by TJ Nichols
Tatiana touched his cheek, and he turned his head to stare through the hole in the bed. The weight of the heat pack spread over his back and he groaned.
“I’ll come back in a few minutes.”
She left him on the table to relax… or at least try to relax.
Jordan had texted that morning to tell him the teen Francis had caught was out already, but he’d been charged. Edra wouldn’t put any money on the human teen getting more than a warning. More likely the judge would throw the case out, but the message had ended on a more positive note—Jordan’s captain had approved the visit to the den. At least Edra hoped it was positive and not some kind of setup where the cops took the opportunity to plant drugs or other illegal items for a future raid.
The anti-integration mayor was now actively campaigning to close down the dens and the mytho temples. He wanted mythos separated from humans, preferably locked up. He was very vocal when the internment camps were shut down, warning of the dangers to humans. A second term would be disastrous for the mytho population.
While there were worse cities to have arrived in, there were also better ones.
Edra made an effort to see what was happening around the country and around the world. He wanted to believe that it would all settle down and they would find a way to live together. Humans had come to Tariko in the past, and some had stayed and made lives there. Edra thought ten years should’ve been long enough for anyone to get over the shock and find a way forward. The mythos had moved on and done the best they could, but some humans still wanted the mythos to go home. If there was a home to go to, they’d have gone. No mytho in their right mind would stay on Earth. Edra had never seen a more dysfunctional society.
Tatiana came back into the room. Her footsteps padded closer, and her large green toes came into view. He tried not to tense, but it was hard when he knew what was coming. She removed the heat pack and pressed into the knots that had formed along his spine and between his shoulder blades. He grunted.
“You feel that?”
He grunted again as she moved her fingers over another knot and kneaded it as though she were trying to make his muscle disintegrate.
She pressed near his neck, and his leg twitched off the table.
“This is not good. You need to fly more.”
“Ow.” He squirmed, unable to help himself.
She made conversation about the various mythos she treated. She didn’t have a degree in physiotherapy, but that was pretty much what she’d done before the collapse, along with herb craft. She was a healer. Here she had a certificate in massage therapy, and she was thinking about getting her degree. But they’d had this conversation before, and she was still thinking about it, not doing it.
“You should.” He caught his breath and prepared for the next onslaught.
“Humans still won’t come to see me.” The sadness in her voice was an echo he’d heard many times from many mythos.
“I think a sports team would snap you up.” She could treat even the beefiest of football players, unkinking muscles and stretching limbs that a human physio would struggle with.
Tatiana laughed. “That would be fun. Some of them are even as tall as me.”
He could hear the smile in her voice and knew she didn’t watch football for the game, but for the men. Sweaty beefcakes were not his thing and never had been. “You’d still be stronger.”
“I know.” She did something at the base of the neck that made his skin go cold. “Too much?”
“Give me a moment.” He breathed through the pain until the cold faded and he was visible again.
She smoothed her hands over his back. “I don’t need a degree to do what I do.”
“True, but we need to stop boxing ourselves in. We need to—”
Tatiana placed her hands on his back and pressed. Something cracked and immediately felt better.
“Be more like them?” she asked.
“Integrate.” Mythos weren’t human, but they could emulate them and strive. More formal qualifications would enable them to get better jobs, and that would be a start.
“So how is your degree going, Knight? What is it cops need?” She pressed and twisted again.
“They won’t let mythos be cops,” he said through gritted teeth. Mythos weren’t citizens and couldn’t become citizens, so they were ineligible to serve.
“That’s true at the moment. But in four years’ time? How old are you now? One hundred and twenty?”
“One hundred and thirty-four.”
“So what are you going to do for another seventy years?”
Edra didn’t know what to say. He usually tried not to think about it. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll start my degree when you do.”
“Mytho kids are starting to finish school. Some will go to college.” He hoped they would, anyway. Mytho kids who were born on Earth were in a kind of limbo—not quite citizens but not quite refugees. The president wanted to end that doubt, but there were those who worried about what that would mean if some of them wanted to join the military. How could they be trusted?
Too many humans thought the mythos wanted revenge. And while some did, the majority just wanted to find a way to live.
“Turn over and I’ll work on your chest.”
He hated this part. The muscle at the side of his chest ached, and she was going to make it hurt worse, but he turned over.
His phone buzzed from his jacket pocket and offered an escape.
“Did you want to get that?”
“No.” Whatever it was could wait a few minutes.
She dug into the muscles. “You should come back in a couple of days and I’ll get into the muscles while you are shifted.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“No it won’t.”
He gasped as she kneaded into knots he hadn’t even realized were there. She was grinning, and her gray skin made her eyes as bright as jewels. For an ogre, she was very pretty. His lips curved for a moment before she wiped the smile away with another well-placed dig with her thumbs.
“I’ll come back.” Anything to make it stop. He’d feel better tomorrow. It would be worth it. He kept repeating that, hoping it would be true.
