Bone Den Kings

Emergency!

“Jen, you have a phone call. They say it’s an emergency?”

Jen’s heart sank. It had to be the school. Estelle had done so well at this one, better than at all the other preschools. She’d lasted three entire months without having an emergency—but Jen had known that it was only a matter of time. She could only hope that Estelle’s emergency wasn’t the kind that would bring Homeland Security or the CIA to Twin Creeks.

“Thank you,” she said to Pam as she took the phone from her. Pam, the office manager, gave her a sympathetic look. She was well aware of Estelle’s history, since she was the one who always had to find a way to cover for Jen when those emergencies happened.

“This is Jen,” she said into the receiver.

“Jen, hi, this is Angelina, director of Twin Creeks Montessori? I’m afraid Estelle and one of her playmates have had a little incident. It isn’t the first time they’ve butted heads, but it is the first time they’ve drawn blood. Could you come in to the office?”

Jen’s heart skipped a beat. “Blood?”

“Just scratches,” Angelina said quickly. “But we’re concerned that the situation will escalate if we don’t do something. As you know, we only have the one 3 to 4 classroom, and if we can’t get the two of them to behave together, we will have to find an, erm, alternative.”

Expulsion. It was the only alternative and Jen knew it. She sucked in a deep breath, steadying her nerves.

“The other child’s father is already on his way. He says he’ll be here in twenty minutes or so. I would prefer that we could all sit down together and come up with a solution, I think it’s better that way so we’re all on the same page. Could you be here as well?”

The school was on the other side of town from Jen’s office, which meant she could be there in ten minutes or less if the stop light gods smiled on her. Twin Creeks wasn’t exactly a metropolis.

“I’ll be there,” she said. She said goodbye and hung up, then handed the phone to Pam with an apologetic look. “Estelle got hurt,” she said briskly, though she suspected deep down that it was the other kid who was hurt. “I have to go.”

“Go take care of your baby,” Pam said. “Where are you with your techs?”

“I’ve routed thirty of them and sent them their first three jobs. The other fifteen are clocking on in an hour and there are fifty-six jobs left in the pool.”

Pam sighed and glanced over at the other dispatcher, a pink-haired daddy’s girl who only got the job because her father owned the business. She was blowing bubble gum and chatting on the phone. She could have been talking to a technician, but from the snippets of conversation that floated through the office it was not likely that she was talking about work.

“I’ll handle the rest of your techs myself,” Pam said. “No point in ruining sixteen people’s day over this.”

“Thank you,” Jen said.

As she stepped out of the steel-framed building and onto the cracked and tacky asphalt, she didn’t look like she was leaving a multi-million dollar business. The dispatch office was a quickly slapped-together prefab box squatting in the middle of the warehouse district—though “district” might have been generous. There were a total of three warehouses and two factories in the six-block square, plus a couple steel buildings like this one and a strip mall filled with a surprisingly random assortment of service businesses.

It had been mostly empty four years ago as the mines started dying out. Then some lucky prospector hit actual oil and the town flooded with money and people to spend it, which in turn made the internet a vital part of the infrastructure rather than a piece of twenty-first century luxury which the dug-in locals viewed with disdain. The hermit-like atmosphere of Twin Creeks was what had brought Jen to Twin Falls in the first place. In the beginning, it had seemed like the best place in the world to hide out.

But there were things that she hadn’t taken into account when Estelle was a baby, like the fact that there were only a few preschools to choose from—and that Estelle would make a habit of getting expelled. Twin Creeks Montessori was the very last school on the list. Over the past three years Estelle had been kicked out of every other daycare and preschool in town—if Jen couldn’t smooth this over, she’d have to beg Pam to let her work from home all the time, and not just for the few danger days every month.

