Page 11 of Handcuffed to the Bear (Shifter Agents #1)

CHAPTER 11

Like all the rest of her family, Debi Fallon was built like a Norse goddess: tall, long-limbed, and blonde. Wearing a severe charcoal business suit and carrying a briefcase, she walked out of the elevator into the Lion’s Share parking garage, then froze when she found herself confronted by a small contingent of SCB agents pointing guns at her.

“Put the case down slowly and raise your hands in the air,” Avery snapped. Behind him Eva Kemp loomed, radiating menace as only a person whose shifted form was a twenty-foot killer whale could do.

Her face like stone, Debi reached toward the breast pocket of her business suit.

“I said hands in the air!” Avery barked. “Eva, if she doesn’t comply, shoot her in the leg.”

“I was reaching for my phone,” Debi said coldly.

“I know. Don’t try it. Put the briefcase down, put your hands up, and get on your knees.”

The agents were fanning out, surrounding her. Debi’s eyes darted around, and then, as the cost-benefit calculus clicked to a decision in her head, she shifted.

Even though he could watch it in the mirror anytime he liked, Avery never seemed to get used to the endless miracle of his kind’s transformation. Debi melted out of her clothes, the charcoal suit fluttering to the concrete as she flowed smoothly forward. Golden fur rippled down her long, pale limbs. Her muzzle thrust forward; her tail whipped around her flanks.

Even for a lion, she was huge—as big as Jack in his grizzly form. She was already moving as her paws hit the concrete, launching her into a bound straight at Avery. Assuming her enemies were normal humans, she was counting on their moment of frozen shock, trying to understand what they’d just witnessed, while she ripped through them like wet paper.

Good thing they’d brought the rest of Eva’s strike team.

As soon as Debi’s transformation began, the agent behind her, Dev Tripathi, dropped his gun and shifted as well. The fur that flowed over his smooth brown skin was rust and black, and the tiger who erupted out of Dev’s jeans and gray shirt was at least as big as Debi’s lion.

Mila Shevchenko’s transformation lagged an instant behind her partner’s, but as Debi finished shifting and began to spring toward Avery, the enormous hooves of Mila’s elk came crashing down on the concrete a few steps behind her.

Out of the corner of his eye, Avery glimpsed the third member of Eva’s team, Vic, blurring into his crocodile form.

Avery shifted as well. He wasn’t as big and dangerous as the others, but it looked like this was going to be a shifter fight, and they still had enough agents wielding guns—those who couldn’t shift on land, like Eva, or whose shifted forms weren’t especially lethal, like Jen Cho and the bat shifter who rounded out their current group. And he was faster as a wolf, with three good legs rather than just one.

Also, it threw off Debi’s trajectory. As Avery went to all fours, Debi sailed over his head and landed with her legs splayed out between two rows of parked cars. Avery had never seen such a shocked look on a lion’s face before.

“What’s the matter, sweet potato?” Jen Cho asked, the muzzle of her service weapon pointed rock-steady at Debi’s furry forehead. “You thought you were going to put the smackdown on some normal humans, didn’t you? Guess again, hon.”

For God’s sake, Jen, stop antagonizing the enormous lion who could eat either one of your forms in two bites.

Debi looked even bigger from his four-legged position than standing on two legs. As her hot predator scent hit his sharp lupine senses, Avery bristled without meaning to, baring his fangs in a snarl.

Debi weighed her options, her wild-eyed gaze darting from the closing circle of shifters to the exit ramp leading out of the parking garage. For a nervous instant Avery saw her eyeing him , as the weakest link among the transformed shifters. But then she seemed to realize how badly outnumbered she was. Her leonine outline blurred and a naked woman crouched where the lion had stood. She spread her hands on the pavement. Eva and Cho marched up to handcuff her, while the others shifted back and collected their clothes.

