Precinct 13 (20 page)

“Starry—?” he started, and then pursed his lips petulantly. “I was just surprised to see a dragon, that’s all.”

“No asking him weird, awkward questions, either.”

Jack nodded vigorously. “Do you think he’ll really come?”

“I have no idea.”

I really didn’t. For all I knew Valentine headed back to Chicago the moment he was found out. He might be angry at me, or feel embarrassed for having been exposed like that. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t still love him.

Did I?

I turned away from Jack and the dead cow, ostensibly to fetch my phone from the pocket of my coat. I’d hung it up on the peg near the front doors. As I searched for the phone, I considered. Did I still love Valentine? He was a dragon—something possibly inhuman, something everyone seemed to imply was dark and unnatural.

Of course, Jones thought I was unnatural, too.

I pushed the numbers and listened to the ringing. It went on long enough that I started to think he wouldn’t pick up. I almost pressed
END
when I heard the click. “Alex.”

“Will you come back? I need you.”

There was a moment of silence. I heard the rush of air
through the speaker. Then, “I will always come when you need me.”

While we waited for Valentine, I separated the cow’s head from its body. Jack, most helpfully, retched into the sink. He kept his back to me while I found an empty storage freezer and placed the remains inside it.

I thought, for a second, I heard Mrs. Finnegan mutter, “Oooooh, company!”

Unless she spoke “cow,” I suspected she was going to be disappointed with her new bunkmate. Jack was still gripping the edge of the sink as I stripped off my gloves and dropped them into the biohazard bin. “How can you do this job?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I have necromancer tendencies just like Jones thinks, but dead things don’t bother me. They never have. I found a mummified cat in my grandmother’s barn one year when we were visiting and spent weeks just watching it decay. Is it morbid or scientific curiosity?”

Jack looked a little green again, so I changed the subject.

“So tell me what supernatural creature has the kind of strength to smash a cow’s head so hard that it pulverizes teeth?”

He toyed with his earring as he thought. “Vampire, maybe. A golem, certainly. An angel. A god? All the beasts like gryphons and dragons, but I don’t think they’d crush a cow, so much as eat it.”

I keyed all the options into my notes app. “I’d like to do this scientifically. I think I could get a supply of cow heads from a butcher. Do you think Devon and Stone would agree to come in and show off their strength?”

Jack smiled at the idea. “If you make it a competition, certainly.”

“What about these other things on your list? Can I get access to those?”

He pulled himself up to sit on the counter next to the sink. His feet swung off the edge. “I heard a rumor that they have an angel in the New York Bureau. Maybe we could set up a videoconference. Of course, you’ll have to get him to admit his true nature.”

“I seem to have a knack with that lately.”

The doors opened and Valentine stuck his head in. “Talking about me?”

Despite his promise, Jack looked utterly stricken at the sight of Valentine. I had no idea what Jack saw, but to me Valentine looked the same as I always remembered: steady, strong, and…predatory. The only difference was that now I knew why there was always that bit of scary around the edges. Tension that I hadn’t realized I carried in my shoulders dropped. I smiled and took the hand he offered.

He brought my knuckles to his lips and smiled toothily. “What does my princess require?” The romance of the gesture was ruined slightly when he smacked his lips noisily and wiped them on the back of his hand. “Gah,” he said. “Antiseptic soap!”

“You should be used to that with me,” I teased. I leaned in to give him a kiss on the lips, but stopped short, remembering that we weren’t alone. “Uh,” I said, stepping back, “you remember Jack?”

Valentine glanced sidelong at Jack. “Ah, yes, the jackrabbit.”

I poked him in the ribs with my elbow. “Be nice.”

Jack didn’t help Valentine’s opinion of him by stumbling as he made his way around the exam table. He brushed himself off in a way that reminded me of Sarah Jane’s preening, and he watched Valentine surreptitiously while trying to gather his dignity.

Valentine, meanwhile, had spotted the now headless cow melting on the floor. “You ate the least interesting part first,” he noted.

Jack sputtered.

