Seeing Red

by Lyra Evans

  By the time he made it back to his apartment, time had crept along toward the early hours. Tiredness was in his bones, but Niko didn’t feel it in his head. He locked the door behind him and tossed his keys to the counter. Kicking off his boots, he began to peel off the layers of his clothes as he walked toward his bedroom. There was nothing in him, he was sure.

  Stepping out of his jeans, he dropped into his bed. With only the energy it took to plug his phone into its charger, Niko let himself fall into unconsciousness with his mind still flickering over everything. It wasn’t thinking—thinking took focus—it was only experiencing. So he sank into sleep without effort or will.

  At some point, he found his eyes were open, staring at the gun safe sitting on the top shelf of his open closet. Unaware of how he’d come to be awake, Niko didn’t move, listening for some indication of sound or movement or danger. Even his heartbeat seemed to stop to allow him to hear even the shifting of the building.

  The angry buzzing that broke the silence nearly made him jump out of his skin, but with reflexes primed and taut, he slammed his hand down on his phone in a flash to check the message. It had barely finished loading before he was opening it. The familiar glitched number stared back at him with the strangest message yet.

  They’re coming for you. Get out. Now.

  Brain still processing the information, Niko’s body leapt to action. He pulled on some clothes from wherever he could grab them and paused in front of the gun safe. Pressing his fingers to each indentation on the lock, he made the trade to clear his fingerprints and unlock it. He removed the gun, his personal weapon, from the safe while making the trade back to his normal fingerprints. A spare holster and ammunition case hung just inside the door of the closet. Taking that, he shouldered it and grabbed a jacket off a hanger before rushing to the living room.

  Who was coming for him? What was going on? Why did he need to escape? All these questions chased themselves through Niko’s head as he gathered what he might need into a go-bag he had prepped and stored under the sofa. The files he believed connected the Woods stared at him from the coffee table and nearby boxes. He wouldn’t be able to take all of them, but he couldn’t leave them either.

  Heartbeat ticking away time, Niko shoved as many of the casefiles as he could into his bag. He took the cases that struck him the most, the ones he couldn’t just explain away or reason out of relevance. But the time it took him to sort had cost him, and as he shoved his feet into his shoes, he heard a knock at the door.

  Niko froze, keys in hand, one boot half-laced. The clock on the wall told him it was three thirty in the morning. He’d been asleep only an hour and a half or so, and this was hardly an appropriate time for house calls. The glitched number’s message shone in his head. Who was they?

  There was no way out of the apartment but through the front door. The window in his bedroom was only large enough to shimmy out of if he popped out the glass, and the sheer drop of the outer building was not something Niko was prepared to scale on short notice with what he was carrying. He hesitated too long, staring at the door as though he could see beyond it without opening it.

  There was no alternative; Niko had to open the door. He pocketed his keys, unclasped the quick release on the holster, and drew his weapon. Gun in hand, Niko approached the door slowly, making as little noise as possible. As his hand approached the handle, the knock came again, this time lighter than the last. It shook Niko somewhat. Why lighter? What waited for him on the other side of the door?

  Gun pointed at about chest height and steady as a hooded cobra, Niko opened the door in one swift, decisive motion. At which point he found himself holding Cobalt Sincloud at gunpoint.

  Chapter 4

  There was a strange collision of impulses in Niko’s mind as he stared at the face of his former—what? What was Cobalt really? Partner? Lover? Dom? Or was he really any of those things or all of them? He hadn’t known Cobalt long, really. It hadn’t been long at all. Days. Just days. Not long enough to assign him a title so hefty.

  Soul Mate, his mind unhelpfully supplied, but Niko pushed it aside.

  Part of him, the angriest part, wanted to shoot. It was irrational and dangerous and stupid. He didn’t actually want to shoot Cobalt, but the anger and hurt was overwhelming in his weakest moments. And Niko was tired. He didn’t have the energy to fight that weakness.

  Another part of him wanted to sob with relief and throw his arms around Cobalt, breathing in the sea-breeze reality of him. But that was the part of Niko he never listened to.

