Chapter Twenty-nine
Patrick
For the first time in ages, Pat had to force himself out of the house the next morning. He’d woken up in a warm bed, wrapped around his mate, and so deeply sated down to his bones, in his soul, that his wolf could hardly contain its happiness. He’d desired nothing more than to stay where he was, and to keep Ethan there with him, naked and warm and loose-limbed, but it was a work day and after a little while the alarm on his phone had gone off, waking the mage from a sound sleep.
“No, fucking hell, just clean yourself,” Ethan had grumbled, shoving him out of bed with a swift kick and sleepy glare.
When Pat had come downstairs washed and dressed, he’d found Ethan in the kitchen with a sauce pan full of fluffy eggs sitting on the counter next to two plates, toast, jam and butter, coffee burbling as it finished its brew, and the man himself with his head in the refrigerator.
“Do we not own sour cream?” Ethan demanded.
“Why would we?”
“Because I need it for this.”
Pat sniffed the food and frowned. “For scrambled eggs?”
Ethan huffed and stood up holding a stick of butter and a carton of shredded Parmesan cheese. “Yes. It’s like the one thing I’m actually good at cooking and you don’t even have—”
“Should have asked for it if you planned on cooking then,” Pat said, grinning at him. He crowded the mage back against the counter, watching Ethan set everything down and open his arms for Pat to curl up inside. It was such a beautiful change from the way Ethan had cringed away from his touch all through December. Pat stared into his eyes, just to make sure he didn’t miss any uncomfortable reactions, but Ethan just smirked at him, his cast knocking awkwardly into Pat’s back even as he lifted his chin expectantly. Pat obliged, pressed their mouths together in a lingering kiss that he was loathe to break, but after a minute Ethan pulled away, pressing him back so he could finish attending to his breakfast spread. Pat poured the coffee and took his plate.
They ate at the counter, standing hip-to-hip, and Ethan wasn’t wrong—the eggs were the lightest, fluffiest texture Pat had ever tasted before and the coffee had been brewed strong and dark enough to chase the last threads of sleep from his head.
He smudged another bitter kiss against the mage’s hairline, grumbling his thanks, squeezed his hips, and then Pat really had to get going or he’d be late.
“What are you doing today?” he asked Ethan.
“I don’t know. Can’t unpack anything so I might swing by my place for a couple more boxes. Do we have to go anywhere tonight?”
Pat shook his head. “Not that I know of. I’ve got to see what happens with Roberts today. Might have Vector and Mallory over.”
“’Kay. If not…” Ethan shot him a quick look that involved enough lip biting to make Pat’s wolf sit up and take notice, but the time glared at him from the appliance clocks and he darted in for one last kiss before he headed out the door.
Mallory was waiting for him at the station by the time he got into work. She gave him a sharp double-take, sitting up a little straighter as he swung by their desks with two cups of coffee and the edges of a grin that Pat was starting to worry he might not be able to get rid of anytime soon.
“Well, well,” she said in a slow voice. “You’re in a mood.”
Pat handed over one of the cups and tried to rearrange his face into his work scowl, but it was a lost cause. “Had a good—uh.”
Mallory shook her head. “No details. Congratulations.”
Pat rolled his eyes. “Anything I need to know about?”
“Augustus is late, not sure if that should worry us or if she’s just decided to take the morning off. I thought we might try to talk to her about the Roberts situation when she gets in.”
“Sounds good.”
Pat went through his In-Tray and work email, deleting or responding to things as required. Across from him, Mallory sat at her computer with fingers flying over her keyboard as she typed out—
“I’m CC-ing you my updated report on the Linetti and Liu cases. I’m going to request copies of the reports on yesterday’s raid too.”
He groaned under his breath.
“Don’t worry, I already wrote yours,” she said.
“You didn’t need to do that,” he protested.
Mallory shot him a look and shook her head. “It’s a good thing you’ve got Ethan.”
He frowned, but Mallory stood up before he could reply. She crossed the bullpen to check the Captain’s office. They were the only detectives on the floor at the moment. Mallory came back over to their desks and sat with a pensive look on her face.
“You don’t think it’s strange?” she asked.
