I dug through the soil and rocks trapping the grate in the ground and used the wire cutters on my multi-tool to cut the more rusted parts. The tool wasn’t strong enough for the tines that were still in good shape. But finally, I managed to get the base free in that corner. I tried pulling up on the grate to make a hole of us, but it didn’t budge. This kind of moment was the only time I wished I’d been born a bigger predator. While therianthropes were slightly stronger than humans, we did not possess superhuman strength. But the larger animals, like the coyotes, big cats, and bears, became exponentially stronger when partially shifted. Which meant...
I put the tool back in the pack and craned my neck up to look at Dom. “I’m going to need your help here.”
A minute later, Dominic, with his shoes, socks, and jacket off, was knee deep in the water next to me grumbling under his breath. “Jesus, this is unpleasant.”
“Ah,” I shrugged, “It’s not too horrible.” Even though I was in my human form, I reaped the benefits of my animal’s underlayer of extra fur and fat even if it couldn’t be seen.
“You’re nuts,” Dominic said. He shook his head. “I’m in now, so what do you want me to do?”
I took his hand. It was super warm. He had lines of calluses across his fingers. Automatically, I touched the tips. “You play guitar?”
“Yeah.” He stared down at me. The pulses in his hand thudded under my touch. “Since I was eight.”
“Cool.” God, I sounded like a nerd. I tugged his hand into the water. “I’ll guide you where the grate is the weakest. I need you to yank it free there.”
“So, you only want me for my muscles.”
“I’ve got the brains, so someone has to have the brawn,” I teased.
“Can’t I have both?”
“That would be unfair to the rest of the world.” Oh, no. I was flirting. Someone stop me!
“I think the water just warmed up a degree.” We submerged his hand down to his shoulder. He shivered. “Okay. Maybe not.”
“There,” I said. “Do you feel it?”
“I’m feeling a whole lot. Oh. Yep. There. I got it.”
“Great.” I let go of his hand. “Try not to make a lot of noise when you pry it up.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Dom’s shoulder drew up and the veins in his neck bulged under the strain of his effort. He eased his muscles and closed his eyes for a moment. In seconds, his arms were covered in a fine black fur, and his shirt buttons gapped as his increased body mass stretched his clothes to their limit. He cracked his neck and stared down at me, his gray-green eyes shining with something between animal and human. In this half-form, Dominic was stunning and powerful, and that fact that he could achieve this anthropomorphic form so easily surprised me, and damn, if it didn’t make me even more attracted to him.
I bit my lower lip then nodded. “Get us in, big fella.”
His chest rumbled as he pulled once more on the grate. I felt the vibrations under the water as the earth gave way beneath the metal obstacle. Soon, Dom’s elbows were up out of the water and debris from the other side of the culvert flowed past my legs.
“Yes!” I went up on my toes and excitement ran like a thread through me from toe to head. Impulsively, I threw my arms around Dom and kissed him. His arms wrapped around me, and I felt the hair recede on his chin and cheeks, before immediately scrambling backward, tripping over a boulder behind me, and completely submerging my whole self underwater.
Two powerful hands hauled me up. Dom’s fur had receded, and so had his extra size. He gave me a weird look that I couldn’t decipher, and usually, I was pretty good at reading expressions. “I think it’s big enough for us to go through.”
My own impulsive actions had left me unable to speak in complete sentences, or even simple words, for that matter. So I nodded and said, “Uh-huh.”
“This water’s not getting any warmer.”
“Yep.” I snapped myself out of the hormone-induced daze. “Let’s get inside.” Hopefully, the preppers would still be busy with the police and the jilted Homer Halliver.
It didn’t matter that I was wet from head to toe. Dom hadn’t been able to get the grate high enough to prevent us from having to crawl through under water. He went first, which was a good thing, because at one point his pants snagged on the broken lattice of heavy wire, and I had to work quickly to unhook him before he drowned. Okay, maybe he wouldn’t have drowned, but he did seem a little panicked when his head finally bobbed up on the other side.
I ducked down under and easily followed him through. I’d always been a good swimmer. I liked it so much, I took classes for open water diving my senior year of my undergrad. My boyfriend at the time had been advanced open water certified and had promised to take me to the Caribbean if I got mine. I did, but we broke up before he could make good on his end of the bargain. I don’t know why that memory had popped up at that moment, but I shook it from my brain. I’d analyze myself later.
