“Jesse, please. This isn’t healthy.”
“What’s not healthy is seeing that fucking death place and imagining tentacles when I close my eyes. And not sexy tentacles. Not into that. Though I would gladly swap sex tentacles for the nasty things I do see,” Jesse replied.
“Stimulants won’t help.” Bryce held his hand out again for the mug.
Jesse put both his hands around the coffee.
Bryce sighed heavily. “Alex is doped up on enough tranquilizers to stop the Kentucky Derby. Stimulants can increase visions, not lessen them. So. Give me the damn coffee.”
“That would explain why everyone thought my uncle was an alcoholic. He must have been self-medicating.” Jesse slowly handed over the coffee.
Bryce took it and dumped it in the sink, abandoning the mug there. He flipped the switch on the coffee maker, turning it off. “Who’s this uncle you mentioned?”
“Great-uncle, technically. Ephraim Dawes. He was an FBI agent who worked with the DWO. Kept a bunch of journals.” Jesse motioned at the journals scattered across the apartment. “He lived here in St. Louis.”
The name sounded vaguely familiar. Bryce wandered over to a stack of boxes where one of the journals rested. The page was describing an encounter with a psychic. An empath from the sounds of it, and she picked up on the fact that Ephraim and the man he was with were a couple.
“Oliver,” Bryce said. He’d seen that name signed and mentioned across countless archive files. “Is he talking about Oliver Uttley?”
“Yeah. They were a couple for about forty years. Until Oliver passed away.”
“Oliver Uttley, first director of the St. Louis branch of the DWO, wasgay?” Bryce said.
“Is that somehow not common knowledge?” Jesse replied. “The way Uncle Ephraim talks about the department, I’m not sure any of them were straight. At least, not in the fifties.”
“You’re shitting me,” Bryce said. He flipped through a few more pages of the journal. Oh, that was definitely an intimate moment captured in ink on paper. Bryce felt like he was peeping through a window in time to the wrong moment. He closed the journal.
And then he realized why Jesse had looked familiar on their first meeting. Digitizing archives took time, and the department was still digging through the decades of material left behind. Bryce’s team had completed an assignment cataloguing and scanning the year 1950. Jesse looked a lot like his great-uncle, whose face had appeared here and there in the DWO’s records.
Fucking hell. There had never been a possibility that Bryce could talk Jesse out of believing in the DWO’s existence.
“So, you’re not denying the truth anymore?” Jesse asked, far too cheerful, considering it was one in the morning.
Bryce waved a hand at the apartment. “You let me in to see this on purpose. You obviously have mounds of evidence.”
“Not all of this is about the DWO. In fact, most of it’s about Crowley Construction. Have you heard of them?”
“Yeah, but I don’t see what they have to do with anything.”
Jesse picked up a piece of paper and held it out toward him. It was an article about a local murder. “That’s Stan Lawson’s building. It’s across the street from Crowley’s latest project.”
“How do you know where—never mind. Jesse, none of this is important right now.” Bryce set aside the article. “You need sleep.”
“What I need is to get put back on my case,” Jesse replied.
If Bryce followed protocol, Jesse would go into the St. Louis field office in the morning and discover he’d been transferred back to Manhattan or promoted to a position in Washington, D.C. But his instincts—and his heart—wanted to keep Jesse around.
What his heart wanted shouldn’t factor into his decisions. He knew it, but when he turned back toward Jesse, he was swept away in the urge to take care of him.
“You’re not going to stop, are you?” Bryce asked.
“I can’t. There is something going on here, and I have to do something about it.”
“You don’t.”
“I do.” Jesse stood up. “I’m healthy, capable, intelligent. And I’m not afraid.”
“Except to go to sleep,” Bryce said.
