by R. J. Blain
I made a thoughtful sound in my throat, opened one of the databases, and scanned for addresses and last-known residences of the populace. “It’s possible if I could gain access to the citizen registry databases I can take the address data of some of these people and limit how many have to be redone. I won’t know until I try, however. It depends on how complete the information in the system is.”
“We’ve been looking into the problem of identifying the missing and dead. Will that comparison help do that?”
It took every bit of my willpower to hide my glee at Sergeant Gildroy’s question. “I can try. I can’t make any promises the current data set will allow it, but I can see what I can do.”
“Good. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. I’ll speak with Dean Lewis and make arrangements regarding your work hours, Miss Daegberht. What is the best way to reach you?”
“My email is likely best; I check it often. I don’t have a phone.” I wasn’t exactly telling the truth; I did have a phone, but I didn’t have the rank or clearance to activate it. “I’m staying with a close friend right now, so any documentation can be sent to his place.”
When I gave Sergeant Gildroy Rob’s address, Jacob’s eyes widened before he recovered enough to smooth his expression.
I somehow managed to leave the station before smiling my triumph for the world to see.
Jacob stalked me all the way back to Rob’s apartment building. When I finally reached the doorway leading inside, I turned to face Kenneth’s dae. “What was your game back there?”
The dae tilted his head to the side, and the corners of his mouth twitched up in a faint smile. “I was ensuring your placement among the police. You’re not just an unawakened now. You’re a potential bonded. You should be thanking me. A little nudge and a little push, and you’ll be classified as a free bonded. That benefits us both.”
I had no idea what a free bonded was, but I had every intention of asking Rob. “I will assume this is a good thing for the moment. If you’re expecting thanks, don’t hold your breath. You’ll have to do a lot better than that to earn my gratitude.”
“Noted. Kenneth asked me to offer his apologies and expressed his desire for a more cordial relationship moving forward.”
I was tempted to flip the dae a rude gesture, but I restrained the urge and forced my best smile. “I’ll think about it. If his version of cordial relationship involves stabbing me in the back, I’d rather not bother. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I’m not willing to put myself in such a position again. I don’t trust you, either, so don’t get too cozy with me. I’ll play your pretend partner game because it benefits us both. Straight and narrow, Jacob. Walk it.”
“Yet you trust that snake up in his tall tower,” Jacob hissed.
I bared my teeth and hissed back at him. At the same time, I rolled up my sleeve to show him my snakehead tattoo. “Birds of a feather flock together.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Do you want it to be? Enough posturing. If you want me to play the game, I have work to do, and it doesn’t involve talking to you.”
“It certainly doesn’t,” Rob grumbled from behind me. I whirled, my eyes widening.
The way Rob glared at Jacob promised pain, suffering, and death, and I shivered at the thought of the dae turning his ire on me.
“Message received.” With a glower the rival of Rob’s, Jacob growled something under his breath, turned, and marched away.
“How long were you skulking there?” I demanded, wrinkling my nose at Rob for having startled me so much.
“Long enough. You get full points for hissing at him. It seemed like you had things under control, so I thought I’d watch and wait to see what happened.”
“Let’s go up to your place before I decide to whip out my gun and shoot him,” I grumbled, wrinkling my nose while glowering at Jacob’s departing back. “I hate that dae.”
“With good reason.” Rob linked his arm with mine and tugged me inside. “How did the interview go?”
“Let’s talk upstairs.”
What I really wanted to do was flop onto Rob’s couch, grab a pillow, and hide, but until I figured out how to deal with being saddled with Jacob, I had to get my head into the game. If there were advantages to allying with Kenneth’s dae, I needed to decide how to make use of them.
They would be making plans of their own, and I couldn’t allow them to beat me, not this time.
Colby dropped from the ceiling and landed on my head with a wet splat. Noodle by noodle, my casserole streamed down the back of my neck and into my shirt. My shriek echoed in Rob’s condo as I flailed and tried to peel my roommate off my back. “Damn it, Colby!”
Shudders ran through me at the chill of it oozing along my spine. Shucking out of my jacket, I contorted in my effort to dislodge Colby. “Get out of my shirt. Out! Damn it. Colby!”
Rob laughed, grabbed hold of my holster and freed me from it, lowering it to the floor and pushing it out of the way with his foot. Grabbing hold of my shirt, he pulled it over my head.
Rob sucked in a breath. “Stay still, Alexa.”
I froze, my eyes widening at the seriousness of his tone. “Rob? What is it?”
Laughter wasn’t the answer I expected, and I twisted around to glare at the dae.
He held up a small disc which was smeared with neon orange slime. “You brought home a friend.”
“I what?” I snatched for the object. Colby dropped to the floor before sticking to my leg. I stumbled at its unexpected weight and fell against Rob.
The dae kept laughing, and his chest rumbled with the sound. “Seems someone is really interested in what you’re up to, Miss Daegberht.” Rob held me with one arm, and with the other, he lifted the disc to examine it. “Curious. Audio? Visual? You left for a little over an hour and got intimate with someone else. Naughty woman.”
My face burned. “I did no such thing.”
