Chapter 27
27
Elliot Crane
Ma and Pa want us to come over for Thanksgiving.
I frowned at the text message. I didn’t actually object to the idea of having dinner with the Harts, but I felt weird about the idea of doing Thanksgiving there. It would be the first time in my entire life that I wasn’t going to be with Noah, which was going to be weird enough. Ever since we’d run away, Noah and I had spent Thanksgiving at Hands and Paws with the other homeless shifters—even once we weren’t homeless.
Even if I wasn’t going to be with Noah, I’d intended to do the same thing this year, alone if need be. I’d just sort of assumed Elliot would come with me, but the text made me realize that we hadn’t actually talked about it.
I’d been busy with work—both the old cases and new ones, although nothing particularly noteworthy. A couple car accidents, a robbery, several bar fights, and two fires, both of which had been accidental.
Elliot had been doing work on the reservation at the Resort and Casino—they were redoing some of the ballrooms in preparation for the holiday season, and they’d wanted extensive carving put in. Elliot had been happy about the money, and I’d been happy that he had to work on site, since that meant he wasn’t going to be spending a lot of time alone at the house.
There hadn’t been any more dead animals, and Smith hadn’t had any new developments on that case—and neither had I, despite going over the particulates twice more. It was both frustrating and nerve-wracking. Without progress, there could be no resolution, which meant that we were just waiting for the next time one of these assholes decided to leave Elliot another dead animal—or do something worse.
At the same time, of course, I didn’t want anything to happen. But as long as it didn’t, all that I managed to do was become more and more anxious about what would happen when something finally did happen.
“Hey, Seth,” Lacy walked into the office and handed me an envelope—the thick brown kind that usually meant test results. “This came for you.”
“Thanks.” I took it from her, ripping the top open. It was the test results from the various barn victims—no additional IDs, but more information, including DNA, blood type, dental records, approximate age and weight, and approximate time of death—or, rather, year of death. Flipping through them, I saw that our victims—other than the most recent, of course—had died five, nine, fifteen, and seventeen years ago. Hopefully this would help Smith to pull the right missing persons cases so that they could get those families some closure.
But it raised some larger questions, I knew. It wasn’t part of my job, but I knew that a serial killer wouldn’t usually have years between kills—not two, then six, then four, then five. Which meant that the motive was something other than a compulsion to kill. But the fact that there were so many was also strange—most killers were either serial, mass, or one-off. The idea that someone would intermittently kill five people across seventeen years was very unusual.
The alternative was that it was more than one someone, which was not a very comforting thought, either.
Not my job, but I wanted to give Smith and whoever else might work on the case more to go off if I could. I probably couldn’t, but I wanted to make sure there was nothing more for me to do before I stopped focusing on it.
I started by texting him to let him know I had the full reports from Wausau. They’d sent summary reports by email, but the packet contained radiographs amid the paperwork, because while they had the equipment to take them, they hadn’t actually managed to have the modern digital equipment that the radiographers for the living got to use.
I pulled out the dental x-rays and got to work finding the main pinpoints to narrow down the search parameters in the national dental database. Wausau certainly could have done that, but so could we, and they were dealing with cases shipped in from all over the state, so anything they knew we could do, we had to do.
I was flipping back and forth between four sets of teeth belonging to missing persons from five years ago, checking each tooth against the radiograph I kept having to hold up to the ceiling lights when Smith walked in. It made it difficult to actually see all the details—given the fact that overhead fluorescent lighting isn’t exactly ideal lighting for viewing radiographs.
“Anything good?” he asked me.
“More details,” I replied. “Might help with IDing them.” Part of me wanted to suggest that he just find a medium and ask them to identify the bodies, but nobody had suggested using a medium even once since I’d moved to Shawano. I kept meaning to ask Lacy if there were policies stopping them from trying, but I also kept forgetting, and she was never around when I remembered. “Is there some reason y’all don’t use mediums to ID Does?” As in John or Jane or Jack or Joan Doe.
“Do you usually in Virginia?”
I shrugged. “We did. But we also had Ward Campion, so maybe they don’t elsewhere in the state.”
“Well, for one thing, we’d need corroboration from physical evidence in order to use a medium’s testimony as an ID, meaning the medium is pretty redundant,” he replied.
“It would help you know where to look, though, wouldn’t it?” I asked.
“Probably,” Smith replied. “But I’ve never met one.”
