Austin woke in the darkness as something slithered over his leg, muscular body undulating in loose, efficient coils.

This wasn’t the first time he’d woken up, nor was this the first snake which had crawled over him. Snakes, as it turned out, were drawn to his heat. He sometimes surfaced from the darkness to find one coiled up at his back or looped between his legs, basking, sheltering from the cold mud. They always slid off when morning came, drawn to the weak, warm light filtering in from above.

It was by way of this light that Austin had been able to tell his scaly friends were brown, green, or gray. Harmless. Not venomous. That was about the only bit of luck he’d had over the course of these past days.

He knew where he was. He had been unconscious for his transportation and arrival, but sometimes the men who had captured him took him outside for a beating. They seemed to have no real love for the task they were doing, so the beatings didn’t last long. His glimpses of the outside world were wide but brief.

He was in a swampy clearing, on the border between marsh and woodland. The treeline was thick and overgrown, smelling rotten and ripe with dense vegetation. Even the solid areas of ground were not really solid at all, more mud than dirt. Where someone stepped, water welled up in the mark they left behind.

There were a few tents in the clearing, disguised with twigs and grass and slimy branches pulled from the swamp water. A pit had been dug beneath the largest of these tents, and that was where he was. There was a layer of water several inches thick on the bottom of his pit, soft and reeking mud beneath that. The walls were slick and slimy. He couldn’t climb out. He had tried. The soft mud wouldn’t support his weight, and terrifying amounts of water seeped in from the places where he pulled the mud away. The possibility of collapsing the walls and smothering himself in an avalanche of mud seemed very real if he fucked with his surroundings too much.

All he could do was wait.

He hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t had anything to drink, except for that one time when he tried to sample some of the liquid surrounding him; he was violently sick half an hour after, though there were no other long-term effects.

Water everywhere, none of it safe to drink.

He slept only in brief, uncomfortable bursts now, though before they had been drugging him. He was cold, constantly soaked. Shivering had become as natural as breathing for him.

All throughout each day, he heard the sounds of distant machinery, punctuated briefly with cracking and thuds as protected trees were felled, and the ecosystem here in the swamp was brutalized.

Each thud would send birds screaming in panicked flocks up into the sky. They seemed not just frightened, but infuriated at their lack of ability to save their home. It was almost as if they were begging him, beseeching him to do something.

Sometimes, it also felt like they were mocking him. Austin, the big bad wolf cop, reduced to a level of usefulness even less than that of a stork.

He knew why he was here, and he knew exactly how he had wound up here. He had had nothing but time to put his fractured memories together. What he couldn’t figure out was supplemented with chatter from the men outside his pit. Through this method of listening and thinking, he had the whole story.

But, the story didn’t just start with him. It started with the woman at the Home Depot who had been slain on the overnight shift. Austin had told Lucas the story, but he had neglected to mention that there had been sightings of an odd man hanging around in the nearby area and in the parking lot. Witnesses had come forward with their descriptions. Though those descriptions were few and far between, because this occurred in the small hours of the morning, there had been enough to form something of a mental image.

The odd man had a slouched back, but broad shoulders. He would have been tall if not for the stoop. He had long hair—white or blonde—and a fuzzy gray beard which was as long as his hair. He had a moustache, big ears, and eyes that might have been a bit squinted.

Austin had been a good cop. He had memorized the faces that Oscar told him to, and the information that came along with it. He had done his own research.

The odd man seen lingering in the area of the murder came very close to matching the mug shot of a convicted poacher named George Glenn. Glenn had paid heavy, heavy fines in the past for hunting and killing endangered animals located primarily in the area of the Everglades, though he also occasionally took trips to other regions of the world. He took trophies, left the rest of the bodies to rot. He had reportedly killed elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, cheetahs, and uncountable crocodiles and exotic birds.

Then, a few years ago, he had abruptly dropped out of sight. No one knew where he had gone or if he was even still alive.

Clearly, he was alive. He had just switched to poaching trees instead of crocs.

The light from outside was growing stronger. It was another morning. Another cold, uncomfortable morning, down here in the darkness and mud. Austin had never been so uncomfortable in his entire life. His hunger and thirst had melted, formed some kind of unholy union. He was a hollow, empty ache with a swollen tongue and parched lips. He felt filthy.

I wish I was dead, he thought, miserably.

The men who were clearing the trees were stirring in their own tents, complaining as they rose for the day. Soon enough, the smells of frying bacon and coffee managed to penetrate through the mud. Austin’s stomach gave a furious roar.