The unforgiving sun had turned her little green Subaru into an oven. She opened it up to start it and let it blow out for a minute or two before attempting to drive it. Even with the windows cracked, the old car was a death trap in the summer—and summer seemed to be lasting longer and longer every year. She could remember a time when the craggy mountains would be capped with snow year-round, always feeding the river and reservoirs—but there hadn’t been a single snowfall last winter, and this winter was looking to be just as hot and dry.

Maybe if she did have to leave, she would look for something farther North. Washington, maybe, or Canada. Somewhere with lots of wilderness and folks who didn’t bother looking too closely into their neighbors’ secret lives. Somewhere Paul would never find them.

Main street narrowed into an overused residential road which rose up into the foothills in a series of steep bumps and deep gutters. These roads were one of the reasons everybody drove trucks; the other was that housing had spread faster than the city could keep up with, and most of the newer developments were still paved with packed earth and gravel.

The Montessori school sat on an acre at the edge of the old neighborhood in a remodeled ranch house as old as the town. Mature trees who had withstood droughts and freezes for hundreds of years shrugged off the heat and cast their shade on the shiny new black parking lot. Jen parked under the oldest and leafiest of these, shooting it a grateful look as she did so.

“Well then,” she said to nobody. “Let’s do this.”

Hers was one of only three cars in the parking lot and she wondered which of the other two belonged to the other child’s father; but as she was walking toward the big country porch that wrapped around the building, a motorcycle buzzed into the lot and Jen’s blood ran cold. She surreptitiously glanced at the back of his vest and was only marginally relieved that she didn’t see the Bone Den Kings’ patch on it.

She knew better than most that the Bone Den Kings didn’t always advertise their affiliation, especially when dealing with family business or employment. The leader didn’t take kindly to them throwing their weight around to get their way—he preferred that they work in the shadows, staying out of law enforcement’s way and riding under the radar.

He looked like he could be one of them. His long black hair fell straight to his waist, loose under his helmet. His skin was the same golden brown that Estelle’s father’s had been, though this man was shorter and stockier than Paul was. Blue tattoos ran from his knuckles up his arm until they disappeared under the sleeve of his t-shirt. If this was the other kids’ dad, Estelle might have been the one to be hurt after all.

That thought got her feet moving faster. She punched the parent access code into the electronic lock and pushed the door open, sliding her sunglasses up onto her head as she stepped into the air-conditioned semi-darkness of naptime. She could hear the older kids moving around upstairs, but there were no thundering footsteps or shouts; the kids here learned quickly that they were given nearly infinite freedom when they used it wisely.

Jen went to the reception desk, where a nervous brunette who couldn’t have been older than nineteen was furiously tapping away at the keyboard. She glanced up at Jen, then back at her work before looking back at Jen with a wide-eyed stare.

“You’re Estelle’s mom,” she said.

“Yes.”

The girl practically flew out of her seat and around from behind the desk. “Follow me,” she said, almost running.

She’s afraid of me, Jen realized with dread. Then she’s seen what Estelle can do. They all have. Jen tried to figure out how much time she had before the government showed up to take her baby away, but there was no way to know. Maybe they wouldn’t show up at all. Maybe they’d assume it was a prank—unless the school caught it on tape.

She was shown to the director’s office. She didn’t even acknowledge Angelina or the little boy curled up on a chair on the other side of the room before she went to Estelle, who was hiding under a long-legged chair and growling softly. Her brown eyes glowed yellow and her fine black hair stood on end, but for the most part she still looked human. That didn’t mean they hadn’t seen it happen, though.

Jen got down on her knees and folded her arms on the floor, resting her cheek on them so she could peek under the chair at her wild daughter.

“Estelle. Mama’s here.”

Estelle growled a little louder but made no other sign that she’d heard her. The door clicked open behind Jen, but she didn’t pay it any attention. She knew she looked like she was presenting her ass to the world, but she didn’t have room in her being to care. When Estelle shifted under the chair, Jen had seen several bright red streaks across her cheek and arm. They looked like claw marks.

“You’re safe,” Jen promised. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Come on out, baby.”

