“Hello?” I tried, and my voice came out a breathy whisper. How long had I been out? I tried sitting up and found that the swath of bandages around my chest and middle made that pretty much impossible.
I lifted my mask away from my face, and that triggered some kind of alarm, along with a nurse.
“Lieutenant, you need to keep that on,” she scolded.
“I can breathe the air just fine, thanks,” I said. There was a commotion outside the swinging steel doors and then Will and Sunny came in. The nurse tried to shoo them back.
“I need to fix Miss Wilder’s oxygen.”
Sunny gave me a huge hug, which started a fireworks display of agony behind my eyes. “Ow,” I managed, feebly.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you’ve been unconscious … the doctors thought you might have lost too much blood …”
“You had two major wounds, a gunshot and that stick you gave yourself,” Will recited.
“There are no visitors,” the nurse said sternly. “You can come back when organized visiting hours start. Leave, now.”
She fiddled with my IV and I felt the cotton wool slipping down over my consciousness again. I tried to tell Sunny I’d see her later, but I fell asleep and didn’t really wake up again for another two days.
They moved me out of the ICU and into a regular room, and then a few days later the doctors pronounced that I could go home. I think they were just glad to get rid of me. I don’t like hospitals, don’t like being poked and prodded when I knew I’d heal, if they just left me alone. I got a little surly toward the end.
I called Sunny to give me a ride, but as I was dialing, Will came into my room.
He looked over my sling, the bandages still covering the gunshot wound, and probably the generally hermitlike appearance I’d cultivated during my stay—pale corpsey skin, tangled hair, deep half-moons under my eyes. I hadn’t slept much in the hospital. I kept dreaming about Asmodeus.
The next time that I see you, it will not be as an ally. I promise you.
“You can say it—I look like hell.”
“Actually, I was gonna say you looked pretty good for someone who beat down a daemon and shut a devil’s doorway.”
“You’re a liar, but thanks anyway.” I picked up the clothes that I’d come in with, folded into a paper hospital sack. They were torn and bloody, and they carried the smell of daemon. I stuffed them into the trash can in the corner of the room.
“Feel like giving me a ride home in your Compensationmobile?” I said to Will.
He didn’t smile. “The Maiden is gone,” he said finally.
Crap. “I know, Will, and I’m sorry, but she was trying to turn my city into some kind of magick Utopia by dint of killing all the humans with a daemon army—” I had a litany of excuses, but Will stopped me.
“It’s not your fault, Luna. It’s mine. She was absolutely right. I got myself cursed and I got obsessed.”
“Just a little,” I agreed, cautiously. I still had enough morphine in me to throw caution to the wind.
“Someday, I’ll find her,” Will said. “And someday, she’ll have to release me from the curse, but …” He took a step closer and took my hand, the one that wasn’t bound up in a sling. “I’m fine if that someday isn’t today.”
“Will …” I started.
“I need to live,” he said. “I spent a lot of time looking to die, and that’s not living. I like you, Luna. You’re the same as me. I’ve never really met anyone like you.”
He leaned in, our foreheads touching, so that we could share breath. “I know that I’ve been a real ass, but maybe we could give this a shot.” He kissed me, gently, and when I didn’t respond he looked at me, searching for what would make it right. “Please. At least give me a chance to try.”
“Will,” I said, gently disengaging from him and picking up the phone again. I hit redial. “I’m glad that you had this epiphany, but it doesn’t mean I’m comfortable around you. You scare me a little, if you want the truth.”
“I can change,” he said. “Please …”
“Stop.”
On the other end of the phone Sunny said, “Hello?”
“Hang on, Sun.” I cradled the phone and looked at Will. He was everything the romantic stories talked about—blond, handsome, cursed, tragic. And enough like me, with enough of the same demons inside, that I didn’t know if I could ever sit still with him.
“I’m not saying no,” I told him. “But I need some time. You need to give me that if we’re even going to start to have a chance, all right?”
Will slipped his sunglasses on and gave me a crooked smile. “Anything worth having is worth waiting for, right?”
“Something like that,” I agreed. “See you around, Will.”
“Don’t be a stranger, doll.”
He walked out, into the sunlight, and I stayed where I was, waiting to go home.
Bryson looked almost mortally offended when I told him I was moving out. “No offense, David,” I said, “but if I have to spend one more week in that little room I’m going to go insane.”
“It’s Uncle Henry, isn’t it?” he said. “He’s been bothering you. He always went for the brunettes. That’s why Aunt Louise put rat poison in his blintzes.”
“David, your house is not haunted. It’s just very small, and very frilly. I am not small and not frilly. You see the problem.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “I ain’t exactly a fan, but if Aunt Louise ever gets out of the home she’ll kill me for changing stuff.”
I had another week of sick leave, more than enough time to find an apartment if I didn’t care too much about exactly where or how many of my neighbors were crackheads.
“Thanks, David. Really. It’s been fun, but it’s time I got my own place like a big girl.”
I climbed the kitchen stairs, still a little slow from the beating I’d taken on the roof. I was healed, a few scars, nothing that I couldn’t handle, but I still remembered that sickening sensation of not being in control of my own body, and the second I did the room would start to spin.
