Page 3 of Handcuffed to the Bear (Shifter Agents #1)

CHAPTER 3

“You didn’t wake me up ?”

Soft-spoken, level-headed Avery Hollen had a firmly established reputation as the office nice guy. He was the calm center around which the hectic heartbeat of the SCB’s Seattle-based Pacific Northwest division pulsed. When Avery blew up, he even did it in a relatively calm way—but that didn’t make it any less startling to people who were used to thinking of him as a guy who never got mad.

Jen Cho jumped so hard she actually leaped away, looking for a moment very much like the gecko that was her shifter form. “Hey, I did wake you,” she said defensively. “Just now. So don’t shoot the messenger. We weren’t sure anything was wrong. We still aren’t sure if anything’s wrong.”

“Jack’s missed two check-ins and you aren’t—All right. All right.” Avery rubbed his eyes and painfully swung his legs off the couch. He’d known it was a mistake to fall asleep in the office break room, but he hadn’t wanted to take the time to drive all the way home and back, not with Jack out on the first night of a very dangerous assignment. Now he’d be paying for it in stiffness and pain. He had a desk full of painkillers, over-the-counter stuff all the way up to heavy-duty prescription ones, but that didn’t help with the problem of getting to the desk.

Sitting on the edge of the couch while he psyched himself up for it, he asked, “Have you called Stiers?”

“Not yet,” Cho said. “I figured I’d get your input first, before pushing the panic button.”

Avery rubbed his gritty eyes, willing his brain to kick-start itself. Back in the Army, he used to be able to go on two hours of sleep a night for weeks. On the other hand, he wasn’t twenty anymore, either.

Cho rinsed a cup in the sink and filled it from the coffeepot. She opened one of the drawers, took out a jar of instant coffee crystals and added a couple of generous spoonfuls, then dumped four packets of sugar into it and shoved it into his hands. “Here, have a J. Cho morning special. Since they still won’t spring for an espresso machine in here, this is the next best thing. Gets the cobwebs out of your brain.”

Avery sipped and made a horrified face. “This should be classified as some sort of chemical weapon.”

“Yes, that’s what makes it work.”

“I think my teeth are melting.”

“Drink up, you giant wuss.”

* * *

The SCB was chronically underfunded, mostly due to the difficulty of justifying to the federal penny-pushers what it was, exactly, that they did. Their Pacific Northwest headquarters, which handled the entire swath of states north of California and west of the Rockies, was run out of a modest suite of offices in a normal office building.

Tonight there was only a skeleton night shift consisting of Cho, Avery, and a young intern named Rivkah Rosen. Most of the lights were off.

His tired brain buzzing from the sugar and caffeine, Avery limped through the dim ops center to the pool of light around Rosen and Cho. The damaged muscles in his leg kept knotting up, making it stiff as a block of wood, the knee refusing to bend. Whenever he put weight on it, though, the leg wobbled and threatened to buckle.

Just a glorious memento of his one aborted tour in Afghanistan, nearly a decade ago now.

He stopped on the way by his desk to shake out two capsules from the mostly empty bottle in the bottom drawer, swallowing them with the dregs of Cho’s dreadful coffee sludge. He’d been trying to dial back on the meds lately, but right now he needed to be clearheaded and not distracted by pain, for Jack’s sake.

Damn it, Jack.

He reminded himself not to get too worked up about it. Yet. Jack had been undercover for about a week, having gotten himself hired by the catering company that worked most of the corporate events for Lion’s Share Software. Discreet strings were pulled to make sure he’d be on Fallon’s yacht on the night of the mixer.

Jack was supposed to check in every four hours throughout the night. He’d made the first check-in on schedule before the ship left port. Avery had been up for two days straight overseeing preparations for the op, and after Jack made his second check-in on schedule and the evening wore on with no sign of anything amiss, Cho had talked Avery into lying down to catch some sleep so he’d be alert if anything did happen.

Now Jack had missed two check-ins and no one knew what was going on.

“You should’ve woke me when he missed the first one.”

“You’d only been asleep for an hour. And you and I both know there are plenty of reasons why he might not have been able to find a safe place to call us from.”

Cho should know; she normally worked the undercover side of things. Her gecko form made her naturally inconspicuous, if a little out of place in the ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest, and she’d turned out to be a natural at infiltration. The only reason why she wasn’t working this job alongside Jack was because she was getting over a lingering bout of pneumonia—the Seattle climate really wasn’t good for geckos—and Stiers didn’t want to send her on any assignments that might involve running and fighting until she was back up to a hundred percent.

Avery had been glad to have her in the ops center because of her field experience, but he hadn’t considered the flip side: she was used to working with a minimal safety net and inclined to give the field agent the benefit of the doubt. Avery was exactly the opposite; he figured that as Jack’s handler on this particular assignment, worrying was his job .

“I wish we’d been able to get a second agent on the boat.” They were stretched thin, as usual; most of their field agents were out in Idaho and Montana, working a big dragnet operation in search of a rogue cougar shifter who’d killed three people at a remote wilderness lodge. “What’s the status of Eva’s team?”

“Standing by,” Intern Rosen reported after a glance at the computer screen. Jack’s only backup was a small strike team with a speedboat, led by their resident orca shifter. “We haven’t alerted them yet that anything’s wrong. Should we?”

