Chapter 29
29
Elliot Crane
Are you at work?
Seth Mays
Finishing up.
Are you back at the house?
Nothing. Which was a bit worrying.
I’d gotten back to my apartment around two in the morning, showered—which I’d desperately needed—and then not slept terribly well. I’d met Colfax back at the fire scene at dawn, and now it was nearly one in the afternoon, which meant I’d made fairly decent time, given all the tire tracks, possible footprints, and trace evidence that needed to be swabbed and tagged.
I finally finished logging all the evidence back at the Sheriff’s Office—since Colfax had officially ruled it an arson—and checked my phone again.
Still no answer.
I’d clearly done something to annoy or upset or make Elliot angry. First he’d spent the night at Henry’s, and now he wasn’t responding to me. And yes, I was also aware that I would much rather he spent the night at Henry’s than in the house by himself—and since I was working, I should have been happy about that decision. But he’d made it without knowing I would be trapped at a scene through the whole night.
I waited another five minutes. Ten. Twenty.
Then I texted Hart.
Do you know what’s going on with Elliot?
It wasn’t very long before I got a response: His dad was killed a year ago today.
“Oh, fuck ,” I said out loud to the phone, my stomach immediately clenching in knots.
I was trying to come up with some excuse that would cause Hart not to think that I’m a ragingly insensitive asshole when the little dots appeared, telling me he was typing something. So I waited.
He didn’t tell you, did he?
No. Shit.
I was rushing to pack up everything, and promptly dropped a stack of paperwork—annoyingly, a very large stack of paperwork—scattering pages all over the floor.
“ Fuck !” Because now that I knew why Elliot had been weird, I realized that I really needed to go back to the house. Because you don’t leave your boyfriend alone on the one-year anniversary of his dad’s murder.
My phone started buzzing. It was Hart.
I thumbed the answer button, then speaker so I could talk while picking up papers. “I’m going back to the house as soon as I clean up the mess I just made,” I told him.
“Seth.”
I paused. “What?”
“There’s no reason you should have known it was today,” he said.
“I could have looked it up,” I mumbled.
“And I could’ve fucking told you, because I’ve known that dumbass my whole life, so I should’ve realized he’d keep that little detail to himself.”
And now I was feeling guilty both for not knowing and because that meant he didn’t trust me enough to tell me.
“Don’t you dare feel guilty about this, Mays,” Hart said sharply.
“How can I not ?” I asked him, and even to my ears, I sounded just as upset as I felt, which I thought I’d do a good job of hiding. Apparently not.
“Because this is on him, not you,” the elf argued. “Shithead doesn’t share things with anybody. He hasn’t talked about it for like six fucking months. Which, okay, I haven’t lost anybody really important to me, and I don’t fucking want to, but that can’t be fucking normal.” He paused, then spoke again before I had a chance to even open my mouth. “Or healthy.”
“Probably not,” I agreed. I finally managed to get all the papers back in a stack that I thought was probably more or less in the right order—not that it really mattered, since the pages were numbered, so I’d figure it out later—and took them over to where they were supposed to go. “I need to get going,” I said. “Back to the house.”
“You living there again?” he asked.
I stared at the phone, incredulous, not that Hart could see me. “He didn’t tell you?”
“Again, Mays, that stripey dumbass doesn’t tell anybody anything.” He sounded exasperated.
“I’m staying there until Smith can catch the assholes who are threatening him. Because the skinned badger and dog they left him are quite enough dead animals, thank you.”
“No fucking shit,” Hart agreed. “So you moved back in?”
I took a breath. “No, not exactly.”
“Can I ask why the fuck not?” From anybody else, the curse would be a sign that he thought I was insane for not doing it. From Hart, though, it was just the way he talked.
“I’m not there yet,” I told him, my neck and cheeks hot. I don’t know why it was any of his business what my reasons were, or why I felt ashamed to explain it, for that matter. I wanted my own life. I wanted Elliot in it, yes, but I needed to know for myself that I could be an independent adult. Not completely reliant on someone else in order to function.
And I wasn’t sure yet if I’d proved that.
Hart made a sound, and I couldn’t tell if it was approval or disapproval. “You do you, I guess, Mays,” he said, although he sounded dubious. “Just—don’t let him get himself killed, okay?”
