Suddenly, the vision blanked out, and I felt my partner give himself a slight shake, the same as he always did when he’d been freed of the vision. I surreptitiously released his arm, but he knew I’d peeked. Hatter had told me once it was like stripping his flesh off his body and laying his soul bare when he shared a vision.
Which was probably why he loathed doing it and had refused to tell anyone that he could. But he’d never minded sharing with me, said if we were partners we shouldn’t have secrets when it came to our cases.
The thing of it was, that hadn’t felt like anything at all related to our case. I shoved my hands into my pockets, knowing I couldn’t ask him about it until we were alone.
Bo looked between us two before asking, “You good now?”
Maddox grunted.
“All right, well,” she said slowly, as though regathering the lost threads of thought. “Anyway, masquerade ball. All the details to the event can be found inside…” She reached back into the drawer of her desk that I was sure had been spelled to be bottomless—I could have sworn I’d heard a wolf’s howl once when she opened it—and pulled out a pure gold envelope that gleamed like molten metal in the light. “The invitation with coordinates as well. I don’t think I need to tell you guys to remain undercover. If there is a theme, keep in character. If the Slashers are there when you arrive, you mustn’t do anything to stand out. Keep the king safe at all costs, and for the gods’ sake, don’t let any of his jewels go missing, or Draven will have us all for lunch.”
She handed Maddox the invite. He took it and slid it into his black dinner jacket. Then she nodded toward the door. “You may leave, Maddox.”
I turned to follow my partner out the door, but Bo cleared her throat. “Elle, a minute, please.”
I blew out a hard raspberry. Maddox glanced back at us worriedly, but like the good little soldier he was, he left without another word, silently shutting the door behind him.
Turning, I shrugged. “You wanted me?”
Bo stood, leaning forward on the surface of the desk with her fingers spread. “It’s been two months, Detective. How are you holding up?”
I knew what she was and wasn’t asking. She wasn’t asking whether Hatter and I got on, because that was obvious to anyone who bothered to look. She was asking, however, about the other thing, the very thing Hatter had tried to talk to me about this morning. And I would think a conspiracy was afoot between the two of them except for the small matter of us having literally just arrived.
I wrapped my arms around my chest, wishing like the twin hells that Maddox hadn’t reported his vision to Bo. By the books, he had to. But as a friend, I wished he’d kept that little tidbit between us, mainly because I didn’t want to revisit it, ever again.
I’d done my mandated counseling, I’d been given the green light to return to work, and that had been that. Instead, I had to deal with a boss who was really, really good at coaxing details out of me that I wouldn’t have even given my own mother—if I’d ever actually had one, that was. It was part of Bo’s shepherdess training, no doubt, but bloody hells, it was annoying.
I shrugged, not even sure what to say.
“If you need to speak with— ”
I held up my hand. “Let me just stop you right there, Captain. I appreciate the concern, but he is a nonissue. He is also very much dead. So please, if we could just— ”
“Detective Maddox Hatter’s visions have a one hundred percent success rate. I understand that this is hard— ”
I snort laughed, but heat burned the backs of my eyes. “Oh, do you? Do you really? Are you seriously going to stand here and tell me that you understand what I’m going through? Please don’t patronize me, Captain. You’ve had your partner how long now? Thirty? Thirty-five years? You have no idea what this feels like.” I chewed the words out, feeling as if I were ripping at a scab that had just barely begun to heal over. I had to make them stop, all of them. I knew they were just trying to be there for me, but giving me false hope wasn’t helping. In fact, it was only hurting me.
Sirens weren’t supposed to be capable of falling in love. We were creatures of the flesh, of the lusts, almost solely. So the fact that I’d done just that had left me vulnerable in a way few of my kind, or any other, could ever fully appreciate.
I’d committed the one act any good siren knew to never, ever do. I’d fallen in love, and I’d paid the ultimate price for betraying what and who I was.
