A Pack of Two 5 (Patreon)

“Sir, are you taking a comedy class? Is this a homework assignment?” Wagner asked, his voice bristling with enough politeness to not be polite at all.

“Watch it, boot,” Captain Anthony replied. “You drew kit duty. You can get a lot worse.”

“I drew kit duty every time Graham was too drunk to come into work. Now he’s suddenly on vacation and I’m grabbing it again?”

“You’re Phase 2, boot. You need a FTO to ride with you.”

“Bullshit, I’m four days away from Phase 3, I can ride alone. I was already pretty much doing that with Graham anyway.”

“Insurance won’t cover it, even the union won’t like it.”

“The same union that complains that there aren’t enough officers? And this how you treat a new recruit?”

The morning briefing had been going well. The usual litany of crooks to watch out for, cars to keep an eye out for, missing persons to find. It was the day after the full moon, so every werewolf in the city had been bussed back to their home. Most would sleep it off. Some might take their edginess out on someone, try to shoot or snort something to make them feel better, so don’t be a casualty because you met a perfectly normal lycanthrope at the wrong time of month.

And there was always the possibility that someone had slipped the collar. Managed not to turn themselves in for the full moon and actually fully transformed out in the open. There were always rumors, but no sightings. Still, with someone who’d gone all-wolf, you just never knew what to expect. Head on a swivel.

Then, since Wagner’s partner hadn’t shown up for work, he was placed on kit duty: working the inventory room, checking in and out the radios, body-cams, and other equipment that real cops used.

Wagner had stayed behind for a word with the watch commander.

Faith had lingered to see what happened. Sue her: she liked gossip, but she didn’t want to chit-chat with the mouthiest of her fellow officers to get it. She leaned beside the door to the briefing room, able to hear what was going on inside—even able to see, in the reflection of the window in front of her, how Wagner was confronting his commanding officer.

For a moment, the kid reminded her of Alcina. He had to be six foot five, maybe a bit taller. But he wasn’t as robust. Long-limbed, he was almost lanky, but there was too much whipcord muscle in the forearms that protruded from his short sleeves to be that. He had a swimmer’s body, she decided. Probably a fiend in a foot pursuit.

His face was lean and thin like the rest of him, almost horseish, but too vulpine for that. Sharp chin, small nose, cheekbones that slashed across his face. Even his ears seemed slightly pointed, the way they tapered along his sideburns. But his eyes didn’t fit. They were deep and still and husky blue. Like the water in a well, with flecks of gold far below the surface.

“Rookie having it out with the Cap?” Banning asked, drawing up to her, but not close enough to be seen listening in on the fracas in the briefing room.

Banning was balding, woman-short, and going soft at the middle. He was approaching retirement like a car coming into the driveway after the owner’s double shift.

Faith didn’t like to gossip with them, but better she passed on the goods than they all crowded around the keyhole like the Scooby Gang. “You know Graham. And no FTO means Wagner can’t do fieldwork. He’s pissed.”

Foley joined in, bringing Banning a coffee while carrying another steaming cup for himself. Ten years the retiree’s junior and growing a mustache that only differed from his elder in color, Faith guessed there’d be a cop like them in the department until the end of time. “Captain’s going to tell him he needs a new partner, otherwise it’s kit duty. That way it’s on Wagner. Union will be off our backs.”

Banning snorted. “No chance of that. Who wants to work with a wolf? I know the brass was trying to be nice, letting him on the force, but why get the kid’s hopes up?”

He drank. Foley nodded.

“Guy’s never going to be blue,” Foley agreed. “His first loyalty will always be to his pack.”

A factoid wandered out of Faith’s long-term memory. “He said he’s not in a pack.”

“Yeah, right. He wants to fight crime, he should turn in some of his packmates. They all know which ones are breaking the law.”

“Hundred bucks says he quits,” Banning continued for his partner, who took a swig of coffee. “Just takes his ball and goes home. It’s never going to get better for him, so why not call it before it gets embarrassing?”

