When I left my apartment twenty minutes later, Kaiten was standing by his car with a scowl painted on his face. Alright, maybe I hadn’t been ready when I called him. Who there was chewing gum on the back of my trousers? Certainly not me.
Last night, I’d been sleepy and quite a bit tired, so I’d failed to notice details I usually kept an eye out for. Now, with the morning sky golden above us and a nice chill in the air, I let my gaze rove over Kaiten with greater detail. He was either ex-military or very well trained. I could tell by his dead eyes and straight back, by the way he held himself, entirely aware of the space around him. It was a quality only the most competent could master.
Deadly. Efficient.
He was in a black suit, dressed for work and without a hair out of place. The slight bulge in his jacket signaled a weapon, and I was sure there was another at his ankle even if I couldn’t see it. Could I take him in a straight draw? Probably not. It was just a feeling I had. His motion was too fluid, too easy. His eyes never missed a detail and there was a way to him that I’d only seen around hit-men in Deadtown.
“Five minutes?” he asked coldly.
I turned and showed him my back. “I had chewing gum stuck to my jeans, and good morning to you too.”
He gave me a flat stare. “You didn’t say where we were going over the phone. Apparently, my every word is being recorded by several clandestine organizations.”
“For being an asshole, yeah,” I replied, “and we’re going to the coroner’s office. No time to chat, Iceman.”
“The coroner’s office? Is this related to the case, or am I simply acting as my driver?”
“Are you refusing to take me? Very, very bad, Kaiten.”
He ran a hand through his thick hair, and I think I wobbled slightly. “It’s right by my station,” he said finally. “Am I missing something? Do you know something I don’t?”
So Robocop wasn’t omniscient. Well that was just magnificent, wasn’t it? I slipped into his black Camaro and started playing with the radio almost as soon as I was in. He slapped my hand away—twice—before turning on me and demanding a straight answer.
“Alright,” I sighed. “Calm the hell down or you’ll blow a vein. Leela Snow died an hour ago at the hospital.”
“What?”
“She’s off to sunnier pastures,” I clarified. “I paid someone at the hospital to call me the moment it happened. The corner is planning to cut her open any minute, and I want to be the first to hear the findings.”
“You mean the corner is going to perform an post-mortem? We don’t call it ‘cutting open’ in our profession.”
“Yes, that,” I replied with a distracted nod. “Are you glad I woke you?”
“I wasn’t asleep, if you must know,” Kaiten said. “What’s with the change of heart, anyways? You do realize it’s your function to keep me away from the investigation?”
“And do you realize your function is to get as close to the investigation as you can? By reminding me of my function, you reduce the chances of ever receiving credit for this,” I replied. “So let’s be happy I bothered to call you and move on, alright?”
Kaiten’s eyebrows met in sharp disapproval, but he started the car and pulled out into the street. I gathered a deep breath, lost in swimming thoughts, and I was hit suddenly by the scent of molten chocolate and almonds. Man, but did I want to bury my nose against his neck and just pant away. Did he rub himself down with the stuff? It was the only way to smell like that. Right at this moment, he felt more like a tasty meal than an attractive man. Maybe a bite of him wouldn’t hurt.
Calm down, tiger. Think ugly thoughts. Blood and gore. Gore and meat. Meat and steaks. Steaks are yummy. So is coffee. Coffee is like chocolate. Chocolate with almonds. Kaiten Elzoran. Oh, my god! It was a vicious cycle. How was I going to escape? Get out of my head, demons!
“What are you thinking?”
“Blood and gore,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly. “You know…the post-mortem. There’s going to be so much blood.”
“Actually, there’s not going to be much. The bodies are drained before,” he replied. “Does blood scare you?”
What a funny guy, right? “No, blood doesn’t scare me,” I said lamely. “Trust me when I say I’ve seen my share of it.”
“That’s what I heard.”
I was suddenly quiet. “What does that mean?”
“Oh, not much,” he replied with a shrug. “People talk. I don’t indulge in the practice, but I asked around about you.”
Shit. How much does everyone know about my past “Did you, now?”
“You sound offended.”
“And you sound incredibly friendly today. It’s creeping me out.”
Kaiten laughed, and I think it was the first time I’d heard him. The sound was deep and strong, overflowing with life but not enthusiastic enough to reflect a true happiness. Like me, Kaiten had his dark past. He had his regrets, fears and evils.
