Feral Dust Bunnies (Offbeat Crimes Book 4) Read online

  “You don’t need much. A box with an old blanket. I’ll get you the things you need to feed her.” Jason reached for her and laughed when Wolf pulled back. “You probably shouldn’t take her on patrol, Officer Wolf.”

  He bent his head to nuzzle the kitten’s fluffy tummy, he just couldn’t help himself, before handing her back. “I’ll call later. Let you know.”

  His squad mates hadn’t moved from their positions by the front desk, though Krisk’s brow ridges crinkled inward and Carrington raised a patrician eyebrow.

  “Kitten. Wasn’t eating. Let’s go,” Wolf growled.

  Carrington moved first, pushing off the wall to head to the door. “I see. A kitten issue. Of course.”

  Wolf side-eyed him though he kept walking. “What’re you saying?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all.” Carrington gave him a one-shouldered shrug. “Jason’s a very nice man. I’ve known him many years.”

  Wolf huffed a breath in response because he couldn’t think of anything else while Amanda took Carrington’s arm and hustled him through the bright sunshine to their squad car. They were engaging in a conversation of fiercely hissed whispers, still loud enough for Wolf to catch “leave him alone” and “just trying to move things along” and “he will if he wants to.”

  Ears burning, Wolf got in his squad car and picked up his tablet to pretend to work on case notes. He didn’t want to look at Krisk. He didn’t want to see if Amanda and Carrington were watching him, still talking about him. He didn’t want to face the fact that he was terrible at this.

  Maybe Jason was interested or maybe he was being nice because of Kitten. Jason liked non-human people. He cared about them. He was a compassionate man. He was patient and kind and…

  I’m going to make myself crazy like this. It’s bad enough that he smells so good.

  After several minutes of Wolf not typing, Krisk tapped his arm and tipped his head toward the street.

  “Yeah. Sorry. Thinking.”

  Krisk pulled out his phone and started texting.

  Officer Shen appears to have compatible interests.

  “Holy crow, really?” Wolf snarled as he threw the cruiser into gear. “Don’t you start, too.”

  The rest of the day was relatively quiet and when he called Mom, she fully supported the kitten fostering, though she warned Wolf that he would be doing the night feedings. He agreed that was only fair since she would have kitten most days.

  “And it’s only for a couple of weeks. Until Kitten’s old enough for adoption.”

  Mom was quiet for long enough that Wolf thought she’d accidentally hung up. Finally, she said softly, “We’ll see.”

  At the end of shift, Wolf drove Krisk home first. He’d thought about taking his partner along to ACC but had decided that was cowardly. Probably. Maybe. Krisk still gave him a look and a headshake as he got out of the car, which meant either stop being so dense, or why do you always make things so complicated, or even wow, you’re making a huge mistake.

  Back to Animal Control, back past the front desk with a wave for the young person at reception, back through the ACO’s desks until he stood near—but not too near—Jason Shen’s. His heart beat harder than it should. He thought was past all this awkwardness and anxiety over communicating with humans he potentially licked…er, liked. Then Jason’s scent hit him like a basketball to the face and he couldn’t try to pretend he was anywhere near in control. If he still had a tail, it would be wagging furiously.

  At least he managed to keep his butt still as he said, “Hey. Here to pick up Kitten.”

  “Great! I’m glad you came back.” Jason shut down his system and stood, his short-sleeved polo shirt straining over his biceps as he levered himself up from his desk. “Come on through. We have everything together for you.”

  Jason led him into the cat room and gave him the bag of supplies and a set of instructions on how to use the formula and when to feed. Then he got out a little cardboard carrier and retrieved the kitten, who immediately began crying when she saw Wolf. He let her snuggle into the crook of his elbow while he packed everything up. A warm ember set off sparks in his heart when she purred against his chest.

  “What are you going to name her?” Jason asked.

  “Name?”

  “Sure. You’ll have her for a couple of weeks. You should call her something.”

  Wolf covered his confusion by detaching the kitten from his shirt and placing her carefully in the carrier. “I’ll call her Kitten.”

  “Dude, you can’t do that!” Jason laughed helplessly. “It’s like calling a new puppy Dog.”

