Vanity Scare

by H. P. Mallory

  No. He did not stop.

  Christina stared at her notebook for a long while after I finished my account. She sighed quietly into the air and stared at the ceiling as she bounced her pen against her lips.

  “Oof,” she said, to herself more than to me. But she faced me all the same.

  “Oof?”

  “Yeah.” She sat up perfectly straight. “This is… kind of enormous. Forcing himself on a coworker, on his subordinate…” Her voice trailed away until I realized she was talking to herself. “Even if they were dating…” As she placed her hand over her mouth, she appeared, for all her quivering, remarkably professional. “Dulcie was in his custody. As an officer of the law. This… Hades, if this is true, it’s going to be a disaster.” She made a face. “If it’s true, it’s already a disaster.”

  “If it’s true,” I repeated, scrutinizing her carefully. “Then you do not believe me?”

  “I’m not fully convinced,” Christina admitted, not unkindly. “I’ll definitely investigate it, though. Just because it sounds unlikely doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  “How delightfully unbiased of you.”

  “I’m definitely biased where you’re concerned, but that doesn’t mean I won’t look into it. For once, I really, really hope you’re lying to me.”

  “That is everyone’s fondest hope, is it not?”

  Christina smiled. “Well, thanks for coming in, Bram. If there isn’t anything else, I have a lot of work I need to do.” She looked at the stacks of folders, then back at her notebook, and sighed through her nose. “A lot,” she muttered.

  “That is all, for now.” I stood. “Thank you for your time, Miss Sabbiondo.” I nodded to her once and started to leave.

  “Hey, Bram?”

  I stopped and turned around. “Yes?”

  “Why did you tell me that?”

  I was quiet for a moment. “Because it was the right thing to do.”

  “But it wasn’t your business.”

  I shrugged. “As strange as it may sound to you, I consider Dulcie to be my only friend.”

  She did not appear surprised. “Go on.”

  “I feel as if I am doing right by Dulcie in admitting this to you. I would hate for the same situation to befall her again.”

  “You’re trying to protect her?”

  I nodded briefly. “Good day to you,” I said as I turned and faced the door.

  “It’s okay that you’re in love with her but don’t forget what’s best for her, Bram.”

  I was not certain how to respond, and I did not appreciate the conversation. My feelings for Dulcie were complicated enough. I did not care to have them broadcasted.

  I could not argue with her. “Your point?”

  “Just, um, just go easy on Dulcie, okay?”

  I made a guttural snorting noise in the back of my throat.

  There was a beat of strange silence.

  Christina’s shoulder dropped a bit as she exhaled. “Anyway, I’ll call you when I learn anything about Darion. Okay?”

  I nodded and left.

  NINE

  Dulcie

  I was covered in coffee.

  Cheap, brown breakroom coffee, with that weird iron-y smell and no creamer, and it was everywhere. On my shirt, my papers, my goddamn computer, seeping into my drawers. This was going to be a disaster and a half to clean up.

  I looked up at the brilliant fuckwad who’d spilled the coffee on me in the first place. Some little intern-looking kid, except they don’t have interns at the FBI, they have new guys with no sense of direction or self-preservation.

  “Um,” he said, holding a now-empty coffee mug that had FBI stamped on it in thick black letters. “I, um. I’m sorry.”

  I inhaled slowly through my nose and spent three full seconds on the exhale, trying not to sound like a huffing dragon or something else that was about to commit coffee-stain-related murder. “It’s fine,” I said finally. “Just, go get some paper towels or something.”

  He blinked at me. “Oh. Oh!” And scuttled away like a frightened crab.

  I looked at the dripping pool on my desk. This mess was going to get into the carpet, too. Hades, that smell. Everyone else said the coffee smelled fine, maybe it was just a werewolf thing, but to me it smelled like rust… and ass, no matter how much creamer you added to it.

  “Great,” I muttered, “fan-fucking-tastic.”