“Huh,” I replied. It made me wonder how often Arc-humans were mediums instead of one of the varieties of psychics—empaths or touch-psychics—or seers. “Well, if you get the chance, I’d recommend hiring one if you can.”
“Let me know if you meet any local ones,” he replied. “In the mean time, what are we dealing with?”
It was dark by the time I got back to Elliot’s house, and I was anxiously tapping my fingers on the steering wheel as I pulled around the corner, worried about him even though I knew he hadn’t been here most of the day.
My anxiety was not assuaged by the fact that the house, too, was dark.
I reminded myself that it was only six, and that it was entirely likely that Elliot was still finishing up something for work up at the casino, especially since his Tundra wasn’t in the driveway. I took a couple deep breaths, then made myself pull into the driveway where the badger had been left—I’d always pulled in behind Elliot, but I didn’t want to block his side of the driveway. Not that he probably cared, but it just felt wrong.
I parked, took a couple deep breaths, and walked up to the front door, pulling out the key Elliot had given me the day before so that I could come and go as I pleased. It felt weird. Not bad, but weird.
I opened the door, letting myself in, and set down my stuff so that I could take off the hiking boots that had become my everyday work shoes. The fact that Elliot had bought them for me made me even more inclined to wear them, because clearly I’m a total sap. And I didn’t have that many actually comfortable pairs of shoes. I had a pair of trainers, but they were almost as old as the hiking shoes Elliot had thrown up on.
Elliot had tried insisting that I buy a pair of steel-toed work boots, but I hadn’t yet managed to pad my nearly-depleted checking account to the point where I could afford more than one over-a-hundred-dollar pairs of shoes. The next pair on my list were fire boots, and they would likely cost me three hundred or more. And then the uniform, extra gear, gas to get me to wherever in Shawano County I got sent… I wasn’t really going to be able to save up much money for a while.
It made moving back into Elliot’s house more attractive as an option.
I picked up my satchel and carried it into the kitchen, setting it on one of the stools at the island. And then I started going through the fridge, looking for the makings of dinner while telling myself that Elliot was just late coming back from work. That he was fine.
I whisked together a dairy-free carbonara sauce in a pan in which I’d sautéed small cubes of duck from one of the ducks that Elliot really had gotten in exchange for fixing up a bunch of bar stools from one of the most popular bars in Shawano. Hunters were big fans of bars, and a lot of them stayed in and around Shawano while hunting game birds and deer in the surrounding fields, marshes, and forests.
Duck fat was absolutely amazing, and I was really looking forward to how it would taste in this pasta with some of the garden peas that Elliot had grown—or, rather, which had grown on their own and which we’d harvested—and frozen.
I was tossing a little olive oil through the pasta to keep it from sticking before stirring it into the rich, eggy sauce when I heard the front door open.
I was a little surprised at how relieved I actually felt—how genuinely worried I had been that something had happened to him.
He padded into the kitchen doorway, and I felt my eyebrows go up as I took in his stain-and-sawdust covered self. “Smells good,” he told me.
“You need a shower,” I replied, unable to help the smirk on my lips. There was a curl of wood caught in his hair that rested against one temple. It was absolutely adorable.
He grinned at me. “Want to join me?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “You want dinner to either burn or congeal?” I asked him.
“I can be quick,” he replied, hazel eyes sparkling.
Shit . He was far too good at completely eroding my willpower. “You’d better be,” I threatened. “Wasting duck carbonara is a crime.”
“Then you’d better hurry up,” came the response as he turned and walked toward the bathroom.
I thought I’d followed right behind him after turning the pan on the stove down to simmer and putting a lid on it so it wouldn’t dry out, but he’d already stripped naked by the time I walked into the open bathroom door from his bedroom, and he immediately slammed me up against the wall, hands already working on the fly of my khakis.
“Jesus, Elliot,” I gasped out. It wasn’t an objection.
“I have been thinking about you all fucking day ,” he growled against the back of my neck, rough hands shoving my khakis off my hips, his thumbs dragging my shorts with them. My shirt followed. “In the shower,” he ordered, and I barely managed to get my socks off before he’d pushed me into the stall.
I immediately noted the bottle of lube sitting on the molded shower seat. I opened my mouth to comment on it, but a hand pushed my spine forward, shoving me hard enough that I had to catch myself against the wall with my hands, the seat below me. He squeezed my balls in one hand, making me gasp, then grabbed the bottle.