  I’m still called Wolf. He didn’t say it out loud since he didn’t want to explain himself and couldn’t have made sense through the little sheen of hurt and embarrassment if he’d tried. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Okay. Hey.” Jason put a hand on his arm as Wolf turned away to leave. “I feel like I’m always making you uncomfortable. I’m sorry if I have. My sisters say my sense of humor gets annoying sometimes. Could I buy you lunch tomorrow, or coffee or something?”

  Is he asking me out? Does lunch count as a date? I should ask Carrington. I will. I’ll ask him tomorrow. I don’t even know if Jason likes men. His scent says he does, like he’s reacting to me, but humans are so weird. He realized with a start that he’d been quiet far too long, staring blankly at Jason’s hand. The hand that was making his bones into pudding by resting on his arm. “Um…sure. Yes. Lunch. Um. Lunch is good.”

  “Good.” Jason’s smile had returned. He tucked a card into the bag with the supplies. “You know Matt and Marie’s? Logan Square? I’ll meet you there around twelve. Just call me if you can’t make it. You can tell me how the kitten’s doing.”

  That didn’t sound too date-ish and he did like the meatball sandwiches there. “All right. Have a good night.”

  Kitten cried all the way home, of course. It broke Wolf’s heart to hear her so unhappy, but safety first. No babies crawling around a moving vehicle. She was secure in the carrier buckled in the front seat. Maybe Krisk would agree to come to lunch too. Then it wouldn’t be even a sort of date and he wouldn’t have to worry about it so much.

  Chapter Four

  “So you’re not going with me?” Disoriented from a night of being up with a hungry kitten and increasingly anxious over his not-date, Wolf stared at his partner.

  Krisk continued setting out his lunch on their shared desk—various meticulously sliced vegetables, a container of hummus and a bowl of dark leafy greens. He didn’t even look at Wolf when he made shooing motions with one hand.

  “That’s cold, Krisk. I mean I’d be there if it was you.” Though trying to visualize any scenario where that might happen gave Wolf a headache. “Fine. I’ll be back in an hour. Send help if I’m not.”

  The sandwich shop was just busy enough that no one paid much attention to him except to glance at his uniform. Even with all the hungry customers, Wolf had managed to snag his meatball sandwich and find a seat before Jason hurried in.

  “Hi! Sorry. Cat hoarder call this morning. Took a little longer than I thought it would.” Jason pointed to the counter. “Mind if I grab something first?”

  Wolf shook his head, trying his best to remember his human manners since his mouth was full of amazingly good meatball. It probably wasn’t polite to stare at Jason while he put his order in either, but the broad back and substantial bubble butt were hard to resist. Jason was solid, Wolf’s favorite human flavor, with a bit of a belly that said he liked his food.

  Now he was coming back to the table, smiling. Wolf had to make the decision he’d been dreading since the day before. How much did he reveal right off? Was it better to just get everything out there? Amanda had said hell yes. Kash had said no. Carrington had said it depended how the conversation went.

  His squad mates were such a big help.

  With deliberate care, he set his sandwich down and cleared his throat as Jason joined him. He hated having things hanging over him lik
e that. Time to just say it. “There’s something you should know about me.”

  Jason’s smile quirked up on one side. “What, that you’re gay?”

  “Um. More pan, I guess? Not that. You know about the Seventy-Seventh, right?”

  “Paranormal squad. Kind of quirky paranormals.” Jason put his own sandwich down. “Yeah, I’ve known some of your officers for years.”

  Wolf nodded, watching a bit of cheese slide down the side of one of his meatballs. “I’m a wolf.”

  “Should that mean something to me? I know that your family name’s Wolf.”

  “No. Not my name.” Wolf took a bite in frustration, trying to gather courage and words. “I am a wolf. Small w. Was a wolf. Long time ago.”

  Jason ate a couple of bites of his chicken sandwich without taking his eyes off Wolf. “Let me see if I’m getting this. You’re saying you were born a wolf and now you’re human?”

  “Yeah. If that’s too weird for you, I understand.”