“The Captain practically lives here. Maybe she decided to take a day off.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
Mallory picked up her phone and Pat decided to do the polite thing and not listen in. He read through messages on his phone from Vector asking if anything new had happened, and replied with a brief rundown of the last twenty-four hours. By the time he’d painstakingly typed it all into messenger and was waiting for Vector’s response, Mallory had finished her call, that frown on her face growing deeper.
“The Captain’s scheduled to be in today. Dispatch said she hasn’t called out or been called away.”
Pat’s cell started vibrating in his hand: it was Vector.
“Hey, what’s up?” he asked.
A pause and then, “Wow, you sound…cheery.”
Pat growled under his breath, sure that the other wolf would be able to hear it.
“Right,” Vector cleared his throat, “so I just got a strange call from a—it sounds so mysterious if I call him a contact, but I asked my old Lieutenant to let me know if he heard anything floating around Vice about your vampire situation. And he just called to let me know that there’s a raid down on the warehouse district where they picked up your mage the other night.”
“Who?” Pat demanded, already on his feet. From the corner of his eye he saw Mallory start at his reaction and reach for her desk drawer, pulling out her badge and her gun without having to be told.
“Jesky said Roberts had ordered it. Technically Le Sang is located within the West Precincts’ jurisdiction but you’d think they’d—”
“He’s got to be trying to cut us out. Any word on when this is going down?”
“Sounded like it was rolling right now.”
“Shit,” Pat swore, grabbing his keys and motioning for Mallory to follow him out. “Thanks for the heads up.”
“Let me know what happens?”
“Yeah.” He ended the call and punched the button for the ground floor, filling Mallory in on the details, such as they were, while they descended in the empty elevator.
Pat slapped a light on the top of the Camero and they were gone, driving through Seattle’s mid-day traffic like a bat out of hell, with Mallory white knuckling the suicide bar. He parked at the back of a line of police cars lining a familiar stretch of abandoned industrial buildings. Adam had died around here, and so had Ethan—nearly. Pat’s guts felt like someone had tied them into knots.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Mallory said.
“Me too.”
Pat trained his ears for signs of the raid as the two of them made their way up the street to where a black Crown Vic marked the edge of the police line. A big armor-plated van had been parked in the street, taking up the northbound lane. He could heard radios clicking and booted feed bouncing off a staircase, but there was too much chatter for Pat to pick out individual threads of conversation. They came up short as the back door of the van ran up with a clang and then officers in riot gear began to pour out of a narrow alley between two buildings. A disheveled looking guy in his mid-fifties scowled at them from the back of the van. He wore a bulletproof vest over a crumpled, sweat-stained blue button down shirt, the tails crumpled and sticking out under the vest, and the butt of his sidearm sticking him in the ribs. His hair stood on end, curling and dampened as though he’d been running his hands through it. Flushed-face, he called them over with a frantic hand gesture.
“Hey, who the fuck are you?”
Pat and Mallory showed him their badges and the guy introduced himself as Captain Jesky. Mallory shook his sweating hand.
“Do you know a Special Agent Vector Clanahan?” she asked politely.
Jesky’s eyes widened. He shot a look over his shoulder and then hopped out of the van, bustling them around the side while officers started milling around.
“You got here quick,” he said, giving them a closer up-and-down. “Vector sent you?”
“He’s my cousin,” Pat said, distracted by a familiar voice raised above the chaos.
“He’s been working with us on a recent investigation,” Mallory interjected.
“Right, right, those girls drained by a vampire. Yeah, Vector mentioned that.”
“Roberts is here,” Pat said.
Jesky shot him a sharp, beady-eyed look and then caught himself. “Oh, you’re a werewolf. Right. Yeah, he’s—”
The back of the police van slammed shut making the captain jump. He took a step back and motioned them closer so he could pitch his voice low.
“Roberts showed up less than an hour ago to order my team out here. No explanation, no warrant, just said to jump and— I mean he’s the Assistant Chief for my division so we jump.”
“Did he tell you what he expected to find?” Pat growled.
Jesky shook his head. “Something about dispelling rumors. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, these brass guys love to order the rest of us around, but Vector mentioned Roberts specifically. And after everything that happened back with Graham—well, they were my best guys, and I’m still a little sore about how it all went down. You know?”
Mallory nodded in a conciliatory way.
