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He hung up.
I stared at the ceiling and stroked Pet’s fur, trying to convince myself that he didn’t really mean it. Which he totally did. And then I tried to think of something that Elliot would actually think was me taking my head out of my ass.
I fell asleep before I figured it out.
6
Monday mornings do not get betterwhen you’ve spent the weekend wallowing in self-loathing and recrimination. To make things even better, every suggestion I’d sent to Elliot had been met with dismissal, derision, or, once, the questionAre you even trying?
I’d started with some pretty conventional self-help tactics, like journalling, baking, going for a run, and playing with Pet.
Elliot had told me those were weak attempts at distracting myself, at best.
I was trying to think of something over my second cup of coffee, sitting at my desk at Beyond the Veil, when Ward rolled into the doorway of my office. I raised an eyebrow.
“Museum called,” he said, and he sounded apprehensive.
“Uh oh.”
“More bones. Animal, they think.”
“Were there more seashells?” I asked him.
Ward gave me the same look I imagined I must have made at Taavi when he’d pronounced the shell a whelk.
“So, um. Apparently whelk shells are symbolic of the afterlife and the cycle of life, death, and rebirth,” I told him, getting up and grabbing my completely unnecessary suit jacket that held my keys and covered my shoulder holster.
“You researched shells?” Ward asked, sounding surprised.
“I mentioned the shell and how I thought it was weird, and Taavi told me that,” I answered, dreading the inevitable follow-up question about my date disaster.
Except Ward must have heard something I thought I’d managed to keep out of my voice, because he didn’t ask about my date.
Instead, he asked, “Did he mention anything else useful?”
“He thinks the knife is fake-Aztec.”
Ward nodded. “Mason said the same thing.”
“I haven’t heard back from Mays on the bones, but if they’re dog bones, that would track with a pseudo-Aztec ritual,” I told him as we headed out the back to my car.
“Is killing dogs an Aztec thing?” Ward asked.
“Xolotl, the Aztec god of death, is dog-headed,” I replied. I was getting better at saying it, although I’m pretty sure Taavi and Doc would still have been scandalized by my pronunciation. “And they believed that Xolo dogs were spiritual guides to the afterlife.”
“So like Egyptians and cats,” Ward remarked.
“Maybe?” I didn’t know much about Egyptians and cats. They had a cat-headed god, but I was pretty sure I remembered hippo-headed gods and crocodile-headed gods, too, and I didn’t think the Egyptians thought those animals were guides to the afterlife. But what the fuck do I know?
We skipped the donuts this time, although we did stop and pick up lunch on the way. I also made a point of hitting up a grocery store for some snacks and a case of water, because if my gut feeling was anything to go by, I was going to end up stripped down and digging in the yard again.
At least this time I had a change of clothes in the trunk.
I was also wearing a t-shirt under my button-down, and I decided to throw decorum to the winds and just strip down as soon as Madeeha opened the door and I saw the chagrined expression on her face.
“Back to digging in the dirt, are we?” I asked, noting that there were tell-tale stains on her jeans.
“I just kept getting this creepy feeling,” she said apologetically as she led us through the house-turned-not-quite-museum. “And I couldn’t help myself.”
