by R. Cooper
Ross was stuck with half his body outside his circle, reaching for Cal with rage contorting his face until he turned and saw the vengeful demon now striding toward him. He tried to step back, too late, into the safety of the chalk circle, and give orders that no longer had to be obeyed.
There was a shot. Loud over breaking glass. Steve barely slowed, though the bullet hit him in his shoulder. He reached Ross and knocked him back into the bricks of the fireplace. Ray could understand words again, felt his mind clear enough to speak.
“Steve!” English still felt strange. The world was spinning, but Ray had to stop this before it got uglier. Penn, he thought. That had been her shot. He hoped she’d called for backup. “Cal, get out of here!”
Ross got backhanded again, hit the opposite wall and groaned, the air forced from his lungs. “Wait, demon!”
“Steve, don’t!” Ray tried again, stumbling forward. Steve picked Ross up.
“He made me kill people, Ray. I didn’t even know those dudes!”
“I know, I know! And the law’s on your side. For that and for the murders there’s no way he’s going free. Now, please.” Ray licked his lips. “Don’t make me have to arrest you for this too.”
The crack of Ross’s arms being broken like twigs wasn’t nearly as grotesque as the sound of Ross screaming. “Enough!” Ray barked, and Steve dropped Ross to the floor. The man was crying. Steve nudged him with his hoof and then pushed up his glasses. Ray shivered.
He looked at Cal, who was still there of course. Because he’d been told to go, he was still there. A shuddering, pale, glitterless figure by the chalk circle.
“You okay, little guy?” Steve asked Cal, ignoring his own bleeding wounds. “Did I hurt you too bad?”
“What?” Cal was staring at Ross, then at Ray. His eyes went wide, and Ray belatedly wiped his mouth, trying to get rid of the blood but only smearing it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what Cal thought of the wolf. What he’d seen. “Oh, I’m fine.” Cal swallowed, his words faint, but Steve sighed to hear it.
Then Penn was there too. Ray smelled her without turning, imagined her taking in the scene. Steve looked back at him.
“That guy is sick, Ray. He kept talking the whole time…. I guess it was about you. You don’t want to know.”
“I do,” Cal whispered, his voice going firm even with Ross still crying on the floor, and Ray stared at him, not blinking.
“And he never once asked my name….” Steve was still complaining now that he was free. Ray didn’t care. Cal was brightening by the second, startlingly quick with so much suffering around him, and Ray didn’t think he’d ever get tired of Cal surprising him. He was on his feet, alive. Unharmed. Wings crushed, but no doubt already healing.
“Penn?” Ray whispered, and she came into his line of sight, gun drawn. He felt himself sway.
“They’re on their way, Ray. EMS too.”
Steve turned to study her, then pushed up his glasses. He still didn’t seem to feel his torn and bitten arm, or his gunshot wound.
“Hey, Detective Del Mar, you’re looking nice tonight.” His red face seemed to get even redder. “Ray just mentioned the last time you guys had to track me down. Remember that? It was embarrassing. Oh, about that forty bucks I owe you, Ray—”
“I don’t care.” Ray wheezed and then put out a hand to stay up, though the table, the walls, were so far away. He couldn’t breathe and looked down, at his bare feet first, and then at his torso. It hurt. His whole body hurt. He was bleeding too. He was suddenly so very tired, like he’d been running all night, every night.
“Ray?”
Oh, right. He had.
Almond milk and chocolate chip cookie scent wafted to him. Ray turned to Cal, smiling to see sparkles again. Cal’s hand went to Ray’s chest, and there was that light one more time, blinding like Klieg lights, and then Cal frowning, crying out.
Which was how he’d sounded against the wall, and Ray remembered that he had to explain what he’d said. It was important. “Cal,” he started, and then fell. He stared up from the floor into stunned faces.
“Ray!” The rain of glitter felt wet and oddly cool, but then Ray was so hot. And still so tired.
“I’m so tired,” he confessed, though it was only part of what he needed to say, but then his eyes were closing. The last things he heard were Cal shouting, “Do something, you dumb demon!” And then something long and low, like a howl.