Pat made an impatient noise, he could hear Roberts’ voice distorted over a walkie-talkie as he addressed his squad leader. The human was going to walk around the corner of the surveillance van and discover them at any moment and he needed Jesky to tell them something useful before that happened.
“This is a lot of manpower for just a rumor.”
Jesky gave him a shrug. “Well, I got the impression that that’s the point. For show. You get what I’m saying?”
He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to hold onto his temper. “Not at all.”
“Jesky! Where hell are you?” Assistant Chief Roberts rounded side of the armored van, just like Pat had seen coming, and froze, mouth pinched as he took in Pat and Mallory standing there. “And just what are you two doing here?”
Pat scowled and braced his hands on his belt, stepping forward into the other man’s space. “Someone forgot to let us know you were following up on our case until the last minute. Looks like we almost missed all the action.”
“Oh, no you didn’t almost miss it, it’s done. But that’s besides the point, it looks like you’ve been misinformed about your involvement here.”
“You mean you’re not following up Mallory’s report?” Pat asked pointedly.
Roberts barely gave Mallory a second glance. “I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to look over any reports from Detective Mallory, but I’ll be sure to check my Inbox when I get back to the station. Now, if you don’t mind, you’re out of your jurisdiction here and unnecessarily involving yourself in—”
Pat felt his temper bubble up a second before the growl rumbled out of his chest. He’d give Roberts credit, the man didn’t bat an eyelash at the sound of an audibly upset werewolf gearing up for some kind of damage.
“Cut the crap,” Pat snarled.
“You’re out of line, Detective Clanahan. I suggest you take a step back before you say anything that you might regret.”
Mallory grabbed his elbow, holding him back when he might have shoved the human back into a corner. She cleared her throat. “This is the same location Detective Ellison was attacked a week ago after following a lead connected to one our ongoing cases. You can see how we were interested in what you might find.”
Roberts’ walkie-talkie spit snow and he absently flicked it off without taking his eyes off Pat. “I do understand that Detective Clanahan has a personal interest in the matter, yes, but this is highly inappropriate. You’re going to have to vacate our cordon. Jesky, do something useful and clear the area.”
Jesky shot Pat nervous glance, but the guy had already gone on a limb to let them know about the raid in the first place, Pat wasn’t going to get him into deeper shit over it. He jerked his arm out of Mallory’s grip and the two detectives let the Captain lead them away from the fleet of patrol cars, back to the Camero. While they walked, Pat cast his hearing back towards Roberts, but he didn’t say anything incriminating or informative. Jesky on the other hand had his hand cupped over his ear bud, listening to someone on the other end. He motioned for them to wait once they’d reached the car.
He ripped the bud out of his ear and stuffed it into his suit pants with a quick look over his shoulder just to make sure no one was within eavesdropping distance. He was sweating, Pat realized, and he looked confused rather than fearful.
“Still no idea what that something was?”
Jesky shrugged. “I get the feeling this is what we were supposed to find. You said another officer was attacked here? Well, there’s no sign of that attack or whoever did it. Just a normal, every day abandoned warehouse. Get my meaning?” he waggled his eyebrows suggestively and gave them a stiff wave before retreating to the surveillance van.
“I’m a little concerned that this time I think I did get his meaning,” Mallory mused, squinting into the watery morning sunshine. A stiff breeze ruffled the dark baby hairs framing her temple, and she flicked the tail of her braided hair back over her shoulder. “You shouldn’t let Roberts push your buttons.”
“He’s trying to discredit us,” Pat grumbled.
His partner nodded. “Looks like that. First the anemic results yesterday at Le Sang, and now a totally empty warehouse here where Ethan encountered a vampire on the same block where Sloan was killed. Only now Roberts can say that he’s checked out both reports of vampire activity and found one loner who maybe likes to munch on the odd college girl at a club downtown and that’s it. Back to business as usual.”
“This is bullshit. We need to talk to Captain Augustus.”
“Agreed.”
Pat drove them back to the station, but they came up short when they found that the Captain still hadn’t reported in for duty. Pat tried calling her on her cell and then at her home but only caught answering machines. He asked her to call him back as soon as she received his message.
“How well do you know the Captain?” Mallory asked.
