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

19. Alan

19

ALAN

A lan was not as willing as Kendra to assume that a violent criminal meant no harm. In his experience, brutality was not an isolated event. But there might be mitigating circumstances he didn’t know yet and he was willing, he realized, to give a shifter the benefit of the doubt.

“You can’t exactly detain him anyway,” Kendra pointed out logically. “I’m pretty sure he won’t fit in your car.”

“Your rig…?”

“I’m sleeping there. Speaking of sleeping, I have a little girl that I need to get to bed really soon, before she hits the too-tired-to-sleep stage.”

Bernard snuffled and sighed, then turned to clomp out into the darkness.

“Night after next!” Alan called after him. “I’m still hoping to get more information for you. And out of you!”

“And I want to check on your leg,” Kendra added.

Bernard’s swishing tail was the only answer he gave.

“I suppose I should go, too,” Alan said, hoping that Kendra would stop him.

She did. “Tell me more about this. You said it would let me know if I was in trouble. You didn’t say that it would tell me what you’re feeling.” The white raven lay in her palm. It gleamed in the darkness.

“You can…?” Alan was deeply alarmed and immediately wondered if she felt that, too.

“It’s flattering that you’re attracted to me, but I’ll be honest, it’s kind of distracting, and I haven’t decided what to do about it. And I realize that you didn’t know it was doing that, because you’re surprised, oh and now you’re feeling super guilty.”

“I had no idea,” Alan said. “That is very unsettling. I swear, I did not know it would do that. If it’s any consolation, I can’t tell if you’re attracted to me, or what you’re feeling at all.”

“That is reassuring,” Kendra said. “I prefer to be mysterious. But, I think you should take this back.” She rolled the raven into her fingers and held it out. “I feel like a peeping Tom keeping it.”

Alan took the token back and was surprised by the unexpected heat of it, and even more puzzled that it went cold almost at once, like it had turned itself off. “Do you still feel anything?”

Kendra shook her head. “You said you made it, but this isn’t like any magic I’ve ever seen before. How did you do it? What else can you do?”

“This is it,” Alan said, and he sounded as frustrated as he felt.

“So you can’t tell me?” Kendra asked in exasperation. “Is it classified ?”

“I’ll tell you everything I know,” Alan said firmly. “But it’s not as much as I wish I knew. How about another cup of tea?”

“I’ll get Amy down while it heats up.” Kendra didn’t invite him in with her, and Alan settled back down into his folding chair and threw a few more logs in the fire, which snapped and lapped flames at them eagerly.

By the squawking in the van, Amy did not particularly want to go to bed, and took refuge in owl form before Kendra coaxed her to bed. Alan could hear the cadence of Kendra reading a story, and Amy gradually went quiet.

Kendra finally came back out, handed him a cup of steaming tea, and scooted her chair closer to the fire. “Sorry, I don’t keep marshmallows on hand. I have no self-control around sugar, so the easiest way to keep from eating the entire bag at once is not to have it around.”

“I’ve always wished they sold marshmallows in smaller bags. Ten would be plenty for a weekend camping trip.”

“Brilliant marketing. Better yet, a ten pack with chocolate and graham crackers, because if I don’t want seven hundred marshmallows, I definitely don’t need an entire brick of sweetened cardboard.”

“Amy doesn’t like graham crackers?”

“I gave her some good taste.”

Alan played with the raven in his hand and wondered if her good taste extended to him. It seemed unfair that she knew about his desire while he was still unsure about hers. He thought that she seemed interested in him but understandably cautious. While instinct suggested they’d be great together, he didn’t want to leap to conclusions.

“I want to know more about magic,” Kendra said firmly. “What’s the range on that thing? Have you made others? Did you leave it in moonlight on an equinox or something? Are we talking Wicca and pagan witchcraft, or some other kind of Voodoo? Incantations? Are these sacred Native secrets?”

“I’ve made a few of these, and they work over a mile or two. Maybe from here to Nickel City, but maybe not. My team each has one, but I’m not getting anything off of them now that they are a few hundred miles away. I’ve never had one act this specific way before, either. We just sort of know when we need each other. None of them mentioned being tapped into my emotions, and I think it would have come up.”

“Have you always been able to do this? To make these things? Did someone teach you?”

“This is where things get a little unbelievable,” Alan said cautiously.

“I just told you that I could feel what you were feeling. We are well past unbelievable.”

“There are magical things in this world that aren’t shifters.”

“Dragons?” Kendra suggested. “I know one.”

“Really?” Alan reminded himself not to get distracted. “I’ll have to go down that rabbit hole shortly. But I was thinking of elementals, like the dryad of Belle Lake, who I understand is a poorly kept secret in Nickel City.”

Kendra nodded slowly. “I’ve met Isadora’s daughter at the day care, but I don’t know much about them,” she said.

“What do you know about permafrost?”

“I assume you don't mean the cinnamon and peppermint liquor that causes really wicked hangovers?”

