by Lauren Esker
"This blog is a joke," Casey called into the condo's bathroom. She was sprawled on the couch with a laptop on her chest. "She's got a page showing UFO landing sites around the Seattle area. There's also a resource page on ... chemtrails? Have you ever heard of that?"
"Jet contrails containing chemical agents, allegedly," Jack called back. He came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and steamed-up glasses; they'd just come in from a game of pickup basketball. "Useful for weather control, mind control, you name it."
"Of course it is." Casey paged through the menu. "If she's going to post this junk, I can't believe she didn't even put a photo of me-lynx in her blog post. So unfair. I feel cheated. Ooh, dare I click on the alien autopsy page?"
"It's your funeral. Or I guess I should say your autopsy."
"Har har. That doesn't even make sense." Unable to resist, she clicked. "Wow, I was expecting disgusting, but that is so obviously rubber and Photoshop."
Jack kissed the nape of her neck as he hung over the couch back. Resting a hand on her shoulder, he leaned down and picked up a section of the Seattle Times, folded open to a small article headlined Campers uninjured after bear attack. "I see that I'm now officially a mother grizzly defending her cubs."
"Congratulations on your parenthood, dear," Casey said solemnly.
Jack snorted, skimming the article. "Like any fool couldn't see those were black bears."
Casey laughed. "Not everyone is a bear expert. Anyway, it worked out in the bears' favor, I guess. The Park Service isn't going to treat them as problem bears and try to remove them, since bears with cubs are known to be aggressive. They've just closed the trail in that area for a couple of weeks."
"How are things going with the Park Service and rare plant habitat?"
"Slowly." She'd found out that Jack was serious about this being her case, including the fiddly details. For the last two days she'd been working her way through Park Service bureaucracy, while also making daily trips to the park and back. She and Jack had done a quick shopping trip and brought them clean clothing and food, since Bobby was unable to hunt while recuperating. Casey wished she could talk them into moving out of the cold, damp, trash-strewn cave, but they were having none of it. She had picked up some forms to get them in touch with local social service organizations, only to find that neither of them could read beyond a first-grade level. Neither had been to school; neither had a social security number. They'd spent their entire lives in the park. Most of their knowledge of social behavior came from observing tourists from afar. She was working on talking Brenda into helping with the volunteer cleanup crew at the vandalized rest area; if the twins wouldn't leave the park, maybe getting them involved in its maintenance was a step in the right direction.
It was well outside the scope of the SCB to mainstream them back into society. But Casey felt that it wouldn't hurt to start teaching them how the world outside the park actually worked. She had spoken to shifter social worker Nicole Yates, and Nicole was helping with the social-services end of things, as well as having some good suggestions for people Casey could talk to in the Seattle shifter community who might be able to offer the twins a place to stay if they wanted to see a little more of the world.
It was possible that they would never be able to leave the park, or want to. But at least they should have the option of meeting other shifters like themselves and learning about the world that was available to them.
There was still no guarantee things would turn out well. They might yet have a fatal clash with tourists, or end up living on the street somewhere.
But Casey couldn't forget her epiphany in the woods: how close she'd come to being where the twins were. Unlike the twins, she hadn't been alone; she had been raised by her human grandmother. Still, she could easily imagine herself in their place if her life had been just a little different. If her mother's death had happened in the woods, rather than in the city ... would she have ended up foraging for herself like a wild lynx, instead of having the foster care system and her father's family to fall back on?
She was glad she'd never had to find out. But she hoped to stay in touch with the twins and see if she could ease their introduction to shifter and human society.
The job was supposed to be about helping people, after all.
"Someone's serious today," Jack said, settling on the end of the couch. "Penny for your thoughts." He picked up one of her bare feet and started rubbing it.
Casey set the laptop on the coffee table. "Ooh. My main thought right now is don't stop."
"The lady's wish is my command." He settled her foot on his towel-clad thigh and picked up the other one.
"Ahhhh." She lay back and luxuriated in the feeling. "Hey ... Jack," she said after a moment, as her mind continued to wander in lazy circles. "Do you think there really is such a thing as Bigfoot? As something other than teenagers putting on a hoax, I mean. The kids talk about the 'guardians of the woods' like they're something real, but when I ask them if they've ever seen these guardians, they clam up on me. I can't tell if it's a religious thing, or something they actually experienced firsthand."
He gave it a moment's thought, while continuing to work the muscles in her feet with his strong hands. "I don't know. There might be a lot of things out there we haven't found yet. Most people in human society don't know about us, after all. Maybe if we do meet a Bigfoot someday, it'll turn out that they've done what shifters have done, and learned how to pretend to be human. Maybe they're living among us right now, and we don't even know."
Casey let out a small, indelicate snorting noise. "That's pretty much how Peri Moreland's blog post ends. Almost word for word, in fact."
"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."
"You know that doesn't apply to digital clocks, right?"
"I'm an analog guy in a digital world," Jack said cheerfully. "Say, I'm running out of feet down here; does anything else need massage?"
"Well, if you're asking ..." She propped herself up on her elbows. "Actually, no, I need to get in the shower myself. You're all clean and I'm sweaty and stinky."
Jack leaned over, planted a knee beside her hip, and put on a show of sniffing her, making her giggle. "You smell pretty good to me."
"Mmmm. I didn't say I wanted to take a shower alone. If you don't mind having another one."
"I'm a bear. We like water."
"Pffft, you're not a polar bear." Delicately, she lifted his glasses off his face and set them on top of the computer. "These are going to get smudged, if things go the way I'm hoping."
"Tell me more about these things," Jack said, leaning down to kiss her. With all the twisting around, the towel seemed to be slithering off his hips. She didn't have a problem with that.
"I'd rather show you," she murmured into his lips.
It wasn't always a perfect life, this life she was building here. But, as he kissed her again and she twined her arms around his neck, she wouldn't have changed a thing for the world.
This is a standalone story in the Shifter Agents universe. The books so far are:
#1 - Handcuffed to the Bear
#2 - Guard Wolf
#3 - Dragon's Luck (coming soon!)
https://www.laurenesker.com
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