Chapter Twenty-five
Butch watched every move the kid made. From the series of fine muscle contractions under Axe’s left eye to the chin itch he was rocking to the crack-of-the-neck finale.
“Tell me, and I’ll let you go,” he repeated.
Man, this was so much easier to do than when he’d been working for the CPD. Miranda rights? Yeah, whatever. Involuntary restraint? Blah, blah, blah. Coercion?
Well, actually he’d done some coercion even back then.
In fact, he thought back to that kid Billy Riddle who had attacked Beth before she had fallen into the vampire world and taken Butch with her. Man, he’d really enjoyed grinding that little bitch’s nose into the linoleum in the emergency room. Hmm … that hadn’t been coercion, technically—because he hadn’t been after information. It had been flat-out payback for the bastard having jumped a perfectly innocent woman in an alley so he could try to rape her with his friend.
Yeah, because you could really get through to an animal like that with arm’s-length handling.
Fucker.
Refocusing on Axe, Butch murmured, “I’m waiting.”
Axe shrugged. “Kick me out if you want, do other shit to me if you want … but I don’t owe you that. You don’t get a piece of my soul—you haven’t earned it.”
Sound logic, Butch thought—and exactly what he himself would have said if he’d been sitting in that chair.
Butch leaned in. “Sooner or later, before your final acceptance, you’re going to have to tell me.”
“Why the fuck do you care?”
“I don’t.”
Well, didn’t that get him a pair of bug eyes. “Then what the fuck are you asking me for?”
Butch planted his elbows on the desk and fanned out his hands, all Duh. “I need to know how you’re going to handle it when you see it again. That’s why. And one assessment of future behavior is past behavior. What you guys experience here in training is nothing compared to what the outside world is like. You gotta be prepared for situations when there is no time to think, when all you’ve got to go on to save your life or the lives of the people who are fighting with you are your instincts and your will to survive—and I guarantee you that when you get to those moments, the last thing you want is to have a lockup. The more you’re exposed to trauma, the more hardened you become to it and the safer you are. And that is a really suck-ass fucking equation, but it is the goddamn truth.”
Axe’s eyes drifted down to his own hands.
“Go back to the gym,” Butch ordered. “Think about shit. Just know you don’t have forever. We’re not wasting—”
“I lied.”
“Excuse me.”
The hard-ass, Gothed-out, degenerate-looking male inhaled slowly. “I haven’t seen any. I don’t know … what it looks like. I don’t know what it feels like.”
The change in affect, from hostile mask to profound sadness, was startling, but that was the way it always happened. When someone broke, when they decided to give up the goods, they became a different version of themselves, proving that self-protection and revelation were two mutually exclusive propositions.
“So why are you here?” Butch whispered. “Tell me … why did you come to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Butch surreptitiously reached over and made sure his phone was on silent and that the ringer on the office line was off. And when Tohr reappeared on the far side of the glass door, Butch put his palm out—and the Brother backed off.
“Why are you here, Axe?”
The minutes slowed to a crawl and the quiet noises of the office seemed to dim even further out of respect for the space they were in.
“My dad was a nobody,” came the hoarse voice. “He didn’t do anything with his life. He was a carpenter for the species, you know … worked with his hands. Ma didn’t want anything to do with him or me—she left before my transition. She didn’t give a fuck about us. My dad, though, he stayed, and without him, I woulda been out on the streets as a pretrans, and we both know how long I would have lasted.” That dark-haired, half-and-half head shook slowly from left to right. “I wasn’t … good, you know? I never have been. He didn’t leave because there was no one else, I guess.”
Butch made no move, no sound. If he interrupted, he was liable to remind the male that he was talking, instead of reliving his previous life internally.
It was pretty clear where this story was going.
“I like X. I like coke. I like … some other hard-core shit. Two years ago, I went on a bender. Gone for like a week. One night, my dad tried to reach me by phone. Left me these messages—I was so fucking high that I got annoyed with him.” That low voice trailed off. “I got … annoyed.”
When Axe stalled out, the haunted cast to his face was a heartbreaker.
“What did you do, son?” Butch said softly, because he couldn’t help himself.
Axe cleared his throat a couple of times. Rubbed underneath his nose like the tears he was holding back were irritating the thing.
“I erased the messages.” There were a couple of coughs. “I erased … all the messages without listening to them.”
“And then what.”
“They’d killed him. The lessers. He was working in one of the aristocrats’ houses that got hit in the raids. He was … dying at the time he left me the voice mails.” Axe shook his head. “I went back and looked at the call log when I found what had happened and did the math.”
Butch closed his eyes for a second. “I’m sorry, son.”
“I didn’t know about it all right away … I guess a son of one of the workers went there and discovered everyone? That guy, whoever he was, he took care … of everything. When I finally got back home—you know, three days later—there was this note that had been put on the door. Someone had called the house phone and left messages, and when there was no one returning them, they put it all … in a note.”
“Brutal. Fucking brutal.”
“I kept the note.” Axe sniffed hard and shook his head. “I have the note they left. The remains are still on the estate—I think the house is in human hands now?”
“Do you want to get them back?”
