Raven’s Instinct (A Day Care for Shifters #6)

Prologue

PROLOGUE

A lan veered at the last moment and backwinged to a landing on the Jeep, which he turned into a one-handed vault from the roll bars as he shifted from raven to man.

Do a flip! his raven encouraged.

“Showoff,” Juliette scoffed, as Alan stood from his crouch. Pumice crunched under his feet and volcanic ash puffed from the place he had landed. “Did you get the security system disarmed so we can get in?”

“No one will be the wiser,” Alan promised. “Their protections didn’t account for wings. How did your rendezvous go?”

“They tried to go back on the deal to use the airfield,” Juliette said mildly. “I know, you warned me that might happen. No need to rub it in.”

“I am wounded ,” Alan said. “I would never rub it in. Even if I was completely and entirely right. Again .”

Juliette chuckled.

“Anyone hurt?” Alan asked more seriously.

“Noah got nicked in the shootout but won’t let anyone look at it. Aiden said something about code so ugly it gave him cancer, but we’re not going to need an ambulance for his wounded sense of programming aesthetic.”

“And you?” Alan prodded.

“I might not be a shifter, but I know how to stay out of the way when bullets start flying,” Juliette told him with a brief sideways smile. “They don’t give promotions to dead people.”

“I dunno, I feel like you could get shot up a little and accept a medal lying in a hospital bed. It would look good on the promotion request.”

“I think I’ll pass on getting shot up a little and keep all my blood and wits inside,” Juliette said. “Let’s finish this. Aiden and Noah will be waiting at the airport to take us home.”

“Jiggity, jig,” Alan said. Despite his best efforts, Juliette noticed when he winced pulling himself up into the Jeep.The hard landing hadn’t helped him.

“Are you hurt?” she demanded. “I thought you said you didn’t trip the security!”

“I didn’t!” Alan gave a sigh when Juliette stared at him and refused to start the Jeep. “There was a fox who took me by surprise while I was doing surveillance, that’s all. Got me by the leg, not the wing, so everything was fine and he was happy to let go and run off when I turned into a man.”

“Does Aiden need to look at it?” Juliette pressed.

“I wouldn’t want to take away from his data crunching,” Alan said. Then, more seriously, “It’s nothing. It will probably heal before we’re back in the States. I know all the signs of infection and how serious it can be. I don’t need mothering.”

Juliette put the Jeep in gear and drove sedately from the pick-up point down the winding highway. “Good,” she said seriously. “I need you in top form for your next assignment.”

“Tell me it’s somewhere tropical,” Alan said coaxingly. “Bikini girls and white sand beaches?”

“Montana,” Juliette said. “The summers do get hot, but you’ll be starting in the fall.”

“Could be worse,” Alan said. “You could be sending me to central Chile to break into a supervillain lair on an actual volcano like some kind of cliche. Oh wait, we’re about to do that.”

“It’s not an active volcano,” Juliette scoffed. “It’s just old lava fields and some techbro billionaire, not an actual supervillain. Don’t be dramatic.”

“I am never dramatic,” Alan said, proving her point. “So what’s the case? Who’s on it with me?”

“It’s a solo job,” Juliette said, and her concentration on the road was not warranted by the conditions. “And it’s personal .”

That caught Alan’s attention. Even his raven went quiet and serious. Nothing about Juliette got personal. Alan had watched her turn on the charm for a job, and he knew the difference between that and her genuine warmth for their team, but he always had the feeling that she kept him—and everyone else—at arm’s length.

Some of it was due to her ambition. Juliette was in line for a promotion that would place her in charge of half the shifter secret agency they both worked for, and that didn’t leave a lot of time for chummy after-hours hangouts. But Alan also had the feeling she was trying to keep herself from getting in too deep, like every time the conversation got meaningful, she backed off, cracking a joke or putting the attention on anyone but herself.

Alan had never pressed, appreciating the need to keep some things private. Ancestors knew there were plenty of things he’d done in his life he didn’t care to share.

“One of my kids goes to child care in Nickel City, Montana,” Juliette said. “It’s a day care for shifters.”

Alan watched her profile as she drove. He knew she had two kids, and her wariness suggested that she had regrets and complications that involved them; they were one of several subjects she skirted carefully around.

