Chapter 8
Teddy
“Ifeel a little embarrassed that a sparkly children’s doll knew more about what was going on in our city than us.”
The words were a muffled buzz as Teddy continued to stare blankly.
“And the fact that I exploded into confetti after being shot out of that cannon was wild.”
“Hmm.” Teddy blinked. “Wait what?”
“Oh, you heard that.” Saint rolled his eyes.
Teddy grimaced behind his mask. “Sorry.”
“Distracted, are we?” Saint asked, narrowing his eyes behind the plastic protecting them.
“By the body on the table with its eyes eaten out of its skull? Sure,” Teddy replied smoothly, looking back down.
He heard Saint snort as he continued to run his diagnostics.
Teddy grabbed the toxicology report the coroner had left with them and flipped through it, steadily ignoring the vibration in his pocket.
The report was incomplete, the guy saying they were still waiting on some results because the first lot had been contaminated.
Other than that, nothing obvious stood out.
Lizards eating eyeballs wasn’t exactly commonplace.
The fact that it resulted in death was the weird part.
As far as they suspected and knew, people were shooting up with this drug, not getting it directly from the source, so what had gone wrong here?
“It’s definitely got curse traces, just like the others.” Saint snapped off his gloves.
“Do you think our guy was trying to make his own supply? Curse an animal instead of paying for a fix?” Teddy wondered.
“Could be. Or maybe he knew more than he was letting on. He could have been one of our distributors and something went wrong. He seems squeaky clean on paper, but who knows what skeletons he has in his closet.”
Teddy hummed. “We need more evidence.”
“Good thing we have some leads, then.” Saint grinned.
“Let’s tell the coroner to put him back on ice for the time being.” Teddy pulled off his own protective gear. “Just in case we need to examine him again.”
They disposed of their gear and talked to the coroner before heading out of the morgue just as the sun was threatening to rise over the glass buildings.
“If you keep yawning I’m going to catch it, and I still need to get us home,” Saint said, unlocking the door to his car.
Teddy caught himself midway through one. He hadn’t even noticed. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”
“Curses never rest. You had two calls when we got back.”
“The first one was simple. It was the bachelorette-party-gone-wrong thanks to a jealous maid of honor that really ate up the rest of the day and much of the night.” Teddy groaned and tried to crack his neck.
Saint whistled. “Bet they thought you were the cursebreaker stripper come to call.”
Teddy grimaced and Saint burst out laughing.
Teddy shoved him into the hood of the car. “Shut the fuck up.”
“He’s not even cursing me with big words, it must have been bad.” Saint continued to cackle as he righted himself and climbed into the driver’s seat.
Teddy took his place in the passenger’s side, glaring. “I should have told you to get lost when you called.”
“Nah. The case was getting colder by the minute; you wouldn’t have,” Saint said confidently. Which was completely right. Teddy wouldn’t have said no. Sometimes he liked to pretend though.
“We should ping our findings over to Slatehollow.” Saint paused and glanced over. “Need me to do it?”
“I’m fine,” Teddy almost snapped.
Saint raised a brow. “Didn’t suggest you weren’t, my man.”
Teddy chewed the inside of his cheek, brows furrowing against his will as he turned to gaze out the window.
West. Exactly where Slatehollow lay. He tried to imagine what Wren was doing at that moment.
Where he was. He wondered whether he was thinking of him too.
Maybe looking into the distance wondering the same thing.
They used to be so in tune with each other that they could finish each other’s sentences.
He wondered if their minds still aligned.
A flash of a familiar car parked in a narrow alley caught his attention.
He squinted against the glare of the still-glowing streetlamp and clenched his jaw. Always watched. Always tracked. Always accounted for.
“I’ll do it,” he said, peeling his gaze away from the car and back to Saint, who was already looking at him.
Saint drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a few beats. “He seemed happy to see you.”
Heartache was a dull throb in Teddy’s chest. “He ran away from me again.”
“Before that.”
Teddy glanced over, knowing his feelings were written all over his face.
“The disappointment he looked at me with and the change that happened when he spotted you were biblical. I was actually scared Mr. Law and Order was going to keep him in cuffs, lock you up, and turn you both in to Nexus for your eye contact alone.”
Teddy clenched his jaw again even as panic cold as ice crackled through his entire being. “They can’t lock us up for looking at each other.”
“No…but that’s not all this is, is it?”
