Dags grunted, muttering under his breath.
“Landlord.”
He didn’t bother to correct her.
Dags reached the front door. He leaned his weight on it briefly, using his palms.
After a bare pause where he considered throwing the bolt, putting in ear plugs and going back to bed, he twisted the handle sideways and jerked the door open instead, wincing violently against the bright light that greeted him and throwing up a hand.
He hadn’t realized just how dark it was inside his studio.
His eyes had adjusted so well to the windowless apartment, he hadn’t realized it was nearly pitch-black inside, not until the morning sun hit his eyes. It half-blinded him, even with the deep shade of the large Jacaranda tree that took up a chunk of his front yard.
“Jesus, Dags,” the voice said. “Are you seriously naked right now?”
He froze.
Then, slowly, he looked down at himself.
He was naked.
He wasn’t even wearing socks.
The woman in front of him burst out in a disbelieving laugh.
Dags forced his eyes the rest of the way open, focusing first on the purple and orange aura that lit up her features and her dyed brown and blond hair, which was now woven into a long braid. He’d gotten to the point now where he identified people via their auras as much as by their faces or voices.
This particular halo of light was familiar to him, even down to the star-like sparkles of gold that made up her outline.
“What do you want, Kara?” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.
She frowned, folding her arms.
He saw her glance down at him a second time, more surreptitiously. When she saw him watching her look, she gave him a half-smile, quirking an eyebrow as her green and brown eyes rose back to meet his.
“Are you trying to impress me, Dags?”
“What do you want?”
She snorted a little. Her voice shifted abruptly to businesslike.
He knew that tone. It was her cop voice.
“Did you work a job last night?” she said.
Internally, he cursed.
Outwardly, he made his expression and voice confused.
“What?”
Her full lips pulled into a frown. “Come on, Dags. Were you working last night? Because there’s a video. Whoever’s on it looks a hell of a lot like you. In fact, the whole thing stinks of you, and your usual, freakishly bizarre m.o.”
She deepened her frown. “Well. This one contains some extra weirdness. More than usual weirdness. Which, for you, is saying a lot.”
Dags lowered his hand with an effort, still squinting past her aura, and past the morning sun.
“Would it make any difference if I said no?” he said.
Her wide mouth hardened.
“At this point? No.” When he didn’t move, she folded her arms. “For fuck’s sake, Dags. Put on some damned clothes. You’re not exactly helping your case, walking out here naked like a lunatic. Are you drunk? Because I thought you didn’t drink anymore.”
I don’t, Dags thought to himself.
He hadn’t had a sip of alcohol since that party on the beach with Jade and Uri.
He didn’t say that out loud, though. Really, he didn’t like anyone knowing any more about him than absolutely necessary. That went double for cops.
Triple for cops he’d known since high school.
Biting his lip, he considered retreating, finding his pants, then decided the hell with it. He stood there, folding his arms obstinately over his chest.
“Am I under arrest?” he said. “You’re going to arrest me for being naked? Or for some video you found on YouTube?”
She snorted, staring up at him.
“Nice try, Dags, but it was dash-cam footage… and body-cam footage… and you answered the door like this. Don’t get pissy with me about it. And yeah, I could probably arrest you for public indecency at this point.”
Biting her lip, she tossed her head to get her longish bangs out of her eyes.
When he didn’t move, she shifted her weight between her feet, obviously uncomfortable as she avoided looking down at him.
“Come on, Dags. I need to ask you some questions. I need you to come with me so we can do it downtown. Put on some pants, will you?”
When he didn’t move again, she sharpened her voice.
“In case you haven’t figured it out yet… me coming out here, asking nicely, is the easy way. Do you really want to do this the hard way? Where it’s not an informal chat with an old high school chum, but a search and arrest warrant with the guys who showed me the footage this morning? Because I suspect they’ll be a lot less amused by you, Dags.”
“And if I say no to this ‘friendly’ chat?”
“I just told you,” she snapped. “I, or, more likely, someone else, comes back with a warrant. Maybe more than one.”
Dags stared at her, feeling his jaw harden.
She wasn’t easy to stare down though, even for him.
“Come on,” she said. “Don’t make me a liar, Jourdain. I told them I could reason with you. I told them I could bring you in peacefully and get a statement without them having to call a judge. I told them I was sure you had a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they saw last night in Hollywood.”
“So let’s talk here,” he scowled.
She shook her head.
“No. Come on, Dags. You know how this works. I can only bend the rules so much. They want to see you.” Pausing, she added, “They aren’t going to take no for an answer this time. They want to see your face, Jourdain. Partly for the ID.”
He exhaled in anger.
He knew at least part of his reaction was cover, while he fought to think.
Video? Christ. He probably should have expected that. Cameras were everywhere these days. Dashboard cameras, body cams… they might have him on CCTV too, although he hadn’t noticed any in that alley.
He’d seen all those cops clustered at the mouth of the alley.