“Thirty-one,” she corrected softly before lowering her eyes and staring at a lamb-shaped paperweight on her desk. She was still for a few seconds, then I saw her fingers clench before she finally turned to look back up at me. She blew out a heavy breath. “You’re right, Elle. I don’t know. What I do know is this. I can’t lose you. You are vital not just to Grimm PD but also to me personally. You’re smart. You’re crazy intuitive, and Melanie and I have been discussing my retirement for some time now, and there are only a few names that come to mind when I make my suggestion to the commander for my replacement.”
I blinked. That wasn’t at all been what I’d been expecting to hear. I wrapped my arms even tighter around myself, feeling oddly vulnerable. “You? You really think I could be captain someday?”
All my life, I’d been a screwup, to royal protocol, to what was expected of me, but mostly to my own father, who’d felt he had no choice but to curse me for bringing such dishonor to our family name. The list of people who hadn’t looked at me like a major screwup was piteously low. It probably didn’t help matters that I was as prickly as a barracuda with a toothache most days.
I swallowed hard.
She thinned her lips. “Well, that time isn’t for a while yet. But yes, Elle, you definitely make the short list. So whatever the hells it is that’s got your head out of the game, fix it. If it’s Hook, fix it. If it’s Maddox— ”
I snorted, quickly shaking my head.
She just gave me a look that I in no way wanted to decipher. “If it’s Maddox,” she said again, “fix it. If it’s something else, then godsdamnit it, fix it. But just fix it, Elle. You hear me? Don’t give Crowley any more reason to hang around. You got that? I don’t know why, but that man has a serious hard-on for you.”
I clenched my molars. She was right. As grumpy as that thought made me, she was absolutely right. I’d been getting into bad habits again. Maddox’s vision had thrown me for a loop. I knew that, and I was obviously doing a piss-poor job of hiding it. All I had left was my work, and I took pride in that. I blew out long breath through my nose before giving Bo a hard nod.
“Pretty sure the masquerade tonight is a high-class S&M theme. Black and white and gold only. FYI,” Bo said, raising her chin at the door. “You and Maddox are free to go and find what you need for tonight if you don’t have anything appropriate. Looking forward to reading your report in the morning. And I don’t think I need to tell you this, but don’t let him die, Detective. A royal death on our watch is the last thing this department needs to deal with.”
After snapping a sharp salute, I turned and made for the door.
When I stepped out, I gently eased the door shut behind me. The precinct was a buzz of activity. Hatter, just as I’d expected him to be, was leaning against the wall, clearly waiting on me, reading the invitation in his hand.
“S&M and gold, black, and white,” he murmured, lifting a sharp-peaked eyebrow and looking at me.
“So I heard. Bo gave us permission to go and shop on company funds for tonight. I have nothing.”
He tucked the envelope into the pocket of his jacket then tapped his chest with two fingers and said in his whiskey-smooth Landian drawl, “I might have something. Care to visit Wonderland?”
I used to hate Wonderland. Now, I didn’t hate it so much. I smiled softly, almost looking forward to visiting the quirky realm.
Lifting up on my toes, I nodded but pointed down the hall. “We’ll need to get an all-access key card from Thantor, then yeah, I’d like to see Alice again.”
> CHAPTER 21
DETECTIVE MADDOX
WE WERE TRAVELLING through an intra-dimensional portal, making our way toward Wonderland at the speed of light.
Elle was looking down at her crossed feet, a tight pinch to her eyebrows and around her tense mouth. She wasn’t happy, hadn’t been since my return, and I’d worry that it was me, but I knew the truth.
Maybe I shouldn’t have told her what I’d seen, but I abhorred lies, especially lies between partners. That wasn’t the way I wanted to start things off with us. Now, though I wasn’t sure if I’d made the right choice. Things between us had hit a stalemate and were pretty much at their frostiest.