  The not-an-intern came back with an entire roll of paper towels and a blue bottle of what looked like glass cleaner and dropped to his knees, mopping up the biggest spots on the floor.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he kept repeating, and he wouldn’t look at me. He looked a little pathetic. Actually, a lot pathetic.

  I sighed and ripped off a paper towel. It wasn’t going to be enough to save my keyboard, but I wasn’t just going to let the ass-coffee pool there.

  “Oof. What happened here?”

  I looked up and found Henry, smiling, still with a little wad of cotton over one eye. He stood over the not-an-intern with his arms crossed.

  “Hurricane,” I answered.

  Henry Cotton was my partner, and exactly as young on the inside as he was on the outside—like, twenty-two, maybe. He’d been assigned to me—he’d asked to be assigned to me; did I mention Henry was certifiably insane? Okay, not really, but sometimes I wondered.

  We’d been partners for the three-ish days I’d spent working for the Splendor police department, since the ANC wasn’t a thing anymore. I’d been moved into the FBI proper because, well, nobody really wanted to work with me except the people I’d been working with when I was an ANC Regulator.

  They’d let Henry tag along because… well, probably because he’d requested to, and everyone was so shocked, they’d just agreed.

  It was a further commute here than it was to the office in Splendor, but that was fine. At least people here didn’t worry that I was going to decapitate everyone in their sleep.

  “You want some help?” asked Henry.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “I don’t know what good it’s gonna do, though. Keyboard’s probably toast.”

  “I am so sorry, Agent O’Neil, I’ll replace it!” said the not-intern.

  “What’s your name again?” I asked.

  “William Peterson, detective,” he replied.

  “Okay, Will,” I said. “It’s fine. Really. It’s a cheap keyboard, we’ve got ‘em in spades in a closet somewhere.”

  He looked a little relieved, but not completely. I still had coffee all down my front. And, yes, my shirt was white, or had been about five minutes ago. Couldn’t he have missed me? Just a little? The sleeves were the only thing that had kind of escaped the brown liquid, and even then, not really. There were little splatters everywhere, like I’d axe-murdered a Keurig.

  “Alright?” I said. “Breathe, kid, it’s okay.”

  “You gotta stop calling us ‘kid,’” Henry said. “We aren’t that much younger than you are.”

  While that might have been true—I wasn’t even thirty yet—it didn’t change the fact that I felt like the old guy. You know, the guys you see in those buddy-cop movies—the one with a cigarette and Stalin’s mustache.

  “Duly noted,” I grumbled.

  Will nodded and took a deep, shaky breath. He was super pale, no blood in his face. Fuck, it was probably his first day, and he spilled coffee on Dulcie O’Neil, the crazy fairy-vampire lady who’d killed the other crazy vampire lady, Meg. So, he saw me, had a heart attack, spilled his coffee all over me, and then had an aneurism.

  Shit, my bad.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and he flinched a little. “Hey, don’t worry about it,” I said. “Really. It’s just coffee, and it’s just a keyboard.” And a monitor, a computer, whatever is in my drawers, and my entire fucking shirt, I added silently. “Okay?”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  I took my hand off his shoulder. “Great. So, we cleaned up most of it, but we’re gonna need a janitor up here to get the
rest—especially whatever is soaking into the carpet.”

  “Yeah,” he said absently.

  I pursed my lips so I didn’t groan in his face. “Will?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Go get a janitor.”

  “Yeah. Oh, yeah! Yes, sorry, yes, ma’am.” He scrambled to his feet and ran like I’d put a scorpion down his shirt.

  “Huh,” said Henry. “He’s… spirited, I guess.”

  I faced him. “Hopefully that spirit dies a quick death, so my desk and I don’t end up covered in coffee every day.”

  Henry laughed, then looked down at my shirt and frowned. “Um. Your shirt.”

  “I am well aware,” I informed him.

  “Do you want mine?” He gestured to his button-up.

  “Do you have another one?”

  “No.”

  “Henry, you can’t just walk around the office shirtless.”

