by Rhys Ford
I tried telling myself to slow down, to prolong our release, because I wasn’t sure when I’d have another chance to wrap myself around another man. Willing to take what Trent gave me seemed best, but I cupped his ass, squeezing it and wishing I’d have a crack at it later.
If there ever was a later. No, he promised a later. Demanded it. Took me as he was saying it, but for me, all that mattered was the now. Our tongues lapped into a hot, searing kiss, his mouth savaging mine as he climbed his peak. My cock leaked heavily, smearing our bellies with precome. My pleasure sang and dove. I felt it bleed over me, touching my eyes and mottling in a volcanic blush of gold and reds.
“Love your eyes,” Trent whispered reverently, stroking my cheek as he drove into my heat. “Look at your gorgeous eyes. Like copper poured into emeralds.”
He kissed my shoulder, his face caught in the glow roiling under my skin. My fae blood delighted in the chase, rising to embrace our pleasure until my submerged wings sparkled and veined. My thighs were bright, but not as bright as my shoulders or sides. Those gleamed, dancing firefly lights under my pale skin. The glow caught on my freckles, sparks of darkness in the bright, and Trent’s body cast long shadows across the sheets where it frustrated the light.
I was close. Too close to do anything other than fall into the tightness coming to engulf me. It built up from my balls, working outward and into my belly. My cock jumped, and I clasped my hand around it, working the loose skin of my shaft up. It was nearly too sensitive to touch, a delicious anguish I could almost taste. It left a metallic edge in my mouth, a razor of pleasure I’d sucked on too long, leaving my tongue shredded with the sharpness of it.
Then Trent came and the world blew back into the night.
I followed him over the edge, throwing myself into the sensations pouring out of my center. He milked me, stroking at the tendrils of nerves in my body until I shivered, too overwhelmed to protest and too weak to cry out. I gave myself one last jerk, and my cock gushed hot, filling the thin space between us as Trent slumped down over me.
He must have pulled free. I wasn’t aware of his body leaving mine until he returned with a couple of beers. He used a damp washcloth he’d gotten from the bathroom to wipe at our mess while the beers sat on a prayer table I’d found at a garage sale for fifty cents. I couldn’t steady the jaggedness of my breathing, torn apart by the violence of my orgasm and fretful of his tenderness as he tossed the cloth to the floor.
My skin ached where my mottling sat inert, a litter of colors subdued by my release. Trent stroked my belly, then carefully rubbed at the long threadlike scabs along my left arm, battle wounds I’d earned while writhing on the street’s broken asphalt as I choked on the scorpion netsuke.
“What are you thinking, Roku?” he whispered softly, lying on his side. Even soft, his cock was something to be wary of. I’d be afraid of rolling over onto its girth in the middle of the night, hurting him and probably scaring me into thinking I’d somehow caught Bob under me. “I swear I can hear you thinking.”
“What are you thinking?” I ventured. I sucked at postcoital small talk. Every bone in my body was sinking down into my flesh, reminding me I’d exhausted myself in the past week and also just been fucked into the mattress. I wanted to sleep until I was hungry and then maybe eat until I was sleepy, but most of all, I wasn’t sure what to do with the low simmer of horniness Trent seemed to have awakened in me.
“I’m thinking I’m really going to enjoy being your partner,” he confessed. “You want to know something?”
I was afraid to ask. Afraid to know. A few weeks ago, I’d shot my last partner, and now I’d just fucked my new one. Still, I nodded, watching his face soften its harsh planes with a wash of tenderness.
“I think… if you let yourself, you’ll enjoy it too. We fit well together. Work well together. And I think, do this pretty good too.”
“Maybe, I don’t… there’s a lot of turmoil in my life. Inside of me, even. I might need some of that time you were taking.” I wasn’t going to admit to the fear crawling through me, sinking its fangs into my soul, injecting me with poisonous doubt. I was tired of waking up alone and even sicker of coming home to an empty bed, but I didn’t know if my heart could take any more damage. I’d already used up everything I had inside of me to tape up its remains, and I wasn’t even sure if it still beat. “Let me get a nap and we’ll switch over. I’m going to have to take a full accounting of it all before I decide.”
