“She’s been nothing but a disappointment to us since she was a little girl,” Mrs. Mosswood said indignantly as they walked back through the living room.
“Yes, and you made sure you let her know that, every minute of every day, didn’t you?” Dash couldn’t hold himself back any more. “No wonder she never wanted to set paw in this house.”
He turned and stalked out of the house, with Loren at his heels.
“What the hell was that?” Loren demanded.
“Can you imagine growing up with those assholes as your parents?” Dash demanded heatedly. “Sir,” he added.
“Thankfully, no, my parents weren’t born with sticks up their asses or a silver spoon in their mouth.” Loren’s stern face actually cracked into a brief smile. Then his usual stone-faced demeanor returned. “Since when were you Isadora Mosswood’s champion? She goes out of her way to aggravate you specifically.”
She did, didn’t she? Dash sighed heavily.
“She very likely sold out her own kind for money,” Loren pointed out. “Especially if her parents cut her off.”
Unfortunately, things were looking worse and worse for Isadora.
“We should look through her bank statements,” Dash said, a feeling of gloom settling over him. “Maybe we could trace any unusual deposits.”
When they got back to Warden Redthorne’s office and had their IT guru access her bank account, however, they didn’t see any withdrawals or deposits from the last six months.
They called her landlady, who told them that she’d always paid on time, and in cash.
Who lived on a cash only basis and always had plenty of money even though they had no known income? Criminals, that’s who.
Dash’s heart sank. It was looking worse and worse for Isadora.
Chapter Five
“He’s lived around here for years. He travels sometimes, disappears for months,” the hyena shifter named Burke said, as he refilled Isadora’s coffee cup. “I mean, that’s not unusual for a Hobo. He travels around the country, from what I hear, going to other Hobo camps. Likes to be near to them, but not too near, like he doesn’t want to be alone but he can only handle so much contact with people.”
She felt much better after having gotten a decent night’s sleep. She’d slept in Lynx form, curled up on the limb of an oak tree. Sally had slept on a branch near her, and Thomas had slept on the ground underneath the tree.
Isadora had woken up when it was still dark, leaving the two kids sleeping. Thomas’s uncle was supposed to arrive that day, which was a weight off her mind. She didn’t like the idea of the kids roaming around with no adult caring for them. Most Hobos were decent enough people, but not all.
She’d left her van parked on a small dirt road several miles away, since there was no way to get to the hob camp by car. She had a feeling she’d need to ditch the van soon anyway; the safest thing to do was to keep switching vehicles as often as possible, to ensure that nobody picked up her trail. She’d brought a couple of bags to the Hobo camp, with clothing, some food, a few of her burner cell phones, and a wallet with cash and fake I. D’s.
Now she sat around a campfire with a dozen other Hobos of various species, drinking instant coffee from tin cups after a breakfast of raw squirrel. Despite all the worries weighing down on her, she felt good. Camping out like this made her feel raw and primal and closer to her inner lynx. Of course, after a few days of it she was more than ready to return to civilization; a girl could only go so long without her flat-iron and regular supplies of chocolate.
She reached in her bag, pulled out a box of granola bars, and began passing them around the circle. “Thanks,” Delia, a bear shifter female, said enthusiastically. “Hey, got a mirror I could borrow?”
Isadora passed her a mirror, and Delia grimaced at her grimy face. “I’m going to go take a dip in the stream,” she said. She got up and ambled off.
“Does he talk about where he came from?” Isadora asked. She drank half her coffee in one gulp.
“No, he doesn’t like to talk about himself. I mean, when he comes to hang out, he’s sociable enough, but if you ask anything about him he changes the subject,” Stephan said.
I’ll bet, Isabel thought. From what her boss’s intelligence sources had dug up, Pyotr had been through years of absolute hell.
The first rays of morning light could be seen on the distant horizon. The morning air was cool and the ground was silvered with frost.
“If you want to talk to him, we need to go now,” Burke said.
