by Lauren Esker
He had never seen or heard of anything like it.
And the woman ... she hadn't been shocked. Whoever she was, whatever it was, she had seen its kind before.
Voices in the Hodgsons' backyard made him turn his head. Loud, authoritative voices. Cops. Which reminded him he was stark naked in the neighbors' backyard, with a collar on. Not something he wanted to have to explain.
He shifted, and found that he hurt somewhat less as a wolf. He was definitely going to be feeling this later, and didn't have any desire to be accidentally swept up, as a stray dog, in a police search of the area. Nicole, I sincerely hope you had the presence of mind to call in the SCB.
Silently, he limped into the shadows. He couldn't run down whatever it was, but the trail was fresh. If nothing else, he could at least follow it, and find where it had gone to ground this time.
Chapter Thirteen
When the gunshot echoed through the neighborhood, Nicole didn't recognize it at first for what it was. The true meaning of that sharp report, which set dogs barking all down the street, rose slowly into her conscious mind, and then she fought a very brief battle with her urge to convince herself that it hadn't actually been what it sounded like.
It had to be a car backfiring.
It couldn't really be—
Maybe she was wrong?
But if the risk she faced was the possibility of some slight embarrassment, weighed against Avery's life, it was no contest. She still had his phone in her hand, and found the SCB preset.
A recorded message directed her to several options. One promised an actual human being to talk to, so she selected it and crossed her fingers.
To her relief, it only rang once before a female voice said, "Can I help you?"
"I hope so. I'm Nicole Yates with Child Protective Services and I accompanied one of your agents on a stakeout tonight, Avery Hollen. I believe he's in trouble, and he asked me to call you."
"Avery's not on duty tonight," the woman said suspiciously.
Oops. She hadn't realized, although in retrospect she should have, that Avery's surveillance of the Hodgson house was not SCB-approved. "I think it's related to a case he's working on. He's exploring right now in, uh, special mode, and I heard what I think was a gunshot. He left his phone with me, and told me to call you if anything happened."
"What case did you say this is about?"
"The four children that were found in the Market two days ago. Listen, I'm not trying to be troublesome, but I did hear a gunshot and I'm really worried about Avery. He thought someone might come by tonight and try to hurt the children." Or ... something. She wasn't entirely clear on what, exactly, Avery's concerns were.
"We'll see about sending someone by to have a look around," the woman said. "It may be a while. We're short-staffed right now. Can I get the address?"
Nicole dutifully gave it to her, and her name again, although she recognized the tone of beleaguered bureaucracy in the woman's voice and had a feeling that "a while" could turn out to be several hours, if not forever.
So far, nothing more had happened as far as she could tell, although the lights were now on in the Hodgson house. Nicole watched it for a moment after hanging up, and then, screwing up her courage, went to Plan B and called Jack.
This time, the phone rang several times before a deep voice answered sleepily, "Avery?"
"No, it's Nicole." There was still nothing new from the house, though dark shapes occasionally moved behind the curtains, and she was starting to feel stupid for sounding the alarm. Still, she had heard something, and the fact that the household was now awake provided tangible evidence that it was more than her imagination. "I'm really sorry to wake you up. I forgot you'd be asleep."
Jack yawned, and she heard rustling as he sat up. "Don't worry about it. What are you doing with Avery's phone?"
"He left it with me. We're at the home of the foster family where the kids were placed, and Avery's been looking around as a ... well, you know. I thought I heard a gunshot, Jack, and he hasn't come back."
"You did the right thing to call me." He didn't sound sleepy at all now. "Did you also call the SCB?"
"Yes, they were too busy to send a—oh," she interrupted herself. "Police."
A police car, lights flashing and siren dying away, pulled up outside the Hodgsons' house. Nicole scrunched down in the seat of Avery's car, and then felt stupid about it. She hadn't done anything wrong. Still, she felt that being discovered watching the house from someone else's parked car, with a gun in the backseat, wasn't going to lead to a police interview she particularly wanted to have.