“She recruited me,” he said, hanging up his phone and thumbing through his messages, but there wasn’t anything new from Vector or Ethan. “Why?”
Mallory tipped her head and eyed Augustus’ dark office. “She’s been in charge of this division since before you were promoted out of patrol. And she’s been here through the whole business with Sloan. You have to have working cogs to keep a cover up secret.”
“You think she’s working for Roberts?”
“Working might be a strong word. I didn’t get the impression that they were chums when we spoke to him the other day. But I’ve thought she’s a smart woman, observant, good at her job. She’d have to—an indigenous woman in the police? She’d have to be exceptional.”
Pat braced himself on the edge of his desk; Mallory’s words made him uneasy.
“But if she is exceptional, then how does she miss something like this? Unless she knows about it. Unless she’s been told to keep her mouth shut, and so far she’s been going along with that.”
“Jordan Augustus wouldn’t be working with a vampire coven. She’s friends with my mother, for crying out loud.”
“And being friends with a werewolf precludes working—” Mallory shook her hand at him. “I didn’t say she worked for a coven. I just meant, what if she’s in on the—bloody hell—the conspiracy. That’s what we’re talking about; a multi-layer government conspiracy that supersedes at least several layers of the SPD, and presumably the newspaper as well.”
Pat dug his blunt human nails into the top of his desk with a frustrated noise. “This is insane.”
“No, it’s just the plot of a Scorsese film.” Mallory folded her hands and stared at him until Pat met her eye. “That is to say, is it impossible to imagine that she might be in the know?”
“We’re talking about colluding with vampires. Vampires who have killed innocent people for one thing, but police officers as well.”
“Don’t act like we’re not all expendable to someone else higher up,” Mallory said matter-of-factly.
That dread had dug into his guts. Pat didn’t like the nonchalant way she dismissed their own value as members of the SPD. It made him think of Adam’s cold case—the one that Augustus had ordered him to let go—or Lachlan Graham, whose assault while on the job had been shuffled away and lost in red tape until he gave up and retired.
Mallory wasn’t done yet. “But I mean, what happened with the Walker case?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s sealed, the same way Sloan’s was. And I’m expected to believe that it’s just another unfortunate young woman who—what? Died under mysterious circumstances. Circumstances, I might add, that warranted assigning the case not just to her token werewolf investigator, but prompted the Captain to pull the Precinct’s only mage from downstairs to work with you? Speaking as an outside observer, that screams theatrical to me.”
“The Walker case is closed.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “You know who killed her?”
He nodded, realizing too late that he’d said too much. They’d made a pact that day to hush up what had happened to Matilde Walker so that the Seattle wolf packs could deal with Aaron Maccabee on their own terms. But of course, that was precisely Mallory’s point. And Augustus had gone with it. Admittedly, the cover-up had been his own mother’s suggestion, but the Captain had hardly blinked at the suggestion. She’d had no trouble burying all of it but for Mallory’s damned persistence when it came to researching her new partner.
He could see from the careful look on her face, as she watched him mull all of this, that Mallory knew she’d struck a nerve.
“Clanahan,” she prompted.
“All right. You might not be wrong about that.”
“Which part?”
“That the Walker case and this one bear some similarities in how they were handled.”
Mallory blinked and sat back, her foot caught the edge of her desk making the whole piece of furniture scrape across the tiled floor with a bang! She looked nonplussed. “Oh, that’s—you know, I don’t usually expect all of my shots in the dark to land.”
Before he could figure out what to say to that, Pat’s desk phone started ringing. It was Dispatch; they had another call out.
As a detective in Major Crimes, Pat worked a variety of violent cases, not just homicide investigations. He assumed that Augustus usually pushed those his way because—well, to be honest, Pat wasn’t sure why. He went where he was directed, investigated anything that crossed his desk, tried to do right by the injured parties. Tried to dig up a little justice for the people who were hurt in the course of living their lives, because that was all that he could do. And if he spent most days up to his elbows in dead bodies and the people responsible, he tried not to let it get him down, tried to hold onto the feeling that came with presenting a family with closure.
