“How are things in the friendship department? It’s gotta be hard making connections when you’ve had so little experience socializing with strangers.”
I had no friends. Not a one. Not anymore. I would much rather blame my self-imposed solitude on social ineptitude than face the real reason why I had no one to hang with after work. “I’ve been focused on learning the job.”
“You gotta have balance, Lee.” He twisted in his seat. “How about I hook you up with some training wheels until you get the hang of it?”
“Um…”
Toying with the piping on the seat, he shrugged. “How about I be your friend?”
“Does this have anything to do with you keeping a closer eye on me?”
Midas had paired us up for a reason, and I had no doubt his justifications went deeper than this case.
“You’re hurting my feelings.” He clucked his tongue. “Friends don’t hurt each other’s feelings.”
I had done more than hurt feelings. I had ruined lives, ended them. That was then, and this was now. I had to stop letting the past overlap the present. Otherwise, what was the point of a second chance? “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”
“Hey, you’re getting the hang of it.” He clapped for me. “Friends always say they’re sorry when they’re wrong.”
“I didn’t say I was wrong.” I smiled at him, all sugar and spice. “Only that I was sorry I hurt your feelings.”
“Okay.” He gripped the wheel. “Back to remedial you go.”
“Are you sure friendship isn’t a conflict of interest when it comes to our partnership?”
“Nah.” He waved off the notion. “Now if we were dating…”
The slight rise in his tone on the last word made it sound like a question I didn’t know how to answer. “We’re not.”
“No,” he agreed, his mouth pinching. “We’re not.”
“I can’t tell if you’re being nice because Midas told us to work together, or if you’re hitting on me.”
“Am I that rusty?” He scratched his cheek, glanced out the windshield. “I haven’t dated in…a while.”
“That makes two of us.” I was creeping up on a twenty-month dry spell with no end in sight, even if Ford was a tall drink of water.
“Do you remember the night we met?”
Try as I might, I couldn’t pin it down to one defining moment. “No?”
“The first time I saw you, you were standing over a decapitated chupacabra, a short sword in each hand, and its head at your feet.” Nostalgia tinged his voice. “Not gonna lie, darlin’. I got heart palpitations.”
I remembered the kill, one of my first, but I didn’t remember him bearing witness.
“Only when you’re hunting big game, huh?”
“You might have noticed the POA is a fan of decapitation.”
I, his faithful apprentice, was one year into lessons with twin kopis blades already stained with more blood than a lifetime of scrubbing would cleanse.
“Does it bother you?” He put a pin in his amusement. “The killing?”
“No.” The shadow reveled in it, took sustenance from it, and I…had made my bed. There was nothing to do but lie in it. “It’s part of the job.”
“You’ve seen gwyllgi?”
“Shifted?” I locked down the shiver that wanted to roll through my shoulders. “A few times.”
Gwyllgi, this pack at least, had descended from the matings of gwyllgi born in Faerie to wargs born here.
In their natural form, gwyllgi reminded me of that flipbook where you mixed and matched heads, torsos, and legs from other animals to create a new one. They weren’t mishmashes, but a seamless blend of a large dog and a monitor lizard. A bullmastiff and Komodo dragon maybe. Their pelts, as far as I could tell, ran toward earthy colors. Tawny or rust or black or some combination.
“You don’t sound scarred for life,” he noted. “Does that mean you can deal with that aspect of my nature?”
“You can’t be worse than Midas.”
A prickling curiosity honed his voice. “When did you see Midas shifted?”
Frak.
I hadn’t meant to let that slip.
Memories from my old life were crowding my new one, and I was at risk of getting trampled.
“The POA is big into assigning homework. I watched footage from the Siege of Savannah.”
Fifteen months ago, vampires had seized the city and held it for the better part of a week. Gwyllgi had fought alongside necromancers to regain control and stomp out the vampire uprising. Midas had missed the action, but he had been present during the initial stages of the rebuilding process, lending a hand to his sister and her newly established pack.
I really had watched the video as part of an assignment on how to secure Atlanta against a similar attack, so it wasn’t a total lie. Even if I had seen Midas shift in person, on more than one occasion.
Nodding, he seemed to accept that. “What did you think?”
He meant what did I think of Midas, of gwyllgi in their natural form, but I faked misunderstanding. “The siege was long and bloody but not half as bad as it could have been.”
Ford narrowed his eyes on me, clearly not fooled, but he didn’t push me for a real answer.
“I should go.” I pointed out the sign near his bumper. “No parking zone, remember?”
“I’ll give you a holler tomorrow.”
“Works for me.”
I slid out of the cab and waited on the sidewalk until he drove off before skirting the front entrance, and the regular nighttime gwyllgi doorman who always eyed me with distrust, to slip down the alley between buildings. I wasn’t kidding about not tempting fate. I kept to myself as much as possible to avoid giving myself away.
That meant avoiding the doormen, the lobby, the elevators, and common areas where I would establish a scent trail over time that anyone could follow straight to me. Using the fire escape to reach my apartment was safer with warm summer rains and hot breezes erasing the buildup before it seeped into the cracks and stuck.
“What are you doing back here?”
Midas.
Instincts honed over a lifetime warned me to hunch away from the snap of his anger, from the certainty pain would follow, but I didn’t take hits anymore, not from anyone, and so I straightened my shoulders. “Going home.”
“Hadley,” he said, the rasp in his voice going soft. “I don’t hurt women.”
Fists balling at my sides, I hated how easily he read weakness in me. “I never said you did.”
“No, you just recoiled like you were waiting for a slap to land.” He considered me. “Or a fist.”
Playing it off as a misunderstanding, I shrugged. “Hazards of the job.”
“That’s not what I—” He shut his eyes, but his lips kept moving as he counted to ten under his breath. Who routinely annoyed him enough that he had adopted such a coping mechanism? “Please use the front door from now on. The fire escape is for emergencies, not for cardio.”
“I’ve been taking the stairs for the past year, and the supports have yet to pry free of the building, crash to the asphalt, and put me in an early grave. I don’t see the problem.” I spun the interrogation around on him. “What are you doing here?”