Chapter Eight
Ethan
Pat was gone in the morning. He was surprised, to be honest, to see what the time on his phone read when he finally dragged his ass out from under the covers to check it; late enough that his stomach rumbled angrily and his head felt stuffed with cotton, indicating to Ethan that he was overdue for his morning coffee fix. He shuffled downstairs in a pair of Pat’s sweatpants and the long sleeve shirt the wolf had worn to work the day before. He’d need to brave the wreckage next door later on and see what he could scrounge up for clothes. Hopefully something from the back of Pat’s closet would have escaped the smoke smell?
The kitchen was cold and sterile, not how he would have expected a kitchen belonging to a half dozen college students to look, but the refrigerator was comfortingly meager. He ate reheated left overs and hunted through the cabinets for coffee grounds, but not only did the place appear to be sans coffee, he couldn’t find a coffee maker with any of the other appliances either.
“What the fuck?” he muttered, slamming cabinet doors when the jasmine rice was gone and his head had started to throb in gritty eyed irritation. “This is just wrong.”
No amount of grumbling was going to change his situation, however, and Ethan was halfway to the door before he remembered that he needed things like shoes and a wallet and some clue where the nearest coffee shop was in this neighborhood. He stepped outside, the walkway like ice against his toes and darted next door where he found the front door locked. Ethan stepped back and stared at the door. Not the same door that the firemen had busted through, a new, cheap door that someone had thrown up in the aftermath. And of course it was locked, but he realized with a bit of dread that all of his personal belongings—those few things he’d had with him when Pat drove him home after everything that happened on Lake Union—were now locked inside, and the set of spare keys Pat had given him weeks ago wouldn’t have worked even if he’d thought to bring them with him.
He went back inside and knocked around the kitchen looking for any extra sets lying around but there was nothing.
“Gods damn it,” he grumbled and ran upstairs for socks—there were none—and shoes—which he’d also left in Pat’s house—and then back outside to the locked door.
In bare feet, wearing borrowed, day-old clothes, he breathed into his cupped hands and stared down at the lock. Either he’d be able to unlock the damn thing, he wouldn’t be able to budge it at all, or he’d blast it off its hinges. Of late, all three options had had an equal chance of happening.
He stared at the damnable lock, imagining in his head the mechanism, all those tumbler teeth lined up at various heights and depths, and reached into the hot center of himself where his magic dwelt, rummaging around for that tingle, the zing! of electricity that felt just out of reach. Until the tips of his toes burned with the cold, digging into the gritty cement blocks, until his nose began to drip a little, until the blood pulsed in his temples as a phantom reminder of why he had come out here in the first place.
“Just think about all that delicious coffee waiting.”
“Is that what you use your power for? Coffee runs?”
Goosebumps rippled across his arms, raised the hair on the back of his neck. He felt the electricity spiral in the palm of his left hand, more than just a tingle or an itch, it burned until he released it into the door with a shout. His magic jumped from him into the metal, super heating it for a second wherein, watching it heat before his eyes, Ethan worried that the whole knob would be reduced to useless slag. But then it cooled just as quickly, the lock clicked, and the door swung open before him.
He exhaled and darted inside, tripping over a bit of debris that had escaped whatever cursory clean-up had come with the installation of a temporary door. He skipped over that, eyes darting over the charred interior, and jogged upstairs where he was relieved to find the master bedroom in relatively untouched condition.
Even to his weak human nose, smoke and dust lay heavy in the air; there could be no confusion about a fire having taken place in this building, but the unmade bed sat in the room free of black soot or char, and when he opened Pat’s closet the clothes smelled like laundry detergent instead of fire. He tested the bathroom, itching for a shower, but the water appeared to have been cut off.
He found a discarded duffle bag that he filled with clothes for both of them, swept the bathroom counter toiletries in on top, dug his shoes out from under the bed, and slammed the cheap door shut behind him.
He bathed again, scrubbing at the smoke lingering in his hair, dressed, unlocked one of the back windows since he didn’t possess a key to this part of the townhouse either, and hit the streets. The townhouse was situated within walking distance of Seattle Pacific University, and he felt confident that there had to be a Starbucks or something—anything—nearby, all he had to do was find it.
Later, when he was fed and watered, had even ducked into a Whole Foods on the corner for food that didn’t come courtesy of a delivery driver, Ethan climbed through the window he’d left ajar, and made himself comfortable in the townhouse. There was a layer of dust on most of the shelves, which did not surprise him—he was a nearly thirty year old man and he couldn’t be bothered to dust most of the time either—except for the massive seventy inch television that took up one wall in the living room; this device gleamed shiny black from regular attention.
