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

37. Alan

37

ALAN

T he kids who were still waiting to be picked up were distraught about Addison’s accident, and Alan was quick to try to distract them from their anxiety and guilt. It was easy enough to get Gil into role-playing a doctor for Addison with Ryan as a nurse. They pretended to take her temperature and blood pressure and squabbled over toys instruments. Amy was inconsolable and didn’t want to be comforted or coddled, and when Alan tried to pick her up to snuggle, she popped defiantly into her owl form.

“Oh!” Alan didn’t register what was different until Kendra said, “She took her clothes!”

Her wings were completely free, and Amy was keen on beating them at Alan. Bits of down surrounded her like fog. Ryan sneezed.

“What a clever girl!” Alan praised her. “What a good job you’ve done!” Amy squawked at him in surprise and looked around with big golden eyes.

The door buzzed. Addison started to reach for her phone, but Doctor Gil scolded her to lie still.

Alan checked the security feed. An ambulance was out front already, and there were two EMTs wearing scrubs with a stretcher, along with two parents with terrible timing. “Tara, Ryan, get your things!” He started to unlock the door for them, then remembered the owl in his arms.

“Fingers and feet, Amy,” he told her. “There are strangers coming.”

Amy stared back at him and gave a little hiccup of a hoot.

“Time to be a little girl,” Kendra said, taking Amy from his arms and setting her on the floor. “Fingers and feet!”

Amy hopped in place and clacked her beak in triumph, then started to skittle sideways.

The door buzzed again and Alan could see the increase in alarm and confusion in the image on his phone. Someone pounded on the door manually. “Amy, I need you to be a little girl so we can bring people in to help Teacher Addy!”

Amy paused, then seemed to concentrate hard. She made a dry heaving noise.

“This is not the time for a pellet,” Kendra scolded her. “Fingers and feet, or there’s no bath tonight!”

“Ooooo,” Ryan said. His mother had warned Alan that he was very bath motivated.

Amy gave a brief shriek and turned into a little girl again, plucking at her clothing with interest. “DID IT! Okay!”

“You did it!” Kendra said, swooping down to pick her up as Alan could finally unlock the door and let in the EMTs.

The parents did an admirable job of not getting in the way, and Addison assured everyone that she was absolutely fine, that this was just a precaution, Gil wasn’t in trouble, he was a very good doctor, ending in an ohhhhhhh that fooled no one.

The medics took her vitals with real instruments and prepared an injection.

“What’s that?” Kendra asked sharply.

“Just a sedative to slow the labor so we can get to the hospital before the baby comes. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. We do this all the time.”

“No!” Addison shook her head emphatically. “I don’t want that.”

The medic exchanged a look with his partner, then reluctantly put the needle away. They lifted Addison onto the stretcher over her half-hearted assurance that she could walk and carried her out to the waiting ambulance.

Tara and Ryan were reluctantly dragged out with their respective parents, along with the sleeping toddler, Shane, who woke up very crabby from his brief nap. Once they were gone, Amy practiced shifting back and forth with her clothing until she was so tired she ran into a wall, knocking herself down. Gil seemed to think that was his fault, too, and cried even louder than she did.

Kendra picked her up and she shifted into a little girl who took a death grip on Kendra’s neck.

“Is something wrong?” Alan finally had a chance to ask Kendra.

“Don’t you feel it? Something doesn’t add up.”

Alan might have dismissed Kendra’s anxiousness as a carryover of the general shock of Addison’s accident, but something rubbed him wrong, too, and he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Smells bad , his raven agreed.

And if a raven thought something smelled bad…

Cherry’s phone rang.

“Yes, we just sent her in the ambulance, Roderick. She should be there in just a few minutes.”

Cherry was silent, but her shoulders went stiff. “Yes, I’m sure.” She pulled the phone away from her face. “Roderick says the ambulance only just left!”

“Then who did we just give Addison to?” Alan demanded. He already knew the answer, and guilt gutted him. The EMTs had been wearing generic scrubs, and it wasn’t that hard to get an ambulance at an auction and refurbish it. They had been tough-looking individuals, but Alan told himself that wimps didn’t do ambulance field work.

“Stork?” Kendra guessed in horror.

Alan said a bad word that made Gil stop crying and stare at him in astonishment. “Owen was released a few days ago.”

“Addison’s ex, Owen?” Cherry gasped. “They guy that shot at her cousin Wendy and Jackson’s mom? Why didn’t you tell us?”

Roderick swore so loudly that everyone could hear him through Cherry’s phone.

“I didn’t think he’d be able to move this fast,” Alan said. “He’s on house arrest in Florida.”

“Wait, wait.” Kendra was trying to comfort Amy, but was clearly growing more anxious herself by the moment. “I was at Veronica Chase’s office when she got a phone call from someone who had been gone a long time. And after that, she changed her tune completely about canceling the Tiny Paws lease. Could that have been Owen? Didn’t you say they had history?”

“Veronica was here a few days ago talking about upgrading the internet cable,” Cherry said. “Could she have planted a listening device? I’ve been careful about cameras, but I didn’t think about bugs !”

“Alan,” Kendra said, clutching his arm. “What if Charlie didn’t work at just any pharmaceutical company?”

“You think he worked at Stork?”

“If he got wind of their real work while he was poking around in their computer system, he might put two and two together and realized that he’d met a shifter. Or his wife did, when he told her. That could be why he suddenly decided to pursue custody!”

“It’s possible they are related,” Alan said, hating that it might be. “We don’t know for sure that there is a connection. But what we do know is that someone has taken Addison from right under my nose and I have to get her back.”

“An ambulance is kind of obvious,” Kendra said. “Cherry, can you watch Amy and Gil a little longer by yourself?”

“You aren’t responsible for this,” Alan protested. “I should go alone. It’s my fault she was taken.”

“It doesn’t matter whose fault anything is. We’ll cover more ground working together, and I see better in low light conditions.” Kendra sounded absolutely cool and collected now that it mattered.

“Go out the back,” Cherry advised, peeling a very reluctant Amy from Kendra’s arms. “You can take off from the back yard without anyone seeing you. This property really is perfect.”

Alan took Kendra’s hand as they sprinted for the back door and flung it open. Outside, the sky had darkened to the twilight promise of night. “Be careful,” Alan warned her. “They’ll be on the lookout for us. For any animals acting human. Damn, I wish we had walky-talkies that we could use while we were shifted.”

“Wait, do you have the white raven?”

Alan dove a hand into his pocket and folded the token into Kendra’s outstretched hand. The connection the first time had been surprising, but this time it was like two nested gears fitting into each other perfectly. He could feel her entire essence, the calm core of her under the arrow-sharp determination. “Let’s go get those bastards,” Kendra said.

Then they both launched into the air and flew into the sky, a silent white owl and a black shadow.