  “Sure, I can—I’m a guy.”

  “That is so not the point.”

  Henry smiled. Curly brown-ish hair, big honking coke-bottle glasses—he looked like his mom pulled him out of school and dropped him off here for the day. “I could go buy you a shirt from the gift shop.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “We have a gift shop?”

  “I think so. Or there’s a Sephora, like, two streets over.”

  “Sephora is makeup, Henry.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” he replied sheepishly. When we first met, everything Henry said was sheepish, but he was getting over that, one sarcastic comment at a time. “Wal-Mart?”

  “I can just run home and change at some point,” I assured him. Not right now. I had paperwork that needed to be rescued and hopefully salvaged from the coffee.

  “I’m totally comfortable just giving you my shirt,” said Henry.

  “I’m starting to think you just want to strip.”

  “What? No!” Henry squeaked, loud enough to make people at other desks turn their heads. Henry wasn’t a strong blusher, but his cheeks turned just a little bit pink. “I’m just trying to help.”

  “I know,” I said, laughing. “Sorry. I’m just messing with you.”

  Henry smiled and spent a couple seconds appraising my shirt. The fabric was clinging to my stomach like its life depended on it. The lines of my bra were super obvious, to the point that the little lacey flower patterns on it were visible, if you looked closely enough.

  He pulled his rolling chair over from his desk and sat on it backwards. “So. How was your weekend?”

  “Don’t you have work to do?”

  “Nope. I finished all the witness testimony stuff for Agent Welch’s homicide case yesterday.”

  “Of course, you did,” I said.

  Henry was a grown-up version of the Advanced Placement kid who smiled too much and spent Friday evenings gleefully doing his homework. But the stuff that made you an irredeemable nerd in high school makes you completely irreplaceable in the real world.

  I looked at the dark circle of coffee between my feet, and while I was looking down, someone started unpacking a box a few cubicles over. These cubicles were Plexiglas from the third-quarter up, so if I wanted to, I could look over and see whoever the newbie was. I wasn’t that interested, though. For now, the person was just background noise: the clunk of a stapler being shoved into a metal drawer, the shuffle of papers falling out of a folder that wasn’t made to get so thick, the whirring of an ancient computer booting itself up.

  But I was listening to those boring sounds for some reason, really listening to them. Henry was saying something, but my ears were across the room, obsessed with the newbie’s stapler and folder and everything else that was coming out of the box.

  This was part of the weird aura-sensing-thing that came with the powers Meg gave me: sometimes, I could tell when something was about to go wrong.

  “What’s up?” asked Henry. I was probably snarling or something.

  “I don’t know,” I said, thinking, the newbie’s got a bomb, or he’s gonna shoot someone, or he’s a terrorist. “Hang on.”

  I looked over. An electric shock of panic shot through my body when I recognized him.

  Knight.

  He stopped unpacking his box. And he just stood there. Then he looked at me and I looked back at him, and I could tell we were both suffering from the exact same reaction. And I had to wonder if he was thinking about the fact that a few nights ago he’d visited me in my dreams. Because that’s exactly what I was thinking about.

  Then the smell got to me. A very specific cologne, masking a very specific cocktail of sweat and testosterone. The panic sloughed off me like a heavy coat.

  Okay. No bomb, no gun, no terrorists.

  Just Knight.

  Great.

  Hades, I felt like a fucking teenager. I was a grown-ass woman, and the second my ex so much as looked at me, I slid straight into crisis mode.

  What the hell, Dulcie? I thought. Get your shit together! I had this mental image of the ducks I was supposed to have in a row running wildly around the office, screaming.

  Knight was unpacking a box into one of seven empty desks still in the open office. He was looking around nervously now, because he’d seen me, and I think maybe he was trying to find somebody to talk to or look at instead of me so it wouldn’t be so obvious that he was avoiding me.

  “Oh,” said Henry. He was looking at Knight now, too. He scowled in Knight’s general direction, then turned back to me, put his head on his crossed arms on the back of the chair, and whispered, “You okay?”

