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“Sounds great,” is what I said out loud.
Itwasgreat. I had to exert willpower not to literally lick off my plate. Although I’m sure Taavi wouldn’t have minded, I had to maintain at least the fiction of having some dignity, if only for my own sense of self-worth.
I’d won the argument about doing dishes, so I was up to my elbows in dishwater because he didn’t have a dishwasher, and this was one of those foods that took like seven pans to make. Taavi dried while he asked me about work.
“So what was it you wanted me to see?” He sounded tentative, and I didn’t blame him. We’d asked him to look at a whole bunch of shit that had to do with dead dogs and dead shifters, and not onlywashe a dog shifter, but he’d also seen some seriously traumatizing shit last year… And I honestly didn’t know how much he’d dealt with it. I sure as shit hadn’t, and I wasn’t the one who’d been hunted and drugged and nearly eaten.
And then I felt like a terrible fucking boyfriend, because I hadn’t asked. Or maybe not asking was a good thing? Maybe asking him reminded him of all the horrors he’d gone through, and he’d rather I didn’t bring it up. And if that was the case, then I shouldn’t ask him even if I should ask him…
And then I realized he was staring at me expectantly. I hurriedly handed him a washed pot.
“Oh. A new client brought in a missing pendant. Well, a drawing of one that was probably stolen from her. It looks Aztec to me, and I wanted to know if you thought I was right.” For some reason, this made my ears flush.
“Do you think it’s connected to… everything else?”
I sighed, scrubbing out a pan. “I—there’s nothing that explicitly ties it to the Culhua, but…”
“But that’s too many Aztec things in the same place at the same time?”
I nodded. “And I don’t believe in coincidences. Especially not that big of coincidences”
Taavi put the pot away, then came back and took the pan from me. “I wouldn’t, either. It’s not like Aztec artifacts are common this far north.”
I didn’t really think of Virginia as ‘north,’ but if you’re from Yuma and talking about Central American culture, I guess it was. “You don’t have to get any more involved in this, Taavi, if you don’t want to,” I told him. Part of me wanted him to agree. To stay away from this and safe. But that wouldn’t be Taavi.
“I want to help, Val. Really.” His hand found the small of my back, warm and gentle.
I finished washing out the baking dish, and Taavi’s hand moved to take it from me, dexterously managing to use the towel with the fingers of the arm in the cast. I drained and rinsed out the sink, then folded the dishcloth over the faucet to dry. Taavi put away the dish, and I took the towel off his shoulder to hang on the oven door handle.
On the way back to the futon, I snagged my work bag, pulling out the folder Izar had given me. I passed the folder to Taavi as I settled down on the futon next to him, and he snuggled up against my hip, leaning into me. I let my arm go around him, pulling him even closer as he opened the folder.
He was close enough that I felt it when he sucked in a sharp breath.
“What is it?” I asked, suddenly even more worried.
“Val… This… is Xipe Totec.”
I went cold. “The guy that does the skinning?”
“The flayed god, yes.”
The email warning me about another killing—the one that was going to happen, in theory anyway, in a week—had come from someone using the name Xipe Totec. This was getting more and more coincidental by the second. And every second, I liked it even less.
“Shit,” is what I said out loud. Because it was all but impossible that Izar Pelayo wasn’t Xipe Totec. I followed up with a “Fuck” when I remembered that Izar had said the damn thing was capable of draining spirits and allowing the caster to use that power as their own.
“Doesn’t that mean that you now know who your informant is? Isn’t that good?” Taavi asked, following right along with me.
I grimaced. “It means myinformantnot only knows my email, but where, specifically, to find me. She knows what I look like. And she chose not to tell me she’s my fucking informant, which means that either she wants me to stay in the dark about it, or she’s too scared to admit that she’s my informant. And if we look on the slightly less shitty side and go with option B, that means the people she’s informing on are scary as fuck. Or both.” I sighed, running a hand over my hair and tugging on the end of my braid. “Honestly,” I admitted, “both seems pretty goddamn likely, especially with my fucking luck.”
“Oh.” Taavi sounded scared, and I could have kicked myself for unloading on him. He shouldn’t have to be scared, and it was now my fault that he was.
“Or it’s a test,” I continued, my mouth and my brain at complete odds with one another.Shut the fuck up, Val.
“What does that mean?” Taavi asked.
“That, uh, she wants to know if I’m smart enough to figure out that she’s my informant.”
“Why would she do that?”
