Jumping the Bull Read online

  Waiting was hard.

  Ben sat in the decrepit cabin with the other shifters, watching the filtered sunlight change angles as the day progressed. A couple of the shifters talked quietly, mindful of the need to listen for approaching bad guys, and quite a few of them slept, exhausted from the stress of running for their lives. Ben stayed alert, waiting, waiting, waiting.

  There were so many things that could go wrong. Oliver could get even more lost. Or he could exhaust himself before he even reached the academy. Or one of Paul’s thugs could spot him and shoot him out of the sky. Hell, he could get taken out by a low-flying plane.

  Ben thought of each of these outcomes and dismissed them. Oliver wouldn’t let them down, he knew that, and his natural optimism kept him feeling positive and if not upbeat, not hopeless either.

  At least until the sunlight dimmed into twilight. That’s when his optimism cracked.

  “Ben?” It was Janelle, the jackrabbit. At some point she’d leaned up against him, herbivore seeking comfort from another herbivore, even if he “smelled like a cow.” “Do you think anyone’s coming for us?”

  “Of course,” Ben said, making sure his voice was full of conviction. “FUC will come.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Oliver and I work for them.”

  “You’re agents?”

  Admitting he was a trainee and Oliver was a yoga instructor didn’t seem to be a good idea at the moment. Besides, being kept on the mission instead of being pulled out was like getting a field promotion, right? Right. “Yeah.”

  Janelle leaned into him harder. “I thought you might be, with how you got us out of there and everything.”

  “How’d you get mixed up in this?” Ben asked gently.

  “How does anyone get mixed up in something like this? I trusted the wrong person.” She sighed. “I was in debt up to my eyeballs and a ‘friend’ offered to take care of it for me. She didn’t tell me there was a catch.”

  “Similar story for me,” Charlie, the gazelle, piped up. “Except I needed a place to stay, and a friend got me hooked up, and before I could say ‘what the fucking fuck,’ I had handcuffs on and there were guards all around me with bigass guns.”

  “Jesus,” Ben murmured. “Same friend?”

  Charlie shook his head. “My friend was a guy.”

  So it sounded like Rylee had a network of people feeding into her supply chain, which made sense. She wouldn’t want to get her hands dirty. “The human cops arrested the woman who sent you all here, but once we’re out of this, I’ll get details from you on all of these so-called friends, okay? We’ll make sure they don’t do this to anyone else.”

  Janelle wrapped her arms around one of Ben’s arms and cuddled even closer.

  By the time the sun was completely down, Ben was starting to feel the first stirrings of panic. Oliver should have been back well before now. That he wasn’t…the scenarios Ben had been trying not to think about rushed through his brain again, each one worse than the last.

  Okay, no, stop. You might not be a full agent, but you’ve got training. You’ve got to put together a plan to get these people out, to safety.

  A plan that would be so much easier to come up with if Oliver were with him to bounce ideas off of.

  Something brushed his outstretched legs. Before he could move, two searing needles sank into his flesh. He screamed, jumped up, and kicked at whatever had struck him in the dark, but it slithered away with the slightest whisper of a sound he’d heard before in his bison form.

  A rattlesnake’s reedy rattle.

  Janelle jumped up. “What? What is it?”

  “I got bit,” Ben ground out between clenched teeth. “Motherfucker, that hurts.”

  “What bit you?” Charlie demanded. Ben couldn’t see him in the blackness, but he knew the gazelle was close.

  “Snake.” Ben crouched and touched his fingers to his ankle. They met warm and sticky blood, a lot of it, and the pain continued to grow. Burning through his veins. Shit. He didn’t know what sort of snake Paul was, but right now, his money was on some breed of rattlesnake. Because this couldn’t be random.

  “Get ready,” Ben told his charges. “They’re coming.”

  “FUC?” Maggie, the house hippo, said hopefully.

  “No.” Ben gritted his teeth. “Paul and his thugs.”