IT WAS his own howling that woke him up again, or he thought it was. His throat was raw and his mouth dry, and a commanding voice was ordering him to be quiet. Ray opened his eyes but wasn’t sure he was awake. If he was, he wanted to go back to sleep.
The room seemed tilted and didn’t smell like anything he wanted, and in front of him was Calvin Parker. Detective Calvin Parker, retired. A man who could have been Chief of Police but had chosen love and had always seemed fine with that decision. Ray would have been fine with it too, if he’d ever really had that choice.
Of course, Cal’s mother had left the man long ago, which just meant that Ray had been right all along. He wasn’t really in the mood to be right, however. His body hurt, everywhere. Especially his chest. Either his heart was breaking or he’d been kicked in the chest by a bull. Possibly both.
“Calvin? Where is everyone?” The room they were in wasn’t that big, though it was private. It smelled too sterile, but Ray couldn’t move much to scratch his nose. “Why are you here? And where is here?”
“I’m here to give that kid of mine a break, though I doubt he’s resting. He never listens to me. If anything, he’s probably downing the contents of every coffee and hot chocolate machine on the first floor. I sent everyone else home, even that stubborn partner of yours. Anyway, most of these poor excuses for nurses are too afraid to push you back into bed when you try to get out of it. Knock that off.”
“Yes, sir.” It was a habit really. Calvin was wearing a worn flannel shirt and jeans up a little too high at his waist. He rubbed at his head where most of his hair was gone and had been gone for years, and then, as always, seemed surprised to find he was bald. He exhaled loudly. Ray tried again. “But I need to go see if—”
“I tried to tell you.” Calvin rolled his eyes but didn’t move away. Ray was trying to figure out why he couldn’t seem to move much despite wanting to when he saw the IV drip. He’d been drugged. With effort, he focused back on Calvin. “Fairies don’t do well with vigils. They get restless, and when they get restless we all pay.”
He paused, and Ray decided that he was supposed to share his smile. He didn’t. Calvin just moved on anyway. “I came to see what I could do to help, and to see what had my son so upset he forgot he was supposed to have lunch with his mother today. Thank goodness Benny’s a good boy and called me.”
Ray nodded, mostly because he felt he ought to respond, even if he was dreaming. Calvin got that intense look on his face, like he’d always used to get before mentioning his son to Ray. He and Cal had never even met, and yet Calvin had told Ray so much, all the time. What Cal needed. What he was looking for. What he thought of his mother leaving. Ray still didn’t understand why.
“Benny,” Calvin began heavily, “Benny was the only person never to prejudge Cal… of course, they met when they were four. But everyone else…. You know what that’s like, I’m sure,” he said pointedly, and stopped to aim a hard look at Ray. Ray opened his mouth but didn’t defend himself.
“The things people think are true without ever investigating for themselves… well, it continues to amaze and disappoint me. Like down at the station, what they all assumed about… about his mother and me.” He rubbed his head, still seemed surprised at the smooth surface of his scalp. “I didn’t care, but….”
He coughed. “Damn it, Ray, look at me. Imagine it. It was obvious after a while that I was getting older. That I was turning into something she couldn’t want, and if she did I couldn’t just let her watch me die. It would have hurt her so much.”
Ray bl
inked, swallowed, but the force building in his throat wasn’t a howl.
“I didn’t want her to deal with that, and I foolishly—and mistakenly, as it turns out—thought it was what they wanted. Happy, she always said. She wanted to be happy. I thought that meant protecting her from future unhappiness.”
It meant something else to a fairy, Ray knew, but Calvin wasn’t letting him talk.
“She—Cal tells me that isn’t how they see things. I don’t know anymore. My reasoning made sense at the time. Now it just seems like fear got in my way.” His cheeks darkened. “Fear of embarrassment or her leaving me, I don’t know. But I can feel fear, don’t think I can’t.”
Ray stared, watched the color in Calvin Parker’s face and tried to think of the legendary detective, afraid. Then he imagined him raising Cal, and it wasn’t so hard to picture. It was no wonder he worried about keeping Cal safe.
