Chapter 20
20
Elliot Crane
Come home.
Now.
Seth Mays
What happened?
Are you okay?
Please.
I was about to hit the call button when my phone started ringing, but the caller wasn’t Elliot—it was Smith. I had a few seconds feeling conflicted before muttering “Fuck” under my breath and answering.
“Mays.”
“You know Elliot Crane, yes?”
“Yeah—” I was about to tell him Elliot had just asked me to come over when he interrupted my thought.
“I need you out at his place.”
Dread filled me. “Is he—okay?” I didn’t think there’d been enough time between the please and now for him to have been murdered, much less having someone else call it in. Please let there not have been enough time between the last please and now for him to have been murdered.
“Physically, he’s fine,” Smith answered. “But we need you out here.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen or less,” I told him.
On my way.
Thank you.
I didn’t tell him I’d be there even if he hadn’t asked, because I’m not an asshole. I was still worried about him— Physically, he’s fine meant that mentally or emotionally he was very much not fine, and as much as I’d tried to stop caring about him over the last six weeks, I had failed utterly. I was also worried about what it meant that Smith was there. Because homicide detectives don’t just show up to people’s houses for no reason and then call in the crime scene techs.
I was already out the door, and opted to grab the extra kits and take my Cruiser rather than the van or the truck. Roger was off, and Lacy was getting an extremely late lunch thanks to an accident this morning that had fortunately not resulted in any dead people, although there had been one bovine fatality and one totaled pickup truck—I shot her a text telling her Smith had called me in and that I was taking my car so I could go straight home.
Because I had the feeling that this was going to take me a lot longer than just collecting evidence. I was hoping I’d be able to con Smith into taking any evidence back with him to log so that I could make sure Elliot was okay. I didn’t know if he’d go for it, but it would be a lot easier if I had my own car instead of one of the crime scene vehicles.
I was driving too fast—I knew I was—but I didn’t care. It was drizzling and cold, and the roads were probably as close to freezing as the air. I told myself to slow down. It wouldn’t do Elliot any good if I ended up in a ditch or wrapped around a tree or telephone pole because I was trying to get to his house thirty seconds earlier.
I drew in a long breath, then blew it out slowly. There wasn’t anything that I could do that wouldn’t wait for those thirty seconds. I might not want to wait, but it was better that I got there in one piece so that I could do my job and be whatever Elliot needed me to be.
Part of me was vaguely disgusted at the fact that the minute Elliot said jump, I didn’t even bother to ask how high before my feet left the ground. It was needy, clingy, the sort of behavior that you weren’t supposed to engage in while keeping your masculinity intact. Not that I’d ever been terribly concerned about that, since being as big as I am usually telegraphed my gender fairly clearly. The beard also helped.
The rest of me, though, was just plain worried, and I tapped my fingers on my steering wheel, impatient at every light that didn’t immediately turn green. All two of them.
There was a cop car at the bottom of Elliot’s driveway, lights off, and he waved at me to stop as I turned in. I didn’t want to, but I did, because I knew the guy had probably been told to keep everyone out unless they had a good reason to be there. I held out my ID for him, and he waved me up.
“Glad it’s you and not me,” he told me as I rolled my window back up. I waved back at him, wondering what horrible thing I was about to find. To be fair, Shawano wasn’t Richmond, and the things that horrified some of the uniforms up here wouldn’t have caused a batted eye in city that had a couple hundred thousand people—not that Shawano got even close to that number. But what’s considered horrific in a city with gangs and a surprisingly high homicide rate is orders of magnitude worse than what set off people in a small town of a bit less than ten thousand.
It wasn’t pretty, though, I’d give him that.
When I pulled around the curve in Elliot’s driveway and parked behind Smith’s dark blue sedan, I saw it—or, rather, I saw something .
Grey-brown, striped with black and white, it was flatish, stretched with chains across the center of the garage door, which had been painted with dark streaks and smudges.
It took me a second.
