Chapter 6
Ulysses
I refused to get into a cab with the skinwalker, since I couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t simply arrest me the second we were alone, so we were forced to walk. He just shrugged with that infuriating calm, swept his hand out, and said, “Lead the way.” As if I had any clue where we were going.
The rain had let up, leaving the air crisp and clean, but there’d been enough rainfall to turn the sidewalks into a maze of puddles.
I kept several feet of space between us as we walked, but I wasn’t stupid.
I knew if I tried to make a break for it, he could easily close that distance and snatch me by the back of the neck like it was nothing.
He was almost a foot taller than I was, one step to every two of mine, and his hands, though hanging relaxed by his sides, were weapons, no mistake about it.
I wouldn’t have been surprised if he could wrap them fully around my neck.
His fingers were so thick that I could imagine—
Heat flared inside me, searing hot, as the vivid mental picture of being stretched wide by those thick fingers came to mind.
Nope, not going there. He’d probably chosen this particular appearance because of how damn sexy it made him look.
Like a character out of a historical romance.
Some kilted Irish lord, standing at the edge of a bluff, the wind in his auburn hair, sea spray on his whiskered cheeks, his shirt open to show off his disgustingly perfect muscles.
I ground my teeth together, refusing to even glance in his direction.
How was I supposed to trust a man when I didn’t know what he really looked like?
He was a walking, talking lie. The fact that he was a god was just another strike against him.
Gods were not typically known for their benevolence and generosity.
They were selfish and narrow-minded. I mean, just look at Loki.
“Here we are,” Ruadan said, gesturing to the building ahead of us, regal and imposing, the windows dark but the marble facade glistening from the decorative lampposts set into the manicured lawn.
“The courthouse?” I asked, shrinking back, only to bump into the god behind me.
Damn him for being so solid and warm and large…
I shook my head to clear the unwanted thoughts.
I huffed, stomping toward the entrance. “Let’s get this over with.
It’s been a long day, and I really want to get home to take a bath. ”
“Do sin-eaters like bubbles in their baths?” he asked, his voice a gravelly baritone that had to be magic, the way it wormed its way under my skin.
I shot him a narrow-eyed glare over my shoulder, where I swore his eyes darted up from looking at my ass. “I can’t speak for all sin-eaters, but this one does. You know we’re not all alike, right? We’re just regular people.”
He scoffed. “I wouldn’t say regular. You literally feed off evil.”
“That’s not—” I began, prepared to explain that it wasn’t what I did at all, but then I reminded myself that it didn’t matter what this brute thought, and I snapped my mouth shut with a low growl. I was just here to prove I was innocent of whatever crime he thought I’d committed.
My pulse was throbbing in my temples, like the pressure in my brain was slowly climbing, until my head was ready to pop. Whatever evil had been living inside Samuel now resided in me, and it was clawing at my insides, making my skin itchy and tight, my nerves frayed within an inch of their life.
Ruadan pulled a set of keys from his pocket and let us into the building. “The DA had a room set up for me to use,” he explained, nudging me through the door into darkness.
My legs locked just inside the door. Yeah, this wasn’t going to help my restless anxiety. I was sure the place was a bustling hive of judicial activity during the day, but after hours, the place was dark and silent as a tomb, and frankly, it creeped the hell out of me.
“Come on, just down here,” the jerk said, refusing to let me stall.
With one of those deliciously large hands firm on my back, he steered me straight ahead so I had no choice but to walk or fall on my face.
Tempting as it was to refuse, I had a feeling he would just pick me up and carry me, and that was a fantasy I refused to indulge.
Down the hall, then another narrower hall, with our footsteps echoing like there was a parade of phantoms on our tail, Ruadan finally came to a stop in front of an unmarked door and unlocked it.
We stepped into a room. Even with the lights off, I could tell it was the size of a closet by the way the air was muffled.
Sure enough, when the light clicked on, it proved to be exactly that, the suffocating space almost entirely filled with one table.
Yellow light shone down on a total catastrophe of paperwork scattered across the table’s surface, and I found the controlled chaos was actually a little comforting. It felt kinda like home.
“So… where do we start?” I asked, pulling out a chair and dropping into it, resigned to my fate.
“We start,” he said, closing the door behind him and dragging another chair over to sit beside me, “at the beginning.”
Ruadan filled me in a little on what he was investigating for the district attorney, Mal Asher, also known as Lagamal—yet another god, oh goody.
Listening to the horrific details of the violent crimes, the claimed innocence and supposed memory loss, made something shrivel up inside me.
Every city had crime, that was nothing new, but even I could admit after hearing some of the stories that this was excessive.
And that was coming from a sin-eater, who literally absorbed the worst of what human souls had to offer.
I still wasn’t sure why I was here. Regardless of what he’d said to justify dragging me here with him, he wasn’t treating me like a suspect, though he was sitting close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, our arms brushing from time to time.
Was it simply his curiosity that kept him close?