I had to laugh. “The head is in the freezer, and actually, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about…”

It took me a while to convince Valentine that getting rid of the cow carcass wasn’t beneath him. Eventually, however, he impressed Jack and me by gathering up the edges of the tarp and hauling the cow out the door.

In the hallway, he paused. “To take it much farther, I’ll need all four limbs.”

I wondered if Valentine the dragon would even fit in the narrow passage of the city hall basement. “Oh,” I said, hating how small and timid I sounded at the thought.

He frowned down at me, a formidable look. “Are we okay?”

The strange thing was that we were. In many ways, we were better than ever. So much of what I didn’t understand about him before made a kind of sense now. But, there were still so many questions—questions that were fundamental to our relationship, like whether or not he was even human.

I looked up into his face, so
familiar
with its noble ruthlessness, and said, “Will you come home tonight?”

“If you’ll have me.” His voice was a husky growl that
made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and a delicious shiver run down the length of my body, all at once.

“Always,” I said.

I considered hanging around to watch his transformation again, but Valentine shooed us out, telling us it was bad enough that he was taking out my garbage. He did not need gawkers.

Thus, Jack and I spent the rest of the day setting up my experiments. The first butcher I called surprised me by being very willing to donate a few heads to the cause of science if I would put in a good word for him with the chief of police. I said I would, though I wondered how much weight I actually carried with the
ordinarium
.

Meanwhile, Jack used my computer to make inquiries to New York and elsewhere. He found a woman in Ohio who had a gryphon familiar who was more than happy to participate. We worked out a way for her to send me all the specifics I needed, and she even thought she might know someone with access to a Sasquatch.

When we hung up the videocall, I had to ask, “Really? Sasquatch?”

Jack just smiled. I went back to carefully measuring and documenting the damaged cow with a shake of my head.

The angel, as predicted, turned out to be extremely reticent. When I realized who Jack had on the line, I couldn’t resist peering over his shoulder at the Skyped image. The man on the computer screen was extraordinarily beautiful, but so androgynous as to be somewhat unsettling. He was mixed race with dark skin, and had the kind of loose-flowing wavy hair that I associated with Indian women. No
trace of stubble dotted his chin, and its smooth flawlessness might have made him seem a bit soft, but for his eyes. In them there was a hollow mercilessness that frightened me more deeply than anything I’d ever seen reflected in Valentine’s.

“No,” was all he said.

With that, the conversation was over.

Jack let out a breath as we both stared at the static image of his Skype icon: the Los Angeles Angels’ halo-encircled “A.” “I suppose that went pretty well,” Jack said. “He didn’t tear us asunder.”

By the time we finished that evening, I had several cow head trauma experiments ready to go. According to Jack, Devon would be incapacitated for another night, so we’d plan to start some time tomorrow. That having been decided, I looked around the morgue for something else to do and found nothing. It was just as well. Thanks to the early morning and all the day’s excitement, my eyes were getting blurry and my muscles ached.

I was ready to go home.

I offered Jack a ride back to the precinct headquarters, but he declined. He made some noises about needing fresh air after having been cooped up in a basement all afternoon, but I thought, perhaps, he didn’t want the intimacy of even such a short drive.

That made me a little sad, but I could hardly blame him. He’d basically asked me out this morning, and I’d agreed under false pretenses. Jack had every right to want to inject a bit of professional distance back into our relationship.

Even though I was tired, I found myself dawdling before
closing up the morgue. I wasn’t sure what things were going to be like at home with Valentine waiting there. I’d told him we were okay, but now that I faced the prospect of “us” time, I was less sure. I locked the door and made my way to my car.

The air outside finally felt like spring, heavy with the wetness of melting snow. Stars sprinkled across the immense blackness of the sky. I paused for a moment before getting into my car, and stared up at the cloudless night. What must it feel like to fly?

I drove the rest of the way home trying to wrap my mind around the fact that Valentine
knew
.

There was no dinner on the stove when I walked in the door this time. In fact, the house was dark. I left my coat and boots in the mudroom with a sigh. Valentine must have found somewhere more interesting to be, though I did notice that his duffel was still on the couch at least.