And then it took me another ten to stop holding my breath and tell my heart to slow down because it couldn’t be Elliot.
First, Smith had said he was okay. It hadn’t been long enough since he’d texted me for that to have been done to him.
Second, this badger wasn’t nearly big enough to have been Elliot—or any shifter. It was just a badger.
The pinkish lump on the ground under the stretched-out hide was undoubtedly the rest of the poor creature, left where it had been skinned.
No fucking wonder Elliot wasn’t okay.
I needed to work the scene—but I also needed to see for myself that Elliot was unharmed. Not that I didn’t trust Smith, but… I just needed to see him myself.
I used the excuse that I should check in with Smith before I touched or did anything—it was standard procedure to touch base with the lead detective or sheriff on scene, although I was just using it as an excuse to get into the house to see Elliot.
I carried my heavy kit and gear with me up to the front door, and the uniform standing next to it reached out and opened it for me.
I stepped inside and instinctively toed my shoes off, although halfway through doing so I noticed that almost no one else had—although I recognized Smith’s beat-up penny loafers by the door. It made me like him even more, the fact that he showed respect for Elliot’s rules even now.
“Mays,” Smith said, his rough voice pitched low as he walked toward me down the hall.
I nodded to him. “Anything other than what I saw?” I asked him softly. Not that it mattered—Elliot could easily hear both of us if he was paying attention.
“No.”
“Anything I need to know about in the house?”
Another head-shake. “No. I had him go through it—he was here.”
“And didn’t hear anything?” I was surprised. Shifter hearing should have been good enough for him to hear that . Because the blood spatter on the garage door told me that whoever had done it had skinned the poor animal here.
“I was downstairs working. I had a lot of cutting to do on the circ, and I had on ear protectors.”
Elliot looked like shit. Pale under the copper tone of his skin. Eyes haunted. Desperate.
I had no idea what to do. I wanted to wrap him in my arms, hold him, tell him it would be okay. That I would keep him safe.
I wasn’t a fighter, though. Sure, I’d fight for him if it came down to that, but if I were being honest with myself, I’d almost certainly lose if any skill was required. I had size and brute strength, assuming whoever I was fighting wasn’t a shifter, orc, or vampire, and that went a long way to making people not want to pick fights with me, but faced with someone who was more skilled, I was probably going to lose.
So I didn’t know if I could keep Elliot safe. But I was willing to try. I just didn’t know if he wanted that from me.
I met his eyes, trying to read his thoughts in the chips of green and brown and gold. But I’d never been very good at that. It seemed pretty clear to me that he wanted something from me, but I really wasn’t sure what that was.
I was afraid of failing him.
But I also had a job to do.
I thought about asking if he was okay, but I could see that he wasn’t. I wanted to touch him—a hug, a hand on his shoulder or arm, something. But I didn’t know if it would be welcome. Or if it would be welcome in front of other people.
So instead I turned to Smith. “Am I clear to work?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” came the response. “Go ahead.”
I nodded, then turned to go reclaim my shoes.
“And Mays?”
I turned back.
“Get me something I can use.”
I nodded again.
This one was personal.
My fingers were numb by the time I finished with the dead badger and was ready to come back inside.
I’d started with photographs of the scene, the tire tracks on the side of the driveway that Elliot never used, his truck parked where it always was, and the footprints that led into the woods, connecting to ATV tracks. Then I took the internal temperature of the animal, took some hair samples from both the hide and the skinned carcass, and measured the injuries to the body. I bagged it, making a mental note to ask Smith if we could get Borde to do a necropsy. I didn’t particularly care how the poor creature had died, but if the ME could figure out what kind of weapon had been used, that might be useful. Not that I thought Borde was going to agree willingly, but maybe Smith had some powers of persuasion I didn’t.
Animal cruelty wasn’t the worst charge that could be levied against someone, but in this case it was compounded by also being an explicit threat against Elliot—and if the local prosecutor was feeling particularly just, they’d file it as a death threat. I didn’t know enough about the local DA to know if they’d be more sympathetic to Elliot or to the badger’s killer, though.