Ethan eyed the television with a mix of jealousy and trepidation. Pat hadn’t owned a TV—hadn’t owned a laptop either—and Ethan himself had only ever owned cheap, usually older models. Not because he couldn’t have afforded better if he’d wanted, but because his magic had a habit of frying anything with complex chipsets, and it had never seemed like a smart idea to spend more than a hundred bucks on something he’d have to replace within six months knowing his luck.
He was bored, kicking around the house with nothing to do, no work, no reading, and the television was tempting.
Ethan flexed his hand.
“Are you sure about that?”
He twitched, shaking his head, and stepped back. Backed up all the way until the back of his knees hit the stairs and then he sat down hard, his half-empty coffee cup sloshing dangerously.
“You are fucking losing it,” he berated himself, taking a drink.
Ethan clamored upstairs, kicked of his shoes and clothes and climbed back into the bed. Weak wintry light slid through the parted curtains. He wondered which lucky bastard got this huge room to themselves. The townhouses had mirrored layouts to one another, meaning that this master bedroom was as wide and spacious as Pat’s. Since he’d unofficially moved in with Pat, Ethan hadn’t actually met any of the pack kids who lived next door—why would he? Hadn’t even caught more than a glimpse of one, even of the kid they’d kicked out last night.
And that was another thing, Ethan mused, rolling himself up into a little burrito with the duvet, why had Pat felt the need to kick the poor kid out in the first place? They could have shared. It’s not like the two of them were loudly fucking on every surface they could find. Or at all.
“Stupid werewolf pecking order bullshit,” he mumbled, reaching out an arm for the coffee again. He drained it and set it down on the carpet.
He fell asleep between one thought and the next.
How beautiful, Edie said, staring into his face.
Ethan’s eyes flew open and he curled his hands into fists under his chest, breathing hard into the pillow. He rolled over and blinked up at the ceiling until he had a handle on his body. He could still feel the echo of a voice rattling around inside his head when he stood up and started pacing around the room. It wasn’t enough, spacious it may have been, but it was nothing to his nerves bouncing around—his magic, he thought darkly.
Doors up and down the hallway had been left open to encourage air to circulate throughout the house, and Ethan found himself clenching his hands against his sides while he wandered around the upstairs, poking his head into dark rooms, sinuses itching at the scents of dust and sweat and possibly spunk that greeted his nosiness, until he glanced inside the last room at the end of the hall and he sneezed.
“Well, that’s certainly ballsy,” he crowed, flicking on the light. There was nothing incriminating to see lying around, but he knew that smell—that particular funk that settles into walls and carpet and was nigh on impossible to get out. One of Pat’s cousins smoked pot right under his damn police officer nose. Ethan smiled to himself and pushed open the door. He might not have had a werewolf’s ability to pinpoint precisely where the pot was stored, but he didn’t need to do that, he wasn’t interested in getting high—at least not that way. Rather, he was hoping to find a bong or a pipe…he wasn’t feeling picky as he checked the bedside table: condoms, lube, and an hitachi wand; he moved over to the closet.
Ethan’s jaw nearly dropped when he saw the familiar shape of a water pipe lying on the top shelf next to a pair of slumpy brown leather boots. It wasn’t as large or elaborate as the device in The Three Sister’s, still he took down his prize with a soft hum and retreated to the master bedroom where he dug out a second packet of herbs he’d purchased the other day. Not tea, this blend were more like incense—To help you relax your eyes, Lailana had explained as she bundled them up for him.
There was no where in the house that he could smoke without Pat knowing about it, and it would be safer to wave a red flag in front of a bull than to flaunt his special magic herb blend where Pat also slept. He threw on one of Pat’s thick cable knit sweaters—thankfully not a product of sisterly handicrafts this time—and carried his finds out onto the back porch. There was a grotty little table and chairs on the patio and a weathered fence screening this portion of the townhouse from Pat’s own part of the backyard. It felt cozy almost as he set everything up, ducked back inside to find a lighter, and then settled in with one of the hoses and a bottle of water.
The rest of the morning passed in a haze of smoke as Ethan sank lower and lower in his patio chair. After a while, even the cold slipped away from him as the smoke hung around him in a warm, sticky cloud of sweet smelling flowers.
“Do you really think falling asleep out here is a wise idea?”