He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of George Glenn since he got here, not since that night at the restaurant, though he was certain the man couldn’t be that far away. This was, after all, his operation. He wouldn’t trust others to do it correctly. He wasn’t that kind of man.

Part of Austin didn’t really regret being here. He was right in the thick of things. He was gathering information that no cop could have ever hoped to get. He would get his chance to break free, and when he did, he was going to make these people pay for what they had done to him and this swamp.

But, that was the police officer part of his brain. The rest of him wished he wasn’t here, that he was still working fruitlessly on the case from a distance in Pensacola.

He wished he had thought of the possibility that this would happen beforehand, so he could have handled the situation differently when it came to Lucas.

He hadn’t known it was going to happen, hadn’t even considered that it would. What police officer thinks that they’re going to see the perpetrator of a crime outside of a fucking Chili’s?

That was exactly what had happened. Lucas had said he was in love with Austin. Austin had gone to reply, because why wouldn’t he? He loved Lucas, too.

Then, he saw George Glenn. And everything unraveled. He had been trying to tell Lucas that they couldn’t do this tonight, that Lucas needed to leave only right then, and that wasn’t the way things had come out of his mouth at all. Lucas thought he had been rejecting him for good.

As much as it pained him to have to do so, he couldn’t let Glenn get away. He had to take the chance then, to bring him in for questioning. He could repair everything with Lucas later as long as he did this right.

He had gone and fucked up that, too.

He had followed Glenn as the suspect walked across the sidewalk, staying far enough back that he never would have thought that he’d be seen. Unfortunately, Glenn was smarter than a rookie cop.

Glenn had his own people following him, in front and behind. They were his protection. It was clear that they had noticed Austin, because he was jumped as he walked past an alleyway. They swarmed out of nowhere, and he hadn’t even had time to think about shifting before he was whacked over the head with a nightstick. Police-issue, he noticed, and then he blacked out.

He had come to less than half a minute later, and by that point, he was already being shoved in the back of a car. Something bit his upper arm. A needle. A drug burned through his veins, and then he was out again.

He was conscious off and on for the entire ride to the Everglades, and then he woke up to find himself in this pit with the friendly neighborhood snakes.

He had majorly fucked everything up. Despite all his daydreams of grandeur, of escaping, he knew he was probably going to die down here. If dehydration didn’t get him, hypothermia eventually would.

Lucas would be better off without him.

He should have mentioned the witness testimonies, the possibility of it being someone with a known history of prior bad acts. He could have said something different when he saw Glenn. Lucas wouldn’t have been so shattered.

Now, Lucas would never know.

Austin closed his eyes. He tried to reach out for his awareness of the other wolf, but the distance between them must have been too great—figuratively and literally—because he only encountered a blank wall. Nevertheless, he thought, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen.

He hoped Lucas would hear it. Somehow.

“Think we oughta try him again?”

Austin opened his eyes and looked up. The voice had come from very close by. In the thin gaps in the tent material, especially where the tent met the pit, he could see the shadows of the men. They approached, their silhouettes barely visible on the outside of the tent material.

“I think he’s a lost cause, honestly,” the second speaker said. His was the silhouette with thinner shoulders. Austin had taken to calling him Scrawny. He probably could have learned all their names by now, but he didn’t care to think of these people as, well, people. They didn’t deserve it.

“He’s just some idiot cop. Probably doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. He only knew what Mr. Glenn looks like.”

“I dunno,” the first speaker grunted. Austin liked to call him Fat Fuck, because of his enormous, round beer belly. “You seen the way he looks when he comes out here? He’s planning. Plotting. He knows more’n he lets on.”

“Maybe.” Scrawny still sounded doubtful.

The tone of his voice made Austin ache, because it reminded him of Lucas. Poor, poor Lucas, who had been trying so hard.

There was the sound of a zipper being yanked down, and Scrawny poked his head through the hole. “Hey!” he called. “Bet you’re hungry!”

Austin said nothing.

They’re switching tactics. Pure abuse did nothing, so now they’re my friends.

God, what he wouldn’t do for a single piece of bacon right now. They knew it, too. They were taking advantage of the needs of his body.

“We’re gonna let you come up. We’re gonna ask you some questions. If you cooperate, maybe we’ll give you some food.” Scrawny lowered his voice a little, as if they were best friends and this was something he didn’t want anyone else hearing. “If you do real good, maybe we’ll let you sleep in one of the tents on the floor. Not exactly a luxury hotel, but better than down there, right?”

Austin still said nothing.

Shrugging, Scrawny backed out for a moment. Austin sat in darkness again.