“I’m going to do my best,” I said.
“And don’t break his heart.”
I swallowed. “No intention of doing so,” I replied, my throat feeling tight.
“One more thing, Seth.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t you get yourself killed, either. Because that will break his heart.” He paused for a second, then continued. “And I’d be pretty fucking bummed out, too.”
I felt weirdly warm and worried all at the same time. “Thanks?”
Hart snorted. “Stay safe, Mays.”
“You, too,” I told him.
He hung up. I finished putting the last few things away, shoved my phone in my pocket after checking to see if Elliot had texted me back—he hadn’t—and headed out to my FJ Cruiser.
I pulled into the driveway, taking the corner slightly fast, my tires kicking up a tiny spray of gravel, grateful that Elliot’s truck was in the driveway, and more grateful that I could see him sitting on the stoop.
It was a little weird that he was outside sitting on the cement step like it was a warm day, given that the temperature was a handful of degrees below freezing—and the sun was low in the sky, the trees casting long shadows that reached purple fingers across the yard and driveway, obscuring Elliot’s features.
For a single, panicked moment I thought that maybe someone had gotten to him—that maybe he’d been posed, but I pushed that away the moment it slithered coldly through my brain. I was not going to think about that. I was not .
I winced as I jarred my knee getting out of the car faster than normal, worried about Elliot even though I could literally see him.
He was breathing, I noticed as I got closer, my bag over my shoulder swinging against one hip. I dropped the satchel to the pathway and knelt in front of him, ignoring the pain in my knee as it took my weight on the cold ground. I took his hands, chilled from being outside for too long, and blew against them, trying to heat them with both my breath and the warmth of my own skin.
His gaze remained fixed behind me, staring at a spot on the ground.
“El, look at me?”
He raised his eyes to mine, and I watched the brightness in them turn to water that spilled over and tracked down his cheeks.
“El?”
And then he pitched forward, falling into my arms as I let go of his hands to catch him, sobs already shaking his strong shoulders.
I held him close, his arms around my neck, his face tucked into the curve of my shoulder. I tightened my arms around him, hearing the thick, heaving coughs of his grief, even muffled as they were in the thick layers of my parka.
I don’t know how long I knelt there—my knee was throbbing, my hands chilled by the contact with the cold air. It didn’t matter, because I’d stay there until Elliot was ready. His sobs had subsided into sighs and sniffles, but his arms around my neck and his head on my shoulder remained heavy.
I didn’t know what to say. Asking if he was okay would be incredibly stupid—he clearly wasn’t. Telling him it would be okay wasn’t a better idea, because I didn’t know if it would be, and, if I were being honest, I wasn’t entirely certain it would or could be, given the circumstances.
So, instead, I turned and pressed my lips against his forehead, feeling the heat of his flushed skin against them. I stayed there for another few minutes, breathing in the scent of him—earth, musk, cedar-scented soap, and the sharp soapiness of his shampoo.
“I’ve been meaning to finish winterizing the roses and putting it off,” Elliot said softly. “But then I thought that the Distant Drums might die if they went another winter uncovered, and I couldn’t stand that, so I came out to finish covering them.”
A few weeks ago, Elliot and I had put piles of leaves over the roses, but he’d been covering them with burlap tied off with twine, although he hadn’t finished them.
“But then I got there and—couldn’t.” His voice broke.
I didn’t understand, but?—
And then I remembered the pictures Hart had sent me. Ground with a tiny white button. I glanced down. There was no button there, of course, and it was almost impossible to tell one tiny square of dirt from another, but it all clicked into place.
Gregory Crane had been hit on the back of the head while covering these roses. The Distant Drums—the purple ones with gold centers that I’d admired when I first arrived. This was where he’d been when they hit him, where he’d fallen, unconscious or groggy, before they dragged him to his death.
No wonder Elliot hadn’t been able to finish covering the roses.
“I can do them later,” I told him, rubbing his back. “If you want me to.”
He nodded against the side of my neck.
“This is where they attacked him,” he said, then, the words barely audible, even to my wolf-shifter ears. His fingernails rasped a little against the smooth fabric of my parka, unable to make fists in the stiff-slick fabric. “Right here,” he repeated. “By his favorite roses.” His voice shook as he spoke.