This was always the undignified part of shifting on a case. As he reached for his pants, Avery tried not to feel self-conscious about the scars on his leg, the wasted muscles that were no longer hidden by his pants. Shifters were generally pretty comfortable with nudity and polite about not staring at the flaws in each other’s bodies. Also, if anyone did ask, “wounded in action in Afghanistan” was usually enough to shut them up. Most of the people he worked with regularly knew the story anyway.

“Who are you people?” Debi demanded as Eva twisted her hands behind her back and unceremoniously snapped the cuffs on her.

“We’re the SCB,” Avery said, buttoning up his shirt. “Special Crimes Bureau. Why has no one ever heard of us? Maybe we need a better PR department.”

“Isn’t anyone going to read me my rights?” Debi growled, her voice strained since Cho had a knee in her back.

“We’d only need to do that if we were arresting you.” Avery picked up his gun and checked the action to make sure it was none the worse for wear after clattering on concrete. “We’re just taking you in for some questions. Someone get her phone, would you? Ah, thanks, Mila.”

“If you’re questioning me, why are you handcuffing me? I want my lawyer.”

“I think you just gave us an ample demonstration of why they’re necessary,” Eva said, hauling her to her feet.

“I’m not saying anything without a lawyer,” Debi spat.

“Really? We’ll see if you still feel that way after we make you a very exclusive and limited-time offer to escape prosecution.” Avery holstered his gun and buttoned up his shirt. His hands were shaking slightly—partly from adrenaline, but mostly from the awareness of how close to the edge they were running this entire operation. They couldn’t keep Debi out of communication with her siblings for very long, not legally at least, and Jack’s life might depend on how they handled the initial stages of their interview with her.

* * *

Debi had not ceased her demands for a lawyer by the time they hustled her into the SCB’s op center.

Avery had pitched the idea of taking her somewhere more relaxed and less intimidatingly jail-like, such as a restaurant, but Eva pointed out that given half a chance, she was certain to a) run, b) yell for help, or c) call her lawyer and/or one of her siblings. They needed to keep her out of contact with the rest of the world for as long as they could, which hopefully would be long enough to get through to her.

Still, rather than taking her into their usual suspect interview room, with its bare metal table and uncomfortable chairs, Avery and Cho escorted her to the much cozier lounge they used to debrief witnesses. Due to the SCB’s ongoing budget shortfalls, it also doubled as the employee break room; twelve hours ago, Avery had been napping on one of the couches.

Now he sat on the same couch across from her after helping Cho get her settled into a comfortable chair, made slightly less comfortable by the fact that her wrist was handcuffed to the chair’s arm. She’d been allowed to get dressed in the backseat of Eva’s Ford Explorer, flanked by two agents to make sure she didn’t try shifting while the cuffs were off.

“I’m Agent Hollen, Ms. Fallon,” Avery said. “This is Agent Cho. Can we get you anything? Coffee, maybe?”

Debi twitched a crease in her charcoal slacks back into place, then sat ramrod-straight in a frosty silence.

“I know you think we’re hassling you, but we’re actually trying to help you,” Avery said. He leaned forward, putting on his warmest and most sympathetic bonding-with-the-witness face. Avery tended to be good at this. He did genuinely empathize with most of the people they dealt with. Even now, half out of his mind with worry for his partner, he appreciated that Debi had to be scared as well as angry.

He reminded himself, however, that even though she’d stayed home rather than out helping her brothers and sister tear an innocent victim apart, she was still just as guilty as they were.

“Some ‘help’,” Debi said coolly, looking down her aristocratic nose at him. “Were you also ‘helping’ me when your nasty little friend there bounced my forehead off the pavement?”

“I see lots of hard surfaces in here to bounce other parts of you off of,” Cho said, cheerfully swinging into her favorite ‘bad cop’ role without consulting Avery.

“Look, Debi,” Avery said, getting her attention back on him. “The reason why we wanted you in here without a lawyer is pretty simple. We know what you did. We know what your entire family, your pride, has done. And we have evidence.” This last part was the only lie. They didn’t have a shred. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be a lie for long. “We brought you in here alone to give you a chance to save yourself.”