“I’ll give you some tea to take tonight for the muscle soreness.”
He thanked her weakly.
Her touch gentled, and she stepped back. Years ago, long before the collapse, they… well, they hadn’t really been dating, because they both knew it was never going to be serious. Dragons and ogres would be like phoenixes and mermaids. He reached out and grabbed her hand. “I’ll look into the degree. Maybe by the time I’m one hundred and fifty, I’ll need it.”
She laughed. “Edra….” Then she shook her head. “Do you sometimes wonder if we shouldn’t have taken over an old town? Moved away from the humans?”
That had been one of the early offers. There were plenty of ghost towns, and the California government had offered up a dozen if the mythos wanted them. While it was tempting and some mythos opted to go, he felt that hiding wasn’t the right thing to do. He couldn’t vanish the way the humans wanted.
“No. They need to see us. We need to be part of their world again.”
“I don’t know if we ever will be.”
She left him alone to get dressed, and he checked his messages. Francis had been stabbed and was in the hospital.
He’d bet a dragon egg he knew who did it.
“YOU WANT to tell me what happened?” Edra stood next to the neat hospital bed that was really too small for the ogre teen. Francis was almost his adult height, though right then he looked like a scared child. His mother sat by the bed, her lips pressed into a thin line.
There weren’t many hospitals willing to treat mythos. The Catholic ones refused. Mythos were against their religion because they didn’t exist in this world. It was an argument Edra struggled to follow, but they were just as picky with humans, refusing to offer birth control and certain procedures, and the people in power let the
m get away with it. That would be like Tatiana refusing to treat him in human form because he’d done the injury as a dragon.
Francis gripped the bedsheets until his knuckles whitened to match the fabric. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“I know that.” What had the cops and ambulance officers said to Francis to terrify him? Where was Jordan? He should be there. “Just tell me what happened.”
“At school some of the kids were hassling other mythos. I wanted to stop them, but I didn’t do anything. I just stood with them, you know, because I’m big.”
A good tactic. Many humans were scared of ogres simply because of their size. “And then what? Did the teachers step in?”
“Not really. The humans weren’t touching us, so they just watched. I saw the guys who’ve been stealing. They looked angry.”
Edra tasted the air and glanced at the door. No jasmine today and probably no slinky underwear either. A few seconds later, Jordan stepped into the doorway. He nodded at Edra.
“I spoke to the officers who attended. The humans are saying you attacked first and it was self-defense.” Jordan didn’t sound as though he believed that.
Francis and his mother both started to speak.
Edra swore and raked his fingers through his hair. That was always the rationale when a mytho was attacked.
Jordan held up his hand and waited for the ogres to stop talking. “But some of the other kids recorded the whole thing. I have been given the footage, and it won’t get lost, because I’ve also made a copy.”
“If the shoplifter hadn’t been let out, this wouldn’t have happened,” Edra said.
Jordan glared at him. “There was nothing I could do about that. On this I can take action. I have the proof. But if I don’t get everything lined up perfectly, it will fall apart, chance gone. You want this done right, but it’s going to be a hard walk uphill.”
“Thank you for trying,” Francis’s mother said.
Edra took a breath and nodded. “What do we do now?”
Jordan looked at Edra as though he barely knew him. “I finish getting Francis’s statement. You get to be his mytho representative.”
Asshole. Edra gave a small hiss.
Jordan’s lips twitched, and for a moment, the hardness in his eyes softened. They weren’t friends. They weren’t enemies. They were in some kind of empty middle ground that quite frankly sucked. It was like trudging through a swamp, though he’d never actually walked through a swamp. He’d always flown over them—much simpler.
Trouble was, Jordan didn’t want to even cross that middle ground. He seemed happy to linger in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by bog cats that were waiting to eat his face off the moment he fell asleep. If Jordan had ever seen a bog cat, he wouldn’t be so happy to have its smaller cousin in his house. He skimmed his gaze over Jordan’s well-fitted suit and crisp white shirt. No lingerie there. His gaze dropped just a little before he remembered he needed to pay attention and stop wondering what Jordan was wearing beneath his suit.
Jordan was taking notes and actually listening and doing his job. It was nice to watch a cop give a shit, but it was nicer to watch him. He had long fingers and neat, pointed handwriting. He thanked Francis and his mother for their time and then beckoned for Edra to step out of the room.
“There is a case and enough evidence, and stabbing is a far more serious crime than shoplifting.” Jordan slid his notebook into his pocket.
“But?”
“I can’t promise that it’ll be easy. Francis will have to testify. He’ll be cross-examined. They’ll paint him as violent.”
Edra managed not to roll his eyes at the display of ignorance. “Ogres aren’t violent. They’re farmers and healers and connected to the land.”
“We know that.”
Edra raised one eyebrow. We?
Jordan smiled. “The Mytho Services website is very useful.”
“Some would call it propaganda.”
