Jeffery shot him a sharp glance, then relaxed. From his perspective, Jordan was relatively harmless. No experience, no contacts, no shifting abilities; Jeffery could probably spill every secret he owned without it going beyond the two of them. Besides, there was something about Jordan that made him want to share. Maybe too much. He craved a bond with the wild-eyed man, and his body had a matching agenda. He could stifle it if he wanted to. Problem was, he didn't really want to. It had struck him, while he was talking about Reeves, that there was one way to keep Jordan with his daughter, and his daughter with her people. Just one. It didn't seem like much of a sacrifice either, with Jordan's striking face and strong, well-built body. Not much of a sacrifice at all.
"I really shouldn't tell you," Jeffery said, fighting his own impulses. "Shifter business."
"Shifters are becoming my business more frequently these days," Jordan pointed out, wryly. "Between you and Monty and that Nero character..."
"Hold on," Jeffery said, sharply. "I forgot about that. You said that someone named Nero Hunt already approached you?"
"Approached," Jordan scoffed. "He..."
Jordan was cut off by Darla's shrill wail. He bolted toward her before Jeffery had even evaluated the situation. Darla was face-down in the dirt underneath the monkey bars. She must have fallen. He started to run toward her just as Jordan reached her and scooped her up in his arms.
"Where does it hurt?" Jordan was asking her.
"Owie!" she wailed. "Ow-owie!"
She cried so hard she choked, and Jeffery started panicking. What could hurt a werewolf child so terribly? He looked around frantically, scanning the wilderness for snipers.
"Oh my god!" Jordan said, suddenly.
Jeffery turned to look at him, adrenaline pumping, ready to spring into action.
"You've scraped your knee! And your elbows! This calls for immediate surgery. Nurse! Nurse Wolfie! Where is that nurse when I need her?"
A smile broke through Darla's tears for a brief moment, then she wailed again.
"Oh no! It's worse than I thought! Quick! We need a helicopter!"
Jordan made thudding noises with his mouth as he spun Darla across the playground toward the truck. She giggled between her sobs, a bipolar expression which left Jeffery feeling flustered. Jordan plunked Darla down in the passenger seat and reached into the back of the truck to grab something. Curious, Jeffery approached from the side to watch. A small, well-loved plushy wolf was now sitting on Darla's chest with bandages under its forepaws. Jordan swiped antibiotic salve on Darla's elbows and knees as he maintained his playful narrative.
"Nurse! Bandage! Stat! What does stat mean, anyway?" he asked Darla, as an aside.
"Um... start?"
"Does it?"
"Maybe?" she said, with a little wiggling shrug.
"Nurse Wolfie, are you not listening? I said bandage!" Jordan scolded the toy.
Darla giggled again, and her tears were drying. Jordan took four bandages from the toy and pasted them on her skin (a waste of materials, Jeffery thought, since her skin will be healed in an hour), then topped each bandage with a kiss. Darla was smiling now, and giggled hysterically when Jordan took Wolfie and made it nuzzle her neck. Jeffery softened to both of them instantly. His mission had suddenly become very, very personal.
"There," Jordan said, with satisfaction. "All better?"
"All better!"
"Yay! What time is it?"
"Play time!"
"Hold on one second, let me find the actual time... okay, Darla? How 'bout we leave the playground alone for right now. I have a surprise for you."
She gasped, her eyes alight with possibilities.
"Surprise? Birthday?"
"No, no, not a birthday surprise. A bedtime surprise!"
"Oh," Darla said, obviously disappointed.
Jordan leaned over and stage-whispered into her little ear.
"Princess bed."
Darla squealed and leapt into his arms, then twisted to grab her stuffed wolf. Jordan ran, bouncing her in his arms, around to the back of the truck. Jeffery checked the time for himself. Seven thirty-eight. He was incredibly late for his check in. Bates would not be pleased.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jordan locked the camper door. It seemed like a pointless exercise; Jeffery had gotten into the locked camper once while it was in motion, he could certainly do it again while it was stationary. Regardless, it made him feel better. The bedtime ritual was an important part of their day, and Jordan didn't want to screw it up just because he had an audience. An audience who was an utter distraction. Watching his face while he talked was the reason that Jordan hadn't seen Darla lose her balance before she fell. He almost regretted it, but it had been such a refreshing change of pace that he couldn't work up much remorse. Keanu Reeves, huh? Who knew?