I ignored it, swallowed it down, and started to pack my few new things I’d acquired since my cottage burned down.
Someone knocked on the front door and after a moment of raised voices Bryson thumped up the stairs. “Luna, you won’t freakin’ believe who just showed up on the stoop.”
I followed him down and found Lucas standing in the living room, looking at family photos like he belonged there.
“Should I arrest him?” Bryson said hopefully.
Lucas looked at me. “It’s up to her.”
“David, I think we can forget about this, don’t you? He did save my life.” Again. I kept quiet about that part.
Grumbling, Bryson retreated to the kitchen.
“I should be long gone,” said Lucas. “Police are still looking for me. I should be out in the woods laying low.”
“Then why aren’t you?” I asked.
Lucas met my eyes. “Because you’re here.”
I held up my hands. “No. I can’t do this again. It would never work: You’re a wanted fugitive, a Wendigo, plus—”
“Luna, shut up,” he said, closing his mouth over mine. I let Lucas kiss me, because our monsters responded to each other and I don’t know that I could have stopped even if I wanted to.
“I’m willing to stay for you,” he said. “Just think about it.” He went to the door and walked out without another word, leaving me standing there flushed and mightily conflicted.
Lucas was another man with a beast in him, someone with a bad past and a future that wasn’t too bright, either. But he called to me and I responded in spite of myself, and he was loyal, strong, enticing, because you knew when you looked into his dancing dark eyes that there would never be a dull moment.
I ran after him, out onto the front lawn, knocking over one of Bryson’s creepy gnomes.
“Lucas!”
He turned back. His hair was like a raven’s wing in the l
ate sun, blue-black and shiny, the rest of him a long lanky shadow. He came back to me, standing on the other side of Bryson’s fence. “Yes, Luna?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I want to—you’re everything I want, really. But you’re not safe, Lucas. I chase after the dangerous ones, the ones with monsters in their blood, and look where it’s gotten me.”
“You seem fine to me,” he said, reaching for my face.
I caught his hand and squeezed it. “But I’m not. I’m a mess, Lucas. I careen from one bad choice to the next. I need something that’s orderly.” I shut my eyes. “I want you, but I need something that’s safe.”
“Fagin,” he said, without any prompting, dead and flat like he was talking about the weather.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just know that it can’t work with us. And I am sorry.”
Lucas shoved his hands into his pockets, his posture like his strings had been cut, but he still managed to give me one of those crooked, promising smiles. “You’re making a mistake, Luna.”
I opened my mouth to protest that on the contrary, I was displaying sense for probably the first time in my adult life, but he shook his head. “I understand why you’re doing it.” He leaned over the fence and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You ever change your mind, and decide that safe isn’t what you need …”
I gave him a hard hug, the chain mesh pressing into my belly. “Thank you for saving my life, Lucas.”
He returned it, and it felt so good to just be touched with no expectation that I held on to him. “It was a life worth saving,” he whispered in my ear.
When I let him go, he smiled again. “You take care of yourself, Luna.”
I laughed, because it was just funny. With cults, curses, and now a city full of citizens of the daemon realm, how likely was that? Still, anything was possible.
I returned Lucas’s smile. “I’ll try my best.”
Epilogue
My new apartment had leaky pipes, a loud steam radiator, and a closet that wasn’t nearly large enough for my imaginary replacement collection of vintage, but it was five minutes from the Justice Plaza and no one was dealing smack or running prostitutes in the immediate vicinity. I left it in the morning and came home at night, just ghosting through.
After I’d come back to work there had been a further two weeks of review that kept me away from the SCS—the IA hearing on Annemarie’s shooting, the commissioner’s review of my squad, questions upon endless questions about that night on the roof. I answered as quickly as I could and didn’t provide a lot of details.
I went to two funerals during those two weeks, Sophia Hartley’s and Annemarie’s. Sophia had a crowd—even her mother got a pass from the judge hearing her murder case to attend, flanked by two U.S. Marshals. Grace Hartley looked tired and wrung out, all of the energy run out of her. They kept her so doped that she couldn’t even cast a simple working, so I’d heard from Bryson, and she didn’t even look at her daughter’s coffin when it was lowered into the ground.
Will Fagin and I were the only attendees at Annemarie’s service. After the priest finished the ceremony, Fagin went and put a white rose on top of the coffin.
“I didn’t bring anything,” I said.
“Well, she did try to shoot you, and curse you,” he said. “I think you get a pass on that one.”
“Stupid girl,” I said, more to Annemarie than anyone. “She really thought the Thelemites were going to take her in.”
“Bad magick always attracts the lost lambs,” Will said.
“By the way, whatever happened to that troll?”
“You want to see?”
He shrugged. “I took the city tram from my office. You got a car?”
I spun my new set of keys around my fingers. “Do I ever.”
The car had been the only thing on the lot that I could afford and that ran decently. It wasn’t the Fairlane, but it had its ugly, ratchety charms.
