***
The shelter's small waiting area was decorated brightly with wreaths and bows. "Visitors aren't allowed in the residential area," the shelter staffer at the front desk told them, "but I can go back and ask her if she'd like to come out and see you."
While they waited, holding hands, a woman came out of the back with two small children. She pinged Avery's shifter senses, which wasn't that unusual. Shifters often had trouble integrating into regular human society; most of them had to cope with heightened senses, difficulty with strong smells and crowds, animal instincts, and often the unique requirements of their individual shifter-type subcultures, such as werewolves' strong pack urges and xenophobia. All of this made it hard for them to find and hold jobs, which meant they were disproportionately represented among the homeless population.
The woman looked away without meeting Avery's eyes.
"Excuse me, ma'am?" He reached in his wallet and pulled out all the cash inside. The kids stared at him silently with wide eyes. It could sometimes be hard to tell with small children whose shifts might not have fully kicked in yet, but he was fairly sure that one of them was a shifter and one wasn't. They must have had a human father, or maybe different fathers.
"I don't want your charity, sir," the woman said tightly. "Or your pity."
"That's not what this is, and it isn't for you. It's for them." Avery held out his hand, offering the crumpled bills. "I grew up in the foster system. Buy something nice for your kids. They could use it."
She gazed at him for a moment longer, then took the money quietly and left without speaking, children in tow.
Nicole's hand traced a gentle path down his arm.
"What's it like back there?" he asked her quietly, sitting down again, with a nod toward the door where the shelter worker had vanished. He'd never been inside a place like this, except in the lobby when it was necessary to deal with a disturbance in the course of his duties. But as a social worker, Nicole probably spent a lot of time in this kind of place.
"It's not a bad place," she said, just as softly. "It's clean and quiet, and they supply basic toiletries and meals. It's infinitely better than where most of these women started out."
Before he could ask anything else, Ashley came out, toting a backpack. She stopped short and stood looking at them nervously, fidgeting as if she wasn't sure what to do with her hands.
The last time Avery had seen her, she'd had her hair chopped off just below her ears; it had looked as if she'd cut it herself with a pair of kitchen scissors. Now it had grown out somewhat and had been dyed a dark auburn instead of her usual mousy hue, but that only drew attention to the unhealthy pallor of her face. She was wearing an oversized University of Washington sweatshirt, draped on her thin body, with a winter coat over the top.
Nicole greeted her with a hug, and Avery offered her a smile. Nicole had warmed to her much more quickly than Avery had been able to. He couldn't quite forget that she'd abetted in the experiments that had claimed the lives of the quadruplets' parents, and had come very near to helping her mother conduct similar experiments on Avery and Nicole.
But she was little more than a kid herself, and she'd done the right thing in the end. Also, the puppies adored her, which Avery supposed was worth something.
"Come on," Nicole told her, giving her a gentle push toward the door.
Ashley's hesitant smile dropped away, replaced by a baffled expression. "Where are we going?"
"My sister's place. You can crash on our couch tonight."
"But ..."
"Don't argue with her when she's made up her mind," Avery told her. "There's no use."
"Miss," the shelter worker said, "if you don't want to go with these people, you don't have to."
Ashley smiled shyly, not quite meeting their eyes. "I—I think I want to."
She was very quiet in the car, huddling in the back with her backpack on the seat beside her. She perked up visibly when Nicole pulled into the driveway outside the Leung house, with its dazzling lights glowing through the darkness and the rain.
"This is pretty," Ashley said quietly. "We used to have family Christmases like this a long time ago, before I got sick."
Which was what had originally set into motion a chain of events that led to werewolves being kidnapped and used as part of Dr. Evans' experiments to unlock the secrets of their healing abilities and save her daughter's life. Avery realized for the first time that Ashley Evans-Lopez must be carrying a tremendous burden of guilt about the whole thing. It had not only been done in her name, but she'd had to watch while it happened.
With that thought, he managed to let go of most of his lingering resentment against her. He wished that she'd had her crisis of conscience earlier, in time to save the lives of the children's parents—but she had, in the end, saved the children's lives by smuggling them out of the lab. And while Dr. Evans was recovering in the hospital from injuries sustained during her standoff with the SCB, Ashley had been cooperating fully, helping the SCB put together a solid case against her own family.