"What are they doing?" Jack asked. More rustles. He was getting dressed. In the background, a female voice asked a sleepy question. Jack answered, too low for Nicole to make out.
"They're just looking around." One of the cops had gone up the path to the Hodgsons' front door; the other, with a flashlight, was walking around the side of the house. Nicole sat up again and craned around, trying to see if Avery had emerged somewhere farther down the street. "It really might not be anything, Jack. I shouldn't have worried you ..."
Her voice trailed away.
Something had come out onto the sidewalk, but it wasn't Avery. Nicole held her breath. It was two houses down from her, in the direction away from the Hodgson place. Whatever it was stood on two legs, but it was humped in the shoulders and hunched over, moving weirdly, and just plain wrong.
"Nicole?" Jack asked, his voice tinny in her ear.
"Shhh," she hissed. She wasn't sure why staying quiet seemed suddenly so important. Surely it couldn't hear her inside a car.
The shadowy silhouette turned its head, looking up the street toward the police car. Alternating red and blue light strobed across its body, illuminating flashes of shaggy fur half-covered in ragged clothing. For a moment its head was in full profile, and she could see a stubby muzzle and pricked, upright ears. Then it hunched over and darted behind a hedge, moving with an awkward, high-shouldered four-legged gait that made her think more of a gorilla or chimpanzee than any kind of canine.
"Nicole, what's wrong? Are you all right?"
Nicole sank back in her seat, letting out a long breath. "I just saw a ... a ..." She tried to think how to describe it. A werewolf? She might have said so, if she didn't know that werewolf wolves were just like regular wolves. "I don't have any idea. I'm pretty sure it's the thing that Avery was trying to track around the park. It's here, Jack."
"And Avery isn't?" Jack asked. His voice was tense. A door slammed in the background.
"Not now," Nicole said. She strained her eyes, searching the dark shapes of the bushes. "Not yet."
"Tell me where you are. I'm on my way over. With reinforcements, I hope."
For the second time that night, she rattled off the Hodgsons' address. Another police car had now joined the first one, which did not seem like a good sign to her. "I don't know what to do," she admitted. "The cops are here."
"The best thing you can do is keep yourself safe. Just stay where you are. Be cooperative if the police ask you questions, but try not to admit anything that'll be hard to backpedal from later. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
He hung up. Nicole clutched the phone for a minute. Then she got out of the car.
Everything about the night seemed sinister now, from the way the breeze rattled the leaves on the trees, to distant traffic on nearby streets. With her heart in her throat, Nicole hurried across the street and ran the gantlet of the Hodgsons' Halloween-decked yard. She was acutely aware of how many places the yard offered for prowlers to hide, and kept looking over her shoulder as she knocked on the door, eschewing the doorbell in case some of the kids were still asleep.
DiDi Hodgson opened the door, looking desperately anxious. Her eyes widened when she saw Nicole. "Ms. Yates! I wasn't expecting—I—please come in."
There was something defeated in that capitulation. Nicole squeezed the other woman's arm and entered to find the house in a state of calm not-quite-panic. E
veryone was up. One of the Hodgson kids was entertaining the puppies, who were back in the playpen and wildly excited. Nicole hoped desperately that none of them got worked up enough to shift. In fact ... "DiDi, maybe you should take them into one of the bedrooms. Just to make sure."
Mrs. Hodgson immediately understood what she meant, and she and her son hurried the puppies off to a bedroom; she returned alone. Meanwhile, Nicole went into the kitchen, where one of the police officers was talking to Mr. Hodgson. Through the window of the back door, she saw two more officers crisscrossing the yard with flashlights. There was no sign of Avery, wolf-shaped or otherwise.
"And you are?" the officer asked her.
"I—" She stalled out in the verge of telling them she was the Hodgsons' social worker. She'd momentarily forgotten that the Hodgsons had no need of a social worker, since they currently had no foster children staying with them—officially. And there went her only excuse for being here in the middle of the night.