“I knew when I met you, kid, that you’d have the same problem. Look at you. Big, bad werewolf, intimidating almost everyone you’d ever meet. Not even a manic little brilliant idiot like my son would have been able to imagine that you’d be terrified of him. I know she couldn’t. But you are, aren’t you?”
“Calvin,” Ray tried at last. Calvin fixed him with a look that was eerily like one of Cal’s, something that would have pissed off Cal to no end if Ray had told him.
“He’s always avoided the station, and probably would have forever if I hadn’t forced him into the consultant job. And even then, though Murphy tells me that he’s damn good at what he does, I know I’m not why he stayed.”
He met Ray’s eyes, and Ray suddenly flashed back to all of those counseling sessions over scotch, and the occasional lunch, all before he’d ever met Cal.
“You—”
“My son isn’t shy, but when he began dropping hints that he’d heard there was a werewolf on the force now, and about how tall he’d ‘heard’ he was.” Calvin paused to make air quotes and lay on the sarcasm. “Instead of trying to bother me by just….” He waved a hand. Ray was too tired to try to determine its meaning. “Doing what he always does, I knew we had a problem on the horizon.”
“That’s why you….” Ray really wasn’t sure what to feel here. But if this was a dream, he thought he should have better drugs. He could have been dreaming of Cal. Not his father.
“No, Ray, I knew you’d have a tough time of it, even once you were accepted as a cop. I just wanted… to at least be there for you, since my son continues to, perhaps rightfully, blame me for his mother leaving.”
He sighed again.
“Even after all that time. I should have known her better. She was….”
“Unhappy,” Ray finished for him. Calvin scowled at him for it.
“You ever seen fairy tears, Branigan?”
Nasreen, with her broken heart. Ray wondered how she was doing, if she’d convinced Audrey, if she was happy again.
“Yes.”
Calvin jerked his chin up, his scowl running even deeper. He poked at the air like he’d poke Ray’s chest if Ray’s chest didn’t hurt so much already.
“See that you don’t see them again or a demon will be the least of your worries!” he ordered, then stepped back, clearing his throat. Ray blinked rapidly. “I think my son has waited long enough.”
“Yes, sir,” Ray answered, more from training than any fear. Calvin nodded, then raised his head as though he was listening to something. A creak, like a door opening. His hard face softened in ways that Ray would have to struggle to define even when drug free and wide awake.
“You should try to get some sleep.” Calvin spoke gruffly a moment later and settled back into a chair that Ray hadn’t even noticed. There were other chairs too, full of cups and wrappers and abandoned jackets. Too many for one or even three people. “See, I told you, he’s just fine,” Calvin added, and Ray tried to focus. “His partner told you he needed his sleep.”
“But what about….” Ray trailed off, then wrinkled his nose when he was shushed.
“Shut up and listen.” He couldn’t see Calvin anymore and realized his eyes were closed again.
“No,” Ray told him, but heard his voice drift away. “I need to see if he’s okay.”
“Oh, Ray.” Cal’s breath was like a fresh madeleine, warm and so close. “I’m fine,” he whispered, nearly into his ear, and Ray turned toward him, or tried to, inhaling, only to fall back to sleep with that marvelous scent finally being where he needed it.
“Seriously, kid, some self-respect please,” another voice grunted, right before the sweet hint of Cal ignoring his father’s words and saying Ray’s name one more time.
RAY jerked awake, flinching at his last memory and then at the unpleasant pungency of floor cleaner and attempted sterility. Hospital. That smell was unmistakable. Damn it. He hated hospitals.
He frowned, but then the collection of sounds around him, voices, rustling clothes, squeaking wheels and condescending advice in the distance, made him work hard to open his eyes.
He felt tired. Tired, but in a good way. As though he’d finally gotten some real rest.
Finding himself on his side in a hospital bed wasn’t really a surprise, though he didn’t remember how he got there. He was facing a wall decorated with some bad art, and on a stand by his bed were some wildflowers in a vase and a familiar heart-shaped box of chocolates with a note that shimmered and smelled like Audrey Conti and happiness. The box was already opened, with most of the chocolates gone. There were wrappers scattered everywhere. Ray sighed.
