Page 63 of A Wolf After My Own Heart
“Of course I would, Oz, but I will anyway.”
“Thanks.” Oz had been scribbling like mad. “Okay, so you knew the plane went down, and you came to town to check on your goddaughter, who was…”
“Well, like you said, they were new in town, but one of Sally’s school friends is a werewolf. Sue told me they’d asked if they would take their wee lass overnight while she and Sam were out of town.”
“Yeah, the…” Oz pawed through the file. “Bauers. They called us when Sue and Sam didn’t come back to get Sally. That’s when we started a file, which landed on my desk. I went to break the news and bring Sally back to IPA. And she wasn’t here two hours before…”
“The adorable, maddening troublemaker had fled for the greener pastures of Lilydale for some reason.Lilydale,” Nadia added with an eye roll.
Annette groaned. “There’s nothing wrong with Lilydale, you sharp-tongued snob!”
“Darling, if I have toexplainto you all that is wrong with Lilydale, there’s simply no point. You will never get it. But why did she run that first time? And why to Lilydale?”
“Well, she was adamant from the beginning that her folks were alive. So I’m guessing her father called her and/or she ran into Dev Devoss.”
“And who,” Magnus demanded, “is Dev Devoss?”
“A plague upon the whole of mankind, ShiftersandStables,” Nadia said brightly, while Annette suddenly looked like the Before picture in a headache commercial.
“He’s kind of the agency mascot,” Oz said, aware of how intensely lame (yet true) that sounded.
“If mascots were multilingual and bent on world destruction,” Nadia added.
“The children in our charge nearly always side with each other,” Annette explained. “Many of them have learned the hard way that adults will invariably let them down. Dev spends almost as much time here as he does at home. So when he saw a cub in trouble who didn’t trust anyone here, his default was to help her the best way he knew how.”
“Which, naturally, was also the most felonious way he knew how,” Nadia added.
“I was right behind her,” Oz said, “but she scraped herself badly on a low fence, and that’s when Lila found her, and then I tracked them both to her house.”
“Your Stable?”
“Uh. She’s a Stable, yeah. Not mine. She doesn’t, y’know, belong to me or anything. She’s not my property. She’s not anyone’s property. I mean, I would love it if shewasmine… Well, now I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Anyway, it’s not like that. She’s her own person. So she’sherStable, is how you could put it? Not mine? I guess? But I don’t think of her like that. Just as a Stable, I mean. She’s Lila. Is it getting warm in here?”
David chuckled while Nadia’s bright blue eyes had gotten still brighter. “Oh. My. Goodness.”
“Settle y’self, lad. She’s independent and you admire the hell out of her, we get it. Must be formidable, given all her disadvantages. So this fine, competent lass—”
“That’s not what I—”
“So this Lila lass, she found Sally and took her in. And thenyoufoundher. You all did. And Lila knows about your true natures. How long have you known her?”
“What day is today? Uh…four days. No, five.”
Magnus’s eyebrows arched. “Is that normal in this part of the world?”
Fair question. And a complicated one. Shifters lived and worked parallel to Stables when it was unavoidable (e.g., when you had to visit the DMV). But in general, they preferred to keep to The Beneath. Which, generally, worked fine and should as long as they were in the minority. There were only about sixteen million Shifters in America, less than half of one percent of the population.
But while all-Shifter agencies like IPA existed, there really wasn’t a group whose job it was to figure out which Stables knew about which Shifters, and then decide what to do about it and act accordingly. No clandestine black ops teams ran around the country executing random Stables because they Knew Too Much. Shifters didn’t have a central government (though Minnesota’s current lieutenant governor, as well as two Cabinet members, were Shifters).
So when something like Lila happened—well, not really, she was one of a kind—when a Stable figured out Shifter secrets, it was on the individual Shifter to deal with it. Or not. Depending on the circumstances.
Of course, on the rare occasion alotof Stables figured out alotof Shifters…well, then you ended up with the Salem witch trials and Shakopee, but the former was centuries ago, the latter a decade ago, and there hadn’t been a flare-up since. Or at least, not one he’d heard about.
Magnus, meanwhile, had picked up the photo that triggered his initial outburst, and sighed. “Oz, were ye sayin’ you were going to show these pictures to my goddaughter?”
“That was one option,” he admitted. “I thought it might help her come to terms with her parents’ deaths. Because she simply wouldn’t believe me or any of us.”
“Possibly, onlypossiblybecause her deceased father kept calling.”
