Bear the Burn(24)
“Is that why you ignored me for that whole week?”
“Exactly why. And it wasn’t easy, woman. You’d already made your mark on me. I threw myself into work up at the firehouse, but I couldn’t keep you off my mind for long. I wanted to know you. Know what you were doing and if you were seeing anyone. I wanted to know what you liked to do outside of work.”
She grinned and looked pointedly in the back seat where Daffodil and Beans were snuggled up together in the crate they shared. “Did you imagine you’d be shacking up with me and two frilly dogs by the end of the next week?”
“Now, that I didn’t imagine. I pegged you for a cat person for some reason.”
“Daffodil can’t handle cats. I fostered one once, and my dog got bullied relentlessly.”
“Well, she’s three pounds of submissive. She didn’t stand a chance with a cat. What the hell is going on here?” he asked, leaning forward.
Red and blue flashed across his face, and Quinn stretched her neck to look out the front window. A crowd was gathered at the mouth of a fork in the road. Some held signs, and some seemed to be trying to hold others back. A police barricade covered the entrance to a poorly fenced property.
“The police around here have better things to do than babysit our land,” Dade muttered as he pulled through.
He rolled down the window. “Hey, Monroe.” Something hit the back of the truck and Dade threw the crowd behind him a pissed off glare. “I thought they kept our names out of the press.”
The dark-haired officer from the hospital nodded and gave him an empty smile. “This isn’t the national news’s doing, I’m afraid. A couple of bloggers in Breckenridge interviewed the witnesses from the fire. Your names leaked online.” He jerked his chin at the restless crowd. “They’ve been at this for hours. Sorry, Dade. If you don’t want to stay closer to the station, we’ll have to camp out here until these yahoos get bored. Cody is posting no trespassing signs to protect your property, but I wouldn’t advise going after anyone who slips through, and especially not as an animal. Everyone is waiting for you to screw up. Don’t give them the satisfaction, yeah?” Monroe patted the open window and nodded a greeting to Quinn. “Y’all have a good night. We’ll be out here if you need us.”
“Mmm,” Dade murmured. “You know I’m sorry for this, man. I wish what we were didn’t stir everyone up.”
“It’ll be a tornado at first, but the storm will pass eventually.”
Dade gave a two fingered wave to a tall, muscular man who was nailing a No Trespassing sign onto the rundown fence beside the road. Quinn recognized him from the video.
“Is that Cody?” she asked.
“The one and only.”
As they began to pull away, she asked, “And he’s your alpha, right?”
“Nah.” Dade kept his troubled eyes straight ahead on the road. “Cody is our alpha.”
“Oh. So we’re his servants?”
“No, woman, you won’t bow down to anyone unless Cody is making an important decision for our crew. He’s a good leader with a good head on his shoulders.”
“Maybe we should stop so I can introduce myself.”
“That’ll slow him down, and he has a family to get home to. You’ll meet him tomorrow.”
“Okay.” She waved to him, anyway.
Cody nodded once and raised a hammer in the air, then turned back to his work.
Quinn fidgeted with the strap of her duffel bag. “He’s out here because of me,” she murmured, settling back into her seat.
“No, he’s not. We discussed going public before you were even on my radar. I get your need to take credit for bad things happening. I have the same instinct, but this one isn’t on you.”
“Why would you want to go public? Your kind has stayed hidden all this time. Why now?”
“Our kind. And the answer to that is IESA.”
“What’s that?”
“The International Exchange of Shifter Affairs. They are a secret arm of the government that has been flexing its muscles with us for a while. With lots of shifter crews actually, and it’s not just bears. Their leader, Krueger, pressed on the Breck Crew for two generations. He hit the kill switch on my dad while he was working a fire, made it look like an accident. We didn’t figure that out until he hit my kill switch, though. Our chemical burns looked the same and were both on our necks. When shifters lost their usefulness, they came up missing, or if they cut their trackers out of their throats, IESA sent us in.”
“What do you mean? Like, you were a clean-up crew?”