Estelle growled again, but there was less power in it. Then she whined, a uniquely canine sound. She was fighting for control like she’d never had to do before. Jen’s heart sank. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked at the moon calendar—she relied on the app on her phone to tell her when the danger week was approaching.

Heart pounding, she took her phone from her back pocket and flipped through screens to the app. It had been cycled to the cloud. She swore furiously in her head as she jabbed at the icon and forced it to download again, cursing the engineers who thought their space-saving measures were so convenient. Estelle shook and whined and Jen deliberately relaxed. Getting worked up wouldn’t help either of them.

“Ms. Breyer?” Angelina said hesitantly. “Mr. Vizuke is here. Shall we get started?”

“Give her a minute,” a man’s rich tenor said in a tone that left no room for argument. “Let her calm the kid down.”

There was something in his voice that made Jen wonder if he understood what was happening. She hadn’t really looked at the other kid and didn’t really believe it was possible—but his support helped her calm her mind and focus. She reached through the side of the chair nearest the wall, carefully avoiding cornering her daughter, and stroked Estelle’s super-fine black hair. Estelle’s canine whines eventually morphed into human sobs, then with a shuddering breath the noises stopped entirely.

When Estelle crawled out from under the chair and buried herself in her mother’s embrace, her eyes were their usual coffee-and-cream color. Jen bundled Estelle into her lap and moved seamlessly into a chair, noticing that the clothes Estelle wore were not the ones she’d been wearing when she arrived at school that morning.

Jen nodded gratefully at Mr. Vizuke without meeting his eyes, then turned to Angelina. The thin, fine-boned woman wrung her ring-encrusted fingers together as her nervous blue eyes darted from parent to parent.

“You’ve both seen the scratches your children sustained,” she said. “As you can see, there was no clear winner—there wasn’t a clear perpetrator, either. One minute they were smiling at one another, the next they were fighting. We have video, but it isn’t very clear.”

“Let’s see it,” Vizuke said grimly.

Jen’s phone chimed, telling her that the app was ready. She looked at it as Angelina messed around with the connection between her computer and the big wall monitor. She frowned, realizing why she hadn’t bothered to make a note of the moon cycle; the full moon was due on Labor Day Weekend, when neither of them would have to be out in public at all. That was still a week away.

She looked over her shoulder at Vizuke and the little boy curled up against his side. Vizuke glanced meaningfully at her phone, then shook his head slightly, frowning at her. She still wasn’t sure about him—it just seemed so far-fetched to believe that there was another kid like Estelle, not to mention one who was in her class. But she put her phone away and turned back toward the monitor, petting Estelle’s fuzzy little head.

“There we go,” Angelina said finally. “I never did get along with technology. Okay, I’ll start from the beginning, when they were playing nicely.”

The hair stood up on the back of Jen’s neck when she saw what Angelina had interpreted as two kids playing nicely. They sat on either side of the sandbox with a dump truck between them. Jen assumed that was the cause of the friction. There was another truck nearby, but it was green and yellow instead of blue and red—Estelle’s two favorite colors.

Estelle moved toward the truck and the little boy hunched his shoulders, baring his teeth at her. She bared hers back, mimicking his posture. He crawled around the outside of the sandbox on his fingers and toes, his eyes locked on hers. She followed suit. Jen’s heart beat fast.

“Aren’t they cute? Just playing around, smiling, nothing wrong at all,” Angelina said blithely.

Jen shot a sideways look at Vizuke, who tightened his lips in a grim smile at her. Yes. He knew. The little boy shuffled sideways toward the truck and Estelle leapfrog jumped toward it, landing within inches of it. She moved again—then the boy was a black blur as he tackled her. Angelina paused the video.

“This is the part that confuses me,” she said apologetically. “Bear has always been high-spirited and physical, and he and Estelle have wrestled a few times, but this just seemed—different. He’s been told to keep his hands to himself and he’s been very good about it recently, so I think something must have set him off—I just don’t know what.”

