Chapter One
Three Weeks Earlier - December 2012 - Patrick
It was the way every story began: with a death, a murder, blood on the streets. Only this time there wasn’t any blood. To spill it would have been a waste.
“Why is it always a dead girl?” Detective Patrick Clanahan muttered under his breath.
The temperature had dropped down just above freezing, settling in at 33F—all thanks to the thick clouds that had blanketed the city of Seattle through the evening and after moon rise. It made the night dark, blocking out the moon and stars, what little you might have seen of them past the city lights, and turning everything a dull grey. The faces of the patrol officers taping off the crime scene were washed bone white under the cop lights.
At least it hadn’t started raining.
The victim might have looked serene, laid on on her back, head propped up on one bent arm, face relaxed even in death, but for the fact that she had been found drained of blood in the alley behind a 24 hour adult entertainment shop.
“Some sort of…hook-up gone wrong?” asked a young man in the black SPD patrolman’s uniform, glancing up at Pat.
Pat frowned at the officer’s tone and gestured for him to step aside so that he could get a closer look at the body. The body. She had been a living, breathing person just a couple hours ago and now she was a husk: drained, dead, and discarded.
He fucking hated vampires.
“I thought you went home,” Pat said over his shoulder.
Captain Jordan Augustas’s heels clicked to a stop next to him. He could just make out the distinct note of the handmade soap she favored, wafting over top the smell of dirt, oily water, and the earliest stages of decay.
“I had. But then I heard the call on the scanner.”
“You should really turn that thing off when you’re not on duty.”
She snorted. “I’m never off duty. Especially when someone drains a human and doesn’t even try to hide the body.”
“You’d rather they try?”
“I’d rather our perps didn’t work quite so hard to write the P-I’s headlines for them.”
Pat huffed under his breath. He startled when Jordan laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“Are you—”
“I’m fine.”
Pat stood and shrugged her off.
“That wasn’t what I was going to ask. Are you sure you have time to take this one?”
“With all due respect, sir, why the hell wouldn’t I?”
Jordan tucked both hands in the pockets of her fawn colored wool coat. “I was going to file his request in the morning, effective immediately. I was just relieved to see him take the step without the Review Board needing to be involved.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your partner.”
“My—” Pat bit his lip and glanced over Jordan’s shoulder.
“The time off will be good for him. For both of you. I’d understand if you want to pass on this one.”
He knew what she had to be thinking. The way this looked. They had been here before, or close enough to leave a cold weight in his chest even now more than a year later. But it would be too easy to accept her offer and pass the buck to someone else.
“There’s no doubt this falls on my desk, Captain. I’ll handle it.” Case closed, end of story: he only hoped his tone made that clear to her.
“Fine. I’ll trust your judgment, but I just wanted to put the offer out there.”
“We’re all too busy,” Pat replied, hunching his shoulders against the icy wind rolling off the Puget Sound and down Seattle’s dark streets. “You should go home, like you were planning.” He checked the time on his phone and glanced up the street. “The Medical Examiner will be here in a few minutes and we’ll get everything processed before 9 AM.”
“Sounds good. See that you do,” Jordan said, nodding brusquely. She hesitated and said, “Drop by my office tomorrow when you have a spare minute. There’s something we should discuss,” and then left, click clicking back to her unmarked off duty car.
It always happened this way, getting called out of his bed at half past midnight to oversee the careful dismantling of death. Not that he’d been soundly sleeping before the call. A sound sleep was hard to catch these days, his mind and body too aware of the tension that gripped his mate and left the other man restless at all hours.
Ethan—Detective Ethan Ellison—had hardly left Pat’s townhouse in the weeks since the incident on board his uncle’s boat. He’d hardly slept either. These days, Pat usually found the mage tucked into a corner of his living room sofa, staring at a book for hours without turning a single page.
And he knew that he didn’t have the words to bring Ethan out of his own head. He never had the right words for anything it seemed, let alone a delicate situation like this one. Instead, Pat was reduced to watching quietly from the sidelines as his mate sank deeper and deeper into his internal maelstrom, withdrawing a little further each day.
He was pulled out of his own thoughts by the arrival of the ME, Doctor Janice Lynch, and her assistant. Lynch gave him a lingering look from head to foot—“Good morning, Detective.”—before getting down to work next to the body, measuring and scraping and indicating where she wanted a particular picture taken.
And it was just like Pat promised, they had the scene wrapped before the sun rose much past nine in the morning. Lynch drove off with the body and a weak estimate that she’d have some preliminary findings before the end of the day. Not that he needed her to tell him cause of death: the two jagged puncture marks on the victim’s neck were testament enough.
