5. Avery
Avery
As a shifter I metabolized everything quickly, so fortunately I was sobered up from the post-sex haze by the time I got to my Jeep Wrangler.
I started the car to get the heater going and began stripping out of my formal clothes, moderately certain the dry cleaner could put everything back to rights, and into jeans, a T-shirt, a heavy wool sweater, and the canvas Nikes I had in the back seat.
I chugged a couple bottles of water I always kept in my car, then maneuvered out of my parking spot and headed to Englewood.
As I drove, I caught a whiff of leather and spicy musk and bent my head, lifting the collar of my sweater and T-shirt, and inhaled. It wasn’t my clothes or me, it was his scent on my skin, his scent that lingered like no one else’s had before.
Beyond the sex being good or bad, I never thought about it once I was done.
Sometimes I thought I’d like to see whoever again, but it wasn’t a compulsion, not necessary, and my heart didn’t rabbit in my chest with…
anticipation. In the moment, lost in what I wanted, needed, and had to have, the afterwards didn’t cross my mind.
But driving away from him now seemed, inexplicably, like the wrong choice.
I’d had the feeling, after I walked out, that it was a mistake, and had stood for a moment, on the other side of the laundry room door, and fought the urge to go right back in.
Then I muttered “the fuck” under my breath before I bolted for the hall closet, grabbed my coat, and was out the back door, fast.
Walking to my car, I’d stopped, turned, taken a couple steps to go back, and then whipped around, continuing on with what I was supposed to be doing, which was reaching my partner.
But I couldn’t shake the weird feeling that I forgot something, like I’d left my phone in the room with him or something.
I had everything, though, so that wasn’t it.
If I could just figure out what was grinding away at the back of my brain, I was confident I could shake whatever it was.
Or I was going to call my mother and ask her if he’d gotten my number from her, because apparently I meant it when I said I’d like to see him again. If he hadn’t, and didn’t care about seeing me again, I realized, strangely, that would twinge more than a bit.
“Call Mom,” I directed my phone, but another call came in, so I answered it instead. “Yeah?”
“Hey”—my partner, Wade Massey’s, voice came over the line, sounding even more irritable than usual—“where are you?”
“Where do you think I am?” I snapped, because it was a stupid question. “I’m on my way to meet you.”
“No, Bannerman wants us in Highland Park, so turn around.”
“Wait. What?”
“Yeah, I know,” he began snidely, “you’re wondering why we’re going to Highland Park, since it’s clearly way the hell out of our jurisdiction.”
“Yeah.”
“Highland Park still has not one lupine detective or any lupine officers, so anything at all to do with wolves rolls over to Chicago PD.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It is,” he agreed, “but they just elected a new mayor, so hopefully that’ll change. In the meantime, their deficit puts you and I on a dead guy in a mansion by the lake, while Pecker and Ness get to go to Englewood and scrape a dead prostitute off the pavement.”
“His name’s just Peck,” I reminded him nicely. “He doesn’t like it when you fuck up his name, as you well know.”
“Is he on the phone right now? No.”
“Why are you like this?”
“This is how my mother raised me.”
“Lies. Your mother’s lovely.”
He grunted. “I blame you.”
“Me?”
“You’re rich, so whenever we get these murders in rich neighborhoods, you and I hafta show up.”
“My parents are rich,” I reminded him for the billionth time. “I am not. Are you rich?”
“Fuck no.”
“Then how can I be since we do the same fuckin’ job?”
“Because your family is all wealth and privilege and the ‘one percent’.”
“Which has what to do with me, other than lavish Christmas gifts?”
“Whatever,” he groused at me. “I’m having Marcie––”
“Meggie,” I corrected him.
“––Meggie,” he amended, “drop me off at the train station in Highland Park, so swing by there and get me. You have thirty minutes; I’m starting the timer now. Hurry the fuck up.”
I was quiet, intentionally not hanging up. We sat there silently, listening to nothing but each other breathing until I finally broke. “Really? Marcie?”
“Leave it alone.”
“If you can’t even remember their names, it might be time to slow down.”
“Can we just focus, please?”
Since it wasn’t an argument I was going to win, I let it go. “Be there shortly.”
He hung up without another word.
When I made detective three years ago, the push was to have a human and lupine together.
The balance was supposed to be favorable.