Her eyes had gone wide for a moment; now they narrowed. “Save myself at the expense of my pride?” she sneered. “You must be joking.”

“Your pride put that rope around their own necks,” Avery said, keeping his voice calm. “And you did too. But we’re offering you an opportunity to get out of the noose before it closes around you.”

“And what, exactly, are these heinous crimes you think we’ve committed?”

“Murder,” Cho said, her voice cold.

Again a quick flash of shock, her eyes wide; then the veneer of calm settled over her again. “Oh, because we’re large predator shifters, you assume we’ve killed someone? Do you level these accusations at every predator shifter you meet? I saw you’ve got a few on your team. And what about you , Agent Hollen? You know some of the stories they tell about werewolves, don’t you? Even—” Her contemptuous gaze flicked to his leg. “—a crippled werewolf.”

“Are you listening to anything we say, ice princess?” Cho demanded. “Did you hear me say the word murder? Because that’s a big word. Murder. A big, tough word. A word that can take away your whole world, all your nice things and your private yacht and your family and your freedom. And we can prove you did it. All of you.”

Debi snorted and inspected her nails as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Avery recognized the tension she was trying not to display, though; her shoulders were stiff.

“You have no idea who you’re dealing with, you fools. Whatever outrageous accusations you’ve concocted, our lawyers will make sure we never see jail time.”

Avery forced a laugh. He looked at Cho. “Hey, she thinks we’re going to put her in jail. Isn’t that cute?”

“Adorable,” Cho said. She grinned, showing small white teeth.

“Oh, is this the part when you try to intimidate me with threats of violence?” Debi asked. “Because our lawyers will bury you stupid g-men.”

“Hon, we’re not the FBI,” Cho said. “We’re the SCB. If you want to compare us to a different agency, you could call us the shifter CIA.”

This time the flash in her eyes was fear. Avery pushed on it.

“You haven’t seen the news erupt in 24/7 headline bulletins about shapeshifters, have you?” he said. “No, because we’re the people who make sure that doesn’t happen. Which means, very quietly, taking care of shifters who commit crimes before they can be discovered. If you aren’t interested in our offer, you aren’t going to get a chance to talk to a lawyer. Ever.”

This was something like the truth—but a very selective version of it. The SCB existed as part of an underground network of shifter infrastructure designed to handle their own problems without involving non-shifting humans any more than necessary. There were shifter doctors, social workers, therapists, and lawyers, as well as contacts the SCB had in other law enforcement agencies. Debi might not be facing a regular trial, but she probably wasn’t going to be locked up in a secret underground prison forever, either, let alone any of the more terminal options she must now be contemplating.

“Here’s the thing, Debi,” Avery said, leaning forward in his sympathetic-investigator role again, while Cho leaned back with her arms folded over her chest and smiled viciously. “I’m a pack animal too. Werewolves, right? We’re famous for it. So I know how much it knots you up to think about turning on your packmates—your pride.

“But what they did—what they’re doing now—is wrong. Very wrong. I think somewhere deep down, you know that, or you’d be out there with them, hunting.”

Debi refused to meet his eyes. Her nails drummed a tattoo on the arm of the chair.

“Do you ever go along with them?” Avery asked gently. “Or have you always used the company as an excuse to stay behind? Because it is an excuse, isn’t it? Someone always has to stay behind and mind the store. I think it’s probably always you.”

The tattoo on the arm of the chair stopped as she made a fist.

“It’s not because you can’t hunt. I’ve seen your lioness in action. You’d be fearsome out there. But I don’t think you like going along. You don’t like participating in their games. The only reason why you haven’t said anything is because you don’t want to break with pride solidarity. Isn’t that right?”

“They’re my family ,” Debi spat between clenched teeth. “If they were your pack, what would you do?”