Once I felt as though I’d done everything I could with the body and hide, I’d moved on to the foot prints and tire tracks, making plaster casts of the clearest portions of each, my hands rapidly chilling as I worked. This was why I’d started with the badger—once the nearly-freezing cold plaster made my fingers this cold, I lost fine motor skills, and trying to remove hair and fiber samples with a tweezers would have been virtually impossible.
It had become dark by the time I’d finished blocking out and pouring the last plaster cast, each marked with a flag and cordoned off by crime scene tape. I’d be able to pry out the plaster in the morning.
Most of the uniforms had left once I packed up the gradually-freezing badger and its hide, although I did manage to convince one of the last ones to take the animal back to the morgue for storage, although he made a face when he agreed to it. Once he’d left, I put a note in my phone to stop by the precinct and give him cookies or something as a thank you.
It was never a bad idea to stay on people’s good sides if you had the option.
Smith was still inside, so I trudged back to the house, pulling off my mask and stripping off the bunny suit outside the front door. I left them in a pile, planning to take care of them later—Elliot didn’t need to see the blood- and mud-stained gear.
I could hear Elliot and Smith talking from the back of the house when I came in, toeing off my shoes and setting down the gear bag and the tote containing the evidence bags by the door before stripping off my coat and putting it on the coat tree.
Smith was doing most of the talking, I could tell, mostly to fill the silence and keep Elliot’s mind off whatever horrible things he was probably thinking about. His dad’s murder. The implied threat against his own life. The attempt that had actually been made on his life last winter.
I padded into the kitchen in my socks, and both of them looked up at me, Elliot from his stool at the island, Smith from where he was leaning against the counter. They both had mugs of hot chocolate, and I was deeply envious, my nose runny and probably red from the cold.
Elliot slid his over toward me, and I saw that it was steaming and still mostly full.
“I can—” I was starting to say that I could make my own or make myself tea or something, but Elliot interrupted me.
“Drink it, Seth. You’re clearly freezing.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I wrapped my frozen fingers around the mug, hissing slightly as hyper-chilled flesh hit hot ceramic, then pulled my hand back. “I’ll… let it cool a little,” I said, fully aware that it probably wasn’t too hot to drink, just too hot for my chapped hands to hold.
Elliot frowned, then reached out and took one of my hands, wrapping it in both of his. “You’re going to give yourself frostbite,” he told me, his frown deepening.
Frostbite had not been a thing I’d ever been particularly concerned about. Sure, I grew up in the mountains, but the Appalachians aren’t that high, and when I’d still lived there, I was a kid who didn’t know any better. My whole adult life I’d lived in Richmond or Charlottesville, and in neither place had frostbite ever been even the slightest concern. “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said.
“Seth, your fingertips are starting to turn blue,” Elliot retorted.
“You should be careful about your fingertips,” Smith put in. “You need those.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “They’re just cold.”
Elliot rubbed my hand between both of his. “Blue fingertips is not fine,” he replied, his voice a little sharp. He lifted my hand towards his mouth, then blew between his own palms so that his breath caused burning tingles to ripple through my hand.
“Ow,” I muttered.
“See? Your hands are too cold.” He rubbed at my fingers a little more, until the pins and needles started rushing in, my hand now flushed and bright pink. He let it go. “Give me the other one.”
I almost protested, then decided that he was more animated abusing my hands than he had been when I’d come in, so I let him do the same thing to my other hand.
“You need better gloves,” Elliot grumbled, before breathing on this hand, too.
“I can’t do my job with gloves on,” I retorted.
Both of them looked at me with horrified expressions.
“Seth—” Elliot said at the same time that Smith went “But Mays?—”
It occurred to me than that it was early November, and already below freezing. It was supposed to warm up a bit next week, but if it was this cold now what was it going to be like in late December or January? It wasn’t like people stopped dying or having accidents just because it was cold. In fact, I was pretty sure that they got snow and ice up here in the winter more like we had in the mountains, which meant that car accidents, at least, were likely to increase in the winter.