Lynch would run the bite through their fang database but he had his doubts that they’d find anything. Too many vampires and too few on record for the database to be much more than a department joke. And the science supporting the Unique Fang Theory was spotty at best. They weren’t fingerprints and the wounds often involved the kind of trauma that made accurate comparisons difficult.
He met his junior partner back at the station. Detective Sabira Mallory had a cup of coffee in either hand and a long wool coat on over her suit jacket, still buttoned against the winter chill.
“You look rather ragged,” she murmured in her clipped English—by way of two transplanted Lebanese immigrant parents—accent. “How early did you get in?”
“There was a homicide.”
“You might have rung me.”
“Figured one of us should be well-rested.”
Her eyebrows shot up her forehead. “Oh, yes, of course. Here, I brought you coffee.”
Pat took the steaming cup with a heartfelt thanks and gulped a few mouthfuls before the heat burned his mouth. He flicked his department issue computer on and logged into the system to check his email—it looked like Toby was on the ball that morning, he’d already forwarded copies of the crime scene photos to Pat’s account.
“Our victim is a twenty-two year old female, name of Jocelyn Linetti, she’s a college student at the University of Washington. Her death was reported to Dispatch by an anonymous tip from a blocked number a little past 4 AM this morning. I got the call half an hour later and arrived on the scene before five.”
Mallory suppressed a yawn while she slipped out of her winter coat and hung it from the wobbly coat rack next to their desks. He couldn’t remember when that particular rack had appeared, suspected it had been an addition brought in by Mallory herself. He’d never seen her throw a single article of clothing over the back of her chair, lest it wrinkle.
His partner sipped her coffee while her computer rumbled to life, nodding along to his description of the scene.
“No mistaking it then,” she murmured.
“I’d say so, but obviously we have to wait for Lynch’s report to confirm. Did you get the photos?”
Mallory nodded, her eyes darting over her computer screen, one hand deftly maneuvering her mouse while the other remained occupied with her coffee.
“You know, I’ve never met a vampire before,” she said.
“I have.”
Her dark eyebrows inched back up her forehead.
“Yes. What about the tip?”
“I’m submitting a request to the phone company. We talked to the businesses that were open when we got to the scene but so far no one’s admitting that they saw anything. Sadly, not shocking.”
“I’m amazed you found anyone hanging around to talk to at all—not at this address. You know there’s a new club about three blocks away from the scene? Did you check there?”
“How do you know that?”
“Google,” Mallory said dryly. “So did you?”
“Didn’t go that wide. You want to check it out?”
“I’ll touch base with Janice first. For confirmation. Just to make sure we’re asking the right questions. You look like you could use some sleep. Maybe you should go home for a couple of hours? I can pick you up around noon and—”
“I’m fine,” Pat interrupted. He cracked his neck and concentrated on sipping his hot coffee without burning his mouth until Mallory stopped studying him like a perp she needed to extract the truth from. “I’ll just go to bed early tonight. This was really good,” he said gesturing with his cup.
Mallory hmmed in agreement. “A new place opened in the storefront below my flat. You seem to have developed a better appreciation for good coffee lately, I thought you might enjoy it.”
“Yeah,” Pat said quietly.
His partner picked up her phone. “I’ll just call Janice. Then we can get going.”
“No one’s going to be left at a club at ten in the morning.”
“I’m sure there will be someone. Those floors don’t mop themselves.”
“Maybe at the clubs you frequent.”
Mallory smiled wanly and tucked her cell between her cheek and shoulder, grabbing their garbage to throw away while she waited for the ME to pick up the phone downstairs.
Pat tapped his fingers against the hard line of the shiny new cellphone nestled against his right thigh. When he saw Mallory turn, absorbed in whatever Lynch was saying, he slipped it out and thumbed it on to check his text messages, saying a half-prayer that there would be something from—
But there was nothing, no texts, no voicemails, no notices of any kind. Pat sighed and turned the device face down on the desk, rubbing at the tension gathered behind his dry eyes.
“Janice can confirm, it was definitely a vampire. You ready to go?”
“Yeah.” Pat grabbed his gun out of his desk drawer and holstered it under his left arm.
“You should let me drive.”
Pat opened his mouth to argue, but she cut him off with a raised finger.
“Ah, now, three and a half months working without my partner I think is enough to say I’m no longer ‘The Rookie,’ which means it’s completely reasonable that I do the driving, especially when you look like that.”
“I don’t look that bad.”
She clapped him on the shoulder. “You really do.”
Ethan
He was relieved when the email came through, informing him that his request for time off had been granted effective immediately.
Ethan closed Pat’s laptop and got up from his desk—it was spare, like the rest of the werewolf’s townhouse, neat and tidy in a way that suggested the room wasn’t used very often, rather than that it was frequently picked up.