“I was terribly rude last night, and I’m hoping to make up for it,” he replied, and there was a note of honesty in his voice. “After I saw how your colleagues treated you…well, I didn’t feel incredibly just in my outrage.”
My hands curled into tight fists, and I pressed them down against my thighs. “I don’t need your fucking, self-righteous pity,” I snapped. “If you want to treat me well, do it because of my merits and not my weaknesses. I have enough people looking down on me.”
I was expecting an outburst or sharp counter of some kind. In fact, I was hoping he’d get pissed off enough to kick me out of his car. I could deal with hate and anger, but I couldn’t deal with friendship. His kindness was a sharp blade digging into me, because I knew I would turn it against him eventually. I’d betray him as I was taught to. I would betray him because he couldn’t possibly find out about my secrets.
“They say you ran off when you were thirteen,” said Kaiten quietly. “To Deadtown, no less. Just disappeared. Is that true.”
“Why?”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he replied. “I was undercover there for a time. Three years with a local gang.”
My heart dropped down and hit my ovaries. I tried to keep calm when I asked, “When was this?”
“Almost ten years ago,” he replied. A cool breath of relief slid free from my lungs. “I was new to the division and good with covers. Back then, we were just figuring out how to work with the prenaturals, and I was one of the few willing to trust them.”
I laughed, but it sounded empty even to me. “You? Trust us? I’ll believe that when I see it.”
Kaiten shot me a sour glare. “I’d been dealing with red tape for two weeks when I met you last night. The Prenatural Branch threw everything they had at me, and I was angry,” he explained. “You showed up, and I just decided to let it all out. I think you’re a pain in the ass and know very little about police work, but you didn’t deserve being insulted.”
“Stop, please,” I begged with a grin. “You’re ruining everything. Can’t I just hate you? I mean, it’s so damn easy. You’re like an icicle.”
“So I’ve been told,” he replied, smiling that small smile of his. “To be honest, Deadtown changed me. It was hell at every turn. Blood and death. If aren’t a killer down there, then you’re—”
“—A victim,” I completed. “Yeah, I’ve heard that more than once. Why’re you telling me all this? Sounds incredibly personal, and I’m all for girl talk and shit, but I’d rather not have you crying on my shoulder.”
Kaiten’s gray eyes hardened slightly. “You said I shouldn’t judge you by your weaknesses,” he said, “and I’m not going to. From what I know, and it isn’t much, you survived longer than I did, and you did it as a child. Thirteen-year-old girls are either whores or someone’s play thing. Which one were you?”
Son of a bitch. This was all another way to insult me. Of course he would assume I was a whore. How else did I survive there? It filled with a burning anger that I just couldn’t hold in. “Go fuck yourself, why don’t you?” I spat, turning my face away and pressing it against the cool window. “You haven’t the slightest fucking clue what I went through, so don’t throw shit at me, you little, upstart dick.”
Kaiten laughed, and it was cold and remorseless. “I saw girls like you. Beaten and useless. Addicted, track marks all over their arms,” he replied. “If I lifted your sleeve, would I see that?”
I jerked at my jacket, pulling it off and baring my arms to him. I raked my nails across the hard muscle and thrust them up at him. “Look at that, you piece of shit!” I shouted. “Look! Not a fucking mark. I’m as clean as fucking baby. If you even knew how I survived down there, you’d crap your pants and beg me not to tear your fucking throat out.”
And then I saw it, that shadow of amusement. He was enjoying this. He’d got exactly what he wanted. Everything that had come out of his mouth was meant to piss me off and inspire an angry reaction. Shit, but I’d walked right into his trap. He’d laid it so well, pretending to be kind and understanding. Then he sprang that whore comment on me, knowing I’d snap and say something revealing, and I’d done exactly that.
“Oh, don’t stop,” he goaded. “You were saying something about tearing my throat out.”
“You’re a bastard, you know that?” I replied, and I was suddenly calm. I was calm like I was before I killed someone. I’d gone to that place of utter solitude where you could do just about anything and not care. It took a certain amount of experience turn your feelings off by command, but it’s a skill I’d mastered years ago “My past isn’t a tool to be used against me. This isn’t amusing. My life isn’t amusing.”
Kaiten slowed at a red light and looked down at me. “I don’t think it is, but there is darkness to you that I don’t trust. I’ve seen it before, and we both know what it means, don’t we?”