“You do that,” Trent said, stretching out beside me. Chinatown continued its dance outside of my windows, the western gate dragon coughing out a challenge to the moon as it broke through the clouds. “Gaines was right, you know.”
I dreaded to hear what my godfather had to say about my existence, but I bit anyway. “Oh? Right about what?”
“He said you were a pain in the fucking ass.” Trent smiled broadly, working our fingers together. “But he said you were worth every damned second of time I’d spend with you. You, Roku MacCormick, are going to be one Hell of a ride.”
WE NEVER got a round two in. Exhaustion took us both in the middle of a conversation my dreams replayed in bits and pieces. At some point in the middle of the night, Bob decided the small of my back was the perfect place to sleep, and she’d curled up in the hollow only to be dislodged by Trent’s leg a few minutes later. The only loser in that fight was me, and after vowing to trim the cat’s claws in the morning, I fell right back into the comfortable cradle of Trent’s arm.
Since Jie had dominated the rest of our murmurs afterward, it made sense she’d take over my subconscious. The reality of her disappearance reared its ugly head again once the glow we’d built up between us faded. I was torn between regret and guilt about the distance we’d built between us and anger over how she’d shoved me out of her life once I’d turned Kingfisher’s over to her and Ghost.
I couldn’t escape the maze of words I’d wrapped myself in before crashing. Ghost played hide-and-seek on tiered fire escapes, disappearing into the rooftop ghettos whenever I got too close. The edges of my dream were hazy and unformed, but I knew where I was as I walked despite seeing nothing but shadows and a few flashes of lights. Her face loomed through the dark, a mocking laughter following me through the corridors of my mind, and I jerked awake to find Trent reaching for me, his bleary eyes blinking at the sleep tangling his long lashes.
“You having a hard time sleeping?” Trent murmured through the graying light of the lifting morning. “Still thinking about Jie?”
“And Ghost,” I confessed hoarsely. “We were thrown together so many times as kids, I never stopped thinking of him as a brother, but sometimes I wonder if he ever counted me as one back. His dad’s gone. So is my mom. And here the two of us are, living out their relationship as if they’re still hooking up every other month or so. Maybe I’m just being sentimental… expecting more out of them than I should.”
“Sentimental doesn’t hand over a club like Kingfisher’s. You did that because you care about them.” His mouth was on my shoulder, and my skin warmed and sang at the touch. “Jie’s out there. We don’t have any proof she isn’t, and if your theory is right, she’s valuable to whoever is bringing this shitstorm down on you.”
My phone rang before I could respond, and when I stretched to grab it before it vibrated itself off the nightstand, my ass reminded me of Trent’s cock with a faint burning twinge. I’d have loved to turn over and give him as good as he gave me, but a ringing phone in the dead of the morning was never a good sign, especially since I was a cop.
“MacCormick.” My voice cracked, me having not quite woken up yet, and I stopped myself from yawning into the receiver. “Who’s this?”
“Roku?” Jie’s voice drove ice shards through my veins, and I sat up, shock and fear stiffening my spine. “God, Roku… you’ve got to come… get me. I’m pretty sure he’s going to kill us.”
“Where are you, Jie?” I was already sliding off of the bed, searching for my jeans. I didn’t c
are that I stank of sex and reeked of spilled beer. The tremble in her voice was enough to get me moving, my mind kicking into overdrive as I tried to process what she was saying. Trent was off the bed and heading to the bathroom before I could say anything else. “Okay, do you know where you are? Can you give me any clue?”
“I’m in a storeroom. There’s gardening stuff in here. I can smell the fertilizer.” There was a roaring sound, an angry trilling close and loud enough to make my ears ring. “There’s a dragon. I can’t see it, but I can smell it. It’s powdery, sweet, so not a red, but I can’t tell you if it’s a gate dragon or someone’s watch dragon. And I think I can see a red maple tree between the slats, but I don’t know for sure. It’s too dark.”
