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And when you know they’re a person, you think about them and feel for them like a person.
I was just really fucking good at lying to myself about it.
At four a.m., I gave up on sleep and resigned myself to having to spend at least a good year or ten wrestling with the fact that I should have just kissed him back six months ago and said to hell with my weird, cowardly scruples.
God knows I’d wanted to.
So I got up and stood at the hotel-room desk and made terrible hotel-room coffee, trying not to think too hard about all the times I’d made coffee while Taavi sat on my floor, waiting for the coffee to brew, waiting for me to pour it in a bowl with two spoonfuls of sugar and set it on the floor for him.
Until the day I poured it in a mug.
I wanted to do that again. But I’d gone and stuck not only my foot, but probably also my whole ass in it.
The coffee maker finished gurgling, and I made myself a mug, dumping in both non-dairy creamer powder and sugar. I was tempted to make it the way Taavi liked it, but even in my sentimental sleepless stupor I realized that was pointless.
I went and sat back on the bed, then started flicking through the hotel’s odd collection of cable channels, sipping the hot cup of complete ass that passed for coffee. I put on the Food Network and tried to shut my goddamn brain off.
It didn’t work, because I just kept remembering sitting on the couch, Taavi in dog form curled up against the back of my thighs, his head resting on my hip as he watched whatever I’d put on with me.
But I’d gone and fucked that up about as royally as you could fuck up a relationship without actually ever managing to get into it in the first place.
The Food Network was showing a baking show, and I half focused on it while sipping my coffee. That also reminded me of Taavi.
Specifically, of that stuff he’d mentioned as his favorite dessert. Capi-something.
I grabbed my laptop from the side table and tried googling ‘Mexican dessert capi*’—it brought up several churro recipes, but alsocapriotada, which seemed like the right thing, since it looked like a spiced bread pudding with fruit and cheese.
I like cheese and fruit Danish as much as the next elf—or Wisconsinite—so it sounded good to me. I wondered if it would be weird or creepy if I showed up on his doorstep with a pan of it.
Once I’d figured out how to perfect it, anyway.
And once I’d found a recipe that was genuine and not some random white lady’s messed-up adaptation of it that included something weird like evaporated milk and pumpkin spice or some shit.
Don’t get me wrong, I like pumpkin spice. I’ll even buy a latte or ten every fall, although I drew the line at things that shouldn’t be sweet and cinnamony. Like kale chips or Spam, not that I could eat canned meat, anyway.
But if I was going to make an authentic baked good, it needed to beauthentic. If you want to just make pumpkin spice bread pudding, knock yourself out. I’m sure that shit is tasty. But don’t pretend it’s an authentic dish from somewhere that isn’t your local fucking Kroger to get some sort of diversity points. Just make your damn pumpkin spice bread pudding and be happy with it.
I sighed, watching someone laminate puff pastry while explaining how the cold butter between the dough layers was what gave puff pastry its distinctive flakiness. I make a damn good puff pastry. I don’t do it often, because that shit is finicky as all get-out, but I didn’t need a puff pastry tutorial.
I grabbed the remote and flicked through the channels, eventually finding some episodes of a cooking competition I hadn’t actually seen before. That at least kept my mind occupied on whatever bizarre theme cake they were making instead of thinking about whether or not I could win Taavi back with a baked dessert I didn’t know how to make.
Yet.
By the time my phone alarm went off, I was another cup of coffee in—having used up all the packets in the room—and had half-fallen asleep several times and had no idea who was winning on the damn show or what the fuck they’d made.
I tapped the sleep button on my phone to shut off the alarm, drained the last of my cup, then sighed and went to shower and get dressed. If Raj had been right yesterday, we’d get to wrap things up today and go the fuck home. I was looking forward to my bed and getting to pet my cat.
At the same time, though, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit excited to be able to investigate a homicide case again—the homicides we found at Beyond the Veil all had to be turned over to the appropriate police department, andtheydidn’t want me involved, both as a civilian and as a pointy-eared bastard who was likely to call them out on their procedural bullshit.
I was hoping Raj would be more willing to let me work this one.
An elf can hope.
9
They’d turned over a long,mostly empty room in the basement of the Federal Building to this case—row after row of card tables with bones laid out on them, a couple of techs working to reassemble the skeletons, listing any missing bones, cataloging injuries and distinctive features, looking for causes of death. It was a lot grimmer when you stood in an empty cement room, overhead fluorescents making stark shadows under each bone.
The bodies had been sorted by species—those Ward had identified as shifters on the right, the dogs of various breeds on the left. Laid out like this, it was about ten times as depressing as it had been with small piles of bones, each carefully bagged and labeled, spread across the yard of the museum in the early autumn sun.
