Page 23 of Red Boar's Baby

She expected protest, especially from Caine, but no one offered any objections. They went back into the ravine so Jessie could shift and dress. Diana found that her pleasure in the crisp, clear beauty of the mountains had faded. She was jumpy, nervous, looking over her shoulder.

“You don’t have any idea what it is?” she asked Caine quietly as they straggled back up the hillside toward the helicopter, Fifi and Jessie lagging behind in an animated conversation.

“No, I don’t.” Caine was as usual inscrutable, but Diana thought she sensed uneasiness in him. Abruptly he said, “You know about the shifter plague last summer?”

“Yes.” She didn’t personally know anyone who had been ill, but there had been a lot of fear in the local shifter community about it.

“Among those responsible, there are some who had shift forms that were—different. It’s possible these people are connected to them.”

“Different how?”

“At least some of them are extinct animal types. And they feel a bit different. Shifter-like, but not exactly.”

They had reached the helicopter. Diana looked back, where Jessie and Fifi were toiling up the ridge after them. The hairs on the back of her neck crawled. She was acutely aware that they were out of cell contact, with nothing but the radio in the helo—and they needed to get up in the air to use that.

It would not be a good place to meet hostiles.

She noticed Caine looking around too, frowning behind his dark lenses.

“You feel it just like I do,” she said, low.

“Paranoia,” Caine replied softly. “There is no such thing as the feeling of being watched. Not as an actual, legitimate phenomenon.”

“But we are.”

He didn’t answer. Instead he scanned the hills around them with an intensity that suggested he might not believe his own talk of baseless paranoia. Diana had a sharp, abrupt urge to call Costa, not that she would be able to get through, or simply to read his last text to her for a strange form of comfort.

She wasn’t used to being uneasy outdoors. Between her knowledge of wilderness survival and her ability to shift, she rarely ran into anything she couldn’t handle, and she was equally good at keeping herself out of situations that might escalate into danger. A big part of being safe in the wilderness was deploying sensible precautions so it didn’t get out of control in the first place.

Thisshould, by the numbers, have been perfectly safe. The usual hazards of backcountry flying were still present (mechanical trouble, unexpected weather), but the helo was in good condition, people knew where she was, and the weather report looked clear. It was a milk run.

And yet, something about itfeltunsafe. She told herself that Caine was right, and she was simply experiencing paranoia because they knew there had been some kind of large possibly-shifter animal around.

But it felt like more than that. She had a sense of being exposed on this hillside, a hunted-wild-creature feeling that she rarely felt when she wasn’t in her smaller and more vulnerable shift form. The bright sunshine was less an asset than a menace, picking them out in clear detail.

“We should get in the—” she began, but broke off at a soft intake of breath from Caine. If Diana hadn’t been standing right next to him, she wouldn’t have heard it.

Her gaze snapped to where he was looking, across the sweep of brush-dotted ridges and eerie rock stacks to the dun-colored massif rising above them, just in time to see a bright flash from the cliffside about half a mile away.

Binoculars?she thought, and thenWearebeing watched!and then Caine grabbed her arm and wrenched her unceremoniously to the ground.

Too surprised to catch herself, she slammed painfully into the rocks, and heard a loud crack as she hit. For one split second, she thought it had been something breaking onher, before she raised her head to see a slowly dissipating puff of dust some ten feet away from her and realized what was going on.

We’re being shot at.

“Get down!” Caine snapped at the interns, who were standing in stunned shock, looking around and clearly unsure what was happening.

Something zinged off a rock a couple of feet from Diana’s head, spraying rock chips, just before another hollow booming crack rolled across the hillside. As with fireworks, the bullets were ahead of the shockwave of sound. By the time they had warning of a new incoming shot, it would be too late.

“Down, down, down!” Diana yelled at the interns. Fifi in her pink sundress was an especially vivid target. “Get behind something, a rock or a tree, anything that can hide you!”

As the interns finally got over their paralysis and threw themselves down, Diana was aware of a swift movement by her leg.

“Caine—” she began, turning, and discovered that he was gone.

Diana cursed to herself and did a hasty military crawl to the helicopter. “No, stay there,” she called to the interns, seeing Fifi’s head start to appear above a rock. “I’m going to start the helicopter. Don’t worry, I won’t leave without you, but it’s gonna be a big target once we start up. I’ll tell you when to make a run for the helo.”

“Where’s Agent Caine?” Jessie’s voice asked from an unseen location.

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