Darla behaved through her bath in the tiny tub and while brushing her teeth. She was so excited to see the surprise he had for her that she couldn't sit still, and he worried that he'd overhyped it. He hated to disappoint her, and he seemed to do it more and more frequently lately. Once she was clean and in her soft pajamas, he brought her over to her bunk and opened the drapes. She smiled, then her face fell.
"Where my princess?" she asked, her big eyes watering.
"That's the surprise," Jordan said, pulling a bag out from the pile of stuff by the door. "You want to help me?"
She nodded, and gleefully got in his way as he made her bed. She rolled in the sheets and untucked the corners as she tried to help, and the chore quickly morphed into a game. He finally won, wrestling her under the covers and pinning her with her soft princess comforter.
"There," he said, with a grin. "You like your princess bed now?"
"My princess bed!" she said, happily. "Story?"
"I have one right here for you. It's a princess story to go with your princess bed."
"Yay!"
He read her a revised version of the old classic about the princess and the frog, and Darla squealed in delighted disgust when the princess chose to kiss the slimy amphibian. The chaos of the day and her tumble off the monkey bars compounded, and her lids were heavy with sleep by the time he told her they all lived happily ever after.
"Daddy?"
"Yes, Darla?"
"You be my Daddy happily ever after?"
"Of course, sweetheart."
He kissed her head and swallowed hard against the lump forming in his throat. Jeffery's lesson about werewolf biology flashed hard and painful in his brain. He wouldn't be her Daddy-happily-ever-after; how could he be? He'd be old, maybe dead, before she'd even matured to adulthood. He held her for a long time, cherishing her weight in his arms, her smooth hair under his chin. Figuring something out was crucial. He couldn't abandon her like that, set her off on her immortal life with a mortal wound. In that moment, he missed Alex terribly. At least if Alex was here, he would know that she would be cared for as long as she needed to be. The cold splash of his own mortality threatened to pull him under into a dark, sucking void, and he quickly kissed his daughter's head and closed her curtains. He took a moment for a deep, shuddering breath and to wipe his eyes before he left the camper to finish confronting the stowaway shifter.
He found Jeffery sitting slumped on the picnic table, his hands dangling loosely between his knees. He looked crushed, somehow, and Jordan was surprised by a sudden, strong tug of intimate concern. Wandering over casually, he propped one foot on the bench, gazing off into the peaches and purples of twilight.
"You good?" he asked, tentatively.
Jeffery shook his head and scrubbed his face with his hands, knocking his ruined glasses to the dirt. He didn't move to retrieve them, so Jordan scooped them up and set them safely on the table.
"They're dead," Jeffery said, in monotone.
"Who?"
"Everybody. The allies... dead. My team... dead. Bates... Bates isn't dead yet, but God I've never heard him so scared. What the hell is happening out there?"
"Don't you guys have, I do
n't know... werewolf cops?" Jordan asked.
Jeffery nodded his head miserably, and Jordan turned to sit on the table. He put a hand on Jeffery's shoulder, who sighed.
"They're the leak," he said, moving his hands helplessly. "At least that's what Bates thinks. I don't know. Everything's screwed up, it's not supposed to be like this."
Jordan's first instinct was to tell Jeffery not to worry; that he would keep him safe from the unknown. He felt foolish for the inclination; this shifter was far older and more equipped to deal with this problem than he was. Still, something about Jeffery's miserable posture made him want to help. He would just need to tone it down a notch.
"Well," he said, putting his problem-solving face on. "What do you know?"
"Not enough," Jeffery sighed. "We thought... we thought that Alex left the colony to hunt Montague down and kill him. They both went all the way off the radar that year. Before that, Montague had been challenging Steel directly, killing his people, declaring war, making a Genghis-level nuisance of himself. When Alex disappeared, that all stopped. Montague, we thought, was dead."