Jen told herself that the woman wasn’t actually an i***t, she just didn’t speak the same language that the kids did. Angelina started the video again, still talking.

“And here—I apologize for the quality. Our cameras are supposed to be able to capture moving images in HD, but I think the heat must have interfered or something.”

No, it wasn’t the heat. The kids were just moving faster than the camera could capture it. The two little figures blurred and pixelated through most of the frames. There were only one or two which clearly showed what was happening, and a human wouldn’t have been able to see them—if they did, Jen hoped they wouldn’t believe them. But to her sharp eyes, the sight of two wolf pups shredding the clothes off of each other burned itself into her brain.

When the video cleared up again, the kids were human. They’d broken apart from each other and were staring toward the approaching teachers. Their clothes lay in tatters around them and they were both bleeding profusely from deep gashes. Angelina paused the video again.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s just a trick of the light. As you can see, they both only earned light scratches from their scuffle.”

Jen traced her thumb over the bumpy scabs on Estelle’s face. “When did this happen?” She asked.

“Ten minutes before I called you,” Angelina said.

Jen nodded stiffly. The video was right. If the kids hadn’t stopped when they did, they would have killed each other—and the school would have had to explain why there were two dead puppies where toddlers should have been.

“Still, blood was drawn and that makes this an incident which requires meticulous oversight,” Angelina said.

Jen clutched her baby to her chest, thanking the demon gods who made them both for balancing the curse with a hefty dose of healing. Angelina let the video play through until the two kids were escorted off the playground by a pair of teachers, then stopped it. She folded her hands on her desk. Jen swiveled in her chair so that she was facing the director, but her attention was on Vizuke.

Bear was a werewolf, just like Estelle. Which meant Vizuke was, too. Vizuke, who resembled Paul as much as any cousin would. She stifled a quake, covering it up by shifting Estelle’s weight in her lap. They’d found her.

***

Coal Vizuke watched the woman’s face. She must have known how stupid it was to enroll her kid in a human school. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Coal had his own reasons for placing Bear in this school—one of them being that Bear was trained, drilled within an inch of his patience, to remain human whenever humans were around. The other was the woman herself—Jen Breyer—and her child.

If he’d seen the two of them on the street, he wouldn’t have assumed they were related. The little girl looked like she could have been Bear’s sister with her fine black halo of hair and her honey-colored skin. He couldn’t see her face, as it was still buried in her mother’s pale bosom. Jen’s arms were barely more tanned than her chest and her hair was a soft red-brown that framed her face.

She had an interesting face—light brown eyes a little too big to match her wide, dark mouth. Her nose was small and upturned and her jaw was strong. It was as if nature had seen fit to take bits and pieces from all over the world and stick them on her face without worrying about proportion or style. He might have liked it if he wasn’t so pissed off at the woman behind it.

“Now,” Angelina was saying. “We have to decide, as a group, whether we should keep Bear and Estelle together. As I said, this isn’t the first time they’ve had conflicts, though we can usually resolve those conflicts before either child loses their temper. What concerns me this time is that we had no warning—and that they both, somehow, managed to destroy their clothing in their effort to destroy each other.”

Angelina sighed and looked from Coal to Jen, meeting their eyes without hesitation. “I’m afraid that we have reached the limits of our ability to deal with this problem.”

“What do you suggest?” Jen asked. Her voice was calm but her body was tense. She expected Estelle to be expelled, Coal assumed. He knew she’d had to leave three other schools already.

Angelina folded her hands on her desk and smiled a motherly smile. Coal didn’t like it. It was a façade. The woman was terrified. “I am a big believer in the idea that a child’s first teacher is their parent. I believe if you and Mr. Vizuke can model some getting-along behavior for your children, the four of you would be able to work through this little rough patch they’re having.”

