Page 58 of Red Boar's Baby

Diana rolled over and sat up, plastered in sand. She looked back at the burning plane. “Well,” she said, “heck.”

“Eloquently put.”

Diana shook out her jeans. “I’m just gonna brush some sand off and put these on. Don’t mind me. No peeking,” she snapped at Farley.

“I think he’s in shock,” Costa said, helping their prisoner sit up. Farley’s eyes were wide and glassy; he’d jarred his broken arm in the fall.

“Too bad for him,” Diana declared. She was bent over, brushing sand off the naked curve of her ass. Costa managed, barely, to suppress an offer to help out. “You know, he was under orders to throw us out of the plane if they didn’t like the answers to our questions.”

“I figured it was something like that.” Costa looked at Farley and stifled a sigh. “Dangerous as he is, he’s also pretty badly hurt. I’m going to get him into the shade.”

He put an arm around Farley’s bulk and helped him sit down behind some boulders, out of the direct sunlight. Diana joined him a minute later, barefoot in jeans with Costa’s shirt draped loosely and beautifully around her naked torso.

“I lost everything else, but I do still have my keys and multitool,” she said, extracting it from her pocket to show Costa. It was a tiny one, little more than a cheap toy, but the blade looked functional. “What have you got?”

“Wallet, phone, keys. Oh, that reminds me.” He took out his phone, checked for a signal, held it up, and shook his head. “No dice. We’re too remote.”

Diana looked down at Farley. “He might have some idea where we are.”

“More or less. Now we just need to get him in shape to talk.”

Diana glanced up at the sky, already pinking with the earliest tinges of sunset. The plane was still burning, smudging the clear sky with smoke. “Before it gets any later, I think I’m going to shift and look around a little, see if I can spot any nearby roads or towns. I can’t fly for long distances, but I can do short hops and see more than we can from the ground. Sound good?”

“Yeah, it does. Go for it. See if you can find any water while you’re at it, because that’s going to be our biggest problem shortly.”

Diana shed her clothes in a neat pile, giving Costa another pleasant glimpse of her lean, strong body, and then collapsed into her roadrunner shape. She looked up at him with her head tilted to the side to view him without her long beak in the way, then spread her wings and took a few running hops to a short, gliding flight.

Costa crouched beside Farley. “Come on, man, let’s take a look at you.”

Farley was badly banged around, but he seemed more shocked than seriously hurt. There was a long stripe of bruised swelling on his temple that suggested a concussion, a number of bruises and abrasions, and the broken arm, which was the worst injury Costa could see.

As Costa probed him lightly, Farley seemed to rally a bit. Now and then, Costa looked up at a flicker of wings and caught a glimpse of Diana, or at least, the bird he presumed to be Diana. There were a number of other birds around, small songbirds and game birds drifting back after the plane crash scared them off. He decided to take this as a good sign that there was both water and game habitat around, which boded well for their odds of survival.

“What do you shift into?” he asked Farley as he checked over the man’s broken arm. It was a slight breach of shifter etiquette to ask directly if you didn’t know someone well, but he figured they were considerably past the point where it mattered now.

After a moment, Farley answered sullenly. “Wolverine.”

“What do wolverines eat? Predator, right?”

“Scavenger, mostly,” Farley said after another pause, as if contemplating how the information might be used against him. “We’re somewhat omnivorous as well. Why are you asking?”

“Because I figure the best way we can get through the night is in our shifted forms. We’ll be insulated against the cold and capable of feeding ourselves.” Costa hesitated too, but it wasn’t as if Farley wouldn’t know both of their shift forms shortly anyway. He’d already seen Diana shift. “I’m a boar, so I can eat just about anything. I figure if no one comes looking for us, we’ll make it through the night while shifted, and then work out what next.”

Farley made a slight gesture with his injured arm and winced. “I’m not going to be able to walk like this.”

“You don’t have to. At least you’re not a horse or something that’d really be in trouble with a broken leg. We can probably bring you something to eat.” Costa wondered how much effort they really wanted to go to in keeping the guy alive, under the circumstances, but just leaving him to die in the desert was certainly not a thing he was prepared to do. “While we’re waiting for Diana to come back, how about you answer a few questions?”

“What sort of questions?” Farley asked warily.

“Who you’re working for, what your plans for us were, that sort of thing.”

“Do I have to?”

“Obviously I can’t force you. But let me remind you that at the moment you’re dependent on us for survival, and also, the more you cooperate now, the more lenient the SCB is going to be later.”

Farley glowered and rubbed his forehead with his uninjured hand. “SCB—that’s basically the shifter FBI, right?”

“More or less. And you’re not who we’re after. You’re a small fish. You roll over on the big fish and we’ll give you immunity as long as you’re willing to work with us.”

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