Interoffice romances were verboten, and I understood why. Relationships were a complication that didn’t need to become an added burden between work partners. Alice and I had been such a disaster that I was in no hurry to jump into any new romantic entanglements, yet Elle had made me feel alive again. Even now, when things weren’t at their best between us, she made me burn with verve. I felt centered around her, more capable, better able to work through complex puzzles, to not get so pulled into the chaotic visions in my head, always lost to the world because I was too full of prophetic images scrolling through my head. Elle quieted all of that, and I knew it was because she was my intellectual equal. I didn’t need to work through the puzzles alone because I had her.
It wasn’t just lust that drew me to Elle, though there was that. Sirens exuded pheromones that made them catnip to everyone, but Alice was a sex therapist. Flesh and the carnal weren’t anything new or even all that arousing to me anymore.
What turned me on more than anything was a meeting of the minds, someone with whom I shared interests, hobbies, someone who understood that a thinking being was a far more complex organism than just what gender or sex dictated one should be.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It was hells not knowing what I should and shouldn’t do where she was concerned. One thing I did know—Hook was off limits. I clamped my lips shut. Maybe I had been wrong. After all, it was two months since I’d told her and six months since I’d begun to have images of his return, and my visions had yet to manifest. I’d never been wrong before, but there was always a first time for everything.
The thought made me sick to my stomach because I realized now just how much I’d always depended on my visions, always believed them infallible. But what if they weren’t? What if I was no longer the same? Maybe it had been Wonderland’s soil that had fed my magick, and after being gone for so long without the twisted madness of Wonderland sinking its feelers into me, I was losing that part of me that I’d taken for granted would simply always be there.
The tension between Elle and me was so thick I could cut it with a knife. I’d love to know what in the hells Bo had told her, but if Elle wanted me to know, she’d tell me—eventually. I was sure of it.
To the rest of the world, Elle might appear prickly and distant, only ever giving others a superficial impression of herself or what she thought, at best. But she wasn’t that. If anything, Elle had trust issues, and unless she fully trusted you, she’d never give you more than a cursory idea of what and who she really was. In that, however, she and I were the exact same.
The starlit doorway opened. Immediately, I was blasted with the familiar scents of home: the smog of heavy machinery belching their black fumes into the perpetually overcast and gray skies of the city square; the street vendors selling their greasy wares; the petrichor of fresh rains; and all of it mixed in with the stench that all big cities boosted, no matter how clean they tried to be.
The buildings were all crawling toward the heavens like long, gnarled, and twisted fingers. Several dirigibles steamed and puttered gracefully through the skies, modes of transportation reserved only for the wealthiest of Landians.
For a second, I suffered a small pang of homesickness when I stepped out. This had once been home, and it had also once been the epicenter of my entire world, but with the loss of my daughter, Wonderland had lost all its appeal for me. I would always love it because of the memories of her forever tied to it, but I was happy to be freed of the shackles that had burdened me for so long.
Grimm was my home now. It was where I felt free and alive, for the first time in a long time. But I still had connections to Wonderland, one of which would come in handy tonight.
“Come,” I grunted and quickly crossed the street to avoid oncoming golden carriages wheeling the obnoxiously wealthy a few meters here and there, their legs all but useless after so many years of disuse.
It was always easy to spot the truly filthy rich. They were generally dressed in the most ridiculous fashions that they believed made them the epitome of desirable, and they never looked anyone in the eyes because they were far too good for the common rabble.
Elle was hard on my heels. In seconds, I spied the wooden placard of the Crypt swaying in the gentle breeze above Alice’s nondescript sex shop.
I opened the door and stood aside, allowing Elle to enter first. She breezed right through, and I smirked. There’d once been a time when she would have hissed at me for daring to open doors for her. I’d call this progress, meager though it was.
I’d rung up Alice before coming, so this time when we entered there was no scent of labulum coral and black anemone being pumped through the vents. That combination turned my partner into the darker, madder version of her—a version that could kill, that had killed.
The shop was buzzing with patrons, more than was normal for this time of day. I glanced around at the scantily dressed men and women of all species. The low sounds of sex were a constant refrain in the background. But after years of hearing sex, I was no longer affected by it.