“I want you so badly,” he rasped. “Tell me I can have you.”
His desire and desperation were contagious. “God, yes,” I replied.
One finger—slick with lube—pushed at my body, and I let out a whimper as he slid it inside me, pressing, working, stretching. He rested his cheek against my spine, and I heard him draw in a deep breath. “Fuck, I love your smell,” he breathed into my skin as he pressed a second finger inside me, reaching deep.
At the mercy of both his fingers and his lust, I made some sort of noise of assent, my breath echoing harshly in the tiled bathroom. Elliot growled softly, his fingers pressing wider. “El, please.”
“Please what?”
“Fuck me.”
The next growl was even lower and louder, and he pulled his hand away. Where he had the condom I had no idea, but I heard the sound of the packet being torn open, the plastic-y clatter of the lube bottle as it hit the floor. I felt the stretch and pressure as he pushed himself against me, then past the resistance of the ring of muscle as he entered me completely, the friction and fullness glorious.
I let out a moan, every nerve electrified by the feeling of Elliot pushed as far into me as he could get, his body pressed against mine. And then he pulled back, leaving me gasping, before driving forward hard enough that it forced the air from my lungs.
“Fuck, Seth,” he groaned out against my back, and the next few thrusts were hard enough that I had to brace myself fully against the wall or risk falling. It was probably good that he hadn’t actually turned on the shower.
And then he slammed into me with a long, low moan, one hand sliding around my torso to spread just below my sternum, the other grasping my heavy cock, stroking me until I shuddered in his grasp as I came.
My legs felt weak, and I was pretty sure my arms were doing more to hold me up than they were.
I felt Elliot press a kiss to my spine. “Are you okay?” he asked, softly.
“Uh huh.” It was the best I could manage.
His hands ran up and down my back. “You sure, baby?”
I gave in to the demands of my knees and turned, sitting—carefully—on the molded seat. “I’m fine, Elliot.”
He cupped my bearded cheeks in his hands, then bent to kiss me, tender and gentle. “Shower?” he asked softly.
I nodded with a smile.
We did successfully manage to make it out of the shower before the carbonara became too overcooked, although I did have to add another egg to get it back to the right consistency. Both of us could now use the protein. For the record, duck and pea carbonara is really damn good, even when it doesn’t have dairy in it.
Elliot refused to let me help with the dishes, shooing me out of the kitchen with a package of peanut butter Newman Os. Despite the ‘cream’ part of them, Newman Os are completely vegan, which is great for me, because I think they also put heroin in them, if my inability to stop eating them is any indication.
I and my cookies settled onto the couch, snuggling up against the pillows on one side, covering my chest and legs with one of the crocheted blankets Elliot kept tossed over the back of the couch. He’d said Judy Hart had made both of them. The armchair next to the couch had a woven blanket, and that one had been made years before for his mother by one of her friends on the reservation. I’d noticed that he never sat in the chair, although I hadn’t asked him why not. I also hadn’t tried sitting in the chair.
Elliot came into the living room, then settled on the other end of the couch, tucking his still-bare feet under the blanket and up against my thighs.
“Hey!” I objected. “Your feet are freezing.”
“And that’s why I need your hot ass,” he retorted, smirking, as he bent forward to take three cookies out of the package sitting on my legs.
“It’s not going to stay hot if you keep shoving your icy feet under it,” I grumbled.
“Oh, baby, your ass is hot no matter what temperature it is,” he retorted.
I rolled my eyes and pulled apart another cookie, eating the side without frosting first—I liked to save the best for last. “You say that now,” I replied. “But if my ass were cold, you wouldn’t be sticking your feet under it.”
He wiggled his toes, earning himself a mock glare. “I will never turn down sticking anything in your ass,” he told me.
“Jesus, Elliot.” Every now and then I forgot he was Hart’s best friend. And then he said things like that, and I was reminded.
He barked out a laugh in response, then grabbed the remote and turned on the TV, flicking through until he found a show about people living off grid in Alaska or Canada or Greenland or somewhere. Noah and I’d never had actual TV, but Elliot liked to watch it. I didn’t mind, I just had no frame of reference for who the bearded men were and why they were constantly traipsing through the snowy woods and not shooting anything in spite of carrying guns everywhere.
I pulled out my phone, then opened my e-reading app, pulling up the latest mystery thriller Noah insisted I had to read.
“Would you rather I didn’t have the TV on?” Elliot asked me over a commercial about some place called a Fleet Farm in Green Bay.
