Page 3 of Foxed Up

He was making an effort to keep it toned down, and I think he realized why he had such negative feelings. But let's face it, the man had some bitterness, and rage, and some real reasons for them. It wasn't going away, not completely, not for a long time. Maybe not ever.

Even at his fiercest, he'd have made a better father than none. He would not have forgotten to feed the boy, if he'd had custody, even partial custody. Even visitation rights. But he hadn't known about Eli, so he hadn't been able to seek them. Until she'd finally reached her limits, and known it, and given the boy to his father, basically dumped Eli on Jon without warning. That was a rude wakeup call to a man who had considered himself a tough, badass cop bachelor without anything tying him back.

Despite the situation's being so tough, I thought Eli, Jon, and Jon's mother were doing pretty darn good with it. Even though I didn't know Eli yet, I'd seen him twice with his dad, before Jon and I were dating. I knew he loved and trusted his father, and that would go a long way to helping him heal.

Would he ever have his mother back in his life? The way Jon talked, it would be over his cold, dead body. It did seem unlikely, since she'd signed over full custody and then disappeared. The woman had a drug addiction. If she ever got her act together and wanted to see her son, she'd probably have a lot of proof to provide before any court let her. I knew Jon would fight it all the way, too — but I hoped that wasn't just because he hated her, but because he wanted to do right by Eli. I wasn't always sure, but I tried to think the best of him.

He was, after all, my boyfriend.

Could I handle dating an angry man, a man whose son had to be the top priority rather than me? Well, of course. I would think less of him if he could set me over his son. Offspring, for any species, have to be protected. As a fox, I understood it in my bones, whereas my human side sometimes had to be reminded of the facts and push away hurt feelings when Jon had to rush off.

We got little enough time together already, as far as I was concerned. I was looking forward to a day (though it seemed very far in the future) when we might live together and have more of those little moments, the everyday, fleeting instants together, instead of rationing the precious seconds and mostly spending them on sex or talking. What I wouldn't give, sometimes, to just be able to sit on a deck with him somewhere and have some breakfast quietly, not needing to rush, not knowing these moments would be snatched away soon, just…restful, peaceful, together.

I got wistful, thinking of those days, hoping they would come.

But maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Sometimes I thought I had a lot more invested in this relationship than he did. Other times, I figured that was idiotic. He'd even faced letting the whole precinct know we were together, and managed it, somehow. That was pretty brave of him, after the asshole front he'd kept up to hide his own dual attraction.

As for me, personally? I'd fallen for him and I couldn't get up. Sometimes it scared the hell out of me. Other times, it felt pretty damn right.

Jon Connery

I headed to the rabbit's home. The address was clear enough on paper, even programmed into my cell phone. But finding it was harder. The area got worse and worse as I drove there.

They all seemed to live down in the hills or the really bad area down by the river that flooded often, so nobody dared build anything too nice.

There was no getting flood insurance, either. Every few years when the river overflowed its banks, there were certain areas that invariably got it. These were areas with lots of trailers and twisty, turny, tiny, poorly paved roads, where every once in a while the roads washed out, a few houses got the hard luck of flooding, and a lot of people lived on welfare.

I hadn't known if most of 'em were rabbit shifters, and frankly, I still didn't. That's just where the address the captain forked over led me. The area near the river in a flood-prone, dirt-poor neighborhood.

Now, I took my car; I didn't take a patrol car. I knew that much; but somehow it didn't seem to make much difference. There were skinny little kids of various ethnic backgrounds playing on the road when I started driving very very slowly up the road where I presumed I'd finally find the rabbit's place.

His name was Quinn Green, and he had been taken in for questioning about the drug trade. The captain had thought he knew something, but it was all very circumstantial — fine for questioning, but no way would he be charged without some serious proof. After the debacle of fox-threatening, as he would see it, the captain wouldn't even be looking for proof.

He'd looked at me long and hard when I asked for the address, as if wondering what awful things I had in mind for the rabbit shifter. Sometimes, having the reputation of a badass can bite you in it.

"Captain, Avery asked me to check on the guy. He's worried about him. I think he has more insight into it than we do."

The captain frowned, but gave a reluctant nod.

"If you've got someone else free, you can send them instead," I suggested. I wasn't faking it; I'd be glad to give this job over to someone else.

Making nice with the community wasn't really my thing. I mean, I did the job, I got stuff done, I think I was always professional. But I was never the first to sign up for a Community Days Outreach Youth Bowling Program + Scholarshipz Poetry Jam! Cops5ever, or whatever shit they came up with, slightly different every year but the gist of it being that I needed to volunteer and not get paid for it, when I had a life (and a kid) of my own to take care of already, thanks.

So, maybe I wasn't the most sensitive soul in the universe. I was still kind of pissed off when the little kids playing at the side of the road in their cut-off shorts and ragged t-shirts ran like I was the devil coming for them. They looked not just nervous or wary, but terrified.

What was wrong? I wasn't driving a patrol car. Nobody knew I was a cop. Did they?

I drove past a white-and-rust-colored pickup with a bent-wire antenna and a crack spidering up one side of the windshield.Maybe my car's too new.

I parked as best I could in the little available space at one of the most precarious-looking mobile homes. I got out, and, feeling unaccountably nervous and like I didn't know what I was doing here, walked up to the door and knocked.

While I waited for someone to answer, I looked around, feeling jittery and out of sorts. It looked like the kind of area where there would be a meth lab explosion. I wasn't privy to all the captain's concerns, but I'm sure he'd had a good reason for asking the guy to answer a few questions down at the precinct.

The river smelled of rot and decay and wetness. The exposed ground that wasn't covered by cracked blacktop, crowded homes, or rusted bits of machinery and aging tires was bare dirt, grass or weeds, or had rocks sticking out of it at weird angles. Even the landscape itself felt crooked, strange, at odds with itself. The hills were high around here and they jutted at odd angles, making roads twist and turn to reach the river, and the creeks and river itself twisted and turned, making the land bunch and hunch, making the houses squish themselves in any old way, looking like they were about to fall off in places. The land wasn't build for people to live here, but they clung on, like ticks, not ready to give up.

I just hoped the guy wasn't actually in the drug trade and trigger-happy. Just my luck, I'd get met in the face with a shotgun — loaded. And me unarmed and just on a friendly visit.

I wondered suddenly why I was doing this. Yeah, I liked Avery. Trusted him, too. But did that mean I had to drop everything and go chase after a suspect and try to make nice, just because he was a shifter?