Page 46 of Red Boar's Baby

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“—turn into,” Costa finished unnecessarily, as Vic, without even breaking stride, lunged to the side and caught a hummingbird an instant before she plunged headfirst into a cactus.

“We’re still working on steering,” Vic said. “You okay, honey?”

Diana glanced from the pile of little-girl clothes deposited limply on the path, as if the girl inside of them had melted, then to Vic, who was carefully putting the hummingbird into his shirt’s breast pocket. Nicole, barely pausing, bent to scoop up the discarded clothing, evidently very familiar with handling shifter children.

“Anyway,” Vic went on as if there had been no interruption, “it makes finding a caretaker difficult, as you might imagine. I’m a single dad, and we don’t have any close relatives in Seattle. There’s a babysitter I trust, but I wasn’t sure how long I’d be gone.”

“You know this could be dangerous,” Costa said levelly.

“No more than back home,” Vic returned evenly. “Molly knows Daddy’s job can sometimes be scary—don’t you, honey?—but we have bad guys up in Seattle, too.”

The hummingbird’s head poked out of his pocket, looking around with bright eyes.

In the ranch house, Molly was handed off (literally) to the aunts, along with her bundle of clothing. As they went off to ply her with orange juice and cookies, Costa passed around bottles of water and cups of coffee to the adults. Diana tried to keep her traitorous fingers from lingering on his as he gave her a cup of coffee, made exactly as she liked it.

“Can I see the baby?” Nicole asked. “It sounds like there’s a possibility this is connected to the shifter lab we broke up in Washington a while back. I thought it was a one-off, but they might have had other branches.”

“Wait, wait,” Diana interrupted. “Quinn clearly knows this, but I don’t. What happened?”

Delgado also looked curious. Nicole gestured them to a collection of overstuffed chairs in front of the picture windows, looking out on the sweep of the desert and the empty road approaching the ranch.

“So this was about two years ago,” she said. “The Seattle SCB broke up an illegal lab that had been trying to find a way to infuse shifters’ special traits—our healing ability in particular—into human test subjects. The experiments didn’t really work, and the results could be ... monstrous. Though not always. We rescued four healthy, beautiful wolf shifter kids, and I’m currently raising them with my husband Avery.”

Her face grew incredibly soft as she spoke. Coming back to herself, she added, “You’ll notice I’m holding myself back from pulling out my phone and showing you a million pictures.”

Costa met Diana’s eyes. Diana grinned. Costa held up one finger. Diana said, “How about just one picture?”

Nicole’s entire body language radiated relief and delight. She took out her phone. “Oh, no reception here?”

“No,” Costa said. “No cell service on the whole ranch, unless you get pretty high up in the hills, where you can sometimes get a signal.”

“Well, that’s okay. I’ve got my whole camera roll.”

The group of them dutifully cooed over a few pictures of Nicole’s husband, a handsome thirty-something man with floppy dark hair, playing with what looked like four adorable, fluffy husky puppies.

“I always wondered what made my sister go from not really caring about anyone’s baby pictures to spamming us in the family chat,” Nicole said. “And then these four came along, and all of a sudden I understood.”

“You’re really raising quadruplets?” Delgado asked. “How do you ever find time for ... anything?”

“It’s certainly been a challenge, especially since Avery and I both work.” Nicole put her phone away. “But I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world. I think when you know, you just know, and I think Avery and I both knew right away that the kids were meant for us, and we were for them—perhaps even before we realized we were meant for each other.” She got up. “Now I’m going to go have a gander at the kiddo, and I’ll start working out a placement plan for her.”

When you know, you just know.Diana firmly told herself that the unhappy clutch in her chest at the mention of Emmeline finding a foster placement was just natural fondness for a small, helpless thing. She would have felt the same at letting go if she’d been helping take care of a lost kitten, she was sure.

Still, she didn’t quite dare meet Costa’s eyes. She didn’t want to see what was written there. Diana looked down at her cup of coffee, then up at Delgado, who smiled at her. Meanwhile, Costa turned his attention to Vic.

“So that’s Nicole’s part in this,” Costa said. “I know you came down because you thought you might have a lead on that card we found at the site.”

“Yeah, and I took the time to pick up something before I left.” Vic opened his wallet and slipped out a card. “Look familiar?”

He handed it to Costa. Diana leaned over to look. It was a white rectangle, business card shaped and sized, slightly discolored and foxed around the edges as if it had been carried around in a pocket or wallet. On the front, there was a stylized blue shape that Diana took to be an alligator or crocodile, jaws open and head curled around so it was looking back with its tail sprawling toward the edge of the card.

Costa flipped it over. In pencil scrawl, on the back of it there was a phone number (very smudged, as if it had been rubbed out and rewritten) and an even more badly smudged set of numbers in the bottom right corner reading, almost illegibly, 36/4.

“It does look like the same kind of thing,” Costa said. He handed it to Diana, who nodded. “Where did it come from?”

“It’s mine,” Vic said. He smiled lopsidedly. “Have you heard of the shifter underground fighting rings?”

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