Before we could look at the device any further, Colby lunged up and engulfed Rob’s hand. Rob’s eyes widened and he shook his arm. “Not my hand, not my hand! Colby!”
When the dae finally managed to dislodge my macaroni and cheese roommate, his hand and wrist were orange and dripped strings of cheese and a few stray noodles. I blanched. “Gross. You have Colby goo all over you.”
The culprit darted across the apartment and disappeared into its room. I blinked and stared at Rob’s hand.
The disc was gone.
“It’s gone. Is your hand going to be gone, too?” I tilted my head to the side and wondered what I would do if Rob’s hand started to melt like metal, glass, and other objects did when under the influence of Colby’s terrifying digestive system.
“Don’t even think it.”
“Towel.” I spun on a heel to head for the kitchen.
“All you can think to do is grab a towel?” Rob blurted. “My hand! It tried to eat my hand.”
“No, Rob. If Colby had tried to eat your hand, you wouldn’t have a hand.” I wet a towel in the sink, returned to Rob, and offered it to him. “I saw what he did to the skyscraper.”
“I was trying not to remember that.” Grabbing the towel, he scrubbed at his hand and wrist. While he got the stringy cheese and goo off, his skin remained a brilliant orange.
Biting my lip kept my mirth contained for the moment, but laughter threatened to overwhelm me. I turned around and presented my back to Rob. “Did he slime me, too?”
“Your bra will never be the same.”
I shuddered. Grateful it clasped in the front, I ditched it to discover Rob had played me for a fool. The black material remained untouched by Colby’s determination to devour the disc that had been attached to me.
“You fiend!” I picked up my bra and whipped him with my lingerie before tossing it onto the couch. “You deserve to be stained. Freak. There’s nothing wrong with my bra.”
“I could have sworn there was orange all over it,” Rob replied, widening his eyes in his bid to play i
nnocent.
I grabbed my shirt, checked it over, and satisfied there were no orange stains or any other devices attached to it, I pulled it back on. “It was probably Jacob.”
“Did anyone else get near you?”
“A couple of cops. I didn’t get near anyone on the street during the walk over.”
Rob frowned. “Well, either way, if that disc was broadcasting, they now know about Colby.”
Snorting and shaking my head, I took the towel out of Rob’s hand and shoved him in the direction of the kitchen. “No one in their right mind will ever believe in mobile macaroni and cheese.”
“You do.”
“Who said I was in my right mind?”
Colby’s discovery and destruction of the disc left me and Rob with far more questions than answers. I paced around the living room, pausing to stare out the window over the city.
“Why would anyone tag me?” I complained, stomping my foot. “I’m basically a limp noodle in a world full of fire breathing freaks. Winged werewolves. Dragons. Even the macaroni and cheese has more viable options than me. You’re the one who should have been tagged with a damned disc. We don’t even know what it did. Colby ate it.”
“Food!” my roommate replied from its room.
“Not food, damn it. Colby, we can’t tell what it did now.”
“Mommy?”
While I was tempted to throw things at my casserole for making my life even more difficult, I took several deep breaths until my impulse to hit someone or something faded. “Thank you for finding it, Colby.”
“Food!”
“Your macaroni and cheese fiend has a very specialized diet,” Rob murmured, leaning against the kitchen island with his arms crossed over his chest. With a mixture of relief and disappointment, I noticed the orange stains had faded from Rob’s hand. “So. You went to the interview. You claim no one was near you on the street. Did Jacob touch you?”
“Yes. He came up behind me and touched my shoulder while I was talking to the receptionist. The receptionist and I exchanged cards, but I didn’t touch her. I wasn’t wearing gloves.”
“So it was likely Jacob.”
I scowled. “Likely, but so obvious. Why tag me at all? What did the device do? It’s not like he couldn’t figure out where I was. He followed me here, after all.”
“If it’s a locator tag, maybe he assumed he wouldn’t be able to follow you? I didn’t see it for long, but it didn’t seem like a camera to me. Too small. Audio transmitter, maybe?”
“They make pretty tiny cameras, Rob. It’s trivial for Kenneth to get something like that. All he’d have to do is hit his black market and pick one from his stock.”
“It’s also possible a clever dae on the street snuck up behind you.”
I grimaced at the thought, but I couldn’t deny it. “Possible. Fucking fliers.”
“Now, now, Alexa. Be nice.”
“I don’t want to be nice. They can fly.”
“I thought you had finished with any aspirations of flight around the time you fell from a skyscraper, hit the end of your line, and slapped into the building with your face.”
Shuddering from the memory of Kenneth’s sabotage of my gear, I shook my head. “Compared to everyone else, I’m a useless freak.”
Rob sighed, pushed away from the island, and strode to me, reaching out to touch my cheek. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
The frustrations of being normal after the Dawn of Dae welled up. I clenched my fist. “I can’t fly. I can’t turn into a dragon. I can’t breathe fire. I can’t summon water out of thin air. I can’t change shapes. I can’t do anything. Everyone’s dreams turn them into the fantastical. What’s down my rabbit hole, Rob? Nothing, that’s what. If I’m lucky, I can get by. If I’m lucky, I might be able to do some things on my own. That goddamned Jacob stalked me to the fucking police station and made them think he was my partner. So, instead of me being able to get in on my own, he came around and interfered.”
