Chapter 1
“Stop giggling.”
Jay covered his mouth, and Pete turned back to the locker room door. Down the corridor, the double doors clanked open. Pete hustled to stand in front of his locker.
“He’s coming.”
Jay launched into a rambunctious rendition of a video game theme, complete with sound effects. Gliding smoothly away from Mackey’s locker to his own, he nudged Pete with an elbow. Then, as footsteps neared outside, Jay fumbled the bottle of balm. Still singing, he bobbled it wildly until Pete snatched it out of the air and shoved it behind his shampoo. Jay’s dark eyes flashed at him, filled with mischief, and Pete began to sing along.
The air changed when Mackey entered the locker room. Sometimes Pete felt like he could see it, the way the big shark shifter pushed the air aside to take up the space it had occupied. He stood a head taller than Pete and Jay, and as broad as both of them put together. He was a scary dude, what with his permanent scowl and all the scars crisscrossing his shaved scalp—and on his face and neck and arms and back and chest. And because he was a shark, he was always missing at least one tooth. That wouldn’t have been creepy on its own, but they never knew which tooth it would be. Changed every day. It was…unsettling.
The first time Jay had talked Pete into pranking Mackey, he’d held his breath the whole time, sure Mackey would kill them, but he hadn’t. Jay said the guy was grumpy because he needed to get laid. Maybe he was right, but Pete suspected Mackey was just a loner.
“Morning!” Jay sang at him.
“Morning!” Pete chimed in.
Mackey gave each of them an intent look over his shoulder. “Morning,” he grumbled, then turned back to his locker and stowed his duffel.
Scary, but unerringly polite.
Jay grinned at Pete and performed a mock shiver. They sang and stripped to change into their flight suits, and Pete tried to ignore how Jay’s warm, bare shoulder bumped his as he danced to their song.
Landry and Espinoza arrived soon after. Some days they showed up together, some days separately, but if the air in the locker room changed when Mackey arrived, it did something altogether different when the Lieutenant and his pilot were in the room at the same time.
It was like an arc of electricity sizzled across the air between them. They’d kept their longtime lockers even after they’d become a thing, Landry to Pete’s left and Espinoza to Jay’s right, so sometimes the bolt bowed over Pete’s head, sometimes it zapped behind him, and sometimes it slithered down the line of lockers in front of him. It had always been there, actually; they’d just taken forever to do something about it.
Not that he could talk. He still hadn’t done anything about his own pathetic strand of lightning.
They all trooped down to the conference room, where Commander Brackett briefed them on the day. She had her usual sadistic readiness drills for them to run offshore, unless anything more urgent arose. That was how it worked for them; the Coast Guard only called in Rogue Rescue if they really needed a shifter unit, which usually meant a capsize or lots of curious wildlife. Unfortunately enough people piloting vessels on open water got themselves into trouble that their unit didn’t go many days without answering a call.
He and Jay took the steps up to the helipad side by side. They greeted their mechanic, Nichols, at the chopper’s bay door, and then climbed into their seats. Pete buckled in and put on his headset. He sat aft and starboard, facing Jay’s seat and the cockpit. On the port side, Mackey’s bulk occupied the rear seat, facing Nichols. Espinoza did his preflight checks, Landry occupying the copilot’s seat, though he wasn’t really a pilot. Wasn’t really a lieutenant, either, but then none of them were what the outside world thought they were. After a few minutes, the chopper lifted off, and the blue water of their little stretch of California coast was skimming past below.
When they leveled out, Espinoza’s voice came over the intercom in their headsets. “Lieutenant Landry.”
“Airman Espinoza.”
“Looking pretty fresh this fine day, sir.”
Jay toed Pete’s shin, and they shared a look. Usually, Espinoza switched to a private channel after takeoff.
“Why, thank you,” Landry said.
“Any reason?”
“If you must know, I got a very nice wake-up treat.”
Jay’s foot pressed hard on Pete’s.
“Oh yeah?” Espinoza said. “What was that?”
“Starts with B and ends with B,” said Landry. “Well, unless you abbreviate it, and then it ends with J.”
Across from Pete, Jay’s eyes blinked wide, and he looked ready to burst.
Nichols cleared his throat. “Intercom’s on, sir.”
Jay lost it, and Pete followed, breaking up. A low “Oops” came over the line, and then Espinoza reached for the channel switch and toggled it.