  Oliver sat on the edge of the backseat of the SUV, willing the driver to go faster. Flying to the academy took too long. Getting the words out to explain what had happened took too long. Getting the strike team organized to move took too. Damned. Long. Once he’d relayed the message, he’d wanted to fly back to Ben, but Director Cooper would have none of it. Yes, he needed to eat and replenish his energy, but didn’t she understand? Ben was out there. Alone. Well, without backup. And yeah, maybe Alyce’s admonition that they didn’t need to be potentially dealing with two injured or exhausted almost-agents was logical. Whatever. Oliver wasn’t feeling the love for logic right now.

  He’d pointed out where he’d left Ben and the other shifters on the map—he’d always had an excellent sense of direction and distance—and the strike team had done its research to determine the best way to get to them. There was a logging road not too far off, it turned out, which was a good thing because there wasn’t anywhere they could land a helicopter. So now they were careening down a not-so-well maintained dirt road that was barely wide enough for the three SUVs in their caravan to navigate in single file.

  The FUC agent riding shotgun—Oliver thought his name was Marcus—turned to glare at him. “Sit back and put your seatbelt on.”

  Oliver glared back and made no move to do as he said.

  “Seriously, this road is—”

  The driver grunted. “Damn, this is gonna hurt!”

  The SUV hit the mother of all potholes. Oliver launched off his seat and slammed into the ceiling, letting out a loud squawk on impact. Then he bounced back down to the floor, smacking his head against the boot of the FUC agent sitting in the back seat. Wearing his seatbelt.

  “Told you,” the front seat agent crowed.

  Oliver climbed back onto the bench and did up his belt.

  Only to have the SUV skid to a stop fifteen seconds later. They could just make out the dark hulk of the dilapidated cabin in a small clearing ahead. Oliver went to grab the door handle, but the agent beside him—whatever his name was—stopped him.

  “We go first.”

  “But—”

  “That was the agreement,” Marcus said, his eyes still on the cabin. “We’re the agents. You’re not. Got it?”

  Director Cooper had said something similar when she’d allowed Oliver to accompany the strike team. And he knew that if word got back to her that he’d ignored her wishes, he’d be looking for another job. “Got it.”

  The agent beside him squeezed his arm. “Good. We’ll—”

  Marcus hissed him to silence as a dark-clad figure moved through the night to the front door of the cabin. “Shit!” He keyed his mic. “Okay, everyone, move!”

  Oliver hunkered down in the SUV while the agents stormed through the trees to rescue the shifters in the cabin. He bit his lip as gunfire split the night.

  A bison’s roar rose above it all.

  Ben!

  Oliver was out and moving before he even thought about it. Like the FUC agents, he wore black cargo pants, a black T-shirt, and a bulletproof vest with FUC patches on the back and front, but he didn’t have a radio in his ear. Because he wasn’t supposed to be a part of this mission.

  But that was Ben, roaring once more. He couldn’t sit in the SUV and do nothing!

  Flying around the cabin was out—the trees were too tight on either side. So that left him in human form, with all of its limitations.

  And strengths.

  He angled off to the side, away from the bulk of the fighting, and crouched low in the brush. Crabwalking was not easy on the thighs and glutes, good god, but there were too many twigs and forest debris clogging the gr
ound to belly-crawl. Finally he reached the rear of the cabin. He couldn’t see much in the dim moonlight filtering through the forest’s canopy, but he spotted what looked like a back door.

  Exactly what he’d hoped to see.

  He ran over to it and pried it open, rusted nails letting go their grip on disintegrating wood without much effort on his part at all. Human shouts, animal roars, and the ping of bullets from the front of the structure covered any noise he made. He slipped through the door into what might have once been a back porch, which led into a gutted kitchen. He turned the corner—

  Only to have a pair of long gazelle horns threaten to stab him in the neck.

  “It’s me!” he croaked. “Oliver!”

  The gazelle shifted back to human form. “You came back!”

  “Of course I came back,” Oliver growled. He could barely see the guy in the darkness of the cabin, and he definitely couldn’t see Ben’s bison bulk, but he could hear him breathing. “Ben?”

