Free Moon Dance by V. J. Chambers Page B

the arm
and tugged him out of the room.
    Dana watched them go,
feeling even more confused than she thought was possible. There
were so many things she needed to process, but there was only one
thing that was pressing.
    Piper.
    She hurried out into the hallway just
in time to see Ursula and Avery getting onto the elevator. Fine.
Dana took the stairs.
    She pounded up the levels as
fast as she could. When she got back to her floor, she flung
herself out into the hallway and tore down to her apartment. She
ripped the door open.
    “ Piper?”
    “ Oh, hello, Dana.” Sherry
Franco stood up from the couch. She was a neighbor who worked as a
secretary for the tracker office. A picture book was dangling from
her hand. “I didn’t think you’d be back so soon. Avery said you two
might be out all evening.”
    Piper was on the couch next to Sherry.
She was sitting primly, her hands in her lap, looking very well
behaved.
    Dana was out of breath. She
took a few deep draws of air, telling her heart to calm down. “I’m
not back. I just wanted to check on you guys. But you look fine.
So, I’ll leave you to it.”
    “ Sherry reading me a story,
Mommy,” said Piper, her eyes shining.
    “ I see that.” Dana smiled.
“You be good for her, Pipers.” And then she backed out of the door
and into the hallway.
    God, why couldn’t Avery have
just told her
there was a babysitter? Did he have any idea how much he’d
frightened her?
    But she was glad to have the
time to herself. She was going to go on a run. The wolf inside her
was itching to get out, and everything would be clearer and simpler
if she could shed her human skin for a little while.
    * * *
    Avery was livid. He shook
Ursula ’s hand off of him as they went down
the hallway to her office. “You let him go. He’s a serial killer.
What the hell were you thinking?”
    “ You’re the one who
said he wasn’t really a serial killer.” She didn’t look back at him, just kept going
down the hall. She was annoyed too.
    “ I didn’t mean you should
let him go.”
    She stopped at the door to the tracker
office and opened it. She went inside, holding the door open for
him.
    He followed her.
    She slammed the door behind
him. “Let me explain something to you, Brooks. The SF is primarily
an organization to help werewolves. We’re not particularly good at
the punishment part. We’re barely equipped to handle wolf
criminals. We only got roped into it because the humans are afraid
of contamination in regular jails—wolves biting everyone in
sight.”
    “ That’s not a reason to let
Randall go. He’s dangerous—”
    “ He’s dangerous to you,” she
said. “And don’t act as if it’s got something to do with your worry
over Dana’s safety, because we all know that he couldn’t hurt her,
and he hasn’t tried since.”
    “ He’s a criminal. We
shouldn’t even be having this discussion. Does the board know that
you’ve pardoned him? Because first thing tomorrow, I’m going
to—”
    “ The board?” She laughed.
“Do you want to know what the board’s reaction was when they found
out we’d captured Randall again?”
    Avery furrowed his brow.
“What?”
    “ They don’t like him here.
Especially not after what’s gone on out west. They’ve got enough on
their plate. The last two times that we’ve had Randall in custody,
SF workers have been killed. Either by Randall’s pack, or by that
Jimmy man forcing his wolves to shift and kill people. Fact of the
matter is, they don’t want him here. They were all scrambling for
ideas about how we could cut him loose. He’s not something they
want to deal with right now. I only convinced them to keep him
around for a bit because I thought he might know something about
the attack out west.”
    Avery shook his head. “That
can’t be true, King. He’s a monster. He killed so many
people.”
    “ No, not really,” she said.
“Except for the people that he killed before he got picked up, he
only causes problems for us