Pete couldn’t see Landry around Jay, but he could see Espinoza just fine. His neck looked a little flushed, and he focused on the horizon for a while. But then he glanced across the cockpit at Landry. His expression was shielded by his helmet, but Pete could imagine the warmth in it. Or at least the plea for forgiveness. After a few minutes, Espinoza’s hand dropped from where it rested on the throttle and reached across the space between the two seats. Landry’s met it, fingers lacing for a brief squeeze.
Pete looked down at his own hands. Unconsciously, his fingers had woven themselves together. Pulling them apart, he looked at Jay’s hands.
As usual, they were bouncing in the air as Jay hummed some tune.
Then they weren’t bouncing but subtly pointing on the beat: port…port…port…
In the port aft seat, Mackey was shifting. Not into his shark form but with an agitated restlessness he never showed.
It caught Nichols’s attention. You all right? he mouthed to Mackey.
In response, Mackey scowled, scooted in his seat, and plucked at the crotch of his flight suit.
It was the oldest prank ever. Topical muscle balm—the kind that felt cold and hot at the same time—Jay had smeared it on the inside of Mackey’s flight suit. Way too lame a prank for the celebratory dance Jay was winding up to, but the conspiratorial gleam in his eyes was too much to resist. Aimed right at Pete, it said you and me, you and me, and Pete danced because it was the most he could ask for.
He’d been adopted by Jay’s aunt when they were kids. Raised in a large pod of dolphin shifters, the lines blurred sometimes, from cousin to friend to sibling, and back again. They’d settled as friends—best friends—but the deep sense of family was there, for better or worse.
He loved Jay, as a friend and more, but he would never really get the more. To Jay, they were practically brothers.
Pete assumed so, anyway. He’d never had the balls to raise the question. Jay would tease him for being a perv and go back to best friend mode.
The intercom clicked on. A rescue had been called in, Landry said. Drills would wait.
When they were near the site, the shifters stripped out of their flight suits. Pete followed Jay down the hoist cable. Letting go several feet above the surface, he shifted into his dolphin form as he hit the water, getting only a flash of its chill before his tough hide and handy fat reserve protected him from it. Showtime, Jay said, and Pete raced him to the rescue site.
It was as standard as these things went: a pleasure craft had underestimated its stability in open ocean and was capsizing. Four souls treaded water, clinging to life preservers. As always, a conventional rescue unit was on the scene with a suited swimmer in the water, their helicopter hovering nearby to take on survivors.
After a quick circuit, Pete knew which two people needed help most.
One shoe—
—bermuda shorts, Jay finished for him.
They swam to the older folks, a man and a woman, and surfaced a few meters away from them. The woman, her silver hair plastered to her face, gasped, and the man followed her wide gaze. Pete and Jay gave them twin nods, then dunked under again. Pete swam to the man and gently tucked his back under the fellow’s arm. The man grunted in surprise but wrapped his arm around Pete’s body, just in front of his dorsal fin. He could hear the woman calling out to their companions, “Look! Dolphins!” as she clung to Jay.
When the fourth was secured to the chopper’s hoist cable and lifted, adrenaline surged through Pete. He dove deep before kicking for the surface. When he broke into the air, twisting with the satisfaction, he found Jay had done the same. And then that they had an audience.
A few feet over their heads hovered a drone, its four propellers whirring loudly. On its belly was a lens.
Shake it, Pete!
Jay was kicking hard so that he stood above the waves. Unable to resist, Pete mimicked him, and they danced and waved and laughed and the drone bobbed overhead, filming it all—
—until a swift body knocked into Pete’s tail. He dropped into the water, followed by Jay, and then Lieutenant Landry’s slick seal head surfaced. He slapped the water with a flipper.
Pete dipped under again. When Jay had done the same, Landry performed a corkscrew dive—their signal to stay underwater.
They did, listening to the buzz of the drone. It hung out above them for minutes that seemed to turn into hours. They could swim for their own chopper, but chances were the conventional unit had warned Espinoza and he was staying out of sight. Wouldn’t do for anyone to see them hauled from the ocean naked, let alone watch them shift just before that.
On and on the drone buzzed, until Pete thought he’d come out of his skin. Just as he was about to skim the surface for a breath, a large dark body surged up from the deep. He saw enough tail to realize it was Mackey, then lost him as he broke cleanly from the water. A few seconds later, he splashed down again. He thrashed this way and that, and then the destroyed drone fell from his jaws and sank out of sight.
Mackey made one prowling circuit, giving Pete and Jay a sharkload of side-eye.
Oops.
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