“But I need my fingers,” I pointed out. “You can’t work particulate tweezers in gloves!”
“Lacy has a pair of mittens that turn into finger-tip-less gloves,” Smith informed me. “So she can do that and then put her mittens back on.”
“Mittens?” It hadn’t even occurred to me that adults might wear mittens. I’d stopped wearing them around age ten or eleven.
“You know what mittens are, right?” Elliot asked me, and there was an edge of something that might have been teasing to the question.
“Yes, thank you, I know what mittens are,” I retorted. “I wasn’t aware that people who weren’t children wear them.”
Elliot and Smith exchanged a look. “Seth,” Elliot said slowly. “ Everyone wears mittens up here when it gets really cold.”
“It is really cold,” I pointed out.
Elliot’s snort and Smith’s pained expression told me that it was not, apparently really cold .
“It’s below freezing!” I said, a little worried now.
“Wait until it gets below zero,” Smith warned.
I knew people lived places where it got below zero. I had not thought that I would ever end up in one, because as far as I’d known, those places were inside arctic circles or were planetary poles. Or really high up in the mountains, like Mount Everest. Not somewhere I could drive to in under twenty-four hours.
I blew out a breath. “Maybe I’ll ask Lacy where she got her mittens,” I said meekly.
Elliot and Smith had gotten into an argument about what to do about Elliot’s safety in the wake of this obvious threat against his life. Smith wanted to post a uniform at the house, and Elliot unequivocally did not want that. Both of them wanted me to take their side, and I told them I was staying out of it.
That got me in trouble with both of them.
Smith shot me a look that clearly asked if I wanted the next skinned badger to be Elliot—which I definitely did not—and Elliot shot me one that told me he wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the department that had written off his father’s death as a suicide and then hid evidence.
I could see both points of view. If I’d been Elliot, I wouldn’t have wanted a cop in or near my house, either. But I also trusted Gale Smith not to pick someone who had issues with shifters, and I didn’t want Elliot to end up injured or dead.
Ultimately, though, Elliot won the argument because he had to give permission for the patrol to be on his property once the crime scene had been cleared up. He grudgingly agreed to let a car and two uniforms stay until then—although he’d grumbled something about how they’d better be gone in forty-eight hours.
Smith had not been happy about that.
He’d argued that someone should stay in the house, in case the perpetrator or perpetrators came back on ATVs through the woods—something that someone had clearly done—until he could get the patrol organized.
Elliot had flatly refused.
“What if I stay?” I asked. It felt weird to suggest it, like inviting myself back into the house. “I’m not a cop, but I can call for backup the same as a uniform if I have to.”
Smith’s frown said that it wasn’t the same, but he nodded. “Better than you staying here alone,” he said to Elliot.
Elliot’s angry hazel eyes had studied me for a few minutes, and then he nodded once, sharply. It wasn’t enthusiastic, but he did agree to it.
I wasn’t confident that I’d be at all useful in protecting him if someone rushed the house, but with two pairs of shifter ears, hopefully at least one of us would hear someone coming if they tried to break in or leave another dead animal for Elliot to find in the morning, especially if I stayed upstairs if Elliot had work to do in the basement or garage.
Smith clearly wasn’t happy, but it was the best he thought he was going to get out of Elliot, at least for now.
I walked him back to the door, leaving Elliot in the kitchen staring at my empty cocoa mug, so that I could pass off the evidence I’d collected. “Look,” I said, keeping my voice as low as I could, hoping Elliot wouldn’t hear the words I said. “You can station somebody on the highway, right?”
Smith sighed, pulling on his coat. “I’m going to ask highway to have someone patrol the area. But it will take at least a day to get it on the roster. So thanks for doing this.”
“Better than nothing?” I suggested.
He shrugged. “I’m more worried about the ATV trails than the highway, honestly,” he admitted. “It seems more likely that our perp came from there.”