Penn immediately came into view. She was in her casual clothes but looked tired. She was smiling.
When she took his hand, he realized that he was bandaged pretty heavily, along his arm and his chest and possibly on his head, which felt fuzzy. But he squeezed her fingers.
“Hey, Ray.”
“Hey, Penn. How long?” His voice rasped, and she looked over. A moment later someone handed her a paper cup, and she was feeding him tiny sips of water filled with chips of ice.
“Just a day and a half.”
“Big, tough wolf just likes to worry people,” said someone with a very distinct voice, like buttery pastry, from somewhere where Ray couldn’t turn to see. Penn rolled her eyes.
“I’m drugged?” he guessed. She snickered.
“Oh yeah. You kept trying to walk out of here, even half-conscious.”
Which… sounded like something he would do. That pissy little voice chimed in with something to that effect too. Penn shushed it. “Anyway, you’ll be fine. Between the door, and the wall, and the wall again, and the claw wounds, you had quite the night, but if you’d eaten anything the other day….” She used guilt like his mother, or her mother for that matter. “And been getting any sleep, you would have been fine by now. But that faster-than-human regeneration ought to have you out of here in no time. Steve’s really sorry, by the way.”
“I’m sure.” He had enough ice water and pulled his head back. She put the cup next to the flowers.
“Really. He loaded you into the ambulance himself.” Doubtless at Cal’s direction. Ray seemed to recall that somehow.
“I could have….”
Penn’s mouth twitched. “I doubt that. You were in a bit of pain.”
Still was. Even with the drugs, Ray was starting to feel it. Demon claws hurt like Hell. At least nothing felt like it was open, or still bleeding.
“But they gave you some doggy painkillers.” That voice just couldn’t stay quiet. Penn made an exasperated noise.
“They were regular painkillers, Cal,” Benedict calmly corrected his friend. “And normal sedatives. Just a larger dose. He’s lucky my protection spell was still in effect,” he added, and Cal’s very loud, “Are you serious?” got them both shushed.
Ray ignored them, studied Penn. He had to ask. “Ross?”
“In this very hospital, under lock and key with some very determined and capable guards. Don’t worry. Steve’s going to testify, of course. He was here too, for a w
hile. Poor thing. You did a number on his arm.”
Only Penny would describe Steve as a poor thing. Ray was a full-grown werewolf, and there had been a real chance he wouldn’t have been able to stop him. “He has a crush on you, you know.”
Penn gave him a carefully bland smile and then moved to let the captain come closer. He coughed uncomfortably, the way he always did when Ray had done some crazy Being thing but caught the bad guy.
“Good job, Detective.” Though this time Murphy’s eyes were sad, at the stain to the department, Ray assumed, but then the captain patted his arm.
“Only the best, Detective,” he praised him in a tight, emotional voice, and patted him once more. “The circumstances are unfortunate, but I’m glad of the outcome if someone like that is out of the department.” Of course, the stain on the department wouldn’t go away either. Not for a long time.
After a few minutes, Ray nodded but didn’t comment. It was a talk for another time. With a nod in return, the captain stepped back. Penn leaned in, grinning against his ear.
“And nice ass. The rest wasn’t bad either.”
Holy crap, he had been naked. He’d forgotten.
“I agree!” Cal piped in, with better than expected hearing. “I love that ass.” There was some grumbling from the others in the room with them. And crinkling, like paper. Or money being exchanged. Ray narrowed his eyes.
“Dude!” Despite Calvin Parker’s words, there were limits to even Benedict’s patience it seemed. “I’m going to the cafeteria.”
“I’ll go with you.” Penn perked up, shooting Ray a mischievous look before he could ask if there was a betting pool about him and Cal. Of course there was. He shouldn’t be surprised. “I’m thirsty. Air conditioning dries me right out.” She moved lightly away from his bedside with another pat, and Ray felt a few more—other cops that must have been in the room.
Betting on him. He ground his teeth together.
They all left, with a series of, “Good jobs” and “Get wells” and lot of footsteps, and then it was just Ray and the hitching, excited sounds of Cal breathing.