“ ’71 Nova SS,” Will said, running his hands over the primer-colored fender. The rest of the car was pea-green, except for the passenger door, which was blue. The Nova had something of an identity crisis.
“Glad you approve,” I said to Will.
“Man, I tell you,” he said, climbing in. “I had one of these back in the day. Good times in that car. There was a girl, Cheryl Lynn …”
“You want to get some dinner?” I said as the car rumbled to life.
Will blinked at me. “Right now?”
“No, stupid, it’s one in the afternoon.” I angled us toward the port of Nocturne City but took the disused access road just before the gates. “I mean some other time, in the future. Dinner.”
Will cocked his head. “What happened to you not knowing what you wanted?”
“That was then,” I said. “This is dinner.”
“Hell, doll, I’ll make you dinner,” he said.
I held up a hand. “Let’s not get carried away. Three dates, like a real couple, and then we’ll see about that.”
“Three dates,” Will agreed. He looked out at the rotting wharf in the shadow of the supports for the Siren Bay Bridge. “Where the Hex are we, body-dump central?”
“Be quiet,” I said. “It sleeps during the day.”
I got out of the car and took the slimy, rotting steps down to the sliver of sand under the bridge. The troll was curled up against the cement, snoring softly. The boundaries that Kelly and Sunny had worked manifested as graffiti marks along the pylons and the wharf, and the troll was bound on the other side by the sea.
“It eats garbage,” I said, pointing to the flotsam drifting past in the current. “It has shelter, and they like the shadows and the damp. It can never go home, but … it’s happy here, I think.”
Will shook his head at me. “Why, Luna Wilder. I never knew you had a soft side.”
“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me,” I said, getting back into the car. Will chuckled.
“A troll under the bridge.”
“And a werewolf in the police and a cursed immortal in the ATF field office.”
“It’s a hell of a town,” Will said, as we drove away.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I kind of like it that way.”
I dropped Will off after settling on Thursday for our date. That gave me enough time to find something to wear and not long enough to start freaking out and second-guessing myself. Will Fagin was a lot of things, but above all he was different. And that was what I needed, even more than stability or safety or anything else. The city had changed, and I had changed, and I was willing, with this new me, to give Will a shot.
I took the elevator down to the SCS offices, still open for business. Sure, we were still working out of a bomb shelter and didn’t have a coffee machine, but at least we weren’t all jobless, either. Once you save the city from a rift to another realm, the commissioner is inclined to be generous.
I could still feel the rift if I walked across the right part of the building, just a cold little breath on the back of my neck. I wondered what else was on the other side, just waiting for their chance to slip through.
“Lieutenant.” Norris handed me a stack of folders when I reached his desk. “All of the case reports collected while you were absent.” His face was screwed up, way off normal. It took me a second to realize this was Norris’s version of a smile.
“Thanks,” I said, trying not to reveal how freaked out I was. I paused at the bullpen. Except for Annemarie’s empty desk, it was a normal day. Pete was in his lab with his headphones on, Bryson was eating a meatball sub at his desk and cursing every time he dropped sauce down his shirt. Batista was writing up a witness statement and Kelly was glaring at his computer, in what I’d come to recognize as his normal expression.
Andy Zacharias jumped up when he saw me and came over. I’d been sure we’d lose Andy after what happened on the roof, to a safe desk job or a private security firm.
But he got himself patched up and came back to work, and never said a word about
what had happened. I hoped that he was at least talking to his shrink. He had that shadowed, haunted look about him that I knew all too well. I’d been in that jumping-at-shadows spot, and it was no place to be.
“Why don’t you let me take those, ma’am. You don’t need to be burdened so soon after you’ve come back.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks, Andy, but this is my job.”
He gave me a nod, like he understood. “You let me know if you need anything, ma’am. Anything at all. I owe you.”
“Andy, you don’t owe me a thing. You’re my detective. We look out for each other.”
I saw a little bit of the tension in his face drain away at that. “I never thanked you, ma’am.”
“Your continued presence on the squad is more than enough,” I said. “Now go bother someone else, Andy.” I made a little shooing motion. He surprised me with a grin.
“You got it, ma’am.”
I gave my squad—my squad, and no one else’s—one last look and then unlocked my office.
I had work to do.
Read on for a preview of Caitlin Kittredge’s
next Nocturne City novel
Demon Bound
Coming soon from St. Martin’s Paperbacks
When you’re a cop, you learn fast that any attempt at a nice evening out can and will be spoiled by a dead body.
The restaurant was Macpherson’s, an upscale steakhouse with medium-rare walls and décor made of antlers, and my dining partner was Agent Will Fagin, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. More than just my dining partner, really … I guessed that William Fagin was, after six months of steady dating, my boyfriend.
I don’t do well with the boyfriend/girlfriend designation, but we went out on too many dates to be friends with benefits and stayed in too often to be friends, period.
Will smiled at me over his porterhouse. He had a great smile. Great everything, if you wanted to quantify it—forty years ago he would have been staring back at me from a movie-house poster. Thick blond hair, dancing black eyes, a long skinny frame that belied strength and manly prowess and all of that stuff that women supposedly swoon over in a boyfriend.
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