Guard Wolf (Shifter Agents Book 2)

by Lauren Esker

  He put an arm around her and she nestled down at his side, curling against his body just as she'd already gotten in the habit of doing as a koala.

  "Awww, you guys," Erin's voice said. Nicole had her face tucked against Avery's shoulder, eyes half closed, and refused to rise to the bait. "That's literally the cutest thing I've ever seen. Isn't it the cutest thing you've seen?"

  "I refuse to answer on the grounds that I have to work with this guy," Jack said, sounding amused.

  Avery raised a hand and flipped him off.

  "Should we ask them to leave?" Nicole murmured into Avery's neck.

  "If they want to stay, they can deal with it."

  She pressed closer into him, as if she could make their bodies one, and closed her eyes.

  ***

  She woke a bit later when a nurse came in to change the IV. Avery appeared to be sleeping, and he didn't stir when Nicole swung her legs off the bed and stood up to stretch.

  Erin and Jack were both gone. There was a note on the bedside table in a blocky, unfamiliar hand that she assumed was Jack's: Back to the office. Paperwork. So much paperwork. Need a statement from you both, but that can wait. Pick you up when you're ready.

  Under this, Erin's familiar, loopy hand had added: Kids are fine. Bet they can't wait to see you. Call me!

  Nicole had a heavy, dull "too much nap, not enough real sleep" feeling, along with a pounding headache. She splashed water on her face in the bathroom, gave Avery a light kiss that didn't seem to wake him up, and went off to find the clinic's coffee machine. She was not quite hungry yet, but felt as if she might be eventually.

  At the coffee machine, someone vaguely familiar approached her. In Nicole's current brain-fogged state, it took her a moment to place him. Lanky, handsome, black leather jacket with tiger-stripe shoulders, stud earring—she flashed back to the red Camaro at the Hodgson place, and then she remembered his name at last.

  "Noah Easton," she said, and shook hands with him.

  "Here to debrief," Noah told her. "Damage control and all that."

  He lounged against the wall while she finished stirring creamer into her coffee. Jack leaned on things, but Noah draped. She'd never seen anyone do it in quite such a boneless way, and yet, despite the laziness of his outward demeanor, there was a sharp and alert intelligence in his eyes. His shifter animal, she recalled, was a tiger, and she wasn't surprised. She could see the cat in him. There were even little flecks of green and gold in his dark eyes, when the light hit them right.

  When she was done, he got a cup of unadulterated black coffee, and they went over to the farthest corner of the clinic's small lounge area.

  "What is it that you need to talk to me about?" She thought about police shows she'd seen, and Jack's note. "You need to take my statement about what happened?"

  "Not quite. That'll be for the field agents to handle. I'm the one who comes in afterwards and talks to the witnesses to find out what they did or didn't see, confiscates any inconvenient cell-camera footage, figures out how to spin the story to the media, and so forth." His smile was wry. "I'm the cover-up department, like they say."

  "If it's cameras you want, that place was full of them. We were recorded the whole time we were there." She tried to suppress a shiver.

  "I know. My people have been all over the place this afternoon, pulling items and fighting with the SCB over what goes into evidence and what gets destroyed."

  "Aren't you part of the SCB?"

  "It's an uneasy relationship. The way the field agents view my branch of the agency is somewhere in the border lands between 'one of us' and one of the enemy, which is to say, the media. We're a little of both—"

  He stopped and looked up, and so did she. Avery had just limped into the lounge area, towing his IV pole and also, from the look of things, using it for an extremely unstable crutch. Over his hospital gown, he'd thrown on a robe, which Jack must have brought for him; it was scruffy, dark brown, and clearly well worn.

  Avery's face lit up when he saw Nicole, and he limped over to them. The bruises on his forehead and down the side of his face were turning lurid shades of green and purple.

  "Man," Noah said, "you do not look like you should be out of bed."

  "I feel better than I look," Avery told him. It would have been more convincing if he hadn't been swaying slightly where he stood. He started to reach for a chair before stopping as if seeing his splinted wrist for the first time.