I pressed my lips together. “There were also tire tracks leading up to the garage,” I told him, and his frown intensified.
“So more than one. Great.” The words were thick with sarcasm.
“Unless somebody else came here today,” I replied. “A delivery. Or Henry, maybe.”
“Henry Lamotte?”
“Yeah. He comes out here to work with Elliot sometimes.” I didn’t mention the fact that they might be illegally mixing up medicinal compounds.
“Get his tire tracks tomorrow, if you can, once we get the patrol established,” Smith told me, and I nodded. “And check the mail truck that comes out here, just in case.”
I nodded again.
“Thanks for staying,” he said softly.
“I was going to do that regardless,” I admitted. If Elliot hadn’t wanted me here, I’d have pulled around the curve of the driveway and slept in my car. But there was no way I was leaving him here by himself.
Smith grunted a little. “I’m leaving my phone on,” he told me. “Call or text me if you hear anything suspicious, got it?”
“Got it,” I replied.
I closed the door behind him, then stayed there for a few moments, listening as his car door slammed, the engine started, and he backed up before turning and driving away. I didn’t like being in the middle of a case—of knowing someone who was a potential victim, of caring about what happens to them. It was one thing to know that Nids were more likely to be the victims of violence and worry that one of those Nids might be my friend or my brother, and another thing entirely to know that there was a very specific threat against a man I cared about.
I turned and went back to the kitchen, worried and hesitant. I didn’t want Elliot to feel like I was trespassing, but I also wasn’t about to leave him alone. I was also hungry—it was a little past dinner time, and Elliot hadn’t made any sounds or moves to make food. I decided to just take him at his word—he’d said I was welcome here, so I went by the rules that had been in place when I had been living in the house and opened the fridge, looking for the makings of dinner. I noticed that although there wasn’t much there, he still had vegan butter and almond milk, even though I hadn’t been here since the middle of August.
“I don’t have anything,” he said, his voice soft and heavy.
“Sure, you do,” I replied, now looking in the freezer. There were several different bags of frozen vegetables and a package of frozen chicken breasts. I pulled them all out, dumped the whole package of chicken on a plate, and threw it in the microwave to defrost enough that I could cut it.
I set the oven to preheat, then made a basic white sauce using flour and the almond milk. Then I combined flour, baking soda, salt, and the vegan butter and almond milk. I’d nearly teared up when I saw that the expiration date on the milk was for December—he’d kept buying it, and because it was new and I’d also seen the regular milk in the fridge, I knew it hadn’t been because he’d wanted it for himself.
He’d gotten it in case I came back. But thinking about that too long would make me dangerously emotional, especially since stress and worry already had me on edge.
Pretending I wasn’t an internal wreck, I tossed the vegetables into the white sauce, cut up the less-frozen chicken and added that to the pot, then mixed together the baking ingredients.
“What are you making?” Elliot asked me, either finally noticing that I was cooking or hitting the threshold of the amount of silence he was able to endure.
“Chicken drop-biscuit pot pie,” I answered. It was something I’d made for Noah and myself often enough when we couldn’t afford much—frozen veggies, frozen meat sometimes, and basic baking ingredients. It was filling and fairly cheap, and didn’t take terribly long to make in the grand scheme of dinner options.
“You don’t?—”
“I’m hungry,” I interrupted him, a little shortly. I was tired, my joints ached from cold and crouching, and I was hungry. And I wasn’t in the mood to put up with Elliot trying to convince me to leave, because it wasn’t happening. And I didn’t really want to fight with him about either that or the fact that I didn’t have to make him dinner. “But I’m not an ass, so I’m going to make enough for both of us.”
I didn’t bother looking at him to see his reaction. His silence told me enough.
I was spooning the biscuit batter onto the top of a pan full of chicken, veg, and sauce when he spoke again.
“Was it still alive? When they…”
“I’m not a medical examiner,” I told him. “But I don’t think so.” I wasn’t lying to him, either. I felt like there would have been a lot more evidence of a struggle if the poor badger had been alive when they tried to skin it.