“Probably the same thing,” Avery said, quashing a dull and very old pain at the word pack . He didn’t have one. Not really. “But there comes a point when you have to figure out who you are. What kind of person you are. And what kind of harm you’re willing to turn a blind eye to.”

There was a tap at the door, right on cue. Rivkah Rosen had been listening outside. She came in with an envelope in her hand, crossed the room quietly to place it in Avery’s hand, then retreated.

“What’s that?” Debi asked, her eyes tracking it. The envelope was a 6x9 manilla one. Not the sort that was likely to hold legal documents.

“I had one of our interns pick up a few things.” Avery spilled some photos into his hand and spread them out on the coffee table. Most of them were women, though not all. “Do you recognize any of these people?”

But the sharp intake of Debi’s breath was a giveaway.

“This is Romchang,” Avery said, holding up a photo of a dark-haired young woman, laughing with her arms around a much older woman. “She immigrated from Cambodia with her mother. She must have been delighted to get such a good job at a well-regarded company. Her mother reported her missing and tried to have her found, but what could an old lady do? She only spoke a few words of English and had no money, because she was disabled and dependent on her daughter. See, this is her mother here. She’s in a nursing home now, which interestingly enough is being paid for with an out-of-court settlement from a shell corporation your company controls. Almost as if she’s being paid off.”

He held up another photo of the elderly woman with a cat in her lap and a walker beside her. Debi tried to look away. Jen Cho took the photo from Avery’s fingers and shoved it in Debi’s face so she couldn’t turn her head without seeing it.

“And this is Mandy Bredon,” Avery said, holding up another. “Margay shifter. She has a daughter in foster care, did you know that? She’s gone through a lot of rough stuff, been on and off cocaine, hooked up with some bad-news boyfriends. But she was finally getting her life turned around. Three years ago, she failed to show up for a court-appointed meeting with her daughter. Your company said she had quit and left the state, incidentally violating the terms of her probation and ensuring that she’d never see her daughter again. Why would she do that? Why indeed? Her daughter is seven now, by the way. Look, here she is. Just getting old enough for sleepovers and mother-daughter days at school.”

He held the photo of a solemn, sad-looking little girl under Debi’s nose.

Debi slapped it away with her free hand, knocking it out of Avery’s hand. Cho got up wordlessly to retrieve it.

“Why are you doing this?” Debi demanded, jerking at the cuffs holding her to the chair. Her eyes glistened.

“Because I want you to see the human cost to what your family does,” Avery said. “These aren’t prey animals. They aren’t faceless and replaceable drones. These are people . Human beings, with families.”

He shuffled the photos back into the envelope, making sure Debi could see how many there were.

“From the look of things, you try to pick people who wouldn’t be missed. Recent immigrants. Ex-felons. The poor. People who either don’t have anyone to miss them, or don’t have anyone who has connections and money enough to hurt you. But they were still people. They were loved. They are missed. I could tell you a story for each and every one of them?—”

“Don’t!” Debi snarled.

“—and these are just the ones we know about. I’m sure there are plenty we haven’t found out about yet, because you were that much better at burying them, or that much more careful about picking someone who wouldn’t leave anyone behind to look for them. But each and every one of them is a person just like you—a person who was once a child, who was loved, who had a whole future to look forward to.”

“Stop!”

“And you know that,” Avery concluded, laying the envelope on the end table beside his end of the couch. “Or you wouldn’t be here, in Seattle, rather than wherever they’ve taken their latest victim.”

Debi drew a shuddering breath. Her uncuffed hand was curled in her lap, and she stared at it, head bowed.

“Debi, there’s one more picture I want you to look at.” This one didn’t come from the envelope. Avery retrieved it from his jacket pocket and held it out. The photo had been taken at a company picnic a couple of years ago. Cho, slipping around with her cell phone camera like the infiltration specialist she was, had caught Jack in the act of pressing a cold bottle of beer to the back of Avery’s neck.

It was rare for Jack to be so openly playful, and the mischievous grin in the photo was one that few people got to see. That was why Avery had asked Cho to email it to him, though he’d claimed at the time it was for blackmail material.

