Page 1 of Red Boar's Baby

CHAPTER1

“...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 timeever.”

“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 inreal 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’tthatkind 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.”

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