SHIFT

THE WRONG KIND OF USEFUL

Finding Ellis should have been easy. Six years of running this city taught me most of its hiding places, and hunters weren't nearly as invisible as they liked to believe — they had patterns, safe houses, the same handful of pawn shops that dealt in silver rounds under the counter. What I hadn't planned for was how hard it would be to convince Mara that walking into a warehouse full of Vasquez's new recruits was a reasonable plan.

"It's not a *plan*," she said, driving with one hand and pulling up satellite images with the other, a habit that terrified me every time. "It's a hope wearing a plan's clothes."

"You have a better idea?"

"I have several. None of them involve you walking in the front door of the place literally full of people who want you dead."

"He won't be at the warehouse," Sam said, from the back seat, and both of us turned to look at her. She shrugged, unbothered. "Think about it. If Vasquez is using him and doesn't want him figuring that out, he's not going to keep him in the room where the actual plans get discussed. He'll keep him somewhere adjacent. Busy. Useful-feeling but harmless."

Mara went quiet for a second, the way she did when someone said something that reorganized her whole read on a situation. "She's got a point. There's a secondary location — smaller, near the old freight yard. Vasquez uses it for meetings he doesn't want traced back to the main operation. If I were running a source I didn't fully trust yet, that's where I'd park him."

"Then that's where we start."

The freight yard sat quiet under a gray afternoon, rows of shipping containers stacked like abandoned building blocks, rust bleeding down their sides in long orange streaks. Mara parked two blocks out — habit, caution, the kind of instinct that had kept her alive doing intel work for a pack that had buried more members than I liked to think about — and the three of us went the rest of the way on foot.

"If this goes wrong," I said quietly to Sam, "you run. Immediately. No hesitating, no looking back to check on me."

"Noted and ignored," she said, and kept walking.

I found Ellis exactly where Sam guessed he'd be — alone, at the edge of the yard, sitting on an overturned crate with his crossbow disassembled across his knees, cleaning it with the kind of mechanical focus people use to avoid thinking about something else entirely. He heard us before he saw us. Of course he did.

He was on his feet in half a second, weapon reassembled faster than should have been possible, aimed square at my chest.

"You've got some nerve," he said.

"I've got information," I said, hands raised, empty. "About the man you're working for."

"I don't work for anyone."

"Then what do you call standing next to Vasquez at a warehouse full of his new recruits six hours ago?" Mara's voice, flat and unimpressed, from just behind my shoulder. She held up her phone, the photo still open on the screen. "Because from where I'm standing, that looks a lot like working for someone."

Something moved behind Ellis's eyes — not guilt, not exactly. Confusion, maybe, cracking through the controlled surface he'd been wearing since the rooftop.

"He's helping me," Ellis said, but the certainty in it had thinned since the last time I'd heard him speak. "He's got resources. Contacts. He said he'd help me find my brother's killer if I helped him deal with a wolf problem in his territory."

"And did it occur to you," I said, "that the wolf problem he's talking about is *me* — the same wolf he set up to take the fall in that alley three nights ago? That he's the reason your brother's dead in the first place?"

"You don't know that."

"I was there, Ellis. I was bleeding out from a silver bolt some low-level thug put in my shoulder — a thug I'd bet good money was on Vasquez's payroll — when your brother went down. I never touched him. I didn't even see him until it was already over." I kept my voice level, kept my hands where he could see them, aware of exactly how much of this was hanging on him choosing to believe a wolf over the man who'd been feeding him information for days. "You've been hunting the wrong person since night one. And the man telling you otherwise is the same man who orchestrated it."

"Why would he do that?" Ellis's grip on the crossbow hadn't loosened, but his aim had drifted a few degrees off center — not enough to matter tactically, but enough to tell me something in him was listening. "Why go through all that just to—"

"Because a wolf that killed a hunter's brother is useful," Sam said, stepping up beside me, calm in a way that cut through the tension better than anything I could've said. "It gives you a reason to hunt. It gives him a hunter with a personal stake, willing to do things other people might hesitate over, and it keeps the two of you fighting each other instead of looking at him. That's not a coincidence. That's a strategy."

Ellis's eyes moved to her — really looked at her for the first time, like he was only now registering that a woman in scrubs was standing in a freight yard giving tactical analysis with the same steady clarity she probably used to call time of death.

"Who are you?"

"Nobody important. Just someone who's noticed that everyone in this yard except you seems to already understand what's actually going on."

The crossbow lowered another inch. Then another. Finally, slowly, Ellis let it drop fully to his side, though I noticed he didn't set it down entirely — old habits, or maybe just not stupid enough to fully disarm around a wolf and two strangers, no matter how convincing we sounded.

"If you're lying to me," he said, voice low, "I will end you. I don't care what excuse you give me."

"I know."

"And if I'm right," he said, "if Vasquez really has been using me — " He stopped, jaw tight, something raw showing through the c***k for just a second before he shut it down again. "Then I want to be there when it ends. Whatever that looks like."

Mara and I exchanged a look. It wasn't trust, not yet — nothing close to it. But it was a door, cracked open instead of slammed shut, and after three days of running, that felt like more than I'd had since the alley.

"Then let's find out exactly what he's planning," I said, "before he decides both of us have outlived our usefulness."

Behind us, faint but unmistakable in the quiet of the freight yard, an engine turned over — a vehicle approaching from the direction of the main warehouse, closer than any of us wanted it to be.

Ellis's head snapped toward the sound, and whatever was left of his composure sharpened instantly back into focus.

"That's not one of ours," he said. "We need to move. Now."