Then, the flaps of the tent pitched above his pit were pulled back completely and Scrawny stood there with a length of rope in his hands. Fat Fuck was at his side, arms folded over his not-inconsiderable chest.

“You know the drill,” Scrawny said. “Do it. Or else you aren’t going to see daylight for another few days.”

At which point, it’ll just be my corpse before you go and drop me off in the swamp.

Scrawny threw the rope down into the pit. Austin judged that the pit was something like 12 feet deep. He could easily have jumped it when he was a perfectly normal, healthy wolf, but he had been drugged and then starved. He was shaky, perpetually tired. He wouldn’t have counted on being able to walk in a straight line at this point.

The rope was caked with dried mud, some of which clung dangling from the fibers. There was a loop at the end of it, which had been tied with a slipknot.

The drill was to slip the loop over his head and cinch it around his middle. He was then to go stand over by the edge of the pit, so the two men could drag him up to the surface.

The process was extremely painful. The rope dug into his ribs. The pressure of the men tugging at him from above made it hard to breathe. Nevertheless, he always took it without a sound of complaint. He didn’t cry out, didn’t so much as whimper. That was for himself just as much as it was for them. If he gave in even a little bit, there would be no turning back.

Even when he reached the point where he should have been able to help drag himself out of the pit, by clawing his way onto solid earth, he didn’t. He tried that the first time, and the men had summarily dropped him, then left him alone with the rope knotted much too tightly around his ribs.

As soft as the mud was, it felt pretty hard when falling onto it. Austin had just lain there, winded, trying to keep his face above water so he didn’t drown.

So, since then, he didn’t try to help himself. He just let himself be dragged on his side until his feet were clear of the pit. He lay there, breathing raggedly, searching for his strength and conviction.

“Sit up,” Fat Fuck grunted and kicked at his aching ribs.

Austin bit his tongue on a growl, knowing it would anger the man, and also that it would only emerge as a raspy choke because of how dry his throat was. He sat up.

“Take off the rope, then put your hands behind your back.”

Austin obeyed, surveying his surroundings as discreetly as he could. Everything looked more or less unchanged, as was the nature of the Everglades. A person could come at the beginning and end of their life and find everything exactly as it was before.

Except, if he wasn’t mistaken, there was something different after all. There was another tent set up at the center of the cluster.

“Are we having guests?”

He regretted the question instantly. Fat Fuck broke away from tying his wrists behind his back, stood up, and kicked at him again. The steel-toed boots he wore caught Austin right between the ribs, knocking his air away.

Leaning forward, coughing, grimacing, Austin lapsed into silence.

“None of your fuckin’ business. We’re the ones who get to ask the questions, anyway.”

Fat Fuck resumed tying Austin’s arms behind his back. He was clearly the resident knot expert, because whenever Austin tested his bonds, he discovered the knots to be perfect and immovable. There was no point struggling with them, not when he was only tied up when he was out here where everyone could see him.

Aside from the extra tent, there was nothing new. A handful of burly men, rough and dirty, gathered around a fire. They were cooking over the flames, frying bacon, boiling instant coffee. Someone had eggs scrambling, and someone else wiped a knife on their shirt before cutting into a loaf of fresh white bread.

Where did they get that?

No convenience stores out here.

A rough hand patted Austin’s cheek. He turned his head and focused on Fat Fuck, who was grinning down at him. Every single one of his teeth were on display, which was to say that his lack of teeth was also on display. His mouth was full of gaps.

“Focus on me, now,” Fat Fuck said. “You know the deal. Behave, you get rewarded. Don’t, and you get ta kiss my boot.”

Scrawny crouched down nearby, though he was still well out of reach. Good cop and bad cop. “What’s your name?”

Austin didn’t answer. The smell of bacon was driving him nuts.

Fat Fuck nudged at Austin with his boot, hard. “Your name.”

“You’re a cop, right?” Scrawny asked. He was the one Austin knew he had to watch out for. Fat Fuck was a regular bully, but Scrawny had smarts on his side. He knew he was more likely to win a captive over by being kind to them. “You have to be. We could easily find out who you are if we did some digging, but we don’t feel like waiting. If you’d just tell us, you’d save us some time.”

Austin turned his head away.

Fat Fuck grabbed his face and jerked it back around. His fingers dug into his skin. “Don’t fucking look away from us. We asked you a question. Answer it!”

His heart started pounding. They reached this point faster and faster each time. He didn’t want to think about what would happen when they finally lost patience with him for good.

Or, maybe he did. It would be a blessing.

“What do you know? What do the cops got figured out about us?” Fat Fuck punctuated these questions with two swift kicks.