He had no one to blame but himself.
Well… he had no one to blame but the Change.
His heart pounded harder in his chest as flickers of memory from the night before flashed through his mind. What exactly had they seen? How much had they gotten on video? If they’d recorded all of it, Kara was being amazingly calm under the circumstances. Did she think it was some kind of optical illusion? A magic trick? Special effects?
He didn’t remember getting home.
That wasn’t exactly unusual, though.
He blacked out a lot when he flew.
“Dags⏤”
“All right, all right,” he snapped, stepping backwards into his apartment, rubbing his eyes with the heel of a hand. “Give me a minute, okay?”
“One minute,” she warned. “I mean it, Jourdain. You try slipping out a window somewhere, and I really am issuing a warrant.”
“I don’t even have a fucking window. Not unless you count that damned thing,” he retorted, motioning towards the beveled slat over his head.
Still scowling, he left the door open as he retreated backwards into the dim space.
“Come on in and watch me put on pants, if you’re going to be an asshole about it.”
She hesitated, then followed him warily inside.
He tried to ignore her.
Still, he could feel her behind him, watching his back as he stalked towards the alcove where his bed lived, more specifically to the giant, walk-in closet that took up the space below it.
Opening the door, he entered without turning on the light, walking to the chest of drawers and opening the one on top, where he kept his underwear. He’d just pulled on a pair of boxer briefs when she flicked on the light in the main room.
Immediately, she sucked in a surprised breath.
Hearing it, he scowled, even as he reached for a hanger, yanking down a pair of dark blue pants.
“What?” he grumbled.
She didn’t answe
r.
He didn’t ask a second time.
He had a pretty good idea what she was reacting to.
He didn’t let people into his personal space very often.
Most people had no idea where he lived.
Still, he’d learned his semi-underground, Hobbit-like apartment wasn’t exactly what people expected from what they knew of him. Presumably, because of how he lived and dressed in the outside world, especially in the course of his work, and the fact that his flat had no windows, they expected some kind of filthy, hole-in-the-wall, guy-likely-to-die-of-autoerotic-asphyxiation type bachelor basement.
Dags knew the type of place they envisioned.
He’d seen a fair-few in the course of his work.
Dags’ lip curled at the memory. He’d have worn gloves in a lot of those places even if he hadn’t been breaking in illegally.
He didn’t know how anyone could live like that.
As for the underground cave where he lived, it wasn’t really his preference, but he had his own reasons for living in a place with no windows.
“What the fuck, Dags?” she burst out, as he emerged from the closet.
She was still staring around his apartment, now with wide eyes.
Dags scowled, yanking the shirt he held in his hands over his head, shoving his tattooed arms into first one sleeve, then the other.
He saw her blue eyes lock on the tattoos themselves as they disappeared beneath the long-sleeved tee. Realizing what she was staring at, he mentally scowled again. He probably shouldn’t have let her see those either, under the circumstances.
Hell, though⏤she’d already seen him naked.
A little late to be worrying about tattoos.
Tugging the shirt down past his belt, he glanced around the room she was staring at, and scowled for real.
His apartment was only one room, so technically a studio, but it was big.
Despite the door he’d gone out of his way to weather and fuck up on the outside, the inside of his apartment had been designed by the same famous designer as the Hollywood Hills house above him, on the same property.
The previous owners had fallen on hard times over the course of a few movie flops and even worse cable seasons; they’d decided to rent out the space Dags occupied, which opened into their lower garden and likely once functioned as a guesthouse or maybe a really big art studio.
It suited Dags’ purposes perfectly.
By the time he moved in, it hadn’t been a guest house for years.
The space was filled with junk, and that part of the grounds had already overgrown with palms, rose bushes, wildflowers, Ficus trees, the giant Jacaranda, a few smaller ones, and whatever else had originally been landscaped before they’d been forced to let go of their gardener.
By the time those original owners left for real, they’d also covered the pool on the upper terrace on the other side of the house.
New people lived in the main house now.
They, and the gardener, left Dags and his part of the grounds alone.
The pool and deck area had been repaired, updated, and cleaned up, along with the gardens around the main house, but the two sides of the property remained relatively separate. The woman living up there now, one Jane Harrow, respected Dags’ privacy, and Dags extended her the same courtesy.
Luckily, it wasn’t hard to do; the grounds were big.
Dags couldn’t hear a damned thing from the main house most of the time, even when she threw one of her industry pool and cocktail parties.
Most people had no idea anyone lived down here at all.
Dags didn’t even get mail here.
Kara must be a better detective than he thought.
“What the fuck, Dags?” she said again, pulling his eyes back to hers. “How can you afford all this? What the hell are you into?”
Dags frowned, that time in disbelief.
Good detective or not, he wondered if he should take it personally that she’d immediately assumed he was living some nefarious life of crime.
His eyes shifted around the studio, trying to see it through her eyes.
It was a large space, granted.