"Now you know that Alex spent that year with me."
"Yeah," Jeffery sighed, and the word rang with heartbreak. "We also know now that there's someone running around calling himself Nero Hunt, getting close to the allies with the code name, and killing them. And we know that the allies have been hiding records, but I don't yet know what the records are. Hidden shifters? Other allies? Mates? Who the hell knows?"
"Where are the records?"
"I have them," Jeffery said, with a bitter laugh. "Sitting there, in my bag, just waiting to be looked at."
"So...?"
"So I can't break the fucking code!" Jeffery exploded. "There's a password to open the files and I can't get through it."
Jordan's ears perked up and a smile spread across his face.
"Hey Jeffery, did I ever tell you what I do for a living?"
Jeffery peered at him inquisitively, trying to figure out if it mattered.
"No."
"I'm a hacker," Jordan grinned. "Well, a programmer, but I got the gig by hacking my way in. I know how to get around the fences I build, and then some. Let me have a crack at it."
Jeffery only hesitated for a moment. With all of his support and protocol crashing around his ears, he had to rely on instinct, and his instinct told him that Jordan would go to hell and back to protect his kid. He slid the laptop out of the bag and rooted around for the flash drive, which he booted up and plugged in, then cursed.
"It's about to die," he said. "How fast can you work?"
"Not two percent battery on a five-year-old machine fast," Jordan said, wryly. "We'll plug it in."
He cocked his head and led Jeffery over to the truck, then opened a panel on the back of the camper, where two outlets were hiding. Jeffery heard the gentle hum of a propane generator, and it called him back to a time when he would live and work on the road, tracking stray werewolves down through hearsay and bodies. Those were simpler times, though exponentially more violent.
Jordan opened the drive and clicked on the first folder. It popped up with the password prompt. Jeffery remembered the tiny scrap of paper that he'd dug out of the filing cabinet and pulled it from his pocket.
"Don't know if this'll help, but it was stuck to the physical cabinet with the same label," he said, shrugging as he handed the paper to Jordan.
"Leet looking glass 2016 year pupper shift sand doggo 2021," Jordan read out loud.
His eyes lit up like galaxies, and he began typing furiously. Jeffery felt a wriggle of life deep in his belly once more, and he silenced it with a vicious internal warning. Now was not the time to be revisiting ideas like love and sex. He couldn't help himself though. Watching Jordan get excited over something so wholly alien to himself was a wondrous thing to witness. Jordan's eyes shot quickly back and forth across the screen as he typed. He worked on it for a long time, never losing speed or focus. Jeffery started pacing, letting his mind wander. Jordan would be at this for a while, he was sure. The clue, if that's what it was, was utterly indecipherable. He rolled his neck and looked at the stars which were just beginning to twinkle into view. He used to lie under the stars with Alex. For the millionth time, he wondered just what the hell had possessed Alex to take off and get himself pregnant, but he resisted the urge to wonder what was wrong with him, specifically. That was one rabbit hole that would...
"Got it!" Jordan crowed, interrupting Jeffery's thoughts.
"What?" he asked in disbelief, rushing over. "What was it?"
"It was right there, on the paper," Jordan said, with a grin.
"No, no, I put these words in every possible way, this isn't..."
"Do you want the password?"
"What? Yes! God, yes please," Jeffery said, grabbing the laptop, his fingers hovered over the keys.
"One two zero two, dollar sign three V L zero W three R three W, ampersand, dollar sign, capital PUP six one zero two," Jordan rattled off.
Jeffery blinked at him.
"I'll write it down," Jordan said, flashing a boyish grin that made Jeffery's heart skip. "Here, let me type it in."
He didn't take the laptop. Instead he scrunched close to Jeffery and gently moved his hands, then typed the password in. His proximity stirred Jeffery's blood, and he had to rip himself back to the work at hand to avoid drifting off into a daydream on the wafting breeze of Jordan's spicy human scent. Jordan finished typing, but didn't move away. Jeffery dared a sideways glance at him, and saw that his eyes were glued to the screen. He was as interested in finding out what the file contained as Jeffery was, that was all. He wasn't trying to stay close, that was ridiculous. Jeffery cleared his throat and clicked the file open.
