They were a little early. A month or so old by now, since they were leaving their den, but that meant they'd been born in February. Early enough that Sam wanted to keep an eye on them, to make sure their mother had food and the cubs were growing strong and safe. He'd spent most of a lifetime doing that kind of thing, watching over cubs, whether human or fox, trying to make sure they'd be okay.
It wasn't a bad way to spend a life. And even at pushing-seventy-years of age, it still had the advantage that his parents, now long dead, had absolutelyhatedthe fact he'd chosen to do it.
A tap sounded on his office door, and Sam, chuckling at his own slightly petty soul, turned his office chair toward the door. "Yes?"
"Mr Todd." His adopted son, Chase, opened the door and poked his head in. He was one of the now-adult kids Sam had fostered, and was currently working as Sam's business secretary in order for Sam to maintain a polite legal fiction. Sam's parents had been petty people, angry that he hadn't fallen into line as the obedient son, and had devised a life-long financial reprimand in the form of refusing to sign over the family trust to him unless he had 'a constant companion.'
They'd meant for him to get married, obviously. It wasn't Sam's fault they hadn't phrased it in such exact language. So while there was regular house staff, their presence specifically didnotcount toward the legal obligations of the trust's requirements. Dependent children, however,didfulfill the legal obligations, and even if his marital plans hadn't gone the way Sam had hoped, he'd always wanted kids. Fostering had been a solution for multiple needs, and Chase, the oldest of his kids, had come back home after the last of the others had outgrown a need for Sam's help.
Of course, fostering kids had been evenless what his parents had meant than 'get married,' but as far as Sam was concerned, that was on them. They'd refused to embrace the fact that he'd found his fated mate decades earlier, when he and she were both just out of high school, and they'd reaped the consequences of their actions. There had never been anyone for Sam except Charlotte Nelson, and there never would be. It didn't matter that she'd left town after his own disappearance, and didn't matter that no one had been able to find her since. Sam had been lucky as hell to meet her, especially so young, and it wasn't fair to ask anybody else to live up to the memory of a lost dream.
"Mr Todd," Chase repeated patiently, in his very formal 'this is business-related so we're pretending you're not my dad' voice, "the investors are here."
"Oh, for God's sake. How many languages do they need to hear 'no' in?"
"Evidently all of them, sir."
Despite himself, Sam chuckled. "Then we're all out of luck, because I only know half a dozen, and that's if you count everyone who actually says 'no' as separate ones."
"Ei," Chase offered. "Óchi. Bù. Hayir. La. That's Finnish, Greek, Mandarin, Turkish and Arabic."
"Why on earth do you know how to say 'no' in Finnish?" Sam stood, smoothing his slacks and shirt front, then slipping his coat from the back of the chair onto his shoulders. "Or Turkish? Or any of those languages? I was a splendid benefactor but I don't remember having five different language tutors in."
"It was a college challenge." Chase grinned at him. Somewhere along the line the young man—not so young anymore, at nearly fifty, but Sam had a hard time remembering that—Chase had grown up into an organized businessman determined to see Sam's family investments grow, even though Sam himself couldn't care much less. "One of my friends learned how to say 'I love you' in sixty-four different languages," Chase went on, "and another one learned a phrase that could get him slapped in any country in the world. I went with 'no.' It seemed easier. Theywillhelp bring the railroad back into Virtue, Dad," he added more quietly. "I know the town is divided on the topic, but I also know you support it and there have to be reasons to bring it back."
"Virtue itself is reason enough." Sam believed that, but also wanted the railroad back for sentimental reasons. Foolish ones, honestly. The last time anybody had seen Charlotte, she'd been walking toward the old train station. He had a dream that bringing it back would bring her back, too. "There's a town meeting about it in a few weeks. If they decide against it, there'll have been no point in even talking to these people."
He sounded a bit like a grumpy old man just then, and knew it. So did Chase, who quirked an opinionated eyebrow about it, but didn't actually say anything. Sam still felt sheepish enough to say, "Well, all right. For a few minutes, then. But they're not going to get anywhere," he added stubbornly. "I'm not selling any of the river front."