"... A family friend," she finally decided upon. She gave them her name, crossing her fingers they would have no reason to connect it to the same Nicole Yates who'd just had a break-in this morning. They didn't seem that interested, though. The officer she was talking to took down her name and number, and asked her if she'd seen anything. She said she'd heard something that sounded like a gunshot and, when the police showed up, wanted to make sure everything was okay.
"What happened?" she asked.
"Looks like an attempted burglary," the officer said. "They got scared when the family woke up and ran off."
"But the gunshot?" she pressed.
"We're not even sure a weapon was fired. Could be the thieves dropped something, or a car backfired."
DiDi Hodgson hovered, looking so anxious she seemed to be approaching the edge of possible hysteria. Since no useful information was coming from the police, Nicole got her to sit down and made her a cup of tea.
"It's because of those kids, isn't it," Mrs. Hodgson whispered, casting an anxious sideways glance at the police, who were now consulting on the back porch. "It isn't their fault, poor things! But those people were trying to break in looking for them, weren't they? Agent Hollen thought—where is Agent Hollen, anyway?"
"I'm afraid I have no idea," Nicole whispered back. Her hands were starting to shake as she thought about Avery out there somewhere, condition unknown. If he were all right, shouldn't he be here by now? He could've gone back to the car and gotten changed ... no, he couldn't get in without the keys, which she had. Oh Lord, he was out there naked and possibly hurt, and there was nothing she could do to help. She certainly couldn't ask the police to look for him. What was she going to tell them, that she needed to find her missing dog?
She'd never been so glad to see anyone in her life as she was when Jack came through the door. There was something instantly commanding about Avery's tall, broad-shouldered friend, the sense that he could take charge of a situation just be getting in the middle of it. He flashed a badge, passed a few friendly words with the cops, and then came over to join her and Mrs. Hodgson at the table.
Up close, he looked tired. His short hair was still bristly from bed, his glasses smudged, and all he wore under his brown leather jacket was a sleeveless T-shirt and a shoulder holster. He introduced himself to DiDi Hodgson and sat down beside Nicole. "Holding up okay?"
"Pretty well, I guess," she said, trying to smile. "Lots of excitement for my first stakeout, right?"
"At the SCB, we believe in throwing new people into the deep end of the pool," Jack replied lightly. "Any sign of that troublemaker Avery yet?"
Nicole shook her head, not quite trusting her voice.
Jack put an arm around her. She was startled both by the familiarity of the gesture, and how good it felt to have someone to lean on. Avery would have been better—but she was very resolutely not thinking about Avery, and what might be happening to him wherever he was.
She registered, belatedly, that Jack hadn't come alone. Another man had joined the group in the kitchen, and was now talking to the cops. He was tall and lean, African-American, wearing a black jacket with orange tiger stripes on the shoulders.
"One of you guys?" Nicole murmured.
Jack nodded, and caught the other man's eye. He came over to introduce himself, shaking hands first with DiDi Hodgson, then with Nicole. A stud earring winked in his left earlobe. "Noah Easton. I'm not a field agent; I'm with SCB PR."
"In other words, the cover-up department," Jack remarked.
"Easton." Nicole tried to figure out where she'd heard that name recently. "There's something familiar about that."
Noah winced. "You might be thinking of Curtis Easton, the bureau director. Yes, he is a relative."
DiDi Hodgson was clearly relieved to have someone to whom she could pour out the actual story of the attempted break-in; she'd been desperately skirting around the facts with the police. Leaving her with Noah, Jack gave Nicole a hand up. "Want to help me find our wayward werewolf?"
"I would really like that."
They went out into the chill of the night. Jack showed his badge to the police again, and they crossed the yard, their feet leaving crushed places on the dew-damp grass. Jack took a small flashlight from his pocket and shone it along the edge of the fence.
"Did you actually see the creature Avery was after?" he asked quietly.
"Yes, although it was some way down the street, and very dark. If I'd thought of it, I should have snapped a picture, but I was too stunned."