“This is Jack Ross. He’s one of our agents. He’s also my partner, and my best friend. Debi, I don’t have a pack, a pride, like you do. I don’t have a family. I lost mine a long time ago.”

He held out the photo, this time not shoving it at her, just holding it between them so she could look at it, or not, as she chose. From the corner of his eye, he was aware of Cho’s sympathetic look.

“That’s what Jack is. He’s my pack. My family. My friend. That’s what he is to all of us here. We’re a pride, and we need to get our missing one back. We have reason to believe your family has taken him somewhere.”

Avery touched the envelope with the hand not holding the photo.

“You couldn’t save any of these people, even if you wanted to. But you can save Jack.”

Please, please let there still be time to save Jack.

For a long time, Debi stared at her lap without reacting. Then she reached out and took the photo from him. She gazed at it as if she was looking through it, then blinked at last and looked up.

“This is your guy?”

“He was undercover, looking into the disappearances of the shifters your family abducted,” Cho said. “We lost contact with him.”

Debi looked down at the picture again. “Yes,” she said, very softly.

“Yes what?” Avery demanded, half rising from his seat. “Yes, we lost contact? Yes, they killed him? Yes what ?”

“We ... found about him accidentally. He wasn’t the target.”

Cho’s head moved subtly, a quick glance down: checking the recording app on her phone.

“ Did you kill him ?” Avery hardly recognized his own voice.

“To be sure we’re clear,” Cho said, with a quelling glance at Avery, “you recognize this photo as Agent Jack Ross, correct?”

“I didn’t know his name,” Debi said.

“Where is he now?”

She darted a quick look at Avery. “He’s still alive. I mean, he was, the last time I saw him. We ... we weren’t after him. He just got in the way.”

Jack was still alive. At least, he hadn’t been killed outright. That was something. “Who were you after?” Avery asked.

Debi chewed her bottom lip fiercely. Small drops of blood sprang up along the glossy line of it. “Fallon’s administrative assistant.”

Avery cast his mind back, trying to remember the dossiers on Fallon’s staff. “Casey McClaren?”

Debi gave a very small nod. “She’s ... everything you said. Didn’t have close friends, even at the company. No family. No one to miss her.”

An involuntary growl bubbled up in Avery’s throat; he stifled it. “Everyone has someone to miss them.”

“I know!” Debi burst out. “I do . It was—it was never meant to go this far, do you understand? It started with hunting animals. I mean, everyone does that. Everyone who shifts into a predator. You do that, right?” She looked desperately at Avery, who nodded. Then her stare of appeal turned on Cho. “And you? I don’t know what kind of shifter you are?—”

“Gecko,” Cho said. “I hunt bugs. Not people.”

“But it wasn’t supposed to be people!” It was almost a wail. “The problem was, wild game just wasn’t challenging enough. We even tried bears, for a while, but when you get a whole pride of lions together, a bear goes down pretty easy. Animals just aren’t smart enough to be fun to hunt. It comes down to a matter of brute strength, claw versus claw. Roger didn’t like that. He thought we could make it more interesting.”

“By hunting people instead of animals,” Cho said. Avery stayed quiet.

Debi’s chest heaved with short, shallow breaths. “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes.”

“You didn’t agree with it.”

“No, but—you don’t understand how hard it is to argue with Roger. With the whole pride. You’re a pack animal, Agent Hollen—you must know!”

Cho looked disgusted, but Avery did, in fact, understand. Peer pressure to go along with the rest of the group, to bow under and be carried along with the tide of it, was a powerful urge for those who shifted into social animals like wolves or horses, orcas or lions. There were times when he still had to fight it in meetings; his instinctive response to arguments was to capitulate for the sake of group harmony.

And besides, they were her family. She loved them. Even if none of them deserved it.

“Did you ever go along?” Avery asked.

