Page 34 of The Badger in His Burrow

Thank God I had finally started working on shifting—I could feel the buzzing that told me I was on edge, fur and fangs prepared and at the ready, but I no longer felt like it was out of control. If nothing else, I would owe Elliot for the rest of my life for that. My control wasn’t perfect, but it was so much better now that’d I’d actually shifted on my own terms a couple of times.

We’d finished the shower stall yesterday—and then promptly inaugurated it by going out for another shifted ramble through the forest. I’d actually come back a lot cleaner, but Elliot had been absolutely filthy. Of course, badgers like to dig and tunnel. Wolves, not nearly as much. Sure, I found digging at the surfacelevel of the dirt to be absurdly fun—and no, I didn’t really understand why—but that was a matter of a couple muddy paws, not full-body dirt submersion.

Elliot had nodded his head at it to indicate I should go first, which I did—only for a naked human Elliot to follow closely behind me.

Let’s just say the shower was inaugurated a bit more thoroughly than just having been showered in.

But thinking too much about that right now was probably not a good idea, given that I was about to go inside to conduct an interview. You really shouldn’t show up to formal interviews with a hard-on.

I was early by about ten minutes, but nervous energy wasn’t going to let me keep sitting in my Cruiser any longer, so I slid out of the driver’s seat slowly, trying not to jar my knee—which was more upset today because of all the shifting I’d been doing, although I wasn’t going to mention that to Elliot—so that I wouldn’t be limping when I went inside.

I only partly succeeded, but I managed to walk off the worst of it by the time I made it across the parking lot. Enough that I wasn’t limping, anyway. I put on a plain mask—grey, like the only now-ill-fitting suit I owned—so that I could at least pretend to be human so that I didn’t freak people out at the interview stage. I’d debated whether or not I wanted to be upfront about it… and decided not to. I wasn’t going tolieabout it—if someone asked me, I’d tell them, or if they looked me up in the right databases in Virginia, it would be listed—but I also didn’t feel like advertising it, especially not at the interview stage. If they offered me a job I’d have to think about it again.

I walked up to the grey building with its glass front doors—eerily reminiscent of the entrance to the Virginia crime lab—and walked inside, coming up to the white-topped counter that served as the reception desk. The floor—like the floors of everysuch building I’d ever been in—were linoleum tile. In this office, everything I could see was grey. Grey floors, two-tone grey walls, grey counters with white tops. Completely monochrome. Heartless and soulless.

It helps people like me, like Hart, to do our jobs. I know that sounds horrible, but it’s true. If you have to be able to shut off your emotions—or at least put them on pause for a while—because what you do exposes you to the worst sort of monstrosity that humanity has to offer, you need the place you work to feel empty. It needs to match the way you feel, or it creates a cognitive dissonance that drives you mad, day by day. Sometimes the job does that anyway, but it would be so much worse if we worked somewhere with soft pastels and lush carpets and plants and flowers.

There was one uniformed officer—a white man with buzzed brown hair—and a white woman with short brown curls and a round face in plain clothes sitting behind the counter. Both wore masks—the cop’s was standard department issue, and the woman’s was covered in embroidered flowers. Not wanting to assume anything, I walked up and smiled at both of them, trusting the expression to be visible over my mask.

“Hi, I’m here to talk to Lacy Krinke.”

The uniform barely looked at me, but the woman smiled, showing off dimples near the outside corners of her mask and smile lines around her grey-blue eyes. “Well, hi there. Let’s see… you’re Mr. Mays?” Her eyes skimmed over the screen of her computer.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked over and smiled at me. “Not from around here, are you?” she asked, although her tone was friendly.

I still felt a little heat on the back of my neck. “No, ma’am. Virginia.”

“You don’t sound like a local,” she replied, showing me her dimples again. “You’ve got a lovely accent.”

The heat spread a little. “Oh. Thank you, ma’am.” I didn’t think of myself as having an accent, but I definitely did if you compared how I sounded to hers. Or even Elliot’s, although his wasn’t nearly as pronounced.

She smiled at me again. “Have you been up here long?” she asked conversationally.

“Um. Not really. A couple weeks.”

“You have family here?”

“No. I, uh, know Elliot Crane. He and Hart, um, Val Hart”—It was really weird to use Hart’s first name—“are friends of mine.”

“Oh!” She beamed. “Judy Hart is one of my mother’s best friends! That’s right—Val is in Virginia now. He’s a cop, right?”

“He was,” I replied. “He’s in the FBI now.”

“Oh, good for him!” She beamed. “My younger sister was in school with them—Val and Elliot. Not close or anything, but Shawano’s a small town. But you’re from the big city, so it must feel strange to you.”

It was a question, even though she didn’t lilt her voice upwards at the end. I smiled back. “I was born in a town even smaller than Shawano,” I told her. “So it’s familiar.” Not in the bad ways, at least not yet. That might come with more time spent here. Elliot had warned me as much—it wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, I just didn’t think Shawano could actually be as bad as the town I’d grown up in. Well. The weird religious community outside of a tiny town that didn’t offer much in the way of escapism.

I wasn’t going to go into that part of my life story with this woman, though.

“Like coming back home, then?” she said, smiling widely enough that her eyes crinkled nearly shut.

I smiled back, but was saved from having to decide between actually lying to her and making the conversation incredibly awkward by an interruption from a familiar voice.

“Mr, Mays?”

I turned, finding that the voice I recognized from our phone conversation a few days ago belonged to a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a tight, dark-brown ponytail and sharp grey eyes over a light blue mask and a lab coat worn over wrinkled black slacks and a blue button-down. “Ms. Krinke?”

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