  “Why is his desk out there? With the rest of us?” I asked, absently.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Knight was the Head of the ANC.”

  He glanced over at the man in question and nodded. “Not anymore.”

  “Not anymore,” I repeated.

  “Want me to follow him around and make beeping noises?” Henry asked me and I stared at him in total and complete bafflement.

  “What? Why?”

  Henry shrugged. “Because it’s annoying.”

  I started ugly laughing. Not super loudly, I was keeping most of it in my mouth, but you know how when you’re really freaked out and somebody makes a joke, it’s way easier to start giddy-laughing like you’re on every drug known to man? Yeah, it was like that. Except worse, because I was also trying not to laugh.

  Nobody would have even noticed if I’d completely lost my shit and started cackling, anyway—Agent Marlowe was cursing up a thunderstorm in the corner—but I didn’t want to bring Knight’s attention back to me.

  Okay, let me make one thing clear. I wasn’t avoiding him. I’m not a child. I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to interact with him after everything we’d been through. I mean, the first time we met I tried to set him on fire, then we were in prison and I thought he was going to die, then everything with Melchior happened, and then Meg right after, and—honestly, we hadn’t had a moment to catch up since before Melchior had him arrested. And how long ago was that?

  Fuck, how long had it been since our relationship was based on anything but the fact that we were all going to die?

  It just… seeing Knight reminded me of a million-billion things I wasn’t prepared to think about. And then, before I could stop him, Henry was walking in Knight’s direction—and his stride was purposeful.

  When he reached Knight’s desk, he cleared his throat and Knight looked up from his unpacking. I just stood there, maybe ten feet away, and I was pretty sure my eyes betrayed my complete shock.

  “Um,” Henry said, “sir, you really shouldn’t be over here. Probably better you stick to your cubicle.”

  “Sir?” Knight repeated, and made the fakest, most forced laughing noise I’d ever heard. “Just call me Knight, man.”

  Henry’s expression was stone-cold. “I’d rather not.”

  I wanted to bury my face in my hands. I really wanted to crawl under the table and wait for both of them to go away. But that was really fucking dumb, and cowardly. And now Kn
ight was looking at me and, crap, walking toward me. I stared him dead in the eye and felt my stomach drop. His eyes were glowing. The Loki’s biological response to someone strong enough to be their “mate.” Seeing that again made my stomach twist. I wanted to cry, scream, and curl up into a ball until I stopped existing.

  “How have you been?” he asked.

  Great, so we’re doing this, I thought. The awkward small-talk of the recently broken-up. Alright, come at me.

  “Fine,” I said.

  It came out more clipped than I’d meant it to, but I really didn’t care. The longer I looked at him, the more I noticed the subtle differences—his hair was longer, there were bags under his eyes, his shoulder clicked when he moved like he’d dislocated it or something. And then I started to get angry. I felt it building in my lungs like a sickness, like I was going to vomit any second.

  When I finally said, “You?” it sounded like an accusation.

  Knight pressed his lips together. He did that when he was trying to keep his temper in check. What the hell did he have to be angry about?

  “Fine,” he answered, and it was even more clipped. He took a deep breath through his nose, trying not to make it obvious. “What happened to your shirt?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly.

  “Doesn’t look like nothing.”

  “New guy spilled his coffee on me.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Right?”

  Except the word came out with the same acidity as if I’d told him to go fuck himself. Hades, I did not expect to be this pissed. I’d thought seeing Knight for the first time since all of this shit went down would just make me vaguely upset, or sad, or irritated, but this was “angry” in big red fire letters. This was “angry” with a bullhorn in the middle of Times Square.

  My whole body felt spring-loaded, like I was going to snap forward and demolish him any second. Yes, I was still angry that he’d basically dumped me because neither one of us knew how to pick up the pieces after everything had happened with Meg. But this… this anger was off the charts, and it surprised me.