  The biggest part of Niko was the practical cop portion. The one that kept reminding him of the glitched number’s warning. The one that had Sade’s murdered and mutilated body hanging in a warehouse always at the back of his mind. Something was going on. They are coming for you. Was ‘they’ Cobalt?

  And now Niko took a moment to think clearly—or as clearly as possible under the circumstances—he noticed Cobalt was not alone. A woman stood just behind him, her arms folded over her chest, her expression unimpressed. Why wasn’t he alone?

  “Niko,” Cobalt said softly, his crystal grey eyes softening at the sight of him, but the gun held between them made him somewhat warier. “Niko, what—”

  “Who sent you?” Niko asked, his voice breaking with a rough edge, like he hadn’t spoken in months. Maybe he hadn’t, in a way.

  Cobalt looked confused. Niko tried not to notice the streak of hurt that flashed over his face, nor the way he smelled the same as always, nor even the warmth that radiated off him, calling to Niko’s body. He tried not to let those images of himself and Cobalt, entwined and naked and in ecstasy, take over his mind. But it was difficult. Cobalt always had that effect on him.

  “Sent me? Niko, are you all right?” Cobalt asked, confusion winning out against all the other possible reactions. Niko accepted, despite the warring parts of himself, that Cobalt likely wasn’t the ‘they’ the text had referred to. No matter the presence of a strange woman.

  Realizing he was running out of time if some other group was coming for him, Niko returned his gun to his holster and pushed Cobalt out of the way, closing the door behind him. He locked it quickly, with Cobalt observing, completely perplexed. The woman seemed equally confused, but there was less concern in her expression and more judgment. Niko ignored it, casting a look down the hall in both directions and listening intently.

  He shouldered his go-bag and made a calculated decision. Heading down the hall, he moved away from the elevators and toward the fire escape stairwell. Cobalt hesitated behind him a moment before snapping into step and following him.

  “What is going on?” he asked. Niko swung open the heavy steel door to the stairwell and disappeared inside. Everything was concrete and iron here, so every sound echoed a hollow sound up and down the floors. “Where are you going?”

  Niko shushed Cobalt, noting that the woman was following despite the fact she seemed increasingly disinterested in the idea. The look in Niko’s eyes must have been warning enough, because Cobalt fell silent and followed as Niko paused by the doorway to the floor below his, listening intently through it for any sound.

  Heart pounding for a variety of reasons, Niko decided there was no movement on the other side and pushed the door open. The hallway beyond was, as he expected, deserted. Slinking along the hall with his back to the wall, Niko progressed, pausing at every door with Cobalt and the strange woman on his heels. When he found the number he was looking for, he knocked rhythmically three times, then pulled out his keys and fitted the one painted purple into the lock.

  It turned with a set of metallic clinks as the pins adjusted into place. Niko opened the door without waiting and stepped into the darkened apartment. Cobalt and the woman followed him in as he flicked on the lights to find a squinting Starla sitting up in her bed and holding a can of mace pointed at them.

  The door closed behind the strange woman, and Niko set down his bag by the small table that stood opposite Starla’s bed.

 
“What the fuck, Niki?” she asked, staring blearily at him from the middle of her mattress. She was wearing an oversized, threadbare shirt with some kind of obscene graphic on it, her hair in disarray. With a glance at her phone on the nightstand, she added, “It’s three thirty-six in the morning. What are you—” But before she could finish her question, she noticed Cobalt standing next to Niko. Without another word, she set down the can of mace, pulled back the covers, got calmly out of bed, walked over to Cobalt, and slapped him as hard as she could across the face. “And where the fuck have you been?”

  Cobalt’s head snapped to the side from the force of the blow, his hands coming up on instinct. He stood momentarily dumbfounded by the action, then reached up and smoothed a hand over his injured cheek. He shot her a wide-eyed half-glaring look.

  “Nice to see you again as well, Starla,” he responded. Niko said nothing to her greeting, unsure of just how to sort through the mess of feelings he was experiencing. There was no time for that anyway.