Ethan whipped around to stare at—he blinked—he set the hose down on the table to scrub at his face, but she was still sitting in the other chair, not looking at him but focused above the fence that lined the edge of the property, separating them from their neighbors.
He slugged back half the bottle of water, looked away, looked back.
This time, she was already looking back; she quirked an eyebrow at him with a low, grinding smirk. The same look she’d liked to give him in—right before she’d grab him by the hair and—
“Fuck,” he whispered, breath fogging in front of his face. All of a sudden, the cold rushed back over him, prickling his sweaty skin.
She leaned over the table, that smirk splitting her face as she leaned her chin on one hand and said, “You already did, didn’t you, big brother?”
Ethan woke up when his chair tipped back and fell out from under him. He crashed down onto the pavement, skinning his elbow through the sweater, it snagged and tore on the rough concrete, and his palms smarted, wrist ached where he’d caught himself awkwardly. Ethan kicked the chair away from him and watched the hookah teeter on the patio table before settling back.
This time when he scrubbed at his eyes, the second chair remained empty, and if the pain radiating through his arms was any indication, he knew he was really awake. Small mercies.
Small. Fucking. Mercies
He got up, dusted himself off, checked to make sure he wasn’t bleeding too badly and went inside to clean up.
Later, when he couldn’t shake the vision from his head, desperate for any distraction, Ethan dug out his cellphone and charged it. It was a piece of shit disposable model that he’d bought somewhere—he couldn’t remember now, some port city between here and Alexandria. When it turned on after an hour, he found that his minutes had run down, but there was a dusty landline phone in the kitchen, which he used to call the last number he’d had for his Uncle Eoin.
The bastard didn’t pick up, so Ethan left a message asking for him to get in contact. Asking if he was still in Seattle.
Ethan didn’t slam the phone back in its cradle but it was a close thing.
He was so lost in his thoughts that he missed the sound of the front door opening until someone cleared their throat behind him. A tall—taller than Pat at least—man stood there with a confused frown wrinkling his brow. There was something vaguely familiar about his face, but Ethan couldn’t place him.
While Ethan stared, surprised, he watch the stranger’s nose flare delicately as though he were—
“You’re not a wolf. But you smell like Patrick.”
Ethan snorted derisively. “You don’t say.”
The confused frown deepened and the other man cocked his head so that he resembled a—okay, definitely a werewolf, no mistaking that.
“Do you always let yourself into other people’s houses?” Ethan asked.
“Technically, this used to be my house, so it didn’t really cross my mind to knock.” He seemed to shake himself and offered his hand to Ethan, stepping forward with a quiet smile. “Vector Clanahan.”
“Clanahan. Of course.” Ethan ran his tongue over his teeth and swept a considering look over the werewolf, from broad shoulders to slim hips and long legs. He was lean where Pat was sturdy, with a more narrow face and lighter coloring except for his eyes—his eyes looked dark and endless, as deep as a void that Ethan could tumble head first into if he wasn’t careful. He was hot, essentially, and Ethan would have had to be dead not to notice, even if he didn’t see much resemblance between this man and Patrick.
He shook Vector’s hand and introduced himself, “Ethan Ellison.”
“Ah, yes, Patrick’s—”
“Friend. Or not—more like, partner,” Ethan interrupted. He wasn’t sure he could stand it if the werewolf said the M-word. “Partner,” he muttered. It was accurate, they’d been partners. It held other connotations of course, but Ethan could pretend that those strings didn’t exist.
Vector visibly hesitated before he said, “Of course. You’re an officer with SPD, yes?”
“Right.” He cleared his throat and took his hand back from Vector’s warm, firm grip. “How did you know that?”
Now Vector seemed to feel a little awkward if the light blush along the tops of his ears was any indication. “I’m afraid you’re something of a hot topic with the pack. I mean, you have to know that Patrick’s never—uh.”
Ethan held up a hand to stop him. “Forget I asked. I don’t want to know. So, what are you doing here? We didn’t put you out on the street did we? I thought this was just a place for Pat’s cousins to crash for free.”
“Oh, it is. I was actually looking for Patrick.”
“He’s at the station. It’s kind of the…” Ethan trailed off as he checked the time on the microwave, a chill racing down his spine as he saw how late it had gotten while he was outside. He’d fucked the whole day away without even realizing.
“Are you okay?” Vector asked, cupping his shoulder.
