Page 111 of The Flame Game

Quinn once again held his hand out to the wolf. “Shake.”

The wolf sighed but stopped guarding his meal to shake with my husband.

With a smug smile, my husband raised a brow at Professor Yale.

“Right. The wolf has been trained to shake. Please tell me you’ve done the sentience test.”

“He doesn’t seem to be a sentient, not like Bailey’s gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys. How are they doing?” my husband asked.

“We lost five of them so far, and it looks like we’ll lose a few more. They have funeral rituals for their dead, and after much confusion, the lab attendants let them handle their burials. They use cairns. So, they’re definitely sentient, they have a culture, and they’re multilingual. We think they have the ability to understand any form of spoken language, although they can’t communicate in anything other than their language. In good news, that means you’ll have an easy time housing them. After they built their cairns, they allowed the technicians to dispose of the bodies, but we’re trying to figure out how to handle communicating with them. It’s a challenge. We think the first generation of them was transformative victims, and they had children—these are their children. Or their children. Or their children’s children. We’re not really sure.”

“Poor gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys.”

“Yeah. We’ll probably get them separated into family units and building a community habitat for them once we figure out their family structure. They have one, so we now have a real mess on our hands, as we have laws we have to follow regarding newly discovered sentients. Since you’re housing them, that’ll help simplify some things down the road.”

“We need very big house, Sam. Very big. Two wolf, one husky, ocelot, many gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys, three gorgons, a cindercorn, a gorgon-incubus doohickey, gorgon fosters, two gorgon-incubus-cindercorn doohickeys. Many beings, one building. Where we find that near work?” I heaved a sigh. “Hard. Not sure CDC check big enough.”

“You’re still getting some compensation for this and the Vegas jobs, Bailey. You’re on vacation, and you’re on contract still for six months, so you get your hazard pays and so on. I just have to talk to the locals to figure out what that compensation is,” Professor Yale informed me.

“Oh. Maybe enough money for big house.”

“And since you’re solving a major problem with the new sentients, the CDC can probably help with your housing problems. At the very least you’ll get a real estate agent who will be compensated by the CDC, which will lower the final bill.” Yale heaved a sigh. “And I can’t authorize putting the wolf down even if I wanted to at this point. This is not an excessively aggressive animal.”

“I think he reacted to the situation. Bailey’s idea of making him a police wolf might be a good one. It looks like he has the right base instinct, but he’ll need a lot of work.”

“And since the idea of giving her a wolf is to give her extra protection and you protection, he did exactly right, because the last thing any of us needed was an actual fight between two chiefs.”

“He wanted to talk, and that cost him.”

“Insane,” I added.

We regarded the corpse with disgust.

“Yes, I’ll buy into that. Still. The wolf killed him?”

“Is what I said. Wolf steal kill!”

Professor Yale shrugged. “It’s for the best. The wolf wouldn’t deal with guilt. You two? You two would need therapy.”

“Like hell I would. He wanted to use my wife!” Sam crossed his arms over his chest and grumbled curses. “My pregnant wife. Guilt would not have been an issue.”

“Yes, but your wife would have had enough guilt for both of you.” Yale pressed both of his hands to his cheeks. “Oh, no! My husband killed someone for me. He will be burdened. Everything is my fault. Woe is me.”

The bastard of an old man even managed to do a damned good impression of me at my worst. I flattened my ears. “Eat you, Yale!”

He laughed in my face, and with zero fear, he rubbed my brow, careful to avoid my steaming nose. “You wouldn’t. You’d miss me.”

“Hate it true,” I complained.

“Now, come along. We have a new blend of napalm for you to try. It’s even stronger than your absolute favorite. I’ve been told to gas you up and let you loose. Apparently, if you’re shit-faced drunk, you won’t feel as bad about setting a major fire. We also want to test how badly you dehydrate. We’re not going to let you suffer, though. We have hangover medication for you, and we brought enough to give it to you before you transform and after, too.”

“It’s your lucky day, Bailey. Looks like you get that bender you wanted. View it as celebrating your successful adoption spree. Yale, did you find any other living animals in the burn zone?”

“There’s limited wildlife still alive, but they’re on the verge of death. We’ll set up a drop zone for her while we’re setting up the first barrier. If she can herd out anything before we start pumping the napalm, we’ll save what we can. Don’t get your hopes up, Bailey. We scanned on our way in, and just about everything here is sick and dying. Your wolf probably came out of the zone we’ll be hosing down with neutralizer.”

“Okay. Will look. Help as can. Make rest burn.”

Yale led me to one of the tankers, and at our approach, one of the workers, who wore a gas mask, brought a sparkling bucket over. To my delight, he pulled a bottle of hot sauce out of his utility belt, opened it, and dumped it on top before giving it a stir.