I swam through and came up next to Dom. I’d been in the water long enough now that the cooler temperature was starting to feel uncomfortable. “Let’s get the hell on dry land.”
“After last night’s rainstorm, I’m not sure that’s possible,” Dom said. “But I know what you mean.”
I regretted leaving my coat behind, but it would have just gotten soaked along with the rest of me.
The culvert didn’t open up right away. There were about twenty feet of galvanized aluminum. When we reached the open end, we found ourselves on the downside of a five-foot ditch that the stream poured into. We crawled up the side and peeked our head up over the edge. In the distance, I could see red and blue cop lights flashing. We didn't hear any shouting going on, so the fight, if there had been any, was over. “Let’s go before people start getting back to their posts or whatever.”
“Yep,” Dominic said. “On me.” He scurried over the edge of the ditch and ran in a crouched position across a gravel road to the back of a nearby building.
I followed on his heels, wincing as the chunky, white gravel dug into the bottom of my feet. I missed my boots along with my coat.
The building was dark and presumably empty. Dom wiggled the door handle of the building. “Locked,” he said.
With a smug expression, I grabbed my lockpick set out of the fanny pack. “See,” I whispered. “It comes in handy.” Using a rake, the tool that looked like a tiny comb, and a torsion wrench, I was able to pick the tumbler and unlock the door. I waggled my brows at Dom.
“Impressive,” he said.
“Let’s get inside.” I cracked the door open and went in first. There were rows of wide metal shelves.
I pulled a large can off the nearest one. It was bulk-sized cream corn. I found dry beans, can beans, large plastic containers of flour, oats, cornmeal, powdered eggs, and powdered milk.
“Looks like we found the food pantry.”
Dom nodded. “This place is stocked to last a year or more. How long do they think this standoff with the humans is going to last?”
“I guess until they run out of grub and start eating each other.”
He held up a gallon-sized container of cayenne pepper. “I bet you this would pair well with filet of human.”
“Yuck.” I giggled. Stop it. “I bet they taste like chicken.”
Dominic chuckled. “Everything does.”
The room was about forty feet long and probably twenty feet wide. Daylight streamed in from small windows high on the walls. We walked up and down each aisle opening items that were unmarked or unsealed. There was nothing suspicious unless you counted the entire wall of toilet paper next to a shelf full of fiber supplements. These people were serious about regularity.
“I don’t think there’s anything other than pantry items in here,” Dom said.
“It doesn’t look like it.” There were six cases of paper towels stacked in front of a cabinet in the back. “Come help me with these. They might be hiding something on the lower shelves.” I handed Dom the boxes one by one until they path was cleared. I sneezed. “Jesus, there is a ton of dust back here.”
I peered down and stepped forward. It was mostly plastic utensils, dish soap, and industrial cleaning supplies.
“Anything?”
“Nope. I don’t think anything on this shelf has been used or moved in a long time.” As I inched closer, a slight breeze brushed my toes. I glanced down to see a quarter-inch crack in the floor. I stumbled trying to step over it, but the pad of my foot dropped down on the edge of the line. I heard a click. It must have been pressure activated switch because a two-foot by two-foot section of the floor dropped open beneath me. I squawked with surprise as I fell in. My leg twisted, catching on the floor as I tumbled through, falling ten feet to the cellar beneath.
“Nic!” Dom shouted. He dropped to his stomach and peered down at me. “Nic! Are you okay?”
“I should have stepped over the crack,” I groaned. Was it the prophecy again? Were Sunny’s predictions coming true? I didn’t want to believe it, but so far, she was two for two.
“Are you hurt?”
I tried to stand up, but the excruciating pain in my right foot, ankle, and calf made it impossible. “I think I broke my ankle. Or at least, sprained it pretty bad.”
“I’m coming down. Crawl back, so I don’t land on you.”
I scooted back using my arms and my good foot to push me. My fingers brushed over something rough, thin, and small. Dom dropped down, and with only the trickle of moonlight through the trap door, it was impossible to see much in the dank cellar, but now that my adrenaline waned and my pain receptors kicked into high gear, I could smell a sweetly scented rot in the room.
I pulled my LED thumb light from my fanny pack and turned it on. The smell in the room resembled a kill room at a chicken factory. Foul. No pun intended. “Dom, something has died down here.”