Seattle was a big city though, and on any given day dozens of crimes were committed in the South Precinct alone, meaning that he didn’t always have the luxury to focus on one case to the exclusion of all others. With no word from Captain Augustus and as the only detectives at the station when the call came in, he and Mallory had gone out to the address relayed by Dispatch: a strip mall about a mile away from Boeing Field, where half the suites sat empty and construction on the back quadrant had been halted sometime in the last year in tandem with the construction crash. Specifically, a hole-in-the-wall dialysis clinic which had been broken into and robbed that morning.
An ambulance had already come and gone for the medical assistant found unconscious in the backroom, and they’d spent an hour canvassing the people at the clinic and neighboring businesses before they’d split up: Mallory headed to the hospital to see what she could get from the assistant while Pat stayed behind to see what his wolf nose could sniff out.
It didn’t take a genius to see that the back door had been forced open and based on the injuries done to the assistant, Pat suspected that she’d interrupted the thief in the act. There were burn marks on both the exterior door to the center as well as on the stock room, but they didn’t smell like ordinary fire, there was a rotten undertone, almost like spoiled eggs.
Magic.
Pat had been thwarted by a lack of security cameras posted anywhere nearby and when he met up with Mallory later that afternoon, all she could say was that the medical assistant was still in a coma.
“The hospital should call me as soon as she wakes up,” Mallory said, rubbing at her eyes. The black mascara from her eyelashes had started to flake and smudge along the tops of her cheeks, leaving her looking exhausted. They filed initial reports on the situation and checked in with Dispatch to make sure there weren’t any other calls on the docket that needed their attention. There wasn’t much else they could do until the CSI’s came back with their reports or the unconscious medical assistant decided to wake up and give them a statement. With no sign of Captain Augustus, Pat made the decision to call it a night for the both of them just after five.
“I was going to invite Vector over for dinner tomorrow night, to catch him up on what’s happened. He’s probably going to bring Graham. Are you and Grace are free?” he asked as they left the station, booted feet echoing in the dark and breath fogging in thick clouds around their bodies.
“You’re turning into quite the hostess,” Mallory mused.
Pat jumped when she reached over to give his shoulder a friendly slap.
“You should hear what Grace has to say about your newly discovered inner domestic goddess.”
“I’d rather not. And there’s nothing wrong with—”
“Wanting to host a weekly couples’ night with your friends?” Mallory finished for him. They’d reached their cars, but she turned and regarded him with a steady look. “No, there isn’t.”
And it was strange to realize that was what he’d been doing. Not just that he’d started “playing hostess” but that he had friends to do it for. It sounded pathetic describing it like that, even in the confines of his own thoughts, and maybe it didn’t count when two of the people on the invite list were related to him. Pat had spent his adult life up until that point as a bachelor, but it was more than that. He hadn’t had friends outside the pack except for Adam, hadn’t gone out with any other coworkers until he’d been promoted to Detective and suddenly his partner had been there inviting him out for a drink at the bar every week, and Pat had invited him around for pack dinner in return. After Adam’s death, he’d retreated into himself right up until Ethan broke down all of his walls—crashed and burned through them, annihilated every inhibition.
Now, without even doing it on purpose, he’d started to establish new traditions with the people around him.
Her hand still warm on his shoulder, Mallory gave him a little shake and said, “I do believe this is what growing up feels like.”
“I’m thirty,” he grumbled.
“Well, that’s all right. Grace says you’ve always been a late bloomer.”
He shook his head, trying to fix a scowl on his face. “I’m going to live to regret the two of you meeting.”
“No you won’t.” Mallory unlocked the door to her Jeep and climbed in. “I’ll have her text you about tomorrow night.” And then she was gone, taillights dipping before they merged with the evening traffic.
Pat drove home on autopilot, trying to figure out what their next step should be about the situation with AC Roberts, but he was no closer to an answer by the time he’d parked and unlocked the front door.
It was dark inside, the only light three small track lights left on in the kitchen. The blinds had been pushed aside and the back door was open an inch, leaking chilly air. Pat listened for Ethan’s heartbeat and followed it outside into the fenced off backyard. The mage hadn’t bothered to turn on the outdoor lighting but Pat could see Ethan well enough without it, seated in one of the grubby plastic picnic chairs someone had set up next to the barbecue. He had the hookah out on the table again and was smoking steadily, the scent of soft herbs and something sweetly floral thick in the back of Pat’s throat.
