CHAPTER TWO || HARRIS
“Harris, into my office now!” Lieutenant Davis barked at me the moment I slung my coat over the chair at my desk.
Given that he was standing next to his office door on the far end of the bullpen—the one-room mess of desks belonging to the detectives in our precinct—everyone else in the room turned to look at me with raised eyebrows and smirks.
“Lovely,” I muttered under my breath. “That’s just what I need.”
Stifling a yawn, I scooped up my coffee and shuffled across the room.
“Hiya, Lieutenant.” I greeted him by tipping my coffee cup in his direction. “Having a good morning?”
He glowered back at me. “Get inside.”
Well, shit. Not exactly a promising start.
Detective Jimenez snickered gleefully as I passed.
He was probably thrilled to see me get taken down a peg.
Last year, I had cleared my cases with record speed, becoming the highest-performing detective in the precinct.
Granted, most of my suspects turned up dead, supposedly of natural causes.
Between that and the fact I always seemed to show up at exactly the right time and place to find them immediately after they’d expired, Jimenez had started calling me “death wish.”
It had caught on, unfortunately.
He didn’t know how right he was. There was nothing natural about any of it. Cole, a vampire with an appetite for serial killers, had been behind all of the strange deaths. He had decided we were partners and hypnotized me into keeping his secrets.
So yeah, “death wish” was pretty fucking apt. Just once removed—and they weren’t my wishes.
I slipped into Davis’s office, and he closed the door behind us. He didn’t waste any time. “I’m concerned about your performance.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure you are.”
Davis crossed the room, coming to stand behind his immaculate desk.
His pale face was turning red, a faint sheen of sweat already glistening on his brow—always a bad sign that he was working himself up to a full head of steam.
“You had a stellar track record, Harris. For an entire year. You were my best detective.”
“Right.”
“And lately you haven’t been clearing any cases.” He paused. “Are you drinking again?”
The question was so ridiculous I had to laugh.
I’d never had an issue with alcohol, though I’d claimed I did in order to get him to approve an extended leave of absence after Paul, my partner, had died.
Davis, a recovering alcoholic, understood addiction.
What he didn’t understand was the depths of my feelings for my partner, and I sure as shit hadn’t wanted to explain it to him.
Davis’s face went entirely red. “Is this funny? Do I look like I’m laughing?”
“No,” I said immediately. “No, sir.”
“Talk to me, Harris. What’s going on? It seems like you’re barely here anymore.”
“I’m here all the time. I’m always fifteen minutes early. You know that.”
“Harris.”
“I’m not drinking again.”
“Then what’s going on? Talk to me.”
I took a sip of my coffee, considering what I could tell him.
The problem was my closing rate had been due to a homicidal vampire who’d since reformed and taken his vigilante justice up to Seattle. But I couldn’t tell Davis that.
And I sure as hell couldn’t tell him I missed the psychotic vampire who had essentially taken over my life last year.
Or that I had been having lucid dreams every single night ever since meeting Reed three months ago—the werewolf I’d met exactly one time, who had made me realize I was, in fact, bisexual, just by laying eyes on him.
And definitely not the worst of it. Without the distraction Cole represented in my life, I was sliding back to becoming the person I’d been after Paul died—dangerously depressed and isolated—and this job was the only thing slowing down my descent.
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” I said at last.
Davis gave me a blank look. “They make medication for that.”
“You asked, I’m answering.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Not sure I like the attitude. I get that no one likes being ambushed, but I’m doing you a solid and not terminating you.”
Anger flashed through me. “Wait—termination? That doesn’t make any sense! I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“You haven’t done anything. You’re like a ghost. When it comes to your job here, it’s like you’ve suddenly got a death—”
“A death wish?” I demanded, my fingers tightening on the cup of coffee in my hand. “Is that what you were going to say, Lieutenant?”
“Careerwise.” He shrugged. “And people talk. You know that. They talked after Paul. And they talked when your luck was just a little too good. A half-dozen suspects who you just happened to find, right after they had dropped dead? It’s a little too coincidental.”
My gut knotted with dread. “Weirder things have happened.”
“Not really.” He paused and let out an angry-sounding breath. “IA is officially looking into you.”
“Internal Affairs?” I gaped at him in disbelief. If IA was doing an investigation on me, they wouldn’t turn up any evidence I had done anything wrong, because I hadn’t.
