The Bureau (A Cage for Men and Wolves Book 1) (18 page)

Elliot had looked surprised when he found Clover in the kitchen the next morning, two cups of coffee ready to drink, both with cream the way he liked.

"I figured I could use the practice." Clover had said. "I can't have another slip up if Rainer comes by again." It definitely wasn't an apology for holding him at knife point.

In reality, the sitting room downstairs had been too quiet to sleep well in. She'd realized, several hours into her tossing and turning that she missed the sound of someone else breathing in the room with her. Even the sound of her enemy was better than the silence. Eventually, it had become more exhausting trying to stay asleep than being awake, so she'd gotten up just as the sun was peeking in through the windows.

Neither of them mentioned the conversation they'd had the night before, and when the time for them to leave for the Bureau came and went, Clover remembered that it was Saturday. Only the agents who had street patrol worked weekends and at first, she was relieved. Going back to the building that swallowed her people whole and spat them out as garbage was the last thing she wanted. But staying home meant that her plans were at a standstill.

Within the hour, she was pacing. Elliot had things to do—'Paperwork to catch up on,' which she knew translated to 'I have to redo those files you burned.'

She still wasn't sorry.

When she wandered into his office for the hundredth time, having just finished her rounds of checking and rechecking the locks on the doors Elliot slammed his pen onto the table hard enough to stop her.

"
Please
, will you
stop
pacing like that?" He said 'please' but she knew he didn't mean it.

"What do you expect? We should be doing something productive. Instead we're just sitting around, twiddling our thumbs."

Elliot seemed vaguely insulted as he looked up from the piles of papers strewn about his desk.

"I mean productive toward
my
goal." She clarified, ignoring the eye roll he gave her in response.

"Well, there isn't really anything we can do until we hear back from Central Records. And honestly, you could probably use the rest. Why don't you take a bath or something?"

"Don't patronize me, Montgomery."

Elliot raised both hands in surrender, but didn't look particularly threatened. As he went back to work, Clover wandered over to the bookshelves, skimming the spines. A few looked like text books, but most of them had titles written out in psychological jargon that made little sense to her. Picking one of the largest, possibly so she would seem smart, she sat down in the seat across from Elliot. He glanced at her feet as she perched them on the edge of his desk, but didn't say anything. For a while, Clover amused herself by flipping through the book, pretending to be intrigued—in reality she was just looking at the pictures. Anatomical drawings of brains, mostly.

She wondered if her brain looked different, somehow, from the ones in the book. She wondered if anyone had even thought to check. The Bureau never cared about understanding werewolves, only about controlling them. She'd always thought it was just because they hated her and people like her, but Elliot had made her wonder if it hadn't stemmed from fear first. Had they only been afraid of the disease she and her pack carried? Had it later morphed into the deep seated hatred they held now?

"If someone was sick," her voice sounded loud breaking the silence of the office. "Would you lock them up or kill them to keep the disease from spreading?"

Elliot looked at her for a second, then sighed, taking his reading glasses off and rubbing his eyes.

"Do we really need to keep having these ethical quizzes?" He sounded tired, despite the extra sleep he'd gotten that morning.

"Would you?"

"I don't know, Clover." He straightened a stack of papers. "No, I guess. But I would make sure they were somewhere they couldn't infect other people."

"So you'd lock them up?"

"Well, yeah. I mean, they could get a lot of people sick."

"What if they were really careful not to spread it to other people?"

"Sometimes even that's too big a risk."

Clover was quiet a moment. She wasn't as angry as she thought she should be. 

"What about you?" Elliot countered after a moment. "Would you just let people who were contagious run around on their own?"

'Yes' was what Clover wanted to say immediately, but if she were honest with herself, she knew it wasn't such a simple question. She wondered if she would trust a stranger with her life, which was, essentially what she would be doing by letting someone with a contagious illness roam free.

"Maybe we're thinking about this in the wrong way."

"Oh?" Elliot seemed interested now.

"Maybe we're working in the wrong direction." Clover closed her book. "Maybe we could have peace if everyone was like me." The quiet horror that passed over Elliot's face surprised Clover. Was the prospect of being like her really that awful? "No one could discriminate against us if we're all the same."

The room seemed smaller suddenly, and for a moment, Clover thought Elliot was going to shout at her, but his voice was even quieter than normal.

"If you could choose whether you had to transform or not. What would you choose?"

Clover couldn't answer, because she knew she'd give him the answer he wanted. She'd give almost anything to go without another transformation, but telling him that would just solidify the lower tier that her people occupied.

"It's not as bad as it seems."

"You're not a very good liar."

They stared at each other again and Clover wondered how many of her lies he'd seen through. It made her nervous. Now that she knew his line of work, his ability to read people—to see straight through her bravado—made sense. She looked back down at the book in her lap, worried now that he would see through to the core of her fabrication if she looked at him any longer. Luckily, before Elliot could say anything else, his phone chirped where it sat amid his paperwork. She was glad he was one to never ignore his phone.

"It worked." He said as he stared at the small screen, a smile splitting his face. "Central Records approved my request."

"Really?" Clover was on her feet before he'd finished his sentence.

"Yeah. They just sent me an email. Of course, since Dad never got around to assigning me a new computer we'll have to wait until we're inside the building on Monday to access them. But the window they gave me will leave plenty of time for that."

Clover was too distracted by the word 'Monday' to notice the absence of annoyance he had in his voice when he mentioned his missing laptop.