  A whuffle.

  A shot pinged off something metallic—god knew what—and Ben grunted. Oliver and gazelle-boy dropped to the ground.

  “Shit, Ben? You okay?”

  “We need to get him out of here,” the gazelle shifter said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Charlie.”

  “Charlie, we’re going to get you all out of here. There’s a FUC strike team out there, taking out the bad guys.” Oliver instinctively ducked as another round hit the cabin. “Though they could move a little faster.”

  “No, I mean—” Charlie bit back a curse at another shot. “Ben was bitten by a snake. A rattler. He shifted so the venom wouldn’t hit him as hard.”

  Right—more blood, less percentage of venom in the blood. The act made sense in a horrifying way. “Paul—the head bad guy,” he explained for Charlie’s benefit, “must have figured he could take Ben out and then you’d all be easy pickings.”

  “Except Ben shifted, got us all rounded up with him between the guns and us, and then you showed up with FUC.” Charlie let out a heavy breath. “We’re going to be okay now, right?”

  I hope so. “We’re definitely going to be okay.”

  If the FUC team got the bad guys. If they could get Ben out of here and to medical treatment as a bison…

  It took Oliver a minute to realize the gunfire had stopped. But who had won?

  “Stay here,” he whispered to Charlie and edged toward the front door. The bullet holes in the wood were a lighter shade of gray than the rest of the darkness and beckoned him forward.

  “This is the Furry United Coalition! We’re here to help you. Ben Beaufort?”

  Oliver breathed a sigh of relief as he recognized Marcus’s voice and pulled the front door open…only to have it fall off its hinges and clatter to the floor in a cloud of dust. He squinted at the lights being shone in his face and held up a hand to protect his eyes.

  “Oliver?” Marcus shouted. The light’s angle drifted downward, and suddenly Oliver could see again. “Goddammit, Zuraw, you were supposed to wait in the—”

  “Ben’s hurt.”

  “Okay, we’ll come in and get—”

  “No, he has to stay in his bison form. He was bitten by a rattlesnake. Paul, I guess.”

  “Shit. Okay. Look—”

  A whisper of a rattle grabbed Oliver’s attention. Instinct took over, and he shifted, faster than he ever had before. In the next moment, he’d speared a rattlesnake with his beak—right behind the snake’s skull. It hissed weakly, rattled again…and was still.

  Oliver had never killed anything before—though whooping cranes in the wild hunted small reptiles, fish, and other small prey, he had never spent enough time in his feathered form that he’d had to hunt in it. So it was…unsettling, that he’d been able to act so decisively.

  And yet, really damn satisfying. He’d gotten revenge for the attack on his bull, and that made him want to preen.

  “Nice.” The FUC agent from the backseat—Oliver still didn’t know his name—gave him a nod of approval as he hopped up the steps. “I guess you can say we’ve cut off the head off this snake-y organization.”

  “Or stabbed it to death, anyway,” Marcus said with a smirk. “Good job, Zuraw.”

  But Oliver didn’t have any time for FUC agent praise. He raced over to Ben, bugling in distress. Ben answered with a tired-sounding, rumbling huff. Oliver purred in response, thankful that Ben was still cognizant enough to react to his presence.

  Behind him, the FUC agent from the backseat said, “Hey, Marcus?”

  “Yeah, Shane?”

  “I think we’re gonna need a bigger truck.”

  13

  About one year later

  Ben stood in line at the start of the rebuilt obstacle course, eying the challenges much as he’d done at the start of his time at FUCN’A. He’d changed so much—grown more confident, grown into a bison worthy of being a FUC agent—but the damned thing wasn’t any less intimidating.

  Probably because he’d had yet to beat it.

  This was his class’s last test. He’d passed everything else. Every exam, every applied scenario, everything they could throw at him—he’d conquered it all with ease. With every day that had passed, he’d felt more and more at home at FUC, both the academy and the organization as a whole.