“Animal or human,” he asked as he knelt next to me. He scooped me up into his arms, cradling me against his body.
“You tell me.” A bear’s olfactory senses were sharper than a raccoon’s.
“With that much decay, it’s hard to tell. It’s probably coming up from the drain. This may be where they butcher their meat in the winter.”
I swung the light around the room. I could see a water spigot on the wall near me, and a drain trap in the center of the floor, but the light wasn’t powerful enough to get a good view of the entire place. I put the light on the object I’d discovered. It was plastic and chewed at the end.
“Hey, I think this belonged to Lloyd Evan. Remember? The other night he took one of those plastic toothpicks from his pocket and was chewing on it like it was a last meal.”
“Could be. Put it in that fanny pack of yours. We’ll see if we can test for DNA.”
Luckily, I had some tiny snack sized baggies. I stuck the pick in one and the piece of metal in another. “We need to get out of here before someone shows up, and I don’t see a door or a ladder.”
“Yeah, that’s suspect. We can’t worry about it now. You’re hurt, and the longer we stay down here, the more likely we’re going to get caught. We’ll come in here tomorrow with the warrant and accidentally find the trap door.”
“I want to do one quick sweep of the room first. This light’s not very good, and maybe we’re missing something. Besides, the smell, while gross, is fresher than that dust up there. There has to be another way in here because those boxes above haven’t been moved in a very long time.”
Dom cupped my cheek. “Okay, we’ll walk around once. If we don’t trip over anything or find any secret passage, we’re out.”
I pressed my palm against the back of his hand. “Agreed.”
As he walked the floor, we both heard a sound like plastic dropping on the concrete. “I kicked something,” he said. Dom squatted while still holding me, which I found super impressive but when he stood up, he smacked my hurt ankle against the wall.
“Ow, ow, ow.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said with real sincerity. “It’s a broken piece of metal or something. It’s got a pattern cut into the top, and it feels rough and damaged.”
“Pocket it.” I swung the light at the walls. In the back, there was a black sheet hanging across the wall. I had “T.S.S.” sewn on in white letters, and under that, it said, “Freedom isn’t free.”
“What’s that?” I squiggled the light over the signage.
“Let’s check it out.”
He walked us over, and we pulled back the sheet. A large metal door with several bolts and slide locks, all of them engaged, was set in the wall. “There’s our out if we can get the door unlocked.”
“Or it could lead us right into the hands of the TSS. We don’t know that it goes outside the compound.”
My eyes watered as the pain in my foot worsened. I flinched but didn’t complain. “There is only one way to find out.”
“But if we go this way, the preppers will know we’ve been here. We have to close the trap door and put the boxes back. We can search it tomorrow when we come back with the warrant. Besides, you need to see the doctor.”
I wanted to argue, but the pain was excruciating now. I nodded. “Fine. Let’s go. I think I’m going to have to shift or there’s no way we’re getting out of here unnoticed. My raccoon form can function better with a hurt ankle.”
“When you shift back you’ll be naked.” He didn’t sound disappointed.
“Yeah, but you won’t see it because I’m not shifting back until you get me to Doctor Smith’s place.”
I could hear the grin in Dom’s voice. “Spoilsport.”
“Yep. Now let’s get out of here.”
Dom lifted me until I could grab the edge of the upper floor and pull myself into the pantry. When I was all the way through, I looked down at him and shined the light in his eyes. The pain increased, so my next words were through gritted teeth. “Give me thirty seconds then come up here and grab my clothes.”
“You really are a spoilsport,” Dom teased.
I hurt too bad to laugh. “You might have to carry me to the stream, but at least I’ll be small enough that I won’t slow you down.” Tears leaked down the side of my face.
“I’d already planned on it, Nic,” Dom said. “You just get yourself ready. I’ll be up in thirty seconds.
I stripped as fast as the agony would allow, closed my eyes and pushed my beast forward. She eagerly climbed forward as fur sprout over my body and bushed out in bands of white, gray, and black. The magic that came with being a therianthrope made shifting pleasurable, and it had been too long since I’d changed without the full moon. I forgot how wonderful it felt to be in this clever, little body. I wiggled my paws, and while my foot and ankle still hurt, the pain has lessened. I tried to walk forward, but my foot dragged. Luckily, before I could do more damage, Dom scooped me up again.
“I got you, darling,” he said, holding me close. “I got you.”