Page 40 of Handcuffed to the Bear

He held out the photo, this time not shoving it at her, just holding it between them so she could look at it, or not, as she chose. From the corner of his eye, he was aware of Cho’s sympathetic look.

“That’s what Jack is. He’s my pack. My family. My friend. That’s what he is to all of us here.We’rea pride, and we need to get our missing one back. We have reason to believe your family has taken him somewhere.”

Avery touched the envelope with the hand not holding the photo.

“You couldn’t save any of these people, even if you wanted to. But you can save Jack.”

Please, please let there still be time to save Jack.

For a long time, Debi stared at her lap without reacting. Then she reached out and took the photo from him. She gazed at it as if she was looking through it, then blinked at last and looked up.

“This is your guy?”

“He was undercover, looking into the disappearances of the shifters your family abducted,” Cho said. “We lost contact with him.”

Debi looked down at the picture again. “Yes,” she said, very softly.

“Yes what?” Avery demanded, half rising from his seat. “Yes, we lost contact? Yes, they killed him? Yeswhat?”

“We ... found about him accidentally. He wasn’t the target.”

Cho’s head moved subtly, a quick glance down: checking the recording app on her phone.

“Did you kill him?” Avery hardly recognized his own voice.

“To be sure we’re clear,” Cho said, with a quelling glance at Avery, “you recognize this photo as Agent Jack Ross, correct?”

“I didn’t know his name,” Debi said.

“Where is he now?”

She darted a quick look at Avery. “He’s still alive. I mean, he was, the last time I saw him. We ... we weren’t after him. He just got in the way.”

Jack was still alive. At least, he hadn’t been killed outright. That was something. “Who were you after?” Avery asked.

Debi chewed her bottom lip fiercely. Small drops of blood sprang up along the glossy line of it. “Fallon’s administrative assistant.”

Avery cast his mind back, trying to remember the dossiers on Fallon’s staff. “Casey McClaren?”

Debi gave a very small nod. “She’s ... everything you said. Didn’t have close friends, even at the company. No family. No one to miss her.”

An involuntary growl bubbled up in Avery’s throat; he stifled it. “Everyone has someone to miss them.”

“I know!” Debi burst out. “Ido. It was—it was never meant to go this far, do you understand? It started with hunting animals. I mean,everyonedoes that. Everyone who shifts into a predator. You do that, right?” She looked desperately at Avery, who nodded. Then her stare of appeal turned on Cho. “And you? I don’t know what kind of shifter you are?—”

“Gecko,” Cho said. “I hunt bugs. Not people.”

“But it wasn’t supposed to be people!” It was almost a wail. “The problem was, wild game just wasn’t challenging enough. We even tried bears, for a while, but when you get a whole pride of lions together, a bear goes down pretty easy. Animals just aren’t smart enough to be fun to hunt. It comes down to a matter of brute strength, claw versus claw. Roger didn’t like that. He thought we could make it more interesting.”

“By hunting people instead of animals,” Cho said. Avery stayed quiet.

Debi’s chest heaved with short, shallow breaths. “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes.”

“You didn’t agree with it.”

“No, but—you don’t understand how hard it is to argue with Roger. With the whole pride. You’re a pack animal, Agent Hollen—youmustknow!”

Cho looked disgusted, but Avery did, in fact, understand. Peer pressure to go along with the rest of the group, to bow under and be carried along with the tide of it, was a powerful urge for those who shifted into social animals like wolves or horses, orcas or lions. There were times when he still had to fight it in meetings; his instinctive response to arguments was to capitulate for the sake of group harmony.

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