“I didn’t realize mermaids were so dangerous. I get why they made part of the bay out of bounds.”
“You have no idea… and that’s a small colony.” Mermaids this close to a city always brought trouble. And they had. Every so often some idiot wanted a closer look. Mermaids were one of the reasons mythos were struggling to be seen as people. They spoke, but they were psychopaths who operated as a team, and they could destroy trade routes and drown whole fleets.
They destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge within a week of arrival, lashed the city with torrential rain that caused landslides, and generally made pests of themselves. Edra and the dragons went down to Alcatraz to speak to them, and while the mermaids stopped creating storms, they also banned all dragons from their island.
“I remember the storms.” Jordan’s gaze didn’t leave him. There wasn’t that much of a gap between them because they didn’t want people to overhear, and there were always people around in a hospital. He leaned one shoulder on the wall. “You need to leave this one with me, Edra.”
“I thought you wanted to give corpses justice.” He couldn’t resist the barb.
“Well, no one has died, so here I am.”
“I’m sorry Francis couldn’t have made your job easier.” Edra took a step away.
Jordan put a hand on his arm. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“No one investigates when one of us dies. It’s our own fault for daring to exist.” In some countries mytho hunting was a trophy sport, and they were eradicating all mythos. Even in the US, some people thought that was a good idea.
“It’s changing. I have a group going to the den.” His hand was still on Edra’s arm. “I’ll see you there tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” Edra wasn’t looking forward to it, even though it was his idea in the first place.
“You need to trust me to do my job.”
Edra glanced away. His job was exactly the same as the other cops who’d shrugged and walked away. He’d seen it too many times, and as much as he wanted to believe Jordan was different, he knew how much easier it would be for Jordan to do the same. “Do you trust me?”
Jordan gave a small nod. “Warn them that I’ll be there. I don’t want trouble.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you’ll lose the one person at the station who’s advocating for mythos. I fucked up by going to the den, but I can’t change that. I’m trusting you with my secret, and I don’t want to lose my job.”
Edra really didn’t like needing people or relying on them. “I’ll speak to Darian. Maybe you and he can work something out so you aren’t endangering them or your job.”
Jordan’s lips parted, and his pupils widened for a heartbeat before the lust was shuttered. “I shouldn’t.”
Edra shrugged. It wasn’t his problem, even though he wanted it to be. Jordan’s hand fell away. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.” He flicked Jordan a grin. “Will you be wearing the red again?”
Jordan frowned and then blushed. “That’s something we don’t talk about.”
“Pity.” Edra walked away, not looking forward to what would be the least fun trip to a den in the history of satyr dens.
Chapter 11
THE COPS were catching a lot of bad press from the anti-integration groups because of the recent human arrests and the discovery that satyrs had been breaking their licensing laws and selling to humans. The one human who had been arrested had talked to the press about his experiences there and how often he bought Bliss. There was no making that go away, even though the human in question had used a fake mytho ID card and identified himself a lesser dragon. Jordan had read the article online on the way to work.
The captain put the newspaper on his desk. “The mayor isn’t impressed, even though we’re following procedure.”
He may not be mayor for much longer.
Jordan hoped that the polls were right, though something could change voters’ minds at the last minute. He’d seen it happen. And Carlin Howard and friends were running a really good smear campaign against the m
ythos. If one mytho got a parking ticket, Howard was all over it. The den story was giving him plenty of fodder.
Jordan didn’t want to say that maybe they should’ve been following procedure for the last ten years. He liked his job, but he’d like it better if he weren’t having to play politics with every case that involved a mytho. “We can’t ignore the stabbing of an ogre.”
“No… that’s serious.” The captain nodded, and his expression was resigned. Not everything could be swept under the rug. “But we need to be careful. According to this, we’re being too harsh on humans.”
Jordan managed not to snort his disbelief. “I’m going to bring in the teen who stabbed the ogre.”
“Do not screw it up. By the book, Kells. If we muck up—”
“I know.” He’d be out of a job, the kid would walk free, and the tentative trust he’d been building with the mytho community would be gone.
The captain leaned forward and smiled as though they were friends. “The mayor wants the charges downgraded to self-defense. He wants to see the ogre treated as a participant, not victim.”
Once Jordan would’ve nodded and played along. “Too much evidence for that, too many witnesses.”
Statements had already been gathered. Some witnesses had decided they weren’t sure, but some had clearly pointed the finger at the human teen. Having met Francis, Jordan was confident that he was innocent.
The captain looked grim. “The liaison from Mythological Services, what’s he like?”
Jordan swallowed. Hot and confusing, and the way he ran his fingers over the lingerie Jordan shouldn’t have been wearing… it was as though he liked it. Jordan had never had a lover who even entertained the idea. It was always something he’d done for himself. But he couldn’t tell his boss any of that. He swallowed, glad his erratic heartbeat was only audible in his ears. “Tendric cares about his people and he’s assisting us.”