  “It might have been if we’d been doing this, oh, I don’t know, about three months ago,” she snapped. Cobalt’s expression closed, flickering only briefly to something Niko didn’t catch.

  “There’s no time for this,” he said. He held out his phone to Starla, indicating the text message. “I don’t know what the fuck this means but—” Even as he spoke, a call came through. His phone vibrated loudly in his hand, Uri’s name appearing on the screen. Cobalt caught it, shooting him a curious look, but Niko ignored everything and swiped to answer the call.

  “Nik, Ash and Oak, where are you?” Uri’s desperate voice came through the receiver.

  “What’s going on?” he asked in response, hoping he sounded sleepy, careful not to answer the question.

  “Everything’s gone to shit, Nik. Chief has lost her fucking mind, or something, and she’s called the fucking Special Response Team in and, fuck, Cap can’t even do anything about it. Your fucking Union Rep is here, but he’s pretty fucking useless. Did they get this guy right out of law school or something?”

  “So where the fuck have you been?” Starla asked Cobalt again in an angry whisper. Cobalt jerked away as she made to swat at him again, then Starla seemed to notice the woman in the room for the first time. She stopped a long moment, then added, “And who is this?”

  “First tell me why we had to skulk through the stairwell to get here in the middle of the night,” Cobalt said.

  “How the fuck should I know? I was sleeping,” Starla answered, gesturing to her less-than-put-together appearance.

  Niko shut his eyes and pressed a finger to his temple, rubbing circles into it. Beyond Uri’s frazzled rambling he could hear the commotion of what he thought was the precinct. But it was early morning, when most often the precinct was quiet and slow. Nothing made sense.

  “Uri,” Niko said sharply, trying to get him to focus and shut the others in the room up. “What. Is. Going. On.”

  “When did you move in here?” Cobalt asked, looking around as though he’d only just realized where they were and with whom.

  “You’d know that if you were fucking back when you said you’d be,” Starla shot, and Cobalt’s eyes flashed.

  “Seems like I’m interrupting something,” the strange woman said, making a motion as though to leave. But Cobalt caught her arm and shot her a dark look.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said decisively. “Definitely not until I figure out what in all the Seas is happening here.”

  “Is she your prisoner?” Starla asked sarcastically.

  “No.”

  “Yes,” the woman said, and Cobalt glared at her.

  “No,” he said again, and the woman rolled her eyes. “She’s my sister.”

  But Niko didn’t register anything else they were saying. His mind was processing everything Uri was telling him, but it was growing increasingly difficult to understand anything that was happening.

  “Obviously not,” Niko said into the phone. “I’ll get back to you.”

  He hung up, his eyes staring distantly into nothing. Whatever was being said in the bachelor apartment was hollow and lost to Niko’s ears. He replaced his phone in his pocket, existing briefly in a haze, outside of reality looking in. He felt alien and numb, like it was the first time he’d ever seen—anything. There was no feeling, no sensation at all.

  “Sade is dead,” Niko said suddenly, breaking through the bickering in the apartment effectively as an oar through still water. “Murdered.” He looked up at them all, the three of them quickly coming back into focus. There was a sharp edge to everything in his vision. Niko’s expression remained unchanged. “And the police think I did it.”

  Niko wasn’t sure what he expected in terms of reactions, but what he got was not quite it.

  “Sade’s dead?” Starla asked.

  Cobalt laughed. “Good. But how could you possibly be responsible for a death while in prison? Do they think you paid another inmate to shank him?”

  Starla stared momentarily at Cobalt. “He was released.”

  Cobalt’s expression fell immediately. “What? How is that possible?”

  “Seems the Court wasn’t too happy about you ‘violating his rights and autonomy’ with your Singing power,” Starla shot.

  Jaw tight, Cobalt glanced at the woman he’d brought, and then he turned to Niko. “When was this? How long has he been out? Are you—”

  “Released about two weeks ago,” Niko said, cutting off the last question. He couldn’t quite bear to hear Cobalt ask him if he was all right. “And I’ve been tailing him ever since, so that’s probably got something to do with why they think I did it.” Niko tried to unlock his jaw, but it remained cemented in place. “That and the obvious, I guess.”