Isadora set down her coffee cup on a flat rock. She, Burke and Stephan quickly stripped their clothing off, shivering. They shifted, and immediately were warm again. Their breath made puffs of white vapor in the chill air, but their fur coats kept out the cold.
Sitting near the fire were their bags of clothing, which they’d already prepared, with hooded sweat suits and slip on shoes for when they reached Pyotr’s cave.
They grabbed the bags and set off at a fast trot. The caw of birds sliced through the quiet morning air as they leaped over fallen branches and wove through underbrush.
About twenty minutes later, they came to a clearing. Stephan and Burke came to a halt at the edge of the clearing, so Isadora did too.
Suddenly a rifle shot cracked in the air. The bullet landed in a quaking aspen tree near Isadora’s head.
“Shift back to human form! Now!” an angry male voice yelled from a distance. Isadora could make out the Eastern European accent. It was Pyotr.
The three of them quickly shifted to human form and pulled on their outfits and shoes. In human form, Isadora hugged herself for warmth.
“Who is she?” the voice called out.
“She’s one of us! She’s a Hobo shifter!” Burke yelled out.
There was a pause, and then a man came trotting up to them, his rifle aimed in their direction. He wore a pair of camouflage pants and jacket and lace up military style boots. His brown hair was long, hanging over his face, and he had a scraggly beard. Half of his lean, hawk-like face was heavily scarred; Isadora could barely make it out behind the hair. His eyes were wild, darting from one person to the other.
“Why did you bring her out here without telling me? I don’t like surprises,” he yelled at them.
“She asked to talk to you. She said it’s important,” Burke said, holding his hands up placatingly.
Pyotr sniffed the air suspiciously, and glowered at her. “How did she even know I was here? She doesn’t look like a Hobo. Doesn’t smell like a Hobo. Too clean.”
“Hey, some of us like to bathe,” Isadora said, exasperated. “I need your help, Pyotr. I found you because I put out the word to Hobo groups online, letting them know that I was looking for shifters from Korslovia. There’s a good chance that we’re going to be able to capture the scientist known as Zador Horvath.”
Horvath had been the second in command at the illegal lab. He was the last known person alive to have escaped from the lab.
He went pale at that. “How? Is he close to here? Is that why you came?” He looked around fearfully, as if expecting Zador to pop out from behind the nearest pine tree.
“I can’t reveal any more information than that, for security purposes. However, I hear that you’ve told people that you were held in his laboratory. Is that true?” Apparently when Pyotr got drunk, he got more talkative. She should have brought some alcohol with her, because apparently he wasn’t feeling too talkative right now.
He was backing away slowly, the rifle trained on her.
“He’s a monster,” he said, his voice hoarse and fearful. “Do you see this? ” He gestured at his scarred face. “He laughed when he did that to me. All the time.” His eyes were huge with fright now.
“If he sent me, the area would be crawling with soldiers already, wouldn’t it?” Isadora pointed out.
“Maybe.” He stopped backing up. “Where is he? How did you find him?”
Isadora walked forward slowly, hands still up in the air. “I don’t know. They don’t tell me these things, I’m just a grunt,” she said. “Will you come with me to talk to my friends? I can arrange a meeting in an open area, if that makes you more comfortable. The information that you can give us could be vital to catching him.”
“I can’t talk about it. I’m sorry. You don’t know what it was like…” he lowered the rifle. He was starting to shake, and tears filled his eyes and ran down his scarred cheeks.
“You’re right, I don’t know. I’m really sorry,” she said soothingly. “Let me give you my cell phone number in case you change your mind.” She handed him a piece of paper with one of her numbers written on it. It was a burner cell phone that she’d purchased recently. She’d ditched her old cell phone so that the Wardens and Pride Patrol wouldn’t be able to track her.
He accepted the paper with trembling hands and tucked it in his pocket.
“What do you need me for?” he asked gruffly.
“There are very few pictures of him in existence, and they’re all blurry. There’s no fingerprints. We don’t have a lot to go on other than verbal accounts, and not many of his victims survived. You’re the only person in this country who has seen him. We’re going to need help identifying him.”