  Nicole reached out and pulled the chair over for him, bumping it into her own, and Avery sank into it. He leaned his leg against Nicole's and lifted his hand toward her coffee, then gave her a questioning look. She smiled and nudged it his way. She'd found herself without much appetite for it; the nausea was back, though not severe. Instead she rested her hand on his knee, which Noah took in without comment.

  "Having you both together will make this quicker, anyway," he remarked. "Since I can get both your answers at the same time."

  "First I have a question," Avery said. "Has anyone found my damn car yet?"

  Noah shook his head. "If the car was damaged, they probably dumped it. Wouldn't want to call attention to a vehicle that looked like it might have been in an accident."

  "Great, so on top of everything, I'm going to have to buy a new car." Avery slouched in his seat and took another sip of Nicole's coffee. "Okay, let's get this over with. Fire away."

  Noah's questions were straightforward: who had seen them transform, how much did they think the staff of the facility knew about shifters, were there any outside witnesses, and so forth. He made terse notes as they talked, tag-teaming with equally short answers.

  For Nicole, thinking about it brought back that same sense of chilling helplessness, like a cold paralysis creeping through her body, that she'd felt when Evans threw the cold water on her. It was such a small thing, and yet she felt as if her thoughts kept circling back to it like the current pulling down at the center of a whirlpool. It seemed she would always be falling back into it.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and Avery's hand wrapped around hers. Looking up, she found him watching her with worried blue eyes. Tired and hurt though he was, his worry was for her.

  It wasn't love, though, but anger that she used to claw her way past that weary, cold paralysis. You bitch, Jan Evans, I've come back from tougher things than you. I almost died at uni, and I fought my way back from that. You're nothing. Just a petty bully with delusions of grandeur.

  "What happened to Dr. Evans?" she asked Noah, and her voice came out tight. "Is she alive?"

  Noah hesitated briefly. His gaze flicked to Avery.

  "Hey, I know Nicole's a civilian, but she's as deep in it as I am," Avery said. "I want to know, too. How many do we have in custody?"

  Noah flipped back a few pages in his notebook. "Of the private security Evans had hired for her secret facility, it looks like we've got two dead and two in custody, plus a couple more guys at the company who were in on the secret but weren't on duty that day."

  One of the men they'd arrested must be Mike, with his crushed wrist. The other ... "You picked up the kid with the girlfriend, right? What's his name—Jeremy?"

  Noah glanced down at his notes. "Jeremy Ludvic, yeah. He's been cooperative so far."

  "And Evans?" Nicole asked again.

  "Touch and go, last I heard. From your statement earlier—" He nodded to Avery. "—it sounds like she got shot by one of her own guys. She may or may not pull through."

  "What about her daughter?" Nicole asked.

  "Ashley Lopez-Evans. She's here in the clinic. I haven't talked to her yet." He grinned briefly. "Lafitte pulled a mother-hen and wouldn't let me."

  At least Ashley had someone on her side. "Would it be all right if I see her? I'm a licensed social worker, if it matters, but mostly it's just that I got to know her while we were down there. And she helped me. I want to make sure she's okay."

  "Hey, don't ask me." Noah pointed across the lounge, where Dr. Lafitte was deep in con
versation with one of the nurses. "She's the one making the call."

  Nicole kissed Avery's cheek and got up, but Lafitte, looking tired but cheerful, had already seen them, and Nicole waited with her hand on Avery's shoulder as the doctor came over to join them. Lafitte's multicolored braids were knotted on top of her head, the ends cascading down around her shoulders like tassels.

  "How are you two feeling?"

  Nicole's first instinct was to say Better and leave it at that, but she went for truth instead. "Still kind of woozy and sick. A little better than I did before, I think, but that's not saying a whole lot."

  "No severe symptoms, though?"

  "Like what kind of severe symptoms can I expect?" Nicole asked warily.

  "Nothing more than a more extreme version of what you've already experienced, really—vomiting, migraines, fainting ... that kind of thing. You haven't shown any signs so far, so I doubt if you're going to. I don't see why you can't go home. As for you—" She turned her gaze on Avery. "If you could ambulate yourself back to the room where you came from, we can run down your vitals and see about getting you out of here, too."