A human tempered the animal instincts of a lupine, and the extrasensory facets of a lupine—smell, changes in body temperature, the ability to distinguish the highs and lows of speech, awareness of those imperceptible nuances—were an asset to the human, especially during questioning.
This was the rationale, which was why I’d been paired with another new detective, Dion Abernathy.
He couldn’t keep up with me, though, and wanted to skate by doing the bare minimum—no overtime, no brainstorming, just punch the clock.
It lasted a month before he asked for a new partner.
And while I appreciated my chief, Seamus Bannerman, keeping me when he transferred Abernathy back down to patrol, the other guys had looked at me like I was a leper.
There were two more partners in the next six months, one who didn’t understand why I checked in on people, even if we had no new information on their cases, and the other, who felt that I was too intimidating and too physical with suspects, especially those cases involving women and children.
I was a lupine, and that meant I was “unpredictable and passionate.” Bannerman looked pained when we both stood in front of his desk as he’d told the second guy his transfer to vice was approved. I was left without a partner again.
The following day we got a transfer from the organized crime division, and being the only detective without a partner, I found him sitting at the desk butted up to mine when I got to work that morning. As I sat down, he looked up.
Stunning man, dark umber skin with bronze undertones, scalp-trimmed hair, copper-colored eyes, like new pennies, long lashes, high cheekbones, and a sharp-angled square jaw.
He rose and offered me his hand. “Wade Massey,” he said, introducing himself, his voice whiskey-smooth. “I’m your new partner.” I shook his hand, and he smiled. “Can I call ya wolf boy?”
I squinted. His answering smile was wide and evil, as was his chuckle and the eyebrow waggle. I liked him immediately, and it didn’t take long to realize he was the other half of me. I felt, at times, there had to be some wolf somewhere in his ancestry, and asked him about it.
“Listen,” he told me the first time we went drinking, “there’s Cherokee in my family, and African and Scottish, Quechuan and German. There’s no wolves, you got it?”
But sometimes I could swear I caught a whiff of wolf on him. We could speak without talking, and I could look at him and convey what I was thinking. We were so attuned to each other that when we went undercover, we rarely, if ever, used our earpieces.
What solidified us as more than friends, and more like brothers, was when a guy had turned a gun on us, and I had stepped squarely in front of my partner.
There had been no thought, just pure instinct on my part.
Afterwards, on the way to our car, once SWAT had secured the scene, Wade grabbed me and pinned me to a wall.
“The fuck?” I groused at him.
“What the hell was that?” he rasped, staring at me, shaking.
Seeing how wrecked he was, I tried to defuse the situation. “I’m a wolf; I can take a bullet and heal more damage than––”
“That’s bullshit,” he croaked out, swallowing hard, breathing through his nose. “You may heal faster, but you’re just as dead from a point-blank shot as I am.”
I was. No question.
“But you––”
“You’re my best friend, my partner. What do you want me to say?”
When he stepped back, I lunged at him, wrapping him in my arms, and he finally allowed the closeness that had been missing, the last piece in our relationship.
Wolves were tactile; we needed, craved touch for true connection.
Lots of human and lupine partners didn’t have that, which kept everything professional but also not locked in, not a true pairing.
The ones who had that functioned far better than two humans or two lupines, no matter how close they were.
Wade had always been strong and independent.
His father, a Marine, was killed in action when he was young, and he became the man of the house for his mother and little brother.
Leaning on anyone else was not something he did.
I was, in fact, the only one he let down his guard with.
His mother told me often, when I was alone with her in her kitchen, that she was so thankful for me because, finally, there was someone in his life he could lean on.
“Well, it goes both ways,” I told her.
And then, inevitably, her scowl would appear at dinner as we scarfed down her food. His brother, Ethan, would watch us with wide eyes, and Ethan’s wife, Delilah, would keep her hands in her lap, staring at us as well.
“What?” Wade would ask her.
“I just don’t want to risk getting my fingers between you two and the food.”
His mother would shake her head at us. “You need a wife,” she would tell Wade. “You need a husband,” she would tell me. “The pair of you need lookin’ after and to be fed something decent more than once a week.”
“We both date,” he lied to her the last time we were there.
Her eyes narrowed, and I kicked him under the table because, holy shit, didn’t he know that lying to his mother was a sin?