I picked it up, thinking I’d put it in my room. The last thing I wanted was for Robert to get annoyed with the way Val left his things strewn around. The duffel was much heavier than I expected. Since the zipper was open, I peered inside to see if he was carrying the anvil. Instead, I found something that looked a bit like a bowling ball, except it had no fingerholds. I picked it up to inspect it. It was some kind of black stone, polished to a shine, with flecks of white crystals in fernlike patterns scattered throughout.

“Snowflake obsidian.” Valentine stood in the archway between the living room and the small dining room. The
lights were off and he was entirely in shadow. For a moment, all I could see was the glow of his ghostly pale skin.

I jumped and nearly dropped the massive stone. “What is it?” I asked. Then, realizing he’d just answered that question in a way, I rephrased. “What does it do? Why do you have it?”

When Valentine stepped into the light, he looked as if I’d woken him from a nap, wearing warm-looking, heavy cotton navy sweatpants and not much else. His short hair was slightly mussed.

All in all, he seemed very…human.

“I have it for the same reason I have anything. It’s beautiful.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added with a little self-satisfied smile, “And I stole it.”

A very dragonlike answer.

Carefully, I returned the stone to his duffel and set both back on the couch. I’d ask him if it bothered him to carry something so heavy around, but I had seen him pick up a dead cow like it was nothing. I knew him too well to expect much more of an answer as to why have it at all. I collapsed onto the cushions with a sigh. “You’re not human, are you?”

Instead of joining me, he came up behind the couch. His hands massaged the knots in my neck. The pressure was just right: hard enough to pop and stretch, but never quite hurting. “Depends, I suppose, how narrowly you define ‘human.’ ”

The hands that caressed me were calloused and dry and, as I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine the silken hardness of scales. But not quite. This afternoon’s transformation seemed far away. Right now, I let myself relax into his touch. “Jones is convinced you’re evil incarnate, you know.”

“Jones…” Valentine considered as he worked my shoulder blades, “…is the one who tried to shoot me?”

In between happy noises, I managed to say, “Yes.”

“I didn’t like him,” Valentine said, and I could hear the disgusted crinkle of his nose in his voice. “He smelled of fairy silver.”

“Yeah,” I said, remembering the other strange visit of the day. “He would. His mother is the queen of fairies.”

“With a mother like that, your friend may easily mistake indifference for maliciousness. Being evil requires that you care enough about the outcome to actively thwart the efforts of another.”

I twisted around to look Valentine in the eyes. As usual, I saw that cool detachment there. “So you’re not evil, you just don’t care?”

“I care a great deal about many things,” he said. His thumb traced the thin welt that the casing’s heat had left on my cheek. “One of the most precious is you.”

Valentine had never said anything like that before, and it hung between us, profoundly. I’d turned all the way around in the couch, so I was kneeling on the seat.

He kissed me. I wrapped my arms around him, drawing him closer. My dragon-hearted lover might never say he loved me, but at least he’d told me that I mattered to him. A single tear streaked down my cheek.

When we pulled apart, I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me what you were?”

“You never asked,” he said.

“That’s no answer,” I insisted. “We were talking about demons and crazy things. Things I
thought
I saw, but that you
believed
in. Why wouldn’t you tell me something so important about yourself?”

“You know you weren’t ready. For every second we spent talking about bridge trolls, you would spend hundreds of
hours rationalizing and denying them. You were tying yourself into knots, making yourself sick. If I had told you, it would have scared you to ground. You would have bolted just like your jackrabbit friend.”

Though he was unnecessarily unkind to Jack, I knew what he said was true. Even so, all the hurt of those times roiled up. I pulled away, and crossed my arms in front of my chest defensively. “Jack said familiars are supposed to protect a witch, introduce us to our own kind, and make sure we don’t have to go through shit like that.”

My angry accusations didn’t even faze him. “And I would have, if it weren’t for the immediate threat that Gayle represented.”