When it came down to it, she did the right thing. How many people can really say that?
"How is your health right now?" Nicole asked as they got out of the car.
"It's okay. I'm on a new treatment Dr. Lafitte is working on, and it seems to be helping with the rejection issues a little. I have more energy now." She smiled slightly. "Not that it seems to be able to help me find a job."
"We'll work on that," Nicole told her. "One thing at a time, okay?"
Ashley nodded solemnly and shouldered her backpack.
The cheerful hubbub in the house seemed to have calmed considerably when they came in. The living room was dark except for the gleaming, shifting lights of the Christmas tree and the flickering of the big-screen TV against the far wall, on which a children's Christmas movie was playing. The kids were all sprawled on the floor, the older ones clutching pillows, the younger turned puppy-shaped and lying in sleepy heaps. As soon as Ashley came in, four tiny tails began to wag, and they scrambled to their paws and came to greet her with little yelping cries of delight.
At the lab, Ashley had taken care of them after the death of their mother Helena, and they remembered her. In some ways she was a second mother to them, and it was clear from the delight in her thin face as she knelt to hold out her arms to them that they still had a place in her heart, too.
With Ashley distracted, Nicole crooked a finger at Avery and hustled him off to the room they shared, which was off the hallway just inside the door. It had been Nicole's room before he'd moved in with her, and still reflected her sunshine-bright personality, although now it was strewn with toys and so crowded with newly added shelves, to accommodate Avery's things along with Nicole's, that it was barely possible to move around without knocking something off.
It didn't help that the closet was no longer available for closet purposes, having been converted into a sort of combination mini-bedroom and playpen with the addition of a child gate and heaps of blankets and pillows inside. It would never have passed muster as a bedroom for human children, especially for four of them, but the children generally slept in their puppy shapes and they liked to be piled together. What even the other adults in the house didn't know was that Avery usually shifted into his wolf shape and joined them there.
"Did you lose something?" Avery asked, as Nicole closed the bedroom door and then began hunting through drawers in the bureau.
"No; I've realized we don't have any gifts for Ashley. If she spends Christmas with us, I have to find something to give her. She can't sit there and watch us open our gifts while receiving nothing."
It was on the tip of his tongue to say "We don't have to," but Nicole, he knew, was right. If they were going to have Ashley with them for Christmas, it wasn't fair to exclude her from the present-opening.
Nicole came up with a bracelet, and Avery donated a book of Sherlock Holmes stories from the clutter of paperbacks on "his" section of the shelves. Nicole also took dow
n a framed photo of the children from the mess on top of the bureau. It was a simple cell-phone snap they'd had printed at Walmart; Erin had put it in a puppy-themed frame for them. "She probably doesn't have any," Nicole pointed out, "and we can always print off some more."
Avery left her wrapping the gifts with odds and ends of wrapping paper on the bed—which she assured him was a one-person job—and went out to the light-spangled dimness of the living room. Ashley was down on the floor with the puppies and the kids, lying stretched full-length to watch the stop-motion antics on the screen. Erin was moving quietly around in the kitchen, putting things away. She smiled at Avery. "I left out a slice of pie for you. I'm hoping pecan is all right, but if you don't like it, there's also pumpkin and apple."
"Pecan is just fine." She'd left him an enormous slice, with a can of non-dairy spray topping beside it. Avery took it into the living room and accepted the spot on the end of the couch that Tim offered him.
So this is what a family Christmas Eve is like, he thought, and he knew that he'd hold this moment in his heart forever: the lights of the tree winking and dancing, reflected in the glass behind them; the movie playing on the screen, with the kids sprawled in front of it; the sweet richness of the pie on his tongue. There was only one thing missing, and this deficiency soon resolved itself when Nicole arrived to slide onto the couch next to him with a pie slice of her own. Her warm body curled against his as if she had been made for it, and every once in awhile, with everyone else's attention fixed on the screen, she turned her head to press a sweet pie-flavored kiss against his lips.
He'd never imagined life could be this good.