“You don’t see that very often,” Alan said cautiously. He wasn’t sure where this was going, or what Juliette’s kids had to do with him or his next job. “But I imagine that’s a part of the changing family landscape these days.”

He himself had been raised by his Russian grandmother in a Native Alaskan village where it was hard enough to keep secrets from the neighbors with her full time care. He couldn’t imagine the challenge an unpredictable shifter toddler would be for working parents, let alone single parents. Once he was old enough to control his powers, he went to live with his parents in Anchorage, and he was still more trouble than not.

He reminded himself to send a birthday card to his mother and have an awkward phone call with her. He wished he could tell his grandmother how much he appreciated the start that she’d given him, but it was too late for that now.

“So, what’s the job?” Alan asked.

“You know as well as I do that every time the administration changes, we end up having to defend our department and the…irregular methods we employ.”

Because shifters were secret, steps that the supernormal agency took to protect them were necessarily classified. It was hard to explain Alan’s exact reasons for deleting surveillance databases that had incriminating evidence of shifters, or the exact mechanism of his infiltration and execution of the plan. “Turned into a raven and flew in through skylight” raised eyebrows and unwanted attention.

“Yes,” Alan said simply.

“Well, we’re looking at the very real possibility that we lose our legal hold on a few important detainees. One of them is Owen Davis.”

Alan remembered the file on Owen Davis. The man was involved in the kidnapping of Juliette’s two kids, Jackson and Darius, and allegedly worked with Stork Inc. Alan could see why this fell into the personal category.

Anything to do with Stork Inc. gave Alan a sinking feeling. The company was trying to uncover shifter secrets as vehemently as the agency was trying to bury them, and they had clashed on several occasions. Las Vegas had become a hotbed of counterintelligence.

“What exactly is it that you want me to do?” Alan said with a sudden flash of suspicion.

“I want you to work at the day care, but hold onto that thought, because we’re almost to the compound.”

The rugged terrain looked gently hilly at a distance, but up close it was rocky scrabble, broken lava, and random crevices, hazed with ash and sprinkled with a few determined bushes. The Jeep turned off the highway at a sign proclaiming SEQ TECHNICAL and wound down to an unexpected oasis of green, with sudden manicured spots of lawn and sculpted hedges, bright with flowers and shadowed with carefully placed palm trees.

The road, which had been paved but poorly maintained, flattened and smoothed into a beautiful approach, flanked on both sides by steep black rock canyon walls. There was no escape route and no room to turn around if they were driving into a trap.

“You sure you got everything turned off?” Juliette asked, guiding the Jeep boldly down the passage.

“The only way they’d know we were coming is if they’ve got someone literally staring out the window at us. All the feeds are looped. And they have no reason to be looking for us.” Despite his confident tone, Alan had a stab of doubt. He could fly up and out, if it came down to it, but Juliette wasn’t a shifter at all. If this was a trap…

Alan realized that some of his concern wasn’t his own and he dropped a hand to his pocket. The carved moose antler he found there was hot to the touch.

“Stop worrying, Aiden,” he said, touching his earpiece to activate the microphone. “You and Noah have our six, and we’ve got diplomatic backup if necessary.”

The diplomatic backup was the exact opposite of its name, and Alan really didn’t want this mission to turn into blazing guns.

“We’ve got this,” he assured Aiden as the token cooled. “Juliette and I are heading in. Have the big bird ready to go in case we come in under pressure.”

“Noah already woke up the pilot and gassed the plane. My code is impeccable. No one will even know you were there.”

Alan trusted Aiden’s skill. He trusted his whole team. “We’re here,” he said.

The compound was a cluster of square white buildings that looked like blocks of fancy cheese in artistically modern shapes. The main building had sparkling fountains and columns, with an open courtyard full of exotic plants. There was white marble everywhere, stark against the black lava flows beyond.

Juliette ignored the grand front entrance and drove the Jeep to the side of the compound. The delivery door at the side of the secondary building was cracked open and waiting. Juliette grabbed a heavy bag from behind her seat—the part of the operation that Alan couldn’t do as a raven—and slung it over her shoulder.

