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I might be a complete emotional wreck, but if I was going to break, I wanted it to be here, with this man, because I had the sneaking suspicion that he was the only one who would be able to help me put myself back together again at the end of it.
17
We had literallyone fucking day left to stop the Culhua from murdering another canid shifter, and I had heard shit-all from Raj and his team since we’d called them to BTV almost two weeks ago. To say that I was irritated at Raj was to put it extremely mildly.
I was fucking pissed.
The bastard wasn’t taking any of my calls. It wasn’t like he was ignoring me completely—I’d been leaving increasingly bitchy voicemails, and then I’d get a text back telling me he was busy or had no update or something equally frustrating. I usually texted him back to push for more, but Raj just kept saying the same thing.
I can’t, Hart. OrThat’s need to know. OrIt’s classified. Some variation on the exact same fucking theme.
I’d called him again this morning.
Nothing.
I hadn’t been very nice in my voicemail. I didn’t feel bad about it in the least.
Since then, I’d worked myself into what my mother had always called aright snitabout getting blown off by Raj. And, sure, I understood that Ward and I weren’t federal agents, and I wasn’t even a cop anymore, but we’d fucking found his dead bodies and called in the case, so I was really fucking bitter about the fact that Raj wasn’t even talking to me about it.
And neither was Kurtz, although the horned asshole at least answered his phone and had been apologetic about the fact that he wasn’t allowed to talk to me.
“What happened?” I asked him. “The last fucking time I saw you, we were touring your basement full of shells and bones, and then—nothing. A big fat fucking zero.”
“I’m sorry, Hart, really. But you got need-to-knowed.”
“And I need to fucking know,” I snapped.
“Sorry, man.”
I hadn’t been able to get anything out of him, and spent the ensuing hour pacing my office, trying to come up with some way around the Great Blue Wall and the sticks-up-their-asses feds whom I usually actually liked.
I get it. I really do. There’s protocol and rules and people who have the power of hiring and firing over your ass who make it clear that you’re not supposed to talk to the nosy elf. But I definitely preferred Ward’s version of ghosting me—the kind that included actual ghosts, even if one of them was a handsy Victorian lady—to Raj’s.
But that wasn’t helping me to do my self-imposed job, which was figuring out exactly what else Bazan had squirreled away in his office besides a merger that involved a mayoral candidate and a businessman named David Garcia. I’d looked up both Vidal’s company, Deepwater Quarry, and Hephaestus Metal and Ore, the other company Bazan had identified in the merger, which was owned by this Garcia guy.
We knew it existed, but we didn’t know the details. Or why it was that the Ordo wanted access to that merger.
Hell, maybe they didn’t. Bazan thought that was important, but maybe that was just his theory. We didn’t know what else was in the dead dickhead’s files.
I really fucking wanted to know. Because I would have bet a million bucks that there was some other shit in there that would make this goddamn case make some fucking sense. Something to tie in Whitehead, maybe.
We knew Whitehead had a link to the Ordo, so we didn’t exactlyhaveto connect him to Bazan, but I really wanted a nice goddamn bow for once.
Just once.
And I had no fucking idea how to get it.
I kept pacing, at least until I walked into what felt like an invisible refrigerator—cold, damp air that made the hairs on my arms stand on end.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Sylvia!”
I stepped back out of the cold spot. Sure, it could have been Archie, technically, but Archie was usually polite enoughnotto put himself where I would walk into him. Sylvia thought it was funny—that way she got to touch me without it being her fault.
She was laughing when she materialized.
Ward had set up some sort ofthing, which I completely didn’t understand, that could enable her to take physical form whenever the fuck she wanted. At least for a while.
What it didn’t allow her to do—at least not without Ward—was talk. Which meant that she would sometimes pop into my office from fucking nowhere so that she could play irritating, semi-flirtatious charades with me.