He lapsed into silence again.
“Seth?” he asked, as I put the pan into the oven.
My heart nearly broke at the vulnerability in his voice. “Yeah?” I turned around, and found him still staring down at the counter-top, his hands palm-down, splayed open. The skin around his knuckles was criss-crossed with the scrapes and scars that were the hallmark of his trade—I knew those hands. Knew what they felt like on my skin, knew the strength in them, the callus that made his palms and the pads of his fingers rough. They looked helpless the way they sat there, or maybe that was just the expression on his face.
“What do they want from me?” he asked, softly.
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I wish I did.”
He looked up then, and I didn’t really know what else to do, so I walked around the side of the island and opened my arms.
He leaned into me, not hugging me back, but accepting what I offered, giving me enough weight that if I’d moved, he’d have fallen off the stool. I held onto him, feeling the long, slow breaths that I could tell he was forcing himself to take, scenting the sharp tang of fear in the air, although whether it was mine or his, I wasn’t sure.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked me, his voice slightly muffled by my shirt and chest.
“I don’t want the next dead badger to be you,” I admitted. Because the only thing I could think that the people who had left this one wanted was to make clear that they meant to do the same thing to Elliot. Maybe to other shifters, too.
“You think that’s what they’ll do?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe they just get off scaring people. Maybe they just want you to feel intimidated. To feel like they’re superior. Or maybe they don’t care about you at all and just want to make themselves feel superior.”
He let out a breath, warm against my shirt. “So either they’re homicidal assholes or just regular assholes.”
I couldn’t help the twitch of my lips, although he couldn’t see it. “Pretty much,” I answered.
I stood there, the heat of his body still resting against me, for several minutes. Five, maybe as long as ten, it was hard to tell. My knee ached, and my back wasn’t terribly happy about it, either, especially after all the crouching I’d done earlier in the day, but holding Elliot against me—I wasn’t going to let a little pain stop that. Especially not under these circumstances.
I’d almost reached my limit when he spoke again. “They’re not going to catch whoever did this, are they?” He sounded hopeless.
I thought about it. “I’d give it fifty-fifty, honestly,” I told him. “The ATV tire treads were fairly distinctive—new, but with a nick on one of the treads that would make matching them pretty easy. And I have some blade typing to do, but I’m hopeful that if I can match the blade pattern to a specific style, they should be able to figure out where someone would buy it, then do some cross-referencing. At some point the Venn diagram gets small enough that you’ve got pretty decent odds.”
“Huh.” He sounded surprised. “So that’s… not so bad, I guess.”
I snorted. I couldn’t help it. “It’s bullshit is what it is,” I said. “But at least there’s a chance we do catch this asshole.” Or set of assholes . But I didn’t think saying that part out loud would help Elliot feel any better.
He sighed again, his weight still leaning against me. “Seth?”
“Yeah?” I tightened my arms around him a little.
“Stay?”
“Of course.” I’d been planning on arguing with him about it, but I guess I didn’t have to. A few minutes went by again, and my back really started bothering me. “Can we do this on the couch, though?” I asked, trying not to be rude, but really needing to sit down before my back did something I wouldn’t recover from for days.
Elliot immediately pulled away. “Oh. Yeah. Of course.”
I grimaced. “I’m sorry, I just… I spent too much time bent over and my back is… pretty bad.” I’d been going to say killing me , but that particular set of words didn’t seem to be the best choice at the moment.
“Do you want some Tylenol or something? A heating pad?”
I’d really just wanted to sit down, but the idea of a heating pad sounded pretty great. I said so, and Elliot slipped off the stool and disappeared down the hallway, his bare feet shuffling a little against the carpet.
Feeling uncertain, I made my way into the living room, lowering myself carefully to the couch cushions and breathing through the pain as my back settled. I closed my eyes, drawing in deep breaths as the cramping started to ease.
“Are you okay?” Elliot’s voice asked, tinged with genuine concern.
