Soul of Fire. Laura Anne Gilman

could, and Jan’s eyebrows rose. She almost smiled, a real, amused smile, looking back over her shoulder at the kelpie. “You have a life strategy?”

      “Lupin are a little more focused than most,” AJ admitted, ignoring the wounded expression on Martin’s face and the burst of laughter from someone in the room behind him. Everyone else was very pointedly ignoring the exchange, even as they eavesdropped as best they could without being called out for slacking. The supernatural world’s reputation for gossiping like a pair of nannies was pretty accurate, too.

      “Do you have a few minutes?” the human asked.

      “No,” AJ said. “But sit down, anyway.”

      * * *

      “Jesus Christ,” the cop said, turning his head away. But everywhere he looked, there was blood and broken furniture. But no bodies. Where were the bodies? “What the hell happened?”

      “Bear,” the man on his hands and knees in the kitchen said, his attention focused on the evidence in front of him more than his answer.

      “Bullshit. Bears don’t do this.” Patek forced himself to take a better look at the damage, his expression unhappy but resigned. There were deep scars on the walls, from around waist-high, dragging down to the ground. He touched one with a gloved finger: it went at least a quarter-inch deep into drywall. “Okay, yeah, bears could do this. But inside a house? Who the fuck lets a bear inside their house?”

      The first thing you learned living in the Adirondack Mountains area was to keep an eye out for bears. Make noise when you went outside in the spring, make sure your garbage was locked up and out of reach, and generally don’t be an idiot, because black bears might look cute at a distance or in the zoo, but up close they were several hundred pounds of muscle, teeth, and claws. More, especially in spring, they saw nearly anything as food, and what wasn’t food was easily seen as a threat.

      Patek had seen a bear claw up close during training. Their instructor had used it to scare them, and it had worked. You didn’t want that thing anywhere near you, not when attached to living bear muscle.