Rob tensed, his eyes narrowing. “Come again?”
Flexing my hand, I turned to the window and stared out over the city until I could control my temper. “What are free dae, Rob? Why would Jacob tell the police he was considering officially bonding with me? What the fuck does that even mean?”
“Free dae are dae who either never had a human bond, like me, or dae who outlived their human progenitor. It surprises me Jacob claimed he was a free dae when he’s bonded to Kenneth.”
“He didn’t make any such claim. Jacob just said he was my partner. Sergeant Gildroy asked if Jacob planned on officially bonding with me. Kenneth didn’t come up in the discussion at all, for obvious reasons.”
Rob sighed. “This Sergeant Gildroy made some assumptions, then. I see. He must be a bonded human with an externalized dae.”
“Why would you say that?”
Smiling usually made Rob seem younger and more vibrant, but his grin reminded me of a snake poised to strike. “Humans who have internalized dae usually end up becoming the physical vessels of their dae and nothing more. Arthur Hasling could be an externalized dae, but he could also be an internalized dae who took over and burned out his human half. Some of the human usually remains, but they often are merely an echo of the person they once were. Those dae—and their humans—lose touch with what it means to be human—something you won’t lose, which makes you far more than nothing.”
“More secrets,” I hissed.
Rob laughed. “Bite-sized chunks, Alexa. I already explained humans with dae are no longer whole. They lose part of themselves when they created their dae. As a result, dae aren’t human. They can never be human, either.”
“But you act human. You do everything a human does. You’re no different from me.” I wanted to wail the fact I didn’t understand.
In so many ways, Rob was a better human than I was, and he reminded me of my shortcomings each day.
“I’m not human, nor will I ever be one, Alexa. The only reason I act human is because of you. I learn from you. I feel from you. But I can never have what you have.”
“And what do I have that you lack?” I stomped my foot, sucked in a lungful of air, and let it out in a heavy sigh. “Damn it, Rob. You’re a better person than I am.”
“Why would you say that?”
“You do a hell of a lot better job of caring for people than I do, for starters,” I muttered, staring at the shiny floor, which was yet another reminder of our differences.
Rob pressed a finger beneath my chin and lifted my head, forcing me to look at him. “Only because of you, darling. Only because of you.”
I didn’t understand. I had done nothing worthy of the label of good person. Maybe in time I’d atone for the things I had done over the years, but I hadn’t even begun to scratch at the surface of making amends for my crimes.
I had ruined more lives than I could count.
Rob was wrong, but I kept my doubts and misgivings to myself. Complaining wouldn’t change anything, including his mistaken belief.
12
“They weren’t exactly wearing a whole lot.”
While the discovery of the disc bothered me almost as much as the nature of the dae, I forced my attention to my immediate future.
Life went on, and according to the new messages waiting for me in the college notification system, so did schooling. The mountainous tasks of working with the police, resuming classes, and dealing with the problem of Kenneth and his slimy dae loomed over me. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing.
Panicking wouldn’t do me any good. If anything, it’d make coping with the problem even worse.
“What’s bothering you?”
I really needed to learn how to conceal my emotions from the dae. I lacked a single good excuse to hide my misgivings regarding my work load. “They want to start classes again a week from now.”
Along with classes, I’d also be resuming my work as the dean’s assistant.
How many different lives could I lead
before I went insane? Would a crazed woman in a world gone mad even be noticed by the majority of the population? If bejeweled dragons, unicorns, and tiny giraffes with three heads and British accents could be accepted, a madwoman wouldn’t be that much of a novelty.
“That’ll help with our plans.”
“I need a clone. A clone would help a lot right now. She could take up some of my workload so I have time to sleep. See, Rob? This is what happens when we don’t think things through. Sure, working for the police is a great idea, but how am I going to do all my coursework, work for the dean, work for the police, and have time for anything else?”
Rob leaned against the kitchen counter, and while his expression was serious, the corners of his mouth twitched in his effort to hide his smile. “It’s a ten minute drive to your college from here. I’ll take care of picking you up and dropping you off. The police station is close enough you won’t lose much time traveling there. Since you are staying with me, I can likely manipulate how much time you’ll have to spend on the dean’s work. I can handle Dean Lewis in that capacity, at least—or make arrangements so you can work from here as much as possible. I’m wired for the secure networks, so classified data can be transmitted here with no problems. We’ll figure something out.”
“I’ll learn more about him if I work with him in person.”
“While I agree, I also think we have a lot more to learn about the nature of the victims. I don’t want you too close to him, not until we have definitive proof he was either framed or he’s really dumb enough to let some low-life drug-dealing psycho invoice him for a bunch of murders. How many women have died so far? If he’s the one behind the killings, what’s stopping him from targeting you?”
The chill started in my toes and swept upwards, and I shuddered at the creepy-crawly feeling working its way up my spine. “Why would he want to target me? I’m not in the same class as those women. Their clothes, Rob. Think about it.”