“Busier than usual,” Elle remarked in a low voice, as though she said it more for her benefit than mine. I nodded anyway. Elle looked as similarly disaffected as I was. Considering she was a siren with a siren’s appetites, I was not at all surprised.
Alice popped out from behind a shelf. A black wardrobe bag was draped over her forearm, and she wore a dress fashioned entirely from a silver netting of nothing but sewn-together diamond chips.
Dusky of skin with striking ice-blond hair that fell in luscious thick waves down her back, she was as beautiful as always. Her eyes were dark blue and shaded with a thick layer of smoky black eye shadow. Her lips were as red as blood.
“Oh, there you are,” she said, eyes widening, and she patted her hair back in place, as though she’d been startled by our sudden arrival. Alice no longer wore her blue ribbons she’d been known far and wide for, because it had been those very ribbons that had nearly been her undoing.
“Maddox.” She smiled softly and leaned in to kiss my whiskered cheek, laying her palm on my shoulder to pull me down to her, calm and poised once more.
It had been many months since Elle and I had saved Alice from swinging on the hangman’s noose for a series of murders she’d been framed for by a dirty beat cop in Grimm.
“Alice,” I said deeply, sometimes still surprised by the silent truce we’d seemingly entered into, and gave her a quick hug of greeting.
If anyone had asked me whether it would be possible for Alice and me to find a peaceful coexistence again, I’d have declared it to be an impossibility. We had so much bad history between us. Yet here we were, never the same but no longer so far apart, either.
“Elle,” Alice said in her cultured voice and dipped her head toward my partner, who snorted and pulled her in for a quick hug.
I thinned my lips in shock. Elle wasn’t the demonstrative sort. A ghost of a grin touched Alice’s composed mask. Blue eyes full of pleasant surprise stared up at me, and I shrugged. Elle often surprised me. Alice patted Elle’s back awkwardly, but I knew her well enough to know she hadn’t minded the touch.
They broke away just seconds later.
“It’s good to see you again,” Elle said and sounded as though she really meant it. “How are things?”
Alice shrugged a slim sho
ulder, sighing deeply but still wearing the ghost of a grin. “The same—yet different too. Seems murder really helps drum up business. Who knew.”
Elle snorted. “You’d be surprised what a hot commodity a sexy possible murderess suddenly becomes with a business like yours.”
Alice laughed, the sound artlessly sultry. Alice didn’t try to exude sex. It simply came naturally to her. “I’m figuring that out.” Then she glanced at me and dipped the wardrobe bag toward me. “I had to call in a favor with a client of mine, but I’m sure this will be a perfect fit. And for you, Elle, I have one of my own costumes, if you’re daring.”
Dark-blue eyes glittered with challenge. “I’m fairly certain you couldn’t possibly have anything for me I haven’t seen or tried at least once before.”
“I’m counting on it. I doubt many would be willing to try, yet I’m certain you are one of the few who could wear this and not have it wear you. Besides,” she said with a shrug and a full-lipped smirk, “Midas is rather a bit of a snob when it comes to his infamous soirees. You want in close with the king, then trust me on this.”
Elle chuckled darkly. “I’m well aware of the king’s dark proclivities. But we go on business and not pleasure. He will invite us in whether we’re gauche or not. He’ll have no choice on the matter.”
“I rather thought you might be. And true enough, but you’ll get a much more cooperative king this way.” Alice grinned then dipped her head at us both. “Come, follow me to the dressing room.”
Her round bottom flexed with her steps, causing the diamonds to wink and glimmer in the haunting lime-green lighting. Rolls of fog swirled around our ankles. Everything about the Crypt was designed to appeal to the baser side of our sexual natures.
Alice would often switch up the décor on the inside. Sometimes there’d be a Roman orgy theme, other times a dark, dank dungeon, and so on. Today it looked like a haunted forest with creeping willow vines shuddering from beams above us, and the creaking, rustling sounds of wind through trees ringing all around. Come to think of it, most of the beings I’d seen when we’d entered had been of the woodland variety.
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