I blinked, looking up. “Oh, I don’t care,” I replied honestly. I can read through pretty much any noise—TV, music, Noah babbling at me… Then it occurred to me that he might not be asking about my comfort level. “Does it bother you if I read?” Maybe he wanted us to bond over his show.
One side of his lips curved up. “Nope,” he replied, his tone amused. “You’re kind of adorable when you do it, though.”
I stared. “I’m… adorable when I read?”
He nodded. “You get this little furrow right here.” He touched the spot between his eyebrows.
I felt my neck flush. “Oh. Um. Okay.” And now I was having trouble concentrating on the words on my phone because I felt self-conscious. Elliot laughed, but it was good-humored, not mean.
He wiggled his toes under my thigh, and I gave a mock sigh, earning another laugh. “Oh,” he said, almost offhandedly. “Thanksgiving at the Harts’?”
I’d forgotten his text.
“Um,” I said, and Elliot muted the TV to give me his attention.
“You don’t want to go over there?” he asked, sounding surprised. “Val said you stayed with them… before you got your apartment. I just figured you’d like that better than…” He shrugged a little. “But we don’t have to, I guess.”
“Noah and I always spent Thanksgiving at Hands and Paws,” I told him, feeling guilty about wanting to do that instead of spending it with the Harts because Judy and Marsh had been really generous and kind to me. “It was always our way of giving back.” I swallowed. “And I know Noah’s still in Richmond and I’m here, but I thought it might at least make it feel like we’re still spending it together if I did that.”
I couldn’t read Elliot’s expression, but I could tell it wasn’t disappointment. “That’s actually a really good idea,” he said softly. “More the point of the holiday, at least.” Then he flashed me a small lopsided smile again. “Makes me feel less weird about doing it, anyway.”
“Doing it?” I asked.
“Thanksgiving. It always makes me feel weird—since the whole holiday is basically a celebration of the exploitation and slaughter of Indigenous people.”
I blinked. “Well, that’s pretty much wrecked it for me, now, too,” I told him, then sighed. “I’m assuming that my rural Virginia schooling probably didn’t fill in a few details, since I was always taught that the point was mutual cooperation.”
Elliot snorted. “That’s what the white man wants you to think,” he informed me. “Colonizer bullshit.”
“There seems to be a lot of that,” I observed.
“Colonizer bullshit?”
“Yeah.”
He barked out a laugh. “Absolutely. Shall I destroy your innocent little white-boy understanding of colonist-Indigenous relations now, or wait?”
I snorted. “Go for it,” I told him.
We ended up spending Thanksgiving with the Harts anyway—not because we didn’t go to the Hands and Paws in Green Bay, but because when Elliot told them why we weren’t going to join them for the holiday, Judy Hart had insisted on coming with us.
We’d just pulled into the parking lot—at five in the morning, because that’s how long it took to cook turkeys—when a maroon-colored Explorer pulled in behind us, and I could see Judy Hart waving furiously, a light from what was presumably her phone illuminating her face from below.
“And that,” Elliot remarked sleepily—I’d driven his truck while he’d slept—“is vintage Ma.” He took a sip of his coffee, which I’d poured into his travel mug when I’d made my own at the ungodly time in the morning we’d had to leave.
“It’s something,” I agreed, a little jealous that Elliot had somehow gotten two awesome mothers, by all accounts, while I hadn’t gotten one. Or even half of one.
“You know you’re now her fourth kid, right?” he asked me.
“Fourth?” I didn’t think Hart had any siblings.
“Val is obviously first, then me, then Taavi, and now you,” he replied, and there was something warm and maybe a little shy in his voice.
“Oh,” I said, the flush on my neck as much from pleasure as self-consciousness. “That’s… nice.”
Fortunately, Elliot is actually fairly good-natured most of the time, and he grinned at me instead of taking offense at how incredibly awkward I am about things like that.
And then I could stop worrying about it because I was somehow being given a bear-hug by a woman who barely came up to my armpit.
“Oh, sweetie ! It’s been too long!” She squeezed again, and I was mildly impressed at the strength in those short human arms as I hugged her carefully back. I wondered—not for the first time—how two people like Marsh and Judy had ended up with Hart . Not because of the height thing, because I understood that, but the personality.
I looked over at Elliot, who had an enormous grin on his face.