Ethan shook his head. “Fine. He’s not back yet. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
Vector sighed. “Do you mind if I wait for a little bit?”
Ethan shrugged. “Do what you want. It used to be your house, right?”
“I can’t stay too late. I won’t interfere with your plans.”
“Don’t worry, you couldn’t do that. Got none.”
Vector gave him a curious look.
Ethan knew that he should be starving with the late hour and having missed lunch, but his stomach felt unsettled, turning cartwheels in his gut. Vector had temporarily distracted him from his dream, but now it came rushing back to him. Luckily for Ethan, the door opened with a bang and Pat stormed into the house with a dark look on his face and even darker bruises under his eyes. He froze, taking in the sight of Ethan and Vector in the kitchen, standing quite close together, now that he thought about it. Vector still had his hand on Ethan’s shoulder.
For a second, Pat barred his teeth, and the hairs on the back of Ethan’s neck stood on end. He watched a closed mouth smile slip across Vector’s face as he lowered his head and stepped back.
“Vector,” Pat growled. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“I got your voicemail late, but it sounded like you wanted to keep this off the record.”
Pat grumbled something under his breath and nodded. He gestured over his shoulder, “We can talk in the office.”
Ethan bit his tongue even as Vector shot him a another quick look, but he followed Pat obediently. And that was that. Whatever it was, pack business? Something to do with a case? Pat didn’t want Ethan involved.
Well, that was fine with him, he reminded himself. He didn’t want to be involved with work, that was the whole point of a sabbatical. And showing an interest in anything to do with the pack…well, that would mean Ethan was a part of the pack, right?
He grimaced and went to go clean up the hookah before Pat noticed it and started asking probing questions.
Patrick
The office, or at least the room that in his own house would have been an office if he had owned a computer or done work there rather than use it for miscellaneous storage, did in fact contain yet another bed. Pat stopped up short and stared: just how many kids were staying here during the school year? He felt Vector come up on his heels, using his extra couple of inches to peer over Pat’s shoulder and make a confused hum in the back of his throat.
“In here?”
Pat shook himself. “Garage,” he grumbled, heading for the last assuredly safe refuge in this pit of college slovenliness.
The unfinished garage was thankfully empty except for a haphazard stack of empty moving boxes and a couple of bikes leaning up against one wall. Pat flicked on the lights and sat on top of the stairs leading down from the mud room. Vector stepped around him and made a show of checking the space out, giving him a moment to collect his thoughts.
Pat braced his elbows on his thighs and sighed, feeling all of the day’s tension starting to trickle out of his body. After the dead body discovered that morning and the interviews, he’d had a frustrating afternoon trying to contact people who had known the victims, attaching phone numbers to frequent faces on Liu’s social media accounts, and an even less productive meeting with Captain Augustas about Adam’s sealed files.
Mallory hadn’t returned until after five, damp and with the shadow of a scowl marring her face. She’d had an equally fruitless afternoon trying to trace down Linetti’s friends and family: Linetti’s parents were out of town according to the neighbors and whoever Linetti was living with hadn’t been around the girl’s apartment.
“So, what happened next door?” Vector asked, cutting into his thoughts.
And with that one little question, Pat felt all of the tension return. He sighed again and stretched out his legs. He met Vector’s curious gaze.
“I’m still trying to figure that one out.”
“Was it an accident?”
“I hope so.”
His cousin made a contemplative noise in the back of his throat. “Well, I’m sure the fire department will catch whoever or whatever—”
Pat laughed, an ugly sound to reflect his raw nerves. “It was Ethan. I just don’t know if it was an accident or not. That’s not why you’re here.”
“Right. You needed help with something?”
“You mentioned the other day that you’d been attached to the local FBI field office?”
A nod.
“They have you working on anything?”
“Not at the moment. You want to hire me?”
Pat frowned. “No, I was hoping you’d heard something about the vampire situation we’ve got developing.”
His cousin crossed the garage, hands braced on his hips. He was dressed in heavy wool slacks and a matching suit jacket and vest, polished leather shoes than gleamed in the low light, and soft dove grey tie that made Pat feel grubby by comparison.
“Vampires? In Seattle?”
“It’s not that surprising. Major metropolitan area, lots of people, lots of poverty and drugs, we’re just deluding ourselves to think that there wouldn’t be some kind of vampire presence here.”
“What kind of situation are you talking about?”
“You first. Have you heard anything in your channels?”
“No. But vampires don’t warrant Bureau attention until it becomes a national incident. What’s going on?”