I didn’t say anything—not only did I not know what to say, but I didn’t think he wanted me to. This wasn’t about me.
His whole body shuddered, and I couldn’t tell how much was grief, how much horror, and how much cold—since he had been sitting outside in a t-shirt and flannel for I didn’t know how long in sub-freezing temperatures. “They dragged him into the house,” he whispered. “Down the hall and into the office, where there were exposed beams.” There were a few of them in the living room, as well, but the ceiling was higher, vaulted, the far wall all windows. I hadn’t been in Gregory’s office—Elliot kept the door closed. I assumed they must have been more accessible than the ones in the living room.
I wondered how they knew where they were going. If one of them had scoped it out while the others snuck up on Gregory or if any of them had been in the house before for some reason. Not that it really mattered.
Elliot shuddered again, and when he spoke, his voice was thick with tears, shaking and fractured. “Th-they put the belt over the beam and p-put him in it. Let him su-suffocate.” I held him tighter, and he buried his face against my neck, the sobs coming again, heavy and broken.
My chest ached for him—I had no idea what this kind of loss felt like, and I didn’t particularly ever want to find out. But holding him as he sobbed, while I could do nothing to ease the pain of his grief, was torture. I wasn’t about to complain, but as I knelt on the cold ground where, a year before, Elliot’s father had bled into the dirt in his last hours of life, I realized that what I felt for Elliot was more than care, more than affection, more than lust.
I loved him.
His heartache cracked my chest, his grief clenched in my stomach, and the sobs that shook him tightened my lungs. I would have given anything, in that moment, to take it from him, entirely if I could have. I wished his pain my own—not to be shared, but carried.
But grief and pain do not work that way, and so I held him, wishing I had more power than I actually did to change the world.
Once I got Elliot settled inside on the couch with a glass of whiskey and manged to put some frozen pizzas—vegan for me, of course—in the oven, I put on my gloves and parka and went back outside in the dark to finish bundling the remaining few roses.
It had gotten colder, the temperature dropping quickly once the sun set, and my fingers and nose were numb by the time I managed to figure out how to bundle together the burlap and twine, which of course I had to take my gloves off to tie. A quick check of the timer on my watch told me that there were only a couple minutes left on the pizzas, so I pulled off my boots and hurried into the kitchen to make sure they didn’t burn.
I was sure Elliot probably wanted something other than cheap frozen pizza, but I didn’t know what, he wasn’t talking, and if I was going to handle both dinner and the roses, I didn’t have time for anything more complicated.
He deserved better, but I didn’t have better in me. And I was what he got.
I sighed, checked, then removed the pizzas from the oven. Mine was a little burnt, but that’s what I deserved for having smaller pizzas and not paying attention to what was happening in the kitchen. I cut Elliot’s first, loaded up a plate with half of it—even though I was pretty sure he was just going to pick at it—and carried it out to where he’d curled up on the couch, staring without seeing at the football game I’d turned on.
“Elliot.”
He blinked, slowly, then looked up at me.
I handed him the plate. “You need to eat something.”
He opened his mouth.
“I know you’re not hungry,” I interrupted him. “But please try anyway.”
He closed his mouth, swallowed, then nodded, accepting the plate of pizza. I glanced at the side table and noticed that he hadn’t finished the whiskey, either.
“You want something else to drink?”
He shrugged.
I went back to the kitchen and got him a glass of ice water, which I set beside the undrunk whiskey. Before I left the room, I bent and kissed his forehead.
I felt a hand grab one of my belt loops when I turned away.
“Seth?”
I turned back to him. “Yeah?”
He looked up at me, and I saw impossible pain refracted in those beautiful hazel eyes. “Thank you.”
I offered him a small, sickly-feeling smile. “No problem.”
His hand tugged me toward the couch, and I went. “Seth…”
I waited.
“I—” He bit his lip. “Can I show you Dad’s office?”
“Of course.” Even though I answered immediately, part of me was panicking. I had no idea if I’d be able to help him through that. Because I was pretty sure he hadn’t been in there at all in the last year. I knew Hart had, because he’d sent me pictures from inside. Carpet with another button. A smudge on a window. Black rubber scuffs on some other piece of furniture.
I had deliberately not asked Smith for the files from the murder case. Not asked to see the crime scene photos. I didn’t need them, of course, but I was pretty sure that if I’d asked, Smith would have let me see them. But I hadn’t, because it felt wrong to look without Elliot’s permission or knowledge.