Yes, we did. He had it as well. The numbness that came after you’d killed enough not to care anymore. That point where you could draw and fire, kill and maim without hesitation. It was trick you eventually learned in Deadtown, and if you didn’t learn it fast enough then you died like the rest of them. I was a survivor, and I would never apologize for what I’d had to do.
“If I can’t trust you then I at least have to know what kind of person you are,” he continued. “There are quite a few people in the APD who believe you’re a mole. That you’re working for someone in Deadtown.”
My head snapped up, and my eyes were empty well of hate. “If my uncle thought for even a second that I couldn’t be trusted, he would never have let me join.”
“You mean your father?”
“What?”
“Chief Commissioner Danthir is your father, not your uncle. You called him that yesterday as well.”
I shrugged. “On paper, sure. He adopted me, my sister and my brother—all from different families,” I replied. “We always looked at him like he was our uncle because we still remember the homes we came from. I don’t see how that’s relevant to any of this. I’m not a mole.”
“I know that, but others are certain you are.”
I frowned up at him suspiciously as he accelerated out of the stop. “You know that? How do you know it?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
Kaiten sighed, and I noticed the slight tightening of his hands around the steering wheel. “There are no track marks on your arms. Nothing to show you were an addict, and you don’t act like one either,” he said. “I spent enough time in Deadtown to know it’s almost impossible to stay away from the drugs. If that place couldn’t break you; if it couldn’t corrupt you, then I doubt you’d betray father’s loyalty so easily.”
“You actually believe that?”
“Yes,” he replied honestly.
“Then you’re being naive,” I replied. “We both know there are more ways to corrupt a person than by drugs.”
“Oh, we do?”
I nodded firmly. “I’ve seen into you, Kaiten. Don’t play me for a fool,” I said. “We’ve already been broken, as much as we want to believe we haven’t. There’s that line you cross; that line you can never came back from. You know what I’m talking about, but you just don’t want to admit it.”
He sat there in silence, and I had my answer.
Our humanity was just a cloak for what we hid underneath.
♦ ♦ ♦
My arrival at the coroner’s office was enough to get my spirits back up. What I didn’t realize until I walked through the front door was that I knew the chief medical examiner. In fact, I knew him damn well. Hanar Javim was a middle-aged doctor who’d been a friend of the family for as long as I could remember. He was the epitome of an academic: inquisitive and slightly mad. I loved the man mostly because of his quirkiness and the fact that he never cared what people thought about him.
Oh, and he was a necromancer. Not many people knew that.
“Aza!” he exclaimed when Kaiten and I walked into his cluttered office. Glasses askew and blue eyes filled with almost childlike excitement, he jumped up and wrapped me in a strong embrace. “I received a call telling me you were on your way. I haven’t been this excited in months!”
We jumped around for a good five minutes, joking and laughing, and catching up on what had happened since we last saw each other. Apparently, Hanar had found a girl whose fascination with corpses rivaled his own, a morbid detail of his character that I’d never held against him. The fact that he admitted it meant she was probably one hell of a person. Necrophilia, anyone?
Kaiten stood in the doorway, dark and brooding, the embodiment of ‘let’s get the fuck on with this’. I ignored the testy bastard and stretched our greeting out until I could feel him shifting on the balls of his feet, just itching to jump in and separate us. Go ahead and try, Iceman.
Hanar finally became serious, looking at me from behind his steel-rimmed glasses. “How are you really doing, Aza?” he asked sternly. “I know the readjustment hasn’t been easy.”
My eyes flitted to Kaiten and then back to him. “How do you know that? Is Sana tattling to you?”
“Your sister is concerned,” he replied. “She said you’ve missed the family dinner three weeks in a row.”
“Seriously? They have one every Friday. I can’t be expected to drop everything and show up.”
“What did I tell you when you came back? Routine is essential for recovery,” he said. “Routine, Aza. You need it more than you think.”
I gave him a lovely pout, bringing my dimple-powers to bear. After my return from the land of the missing, Hanar had assumed the role of an informal psychiatrist. He actually had a degree, so stop looking at me like that. The man probably knew more about what happened in Deadtown than anyone who wasn’t there to see it with their own eyes. Despite the fact that he could easily read me, Hanar wasn’t exactly resistant to my charms.
“If I promise to go, will you leave me alone?” I asked.