“Okay, let me think. How are you calling me? Where—”
“They brought another woman in, and she had a phone in her housecoat pocket, but it’s almost dead. I dimmed the screen down to black so I could call you,” she whispered.
“What can you tell me about where you are?”
“It’s dark and smells like earth. The floor’s hard, rough. Stone or a slab. It’s small, a shed? There’s bags of stuff in here, but nothing I can use to get the door open. Wait, no—the woman says we’re either in a storage room behind her teahouse or the gardener’s shed. She’s groggy. I think he hit her…. We don’t have enough power—” Someone spoke, and I heard Jie murmur, “Hold on… what? Roku, she says her name’s Yukiko. Said that you’d know who she….”
The phone went dead, and for a second, I stared down at my blank screen as Trent came in from the bathroom, holding a wet toothbrush with paste on it in one hand and a canister of baby wipes in the other. That was going to have to do for a bath. We didn’t have much time, if we had any time at all.
“Hold on. I’ve got to call Gaines,” I said, punching in the numbers.
“Does she know where she is?” Trent began to pull moistened wipes from the plastic tub in his hand. “An address?”
“No, but that’s not the worst of it.” I listened to Gaines’s phone ring, mentally screaming at him to pick up. “She’s not alone. The son of a bitch doesn’t know what’s going to come down on him, because the fucking idiot didn’t just take Jie, he took my grandmother too.”
Eighteen
“JESUS, YOU fucking find her, MacCormick,” Gaines snarled as Trent and I left the squad’s briefing room. The force of his voice was strong enough to make the SWAT team gathered there flinch like a flaggerdoot of jackalopes hiding from a canyon roc. “Fucking find them before this whole city goes up in flames.”
We fled. It was the smart, right thing to do. Once the Asylum gathered all of its inmates and her warden barked out his orders, it was intelligent to begin moving in the direction of the door. Any door. Hell, if we hadn’t been three stories up, I was sure one of the uniforms would have crawled out the window if he could have fit his shoulders through the cramped frame. We’d each been given a section of the city, but it was going to be like finding a silver coin caught on a white dragon’s scales.
I’d never been so glad to see the inside of a cheese-scented, stained-carpet sedan in my life, and Trent nearly kissed the dashboard when he slid in, his shell-shocked expression at the enormity of our task pretty much saying everything I felt about the situation.
My stomach was too sour for anything other than strong black coffee with enough sugar to give my tongue cavities, and Trent tsked at the stream of white crystals I poured into my to-go cup until I reminded him I was faerie, and like most hollow-boned nonhumans, I needed to consume my body weight in sugar and carbs in order to survive.
Trent wasn’t buying it. I could see the doubt on his face, and it didn’t help when the coffee kiosk tender who ran so thick around his middle, his wings stuck straight out of his back, grunted his approval when my coffee turned to syrup. Still, I needed the kick, and I didn’t think food would stay down long enough for me to bother chewing it. We got in the car with our coffee and began driving.
Chinatown sobbed its heart out, drowning its gutters in an icy rain thick enough to turn its close-set buildings in shimmers of brick red and blue glass. Pain and sorrow were caught in the shadows, struggling to break free to fill me as Trent had not more than a few hours ago, but I couldn’t afford their affection. Not now. Dwelling on anything other than getting away from the station was a losing proposition. I couldn’t focus on the break in Jie’s voice when the phone died on her or the rustling whispers I’d heard in the background.
Too many of my tragedies happened offscreen, captured in a silent bubble where I’d been unaware of my world—of my life—ending. Those moments were gone, slippery fragments of time lost in a darkness I could never find again, and I hated wondering where I’d been, what I’d been doing when the people I loved took their last breath.
And scared to death my name had been on their tongues when the end came.
“Going a little fast there, Bucky,” Trent muttered from the passenger seat.
“Who’s Bucky?” I spared him a glance, which only made him clench the door grip even harder. Trent was whiter than Bob’s canine victims and about as wild-eyed. “Are you losing your mind?”
