Zhane stares at me in shock, mouth hanging open.
I pinch the bridge of my nose and sigh, aware I went way too far. Another thing to apologize for—
“Ahem,” someone says. Ramirez. His head is poking out from behind one of the conference room doors, and he’s glancing back and forth between Zhane and me. My rant must’ve been audible in the conference room. “You, uh, ready for your interview, Kinsey?”
I rise from my seat before Zhane can protest. As I trudge past her, I say, “Like I said, I’ll talk to Delarosa and have him rescind your punishments. I’m sorry I put you in that position. It wasn’t fair of me.”
“Cal, wait…”
I keep going.
Ramirez holds the door open for me, concern etched into his frown. “Everything okay?”
“Of course,” I reply. “When is it not?”
Ramirez doesn’t have a response for that.
The conference room is three times larger than any from the old building, and the investigative panel is spaced out in tall-backed ergonomic chairs along one side of an impressive dark-wood table with artistically rendered metal legs. There’s only one chair on the opposite side of the table, the side where I’m supposed to sit. The skinny windows punched into one wall of the room have been shaded, emphasizing the harsh glow of the fluorescent lights overhead. And I could swear the table has been moved a few feet from its intended position, perfectly centered under those light fixtures, so that my designated chair sits underneath them instead. To put a spotlight on me.
A real interrogation setup. Joy.
Riker sits in the middle chair of the panel lineup, a stack of paper and some pens on the tabletop in front of him. He doesn’t give me the time of day as I approach the table, just points with his commanding index finger at the chair and grunts to indicate I should glue my ass to it and keep my mouth shut until prompted to speak. Because I feel guilty about hurting his knee in the infirmary, I follow his unspoken instructions without complaint. I roll the chair out and sit down and drop my hands into my lap and lace my fingers together and smear a placid look across my face.
Ella, seated next to Riker, stiffens like she expects me to make an inappropriate quip about the heavy silence in the room, broken only by the humming air vents in the ceiling. When I do nothing of the kind and instead stare blankly at the wall behind Riker, she relaxes slightly, but at the same time seems almost disappointed. I’d call her contradictory, but I understand her feelings. She’s disturbed by the the missing sense of normality. I always makes sarcastic jabs, and Ella is always there to chastise me when I say something funny at the wrong time.
I would fulfill her expectations to defuse some of the tension in the room, but I…Well, I don’t feel like it. I feel bogged down, like there’s a fifty-pound weight on my back, and another on my chest, and another in my heart, and yet another chained to my mind, slowing all my thoughts to a crawl and forcing me to dwell on everything that’s happened in the past forty-eight hours. A slideshow of horrors playing on repeat. Nightmares in the making. More things for me to scream about when I’m lying in the dark.
Riker finishes skimming one of his papers, flips to a new one, and picks up a pen. “No need to make this complicated, Cal,” he says in an even tone that barely disguises his underlying anger. “Tell us what happened yesterday, start to finish. We’ll record your testimony.” He points to a small voice recorder sitting in the exact center of the table, so it can capture the exchange between the panel and the interviewee. “If we have any questions, we’ll write them down as you speak and ask them when you’re done. We’d like an uninterrupted account of your rendition of events.”
The clinical way Riker speaks to me hurts, but it’s the least I deserve for the way I treated him. So I ignore the ball of lead sitting low in my stomach, take a deep breath, and say, “Well, first off, my ‘rendition’ doesn’t start with yesterday morning. It starts with the night before…”
What follows is every relevant detail I can remember, including Foley’s bloody arrival, Lucian’s enlightening phone call, the attack in my apartment by Caine’s crew the following morning, the rush to counter the blood trace that ended with the forest fight near Erica’s house, and so on and so forth, until I recap my rooftop conversation with Lucian. I even drum up enough courage to reveal the truth about my mother’s death—something I neglected to tell my teammates before now because I was uncomfortable with it. The only details I leave out are things no one needs to hear, like the particulars about my death in the hallway, and things I worry might have unintended consequences if they become public knowledge, namely my encounter with Don and Pell.
