Rick shook his head at the ribbing. “Go sit with the nice ladies, Brute. Be charming. I’ll bring you a plate.” The wolf rolled his eyes up and Rick said, “Yeah, I know. Six eggs over easy, half a chicken, raw, and apples, quartered. Come on, Pea. Let’s go through the line.”
Rick tossed the grindylow to his shoulder and turned his back on the wolf, going to the buffet. While loading up three plates, he watched in the mirrors over the serving table as Brute padded to the table and sat beside Polly, who was a dead ringer for a young Gwyneth Paltrow. Brute rested his head on her thigh and looked up at her with puppy-dog eyes. Both girls went all mushy and started petting him.
It was ridiculous. Brute got more female attention than he did. And it wasn’t like Rick was ugly, despite the bruises. At six feet even, with black eyes and black curling hair, he’d been known as a ladies’ man, a player. Of course, that was part of the reason he’d been bitten by a female black were-leopard, tortured by werewolves, lost his humanity, his job with NOPD, and his girlfriend, but that was another story.
Rick set Brute’s plate on the floor, Pea’s beside his on the table, and slid into the proffered seat, digging in. The eggs were perfect, and the pancakes, while not as good as his mom’s, weren’t bad, especially when he poured warm blueberry syrup over them.
“Is he really a werewolf?” Polly asked, her fingers in Brute’s fur.
“Yep. The only tame werewolf in the world.”
“You tamed him?” she said, her tone going skeptical.
“Nope. An angel named Hayyel did.”
“No shit?”
“No shit at all. I was there. Saw the whole thing. Pass the coffee?” The girls exchanged a pointed look and Polly poured him a cup. Rick glanced at the wolf’s pale eyes. Brute looked . . . shamed. Rick narrowed his eyes. The wolf was not feeling shame for what he had done in his life. No amount of penance assigned by an angel could make that happen.
The schedule was a twelve-hour day: three hours of physical training and combat sparring, six hours in class, with a break for lunch, then shooting, at which Rick excelled. He grew up on a farm in the South and had practically been born with a gun in his hand. Dinner was at seven, with library study time after. The library was a computer room with no books, but with electronic links to everything: the National Crime Information Center, the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the U.S. Department of State’s database of biometric facial recognition and iris scans, and databases the CIA had been compiling since 9/11. They also had access to every state’s motor vehicle records, criminal warrant and parole records, and wanted information. The computers allowed access to Interpol and most of the law enforcement agencies in treaty nations, not to mention advanced GPS and satellite photo programs that made Google Earth look like a high school science project.
Everything was encrypted and was monitored by advanced artificial intelligence counterterrorism software, just in case someone was running unauthorized searches or a sleeper terrorist was compiling a database for use against the U.S. It was a cop’s wet dream. The library alone was reason enough to join PsyLED, and that didn’t count all the cool toys stored in the other half of his Quonset hut quarters.
Polly joined Rick there for study. He could tell she was interested, but for lots of reasons, there would be no big love scene to end the evening: it was against the rules for trainees to hook up, Polly had a night-training session, and the biggest reason—Rick could transmit were-taint to a human through sex. The proscription against sex—for the rest of his life—was something he hadn’t been able to make himself think about yet. At all. Instead of encouraging Polly, he kept it casual.
Together they researched a bungled crime scene from the seventies and talked shop, while Brute and Pea lay curled in the corner. Later they all went to the farmhouse kitchen for snacks and beer. The nearly full moon was just rising over the trees when they said good night, Polly heading to the admin building to meet her mentor, and Rick to the Quonset hut to get out of the moon-glow.
He nodded to the security guards he passed, his night vision so acute that he could pick them out in their night-black camo. Ernest lifted two fingers from the stock of his weapon and Rick waved back. Ernest was a former PsyLED operative, now fifty-seven and retired, working part-time to keep his hand in. Rick understood that; most cops had problems quitting full-time work, going from service and adrenaline to sitting in front of the TV or playing golf.
