Page 6 of Red Boar's Baby

“I’d better yell out, then. Don’t want ‘em to think a woman’s up here alone.”

Diana glared at him and bellowed, “Hello down there! We’re here to investigate a plane crash. Can anyone hear me?”

As the echoes of her voice died away, she heard small rustles in the brush. A couple of birds burst from cover and took off down the ravine, their wingbeats fading in the distance.

“Good lungs on you,” Luis said.

“Just for that ‘woman alone’ crack, I really am going to introduce my boyfriend to Alvero.”

Another few moments of climbing down the increasingly steep ravine, and the fuel smell became stronger.

“No passengers, right?” Luis asked, confirming for form’s sake what they both already knew.

“Right. Just the pilot.” According to the company, the plane had been flying out empty to pick up a cargo of live chickens in Alamagordo.

Luis cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello! Anyone alive down there?”

He shook his head when there was, once again, no answer. Diana pointed up to a snapped-off pine branch just above their head height. The yellow wood gleamed, and the scent of pine sap was fresh.

“Crash site,” she murmured.

“Or something. Big storm, maybe.”

But it was swiftly clear that something violent and dramatic had happened here recently. When Diana clambered over a boulder, she sighted the tangled structure of an airplane just below her, nose down in the ravine, wings broken and crumpled.

“Sonuvagun,” Luis muttered. “We found it.”

He started forward, paramedic training taking over, but Diana touched his arm to stop him. She took a moment to look at the site. There were no obvious dangers. The smoke was gently twisting up from the engine, which had been half ripped out of the nose of the plane, but nothing was actively on fire—though recent crash sites with spilled aviation fuel were always dangerous, especially in a confined area like this with nowhere to run. She saw no one moving.

“Hello?” Diana called.

There was an abrupt flurry of motion from near the plane, under one wing. It sounded more like an animal than a person, something thrashing around in the brush.

“I’ll investigate the cockpit,” Luis said quietly. “You check that out.”

He was taking the harder job, Diana knew. But unlike the half-playful, half-protective chauvinism that her male coworkers indulged in, this reallywashis job, just like flying the helicopter was hers. She had first responder training, but Luis was the one who worked with drug overdoses, suicide attempts, ugly ranching accidents, and domestic violence four days a week. Whatever he found here, he was capable of dealing with it both professionally and emotionally.

So Diana crawled beneath the crumpled airplane wing, seeking the source of that furtive fluttery movement. “Hi there,” she called soothingly. Was it a pet? A wild animal trapped by the crash, maybe injured?

She glimpsed a quick flash of something moving, and felt an odd twist in her gut.

A shifter?

Shifters could recognize each other, but there was no scientific explanation for how they did it. For most people, it was visual, but Diana, like everyone else she’d talked to, couldn’t narrow it down any more than “you just know.” Some people spoke of it as a tingling feeling or a kind of adrenaline rush. For Diana it was more nebulous, a vague sense she couldn’t put her finger on. And she thought that might be what she was feeling now.

“Hello?” Diana called softly. She squirmed under the wing. It had crumpled like a sheet of paper in the force of the crash, folded up accordion-style and wedged against a boulder. She had to fight her way through a brush-choked crevice in the rocks, the bulk of the airplane above her.

It seemed unlikely that anyone had survived the crash. But she’d encountered odder things. It could be a kid, or, as she’d thought a moment ago, a panicked and possibly injured shifter trying to flee. An escaped pet, a smuggled exotic animal—it could be a lot of things.

But when she finally fought her way free of the brush, picking twigs out of her hair, nothing could have prepared her for what she saw.

“Oh my,” was all Diana could say.

It was a baby.

CHAPTER3

The baby was naked,and it was a girl. She lay on her back, light pink and rosy, a bit dusty but not hurt or even sunburnt, as far as Diana could tell. Her face was screwed up as if she couldn’t decide whether or not to cry.

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