“Tonight,” he said firmly. “You promise?”
Score for the dimples! “I promise.”
“Good,” he replied. Then, his gaze went to Kaiten. “Detective Elzoran, forgive me for not greeting you probably. Aza has the effect of completely distracting me.”
Kaiten gave him a stiff smile, and I knew him well enough by now that the expression came as a surprise. He’d barely even looked at the receptionist, and I had the feeling Kaiten wasn’t the kind of person who cared about annoying others. So the fact that he’d bothered enough to give Hanar a smile meant he didn’t have anything against him.
“That she does, Dr. Javim” he agreed, “and the ability to annoy me to no end.
I scowled up at him, but I was too happy to be angry.
“You’re both here for the woman who died recently?” asked the doctor. “One of the white-eyes?”
“White-eyes?” I asked.
Hanar nodded, and I could see the edge of excitement in his eyes. This case interested him immeasurably. “That’s what I’m calling them. The white-eyes,” he replied. “Their eyes don’t actually turn white, they simply roll so far back that everything else disappears. Muscular spasm.”
Well that was good to know. “What can you tell us?”
Hanar hesitated. “You are part of the investigation, aren’t you?”
“I’m liaising,” I replied. “Technically, that makes me a part of the team.”
The doctor grinned. “I’m all for technicalities. This case is magnificent, Aza. I always come across interesting deaths when prenaturals are a factor, but these are some of the most bizarre I’ve ever seen.”
I hated lying to him, but I had to do it. Hanar knew I’d killed people when I was in Deadtown. He didn’t know how much though, and he didn’t know I’d done it more often on orders than in self-defense. I’d been too afraid to admit that to him. In fact, I’d been too afraid to admit any of it, and most of what he knew was based on assumptions. I would make an ambiguous statement, and he would take whatever meaning he could out of it.
Not the best system, I know.
“The cause of death isn’t clear, but it’s entirely a result of the mind,” he explained breathlessly. “There’s no trauma whatsoever on the three victims. I’m operating on the theory that they died from a neurological problem. It was almost like their body shut down; someone pulled their plug.”
“Is there any chance the victims were poisoned?” asked Kaiten. “Two died while asleep in their beds, and the third was found in an alley not a block away from where she was believed to be staying. If there were no defensive wounds, it would be possible they were poisoned.”
Hanar pursed his lips. “I considered that, but every test I’ve run came up negative for poisons,” he replied. “However, I did find something quite interesting. I don’t know how it pertains to the nature of their deaths, but all three had a common mutation in their genes.”
“Lycanthropy.”
The word slipped out of my mouth before I could stop myself, and I was immediately horrified. That’s me—the effervescent detective without a clue about a damn thing. How could I go and spit that out? There was no way in hell I could explain my source of knowledge, even if I consumed a dozen cups of coffee. Here’s to all the idiots capable of screwing themselves without help.
The doctor stared at me with an open mouth and then shut it with an audible click. “I believe you just stole my thunder.”
I shot Kaiten a sheepish glance and found him staring down at me in a mix of triumph and suspicion. The triumph was obviously for the fact that I’d confirmed all his theories. Now he knew I was hiding something, and he wouldn’t stop until I spilled it all out. The suspicion was obviously him wondering whether I was worth trusting and what else I’d hid from him. Just when we were beginning to understand each other, I’d pissed it away with a careless impulse.
“Care to explain how you guessed that, detective?” asked Kaiten slowly, his voice edged with warning.
“Well there’s your answer.”
“What?”
“I guessed it,” I replied with a nonchalant shrug. Yes, I’m badass and I can pull of nonchalant shrugs. That’s good genes. “Just had a feeling. Hanar always saves the best for last, so I said the first thing that came to mind.”
The doctor was too oblivious to make out the undercurrent in our exchange and continued talking. “All three of them tested for lycanthropy. From what I know, Detective Inspector Schuler has yet to link them in their private lives, but I have a medical reason to believe they may have been targeted because of what they were. I honestly believe that Schuler is incompetent.”
If there was one thing I agreed with, it was that. From what I could tell, though, there were more pressing problems than Schuler’s sheer incompetence. Kaiten was beginning to look at me like he had last night. Like I was something that ought to be knocked over the head, stuffed into a car trunk and driven off the edge of a pier.
What now?
Glamourist Extraordinaire 