Page 1

CHAPTER 1

“... and he climbed up on the windowsill yelling, ‘I’m a bird, I’m a bird!’” the very drunk girl wearing nothing but an oversized University of Arizona sweatshirt sobbed into Costa’s shoulder. “And then he jumped out the window!”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Costa said, trying to extricate himself from her watery clutches without upsetting her too much. He gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder and unloaded her on a female friend among the other kids in the dorm room, where she clung like a sad, drunken barnacle.

“It’s the third floor!” one of the frat boys protested. He appeared to be slightly less drunk than the others. “He has to have broken a leg, at least.”

“We have people looking for him right now.” In retrospect Costa wished he’d taken that duty. At the time, he’d thought that interviewing witnesses would be less of a problem than searching bushes and ornamental cactus gardens all over campus for an extremely stoned owl shifter.

He had been wrong. So, so very wrong.

“We’ve never had a pledge jump out the window, Officer,” another of the frat kids earnestly assured Costa with the slow-paced speech of a very drunk person trying to act sober. “This is the first time ever .”

“It was like he thought he could really fly!” the girl wailed. “I thought that was just a made-up, like, scared straight anti-drug thing! I didn’t think it happened in real life !”

“Especially when you’re just a little high,” one of the frat boys said. “I mean, mescaline, or—ow!” One of his buddies had stepped on his foot, gesturing wildly to the federal agent in the room.

Costa didn’t bother trying to explain he wasn’t that kind of federal agent. The Special Crimes Bureau, aka the Shifter Crimes Bureau, cared nothing about drugs; what the SCB cared about was investigating shifter-related incidents and trying to prevent their exposure to the world at large.

Instead of explaining, he went to the open window and looked down on the landscaped shrubs and sidewalk below. The sun was just peeking up over the horizon, painting the campus in golden light. If the kid had shifted and flown (the logical conclusion, since his clothes had turned up in a pile under the window and the rest of him was nowhere to be found), he could be miles away by now.

They wouldn’t even have known about it, except the campus security officer who answered the frat kids’ panicked call was one of the local shifter community and had called them. So here they were, running damage control. And Costa was here because he had been up for his habitual early-morning jog and was therefore one of the only agents available to answer the call, with only the skeleton night staff on duty.

Just as he was thinking that he should’ve spent an extra hour in bed, the radio crackled and Cat Delgado said cheerfully, “Got him, boss.”

“Unharmed?” Costa asked, low, turning away from the window.

“Yeah, he’s fine. We’re going to hold him in custody for a bit until he’s—ah—back to normal.”

Meaning he was still an owl. “Do that,” Costa said. “Call the interns and get them back to base. I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Did you find him?” the less-drunk frat guy asked.

“Yes, he’s fine, he’s sleeping it off.”

“But how’d he get dow?—”

“Pure luck,” Costa said. “Nobody else try it,” he added, scowling sternly, as some of the others eyed the window speculatively. “Good night, morning that is. Hope not to hear from you again.”

He went downstairs and out into the brisk early-morning desert air, where he paused to draw a deep breath to clear away the residue of stale alcohol clinging to his shifter-sensitive sinuses. It was spring in Tucson, by far the nicest time of year, when the desert bloomed and the oven of summer had not yet begun to bake. And he could be out jogging and inhaling the crisp scent of creosote bush and mesquite and desert wildflowers, but no, he was here interviewing tanked 21-year-olds with a staff that consisted, at the moment, of Delgado and two interns, the only people who were available in the middle of the night on short notice.

It had been most of a year since the devastating blow of last summer’s shifter plague, and the office was still struggling with ongoing staffing issues. They had been lucky, Costa knew, not to lose more people. But he wasn’t okay with losing any people.

Cesar Quinn Costa, chief of the Southwest SCB, was a large man, muscular but not heavy, with an athlete’s grace and light, quick steps. His hair was a slightly grown-out mop of dark red, at this time of year lacking the paler, carroty sun-streaking that it would develop in summer. The call from a slightly desperate Delgado had come just as he’d been halfway through his single pre-run cup of black coffee. He was wearing drawstring sweat pants and clunky running shoes, with a sweatshirt over a bare chest that he’d thrown on against the desert chill as he went out the door.

At least he fit in on a college campus.

“I’m outside the dorms,” he told Delgado over the radio. “Where are you?”

“Parking garage, chief. Main gate.”

He set off in that direction on the paths that looped through the campus, loping in a slow jog. He hadn’t made it far before a horse clattered up beside him on the bike path.