They both glanced out his office's huge bay windows as he insisted. The river was actually on the other side of the house, but the compulsion was strong, and made them exchange a brief, rueful smile. Centuries earlier, Sam's family had settled four miles of river front. The only development that had been done in the area since was building their family home and, under Sam's own supervision, adding a cycling trail that ran through the woods along it. A number of old Virtue families had similar arrangements, and for most of Sam's life, increasingly pushy developers had been trying to buy it out from under them to turn the quiet town's outskirts into a tourism resort area.
"There's already a hotel in town and one outside of it," he added. "We don't need more people than that coming into Virtue."
Chase shook is head as they walked through the old echoing house. Sam missed having the younger foster kids there, but he was too old to keep up with them anymore, so the old Colonial home felt emptier with every passing year. At least Chase was a through-line from the early years of fostering, and for the moment,hisvoice filled the halls and fended off some of the loneliness. "Most places are eager for some kind of modern development, you know. Small towns have such a hard time holding on to their population, and jobs."
"Virtue isn't most small towns. You know that, Chase."
"I do. We all do." The one thing Sam's foster kids had in common was the secret they, and Virtue, held close: they were all shifters, and Virtue itself had been founded as a sanctuary for shifter families. The town had survived for centuries as just that, and Sam, knowing about shifters himself, had provided an extra layer of safety for shifter kids who ended up in the foster system. Most of them who had come to live with him for a while had families of their own to return to, but a handful werehiskids, and nothing anyone ever said could take that away from him, even as they grew up and moved on to their own lives.
And as they'd done that, from the safety of his own big-house sanctuary, Sam had watched Virtue move on, too, until it seemed like it had nearly faded away. He'd been afraid that it would lose its ability to provide shelter for shifters within his own lifetime, but something had changed recently, and it wasn't just that Chase had come home from working in the city to take over the Todd family estate finances.
Sam couldn'tentirelyplace the town's resurgence at the librarian's feet, but it was a close thing. Sarah Ekstrom had grown up in Virtue, not a shifter, just a girl who loved the town. She'd gone away to college, and for most kids from small towns, that was it. But she'd come back, too, determined to bring life back to the little town, and over the past decade, Virtue had begun to bloom again. Sam knew—a sigh escaped him, though it was almost a laugh, too. He knew a lot, for a man who stayed tucked away on his own private property.
Hazel, the old Oneidan fox shifter who lived in the woods, told him some of it. So did Old Man Evans, a badger shifter who had been around as long as anyone could remember. They hadn't given him a lot of details, but he knew there'd been a passing of the baton lately. Sarah Ekstrom and her mate—a bear shifter from Argentina, Sam believed—had taken over protecting the town's charter. As far as Sam knew, it was the first time a true human had ever been part of that protection, and he thought itmeantsomething. He wasn't sure what, but it meantsomething.
There was more, too. Something else had changed in the town's…vibe. That was what the kids these days would call it, Sam thought. The librarian's efforts had injected pure love into the little town, but in recent months there had been a new energy around Virtue. Businesses were opening all over the place—small, locally-owned businesses with real customer bases—and there were more new shifters arriving in town than Sam could remember in his entire life. It was as if the town had been sleeping, slipping away, for generations, and suddenly it had remembered its purpose for existing. Suddenly it wanted to survive, and thrive.
Sam hadn't wanted to get out of the house and spend time in the town for literal decades. For the first time since he could remember, though, the idea brought him joy. He'd been taking walks recently. Mostly just to his property's edge, or along the cycle path to where the town started building up, but that was more than he'd done since he'd had foster kids to bring to school and attend performances for. Whatever was calling new shifters to Virtue was calling old ones like him back, too.
Maybe this afternoon he'd actually go into town. Get a cup of coffee—decaf, or his doctor would scold him—and people-watch for a little while. That actually sounded pleasant.
As soon as he got rid of these investors.
"This way, Mr Todd."
As if Sam didn't know the way to his own library, although in all honesty, he hadn't been in the room in such a long time that he wouldn't have been surprised if hedidn'tremember the way. Well, the house wasn'tthatbig. He said, "I know, Chase," a little acerbically, although Chase didn't look in the least apologetic as he pushed the library door open for him.
There were two men waiting for him: one was enormous, with long brown hair tied back in a very tidy ponytail, and the other, slender and no more than Sam's own height, which didn't make him short by anyone's standards. They both wore extremely expensive suits—Sam should know; he wore one himself—and both turned away from the river view with polite expressions that sharpened into intense interest in the same way Sam knew his own did.
