Damian hit print on the last of the reports for their latest ‘investigation’ and tiredly shoved his chair back from the desk so he could walk across the office to pick them up.

"Go home, Damian, you’ve been up forty-eight hours straight," one of the other officers told him.

"Heading there," he said shortly. "Just gotta sign this and drop it in the box." He did exactly that, shoving it into a brown manila envelope before he stuck the appropriate label on the front of it and put it in the box for internal mail. He could do it all in his sleep now and, honestly, he kind of felt like that was what he was doing today.

Quietly, he gathered his wallet and his car keys from his desk, locked everything that should be locked, then went to check out at dispatch.

“You okay?" His partner and team lead Oscar caught up to him just inside the building’s main door.

"Yeah. Why?"

Oscar shrugged. "You haven't been yourself lately. Quiet." He gave him a hard look. "Not going lunar on me, are you?"

Fuck me for teaching him some shifter phrases. "No, I'm not going lunar. Just tired." He threw a wry smile in the human's direction as a sop to the man's conscience and pushed the door open.

"Missing home?" Oscar asked suddenly.

Damian froze. "What do you mean?" he replied, careful of his tone.

Oscar came out the door and let it close behind them. "I'll walk you to your car," he said, subtle code for Let's have this talk somewhere no one can hear us.

Damian followed him, anxiety raising the hair of his ruff.

The grounds of the Federal Audits Agency—an entirely fake name for an entirely fake agency--were perfectly landscaped, if by landscaped you meant concrete barriers, cracked pavement, and faded paint surrounding a nondescript concrete building that could have belonged to any underfunded government agency. The parking lot was behind a tall wire mesh fence topped by cheap-looking razor wire, a few weedy flower tubs scattered here and there to relieve the starkness of it.

They stopped when they got to his car. Damian crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the hood. "What's the problem?"

Oscar copied him. "Just that you've been quiet, kind of tense lately. And I got thinking about it and figured you might be missing home a little. It's not easy, being a dead man. Worse when you're a shifter, given the way you guys pack together."

A subtle shift in Oscar’s scent signaled that there was more to his gentle interrogation than Oscar was letting on, probably something that Damian wouldn’t like, but still he had to concede the point. He wondered if they’d lost shifters before to that creeping need to be with pack—he definitely wasn’t the first or only shifter in the bunch.

Just the one that had been around the longest.

"Not much to be done about it. I made my deal, I'll stick to it." His family was doing well; he had another niece from this spring and the latest intel had suggested that his youngest brother might be getting mated soon. Yes, it was a steep price, but not too steep for what he'd been able to get in return.

"How long has it been since you took a vacation?" Oscar asked mildly.

"You know exactly how long it's been."

"Yeah, I do," Oscar agreed. "I was thinking," he continued in a too-casual tone. "It's been nearly a decade, no one's going to recognize you. Not meaning that you should be going home to Montana Border, but maybe a visit in one of the other packs."

"Are you out of your mind?"

Oscar shrugged. "Not like we can't do up paperwork for you. But no, I was thinking about something different." He looked Damian up and down. "Answer me honestly—how long has it been since you got laid?"

Lysoon, too long. "You're thinking of Nevada Ashes."

Oscar nodded.

Damian tipped his head back and stared up at the sky, deepening toward evening. Nevada Ashes, a pack notorious even among the other packs.

Once upon a time they’d been a pack called Rogue’s Hollow, somewhere in Ohio. Overcrowding had led to madness and the humans had gone in with guns blazing. The ones who’d survived had been loaded on freight cars and shipped out west in an eerie echo of the first Enclosure. They’d been dumped in the scorched desert like so much vermin, to live or die as well as they could.

And they’d lived.

But now they were Nevada Ashes, a name chosen in memory of the dead they’d burned, as had been the law since shifters had first been forced inside these walled enclaves. There, they'd taken advantage of human laws and built themselves a way to survive out there in the unforgiving desert.

He’d asked his father about the enclave once, when he’d been about sixteen and the hormones of a teen-aged alpha had been riding him hard. He knew, through the distorted lens of teen-aged gossip, that the entire front of the enclave was brothels. Which, to sixteen-year-olds still trying to negotiate the urge to mate and the needs of polite society seemed like a smorgasbord of possibilities. His father had quickly disabused him of that idea.

“They sell their very identity to tempt their customers,” his father had raged. “They have no pride, they bow and cater to the humans, and make themselves no better than dogs, owned and dependent on the hand that abuses them.” He’d gone silent a moment, then added in a soft voice that somehow seemed more angry than the shouting, “They are a disgrace to the name of shifters.”

Though Damian'd done exactly that in the army and he still didn’t quite understand where the line was drawn between the two. One young untrained shifter, in exchange for a roof and steady meals and some money to help keep his mother and his family in their home. And then sold himself again, when they’d come to offer him this deal with the devil that was slowly killing him.

But to smell a shifter, touch one… He was hit with a wave of homesickness like a knife in the gut, only worse, because he couldn't pull this knife out. Knew it wouldn't ever heal. How could it?

He was a ghost.

"I'll think about it," he said sharply and thrust himself away from the car. "See you tomorrow." He refused to look at his partner, just got into his car and drove out of there at a speed that would have gotten him in trouble if he'd worked anywhere else.

Luckily he didn't.