“I don’t know. No. No, I don’t think so. Just one more way to be a bad son, huh.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“Heard she moved up in the world, married some rich guy, living the life. I don’t know—I don’t care.” As the male looked up abruptly, Axe’s face resumed its earlier composure, shutting the emotion down in the same way you might lock out an intruder. “So, no, I haven’t seen death up close. That’s one cherry I haven’t popped. Can I go now?”
Butch felt like he should say something profound. But what Axe really wanted, more than some pep talk, was the exit. “Yeah. You can.”
That chair made a squeaking noise against the concrete as it was shoved back hard, and then Axe steamed for the door. Before he opened it, he stopped. Looked back over his shoulder.
“What is it like?”
“Death?” When he got a nod, Butch did an inhale of his own. “You sure you want to know that kind of shit?”
“You said we needed exposure.”
Touché, he wanted to say. Instead, Butch pictured the male going back to the modest house he lived alone in and getting really fucking drunk and slitting his wrists. Or OD’ing. Or jumping out a window.
Not a foregone conclusion, given the amount of pain lurking under the half-tats and the metal.
“I want you to move in here.” Butch rubbed his large gold cross through his shirt. “Craeg’s going to stay with us, you need to as well.”
“What, worried I’ma go hang myself in the bathroom?”
“Yeah, precisely.” When Butch just stared across the desk, those dark brows of the guy rose once again. “You’ll stay here, Axe. It’s safer, you’re protected, and you can concentrate on what you need to do.”
There was going to be a fight about this, of course. Asshats like this guy always had a—
“Okay, but I’m going to need a night or two every once in a while to … you know.”
Interesting, Butch thought. So the poor SOB was aware, on some level, of the shit going on in his brain—and was spooked.
“You need to get laid, huh?” Butch drawled.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t blame you—and you can make arrangements with the doggen to drive you in and out. That won’t be a problem.”
“So … what is it like?”
Butch fell quiet and found himself pulling a little middle-vision-field of his own as images—gruesome, horrible images—played across his mind. For a moment, he wondered whether he should go there with the kid, but then he recognized that the truth was something that needed to be spoken even if it was terrible. Maybe especially if it was terrible.
And it had to be told to anyone who wanted to fight in this war.
If Axe couldn’t handle his demons, then the last thing that was good for anybody was to give him a dagger and a gun and send him out into Caldwell’s alleys.
Butch shrugged. “I used to be a homicide detective with the human police—don’t ask—so I saw a lot of it. To answer the question, it depends on how old it is and how it happened. The new stuff … especially if it was violent … can be messy. Body parts really don’t like to be cut, stabbed or hacked into sections, and they express their anger by leaking all over the fuck. Jesus, we’re, like, seventy percent water or something? And you learn that’s so fucking true when you go to a fresh scene. Pools of it. Drips of it. Speckles of it. Then you got the stained clothes, rugs, bedsheets, walls, flooring—or if it’s outside, the ground cover, the concrete, the asphalt. And then there’s the smell. Blood, sweat, urine, other shit. That juicy bouquet will get in your sinuses and stay there for hours afterward.” He shook his head again. “The older cases … the smell is worse than the mess. Water deaths, with the bloating, are just ugly—and if that gas that’s built up gets out? The stench will knock you on your ass. And I don’t know, I wasn’t too crazy for the burn deaths either. I mean, you’d think we’d realize we’re not different than any other mammal—cooked meat is cooked meat, period. But I’ve never seen a grown man puke up his coffee and donuts over a medium rare T-bone.” Butch refocused on the male. “You want to know what I always hated the most?”
“Yeah.”
He motioned over his head. “The hair. The hair … God, the fucking hair, especially if it was a woman. Matted with blood, dirt, little rocks … tangled and twisted … lying on gray skin. When I can’t sleep at night, that’s what I see. I see the hair.” His hands automatically began to rub themselves. “You always wore these gloves, you know … so you didn’t get fingerprints on anything, didn’t leave any of yourself behind. Early days they used to be latex—later, they were nitrile. And sometimes, when I’d handle a body, the hair would get on the gloves … and it was like it wanted to get into me? Like … you could catch death by murder somehow.” He shook his head. “Those gloves were so fucking thin. And they didn’t work.”
Axe frowned. “Why did you have to wear them then?”
“No, no, they worked with fingerprints, you know. But I left something of myself behind in all those dead bodies. Every one of them … has a piece of me.”
Starting with my sister, he thought. And to be accurate, she had taken the largest hunk out of him.
There was a long stretch of silence.
“You were in the human world?” Axe asked. “I mean … it sounds like you were—”
“Yeah, a while ago. Now … I’m something else.” Butch cleared his throat. “G’head, get outta here. You need your workout. You, me, and Craeg will go get all your shit—and maybe it’ll help me if you’re in the car with that hardheaded sonofabitch. I think I’m going to have to fight to keep him from jumping out and pulling a runner.”
“Yeah. Okay. Sure.”
“I’m sorry about your dad. And he wasn’t a nobody. Taking care of you made him count.”
Axe turned away and paused again, like he was bracing himself. Then he pushed his way out into the corridor and was gone.
As the glass door quietly eased shut, Butch stared straight ahead. He hadn’t intended to reveal that much to the male—he never spoke about that shit to anyone.
Putting his head in his hands, he took some deep breaths … and prayed to God that none of the other interviews went like that one.