, the soft warmth in Jack's eyes when he looked at her and thought no one was looking at him. They fitted together like puzzle pieces.
For a long time, Avery had thought he'd never have that. Other werewolves wanted nothing to do with him, and he'd believed he could never get the full bonding experience from anyone who wasn't a werewolf. Different kinds of shifters had their own unique traits and culture, and werewolves were among the most unique—and the most insular. Only a few other social shifters, like orcas, had anything like the werewolf group bond.
But then again ... Jack. They'd met in Afghanistan, Avery as a soldier, Jack as a military contractor; they'd met under fire; and Avery's pack instincts had bonded hard, in a way he'd never managed to do with his own (human) unit. He was pretty sure Jack didn't actually know just how strongly Avery had bonded to him. At first it had been difficult to let Jack out of his sight. He'd learned to back off and not hover—normal people, non-werewolf people, did not actually want to be with their friends 24/7. And Jack, as a bear shifter, was kind of standoffish even by human standards. So he'd figured out where the boundaries were: how much gift-giving was too much, how often he could get away with calling or texting before it started getting weird, and so forth.
More recently he'd found the feeling had expanded to include Casey, as well as some of his other co-workers at the SCB, such as Jennifer Cho. And he was much better, now, at walking the tightrope line that was "being friends" without letting on just how much his instincts wanted him to wrap up the people he considered his pack in a blanket of smothering affection and never let go.
Or at least bring them food a lot.
So ... it was possible, at least on the level of platonic packmates. But he hadn't met anyone yet who'd caused him to feel a mate-bond feeling on top of the
pack bond. He hadn't even been entirely sure he'd know what it felt like—had been wondering, in fact, if he was in danger of confusing one for the other. Now he knew that it had never been a risk. The way he felt about Nicole ... it was like the way he felt for Jack and Casey and Cho, in some ways, but it was very uniquely its own thing.
Its own very nice thing.
The question was, he thought, if she could ever feel the same way.
Chapter Nine
Nicole drove to work buoyed up with happy thoughts of Avery. She turned up the car radio and sang along with the first sappy, bouncy love song her channel-surfing fingers could locate.
This is so dumb. I'm acting like a smitten teenager.
But she was so damned happy. The little doubt-weasels still nibbled at her, damn them. But for now, the flood of cheerful falling-in-love feelings seemed to be holding them at bay better than usual, and she forced herself to relax and let it carry her along without second-guessing it.
She always had an emergency supply of antidepressants in her purse, so she'd been able to take the usual dose in the morning. Clean clothing: optional. (She was still wearing the damn skirt. Her co-workers would just have to deal.) But the meds, she couldn't skip.
And the condoms nestled beside them, well ... Be prepared. Erin would approve.
But hadn't she known, really? None of her other relationships had felt like this. The one-night stands had been ... well, just that. And the other guys she'd dated had ended up in slow holding patterns, never really going anywhere.
With Avery, though, she felt like she was being swept along by something very much out of her control. She ought to have hated it; normally that kind of thing would have made her want to plant her feet more firmly on the ground, hunker down, and resist the tide of change. She had always thought of herself as a very grounded, down-to-earth person, planted as firmly as the eucalyptus trees that her shifted form was drawn to.
