Page 2 of The Turning of the Tables

Most people are intimidated by my size—six-three and a good 210-odd pounds. I’m in decent shape, I guess. I walk—a lot—and do body weight exercises, but I’m no gym rat. And I like good food, so I’m not what you might call ‘cut,’ even if I do have enough muscle that I don’t normally have a problem throwing around heavy objects. Like dead bodies or the medium-in-a-wheelchair, Ward Campion, who shows up to work our crime scenes sometimes. Not that he usually needs my help, since he’s also usually accompanied by his six-seven orc husband, who makes me feel small.

Elliot did not appear in the least bothered by my size. Of course,hisbest friend is a six-four extremely mouthy elf, so I guessed he didn’t intimidate easily.

His face wasn’t exactly what I’d call handsome, but it was definitely striking, the kind of face you keep looking at because you can’t figure out why you can’t look away. The earrings that I’d seen glint in the heinous airport lighting were silver hoops with a single pinkish bead in the center. Not baby pink, but mottled, with bits of black and off-white.Elliot also had a lot of muscle under that long-sleeved dark grey t-shirt and jeans, but the used kind, not the sculpted kind that a lot of guys got at the gym that was mostly for show. I didn’t mind a show, but I wasn’t usually into the personality that usually comes along with it.

Not that I was in the market. I’d just gotten myself out of a four-year relationship that I’d thought was going to be The One, now and forever, and whichhehad decided was totally worth blowing—literally, and I wasn’t the recipient of that blow job. That had been someotherblond guy, that one skinny and wearing sequins and a schoolgirl skirt, which is a look I can’t really pull off. I’d been lucky—or unlucky—enough to witness said blowing when I’d gone to the bathroom at the club where we were holding his birthday party.

Hehad a good birthday. At least I assume so. I wasn’t there when he got home and I hadn’t seen him since.

I left him a note telling him I hoped he had a good life, packed up my shit—I hadn’t had a lot, since the apartment and most of the stuff in it had been Devin’s—and called Noah to come get me.

I’d been living with him since, but Noah’s my twin, so he kind of has to put up with me when I have horrible, life-altering crises. Just like I’ve been there for him when the crises go in the other direction.

It had been two months since that night, and I was still living with Noah because I was too lazy to bother finding a new place to live, and Noah likes the fact that I can cook. I’m no gourmet or anything, but I like cooking, and my food is always edible and usually tasty, even if it isn’t going to win me any cooking shows.

All of which was completely irrelevant to the fact that I wasnotgoing to even think about getting involved with Hart’s childhood best friend who lived half a country awayand was only in Richmond to assemble and hand-carve a table that was going to have some sort of magical sigil on the top of it. That’s what Hart told me when he’d begged me—between creative invectives—to pick up Elliot Crane.

“Your first time in Richmond?” I asked Elliot.

He nodded.

“It’s a nice city,” I told him, opening the back of the Cruiser. “You can put your bag back here if you want,” I offered.

“Thanks.” He half-tossed the backpack in, but kept the case with him.

“Your carving tools?”

Another nod.

“I guess they must be pretty delicate.”

Nod.

Okay. Not much for conversation. That was fine. He seemed tired, not stand-offish, which made sense, since it was almost eleven at night. Besides, I wasn’t interested.

“We’re going to the Marriott on Broad, yeah?” I asked him.

“Yes.” He pulled up something on his phone. “3800 block.”

I nodded. I knew it wasn’t far from Hart’s apartment, but only because Hart had said so when he pulled the keys off his keyring late this morning. I wasn’t totally clear on why Elliot needed keys to an apartment he wasn’t staying in, but I hadn’t had time to ask, and I was being herded away from the crime scene at the time because the Feds were taking over.

It had been a long day that had started when Dan Maza had woken me up at five a.m. to call me to a murder scene that turned out to be Senator Simon Adams’s wife, and shit hadn’t really improved from there.

The scene was messy, the murder ugly, and we’d been halfway through processing when Clarabel Quincy—my usual partner in helping to solve crime—had found a purse in one of the hotel dresser drawers with Yvonne Gates-Adams’s driver’s license. We were pretty sure the photo was our victim, which should tell you just how gnarly the crime had been.

There was also, of course, the unspoken question—by us lowly CSI techs, anyway—of what the hell the senator’s wife was doing in a hotel room when she lived in the city.

But you didn’t speculate on scene.

We left that to the cops, although Maza had shut it down every time he heard it spoken out loud. Once we’d IDed her, he’d called Hart, and Hart and Rajesh Parikh had shown up with the proverbial cavalry. Because Yvonne Gates-Adams had been a lynx shifter—a piece of information that had also been in the wallet in the form of a Virginia Registered Shifter ID.

The Shifter Identification Registry was a fun new piece of legislation that had been pushed through at the bitter end of last year, required to go into effect with the start of January of this year, and had put Noah—my twin—through hell because he’d had to get an RSID in like two weeks. Him and like every other shifter living in the state of Virginia, which meant that the government offices had been overwhelmed for the first two weeks of the year with shifters desperately trying to follow a law meant to essentially screw them over.

Thanks, Governor Littleford. And the Magic Free Movement. And all the assholes who supported them. I might be fully human, but I had friends and family who weren’t, and they deserved the same rights I had. As far as I could tell, the SID Registry was one step closer to creepy state-sanctioned authoritarian oppression of Arcanids. They hadn’t required IDs for the other Nids—but you can tell a vampire, ghoul, orc, faun, or elf on sight. Arc-humans and shifters you wouldn’t know just by looking at them. They hadn’t managed to push through the Arc-human Registry. Barely.

I guess the fact that Arc-humans were still geneticallyhumangave them an advantage. Seeing ghosts or developing psychic powers wasn’t quite as scary as being able to shift into a massive predatory mammal of some variety—based on your ethnic group’s geographical origins. Some people had gotten quite the family history surprise when they’d shifted into a lion or a coyote or a sunbear. Or, I suppose, a plain old European wolf, depending on who you thought your ancestors had been.

But thanks to bigotry-turned-legislation, now every shifter in the state had to carry an ID with their shifter type—other Arcanids only escaped having to do the same thing because you could tell what they were by looking at them. Nobody was going to mistake an orc for anything but an orc. The part of the bill that had failed—thank God—was the part that had also wanted to register every Arc-human. But I guess there were enough of those in the State Assembly that they’d at least killed that. For now.