AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dan was nodding. “In the back.”
Ward pointed, and Dan nodded again.
“Yeah,” the medium confirmed. “There was a bear, I think, in the cage next to him that… I think she basically killed herself by throwing herself into the cage so that they couldn’t do the same thing to her.” I saw his eyes fill with tears. “She’s here, too. More coherent than some of the others. She says they injected them first, then did surgery. Some people didn’t survive the surgery or sickened within a few days. She wasn’t going to let them do that to her.”
This time, Dan ran both hands through his hair. “Fuck.”
I bumped his shoulder with mine. “That’s supposed to be my line, asshole.”
He looked up at me, and I took the brunt of one of those moments we try to hide from each other. “How the fuck do you take this shit?” he asked, softly.
I looked back, my lavender eyes to his brown. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Some days, I just don’t fucking know.”
24
Raj calledwhen he left Spotsylvania. They’d found some illegal weapons, some chemical components that matched the composition of the beta blocker, and not much else. They had employees who showed up on the not-MFM roster who were working for Cornerstone Virtues, but nothing that explicitly tied them to the abduction or murder of shifters or vampires. In other words, a lot of circumstantial and not a lot that would hold up in court.
I told Raj I was going to go home and get fucking wasted, and if he wanted to hear more, he’d better show up before I was too shitfaced to talk.
I asked Ward if they could keep Taavi overnight.
Because I couldn’t.
I just couldn’t fucking face him after having seen what was in that warehouse. I don’t know how the fuck Ward was going to do it, either, but I didn’t have the capacity left to worry about how Ward Campion slept at night.
Yes, I am fully aware of just how shitty a person this makes me.
Ward told me, point blank, that he wasn’t going to tell Taavi a fucking thing other than saying they found some dead shifters and that he could chew it out of me the next day. And then he told me that if I didn’t show up by ten am to pick Taavi up, he was going to have Doc break down my door and give Taavi back to me because this was my case and my—and I quote—“fucking responsibility, you beautiful coward.”
He wasn’t wrong. About any of it.
So I went home, opened up a bottle of Scotch, and was three shots in when Raj called me to let him in.
Raj slept on my couch.
I slept on Taavi’s air mattress on the floor.
I texted Ward at nine fifty-eight from the driver’s seat—still parked—to tell him I was on the way, and he told me that I’d better be or he’d send Sylvia to haunt me.
The look I got from Taavi when I walked into Doc and Ward’s living room was murderous, even though he was the middle of a furry sandwich between Doc’s white German shepherd, Alma, and Ward’s enormously fluffy cat, Peveril. Maybe being the hairless dog in the middle was part ofwhyhe was giving me a murderous look, but I kind of doubted it.
Also, I completely deserved it.
“Sorry, bud,” I told him as I loaded him into the car after Doc essentially force-fed me a breakfast I really didn’t want, but after which I felt much better, not that I was going to admit it. “Yesterday was just a really long fucking day, and I had to report in to Raj at the end of it.” All true, although there was no good reason Taavi couldn’t have been there.
I just hadn’t been able face him.
I still didn’t want to, but even I could only be a coward for so long.
His expression told me in no uncertain terms that I—not he—was in the proverbial dog house. Which was totally fair. Because whatever amount of disgust Taavi was directing at me was equal to or possibly even less than the amount I was directing at myself.
I’m not generally the kind of guy to get all caught up in his own head and become mired in deep self-loathing. Yeah, I’m an asshole, but I accept that. It’s a part of my personality, and I’m good with it, even if I occasionally regret the shit that comes out of my mouth. I don’t dislike that part of me.
But I was very much disliking the part of me that had hid from Taavi because I didn’t know how to deal with my own goddamn feelings of failure, inadequacy, and whatever the fuck I felt about the damn Xoloitzcuintli shifter that had been living with me for the better part of two months.
I’d spent most of the drive over to Doc and Ward’s house trying to figure out how to make the fact that I’d basically abandoned him up to Taavi. I still didn’t have any good ideas, even though he gave me the entire drive back to keep thinking about it, a churning pit of acid in the bottom of my stomach.
And then I had the drive to the federal building to think some more, because Raj called right as I pulled up to the curb in front of my apartment building and told me to get my ass in to his office.
