No,she sent back.Elf.
I winced.That sucks, I sent back.
Yeah,came her response.But cool about fire investigation. You joining arson or something?
We don’t have an arson team,I informed her.Too small. Sheriff’s Office does the investigation, and they send someone from fire out of Peshtigo.
Where the fuck is Peshtigo?
I laughed a little, since I’d said almost the exact same thing to Ziemer.
Close-ish to Green Bay, I sent back.
Where the Packers are?
Yeah.I followed it up with a smiley and a small cheese emoji.I gotta get going,I sent her.Talk later?
Me, too,came her reply.And yes!!!
At least I was smiling by the time I got out the door.
“Arson investigation is goingto be so cool!” Quincy gushed over the phone.
I smiled, even though she couldn’t see me. I was making myself some sandwiches for dinner after having had a very long day, and I had Quincy on speaker. “I’m excited,” I told her. “Most of today was just logistics—what it’s going to take, what firefighter training includes, how the certification exam works, that sort of thing. But I’m actually kind of excited for the firefighter training.”
“Seriously?” She sounded incredulous. “Youwantto learn how to run into a burning building?”
“I mean—I have shifter strength and speed now,” I pointed out. “I might as wellusethem.”
“And not tell anyone?”
I was quiet for a moment, then figured I might as well tell her. “There are eight of us, and we’reallNids.” Mostly shifters, plus one faun and one orc. The faun, an Indigenous guy named Nathaniel Rivers, didn’t have to do the firefighter training because he already was one. The orc, an absolutely massive woman who had to have been nearly as tall as Mason Manning with vibrant green skin and bright yellow eyes named Kitty Matuszak, would be doing training with me, as would another wolf shifter named Bruce Demain.
We would, Ziemer explained to us after he’d let the rest of them go, be doing our training with normies and Arcs, but it was up to us whether or not those of us who could pass actually wanted to try.
He left unsaid the fact that in a life-or-death situation, it would probably become crystal clear to whomever we lifted something way too heavy off of that we weren’t human.
Bruce had looked nervous about that. Kitty clearly didn’t have a choice. It didn’t make me nervous, exactly. Just… resigned. I didn’t necessarily like the idea of running around waving my shifter flag, but I also didn’t want to lie about what I was—not really. I still felt weird about not masking in places like the grocery store, because it definitely got you weird looks, but, then again, if I’d become a different kind of Nid, it wouldn’t be an issue of choosing.
I decided I was just going to do what I did—not try to hide being a shifter, but not wearing my Hands and Paws t-shirt, either. At least until I put it on at the end of a laundry cycle and promptly forgot.
Ziemer had given us our schedules—when we had our firefighting training, when we had classes, when we had off. The program was designed for people with jobs—we had classes a couple nights a week, but online, so we could log in from home to do the classroom portion. Over the next year, we’d do weekendin-person training, finishing our firefighting training after about six months, then continuing for another year-and-a-half after that with both in-person and online classes and tutorials before we were ready to take our certification exams—those of us who stuck with it, anyway.
I told all this to Quincy, who let out a low whistle. “So everybody in fire investigation is a Nid?”
“I mean, everybody in my class is,” I replied, putting my completed sandwiches on a plate and sitting down at my small kitchen table—a Habitat thrift store acquisition. “And Chief Ziemer is.”
“Huh.”
“It does kind of make sense,” I pointed out. “Speed, strength, and our senses of smell.”
“I thought you hated doing that sniff-test thing for Maginot,” Quincy said.
“Apparently I was doing it wrong,” I told her. “Or so the Chief maintains.”
“I mean, I hope so, if you’re going to have to do it again. Because you looked like you were in hell.”
“Oh, I was,” I assured her. “So I am not particularly looking forward to those classes. But if it’s better and it helps us solve an arson case or a murder…”