That was the good part.
But the bad part was the entire time they dug into me—days, weeks, or even months of them going through all of my cases with a fine-tooth comb—I wouldn’t be allowed in the field. I’d be consigned to desk duty. Or stuck filing paperwork.
I’d have plenty of time to think about all the things I was trying to avoid.
“I didn’t report you. I don’t know who did.” Davis sounded exhausted. “If you say it’s not a relapse, I believe you. For now. But you need to get your head on straight, pronto.” His expression hardened. “And you’re suspended for the foreseeable future. Until IA is done with their investigation.”
“Wait!” Panic ripped through me and the words tumbled out faster than my brain could keep up. “Davis, you don’t understand! I need this job. I need to keep busy. I need the distraction—”
“From what?” he demanded, his brows shooting up, a probing look in his eyes.
I stood there, racking my brain for something to say—for anything that wouldn’t sound completely batshit—but came up empty.
Defeated, I looked away.
“Yeah.” Davis wiped the sheen of sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and sighed. “That’s about what I thought. Harris, if there’s something going on in your personal life, it’s none of my fucking business. But you need to fix it. Yesterday.”
“I don’t need—”
“You’re suspended until the investigation is over,” he repeated, his voice flat. “I suggest you use that time to get your head on straight.”
Detective Jimenez was smirking at me when I left Davis’s office. From the knowing look on his face, I was pretty sure he was the one who’d called Internal Affairs on me.
It took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to punch him in the face. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t have helped my cause any.
Instead, pretending that every pair of eyes in the room wasn’t locked on me, I collected my things and left.
I needed to call Cole.
He got me into this mess. He was going to get me out of it.
* * *
“Let me get this straight,” Cole said four hours later, after I had gone home in a seething rage, watched enough daytime television to make my brain feel like mush, and finally felt calm enough to pass for a sane person. “You want me to mind-control your boss into compliance.”
I gripped the phone to my ear. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it.”
“Is it possible Davis has a point? The investigation sounds like a nuisance, but a vacation might do wonders for you.”
I refrained from throwing the phone across the room, but it took effort. “No. The problem is that I don’t have a homicidal vampire solving all my cases for me anymore.”
“You do miss me!”
“Yeah.” He’d released me from the compulsion to always tell him the truth, but old habits die hard. “But I can’t exactly explain to my boss why my performance has suddenly taken a nosedive.”
“Right,” he said, sobering. “Look, I don’t really mess with people’s heads anymore, but I could probably make an exception this one time. After all, it’s my fault you’re in this mess.”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“So understated. You know, that’s one of the many things I adore about you, detective. You’re far more patient than you give yourself credit for.” He paused. “Are you sure you don’t want to move up to Seattle? There are plenty of homicides up here, too. Humans are so violent.”
“Plenty of folks for you to snack on, then.”
“I’m on the wagon. I’m a reformed bad guy.”
“Right,” I said, heaving a sigh. “True love and all that.”
I punctuated it with a yawn.
“Not sleeping well?”
I chuckled darkly. “Not really.”
“Hmmm. You mentioned that last week, too.”
“Did I call last week?”
“You did. Like I said, you miss me. I don’t blame you, of course. I’m delightful.” He paused again, for longer this time, before saying, “I miss you too. Seattle isn’t so bad, really. You’d like it. And perhaps we could even find you a nice vampire to shack up with.”
Despite myself, I grinned into the phone. Cole had regained his humanity, but it was still sometimes like talking with an alien. And a wave of heartsickness gripped me—yeah, I really had missed him, the bastard. “Cole, are you trying to marry me off?”
“Well, human lifespans are so very short. And if you were a sanguinato, you’d live as long as me.”
“I’ll take the bait,” I said, when Cole just let that hang there without explanation. “What the hell is a sanguine-whatever?”
“Sanguinato,” Cole corrected. “When a human regularly consumes vampire blood, they stop aging. They get stronger, they heal faster, and they never get sick. I’d be very upset if you died. It’s not allowed.”
“Well, I’m not planning on dying anytime soon.”
“Of course you aren’t planning on it. Who does? But you’re, what, thirty?”
“Thirty-two. That’s not old.”
“But that means you could have as few as sixty years left!”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”