Austin doubled over as pain shuddered through him. His ribs throbbed. Even his thoughts were hurting now. Still, he didn’t answer.

That seemed to be all that the fat man wanted to deal with. Snarling, Fat Fuck shoved Austin onto his back and backhanded him across the face.

Rather than resist, Austin let his head twist with the force of the blow. It felt like he had just had his skull bashed with one of those frying pans. Colorful circles of light formed behind his eyelids.

“Answer us!” Fat Fuck braced for another blow, the muscles in his body tensing convulsively.

He sounded afraid.

What was there for him to fear, when he was the one who wasn’t tied up, who wasn’t being beaten?

Austin gritted his teeth and prepared for the next strike, but before the punch landed, he heard footsteps approaching from the direction of the swamp. Mud and water sloshed. Branches snapped, the sound waterlogged and dull, rather than sharp.

“What’s going on here?”

Austin screwed his eyes shut. No. Goddammit. Just when I thought this couldn’t get worse.

The voice belonged to none other than George Glenn. The words were mild-mannered enough, with a distinctive southern accent. However, Austin detected a threat hidden underneath them.

“Gentlemen, this is our guest,” Glenn said. He approached all the while. Austin kept his eyes shut, not knowing what else to do. “We do kind things for our guests because we are a hospitable people. We don’t, say, stalk them. Or beat them. Or arrest them. We give them a sheltered place to sleep, and hearty food.”

There was an awkward pause. No one wanted to speak first.

Glenn was standing right over Austin now. He could smell the criminal, the odor of mud and rotting greenery, perfumed with cigar smoke. He could also smell fading remnants of some city or other, in the form of metal and car exhaust, two things found nowhere in the swamp.

Glenn was the one who brought the bread, then. A treat for his hard workers.

Finally, Scrawny spoke up. “We haven’t…been feeding him.”

“Oh, dear,” Glenn said. “We’ll have to fix that, now won’t we? Open your eyes, little cop. You might get a nice surprise.”

Knowing he had no choice but to do as the man said, Austin opened his eyes. He found himself staring upside down into the craggly, wrinkled face that was and was not Glenn. He looked as he had in his mugshot photo, but that had been years ago and he was old even then. He was older now, and the years hadn’t been kind to him. All the little details Austin hadn’t been able to see before were on display, making him wonder if, had he been able to see all this, he would have recognized the man that day at the restaurant.

Glenn was missing many teeth now. His eyes were sunken deep into his skull. His hair was a mixture of gray and a yellow-white, like bleached wheat. His beard had mud and twigs in it. His slouch was more pronounced than ever, and his skin had an unhealthy, bluish cast to it. The wrinkles were not limited just to his face, but stretched tributaries over his arms. He had liver spots, splotched over his skin like scales.

Scales.

Something about that word in particular seemed right. Austin couldn’t put his finger on it.

Lastly, he looked into Glenn’s eyes and froze.

If a wolf was primal, then whatever Glenn was, was prehistoric. His pupils were mad slits set deep in marbled yellow-green orbs.

This man was a shifter. He was no animal that Austin had experience with, however. The scent of mud and rotting things no longer seemed like just the stench Glenn had gathered by being in the swamp. It was part of him, the odor of his species.

“It took you long enough to realize, didn’t it?” Glenn said. He turned his head abruptly and broke into a harsh, whooping cough. His shoulders quaked. His chest heaved, and his knees nearly buckled from the force his own body was exerting upon him. He seemed like just an old man, feeling the effects of cigar smoking as it all finally caught up to him.

When Glenn lowered his fist from his mouth, Austin saw blood on his fingers. Then, the criminal wiped his mouth with a stained handkerchief and there was no more sign of the crimson liquid.

I’d bet anything he has lung cancer.

“Now, then,” Glenn rasped. “Let’s see about getting you some food, and then we’ll see if you decide to be more cooperative. Stand him up.”

Knowing better than to help himself by now, Austin waited until he was yanked to his feet by Fat Fuck.

Glenn had gone over to the campfire and was busying himself with some task or other. Without turning his head, he said, “Take him over by his quarters. Don’t put him in just yet.”

Austin let himself be led over to the edge of the pit where he was being kept. It occurred to him that, if he got through this, he might have flashbacks whenever he encountered mud. He should probably move somewhere without a lot of rain.

He smiled wry, then quickly rearranged his features as Glenn came toward him with a slice of bread in one hand.