  “It’s not…” Another slow bite of sandwich. Jason finally looked away while he chewed. “Part of me wants to say that’s crazy and can’t be. But a bigger part of me says, wow, that explains a lot.”

  “I’m not crazy and I don’t lie.” The growl was in Wolf’s voice before he could prevent it. “I don’t need you to believe me.”

  “That’s just it. I shouldn’t believe you but I do. It’s not any harder to believe than Carrington’s vampire issues or Virago’s fire-starting ones. I’ve seen that one first-hand.”

  “Oh. All right.”

  Jason put his sandwich down and leaned forward. “Do you want to tell me how it happened?”

  That wasn’t what Wolf had expected. Jason should have laughed at him, gotten angry, or walked out. Huh. “I, um, well, I was a wolf.”

  “Got that part.” Jason’s smile was back, though a gentler one without the teasing.

  “Yeah. I don’t remember it really well? Mom says it’s because I was young. They think maybe I was three when it happened. I do remember my family. Small pack. Mom and dad wolf and my sibs. Older brother, younger sisters.” A little shiver raced up Wolf’s spine thinking about that night. He still didn’t understand it. Nobody did. “It must have been a bad winter. I remember being hungry all the time. We found these small fluffy deer in a strange thicket. I mean, now I know they were fenced in sheep. Then, I just knew they smelled like food. We killed two and were eating them. It felt so good to have something in my belly again. None of us heard the woman come up on us until she was screaming at us. My pack ran. I got stuck trying to squeeze under the fence. I felt wrong and sick and howled and howled but the howls even sounded wrong.”

  “That sounds really awful.” Jason reached across to pat his arm.

  “It was. Everything was wrong. I couldn’t get my legs to move right and I was freezing. I think I remember ending up in a barn wrapped in a blanket. Stuff’s fuzzy from those first weeks. Then some other humans came and took me to the research center. They kept me in a locked room while they figured out what to do with me, I guess. It…took me a long time to understand that I was human-shaped and that the hands and feet I saw were mine.”

  “Hey.” Jason tapped on the table to stop Wolf’s narrative. “This is pretty weird stuff you’re telling me. I’m trying to keep up the best I can. But you’re shaking. You don’t have to tell me anymore if you don’t want to.”

  “No, I can. I mean, it gets easier.” Wolf fidgeted with his plate, fighting the urge to take another bite. Eating helped when he was anxious. Mom said that might be a problem later in life. At least the scent of meatball parmesan helped drown out Jason’s scent. “You don’t…I mean, I don’t expect you to believe me.”

  Jason leaned back, arms crossed over his chest. “Look. I once had to get a goat out of a top-loading laundry machine that not only had a closed lid when the goat found it but also a load of laundry on top. So don’t tell me what I should disbelieve. I know you probably didn’t know back then when you were so scared and confused, but what do they think happened to you?”

  Wolf shrugged. “The psychics at State Paranormal say it was a curse. That the woman yelling at us about her sheep had probably thrown it, though she still denies ever seeing any wolves.”

  “And no one asked her to, you know, turn you back? She wasn’t even charged with anything? Child-endangerment at least? Were you a kid when you changed?”

  Wolf stared, open-mouthed. All those sharp questions. He knew Jason wasn’t angry with him, the story didn’t affect him personally. He had to be angry with the sheep woman, on Wolf’s behalf. No one besides Mom and Dad had ever been angry for him before.

  “I was…um, they thought I was about twelve when I was changed. Not in years I’d been alive, but in human development. I couldn’t understand human. Sure as hell couldn’t speak it. By the time I could?” Wolf shrugged. “She refused to admit to anything. The people at State couldn’t figure out how to change me. And they weren’t sure that it wouldn’t kill me, ’cause by that time I was in the body of a sixteen-year-old human and if I changed back into a sixteen-year-old wolf, I’d die. It’s kinda confusing.”

  “How old are you now?”

  Wolf gave in and devoured part of his sandwich while he pieced an answer together. The food did make him feel better. Steadier. “I’ve been alive for twenty-eight years. The doctors say my aging process has slowed down, though. So even though I looked like a sixteen-year-old about twenty-one years ago, I’m closer in, I dunno, aging-process age? To thirty than thirty-seven now.”