As with Lucian, I worry revealing that Don and Pell are looking into events currently happening on Earth might inadvertently tip off the mystery group they’re trying to undermine. With the way the Knights so easily seeded spies into Aurora’s public offices, I’m afraid anything I say here, even in the presence of only DSI agents, might somehow get leaked to the wrong people. Whenever you create a physical record of any information, you run the risk of that information getting stolen and disseminated. And the stakes are so high in this war with the Knights and their unknown allies (or perhaps benefactors) that I have no choice but to be cautious about how and when I speak of topics relating to them.
When I get a chance to speak with my team in a location I’m sure is secure, I’ll clue them in. But not a moment before.
“And that’s what happened,” I finish. “Any questions?”
Everyone on the panel is gawking at me. Faces pale. Eyes wide. Lips flapping silently.
Eventually, Riker collects himself and says, “You said that when you were…resurrected, all your injuries healed also? What about your hand?”
I hold it up, showcasing the scar. It’s hard to see from a distance, but the scar is smaller than it was yesterday. Not by much. It’s healing slowly. But it is healing. “Getting better. Might be a hundred percent again, given enough time. A rosier outlook than before.”
Riker murmurs, “Good to hear.” He looks at his long list of scribbled notes and runs down the page with his finger, reviewing the key items from my deposition. Or at least pretending to. There’s only one thing he really wants to discuss—only one thing any of them want to discuss—but he hesitates to bring it up because he doesn’t want to make this meeting any more awkward than it already is. In the end though, Riker stays true to himself, gruff and tough and unafraid to confront anything, and he drags the elephant out of the corner of the room. “Did Ardelean give you any ideas as to what your nonhuman parent—your father—might be? Because I swear, Cal, you don’t look like you have any nonhuman ancestry.”
Ella and a few others nod in agreement.
I shrug. “Guess he’s something that looks human then.”
“Do you, ah, feel any different than before?” asks Naomi Sing.
“Do I feel less than human, you mean?” I reply.
She cringes. “No. Not less, Kinsey. If anything…more?”
“Other than the faint, omnipresent hum of magic energy, which I assume is a normal sensation for practitioners, I don’t feel any different.”
Half the people in the room visibly relax. The other half hide it well.
Worried I’m a scary monster with a human face, are you? Well, guess what? So am I.
Riker makes another note and holds up his hand. “Does anyone have questions relating to the vampire attack on the charity gala?”
No one responds.
“Then we’ll conclude this interview.” He sets his pen aside. “We can discuss Cal’s personal situation further at a later time. We have a great deal of administrative work to do before we can formally close this case and appease Mayor Burbank. Other topics will have to wait.” He gestures to me. “Thanks for coming in, Cal. You’re free to go.”
“Wait, no reprimands?” I ask, honestly surprised he’s not going to throw the book at me.
Riker takes the question as a wisecrack. His eyebrow
twitches. “Leave before I change my mind.”
“Yes, Cap…um, Commissioner.”
My legs drag me out of the chair, across the room, and to the double doors before anyone can let another breath out. I push through the right-hand door and close it quickly behind me, then slump against it, eyes closed, deep sigh in my throat, as I think of all the ways that interview could have gone worse, and better.
It was never going to be possible to hide the truth about my heritage from DSI for long, not so much because of the magic—that could’ve been explained away with the truth about my mom—but because of the resurrection. DSI agents aren’t dumb. If I had said nothing, they simply would’ve done their homework and figured out that coming back from the dead isn’t in a practitioner’s repertoire. Then I would’ve had to answer for a lie by omission.
Still, watching all those people grow uncomfortable around me when I revealed—
A finger pokes the center of my forehead.
My eyes spring open.
Amy and Desmond are standing in front of me.
