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

26. Alan

26

ALAN

A lan didn’t have much of a house to clean. As much as his raven liked shiny things, he wasn’t much of a collector, preferring to find things to give to people over hoarding them for himself. He was fairly tidy by nature, and he had a weekly housekeeper to scrub the bathroom and kitchen and vacuum the house.

The house itself had been selected and furnished by the agency, and it was relentlessly bland, with beige carpet and off-white walls. Token pieces of completely inoffensive artwork (landscapes and abstracts) filled the largest spaces, but it was definitely a place that lacked personal touches.

Alan hadn’t considered it a problem until he was going to have Kendra over and he realized that not only was it dangerously unprepared for a toddler to visit, it was also the most boring house possible, and he felt a tinge of shame.

The bookshelf had glass cabinet doors, the television was in reach of swinging toys, and Alan had no items of entertainment that would be of interest to someone who was still at an age for putting things in their mouths and banging things for the sheer noise of it. The recliner-rocker was a finger-pinch hazard, and the couch was the same off-white as the walls…just daring someone to spill something on it. None of the cabinets or drawers had been safety-locked, and the knives were in a block on the counter which would not be out of reach of a determined climber. Alan had learned quickly that some little kids could scale almost anything.

He should have brought some toys from the day care, Alan realized when he unlocked the front door and stared in at his very neutral, starkly empty living room.

He should have put up some personal touches by now, he thought. Artwork that represented his own roots, not Martha Stewart’s BigMart line of don’t rock the boat.

It was too late to redecorate before his guests arrived. He had thought to stop at the store and get milk, since he wasn’t sure if it would come with Thai food, and a booster seat with a tray so that Amy would have a place to eat. He didn’t remember until he was checking out at the department store that Kendra would be driving her kitchen to his house and could probably supply her own beverages if she needed them.

Alan rumpled the blanket on the back of the couch so it wasn’t quite as savagely un-lived in, put the milk in his fridge, buckled the booster seat onto a chair, and waited.

Ten minutes before Kendra said she would arrive, Alan’s phone rang, and he answered without looking at the screen. “Yes?”

“That’s yes, sir ,” Juliette teased him. She’d been recently promoted, and Alan had given her a lot of good-natured grief about outranking him now.

Alan tamped down his disappointment, looking at the clock on the microwave. “What can I do for you, sir ?”

“I actually have some unfortunate news for you,” Juliette said, sobering. “Owen’s out.”

Alan swore and his raven bristled. “Someone upstairs pulled strings?”

“I don’t like it,” Juliette said. “We’re losing four of our highest-risk holdings, and the agency says they can keep tabs on them and minimize the damage they can do, but I’m doubtful that we actually can.”

Alan knew that the temperature of the agency had been in flux for a while. Changes in administration meant changes in policy, and some of those policies that were for the protection of shifter secrets didn’t look good on ledgers outside of the circles of secrecy. “Who are the others?”

Juliette named them and Alan filed them carefully to look up later. They weren’t individuals he knew. Owen, given his history with Addison and Theo, was the largest immediate threat. “Directives?”

“Continue as-is,” Juliette said.

“Am I advised to warn the concerned parties?” Alan asked the question carefully.

“You are not advised . The agency is not convinced Owen actually plans retaliation. They consider him completely rehabilitated, and he is being established basically as far away as we can get him. A restraining order for the entire Nickel City district was part of his deal.”

“But…?” Alan had worked with Juliette long enough to know she wasn’t telling him everything. He also noticed that Juliette didn’t specifically forbid him from warning Theo or Addison. He was just not advised to. She would understand that distinction.

“I have a bad feeling about it,” Juliette said bluntly. She wasn’t a shifter, but she did have something akin to a shifter’s instinct and could recognize them on sight. More than that, Alan respected her intuition. “This whole thing gives me red flags from top to bottom. Even if we keep tabs on him, we don’t have the manpower to enforce his isolation from some of the questionable parties we suspect he’s had dealings with.”

“Stork?” Alan confirmed.

“Possibly,” Juliette agreed. “And he might have had friends in Nickel City itself.”

“Veronica Chase.” She was the landlord for Tiny Paws, and had been threatening to break the contract just that morning.

“We already suspect that she may be investigating the day care center, and she was chummy with Owen before his detention. Don’t underestimate her.”

“I promise I won’t.” Alan looked at the clock again. Kendra would be there with Amy at any moment. She was usually prompt at day care pickup, or courteously called with changes in her schedule, and Alan didn’t expect that a date—if that’s what this was!—would be any different. “Is there anything else?”

Juliette didn’t miss the desperation in his voice. “Do you have somewhere to be?”

“I have a dinner engagement.”

“Business or personal?”

Was that a note of humor in her question? “ Pisiness ,” Alan quipped. “Or bersonal . A bit of both.”

“You’ve been working with kids too long,” Juliette said dryly. “That’s the kind of answer Darius would give me.”

“Or, maybe I haven’t been working with them long enough,” Alan said, recognizing the truth of it as he spoke.

“You’re really fitting in there, aren’t you,” Juliette said softly.

“I may have found a new vocation,” Alan admitted. “I won’t say that I love the diapers or trying to negotiate with the proto-verbal, but…there’s a real sense of purpose here. Purpose I’m not sure I have with the agency anymore.”

“Does that have something to do with your dinner plans?” Juliette guessed.

Alan made a non-committal noise and then distracted her the best way he knew how. “Jackson is doing great. He’s even making some strides towards potty-training. He’s added ball, booty, and cow to his vocabulary.”

“ Booty? ”

“Like pirates’ booty. The kids are super into pirates lately. We’ve got part of the play room made into a sailing ship.” That had been his idea, and he’d even built a tiny plank that they loved to throw themselves off of onto the beanbag.

Juliette laughed. “That’s much better than the booty I first thought of.”

“Speaking of…” Alan thought he heard Kendra’s rig in the driveway.

“Go enjoy your bersonal dinner with your booty call,” Juliette teased him.

“Oh, I intend to,” Alan assured her, and he was glad to hang up so he had a moment to compose himself before the front doorbell rang.