Alpha Omega 03 - Fair Game

wasn’t paying any attention. “FBI. You’ve got it looking for clues.”
    “
He
is,” said Anna, getting tired of the “it.”
    The jogger wasn’t disconcerted by her correction. “He work for the FBI?”
    “No. Strictly volunteer,” Anna told him.
    “Wicked,” he said approvingly. “Wait until I tell the guys I saw a werewolf. He mind if I take a photo?”
    “Not at all,” Anna told him.
    He popped his phone out of a pouch on his belt and stood still long enough to snap a photo. “Cool. The guys are not going to believe this.” He looked at the photo and frowned. “They’re going to say that I took a photo of a big dog.”
    “Charles,” Anna called. “Can we get a smile?”
    Charles turned and gave her a look.
    “Public relations,” she suggested.
    Heturned his gold eyes to the jogger and then dropped his jaw in a wolfish smile that displayed fangs too large for any dog ever born.
    The man swallowed. “Werewolf,” he whispered, and then, remembering what he was doing, he snapped another photo. “Thanks, man…wolf. Thanks. They won’t laugh at that.” He glanced at Anna and Leslie and started jogging backward down the path. “Hey, good luck. I hope you get the guy.”
    “We do, too,” Leslie assured him.
    He turned back to watch them a couple of more times before he sped up and headed off the island.
    “Doing a little PR?” Leslie asked.
    “Never hurts,” agreed Anna absently. “It’s kind of my job.” She’d been watching the jogger and he’d just passed a familiar figure. Goldstein saw her watching and waved.
    “I texted Agent Goldstein and told him where we’d be,” said Leslie.
    Anna nodded. “Charles doesn’t seem to be finding anything. I suspect I’ve just wasted your time.”
    “A lot of my work is like that,” said Leslie.
    Agent Goldstein sauntered up. “Find anything?”
    “No,” Anna told him. “Charles?”
    Charles trotted up and started to change, right in front of them. Right in front of anyone who happened to look over and see what he was doing. It wasn’t like him.
    “What do we do, Mrs. Smith?” asked Goldstein quite calmly.
    “Stay quiet and don’t touch, okay? This really hurts and touching him makes it worse.”
    Anna glanced around, but no one else seemed to be paying much attention. That might be sheer dumb luck, or it might be something that Charles was doing.
    “Remember, please, don’t look into his eyes.” There were a couple of meaty pops and Leslie winced.
    “Yep. That hurts,” Anna agreed. “This is why, if you’re around arecently changed werewolf—either direction—you walk softly for a while. Pain makes the best of us pretty cranky.”
    “Does this mean he found out something?” Leslie asked.
    “I don’t know,” Anna replied. “Either that—or he decided it was a good day to give a few Bostonians a heart attack.”
    “It’s not as bad as it is in the movies,” said Goldstein, sounding philosophical. “There’s no liquid or clear oozing jelly, for one thing.”
    “Ick,” said Anna. “Though if you move at just the wrong time, it can get bloody.”
    Leslie turned away and swallowed.
    “Just kidding,” Anna said. “Mostly.”
    “Still,” Goldstein continued. “I can see why no one has agreed to change in front of the camera.”
    “That whole changing naked thing that most of us have to do makes it awkward, too,” Anna told him. It wasn’t easy to watch, even for her. Mostly, it was the empathy—you didn’t have to be a werewolf to watch joints and bones changing and feel the ache in your own flesh in sympathy. And then there was the weirdness of watching things that should only be on the inside of a body show up on the outside. “You’d have to have a cable network like HBO. And we’re trying to make people forget that we’re monsters—this is kind of an unpleasant reminder.”
    “I thought it took longer than this,” Goldstein said, as Charles became mostly human.
    Leslie was scared, but holding it together. Goldstein looked like he was ready to fall asleep.
    “For most of us, it does,” she agreed. “Alpha wolves tend to be faster, and they can change more often. Charles is faster than most Alphas. We think it’s for the same reason that he can wear clothes when he changes—he’s got magic users on both sides of his parentage.” They didn’t need to know that he was the only werewolf born.
    “For a secretive werewolf,” observed Goldstein, “you are awfully happy to