Then Judy pulled back and promptly swatted at my arm. “You need to come by more often, Seth,” she told me sternly, and I saw a flash of where Hart had gotten his pushiness.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Judy,” she corrected me.
“Yes, Judy.”
She let out a disgruntled sound that I recognized as being very Hart, as well. I guess I could see where Hart’s personality came from, after all. Just not his propensity for extremely creative cursing. Or the fact that he acted like the world’s biggest asshole most of the time—although once you spent enough time around him, that actually became strangely endearing, and I found myself missing it sometimes. Especially at crime scenes.
Judy took my arm, distracting me from my thoughts. “Come help us with the food,” she said to me. “You’re a big, strong boy.”
I shot a look over at Elliot, who was still grinning at me over the rim of his travel mug. “Yes, ma—Judy,” I said meekly, and let her lead me over to the Explorer and load me up with two tote bags, one on each shoulder, and two coolers.
When I staggered inside, people immediately took things from me—and Elliot, who had grabbed the totes from the back seat. He wrangled a couple people to help him unload the food I’d gotten people at work to donate—without telling them where, exactly, I was taking it—and what he’d rustled up from somewhere yesterday after we’d talked about it.
There were three other volunteers there, plus the Green Bay shelter’s Noah-equivalent, a woman named Nari with purple braids and deep brown eyes and skin. “Oh, my God,” she kept saying as Judy unloaded multiple side dishes, two turkeys, and a ham from one of her coolers, while Marsh pulled out bags of dinner rolls that looked and smelled homemade.
The other volunteers looked just as awed by the copious quantities of food the Harts had brought along. Elliot leaned into me and whispered, “And here I was, impressed by our cans of green beans and corn.”
I snorted. “The ducks are more impressive,” I told him. He’d brought along three.
“Fair,” he replied.
We’d cooked all day—dinner had been served at four—making enough that Marsh had gone off to borrow a grill from somebody he knew who lived in Green Bay so that he could put several turkeys and the ducks on the grill to make space in the ovens for everything else.
There was green bean casserole (which I couldn’t have, because cream of mushroom soup), corn casserole (made with oat milk), corn bread (also made with oat milk), roasted and pureed baked squash, two kinds of stuffing, cranberry sauce, Judy’s dinner rolls, sweet potato casserole with marshmallows and without marshmallows, roasted carrots, a veritable mountain of mashed potatoes (made with chicken stock and oat milk), gravy made with the rendered duck and turkey fat, about five different salads, Elliot’s frybread, smoked fish, ham, roasted apples, and then pies—pumpkin and apple, and I’d made a point of making several pecan, because these Northerners needed to understand what real pie was. And then there was ice cream (not the kind I could have), whipped cream (also no), and, because this is Wisconsin, enough cheese to choke a horse or ten.
I’d never actually seen so much food in one place, and Nari had blown her nose at least a half-dozen times because it meant that not only would we be able to feed the shifters who normally lived at Hands and Paws, but also everyone who had driven or hitched a ride into Green Bay from one of the surrounding towns, including Shawano.
And everybody got to feel full , which I knew very well was a rarity for a banquet hall full of shifters. It was the happiest I’d ever heard a Hands and Paws dining hall—people talking and laughing, trying different dishes they’d maybe never had before, feeling full, surrounded by people like Judy Hart, who I swore had adopted at least half the room.
The woman was an energetic pinball of love, bouncing all over the room and lighting up every single person she touched.
It mattered that she wasn’t a shifter herself. That she cooed and petted and hugged anyone who showed the least bit of interest in her attention. That it didn’t matter to her what anybody was—because Hands and Paws had been made for shifters, but they also catered to any Arcanid, and there were orcs, a few elves, fauns, a handful of ghouls, and even a vampire.
And Hart’s mom gave love to all of them.
She was probably the biggest-hearted person I would ever meet in my life, this tiny Midwestern woman. She’d never lived anywhere but this small town, and yet she listened and learned and loved as much as she possibly could, no matter what.
I hoped Elliot was right, that she’d decided I was her fourth kid. Because Judy Hart was the mom I’d always dreamed existed, but never in a million years thought I’d know. That unconditional love that you were supposed to have from your family.
She had it, and gave it away in spades.
I knew that even if I never spent another minute with Judy Hart, I was going to remember this night as one of the times I’d felt most loved in my entire life. I had Elliot and Judy and a room full of Nids who had found a mom who loved them for who they were no matter where they came from or what they’d done or failed to do.