"Wolf? Human?"
"I don't know." The creature's weird profile was burned into her mind, but she wasn't sure how to begin describing it for someone who hadn't been there. If only she'd had the presence of mind to hold up the phone and photograph it. Although it was possible the flash would have rebounded off the inside of the car windows and given her nothing. "A little of both, I guess. It was standing upright, but it had more of an animal's head. I could see the ears and muzzle."
"A bear, maybe?" Jack suggested. "They can look pretty humanlike when they're standing on their back legs. And there are bears all up and down the coast. It's not impossible that one might have wandered into the subdivision."
"I guess it's hard to say for sure." But she recalled the hunched wrongness of its shoulders, the ungainly way it moved. "I could swear it was wearing clothing. But, you know, the mind plays tricks at night."
"And maybe I'm grasping at straws. Avery would never have mistaken a bear for a werewolf at the park, anyway." Jack crouched on the lawn, shining the light at the grass.
"Did you find something?"
Jack looked over his shoulder at the police, and angled his body to block their view. With his phone, he snapped a photo of the lawn, tilting the camera to get the fence in the shot as well. Then he took a tissue from his pocket and carefully picked up a small plastic object. Nicole crouched to look. It looked to her like a toy from a children's dart game.
"Tranquilizer dart," Jack murmured. He put it in a small plastic bag, tissue and all, and tucked it into his jacket. "I'd rather leave it in situ 'til the SCB can send someone from Forensics down, but I don't want the Seattle PD trying to work it into their picture of what happened here tonight."
"Maybe that was the shot I heard," Nicole said.
Jack shook his head. "It wouldn't sound like a gunshot. Most dart guns use compressed air as a propellant. All you'd hear would be a loud snap. Generally they don't have a very long range. Most likely the shooter was on the other side of the fence. Do you see any more darts?"
Nicole found another dart at the far end of the backyard. Jack snapped another photo and picked this one up, too. "And look at this," he said, pointing to the ground.
All Nicole could see was that the grass was scuffed up. Some of the turf had been peeled back in small parallel strips, exposing dark earth.
"Pretty sure he jumped the fence," Jack said. "Avery, I mean. Or something about the size of a wolf or large dog."
"You can tell that from the tra
cks?"
He gave her a quick, crooked grin. "I'm pretty good with tracks. Wish I could shift here. I could tell if it was Avery or not by the smell."
The fence was only up to his waist. Jack placed a hand on it, and vaulted it easily, landing in the neighbor's yard.
"I don't think I can do that," Nicole said, studying the fence dubiously. At least she was no longer wearing the skirt—she'd changed into jeans before coming out to join Avery on his stakeout. Still, her tree-climbing days were a number of years and about fifty pounds behind her.
"Here." Jack held his arms over the fence.
"You can't possibly lift me like that," she protested. "I'm no lightweight."
"Really? Watch me."
He gripped her under the arms and lifted. Startled, she flailed for an instant and then used her feet to help, catching temporary purchase in the fence before he swept her over it and set her on the grass.
"Whoa. You're stronger than you look—and you look pretty strong."
"Bear," Jack explained, and then he doubled over in a coughing fit.
Nicole awkwardly patted his back. "You're still getting over the flu, aren't you? Should you really be out at night?"
"I'm fine," he wheezed. "Stay by the fence for now. Tracks."
Still coughing occasionally, he examined the ground with the flashlight. Nicole looked over her shoulder at the Hodgsons' house and its inviting pool of porch light. In the light, inside the fence, with police around her, she hadn't been afraid at all. Now the night seemed much too large, the shadows seeming to move out of the corners of her eyes.
"Nicole," Jack called softly, and she jumped. "Come here. Stay off the grass as much as you can."
He was crouched in a dark patch of shadow screened by trees. Nicole skirted the edge of the lawn and leaned over. The lawn was badly scuffed. Jack was just picking up a dark hank of fiber with another tissue and tucking it into a plastic bag.
"Is that fur?" she asked.