The stark white hallways were a welcome breath of climate-controlled air. It wasn’t swelteringly hot outside at this elevation, but it was dry and the wind outside was sharp with ash. The air inside was weirdly still and smelled clinical. Machinery hummed somewhere nearby.There was no sign of guards.

“Why would you put a server backup in Chile?” Alan asked conversationally as they walked in, pausing at each door. They kept their weapons holstered, following memorized directions down the maze of corridors to the correct server room.

“Taxes, mostly,” Juliette said. “And privacy laws are more lax here.” She found the correct door and they waited until Aiden gave them the okay. The door lock released with a hiss when Juliette waved the keycard at the pad. “Actually, no. The privacy laws are just for sale here.”

Alan went in first and came face-to-face with their first complication—an unarmed technician who must be working off-schedule.

“ Que— ?”

Alan debated tackling him, then strode forward with his hand out. “Hey, Partner!” he said with his best Texas drawl. “I appear to be a bit lost in these here parts…”

“ Que ?” The man didn’t offer to shake Alan’s head. He didn’t look entirely convinced, but his attention was all on Alan while Juliette came up behind him, injecting him swiftly in the base of the neck. He blinked a few times and Alan caught him as he slumped forward.

“Aiden…?” Alan prodded, lowering the man to the floor. His mauled leg reminded him that he was going to be sorry tomorrow.

“Sorry, he’s not scheduled to be there!” Aiden protested. “Will he be okay?”

Juliette peeled back an eyelid to check. “He’s going to wake up in about twenty minutes from some really weird dreams that will make him question his sanity and lose his last meal. Let’s finish up, Alan! I don’t want to be here for that!”

“For someone with kids, you’re awfully squeamish,” Alan teased. He scanned the numbers on the banks of servers. “Alpha… Gamma… Delta… Charlie… seventeen, here we go!” Alan pulled the server out as far as the wires would allow. “On your mark, Aiden.”

“One twenty-block power outage and a very targeted surge in Seattle, coming up!” Aiden said cheerfully. “Go time!”

Alan pulled the wires from the back of the server and took the replacement from Juliette, careful to put them back exactly as they’d been before he slid the new one back into place. Aiden had drilled him thoroughly.

There was no sign that they’d triggered an alarm as they left the unfortunate technician in his own drool. Alan shut the door behind them and heard the lock click into place. They would be back in the States by nightfall, no one the wiser for the thorough wipe of incriminating footage from the backups. What’s more, Aiden’s newest babysitting program was now in place, scanning trillions of bytes of data for anything else that might accidentally endanger secret shifters. The power outage in Seattle would wipe the data, and they would replace it from the backup here, not aware that it had been tampered with.

The Jeep was undisturbed, and no one challenged them as they left.

“What did you mean about working at a day care?” Alan asked, once they were back on the main road.

“I want you to go undercover at Tiny Paws and make sure that no one can get in and hurt those kids,” Juliette said serenely. “It might be nothing, but I don’t want to leave them unprotected.”

“You want me to be a nanny?” Alan had done plenty of covert work, but he was having trouble wrapping his head around the idea of working undercover in a day care . It wasn’t like he could pretend to be one of the kids, which meant…

“I’ve got you signed up for legitimate childcare certification,” Juliette said. “You can cram what you need, we can provide a paper trail for the rest. I’ve already talked with the owner, and she’s agreed to hire you on while the threat level is high. Everything will be completely above board as far as she’s concerned, though I may need you to do a little investigation into the owner, Cherry, and the parents. We can’t eliminate the possibility of a breach within the day care itself. Even if we don’t want to suspect another shifter, you know as well as I do that people are susceptible to blackmail.”

“A day care ?” Alan repeated. “You actually want me to change diapers and enforce nap time for a bunch of screaming shifter babies ?” He remembered belatedly that Juliette’s son was one of those screaming shifter babies. “I mean, kids are great, I guess, probably, but…I’m…I’m not really…equipped…for…”

Juliette looked sideways at him and lifted an eyebrow and Alan realized that all he could do was dig himself deeper.

“Sounds like fun,” he said with a sigh.

“How do you always get these cake assignments?” Aiden complained in his ear. “I’d love to play trains and take naps all day.”

But Alan had a sneaking suspicion that the mission he’d just been on was going to look simple by comparison.