As he reached for the door handle, Brute came out of nowhere and slammed into his legs, sending Rick stumbling to the side. The wolf started that horrible, low-pitched growl, the one that made the hair stand up on Rick’s arms. Rick stared at the handle. There was nothing there, nothing visual anyway. He bent and sniffed, but smelled nothing except his own scent. He looked at the wolf, who was staring at the door, head down, slightly hunched, as if he was going to pounce.
“Someone went into my quarters?”
Brute nodded, dropping his head once.
Rick ran through the scenarios. He wasn’t allowed to carry his sidearm on campus. None of the students were—they weren’t on duty, they were in school—so going in alone would be stupid. But if he called for help and no one was in there, he’d look like an idiot. So . . . He took a slow breath and let it out. “Let’s be stupid and see what this is.” Rick stood to the side of his door, his back against the wall, and turned the knob slowly. Opened it an inch and sniffed. Brute stuffed his snout inside and sniffed too. After a moment, his ruff settled and he looked up at Rick. “I agree,” Rick said. “Whoever it was, is gone.” He reached in and turned on the switch, flooding the small space with light. No one was there. There weren’t any hiding places. And witches didn’t have invisibility spells. Or at least that was what he’d been taught. Of course, if they were invisible, how would you know?
They entered slowly, Brute at Rick’s side, alert, quiet, intense. “We’ll quarter the room. When you smell something, give me the signal.” Rick moved around the room, his jeans brushing the wolf’s side. Brute kept his nose to the floor, his ears pricked sharply. He sat in front of the small dresser, and again at the closet, which was the signal they had worked out for having found something. Rick opened both dresser and closet, but the wolf showed no particular change in attitude. The intruder hadn’t done anything with his clothes, so, why come in here? The wolf stopped at the old bed, the small laptop lying on top. Brute sniffed and sat.
Rick studied his computer. Pea leaped to the bed and raced around the laptop, twittering, almost as if she were scolding it. Rick still had a pair of gloves on his desk from the crime scene and he pulled them on before carefully lifting the screen. He didn’t see it at first, and he never would have noticed it at all except for Brute’s nose and Pea’s verbalizations. A tiny black dot was on the black keyboard where he would rest his palms when not typing.
He had to get someone in here to check it out, but if he was going back into the moonlight, he’d need his MP player and the counter-spell music. He reached to the desk.
It was gone.
Shock swept through him, electric, hot. In an instant he was back at his first full moon, three days in a New Orleans cell, drugged to the gills, as his body tried to turn itself inside out, fighting to shift, struggling to change into the black were-leopard that was his beast. Tried and failed over and over again, held to his human shape by the mangled tattoo-spell on his shoulder and upper chest. The artwork bound him to his human shape, his human form, and stopped every attempt to shift. The full moon meant pain like being struck by lightning, pain like being flayed alive. Mind-breaking pain. He didn’t want to shift, didn’t want to be a were, but even that would be better than the three days of hell.
His heart thundered. He broke into a hot sweat. The world telescoped down to the desktop, empty of the MP player. Rick reached out and touched the surface of his desk. Gone.
He blew out a breath, heated and hard. He had uploaded the music to a cloud backup system. He could easily download it to his computer for instant listening.
He dialed Soul on his cell. “Someone’s been in my room and stole my MP player. They also left something on my laptop. Brute found it.” He described the tiny dot and added, “I’m in my quarters. And no, I didn’t touch anything except the light switch and my laptop, and I was wearing gloves.”
“I’m on my way,” she said.
Rick closed the cell. An hour later, his room had been swept for listening devices and video recorders, and the black dot had been confiscated. His room was clean, and Rick finally got to bed. He needed sleep, but he was edgy, restless, and couldn’t keep his eyes closed. The full moon sucked. Each one could be the last night of his life,