  The crinkles at the corners of Jason’s eyes had reappeared. “That may be the most convoluted sentence I ever heard. Well, outside of politics, anyway.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it was great. I’m sorry. I interrupted. You were telling me what happened at the research center?”

  “Lots of tests,” Wolf growled around another bite, manners be damned. “They finally called Dr. Tudosz in. He was an animal behaviorist and they thought he could help. That’s who became my dad and mom, Hector and Miriam Tudosz. He was the one who started teaching me to communicate. Simple stuff at first. Pointing to things. Finger counting.”

  “They didn’t make you stay in that cell?”

  “For a while, yeah. They said I was dangerous.”

  “You were probably scared out of your mind. But Dr. Tudosz didn’t think you were dangerous.”

  Wolf shook his head. “He…I don’t remember all his visits. I remember how they felt. It was better when he was there. Nothing bad ever happened while he visited. After a couple of months, he got me out. Said he and Miriam would foster me. Then after a couple years more, they adopted me, though Mom and Dad said that was tough. State Paranormal had to help make me a legal person first.”

  “They sound like really great people. Your parents.”

  Half of their lunch hour was gone. Wolf swallowed another bite. “I’ve…talked a lot. Now you say stuff. About you.”

  Jason laughed, loud enough for other patrons to glance over. It was such a genuine, warm laugh, though, that people smiled and turned away again. Just colleagues enjoying a break. “I’ve liked listening. Don’t think I’ve ever heard you say so much at once.”

  “Yeah. Well. It’s not a story I tell a lot. People think I’m crazy or a liar.”

  “I don’t think you’re either. Who was the last person you told all that?”

  Wolf thought back. Had he told Anna? No. No, he really hadn’t. He purposefully hadn’t, which was sort of like lying. That didn’t make him feel good at all but he’d been trying something new, trying to see if she could accept him without explanations. “The doctor who did the psych eval when I was applying to the academy. Last time I told it from the start. Still not talking about you.”

  Jason tossed a potato chip in the air and Wolf watched in fascination as he caught it in his mouth. Not that Wolf couldn’t do it. He just didn’t meet many humans who could.

  “I have a house by Pennypack Pa
rk,” Jason began. “I’d say I lived alone but that would be fibbing.”

  “You live with family?”

  “Not my human family.” Jason chuckled. “I’m owned by four dogs, six cats, a pair of rabbits and an iguana.”

  Wolf blurted out, “How do you…manage? Just one kitten… It’s harder than I thought.”

  “None of them were babies when they came to live with me,” Jason said gently. “They’re all rescues. Animals no one else wanted. Some were strays, so we don’t know if their people lost them or something happened to them or if they just didn’t care. Some, like Chien Long, got too much for their owners. They didn’t realize iguanas lived so long or that they keep growing their entire lives.”

  “They should know that if they want an iguana companion.” Wolf couldn’t help a dark frown. That all sounded worse than irresponsible.

  “They should. You’re right. I wish more people thought like you.” Jason chomped on another chip. “Anyway, grownup animals don’t need quite as much from you. How’s your kitten adjusting?”

  “She—” Wolf cleared his throat in embarrassment. “She was really hungry last night. And didn’t want to be in her box. I, um, didn’t get much sleep. Might have let her sleep with me.”

  “Poor little girl. She had a big day yesterday.” Jason laughed again, his dark eyes shining with sympathy for Wolf’s predicament. “She’ll settle down when she feels more secure.”

  Jason finally took over the conversation, much to Wolf’s relief since his brain’s conversation center resembled a dumped out junk drawer. There was more about Jason’s own family, both parents, two brothers and three sisters all living nearby. Wolf could have listened for the rest of the day to that soothing, playful voice.

  Their timing instincts kicked in simultaneously as they both checked the clock and twitched at how fast the hour had zipped by. Tiny sunbursts spun through Wolf’s stomach when Jason stumbled through leaving as badly as he did. Good to see he wasn’t as unshakably confident as he always seemed. Wolf did manage to hand over his phone number and he did accept an invitation to unspecified dinner before he hurried away with awkward goodbyes.