Desmond looks much further from the verge of death than he did yesterday, his typical tranquil smile plastered across his face. “Good morning, Calvin.”
Amy, on the other hand, looks every bit as angry as she did last night. “I hope you apologized to the boss while you were spinning your story in there.”
I swallow, my throat suddenly parched. “I did, but it was buried in the middle of my ‘story,’ so I doubt it counted for much.”
She huffs. “I should clock you for what you did.”
“Go ahead. Any damage you do will heal in a few minutes.” Or so I assume. I jabbed myself with a sharp pair of trimming scissors last night as a test. Cut scabbed over in thirty-seven seconds. Completely healed in under ten minutes. Useful. But also kind of creepy.
“So it’s true?” Desmond sticks his hands into his pockets and sinks into a casual pose that belies the seed of mistrust I know has been planted in his mind. “You have a healing factor now? Along with your magic?”
“Like a vampire?” Amy scowls. Not at me directly, but at what must be the memory of DSI agents being cut down by the Knights during that awful battle last night. “So you didn’t come back from the dead a hundred percent human, eh?”
“I wasn’t a hundred percent human to begin with, apparently.”
Amy blinks. “Wait, really?”
I peel myself off the door and maneuver around her. “Yes, really,” I say, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “My death and resurrection just brought the truth to the surface.”
She grabs my arm. “Hey, cut the moping, will you? You’re the same Cal as before.”
“Am I?” I pull free from her grasp. “Are you sure?”
She hesitates.
“That’s what I thought.” I turn to walk away, but Desmond steps into my path.
“Now, now, Calvin, you’re not being fair.” There’s a twinkle in his eye that speaks of some important conclusion he’s come to in the last fifteen seconds. “You’re allowing yourself to be shocked and dismayed at the revelation you aren’t what you thought you were, but you’re not allowing the same of your friends—the friends who’ve been trained to be suspicious of supernatural beings. We all have new and unexpected information to process here, and while that information certainly affects you more than anyone else, that doesn’t make it right for you to hold everyone else to some higher standard.” He rests his hand on my shoulder, and his smile shifts into a grin. “Give it time. We’ll all stop being whiny shits about it eventually. Including you.”
“Hey, I’m not being a whiny shit.”
He cocks an eyebrow.
“All right. Point taken,” I grumble.
He turns around and drapes his arm across my shoulders. “How about we all admit we have some improvements to make to our moods?”
Amy scoffs. “My mood is fine as it is.”
“When we were coming back from our donut run this morning,” he replies, “you kicked over a residential trashcan and got yelled at by an elderly woman.”
“Christ, did you have to mention that?” She tugs on a loose lock of hair. “That old crone hit me with her cane. Twice. I have bruises.”
“You deserved them.” Desmond gives her a pointed look. “They should’ve also been a hint to stop acting out in rage at every mildly annoying thing you come across today. But since they didn’t drive the point home, I suppose we can try positive reinforcement instead.” He gestures to a digital clock on the wall that claims it’s nearly noon. “Our new location, Calvin, happens to be only four blocks away from a very lovely Italian restaurant that serves delicious pizza and pasta options. How about we all have a nice, long lunch to de-stress from our recent rigorous experiences? Hm?”
My stomach, which has been tied in about fifteen knots all morning, suddenly untangles itself and growls loudly. Which reminds me I haven’t eaten for almost a full day. “You’re not going to ask me to repeat my deposition, are you?” I cringe at the thought of having to recall all that pain and suffering twice in one day. It was dreadful enough the first time through, and I wasn’t even trying to eat in the conference room. If I have to recap Foley showing up at my door with his intestines hanging out while trying to eat pasta, I think I might throw up.
Desmond squeezes my shoulder. “Of course not. We can listen to the recording later if we’re curious about any details. You don’t have to say any more than you already have.”