“Only once.” Her breath hitched in something that wasn’t quite a sob. “It was ... I didn’t ... didn’t go any more after that. I don’t think they knew how much it bothered me. Honestly, I don’t think I knew how much it bothered me. I just tried not to think about it too much. Every family has a few points of disagreement, don’t they? I did my job, and let them go enjoy their hobby.”

“Their hobby of killing people,” Cho said, her voice so frigid it would’ve sent an actual gecko into hibernation. “Just so we’re clear on that.”

“I know,” Debi whispered. She raised her free hand to press against her face.

Avery nudged a box of Kleenex in her direction, though she still wasn’t quite crying. It was more a sort of emotional overload.

“Where are Roger and the rest now, Debi?” Avery asked.

Debi shook her head.

“You can save a life, Debi. Maybe two. But you have to tell us.”

Her breath caught again, and she whispered, so softly he could barely hear her, “There’s an island.”

Avery’s glance flicked sideways, to meet the electric snap of excitement in Cho’s eyes. “What island, Debi? Where?”

“Up the coast a little way. Our family owns it, but it’s not in our name.”

That plausible-deniability thing again. The Fallons were good at covering their asses. “Holding company?” Cho asked.

Debi nodded. “The name on the paperwork is RMD Investments. For our initials—Roger and Rory, Mara, Debi and Derek.”

Cho sprang to her feet and was out the door like a shot.

Avery had to fight down his own surge of eagerness. “What’s on the island?”

“Nothing,” Debi said, shaking her head. “Nothing at all. Maybe a few falling-down hunting and fishing cabins from before we bought the place, but mostly we just keep it wild to hunt on. And not,” she added sharply, “ not what you’re thinking. Not only what you’re thinking, anyway. We keep it stocked with deer and moose and other game animals. Whenever one of us needs a getaway, we’ll take the yacht up there and spend a weekend.”

As an urban shifter, Avery understood the appeal of a getaway island where a shifter could embrace all the hidden aspects of their nature. It sounded like a dream come true, in fact. “Are Roger and the others up there now?”

Debi gave a silent nod.

Cho stuck her head in. “Well, now we have the name, it took ten seconds to find it in the property records we’ve been looking at. Stiers is getting clearance from the Canadians right now to send our S she plucked at it, picking off little pieces and rolling them into balls. “What’s going to happen to me now?”

“I don’t know. That depends on my boss.”

The door opened and Vic Mendoza sauntered in. “Hey, looks like I get to sit out the S&R and keep grilling our guest here. Lucky me. From what I hear, it’s monsoon season out there.”

Debi looked anxiously at Avery.

“Just cooperate with him,” Avery said. Against his better judgment, he patted her on her shoulder, feeling the muscles beneath the business suit. He still wasn’t sure if he believed that she’d only gone on one hunt with the rest of them, but it didn’t matter now. “The more you can tell us about your siblings’ methods and their past hunts, the more chance we can get Casey and Jack out of there alive.”

“Y’all have fun storming the castle,” Vic drawled.

Avery limped quickly out the door, almost running into Eva in the hall.

“Gear up and meet us at the helipad,” she was saying into her radio. “If we’re gonna make it anywhere, we gotta go now. It’s pouring buckets out there, and blowing a regular hurricane up the coast—” She looked up and saw Avery. “Oh no, you aren’t coming.”

“Oh yes, I am. What do I need to get?”

“We’re up against a whole pride of lion shifters, Hollen.”

“Yeah, and you’re leaving one of your heavy hitters behind to guard the lion shifter here . You need all the bodies you can get. And you know I can handle myself just fine in the field.”

Eva planted her fist on her hip. “All right,” she said. “But I’m point on this one. You come with me, you’re part of my team. If that means I decide you stay in the chopper for backup, that’s what you do.”

“Agreed.”

“As for what you need, we’ve got the usual arsenal on board, but you better grab a rain slicker.” Eva smiled, and for a moment Avery glimpsed the killer whale lurking beneath the human skin she wore. “We’re gonna get wet.”