Faith thought about it. “Two hundred says he finds a partner in ten minutes.”

“Fuck, Lehane, you got a gambling addiction I don’t know about? Need to lose money to feel good about yourself?”

Faith took out her wallet and slipped the money from the billfold. “Five hundred.”

“I’ll take that action,” Foley said.

“I always pick up a quarter off the sidewalk and I always take a sucker’s money,” Banning said.

“Okay. Push it around the squadroom, real quick. In five minutes, no more bets. Five minutes after that… we’ll see.”

Foley hit the countdown on his smartwatch. “I’ll go see if anyone wants free money.”

Faith kept leaning where she leaned. She turned her head and looked over her shoulder, seeing that Wagner had sat back down in the empty briefing room. He wasn’t going around begging for someone to ride with. He knew there was no point. Wrapped his dignity around himself like a suit of armor.

Faith nodded to herself. Yeah. He kept reminding her just a little bit of Alcina. Like he had one-tenth of something she had—only Faith couldn’t say what.

Five minutes for the bet to make the rounds. She had time to think. Faith didn’t think about what she’d done, of course, whether it was cruel or unethical. She thought about Alcina.

Once you opened an old wound, what could you do but let it bleed?

***

Faith never would’ve expected it, but she’d gotten used to nude modeling. Not herself, of course, but drawing someone else. She didn’t feel right being at UCLA, when she studied she felt like she was not so much memorizing things as shoving them into her brain hard enough to leave an imprint. When she sat through class, she half-expected it to stop at any moment and for the professor to call her out as an imposter.

When she sat in her dorm, sometimes she felt like she was waiting for her parents to come pick her up and take her home. She was still a kid. She shouldn’t be here. This was too much growing up.

She had dreams about it. In them, her parents were dressed like they’d been at the funeral home. In a nice suit and an evening gown that she never remembered them wearing. Their faces just a little… not themselves. The mortician had done a good job, but it was his work, not the lives her parents had led.

But in some stupid art class, drawing a stupid bowl of fruit, she didn’t feel that way. She wasn’t thinking. Or if she was thinking, it was of some stupid pencil or brush or piece of charcoal, and how she could use it to take that dumb fucking bowl and put it on paper and not have it look like complete crap.

And now they’d moved onto nude models, so she was drawing dicks and balls. But she didn’t mind. Maybe it was a competitive streak in her. If they could take laying it all out there, she could take looking at it and doing a few brushstrokes.

She didn’t even have to worry about a grade. Apparently—according to her professor—she was a natural. A real talent. The prof would give a pass to just about anything she tried… the horny old goat. So she could relax and just do this thing her hands were apparently capable of. Keep her grades from being in complete freefall.

So art was a complete jerk-off class: one step up from The Wit And Wisdom of Dr. Seuss 101, that kinda shit. Except maybe she could make some money for it, eventually. Start an Etsy shop. Or at least work on South Beach, drawing caricatures.

She’d cut back on beer and smokes—a pretty girl shouldn’t pay for her own drinks and tobacco wasn’t helping her nerves anyway—to budget in some art supplies, some real investment from her waitressing gigs and scholarship stipend. That was when she met Alcina.

Alcina did not leave intact Faith’s plans to make a little money drawing pictures of couples with big noses and huge eyes.

Faith had come across a lot of different people modeling. Vain people, who liked showing off their bodies and having an excuse to be admired. Pathological people, who otherwise would be naked in the bushes of a public park—the school mostly filtered them out. Hippie types… that was most of them… who believed in art even when all they could contribute was modeling for it. They were average-looking, casual about sex and nudity, and maybe could use fifty bucks a little more than the next guy.

She heard heels first. Not just clicking on the tile floor. Punctuating every footfall like a spike being driven into a railroad tie. Tthh! Tthh! Tthh!