  Things had been touch and go for Ben in the first moments after he shifted back to his human form following the Paul mission. Paul’s venom had worked its way through his system when he’d been in his bison form—not a problem for an animal that weighed nearly three tons, but when he changed back, suddenly his blood volume was a lot less and…well, it had been scary for a bit. Especially because Ben had taken more than a few bullets protecting the other shifters, and these ones had worked their way past his tough hide. Oliver had been there every time Ben had woken up—and more often than not, Diana, his sister, had been as well. When he’d gotten more lucid, Oliver had gushed about how he thought Didi hung the moon, with her take-no-shit, unapologetic attitude.

  It would be great to see her at his graduation party this weekend.

  If he graduated.

  Shit, no. Don’t think that.

  For this final test, the physical fitness instructor, Falk, was calling up each recruit in alphabetical order. That meant Ben was the third up, after Ulysses Ackerman and Yonda Albright. Ulysses was a rat shifter, and Yonda was a raccoon shifter. They both ran the course easily, within the time allowed, as they had been doing for months.

  “Benjamin Beaufort!” There was a growl in Falk’s voice as he called Ben’s name, and paired with the glare he was shooting in Ben’s direction, Ben got the message loud and clear.

  Destroy the course at your own peril.

  Ben started, the motions as familiar to him now as shifting into his bison form. Running through the tires, climbing the rope wall, belly crawling under low beams, walking across the high beam—it was all…well, not easy. His body wasn’t meant to be agile and flexible, a fact he’d come to terms with months ago. But he was more flexible and more agile than he used to be, and that was what—

  “Time!”

  Just like every other attempt he’d made at the course, he’d come up short. Another thirty seconds, forty-five at the most, and he would have finished. His bulk slowed him, every time. He stood on the balancing beam, looking out at the crowd. He spotted Didi first, and then beside her, Oliver’s platinum head of hair. Their expressions both fell as the results of the test sunk in.

  You either passed all of the academy’s tests, or you failed.

  Ben wasn’t going to be a FUC agent.

  He jumped down from the balancing beam and closed his eyes, trying to envision his future. Would they let him attend the academy again? If they did, could he defeat the obstacle course? Or should he give up and try to find something else for a career? Except now that he’d been here and experienced what it was like to be part of FUC, he didn’t want to do anything else. Not to mention the plans he and Oli
ver had made over the past few months.

  At some point while Ben had been in and out of consciousness in the hospital, Director Cooper had approached Oliver with an offer. Because he’d shown himself so capable in the field, and he had partial academy training, he could apprentice with a FUC agent to learn on the job. Or he could remain a yoga instructor at the academy. The choice was his—the Avian Soaring Security had signed off on it. He’d delayed giving her an answer until Ben was awake and feeling better, so they could discuss it. Of course Ben had supported it completely, especially when Oliver said he wanted to make it a condition that once Ben graduated, they’d be partnered up. Because they made a great team, at work and outside of it.

  They’d bought a house together with the idea that Ben would move in after graduation. But if he didn’t graduate, would Oliver wait another year to put their plans in motion? Would FUC force him to partner with someone else?

  What was he going to do?

  “Pardon me, Instructor Falk. Before you call the next recruit.”

  Ben lifted his head, looking for the owner of the voice. Director Alyce Cooper stepped out from the crowd, dressed in one of her ubiquitous power suits—this one in burnt orange. She marched over to Falk, and the waiting recruits made a wide berth for her.

  Falk frowned. “Director Cooper?”

  Ben tentatively stepped around the balance beam and made his way closer to Falk and the director. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Didi ramming her way through the crowd, towing Oliver behind her.

  “Why was Mr. Beaufort running the obstacle course?” Director Cooper asked.

  “I—” Falk blinked. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “It was a very simple question, Instructor Falk.”

  “He’s a recruit, Director. Every recruit needs to complete this course in under two minutes before they graduate.” He looked around, as though he was searching for backup, then turned back to the director. “It’s in the policies.”

  “Yes, I’m aware.” Her smile was downright frightening. “So I ask again: why did you have Mr. Beaufort run the course?”