“It’s freezing out here,” he said, dropping into the chair next to Ethan’s.
The other man took a long drag off the pipe and held the smoke in his lungs without looking over or in any way acknowledging Pat’s presence. For a couple a beats, he felt that panicked hurt at being ignored again, his traitorous mind going immediately to thoughts of Ethan having spent the day deciding that he’d made a mistake the other night when he told Pat he didn’t want to leave him. What if he’d changed his mind already?
Pat’s wolf growled at him, irritable both from his day and now his worried thoughts. He wanted to believe what Ethan had said last night, he did, and he hated himself for doubting. It made him feel sick with guilt that despite what he’d said in return, he didn’t totally trust Ethan not to change his mind again.
“So, I got a call this afternoon,” Ethan said eventually, breaking the silence with a slow exhale into the air over their heads.
Pat sat up straight, shoving aside his fears to listen. There was a strange flatness to Ethan’s voice that made his wolf whine softly in the back of his head.
But instead of continuing, Ethan just sat there smoking his pipe for a couple of minutes until Pat thought he might have to claw the words from the man’s throat himself.
“Hecate, this is—” Ethan rubbed at his eyes and then Pat smelt the faintest whiff of salt. “You know those sessions I’ve been going to? With the station shrink.”
“Do they want you to keep going to them or something?” he asked, confused.
Ethan huffed and said, “I guess they weren’t actually therapy sessions. They were part of an evaluation to decide my mental fitness for continued employment with the SPD. Only, no one mentioned that part to me, they just called me up when were done to let me know that—that I wasn’t deemed fit.”
Pat frowned, trying to untangle what he meant. Unfit for what? For— “They fired you?”
“They didn’t phrase like that, but yeah.” Ethan’s mouth kept moving soundlessly until he brought the pipe back up to his lips and puffed a couple of times, the water in the belly of the hookah burbling softly in the quiet night. Ethan had wrapped himself up in a scarf and heavy wool coat—not one of Pat’s, this had to be something he’d retrieved from his own apartment—but he was starting to shiver, and Pat wondered how long he’d been out there smoking before he got home. His wolf sight couldn’t make out colors very well in the dark so it was impossible to tell just how red Ethan’s skin must be.
“Shit,”Ethan said, the word ringed in smoke. “I can’t actually believe they—”
“Who was it?” Pat demanded.
Ethan shrugged. “Someone from HR.”
Pat swore under his breath and then again, louder, kicking his chair back so he could stand up, hands braced on his belt while his mind churned in a useless circle of thoughts. “We’ll fight it,” he said, glancing over at Ethan.
His mate looked up at him with a little frown, fingers curled delicately around the pipe mouthpiece. A line deepened between his brows, and he didn’t say anything for long enough that Pat started to feel self-conscious standing there like that, just staring back, vibrating with the anger sifting through his body.
“What?” he demanded.
“Nothing. It’s just strange.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Not that,” Ethan said, setting down the hose and standing up to face Pat. He hesitated with his hands hanging between them before he reached out and grabbed Pat by his belt, forcing him to step into Ethan’s personal space. “We’ll fight this, eh?”
“That’s what I said.”
“That’s—don’t go picking any fights with someone just yet. But, uh, thanks?”
Pat rolled his eyes and slung an arm over Ethan’s shoulders, tugging him into the curve of his body. “I wasn’t going to go tear someone’s throat out. Unless Roberts is behind this, then all bets are off.”
Ethan’s shoulders jerked up and down and he tilted his head back to prop his chin awkwardly on Pat’s shoulder, breath warm against the side of his neck. Despite his anger, Pat felt a sense of comfort rolling through his body at the closeness.
“I mean, there might not be much reason to fight this,” Ethan said in a low voice.
“They’re trying to say you’re crazy—”
“No, they’re not. It’s not—” Ethan pinched his side and shook his head. “That’s really not what it means. They just don’t think I’m fit to be doing the job.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“I don’t know. Look at the last couple weeks.”
“You had a traumatic experience—”
“Sure, but—”
Pat gripped him tighter, a low grumble sending his words vibrating through both of their chests, “Just because you need to take some time off doesn’t mean you’re suddenly unqualified to do your job. This is bullshit.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said with a sigh. “Kind of.”
“So, we’ll fight it.”