Pat stared up at Vector, feeling tired and shabby in his soul if not precisely in his body. “We’ve got two bodies, by all signs drained dry by a vampire. Maybe the same one, I’m still waiting on the forensics.”
“I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but if it’s only two…”
“So far. Both vics were young attractive women enrolled at a local college. At least one of them had apparently developed a taste for partying this year.”
“Well, that’s definitely suspicious, but what did you need from me?”
Pat swallowed around the tightness in his throat. He hadn’t talked to anyone about Adam since his mandatory psych sessions right after his late partner’s death.
“Patrick?” Vector asked softly.
A hand landed on his shoulder, making Pat jump.
“We both know the party line: no coven in Seattle. That makes us the biggest metropolis in North America without a visible organized vampiric crime element. So, whatever vampire related crimes do occur, we chalk them up as outliers. Fringe violence or crime that no city can avoid. But I can’t help thinking… That’s bullshit, right? You can’t have a city of this size, a port city to the rest of the Pacific for crying out loud, without attracting a coven element. No way.”
Vector shrugged. “By contrast, Seattle has a disproportionately high population of werewolves compared to almost every other city in the United States.”
“Sure, but the packs don’t police vampires. We’re not the ones supposedly keeping them away.”
“No, but they were influential in writing strict city ordinances to prohibit a significant portion of vampire tradition. It makes Seattle an inhospitable environment for the covens to function under their own laws.”
“To function legally. That’s never stopped human crime organizations. Where there’s profit, there’s crime.”
“So, you think where there’s…blood in this case, there must be vampires? Based off of two murders? That seems incredibly far fetched,” Vector said skeptically.
“I know. I’m not really convinced myself, but my partner is suspicious.”
“Ah, the tenacious Ms Mallory.”
Pat shot his cousin a sharp look, wondering when the hell Vector had gotten to know Mallory.
“Yeah. She tried to access some files on vampire activity in the city going back the last four or five years and ran into a wall of red tape. Rather than deter her, that just made her more suspicious. I said I’d look into getting my hands on the files.”
“Are they from the FBI?”
Pat squeezed his eyes closed and sucked air through his teeth. Did he have to mention Adam? How much did he want to tell Vector?
“We’ve sent in official requests for the files. I’m not holding my breath that we’ll see anything, but who knows, the Captain likes me. Or she did before I took an unplanned leave of absence in September. I was actually going to ask if you could check with your people, or databases, whatever, to see if the FBI has any information that might be relevant. Something that’s not in our police records that you can get your hands on.”
“Seems like a long shot.”
“Probably is, but I don’t want more dead college girls on my hands.”
“I understand. I’ll see what I can find.”
“Also, I had this thought, that if there isn’t a coven here that doesn’t mean that the coven in another city doesn’t have fingers in our pie. Which, like you said, could be a national incident.”
Vector nodded. “Anything else?” he asked with a curious tilt of his head.
Pat could feel his eyes on the side of his head. Still he hesitated, fingering the evidence bag he’d stuffed in his jacket pocket on the way out of the station. He shouldn’t have taken it—a torn scrap of clothing from Liu’s dress. If he wasn’t so tired, if he wasn’t worried about getting home to Ethan every night, praying silently that the mage hadn’t done some permanent damage to himself, he would have followed the lead himself. But Vector was there, and he’d said that the Bureau didn’t have him working on anything at the moment.
Lucky bastard.
And Vector had always been better at this sort of thing than Pat.
He gave his cousin the evidence bag and explained where it had come from, including the street address.
“Any chance you could try and trace her steps before the scent trail disappears? We recovered the body this morning, killed sometimes before seven.”
Without opening the plastic, Vector held it up to his nose and huffed a couple of deep breaths. “I can check it out tomorrow.”
“Thanks. I’ll owe you a favor.”
Vector flashed him a quick, closed-mouth smile. “You seem…tired, but better?”
“Good night,” Pat said, cutting off that line of questions. He hit the button on the garage as he stood up and threw Vector a wave over his shoulder. He was being rude but no way was he going to have that conversation with anyone. Vector was a nosy son of a bitch, half the reason the FBI had snapped him up, no doubt.
Inside, he found Ethan leaning on the kitchen island, ass up and head bent over a mess of take out menus spread out in front of him. Pat had to tamp down on the twitch of interest that stirred in his groin at the sight and cleared his throat.
“So, what do you feel like having?” he asked, wondering just how much of his casual tone rang false to the other man.