Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(39)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Leslie gave her a thoughtful look as she stopped. "I thought that you were mismatched when I first met you two. But you aren’t, are you?"

"No," Anna agreed. "I’m the only one who knows when he’s teasing."

"If you say so," said Leslie, amused.

Anna looked around. "Is this where Jacob was found?"

"Over here."

Between the sidewalk and the sea stood a two-rail decorative pipe fence that the salt water had colored green and rust. Beyond that, a short rocky shoreline edged in green sea grasses gave way to a bit of water and a wall of worn wooden poles stuck side by side like soldiers keeping the waves off the land. Leslie pointed to a small patch of dirt between the wharf wall and the wooden poles.

Jacob would have been sheltered a little from the weather. Anna bent down a little closer than she needed to when she unclipped Charles’s leash, and she breathed in his familiar scent to comfort herself. He waited until she stood up before he hopped over the fence and down to the strip of land below. Anna made no attempt to follow.

Leslie gave her a searching glance. "He can scent things better in wolf form than you can in human?"

"Yes. But he’s also better at this than I am." Anna didn’t feel a bit defensive about it. He’d taught her a lot, but…"He has a lot more experience than I do. Scents don’t come with a label – this is the villain; here is a lady with a dog; here is a police officer and that sticky-sweet-and-sour-milk smell is someone’s old banana ice cream cone. Charles can pick out what he’s smelling better than I can, and date them, too, usually."

Brother Wolf trotted down to the isolated bit of dirt that Leslie had pointed out and then followed it toward them with his nose on the ground.

A jogger approached them and stopped, jogging in place. "Your dog should be on a leash," he said in politely disapproving tones. "It’s the rules. There are lots of kids here and a big dog like that might scare someone."

"Werewolf," said Anna blandly, just to see what he would do.

He stopped jogging and looked, his jaw dropping. "Shit," he said. "You’re kidding me."

"It’s a werewolf," said Leslie.

"It’s red. Aren’t werewolves supposed to be black or gray?"

"Werewolves can be whatever color," Anna told him.

He bent down, stretching his legs and breathing deeply. "It’s beautiful. Hey, that’s where they found that little boy, isn’t it? I saw the police tape out here a couple of days ago. Are you with the police?"

"FBI." Leslie gave him a sharp look. "You run here all the time?"

"When I’m off duty," he admitted. "I’m a fireman. Missed the fuss, though."

"You get a lot of things washing up here?"

"Yes, ma’am. Lotsa. New stuff every day, but we keep it picked up pretty well. His is the only body I know about, but I’ve only been running here a couple of years." He stared at Charles, who happily wasn’t paying any attention. "FBI. You’ve got it looking for clues."

"He is," said Anna, getting tired of the "it."

The jogger wasn’t disconcerted by her correction. "He work for the FBI?"

"No. Strictly volunteer," Anna told him.

"Wicked," he said approvingly. "Wait until I tell the guys I saw a werewolf. He mind if I take a photo?"

"Not at all," Anna told him.

He popped his phone out of a pouch on his belt and stood still long enough to snap a photo. "Cool. The guys are not going to believe this." He looked at the photo and frowned. "They’re going to say that I took a photo of a big dog."

"Charles," Anna called. "Can we get a smile?"

Charles turned and gave her a look.

"Public relations," she suggested.

He turned his gold eyes to the jogger and then dropped his jaw in a wolfish smile that displayed fangs too large for any dog ever born.

The man swallowed. "Werewolf," he whispered, and then, remembering what he was doing, he snapped another photo. "Thanks, man…wolf. Thanks. They won’t laugh at that." He glanced at Anna and Leslie and started jogging backward down the path. "Hey, good luck. I hope you get the guy."

"We do, too," Leslie assured him.

He turned back to watch them a couple of more times before he sped up and headed off the island.

"Doing a little PR?" Leslie asked.

"Never hurts," agreed Anna absently. "It’s kind of my job." She’d been watching the jogger and he’d just passed a familiar figure. Goldstein saw her watching and waved.

"I texted Agent Goldstein and told him where we’d be," said Leslie.

Anna nodded. "Charles doesn’t seem to be finding anything. I suspect I’ve just wasted your time."

"A lot of my work is like that," said Leslie.

Agent Goldstein sauntered up. "Find anything?"

"No," Anna told him. "Charles?"

Charles trotted up and started to change, right in front of them. Right in front of anyone who happened to look over and see what he was doing. It wasn’t like him.

"What do we do, Mrs. Smith?" asked Goldstein quite calmly.

"Stay quiet and don’t touch, okay? This really hurts and touching him makes it worse."

Anna glanced around, but no one else seemed to be paying much attention. That might be sheer dumb luck, or it might be something that Charles was doing.

"Remember, please, don’t look into his eyes." There were a couple of meaty pops and Leslie winced.

"Yep. That hurts," Anna agreed. "This is why, if you’re around a recently changed werewolf – either direction – you walk softly for a while. Pain makes the best of us pretty cranky."

"Does this mean he found out something?" Leslie asked.

"I don’t know," Anna replied. "Either that – or he decided it was a good day to give a few Bostonians a heart attack."

"It’s not as bad as it is in the movies," said Goldstein, sounding philosophical. "There’s no liquid or clear oozing jelly, for one thing."

"Ick," said Anna. "Though if you move at just the wrong time, it can get bloody."

Leslie turned away and swallowed.

"Just kidding," Anna said. "Mostly."

"Still," Goldstein continued. "I can see why no one has agreed to change in front of the camera."

"That whole changing naked thing that most of us have to do makes it awkward, too," Anna told him. It wasn’t easy to watch, even for her. Mostly, it was the empathy – you didn’t have to be a werewolf to watch joints and bones changing and feel the ache in your own flesh in sympathy. And then there was the weirdness of watching things that should only be on the inside of a body show up on the outside. "You’d have to have a cable network like HBO. And we’re trying to make people forget that we’re monsters – this is kind of an unpleasant reminder."