"What d'you mean, 'Monday?' We're going
now.
"

The towering Bureau looked eerie without its swarm of workers funneling in and out of the giant maw of the building, and she was glad when they moved around to the nondescript side of the compound instead. The idea of walking through the cavernous atrium that made up the lobby without her usual cover of bodies made her uneasy.

At first, Elliot hadn't believed her when she'd said they'd be going 'now.' It had been foolish of him. But after she'd confiscated his paperwork, depositing it all on the ground beside the desk with one good sweep of her arms, he'd realized that she'd been
very
serious. It was good for both of them that his position at least granted him after-hour access to the main building.

On the side of the concrete fortress, down a service street, was a line of garage doors, probably used for sending and receiving shipments of werewolves. Beside the truck-sized doors was a smaller door at the top of a lone set of stairs.

Clover's fingers rubbed at the green trust badge she'd added to her uniform before leaving. Elliot had said it might make things easier, but that she should stay close to him anyway. She held her breath as they approached the unremarkable door. She wasn't sure why she was nervous, but she didn't breathe as he produced his access card and swiped it through a small black box beside the handle. The door buzzed and Elliot pulled it open like he'd done it a thousand times.

"There are still a few workers here on the weekends," Elliot explained as they made their way through back halls. "So don't do anything that'll draw attention to us."

Like many of the departments they passed once they were in the main halls, the Department of Evaluation was mostly dark when they arrived, the open space lit by only a handful of the florescent tubes that lined the ceiling. Elliot's shared cubicle seemed even more meager than Clover remembered, but as he sat down at this computer she felt a thrill of excitement banish her bad memories of the place. It was time. She was finally going to know where her family was.

- 18 -

"Clover, please. Please, will you stop pacing?" Elliot turned in his chair as she continued to prowl behind him.

It had been forty-five minutes since they'd gotten there, and Clover could barely contain her impatience. "Why is this taking so long?"

"It's a lot of information to load, and a lot of information to search." Even his seemingly unending well of patience was drying out. "If you
have
to pace, could you at least do it in the hall way. You're making me claustrophobic in here."

"
You
told me to stay close by."

"I know what I told you. And now I'm telling you to
please
go pace outside the cubicle. Just..." he turned back to the computer screen, his voice sounding like he was fighting for kinder words than what he actually wanted to say. "Just stay on this aisle."

She wished he could feel the hateful look she gave the back of his head before she walked out of the cubicle. Making sure to stomp her feet like she was spelling out her irritation in Morse code, she marched to one end of the aisle, then to the other, shooting Elliot's back another look as she passed the opening of his cubicle. When she made it to the other dead end she stopped herself from making another pass.

What was she doing? These were the temper tantrums Elliot had warned her about outside the boutique. Luckily, there was no one there to witness her childish behavior this time, but if she couldn't control it when she was alone, how could she hope to control it when she was under pressure?

A feeling of isolation crept up on her as she stood in the expansive room, the sound of Elliot's keyboard echoing from behind her. She hadn't realized how fully she'd accepted him as a partner in crime until she'd seen those files. She folded her arms over her stomach to ease the squirming she felt inside herself. She didn't want to be alone in this anymore. She wanted to trust him. She wanted to go back to the relief she'd felt when he'd pulled her into his side, shielding her from Rainer and from Mrs. Pierson. The woman's clawed hand had left an icy specter floating over her arm where she'd held her. But going back to that would mean forgiving him of his own crimes. She didn't know if she could do that.

Her footsteps were much quieter now as she wandered into the nearest cubicle. Like many of the other desks she'd passed, this one was laden with photos of children. She'd been horrified by the implications of what Elliot did, but the mother or father of the cake-covered child in the photograph did the same thing. Every person that manned every desk in the honeycomb of cubicles did the same thing. She wondered how many “Terminations” they'd circled. At her core, she knew the answer was 'more than Elliot had.'

Walking back toward the center of the aisle she peeked at Elliot's desk again. He didn't seem to notice her. She could just make out the line of his profile—his brows drawn down in concentration, his lips pressed into a line. He was doing more in that moment for her cause than she'd done at all. She didn't interrupt him.

As she neared the other end of the aisle again, from the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a narrow white door with a single square window built into it. She glanced back at the light coming from Elliot's cubicle. He'd said to stay in the aisle, but she was wearing her trust badge, and he was too busy to notice if she wandered a little further. Moving along the wall, she walked the perimeter of the room until she made it to the door. Raising onto her toes she could just peek through the window whose glass was crisscrossed with an embedded wire, probably to protect against breaking.

On the other side of the door was a hall filled with more doors like the one she was looking through, each with a little window of their own. She looked back at Elliot's lamp light again. He'd
wanted
her to stop bugging him. She surveyed the room, paying close attention to the corners. No cameras. She looked through the window again. No cameras in this hall either. The sound of typing was steady, and she thought she'd be back before he realized she was missing.

Clover had expected the door to be locked, but as she pressed the lever-style door handle down, it clicked open without any resistance. Opening it only wide enough for her body, she slipped inside, easing it back into place. Even being careful, the sound of the door shutting echoed down the endless hall. The silence made her skin crawl as she approached the first door.  Unlike the one that led to the cubicle room, this door, along with the others in the hall, had a smaller opening at chest height—like the mail hole in Elliot’s door—that was covered with a sliding piece of steel, a latch holding the plating in place. Beside the door, a file holder was bolted to the wall, a folder like the ones she'd found inside Elliot’s satchel—like the ones she’d burned—sitting inside it. The small photo from inside was paper-clipped to the front.