Amy fidgets for a minute, deciding whether to agree with Desmond. At last, she sighs, and with the breath, a great deal of tautness leaves her muscles. “Yeah, okay. You can keep your trap shut unless you’re shoveling pizza down your throat.” She turns around and points to the bank of elevators halfway down the hall. “Come on. Let’s get out of here so we can beat the lunch rush. Damn restaurant had a twenty-minute wait last time.”
Desmond coaxes me forward, and with significant effort, I release a few ounces of tension from my own body, stuff my mounting pile of fears into a corner of my mind filled with the cobwebs of long-forgotten anxieties, and follow Amy to the elevator. Desmond lingers behind me for a few paces, and though I don’t look back, I can tell he’s scanning me head to toe with his calculating gaze, making a final determination. About who and what I am. About whether I’m trustworthy or not.
For a heartbeat, I’m terrified he’ll come to a bad conclusion.
Then he slaps me playfully on the back and says, “Make sure you try the garlic bread. It’s heavenly.”
Chapter Twenty
After a fair amount of groveling in the form of weepy texts, Lassiter pulls some strings and has the active crime scene posting removed from my apartment, allowing me to move back in. My first order of business is to grab the broken door that someone placed against the wall and haul it back into the frame. The hinges and lock mechanisms are bent out of shape, but with the creative use of some nails, a hammer, and half a roll of duct tape, I manage to get it back into semi-working order. But I’ll still get it replaced as soon as possible. Because way too many assholes come knocking at my door.
That done, I clean up the scattered pieces of my furniture. My sofa, ripped to shreds, springs sticking out at all angles. My coffee table, nothing but splintered wooden legs and a pool of glass. My TV, thrown against the wall in someone’s rage and cracked beyond repair. My entertainment center, missing shelves, cabinet doors torn away.
It takes me two hours and eight trash bags to gather up the mess and pack it away for a trip down the garbage chute, and when I’m done, there’s nothing left of my living room but a bare floor with a prominent hole in it and a number of suspicious stains.
That chore is only the beginning. They tore apart my bedroom as well, mattress completely shredded, nightstand knocked over and crushed, closet emptied of clothes and storage crates, storage crates emptied of ancient memories I probably should’ve thrown away years ago. I clean all that up with a forced sense of detachment, pretending I�
�m not devastated that some evil vampires wrecked my home and everything in it. I keep reminding myself that things can be replaced and people can’t. The important thing is that Foley and I escaped…out the window.
Oh, I was wondering what that cold draft was.
I glance at the empty frame where my bedroom window used to be.
I’ll have to replace that too.
The last room I clean is the kitchen—thankfully, they left the bathroom largely untouched, just the stuff in the sink cabinet knocked about—where I painstakingly haul the big pieces of my kitchen table into the hall and set them down next to the trash bags full of busted furniture bits. I then sweep up shards of broken plates and glasses. I also gather the scattered silverware, which is salvageable, and toss it all in the sink. Lastly, I stick all my (intact) dirty dishes in the dishwasher with a noticeable dent in the front panel. Still runs though.
Totally beat, I make a quick list of the things I can and can’t live without for a night, and check the time. Seven thirty. A little late for the mom and pop shops, but the big box stores will still be open. I can fit a new mattress and maybe a couch, coffee table, and TV in my rental truck. The rest I can order and have shipped over. My apartment will look awkwardly empty, like I’m some recent college grad who can barely pay rent, but as long as I have some barebones comfort, as long as I can cling to a modicum of normality, I’ll survive.
On my way out, I grab the small bag with my new iPad inside. Desmond gave it to me after our lunch and said it was a gift from Ella. I assume it’s a subtle order to call Cooper and update him on the steaming shit pile that just fell on top of Aurora—and on me. Amy told me they thought about calling Cooper after my “bizarre” infirmary breakout and subsequent kidnapping, but they didn’t want to risk freaking him out on the chance he knew nothing about the cause of my behavior. Good choice on their part. Cooper would’ve stressed himself into a major anxiety attack, being stuck on the other side of the world while all that was going down.
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