The townhouse was quiet. Pat’s cousins, who lived next door, were gone for the rest of the month on a snowboarding trip over winter break. Ethan relished the peace, soaked it up until it weighed down his bones. He slid onto the couch and stretched out on his stomach, cheek pressed into the rough cushion. He breathed slowly, pushing all the air out of his lungs and holding his breath until they ached before he broke and inhaled again. A weight that he could sink under.
From his position, Ethan could see the edge of his book—it wasn’t even his book, it belonged to a dead man, inherited through something like attrition—poking out from between the cushions of one of the matching campaign chairs. He’d read it cover to cover by now, there wasn’t much else to do since he had yet to find a secret stash of paperbacks, DVDs or even porn. Pat Clanahan, it turned out, wasn’t much of a reader.
If Ethan had learned anything in the past couple of weeks, it was that the wolf spent what little spare time he wasn’t at the station, working out in his dining room-turned-gym.
He frowned and rubbed his cheek against the cushion. Fuck he was bored. He’d passed through the stages of mindless sleep and marathon insomnia and come out the other side to—to this. To a state where he wasn’t particularly tired but wasn’t exactly motivated to do any work either. Not that he had any work to do, not now.
It was the right decision, handing in his request for time off. He knew deep down that it had been the smart move. Even though he’d just taken three months off to spend them running around the world, it had hardly counted as a vacation, and now…
Now, Ethan couldn’t see anything except his si—her—her shocked face as it disappeared under the roiling sea, whipped down and away out of sight, playing out in a loop whether he was awake or asleep.
He was distracted and there was nothing worse than a distracted cop. A distracted cop missed things, missed clues, missed suspects, missed the shaky knife until it was already stuck between their ribs by the hapless junkie. And that was if they were lucky and their distraction only got themselves killed. He couldn’t bear to think about being the cause of someone hurting Pat again. The guy had been through enough on Ethan’s behalf, not least of all because Ethan was an emotionally crippled jackass.
So, instead he lay on Pat’s sofa, soaking up the feel of gravity weighing him down until he felt like a lead weight pressing a groove in the werewolf’s sofa. This was how he’d leave his mark.
Without him being conscious of it, the sun moved across the room, marking the inevitable march of time until it slapped him in the face.
Ethan flinched back, squinting, aware all of a sudden that the day had slipped away from him and it was early afternoon. The deadbolt turned on the front door and before he could think of moving, making himself look less pathetic, more presentable, Pat swung the door open, halting on the threshold with his keys in one hand and his eyes frozen on Ethan.
“Hey,” the wolf greeted him.
“Hey,” Ethan murmured, sitting up in a series of twitches and jerks. He scrubbed a hand at the lethargy clinging to his eyes. “How’s—you’re early.”
Pat’s mouth turned down at the corners, his face drawn with a tired look. “I got called in early.”
“Did something happen?”
Ethan watched indecision move across his partner’s face. He could see the moment Pat decided not to answer honestly, and Ethan chose to look away first, as though he could lessen that twinge of disappointment he felt if he manufactured the pocket of space between them. Pat didn’t trust him enough to talk about whatever it was with him. Not the whole truth at least.
But why should he? Ethan looked down at his threadbare T-shirt and sweatpants. He’d tendered his own leave of absence that morning. Of course Pat couldn’t trust him with the details from an open case.
“No, never mind.” Ethan held up his hand to forestall any shifty replies. “Forget I asked.”
Pat sighed and kicked his shoes off, dropped his wrinkled jacket over the back of a chair and took a seat on the living room table so that they were on a better eye level. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were planning to do?”
Ethan shrugged.
“I wish you— Fuck it. The Captain said she approved your request. Just so you know.”
“Yeah, I got the email.”
Ethan glanced up at his partner through his bangs—he needed a haircut again. He was lazy enough to just let it grow out but Ethan couldn’t stand the way he looked with long hair. It did something strange to the angles of his face, made them look gangly and overlarge until he didn’t look like himself anymore. On a good day, he could hardly stand to look in the mirror at all—he was afraid what would happen if he looked and saw someone else. Someone…
“Ethan?” Pat said quietly, leaning towards him. He hesitated a second before resting his palm on Ethan’s knee, warm and solid, grounding in a way that settled the unhappy flutter working it’s way up his throat, threatening to choke him.
Ethan swallowed and said, “I know I didn’t ask if—I mean, is it okay if I, you know, stay here?” And then he tensed, searching Pat’s face for any sign of discomfort at the idea but there wasn’t any. If anything, the wolf’s shoulders eased an inch at his question, which Ethan watched from the corner of his eye, curious.
