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“Something under his skin that’s dosing him. Some diabetics use similar devices.”
“Like an insulin pump?”
“Exactly.”
“I haven’t seen anything like that.”
“This would be under his skin, in theory, anyway. You wouldn’t see a device—but you might find a lump under his skin if you check.”
Taavi lifted his head off my lap, then stood up, presumably so I could do just that.
“Um. Hang on.”
I set the phone on the couch cushion—still on speaker—and started looking. Well,touching. And that was fucking weird. Because on the one hand, yeah, sure, I’d been touching Taavi a lot—on the head. On the back. Around his belly to pick him up. Ihadn’tdone a full-body-touch-everywhere examination.
And my brain just kept screaming at me that he wasn’t a dog.
I was basically doing a full-body search of another person. A person with a tail and four feet.
A person whose ID photo I’d seen, which meant that I was having a very hard timenotthinking about what it would be like if I had been doing this search with Taavi in human form.
God, this was fucking awkward.
Taavi didn’t seem in the least bothered by it, standing calmly as I ran my hands over every last inch of him. Well. Almost every last inch. I wasnotabout to check that to see if someone had put a drug-dispensing devicethere. Because I was pretty sure that would have caused some plumbing issues that Taavi pretty obviously didn’t have.
“Nothing,” I reported back to Dr. Keller. Taavi flopped back down, putting his head back on my leg.
“Damn,” was her response. “I really thought that was it.”
“Any other way they could be doing this?”
More teeth-sucking. “Honestly? I have no idea. My next plan is to try to come up with something that can counteract the effects—but that could take weeks. But I’m not giving up on you and Taavi, detective. And keep an eye on him—any change in symptoms, any possible way he might be getting this stuff in his system.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, a little disheartened. “Will do.”
That night, I fell asleep on the couch with Taavi curled up against my stomach.
12
Taavi whined at me,loudly, for what was probably the tenth time that morning.
“No, you can’t come with me,” I told him, also for the tenth time. “I’m dropping you off with Doc and Ward.”
He barked at me, and I stopped loading our breakfast dishes in the dishwasher to glare at him.
“No, Taavi.”
This time, he growled.
“Look, bud, I appreciate… No, you know what? I don’t appreciate. Iunderstandthat you’re stressed out or worried or whatever the fuck you are, but it doesn’t matter. You aren’t coming with me.”
I hadn’t yet strapped on the Kevlar vest that I’d explicitly been told to wear today when Captain Villanova called this morning. There was a pro-Arcanid rights demonstration scheduled at Monroe Park, and everybody, me included, was expecting disaster because the assholes from the Magic-Free Movement hadn’t exactly gone anywhere.
Sure, the major demonstration from a week and a half ago had included quite a few non-locals, but that didn’t mean there weren’t still a good several dozen outside the State House daily, still carrying their stupid “Good-Nid-Dead-Nid” and “Magic is a Fluke” signs. Arrests for assault and disturbing the peace were an almost daily occurrence, with a few belonging to each so-called side of the debate. And on top of that, there had been at least two dozen separate vandalism incidents, three break-ins at Arc- or Nid-owned businesses, and one broken window of a shop owned by a baker with an MFM sign in the window.
Everybody knew damn well that the MFM was going to show up to this Pro-Arcanid rally, probably in force, and we were all expecting it to get real ugly, real fast.
Hence the Kevlar.