I opened my eyes. “Fine,” I replied. “Just too much crouching.”
He was frowning, an electric heating pad in one hand. “You’re what, barely thirty?”
“Almost thirty-one, thank you.”
“Still too young to be in that much pain.”
I opened one eye. “Oh, well, I’ll just stop being in pain then.” It wasn’t the nicest thing I could have said, but I get short-tempered when the pain gets too bad.
Elliot just looked at me, then came over and put a hand behind my shoulders, pushing me away from the couch gently so that he could put the heating pad behind me. I shifted it to the right place. “Sorry,” I muttered at him. “I’m?—”
“Tylenol?” he asked me.
“Doesn’t do anything,” I replied glumly.
He plugged in the heating pad, then turned it up a few levels. “Let me know if it gets too hot.”
“Elliot, I am?—”
“It’s okay,” he said gently. “Will you—will you let me make you some of Dad’s tea?”
I knew what he was asking. “What’s in it?” I asked him.
“Turmeric, ginger, willow bark, cloves, fennel, and white tea leaves.”
I was skeptical that it would do anything, but none of that should hurt me. And tea was warm, at least. “Okay,” I agreed meekly. After snapping at him, trying to be nice was the least I could do.
He nodded, then disappeared. I heard him open a door, then his feet padding down the stairs to the basement.
I closed my eyes and tried to let the heat relax the muscles in my lumbar spine. The heat felt nice, but the spasms weren’t ready to calm down. Experience told me it would probably be another few hours, at least.
I hoped that if the asshole who had skinned the badger came back, he—or they—at least waited long enough for my back to be semi-functional.
More footsteps, these coming up the stairs, then the sound of cupboards and dishes in the kitchen. Running water. More movement. Rustling. Cabinet doors. Then the whistle of a kettle. Water pouring. The sound of a spoon in ceramic.
“Here,” came Elliot’s voice, and I opened my eyes to find him offering me a mug on a plate, a couple cookies that looked like Oreos next to the mug.
I tried to push myself into more of a sitting position and failed. Elliot set the plate down on the end table, then helped, trying to gently lift me as I pushed. I got far enough that I wasn’t going to choke and gave up.
“That’s fine.” I swallowed around the ache in my throat. “Thanks.”
Elliot’s brow was furrowed, but all he did was hand me the plate and mug.
Except that my hands shook too badly for me to take it.
“Shit,” I hissed.
“I’ve got it,” he told me, then carefully sat next to me. He left the plate on his thigh, and held my hands with his to help me sip at the hot tea.
It was… weird. Spicy, and a little bitter, although it smelled a little like ginger snap cookies. It also tasted like Elliot had tried to put honey in it to cut the bitter. It needed more, not that I was going to complain.
“Here, have some sugar,” he told me, taking the mug back and offering me a cookie.
“I can’t eat Oreos,” I told him. “They process dairy in the same factory.”
“They’re Newman Os,” he replied. “Certified vegan.”
I accepted the cookie, although chewing and swallowing it had just gotten a lot harder around the ball of emotion in the back of my throat. He was right. After the second cookie, the shaking in my hands had calmed a little. I held out a fairly steady hand, and he passed me the tea. I took another sip. It didn’t really improve much the more you drank it.
I knew it was the willow bark that made it so very bitter.
I wondered if adding cinnamon and almond milk would help. Ideally something like cream would help, but plant-based creams tended to get… gloopy in an acidic environment. Salt would also cut bitterness, but the idea of putting salt in tea was disgusting. And there was only so much honey or sugar you could add before that got gross, too.
Or maybe I could stop thinking about it because I didn’t live here and I wasn’t really a part of Elliot’s life any more. I was here because he’d been threatened, and I worked for the Sheriff’s Department. He might trust me more than he did a random cop, but that was it. I was here because I was more trustworthy than someone who might very well harbor anti-shifter beliefs. Someone who might very well be responsible for the dead, skinned badger left outside his garage.
Not because he cared about me.
I was just the best option he had.