It was a beautiful, well-toned pinto quarter horse mare, patterned with great splashes of cream and roan coloring. The horse wore no saddle or bridle. There was a woman on its back attempting to stay on by clinging to its mane while also trying to hold on to a small bundle which looked like it was rolled up in a pair of jeans.

“Why are you a horse?” Costa sternly asked the horse.

“We thought it would be a good way to cover more ground,” the girl on the horse’s back panted. “And we were right. Ow, my butt.”

“No offense, Dawes, but I wasn’t talking to you.”

The rider, Fifi Dawes, slid off with another small “ow.” She was older than a typical intern, in her early thirties, pillowy and soft-looking, and generally didn’t look well suited to athletic field activities. She probably should have been the one to stay in the office to staff the phones. But the interns had already rock-paper-scissored for it before Costa got there, and decided to leave the kiwi shifter, so fine; he figured he’d let them make that decision, and it wasn’t like a kiwi was going to be any more useful in the field than Fifi’s capybara. They were all new hires, so he was trying to give them as much leeway to do their own decision-making and team-building as possible.

Turning into a horse in the middle of the U of A campus was really pushing the limits of his patience, though.

“Get your pants on, Boyd,” he told the horse. “Not here; find somewhere discreet.”

The mare flattened her ears, but delicately pulled back her lips from her long, strong horse teeth and neatly took the bundle of clothing from Fifi. It was tied up in her belt with a loop to clench between her teeth, which suggested to Costa, ominously, that she had a habit of doing this. She trotted off in search of a place to change, evidently oblivious to a pair of sleepy-looking students walking to the cafeteria who had pulled out their cell phones to take pictures. Costa figured it wouldn’t hurt since they didn’t have footage of her shifting, but he was going to tear her a new one as soon as they got back to the office.

“Stay with her until she gets dressed, then both of you head over to the main gate parking garage and meet up with Agent Delgado,” Costa told her. “I’m going there now. By the way, I want an unauthorized-shifting-in-the-field form on my desk from each of you before you leave today.”

“Is that the SH-24 or the SH-36?” Fifi asked, wide-eyed and eager to please.

“Both,” Costa snapped, rather than admit that he couldn’t remember. The forms came down from central HQ and changed all the time.

He reached the parking garage in considerably less than a good mood. One of the agency’s SUVs was parked on the lower level, with Delgado perched on the hood, holding a grease-stained paper sack. She was a slim, athletic woman, her long, silky black hair tied back in a practical bun. As usual for field work, she had camouflaged the scaly lizardlike side of her head so that it simply looked like she’d shaved it. Delgado was a chameleon shifter who did not fully shift; instead she changed her skin, but she had to concentrate to hold it. In the dimness of the parking garage, he could see the faint glimmers of scales above her ear that were no longer quite covered up.

“Hey, boss.” She slid off the hood and held out the small sack. “Fries? I was starving.”

Costa shook his head, although the smell of grease and salt was tempting. “My body is a temple, and I’m not gracing the temple with those saturated fat bombs first thing in the morning.”

“Your loss,” Delgado said, reaching into the bag. “Jessie and Fifi checked in and said they were headed over.”

“I’m going to guess you only talked to Fifi, since Jessie is a horse.”

“Oh, dear.”

“At least they’re together. I told Fifi to stay with her until she’s changed, in both senses of the word. Where’s our fugitive?”

Delgado jerked her chin at the backseat. Costa peered through the tinted window. There was a cardboard box on the backseat with Delgado’s jacket in it, and snuggled down in the middle of that, a small owl with its eyes closed and beak open. Through the window, Costa could hear faint, high-pitched snoring.

“He’s a Western screech owl,” Delgado said. “According to the birding app I installed during the Falcone business last year, anyway.”

“Did he screech?”

“No, he nibbled my fingers and fell asleep. If he gets sick on my jacket, he’s paying for it. Is there any cleanup left to do?”

“Nah,” Costa said. He leaned a hip against the rear fender and regretted passing up the fries. That cup of coffee was a long time ago. Wrenching his brain away from food and back to business, he went on, “Someone should follow up with the college kids in a day or two, just to make sure none of them did any more investigating on their own. I doubt it, though. Everyone up there was so baked or drunk that I’d give low odds they’ll even remember it in any detail. One of the interns can handle that job.” It seemed a fitting punishment for Jessie Boyd, assuming she could manage to do it without turning into a horse.

“What about Sleeping Beauty? What do we do with him?”