He saw the familiar and unfamiliar names; the same names he held in their files when he was in the shop. This time, he opened an unfamiliar name first. Boris Allen. The first PDF looked like every other werewolf registry at first glance, and he felt frustration rise hot in his shoulders. He looked over each line carefully, then once again, rubbing his eyes hard, irritated that he couldn't see any reason why she would have this file and he wouldn't.
"Is that watermark on all of these?" Jordan asked.
"What watermark?"
"Right there, behind all the text. What does MDP mean?"
Jeffery froze, then his eyes widened and he clicked out of the file to open one that he did recognize. He saw the watermark immediately; ASP. His hands began to tremble, and Jordan shot him a curious look. His head was spinning. She couldn't. She wouldn't. Would she? How well did they vet their allies anyway? That had never been his department. He'd always assumed that their allies were screened for pack loyalty as well as empathy for their species and competency in their various skills. He had never once worried about this eventuality.
"What is it?" Jordan asked, impatiently.
"ASP," Jeffery said, dazedly. "Adrian Steel Pack. MDP..."
"Montague Domingo Pack?"
Jeffery nodded slowly.
"He stopped attacking because he didn't need to," Jeffery said, his voice sounding flat and monotone in his own ears. "He's creating his own pack."
He shook off the dread suddenly, panic overwhelming it, and began clicking files open.
"Get a pen, paper, stuff to write on!" he ordered frantically. "Go, now!"
Jordan left, which surprised a small part of Jeffery's brain. Jordan didn't seem like the type to take orders without question.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jordan's mind was swimming with all of the new information. Alex had been pretty close-lipped about the whole shifter thing. So much so that Jordan had been under the impression that he was one of a dying breed when they'd met; now, with the war Montague was waging, he realized that he was kind of right. But everything about the colony, the immortality, everything that set the werewolf culture apart from human culture, all of that was new for him. He'd had no idea that there was a safe place to raise Darla, and it angered him that Alex
hadn't bothered to tell him. Not to mention the fact that he was god damned royalty.
He scrounged up a notebook and a pen, and told himself that he needed to take the time to get organized tomorrow, barring any other supernatural distractions. He was uncomfortable with piles and boxes, though that had been standard in his house ever since Darla had discovered her love of destroying furniture. There was plenty of storage in the little camper for their sparse possessions, and he was bound and determined to create a home that he and Darla would both be happy in, for as long as they needed it. But the colony... Jordan pushed the thought away. There was something about taking her to the colony that was bothering him, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it.
"How's it going?" he asked, as he stepped out of the camper.
"It'll go faster with a list. You find something to write on?"
"Yeah," Jordan said, holding up the pen and notebook. "List of what?"
"I'm trying to see how many people Montague has," Jeffery said. "And what their pack ranks and statuses are."
"What are ranks and statuses in this context?"
"Ranks. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon..."
"Are you just telling me the Greek alphabet?" Jordan asked, feeling mildly amused. He sat closer to Jeffery, drawn by his warmth and scent like some kind of feral animal. Maybe I just have a werewolf fetish, he thought, wryly. Can't seem to stay away from the danger zone.
"Yes and no," Jeffery answered. "The ranks are labeled that way. When ranking a shifter, you take a couple of things into consideration. Birth or turn order, and natural inclinations. Alex, for example, was the Alpha's first son, and showed leadership qualities. He was considered a natural Alpha, and he would have been expected to take an Omega as his mate."
Jeffery's voice caught on that last word, and Jordan suppressed the urge to squeeze his hand. He bumped his shoulder gently instead.
"You would have made a good Omega," he said, awkwardly.
Jeffery laughed. "You think so? You just met me."
"I saw how panicked you were when Darla fell. You've got the instincts. I had to learn everything I know about being a parent, especially to a shifter. I don't know what Alex was running from, exactly, but I'm pretty sure he didn't plan on getting pregnant. He left me with next to nothing as far as shifter parent knowledge goes. Guess he thought he'd be around to handle it."
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