“Not quite yet. What about our CI?” Avery asked. “Heard from him?”

Their confidential informant in Fallon’s organization was a security guard and lion shifter who was also the boyfriend of Fallon’s sister Mara. After helping to clean up the aftermath of one of the hunts, he’d had a change of heart, but was too scared to leave the company. He’d promised them information in return for immunity regarding his role in the murders. It was through him that they’d gotten most of their information about what the Fallons were up to.

Rosen shook her head.

“Look, we know Fallon confiscates cell phones for the duration of the cruise,” Cho pointed out. “Supposedly to help people relax and enjoy themselves without thinking about work. A guy making a phone call is going to stand out like a sore thumb. It could be that Jack just hasn’t been able to find an unobtrusive place to call in yet.”

“Yeah,” Avery said, but he didn’t believe it for a minute. Not Jack. It wasn’t merely a communication failure; Jack would’ve had a contingency plan in place. They’d worked together too long for Avery not to know that.

Despite Cho’s reassurances, gut instinct told him this op had gone FUBAR—fucked up beyond all recognition. He just hadn’t figured out the exact nature of the FUBAR-ing yet. Had Fallon realized that Jack was a plant, or that one of their pride was passing information to the feds? Or had Jack figured out who Fallon’s next target was, and gotten involved without waiting for backup?

One thing Avery knew for sure: if Jack believed Fallon was about to make a move toward the next person on his hit list, he wouldn’t merely have stood by and let it happen. Even if he couldn’t call for backup, Jack would’ve gone in anyway. He was exactly that sort of reckless hero type.

But he was also more than capable of handling himself in the field. If things had gone wrong, there was no more capable person to be out there. Not to mention that Jack could shift into a big damn grizzly bear. One-on-one, at least, he was capable of taking on the biggest lion in Fallon’s pride, and winning.

But part of Jack’s strategy would be contingent upon knowing that his team was out there, trying to get to him. So let’s make sure we don’t let him down.

“First we need to figure out where that boat is,” Avery decided. “Rosen, contact the Coast Guard and explain the situation. We’re not going to move on the boat yet—we can’t, without blowing all our work so far, but we can at least narrow down our efforts.”

Rosen nodded and reached for a headset.

“I should get out there,” Cho said. She was practically vibrating in place with eagerness to get back in the field again.

Or maybe that was the caffeine.

“Not yet. If we have to get up the coast in a hurry, we’ll need fast transportation. Helicopters. See what you can get hold of; they’re probably all out in Idaho, but I think the DEA owes us a favor. I,” he sighed, “am going to call Division Chief Stiers and let her know we seem to have lost her best field agent.”

Stiers, it turned out, was already up. She was a night owl—literally. A great horned owl, to be specific. She’d adapted to working the day shift since getting her promotion from field agent to chief of the Bureau’s Pacific Northwest division, but Avery had very rarely managed to catch her asleep. Rumor around the office was that she didn’t sleep at all. He’d also heard that she liked to drop in at night to see if she could catch new techs napping on the job.

Tonight, though, she was nowhere near the office. “Glad you caught me,” Stiers said, answering on the first ring. “I’m still in Boise, working on our cougar problem, but I’ve got a flight back to Seattle in the morning. How much of an emergency would you say this is?”

“Depends on whether we hear from Jack in the next few hours,” Avery said. He dug a thumb into his temple. Cho’s caffeine-and-sugar bomb had done the trick as far as jolting him awake, but it had left him with a throbbing headache that the aspirin didn’t seem to be cutting. It didn’t help that his wolf instincts were driven half mad by inactivity while a pack member was in danger. He itched under his skin, restless, wanting to move.

With the habits of long practice, he forced himself to stillness, soothing his wolfish side back to relative calm. “Don’t bump up your flight. Just take care of what you need to there. We’ve got the situation in hand and we’ll brief you when you arrive.”

After he hung up, he sat for a moment with his forehead resting on the heel of his hand. The question was whether Jack had it in hand, and there was no way to know until they either heard from the reckless bear-shifting bastard or found him.

Something clunked heavily near his elbow. He raised his head to find that Cho had refilled his cup. “Figured this was the sort of night that called for two Cho specials,” she said. “It’ll cure what ails ya.”

“Oh, God,” Avery groaned, but he took a sip anyway, wincing as the powerful combination of too much coffee and even more sugar blasted his taste buds. It’d either clear out his headache or leave him unable to sleep for a week. “You’re a menace, you know that?”

“I strive to be menacing,” Cho said. She sat on the edge of his desk, swinging her legs and looking about as un menacing as it was possible to be, especially in her oversized sweater and jeans. Avery wasn’t a big guy, but she made him feel large. Her straight dark hair fell in two graceful wings on either side of her narrow face.

She nudged him with her foot. “Hey. He’ll be okay, Hollen. We’ll find him.”

“I’m confident Jack can take care of himself,” Avery said. “I just wish we could do more to make sure he doesn’t have to. We’re supposed to be his backup, damn it.”

Cho punched him lightly in the shoulder. “We’ll get him back, Avery.”

“Weren’t you getting us a helicopter?”

“On it, Agent Wolf-Shifter sir ,” she said, with a fake (and very sloppy) salute.

Avery snorted and drank some more of the sticky goop in the cup. Jack had better have the situation under control, or Avery would use his one good leg—or three good wolf legs—to kick his ass.