I tried my best not to watch his long, thick fingers as they flew across the keyboard.
“Here, you start scanning social media feeds while I skim the police reports. Look for anything that could be linked to your guy Samuel. Don’t worry if the sources aren’t legit. We’ll weed them out once we’re done.”
Time lost all meaning after a while. Ruadan could find no police report on Samuel’s violent death, which was suspicious in itself, and so, the broader search began.
It was the mindless blur of doomscrolling, but with purpose.
The problem was that even with the best intentions for staying focused, the brain eventually settled into a haze, barely registering any of the images that passed by.
And it was while drowning in this haze that I almost scrolled right past the video.
It was only the distant spark of awareness that had my hand pause mid-scroll, even before my brain caught up to what I was seeing.
“Hey, I think I might have something,” I said, frowning at the shaky phone footage, grainy from the digital zoom.
One of the benefits to everyone walking around with a camera in their pockets and the need they all felt to be “liked” by strangers, the ultimate goal to go viral and earn totally pointless validation, was that you could find evidence of just about everything.
These days, a lot of the images were AI-generated, but this one looked real.
And not staged, either. I turned the laptop toward Ruadan, restarting the video.
“Look at this. I think that’s the guy, Samuel Lear. Except…”
“Except what?” Ruadan asked when I didn’t continue.
We both watched the footage of the elderly man fighting his way out of a building, with a giant duffel bag thrown over one shoulder.
He fought off three guys in dark suits, using the heavy bag as a weapon, swinging it around and knocking two of the guys back.
There was a glint of metal from the third, a flurry of jabs and swings at Samuel’s torso.
But then Samuel slammed a fist into his attacker’s chest, and the younger man staggered back clutching where he’d been hit.
“I know those guys… They’re Victor Romano’s thugs.
I’ve heard he’s a real piece of work, not that the cops can prove anything,” the god said, leaning closer, until his mouth-watering aroma crept over me.
“Did he steal something from them? No wonder he’s dead.
” Shit, was that what his family had used to pay me? Blood money?
Samuel then broke away and full-on sprinted down the street toward whoever was holding the camera.
Someone off camera shouted, “Hey, man, you okay?” but it was like Samuel didn’t even hear him.
I hit pause and stared at the man’s face, at the dark patches of blood soaking through his clothes.
I knew the injuries beneath that fabric, knew they were fatal, but they didn’t even slow him down.
“Well?” Ruadan asked. “Is it him?”
“Yes, but the man I purged suffered with arthritis. His joints were so thickly knobbed, I doubt he would’ve even been able to make a fist, let alone fight off three men half his age. Did any of what you just saw look possible for a man in his 80s?”
The god paused, mulling over the facts, as conflicting as they were. “So what are you saying?”
I shifted in my seat and fought the urge to eye him suspiciously.
“I mean… maybe it’s not him. How sure are you that it’s not a shapeshifter?
Someone making it look like these people were committing the crimes.
You said yourself, the evidence was rock-solid.
” I nodded toward the screen, still paused on Samuel Lear.
“Hard to look past what’s staring you in the face. ”
I could feel his burning stare as he turned toward me. “Even harder to look past the very real injuries to the very dead body you purged, sin-eater,” he gritted out. “Or was that somehow a shapeshifter’s fault as well.”
Huffing out a breath, I had to admit he had a point. “Fine, not a shapeshifter then. Magic of some kind, though, but I’ve never heard of anything that made people do impossible things, then erasing their memories of it ever happening.”
Ruadan flinched. “Unless… possession?” he said, his voice a horrified whisper.
“You mean ghosts?”
“Or demons.” There was something about that word—demon—that felt right. Too right. We shared a long look, both shuddering at the thought.
My skin had gone cold and clammy, nerves wound tight until I thought they might snap. What the hell had I been dragged into? “Well, case closed, I guess,” I said sharply, shoving my chair back from the table and rising to my feet, ready to be done with the whole thing. “Have a nice life.”
“Whoa, where do you think you’re going?” Ruadan asked, smoothly rising to block my route to the door.
“Where do you think I’m going? I was a suspect and now I’m not.
” I pointed at myself. “I am neither ghost nor demon. Good luck with your little investigation, but I’m going home for that bath now.
” I tried to step around him, but he shifted on the balls of his feet, surprisingly nimble for a man his size.
“Oh, no, no. You might not be the culprit, but fate put you in my path for a reason, I can feel it. You’re involved in this case one way or another; I just need to figure out which side of it you’re on.
And since I don’t trust you for a second, where you go, I go.
” His lips spread into a sultry smile. “Besides, I promised you dinner, and I’m nothing if not a man of my word.
What do you want to eat? There’s a great pho place just down the street.
We’ll pick it up on the way to your place. ”
No matter that we didn’t trust each other for a second, I was still not immune to his damn charm, my insides warming. Dammit. I took a long breath to steady myself. “I’ll take three of the most expensive item on the menu,” I snarled as I shoved past him out the door.
His laughter followed me out.