“It’s… never mind. Just…. Gods in Heaven!” He grimaced, bracing himself against the door. “Could you watch the damned road?”
“The road’s fine,” I grumbled, dampening the growl roiling from my belly. “We’re just… fucked. That’s what we are. I’ve got nothing. I have nowhere to go, and the lab’s got the call file, but there wasn’t enough time to tap where it came from.”
San Francisco was taking a beating, its skies filled with sheets of rolling lightning, sharp white flashes bright enough to blind and steal the color from the city below. The beggars under the East Gate huddled under its dragon’s enormous coiled body, using the reptile’s folds to shelter them from the rainwater. I’d seen the South Gate dragon abandon its post a few minutes before Gaines walked into the conference room, its angry screams of displeasure carrying through the streets, shaking out a flock of mock basan nesting in Washington Square Park. The basan were the reason Central moved out of the building, abandoning it to Arcane Crimes for less incendiary grounds after a nasty infestation of the fire-sparking birds scorched most of the roof. Arcane Crimes, thankful for the space, cleansed the nest and settled in, periodically sending a rookie dressed in an enchanted rooster mascot suit to dance around the perimeter to reinforce the protective wards.
There were no wards, and the so-called enchantment on the old rooster suit was nothing more than two bags of opalescent glitter liberally rubbed into the suit’s matted faux fur. Savvy to the initiation rituals of bored detectives, I’d not done the traditional welcoming dance of the flagging cock, but when a basan lightly settled on a stop sign near the farmer’s market’s entrance, I wondered if the molting suit would fit Trent and if I could con him into wearing it.
It was a stupid thought, but I needed something, anything, to stop me from thinking about Jie and my grandmother.
In my rearview mirror, the station faded off into the distance, a benefit of living in a city made up of hills and odd architecture. The rain poured in sheets from the bridges between the gōngyù and, in one case, made an alley I wanted to cut through impassable. Despite the early hour, it was difficult to find a clear shot away from the station. I was burning time working the side streets, but there was no avoiding the congestion of early-morning deliveries and the emergency crews working to get the flooded rooftops clear of people. We’d gone only three blocks when a chunk of metal and wood crashed down a few feet in front of the sedan, and I tapped the brakes, knowing full well the car would hydroplane sideways down the hill.
It did, and Trent treated me to a rousing rendition of curse words sung in a low pitch last used to send Viking chieftains off to Valhalla. A twist of my wrists and a gentle press of my foot on the gas pedal and the car righted itself in time for us to slide past another chunk of fallen bridge hitting the road.
�
�Okay, left turn. Damned city is falling apart.” My phone sang out its displeasure at being put in one of the cup holders between the seats, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the road. “Grab that, will you?”
“And if it’s Gaines?” Trent asked, reaching for it. “What do I tell him? We’re going to drive off the end of the pier because we have no idea where to start?”
“I’m about to if I don’t get a clear road in a few minutes. Jaan confirmed the woman used in the doppelgänger spell was Shelly Chan. I was thinking we should start off at the temple where she was last seen. CAP followed up on it initially, but they didn’t know what we know now, and I’d feel better if we questioned the—shit, hold on. This guy’s hot on our ass.”
That much was obvious, because the sedan’s rearview mirror was full of chrome grill and headlights. Unease nipped at the back of my brain, and I pushed the sedan forward, getting some distance between us and the SUV. A second later, it was back to kissing my bumper, and the unease grew to full-blown worry.
“Let me call in for backup,” Trent said, reaching for the console, but I shook my head. “Why not?”
“I’m going to circle around. Could be connected to Jie and—shit!” I took a hard left when the SUV pulled in too close behind me, its beams filling the sedan, but the massive vehicle followed, tight on my tail. The road narrowed, leaving me a single lane, and I cursed. Trent’s astonished grunt was something I could have done without, and my stomach sank, expecting the worst.
The phone stopped ringing for a second, then picked back up again.
“Answer it,” I ordered Trent. “Because that sure as fuck isn’t Gaines.”