“You must know…” Pat sat up, looking around anywhere but at his eyes. “Of course you can stay here.”
Ethan nodded slowly.
“What about your place?”
“What about it?”
“You’re still paying rent on it, aren’t you?”
“The lease isn’t up for a couple of months.” His lips twitched but not into a smile. “Besides, where else would I store all my shit?”
Pat shifted his weight on the table and for a second it looked like he was going to reach out. Ethan braced himself for a touch against his bare skin, only breathing again in relief when it didn’t come.
“You could store it here,” the wolf said.
“Don’t ask me to move in.”
It wasn’t fair the way Pat’s face crumpled up around the edges. It was too much, not just this twisted thing between them that he hadn’t had any say in—this wolf thing—but also the expectations that Pat kept putting onto it. Sometimes when he lay still for too long and thought about the look in the wolf’s eyes, Ethan felt as though the pressure would grind him into a fine powder.
Just another complication that he wasn’t equipped to deal with just then. And it made him a little angry the way Pat kept flirting with the edge of that anvil, pressing down no matter how hard Ethan tried to ease out from under it.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Sorry,” the wolf muttered, though there wasn’t anything apologetic about his tone, only a hint of confusion and more bitterness than was probably healthy to hear in the voice of the man who claimed to be in love with you.
“Are you tired?” Pat asked. “Hungry? I could fix you something.”
“It’s too early for dinner.”
“I’ll start something,” he said, disappearing into the kitchen.
Ethan lay there listening to his partner open and close the refrigerator in quick succession. He smelled onions cooking and knife noises moving against a cutting board, but it was impossible to tell what Pat was fixing. He wasn’t a gourmand or anything, but the wolf had a surprisingly robust collection of recipes that he could fix without too much effort. Something about helping to cook family meals growing up, Ethan hadn’t been paying much attention when he’d explained it.
At any other time he would have been more than happy to reap the rewards of Pat’s skills, but he’d found it difficult to keep solid foods down—when he could bring himself to eat anything in the first place. He knew intellectually that a loss of appetite was symptomatic of several things, depression being one, but knowing that didn’t help him get over the apathy that had spread through every corner of his life.
He blinked his eyes open some time later, not noticing when he had slipped into a light doze. Pat stood over him, one hand warm against his shoulder to shake him awake. Ethan cringed under the touch; everywhere he could feel Pat’s body heat his skin started to crawl—the sensation akin to a thousand centipede legs shimmying across his body.
Pat let go and jerked back. “It’s ready if you want to eat.”
Ethan dragged himself up into a sitting position and eyed the bowls of pasta on the living room table.
The television was on but muted in the background, paused on the Netflix landing page.
He held the bowl of homemade mac’n’cheese in his hands while Pat sat down next to him, careful this time to keep a spare couple of inches between them. It was hard for the wolf, who had become rather touchy-feely on their globe trotting adventure over the autumn. He figured that it must have been that pack mentality labeling him as part of the wolf’s family or something. That’s what a mate was, right? Like a soulmate or something equally ridiculous. He’d been reading Jansson’s book about it, but Ethan still struggled to think the word “mate” without grimacing in disbelief. He hadn’t been raised to believe in that kind of hocus pocus, which was saying a lot when he’d been trained in just about every other sort of magic. But magical, pre-determined soulmate crap? Not in his wheelhouse.
But ever since Patrick Clanahan had gotten it into his head that Ethan was his mate, he seemed to take every opportunity to get up in Ethan’s business. Before—well, before it hadn’t been so bad. The wolf was easy enough on the eyes and a decent lay, open to instruction and eager to please, which Ethan had appreciated on more than one occasion. But that was before.
Before.
He forced himself to take a bite of the food so that Pat would stop staring at him and eat his own dinner.
In the here and after he couldn’t trust his instincts. The same instincts that told him to sink into Pat’s strength and let the wolf carry him. The same instincts that had led him astray so badly in the previous year. And he couldn’t trust Pat’s instincts anymore than his own; they were ruled by this belief in a magical system of true love.
Love. It made his insides cringe up in a kind of secondhand embarrassment whenever the word slithered out of the shadows around them.
Ethan couldn’t trust that either.
Instead he sat in Detective Pat Clanahan’s living room trying not to gag on objectively delicious pasta while the television droned quietly in front of his glazed eyes.
He slipped into the bathroom afterwards and stayed in there longer than was polite.
He needed more clothes but he was loathe to pick them up from his apartment, and at the same time he couldn’t ask Pat to do it. The wolf would—wouldn’t ask a question about it either, but Ethan’s pride held him back.
Cold water out of the faucet felt soothing against his overheated skin.