  Avery smiled wanly. "You just want the bed for other patients."

  "What I'd really like to know is why you and Jack Ross can't seem to let a single month go by without showing up in here."

  "And leave you out of a job?"

  "You and Ross will be the end of me," Lafitte sighed.

  Nicole cleared her throat. "Doctor, I have a request. Is it all right if I see Ashley Evans-Lopez, before I check out? Partly in a professional capacity, I suppose, but really more as a friend. We got to know each other a little, and she helped me. I'd like to thank her, and let her know she has a friend here, if she wants one."

  Lafitte's answer was a quiet one. "I expect that girl could use a friend."

  ***

  Ashley's room was under guard, a duty currently assigned to intern Rivkah Rosen. The tall falcon shifter was reading, with the back of her chair tipped against the wall so it rested on its rear pair of legs. She looked up at Nicole's approach and let the front legs thump back to the linoleum.

  "Dr. Lafitte said it's all right if I see her."

  "Gotta ask if you're taking anything in."

  Nicole shook her head. "Just what you see. Is she on suicide watch?"

  "Not really as such, but it is a concern, and we don't have a psych ward here. The Ranch does, I've heard, but hopefully she's not going there."

  "What ranch?"

  "Oh, it's ..." Rivkah winced. "Kind of top secret. It's a prison for shifters, and other people who need to be kept under high security. Before you ask, I don't know where it is or what it looks like, and I don't think I'd be able to tell you if I did."

  "Hmm," was Nicole's noncommittal response, filing this away under things she needed to ask Avery about later. She tested the door, found it unlocked, and pushed it open.

  Ashley was sitting by the window, gazing out with an unfocused stare. A book lay open and ignored in her lap. She wasn't dressed as a patient—she wore, as far as Nicole could tell, the same oversized sweatshirt and skinny jeans she'd been wearing in the EGL facility. Nicole wondered if they were only keeping her in the clinic because they needed to confine her somewhere and didn't want to put her in prison.

  "Hi, Ashley. Is it all right if I come in?"

  The girl gave her a bland glance, and went back to staring out the window.

  Nicole sat on the end of the neatly fixed bed, since Ashley's chair was the only one available. The room was austere even for a hospital room, and Nicole suspected it had been hastily stripped of anything they thought she could use to escape or hurt herself. Not that I can't see a dozen ways without even looking hard.

  But Ashley surely could as well, and she hadn't tried any of them. That counted for a lot.

  "I wanted to thank you for helping me, Ashley. That was a very brave and heroic thing you did." She wasn't quite sure how to get the girl to understand just how brave she'd truly been. Facing down an abusive parent, saying no to them for the first time, took rare courage.

  "And look how that turned out," Ashley said dully to the darkening sky outside the window.

  "Nothing that happened to your parents is your fault in any way."

  "You think that helps?" Ashley demanded. She rounded on Nicole with a flare of sudden anger. "My dad's dead, no one will tell me about Mom—"

  She collapsed again, the fight draining out of her, and stared at her thin hands curled around the edges of the book in her lap. It was a dog-eared fantasy novel that must have come from the small bookshelf in the lounge.

  Nicole's heart went out to her. "The last I heard, your mother's condition was still uncertain. They may not have told you anything because they didn't know themselves."

  "I don't even know if I want her to live," Ashley whispered. Her fingers nervously folded and unfolded the edge of a page, working on their own as if they were no longer any part of her. "I think about both ways it could go, and I ... I don't even know. I want her to live, because she's my mom, but then I think about her dying, and I don't feel anything. Does that make me a bad person?"

  Nicole reached out cautiously, and placed a hand on the girl's bony shoulder when she didn't flinch away. "It makes you human. Your parents hurt you, Ashley."

  "They were trying to help me."

  "I know. People are complicated. It's possible for parents to love us, and sacrifice for us, and still do terrible things to us. And some of the things your mother did to you were terrible things."