“If he doesn’t need medical attention, find a cozy patch of cactus in an out-of-the-way location, stick him in a hollow and let him sleep it off. If he shifts before he wakes up, he’ll get a valuable life lesson.”

“Wow, boss. You’re mean when you don’t get your beauty sleep.”

“Mean? You haven’t seen me mean yet. He’ll wake up naked, regret his life choices, and hopefully won’t do it again. The follow-up agent ought to check in with him too.”

The two interns arrived just then. Fifi looked nervous. Jessie, who was now a tall, tanned young woman with her hair in sun-streaked brown braids, appeared buoyant. She was definitely getting all the crap busywork he could find for her over the next couple of days, Costa decided.

The SCB’s interns were the lifeblood of the organization in their own way, an ever-changing group of shifters and humans who were too untrained, inexperienced, unqualified, or uninterested to be field agents. They filled in with office tasks that ranged from filing paperwork to picking up lunch, as well as providing warm bodies for legwork on simple, mostly harmless cases like this one.

Careless shifting, however, needed to be nipped in the bud before it turned into everyone’s problem.

“Boyd, did anyone take a picture of you shifting?” he snapped.

“Course not,” Jessie said. “I’m careful.”

“No you aren’t. Consequently, you’re on social media duty for the next few days, with special attention to horse sightings around town. Downvote or be prepared to send a takedown notice on anything valid, and see if you can find something unrelated to us to call attention to instead.”

At least Jessie had the common sense not to argue, though he could see her thinking about it. Instead she said smartly, “Yes, sir.”

She either had the makings of a great field agent or a terminal pain in his ass. Possibly both.

“Permission to head home, sir?” Cat asked just as smartly.

Case in point.

“Yeah, drop off the feathered menace, take the interns to the office for a half-shift, then hit the hay. It’s Caine’s day off, so you were the duty agent overnight, right? You should’ve been off hours ago.”

“Thank you for noticing,” Delgado said. “Come on, ladies, let’s go find a perch for our feathered friend. Need a ride, boss?”

Costa shook his head. “I’ve got my car.”

He was parked all the way across campus, but it was a pleasant walk. The sun was fully up now, the air growing warm and perfumed with a wealth of lovely spring scents. Tucson was as lush and verdant as it was ever going to get. Costa wondered if he might take off early this afternoon to make up for the interrupted morning. Tomorrow was Saturday; he could get out in the back country, maybe camp overnight?—

Oh hell. Not this weekend. At least not tonight.

Costa took out his phone as he walked. Yep, several missed texts on the family chat. Ignoring those for now, he paged through his contacts to the one labeled ACME NO 1.

He wondered if she’d be up yet, but of course she was. Like him, she was an early riser. She answered on the first ring.

“Let me guess,” said the warm, low voice, thrumming with pleasant amusement at his expense. “You need a date.”

Costa nearly tripped on perfectly flat pavement. He stopped walking and sat on a low wall beside an ornamental shrub planting. Diana had no idea—no idea—what that voice did to him. It was a voice made to be a late-night radio DJ, smooth and warm and easy. A voice that uplifted, a voice that comforted.

“Don’t I ever just call to say hi?” he asked, keeping it light.

“No,” said Acme No. 1, otherwise known as Diana Reid, but she sounded amused rather than annoyed. “We don’t have that kind of relationship. You know, my coworkers think you’re the world’s worst boyfriend.”

Costa laughed; he couldn’t help it. She had that effect on him. “I strive to be the best. Anyway, you’re right, I have a sudden need for an emergency date. Tonight’s the big family to-do for Great-Uncle Rodrigo’s eighty-seventh birthday at the family ranch. The whole clan is going to be there. Sorry about the short notice; if you can’t make it, I get it.”

“Uncle Roddy is how old? My gosh, how time flies. And I haven’t been out to the ranch in absolutely ages.” She turned serious. “I actually would like to come, Quinn, even though I think at this point I’m down a date or so in the tally?—”

“I’m at your disposal,” Costa promised.

“—But I’m on a callout. You just happened to catch me in the office while I still have cell coverage, but I won’t be here for long. We’re all hands on deck for an S he could pick it up later. He’d jog from here to the office. It was about ten or twelve miles, give or take a little. He’d done longer runs than that—not generally on a workday, but it wasn’t too hot. It would give him a chance to clear his head, get himself straightened out, and think about work rather than Diana Reid.

Not thinking about Diana was a good plan. A great plan, even. Too bad it never worked.