Alan chuckled. “No, I meant the frozen blocks of ice beneath the tundra in some places in the world.”

“I’m very vaguely aware that it is a thing.”

“It is much more than just a thing.” Alan took a sip of his tea. Earl Grey, only warm now, not hot. “Trees aren’t the only things that can host elementals.”

“I’ve heard of fire elementals,” Kendra said warily. “There’s a kid at Tiny Paws that can control fire.”

“Fire,” Alan agreed. “Air. Water. And ice .”

“Oh. There are ice elementals?”

“Are there ever. All the elementals seem to be rare, but ice elementals are one of the rarest and least friendly . The surface elementals around glaciers are for the most part benevolent, but there are areas of northern Alaska and Russia that are millions of acres where elementals have been safe and secret, sometimes living as much as four thousand feet deep under the ground.”

Alan could see Kendra doing math in her head. “That’s a lot of ice.”

“An oil drilling operation on the north coast of Alaska hit a patch, and they were experiencing a whole lot of supernormal activity that I was sent to work out. It was one of my first assignments with the agency since I’d retired from the Marines.”

“You don’t look like a Marine,” Kendra said, giving his hair a skeptical look.

“Five years. Three tours. Seven medals,” Alan said briefly. “Being a raven shifter was intensely useful to my superiors.”

“They knew?”

“I was in a special unit. Shifters recognize each other, so it was easy enough for them to recruit selectively.”

“I don’t need a magical totem to guess that you did some uncomfortable things,” Kendra said, and her hand briefly found his arm and gave a squeeze.

“War isn’t pretty,” Alan agreed mildly. “If I let myself think too hard about the things I’ve done, it would be easy to fall into a spiral of regret and self-doubt.” Some of his cohorts had, and he still missed them and wondered if he could have done more for them. “I did a lot of time in therapy to make certain I put my demons to rest and I forgave myself for actions outside of my control. And I’m glad I did that work, because if I hadn’t, my encounter with that elemental would have gone much differently.”

“Most guys don’t admit to doing therapy,” Kendra observed, her voice carefully neutral.

“I’m not most guys,” Alan said firmly. “And machismo pride can only take you so far.”

Kendra leaned forward to stir the fire and let him continue at his own pace.

“The elemental I met was old and powerful, and could easily have snuffed me out without a second thought. If I’d gone in mad, or proud, or looking for a fight, it wouldn’t have been a battle, just a slaughter. Instead, we talked. And I listened. Have you ever seen pictures of the polygonal permafrost patterns on the north slope?”

“That sounds like the set up for a joke or the start of a Gilbert and Sullivan number,” Kendra said.

“It’s no joke. Scientists have explanations about how ice wedges form and thaw in the active layer, but not all of the formations are entirely accidental. The drilling company had disturbed some of the glyphs. This elemental was trying to keep them from breaking protections that were in place for a reason. I got the oil executives to move their operations by a mere mile, and the elemental gave me a parting gift.”

“That raven you gave me? No, you said you made that.”

“It gave me the ability to make the tokens. I had been carving trinkets since I was a kid, but it took one of them and showed me what to draw on it to make it magic. This symbol means connection . I tried making them for other people, but they didn’t do anything for anyone outside of my team. And it has to be on a raven, nothing happened on any other kind of sculpture.”

“That’s weirdly specific,” Kendra observed. “But I guess that if magic didn’t have some pretty strict rules, it would be all kinds of chaotic. And you said it didn’t do the same thing for the rest of your team that it did for me.”

“Maybe you and I had something different from the start.”

Kendra was silent, but she didn’t try to deny the connection that they had.

“I should get to bed,” Kendra said, before Alan could gather his courage to press harder. “I’ve got a packed calendar of appointments tomorrow and slow reflexes mean getting kicked or bitten.”

Alan rose when she did, and put the fire out thoroughly while she folded the chairs and stowed them under the van. She picked his empty cup up off the gravel as he smothered the final glowing embers with sand.

“Let me walk you to your door,” he offered chivalrously when he stood.

“I might get lost,” Kendra teased, but she seemed as reluctant to send him away as he was to go.

Alan had pins and prickles of nervousness and hope. He’d never had much use for romance. His few relationships had been short-lived, and the examples around him mostly demonstrated that sex made friendships messy, so he kept things carefully compartmentalized. His raven was companion enough.

Until Kendra.

Bright, clever Kendra with her big heart and cool head. She rose up onto the first step of the van and turned to face him instead of opening the door. “It seems a little unfair that I know how you feel about me and it didn’t go two ways. Just to level the playing field, I think you’re pretty hot.”

“No one wants to drink me cold,” Alan said, only wondering after he said it whether it was terribly inane. “Can I kiss you?”

Kendra was about the same height as he was when she was standing on the bottom step up to her van, and when she tipped her head to him invitingly, he didn’t have to move far to close the distance and press his mouth to hers.