Teddy didn’t answer, looking back out the window.
“Look…” Saint sighed. “All I want is for you to be happy. But maybe it’s a good thing that he decided to stay back? Less risk. Less complicated.”
“Sure. Less risk. Less complicated,” Teddy murmured with no feeling.
They drove home in uncomfortable silence, Teddy acutely aware of the tail they had, and would continue having until he was finally locked inside their house. Away from the world.
Teddy knew Saint was only looking out for him, but he could never understand. Was he right? Absolutely. But something being right didn’t mean it wasn’t still wrong. Teddy and Wren being apart was wrong. A tear in the universe. A thread unwoven that was never supposed to be missed.
Yet…Nexus deemed their relationship impossible. Taboo. Forbidden. They had torn them apart. Unwoven their threads mercilessly. The consequences people whispered about weren’t just rumors—Teddy knew them to be true. It had been impressed upon him that they had gotten off lightly.
So where did that leave them? They’d found each other again, but could they be together even if they found themselves in the same place?
He closed his eyes, already knowing the answer.
They reached home soon enough, pulling up to the gate.
“A car and trailer are parked down the street illegally. Old Dennis is going to get his panties in a twist. ‘How unsightly,’” Saint mimicked in their neighbor’s voice.
Teddy simply hummed, not bothering to look over.
They parked and got out, Teddy following Saint to the door and letting him unlock it.
“I’m heading straight to bed,” Teddy said, cutting Saint off before he could say anything else. “I’ll be fine. I’m just tired.”
He didn’t wait for a reply, just headed straight up the stairs, feeling Saint’s worried gaze on his back. He only allowed himself to sigh once he was out of sight, pausing in the middle of the hallway and looking up at the ceiling before trudging on to his room.
He entered silently, kicking off his shoes and navigating around without needing to turn the light on.
He felt a breeze and realized he had left the window open by accident, tripping over something on his way to close it. He bent down and grabbed the object, realizing that it was a shoe he didn’t recognize. Dirty, with frayed laces that looked to have been chewed on.
His heart began to pick up speed the longer he stared at it, not daring to hope but hoping anyway. He looked at the window, suddenly feeling breathless when he caught sight of the broken lock.
A thousand memories flitted through his mind. The image of an angular face that still had the roundness of childhood stubbornly clinging to it peering over the edge, bright blue eyes with his beautiful mark beckoning him on.
“Hey! Over here!” he said with a grin. “You just going to stare all day and get caught?”
Teddy spun around, chasing the memory and the feeling, not needing to look anywhere else when there, in a tiny, vulnerable lump on his bed, was Wren.
He dropped the shoe with a dull thud.
Teddy wanted to sob with joy. To collapse at the universe’s kindness.
His little bird had found his way home.
He shouldn’t have been thinking in those terms, but it was impossible not to. Not to give in to the tide of emotion washing him under.
Approaching the bed, he realized Wren wasn’t alone, there were a pair of yellow eyes glinting at him from the darkness and daring him to make a wrong move. Teddy didn’t begrudge the creature—he was glad that he was there to protect Wren.
He kept his movements slow as he crouched in front of his own bed, tilting his head to put them eye level.
And then his vision was filled with Wren’s beautiful, slumbering face.
Plush, pouting lips parted on soft, deep breaths, forehead smoothed out of any worries.
Long lashes touched his dirt-stained cheeks, and his cursemark gave him an ethereal glow under stray strands of hair.
He had a doll-like beauty mixed with a uniqueness that Teddy had dedicated novels to, unable to capture an ounce of its brilliance, devoting his life to remembering and documenting every detail like a scholar.
He had done none of him justice.
He reached out with shaky fingers to brush a lock of hair back inside his hood, fingers brushing a material that instantly gave him déjà vu.
It can’t be…
Teddy reached over to his bedside table and found the switch to the lamp, setting it on dim. Amber light filled the room and Teddy fell on his ass at the sight of his old hoodie.
Wren was here in his bed. And Wren was wearing it.
Teddy didn’t know what that meant… No, he didn’t dare think about what that meant.
He could already feel the quicksand up to his neck, sucking him back down.
A curious chirp made its way into his panic-filled brain, and he blinked down at the light weight that fluttered to perch on his knee.
He knew this face as well. “B-Blu?” he whispered.
“Teddy,” was chirped back with a small hop, like he was ecstatic to talk to him after all this time apart.