  Ashley shuddered under Nicole's hand. "What's going to happen to me?"

  "I don't know, but both you and Jeremy helped us, and that's worth a lot. I'm going to speak on your behalf. I think Avery will, too."

  Now Ashley looked up, her eyes hollow. "I helped Mom hurt him. And you. But him, especially."

  "You didn't have a choice. Avery understands that." If he didn't already, she'd make sure he did.

  "I did," Ashley whispered. "I always did. You said I did."

  Trust that conversation to be the one that stuck in her head. "And you made it, when it counted. Not just with me, but with the children too. You chose to do the right thing, and it was one of the bravest things I've ever seen anybody do. No one can take that from you, Ashley, not ever."

  "The children." For the first time, Ashley's eyes lit up; she looked almost animated. "How are they?"

  So Nicole told her about the kids, and the mishaps she and Avery had gone through, trying to take care of them. She referred to Ginger by name, and then had to back up and explain how she and Avery had named them, since they had to call them something. "What were their names before? Or did they have any?"

  Ashley shook her head. "They were just numbered. I think their mother might have given them names, but if she did, she never told them to me." She collapsed a little, shrinking in on herself. "By that time, she was the only one left."

  "Helena?" Nicole asked gently.

  Ashley gave a small, miserable nod.

  "Who was the father?"

  "He was the one Mom called W002. I think his name was Gordie."

  The cousin. Better than the brother, at least.

  "They did in vitro with her," Ashley murmured, her gaze blank and fixed on her lap again. "By that point, the other male subject was dead. He was the first one. He got killed escaping. The others just died."

  "Died of what?"

  "Nothing that anyone could figure out. It was like they stopped wanting to live. Helena lasted the longest, because of her kids, I think. But she got thinner and thinner, and finally ..." Ashley looked away, and closed her eyes for a moment. "It wasn't too long after that when I took the kids out of there."

  Nicole drew deep, slow breaths, steadying herself and suppressing her emotional reaction. Of course they died. They were imprisoned and tortured, with no hope of a way out. It would have been hard enough for a human, but for shifters, werewolves especially ... she could only imagine the hell they wou
ld have been in, locked away from the sky and the forest and their pack.

  And Ashley had been an accomplice to that, albeit an unwilling one. In the end, she'd made the right decision, Nicole reminded herself. It would have to be good enough.

  The door opened. Ashley curled in on herself, but Nicole gave a delighted gasp when she realized who it was—and what they had with them. Jack came in first, followed by Casey, and each of them had two puppies in their arms.

  "Thought you might want some company," Jack said cheerfully.

  Nicole prodded Ashley's shoulder. "Ashley. Look."

  Ashley looked up, and delight flooded across her face. For a moment she no longer looked like a torture victim herself, simultaneously too young and too old for her years; she was simply a thrilled girl confronted with an armload of puppies.

  And the puppies recognized her—both her and Nicole, but especially her. They went wild trying to scrabble their way out of Jack and Casey's arms, stubby tails wagging furiously. When they were deposited on the bed, Ashley threw herself beside them, and they climbed all over her with tiny squeaks of delight.

  "You must have spent a lot of time with them," Nicole said, sitting beside her and running her hands through soft puppy fur.

  Ashley looked up, fending off Sophie and Gael as they tried to lick her face. "I was mostly the one who took care of them after W001—I mean, after Helena died. That's how come nobody noticed when I took them out. I played with them a lot."

  Families are complicated, Nicole thought. And this one had just gotten a little more so. Because Ashley was part of it too, in a strange way.

  She noticed Dr. Lafitte in the doorway behind Jack and Casey, watching the proceedings with amusement. Nicole made her way between the two SCB agents, squeezing Jack's arm in thanks as she went.

  "I didn't think a little puppy therapy would hurt anyone," Lafitte murmured. "Avery's ready to go, by the way. He's getting dressed right now."

  Relief rushed through Nicole. They were okay. All of them. Finally. But lingering questions nagged at her, about Ashley in particular. "Has anyone told you the full story of Ashley's heart transplant, and the shifter donor?"