Page 2 of Red Boar's Baby

“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.”

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