  “This is insane,” Starla said, beginning to pace the small apartment. She had a habit of moving around when she was stressed and sorting through problems. “Can’t you—I don’t know. Give DNA samples or something? Prove it wasn’t you so they can get on with things?”

  Niko shook his head. “They have my DNA on file. Department policy. And it didn’t help because I was on scene.”

  “How were you on scene?” Cobalt asked. The woman with him seemed to shrink back from what was going on, her sharp eyes trained on Niko.

  “I told you, I was tailing him,” Niko answered, the raw edge of his frustration beginning to show. “I was the one who found the body, so obviously my prints and DNA are everywhere.”

  “Then that should explain away—”

  Niko shook his head again. “Not when they can’t find any other prints or DNA, and I’ve got a really stellar motive and no alibi.” The stress pulled at him, tearing through his calm and detachment to force him face-first into the terrifying reality.

  “This is foolish,” Cobalt said. “Even if that is the case, Sade had hundreds of enemies, I’m certain. He was hardly a likeable guy. Deciding on you as prime suspect is idiotic at this stage, circumstances or not. Surely they’re just exercising an abundance of caution and—”

  “No ‘and,’” Niko said. “Uri said the Chief called in Special Response. They’re coming to arrest me now.”

  The room went quiet again, but the chill that fell over the four of them changed the tone of their thoughts. Starla stopped moving only long enough to plot a specific course. Then she began to pull on more appropriate clothing and take her phone from its charger.

  “We’ve got to get out of this building,” Cobalt said, his words even but forceful. Niko knew as much, but some kind of apathy assaulted him. He was unprepared for it.

  “And go where?” Niko asked.

  “Uriah or Captain Baobab must surely have—” Cobalt began, but Niko cut him off.

  “I can’t ask them to risk that much for me. Their careers, their freedom even. Harbouring a fugitive carries a pretty steep penalty. Even Starla is at risk just because I came here.” He turned to her, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Star. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Maple, Pine, a
nd Ash, Niki, you are a fucking idiot,” she answered. “If you hadn’t come here, I’d have been pissed. Get your shit. I’ve got a place we can go.”

  Niko watched as she collected a set of keys from an enveloped hidden in a book with a hollowed out centre. Cobalt moved where Niko did not, and he picked up Niko’s go-bag without question. But Niko couldn’t allow this.

  “Star, you can’t risk this,” he said harshly. “You’re still on parole. If they catch you trying to help me escape arrest, they’ll arrest you.”

  She pulled on a slouchy beanie, tucking most of her hair up into it with only a couple pieces hanging out around her face. “You still don’t get it, Niki,” she said, sounding rather more tired than determined. “I take care of my friends. Let’s fucking go.” She paused and nodded to Cobalt. “Carry him, if you have to.”

  Cobalt nodded, but Niko glared at both of them and shoved him off, following her, despite himself, out the door. They waited in the hall, taking stock of the sounds on the floor as well as that above them. Niko brushed a hand over his ears and enhanced his hearing, giving up some of his sense of taste for the temporary trade. Heavy footfalls were muffled by the carpeting and insulation, but he was certain the response team was at his door.

  Nodding toward the emergency stairwell again, Niko led the others there, pausing at the door in case there were more officers waiting there. He couldn’t hear anything, though, probably assuming Niko was asleep in his bed, given the hour. They wanted to surprise him, clearly. It was a tactic used on dangerous suspects. His stomach burned. He supposed he was dangerous.

  Niko started down the stairs when Starla hissed at him, pointing upward. He shook his head in confusion.

  “We can’t very well take your car,” she whispered. “Just trust me.”

  With a tight nod, Niko followed her up the stairs, passing his floor as they did. The stairwell door had no window in it, but Niko could hear the officer standing just outside of it. Likely meant to guard every possible exit, he wasn’t considering the possibility of Niko already being beyond him.