Chapter 5

Chapter Five

Vance

We make love again the next day. Afterward, I call a few friends to see what they can find out about this Maxwell Cowdery. An hour later, I have her over to my place and she's amazed to see how it's decorated. She's also a little confused. I'm cagey up until the moment my brother calls me.

My brother. That means this is serious enough that my friends involved him.

I answer and he says, "Cowdery is with the Glenn Forth Clan."

Damn.

She can see my expression, and she's instantly worried. I say, "All right, Karl. I'll keep you up to date."

"I can be there with one nine-hour flight."

"Not yet but maybe."

I hang up the phone and say, "I go back to Company 417 tomorrow. I wonder if you wouldn't mind if I put you in a hotel room for the four days I'm gone."

"A hotel room?"

"Well, I want to check out this Maxwell fellow, and until I do, I don't want you to be alone at home."

She seems a little bit wary. Of course, who wouldn't be a little bit wary about that? But she nods and says softly, "Okay. Whatever you think is best."

And I tell her, "Well, right now, I think you need to feel how soft my sheepskin rug is."

She reaches for it and lifts it up. "Very nice," she says while rolling her eyes.

"You can't get the full effect," I say, "until you feel it under your hands and against your knees." Her eyes grow wide and she giggles and punches my shoulder.

But she ends up on her hands and knees.

And then on her shoulders and her knees.

And I'm pretty sure she doesn't really care about how soft the sheepskin rug might be.

Afterward, we shower and I try to get my mind to slow down now that I've been able to distract her from things. Maxwell Cowdery is a wolf shifter. The Glenn Forth Clan is an organization of militant wolves who believe humans are inferior beings suitable only for breeding. They kidnap girls to breed them.

And he's after Toni.

I arrange for the hotel room online and we drive there. She sees that I've paid for a month in advance and she asks, "Why did you do this?"

"Well, I'm gone for four days at a time, and it makes sense to have it available."

"There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?"

I look at her and hesitate for only five seconds or so. "Yes. There is."

"Will you tell me what it is?"

I look at her for a few seconds. We stand in the hotel room and I finally say, "Do you trust me?"

She doesn't hesitate at all. "Yes. I trust you."

"Then I'm not going to tell you right now," I say.

She takes a breath but processes that far more quickly than I might imagine her to. She finally nods and says, "All right. Then you have plenty of time to fuck me like there's no tomorrow."

I chuckle at that and ask, "Again?"

"First of all, I'm not going to see you again for four days. Second of all, I kind of feel like there's still a tomorrow so you're going to need to up your game."

We end up having room service for dinner and for breakfast. Despite my best efforts, tomorrow still arrives, too. After breakfast, I kiss her goodbye and head home to get ready for work. The hotel is owned by an equity fund that primarily consists of shifter money.

Some shifters, like Tigers and Lions, tend to be very wealthy. Nothing like dragons, of course, but very wealthy, nonetheless. It comes from our lifespan more than anything else. When you have thirty or forty years longer to acquire wealth, you tend to be more successful. And the dragons… Well, they have thousands of years.

In any case, I'm a shareholder in this hotel. I think there are fifteen or twenty of us. They take care of all the guests but they particularly take care of guests directly associated with us. When I leave the next morning after breakfast, I feel confident that Toni is going to be fine while I'm at the firehouse.

Everyone at Company 417 is a shifter. That isn't common knowledge, of course. Shifters are out in the open now but most people will never meet one. Perhaps someday the sight of us will be run of the mill. I doubt it, though.

The fire chief knows and one other member of the city fire authority. There are two or three others in the state fire authority who know. Company 417 is a sort of pilot program. The idea is that once we've been successful, the state will reveal to everyone that we're shifters as part of explaining how well shifters can live with humans.

It's been a number of years.

Company 417 is famous for what it accomplishes.

We're still humans as far as the world is concerned.

Not too long ago, Company 417 put out a fire that had an entire ghost-town turned theme park ablaze. We did it by fixing a geological anomaly, a dam formed by a plane crash. The dam created a little lake and dried up the stream that ran by the ghost town. We broke the dam, flooded the town, saved a bunch of people, and were very celebrated on the news.

Celebrated as wonderful firefighters.

Human firefighters.

Nobody knew a dragon rammed the rubble that formed the dam. Nobody knew that the man who led the whole thing was actual a panther. Nobody knew any of that. Nobody knows that the firefighter who rescued all those kids from the school bus that crashed on Candle Mountain is a wolf. Nobody knows that the man who not only saved two girls from a burning van but also took out their kidnapper was a horse shifter.

Nope. The state has yet to reveal to the world that Company 417 is composed of shifters. To be honest, I'm not sure they ever will. I think the powers that be in the world of straight humans are content to let people treat our revealing ourselves to the world as something of a hoax.

The Glenn Forth Clan is most definitely not a hoax. My brother and I have often considered just wiping them out. We know we could recruit enough tigers just among the Grey. Not only do we think kidnapping women to breed them is evil at face value but in addition, we can't risk humanity ever finding out that there are shifters like that.

There is no way we would survive a war with humanity. This is why we remained hidden for so long. If they wanted to, they could wipe us out. If they learned there are groups of us (all wolves, actually) who are willing to steal human girls from their homes, keep them prisoner, and breed them until they can't produce offspring anymore…

I feel anger rising up inside of me. If I hadn't discovered this, it's highly likely Toni would end up in a cage somewhere. She would spend most of the rest of her life pregnant and would never even get to know the dozen or so children she produced.

I dial my brother. He answers by saying, "I'll be on a flight in ten minutes."

"No," I say. "No flight. Not yet. Get recruits. It's time to end Glenn Forth."