If it had been ordinary white sandwich bread, it would have been nothing to be excited about. However, this was from a beautiful loaf of French bread, purchased from a bakery either today or yesterday. The slice was thick and he could see the airy holes created by yeast. His mouth abruptly watered, which was odd because he hadn’t known that he had any water left in him.

Glenn tossed the slice of bread into the pit, down in the mud. Austin heard it land, and then realized that was the sound of his own control breaking.

Red fury burst up inside him, hotter and brighter than anything he had ever known. Not even the sun blazed like this.

Crying out, Austin threw his body at George Glenn. He didn’t know what he was going to do. His arms were tied. He couldn’t shift, or the rearrangement of his own body would dislocate something—or worse, break a bone. That left him with his mouth, his weight, and his legs to work with.

If he had to bite out Glenn’s throat, he would.

He never made contact with George Glenn. The criminal shifted rapidly, his face pushing outward in a long, massive green maw filled with jagged teeth. An unholy hissing rumble exploded through the air, and the maw snapped shut inches from Austin’s stomach as he flinched away. He stumbled, mud sliding under his feet.

Glen dropped to the ground a split second later, in full crocodile form. His tail was still unfurling out behind him, adding an impossible amount of length to his massive, burly body. Austin had only a moment to study him, to notice the weathered spikes, deep cracks in the leathery scales. Then, Glenn whipped around to the side, lunging faster than even Austin’s eye could follow. The crocodile’s tail came forward, slashed into Austin’s legs, and sent him falling back into the pit.

For a moment, nothing.

Then, Austin slammed on his back in the mud. All the breath was forced from his lungs in a single exhalation. He rolled over on his side, groaning.

The hissing thrum faded away and Glenn spoke calmly, as if nothing had happened. “You’ll regret that. Here.”

Something thudded down in the mud at Austin’s side, splashing him with water. He couldn’t turn to see what it was. Not yet.

“Enjoy your meal. And heed my warning. Your treatment thus far has been rather lax. We will find out what you know. You will beg us for death when we’re done with you.”

Then, Glenn walked away. The tent was zipped up, and Austin was back in the darkness.

He waited, trying to catch his breath. It was a long, slow process, especially when his body already had little to work with. Having his hands still tied behind his back didn’t help, either.

Eventually, he sat up.

Thank god I’m in shape, or I wouldn’t have been able to do that without my hands.

Austin slid back against the slick wall and then rested, because even that was enough to tire him out at this point.

His eyes adjusted, and he was able to make out the slice of bread, sitting on top of the water. And the other thing that had been tossed down was a frying pan. The pan had somehow landed the right way up, containing a single slice of bacon and a whole lot of grease.

These people meant to degrade him. He was worth as little to them as the animals whose homes they were destroying.

But, now he knew something that he hadn’t known before. He was privy to a secret.

George Glenn was a shifter—a very, very old one, older than he had any right to be. That must have been how he was able to just disappear for a time, by hiding in the swamps in his crocodile body. He was more of a monster than anyone could have guessed, especially since he was willingly harming the environment where his animal counterpart lived.

Austin couldn’t imagine doing something like this to a place where wolves lived. Or any other animal, for that matter. It was wrong to take something that didn’t belong to him.

He sighed, lowered his chin to rest against his chest. Wasn’t it equally as wrong to miss out on taking what was his, then? He had fucked up everything with Lucas. Maybe if he got out of this, he could put everything right again.

If he got out of this at all, that was.

I can’t do that just by sitting here. I’m a wolf. We are strong, intelligent. There has to be some way.

Opening his eyes again, Austin focused once more on the slice of bread. He grimaced, but he knew what he had to do. If he wanted to have any strength at all when his opportunity to escape came, he was going to need to degrade himself a little. He had to accept every scrap they threw at him.

Austin slid away from the wall, scooting over to the floating slice of bread. He tried to disturb the water as little as possible, hoping he wouldn’t make a wave that submerged his snack.

Leaning over, he grabbed at the bread with his mouth and bit through it. It was like bobbing for a soft, sludgy apple at the world’s worst children’s party. He tasted mud and the vile water that made him vomit.

He also tasted bread, and it was like heaven. Food of the gods. Starchy, filled with nourishing carbs and whatever the hell gluten was.

By focusing only on the bread taste, he discovered that the earthiness of the mud fell aside. He’d dropped his food in the dirt, no big deal. No point in wasting it.

From there, he turned to the frying pan. He wondered if Glenn realized how many calories there were in that grease. It might not give him straight energy—in fact, it was more likely to make him want a nap—but it would give his body way more to work with than a single slice of bread.

Little by little, he would do what he could, gathering all the small things until the moment when he could make them something big: his great escape.