Opposite the front door, the wall was exposed brick, broken up by stone tiles and glass squares that lit up when the main overheads switched on.
The designer built most of the structure into the hillside, raising the height as he built back, which stretched the normal-ish nine- or ten-foot ceiling by the front door to more than double that at the highest point. The whole studio was maybe 1800 square feet of floor space. Stone from the hillside and wooden brace beams kept the ceiling up, and despite the lack of windows, the white and glass-tile walls lent it a feeling of space, aided by his overall minimalist thing. Navajo rugs covered parts of the stone tile floor; those, coupled with the wood beams gave it almost a Southwestern feel, despite the confusion of styles.
The opposite end of the great room led to a large, yellow- and white-tile kitchen with a door to the back garden. He had sun-simulating lamps that allowed him to have a small palm forest near his work station, along with vines that wrapped around an upright desk.
Jade and Uri joked it was a supervillain’s lair.
Dags figured that was the underground thing.
Well, that… and the wall of weapons.
Those could arguably be decorative, though.
“What?” he said again, looking back at Kara. “You don’t like my decorating style?”
She was staring around at the high ceilings, the stainless-steel kitchen on the other side of its white marble island. Her eyes flickered back to the raised alcove where he slept.
She glanced at his white-stone fireplace and the leather furniture.
Then her eyes found his wall of weapons.
She stared at his collection of swords, axes, throwing knives and other assorted knick-knacks in obvious disbelief.
“What the fuck, Dags?”
“What the fuck what, Kara? Are you seriously asking me to explain my decorating quirks?” His mouth hardened. “Why, exactly? Do you have a warrant? Or not?”
Glancing at him, she hesitated.
He saw the instant she decided not to answer, closing her mouth and folding her arms. She watched him silently as he plunked his weight down on the white leather chair near the door to pull on socks and shove his feet into his standard combat boots.
He tried not to let her see him wince while he did it.
It wouldn’t exactly help his case if he appeared visibly injured.
“Do you have permits for those?” she said finally, nodding back towards his weapons wall.
“Name one thing on there that requires a permit,” he retorted. “…and I’ll tell you.”
Her frown deepened as she turned back to scan the wall with her eyes, clearly looking for something illegal or quasi-legal, something that required some kind of permission to own.
“God bless the U.S.A.,” he muttered, rising to his feet.
Motioning towards her with a flourish, he invited her to lead him out.
After another stiff-shouldered pause, she did.
Chapter 4
High School
She didn’t talk to him much on the drive down to the station.
She got on the radio a few times, confirming she was bringing him in.
Apparently, not everyone down at the precinct was wholly comfortable with her assurances she could “bring him in peacefully.”
One of them even started to argue with her, until Kara informed the guy that Dags was sitting next to her, listening to every word.
Dags wanted to ask how she found him, when the only address he had, the only one where he actually received mail, was his office in Los Feliz. He kept his real address off pretty much everything. His driver’s license and passport still used his parents’ address, even though they’d both died the year before and the house had been sold.
He supposed he’d have to do something about that, now that the mail-forward was about to
expire.
That didn’t answer the question of Kara, though.
Had Kara called Jade? Because that was pretty low.
Scowling, he stared out at the buildings and streets as they blurred past. He wanted to ask, but forced himself to sit there instead, jaw clenched.
He knew Kara.
It was definitely better if she didn’t know it bothered him.
It would only pique her interest more.
It would only make her dig more.
“What did you tell them about me?” he said into the silence. “The other cops?”
She gave him an incredulous look.
He’d thought the question was innocuous enough, but maybe he really was bad at this peopling thing, because she looked at him like he was nuts. Like he hadn’t just been woken up by a homicide detective and stuck in her car⏤even if it was a regular, non-black and white, and he rode in the front seat, not behind a wire cage.
“Other than the fact we went to high school together?” she snorted. “Other than the fact that you used to be relatively normal once? If kind of a loser burnout?”
His mouth curled involuntarily.
“Did you tell them you used to be a pep squad geek?” he grumbled. “One who got off on busting her friends for sneaking off campus?”
She gave him a hard look.
“Friends, Dags?” she said coldly. “Really? Is that what we were?”
Seeing the real anger in her eyes, he realized maybe he’d crossed a line. Probably not a great idea, given she’d obviously made this easier on him than it could have been.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
She didn’t answer.
He saw her fingers clench on the worn steering wheel of her battered-looking Honda, relaxing only slowly. That harder look never left her mouth.
Remembering how she’d been treated in most of high school, he regretted his words even more. He also couldn’t think of a way to take them back, not without making it worse.
They didn’t talk for the rest of the ride downtown.
Even when she parked, she just got out, without looking to see if he followed.
He did follow.
He caught up to her on the stairs, walking up beside her, passing in front of her only when she held open the door. How was it she tracked him down, woke him up, saw him naked, demanded he get in her car, practically arrested him, and he felt like the prick?
I, Angel Page 3