She cleared her throat, then smiled again. “I think the best thing would be for you to take the weekend, if you’re able, and spend some time together. Let the kids play somewhere where they feel safe, with you two there to referee anything that comes up. What do you think?”

Jen hesitated.

“Yes,” Coal said, not giving her an opportunity to think of an excuse. “That’s exactly what we’ll do. We should work out the details in the parking lot—these kids are exhausted.”

Angelina clucked sympathetically. “Poor dears, they missed nap time. Well then, go and do that and update me on Monday. If it turns out we need to move one of the kids to a different school, I am more than happy to refund you any remaining tuition.”

He felt a wave of defeat from Jen and it made him want to shake her. Did she just think she could walk around pretending she was human or that her kid wasn’t dangerous? He could relate, to a point. His teen years had been rife with angst and longing to be human (mostly so he could date Susette Arnelle, a dream that wouldn’t have come true even if he had been human), but he’d gotten over it before adulthood. And, like every other civilized shifter, he knew better than to tempt fate by putting unpredictable pups in with human children. Bear notwithstanding, of course. That was a calculated move on his part and would be rectified immediately.

He stopped as he stepped out into the parking lot with Bear’s hand in his. He’d forgotten all about the bike. Jen stopped beside him, following his gaze to his motorcycle. She gave him a look full of judgment and he glared back, flustered.

“I was at work,” he explained defensively. “I usually pick him up in the truck.”

She sighed. “I have a spare booster seat in the trunk. If you want, I can give him a ride home—as long as he behaves himself.”

Coal looked down at Bear, who gazed back up at him with deep, sorrowful eyes. “Did you hear that?” Coal asked.

Bear nodded.

“Good. Thank you, Ms. Breyer.”

“Call me Jen,” she said.

Which was good, because he’d almost slipped up and called her Jen to begin with. Angelina hadn’t introduced them by first name—if he knew hers from the jump, she’d have questions. She might have questions anyway, come to think of it. She was moving like a hunted dog, skirting around him, never showing him her back, never dragging too far behind. She was doing everything she could to look as non-threatening as possible, which set his teeth on edge.

“Video cameras have a hard time with our kind,” he said softly as she popped her trunk and dragged out a booster seat.

She froze for a heartbeat, then closed the trunk firmly and started attaching the car seat. “You’re lucky I still had this in here,” she said. “I was supposed to drop it off at the thrift store ages ago, but I kept forgetting. There’s nothing wrong with it and it’s big enough for either of them. I only replaced Estelle’s to celebrate her enrollment. The new one has rocket ships on it.”

She pulled her head and shoulders out of the car. “It’s ready,” she said. “Just let me get the AC on before you strap him in.”

Coal watched her move and listened to her chatter, puzzled. She must have heard him. Why was she talking about rocket ships and thrift stores?

“Even so,” he continued as she started the car. “We don’t know what the teachers saw, if anything. We don’t know why the kids stopped fighting. There’s a good chance that someone is going to file a report or post something online that will get attention.”

“It should be good now,” she said, going on as if he hadn’t said anything. “Go ahead and strap Bear in. I’ll get Estelle.”

Coal’s confusion compounded into irritation. She was ignoring everything he said. Did she think he didn’t know what she was? What her daughter was? He’d watched the same video she had and he knew that they both saw the same thing. Bear wasn’t the only shifter in the sandbox.

Annoyance sharpened his tone as he strapped Bear in. “Now you listen to me, Bear. You will not touch this little girl on the way home. You will not even look at her. Jen isn’t going to put up with bad pups in the back seat, you understand?”

“Yes,” Bear said solemnly.

Coal looked up just in time to catch the fading edge of Jen’s wince and he realized that he’d been harsher than intended. Awkward, he ruffled the boy’s hair then shut the door. He shot an irritated glance at Jen, who had finished strapping Estelle in without a word, and stalked toward his bike.

“Follow me,” he said. “It’s not far. Ten minutes.”

Then they were going to talk whether she liked it or not.