Page 13 of Red Boar's Baby

“Calling the family and letting them know we can’t make it.”

Diana shook her head. “You shouldn’t have to cancel on my account. We could—uh—we could take the baby with us, maybe? We just have to make sure she doesn’t shift?—”

“No,” Costa said, as horror sank through him like a knife through soft cheese. “No, no, no. There is no universe in which the two of us going to see my family with a baby would end in anything other than endless requests for baby pictures and a wedding date. We would never know peace again. Do not do this to me, Di, I beg of you.”

Both corners of Diana’s mouth curled up into a smile she was evidently struggling and failing to suppress. “Okay, no baby.”

“You were telling me what she turns into when she decided to throw a fit.” Costa went into the kitchen. “Actually, since we’re not going anywhere, how about I open this wine and also pull out this fruit plate.”

“Quinn, I was in the field for six hours today, and I’ve been taking care of a screaming potato ever since. I do not want a fruit plate. I want something massive, greasy, and full of protein.” She sighed wistfully. “An enormous platter of your aunt Maura’s enchiladas would go down really nice right about now.”

“They’re an hour’s drive away, but tell you what, I can Doordash something if you will just, for the love of God, tell me what that child turns into.”

“Oh,” Diana said. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I hadn’t. Uh, she turns into a winged antelope.”

There was a brief pause, punctuated by some small cooing noises from the baby in Diana’s arms. Then Costa said, “A what?”

“A baby antelope, with wings. She’s very cute. But you can see why I brought her here.”

“Are yousure?—”

“Cesar Quinn Costa, are you about to ask me whether I’m deluded or simply lying?” Diana asked, her eyes flashing dangerously.

“No, not at all, I’m just saying, there could have been a tree branch behind her, or?—”

“It was not atree branch, for the love of?—”

The baby began to fuss louder.

“—socks and little monkeys,” Diana said, modulating her voice to a baby-soothing rise and fall. She continued in that tone even as she went on speaking to Costa. “This kid has wings. I didn’t just see them, I touched them and felt the draft when she flapped them at me. I don’t have any idea what she is, or why she was next to a crashed plane in the middle of nowhere, but I didn’t want to risk having her vanish into a lab or worse, if the wrong person saw her, and that’s even aside from the risks of a shifter going to a normal hospital. You get me?”

“I get you,” Costa said, similarly quiet and calm. He put a hand over the baby’s head, uncomfortably aware of how her small, fuzzy scalp nearly vanished under his large palm and his sun-tanned fingers with their light dusting of reddish hair. “We’re going to want our agents to take a look at the crash site, and we’ll need to share info with the other agencies already working there.”

Diana let out a sigh, and her body relaxed a little, making Costa realize how tense she had been. Her eyelids half closed for an instant. “I knew you’d be the right person to bring this to.”

* * *

Half an hour later, they were settled down on the couch with the baby between them and a pizza on the coffee table. (Costa had drawn the line at ordering enchiladas; he knew it would be a pale shadow of the far better Tex-Mex spread he was missing at the family ranch.)

Costa had texted Mavis Begay, head of the Arizona SCB’s medical and science department, to come by his place this evening when she had a chance. Then Diana filled him in with a much more detailed and less chaotic description of her day. When she wasn’t panicking, as it was now clear to him that she had been earlier, she was a thoughtful and careful witness, even providing photos of the crash site on her cell phone.

“What agency is investigating the crash?” Costa asked. He had opened the bottle of wine after all and poured them both glasses.

“National Transportation Safety Board and the local authorities.”

“What about any items from the site—evidence, that kind of thing? Where’s that go?”

Diana shook her head. “The NTSB will be looking into the cause of the crash, so they’ll have the flight recorder and any other evidence they retrieved from the airplane’s body or engine. But there are also, obviously, concerns that it might have been used for drugs or other smuggling, so the sheriff’s department will be working with the DEA and ... oh, I don’t even know who else. These kinds of situations are a jurisdictional mess.”

“Then I’ll add to the mess and get the SCB involved tomorrow,” Costa said cheerily. In a perverse way, he enjoyed wrangling with other law enforcement departments. It was like a martial artist having a throwdown with a good strong rival of an equal fighting class. He’d take it in a hot minute over having to talk to drunk college students or the bureaucrats who controlled the bureau’s funding.

“Do you think I did the wrong thing?” Diana asked anxiously. “Taking the baby, I mean.”

The reminder that Diana had in fact committed a serious crime washed over him. It was followed an instant later by a mental reminder that running a secret federal bureau that dealt with crimes which were often unprosecutable meant a lot of coverup. The fact that Diana had chosen to run her own freelance coverup didn’t make it morally wrong. If one of his agents had done the same thing, he would have yelled himself blue in the face and then backed them up.

“I agree with you that it’s better to keep her out of the official reports for now.” Without meaning to, Costa ran a hand lightly over her sleeping head, once more feeling the soft brush of her peach fuzz on his palm, and noticed Diana following his hand with her eyes; he had to wrench himself back to business. “One thing I definitely want to do tomorrow is contact our Seattle bureau. A couple of years ago, they had a case involving shifters being experimented on in labs. This might be another branch of the same operation, or someone connected to it. Actually, maybe I’ll send an email tonight.”

He was tapping out a brief note to Pam Stiers, the Seattle bureau chief, when there was a sharp knock at the door. Diana got up and, after some murmured conversation, came back with Mavis Begay. She was a small, brisk Navajo woman from a family of pronghorn antelope and deer shifters. Although she had been at the SCB since before Costa’s time, there was only a faint streaking of gray in her black bun.

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