He set the plate down on the couch and stood up, then headed down the hall, his steps a little halting, but determined. As though if he didn’t do it now, he wouldn’t be able to do it.
I followed him, fear balling in my stomach.
This part of the house felt cooler—unlived in. I suppose it was, since the only room in this corner was the office, with its glass doorway leading out into the poison garden and the massive windows and sliding door out the side by some of the flower beds. There were shades inside that had been lowered, so maybe Elliot had been inside, at least once, to do that. Or maybe he’d asked someone else to do it. Henry or Judy, maybe.
Elliot had stopped, both palms pressed against the wood of the door. “Val closed it up for me before he left,” he said softly. “Made sure I had everything important for the house, taxes, that shit.” I heard him swallow. “I—I haven’t been able to?—”
I put a hand on his shoulder, and I felt the muscle shift beneath my palm as he tensed.
“Sorry.” I pulled it back.
“No—Please.” He sucked in a breath, and I heard it catch. “Please touch me.”
I put my hand back, and this time I felt him lean into it, turning to look at me. Then he took a deep breath, his shoulder rising and falling beneath my hand, and turned the knob on the door.
It felt anti-climactic, the simple fact of opening a wooden door and walking into a dark and cool room that smelled stale from the lack of anyone living setting foot into it.
Elliot stood in the doorway, trembling, then reached out and flicked on the switch just inside the door, bathing the dark space in light that was disconcertingly warm in tone. It felt wrong—like the light should have been cold or sinister. But it wasn’t, and I could easily see how cozy the room could have been and probably was when Gregory Crane had used it.
Dragging a shaking breath into his lungs, Elliot crossed the threshold, and I followed.
There was dust, but not as much as I would have expected.
I could tell from the tilt of his head exactly where Elliot was looking—at the beam with a very slight scuff mark that had to have come from the belt that had hanged his father.
I heard him drag in another shaky breath, and my heart melted when one hand reached back, clearly looking for one of mine. I took it, squeezing back when he gripped it tightly.
“Do you—” He broke off, swallowed, and tried again. “Do you think it wasn’t as bad, because they’d hit him already?”
I didn’t know. Hart might. Ward almost certainly did, since I knew he’d summoned Gregory as a ghost. But I didn’t. So that’s what I told him. “I don’t know, but if he was unconscious, then he at least might not have been aware of what was happening.”
Elliot shuddered. “Fucking hell, I hope not,” he rasped, and the hand that wasn’t holding mine went up to his neck, his fingers running over the scar around his own throat. “It—” He swallowed again, and I held my breath. “They were waiting for me inside. I’d left the back door cracked so I could get back in. They grabbed me, tried to throw a sack of some sort over me, and I fought back. I hit one of them, at least, I think.”
He paused, and I wasn’t sure if he was going to continue. I didn’t know what to say, so I just squeezed his hand.
“They hit me several times, under the burlap. I’m not sure what with, but it was hard. A bat maybe. Crowbar. I don’t fucking know. I passed out at some point.” He paused, drew another breath. “They gave me something. Injected, I think. To push me to shift back. Left me in a basement with a pair of dirty fucking underwear, my hands tied. They made me put them on. I tried to shift, and couldn’t—I was too drugged.”
I knew there were a number of adrenergenic drugs that suppressed the magic in shifter blood that kept us shifted or let us shift into animal form, particularly arcaphenylephrine, arcaclonadine, and arcaoxymetazoline, all of which were based on non-arcane alpha-receptor adrenergenic medications. They weren’t easy to get a hold of, as they were strictly controlled substances, but if you had access to an arcane hospital or the right doctor—or possibly a medical examiner—it was absolutely do-able.
But Elliot didn’t need—or probably even want—to hear all that.
He dragged in another breath. “I remember them moving me. It was cold, loud. Maybe I was in the bed of a truck? A trunk? I don’t know. I was in and out. Until I came to on the floor of the barn.” He swallowed again, his fingers rubbing harder at the line on his throat.
I stepped up behind him, capturing his hand, stopping him from continuing to worry at the scar. I kissed his fingers, and he leaned into me, letting out a long sigh. Still holding his hands, I wrapped my arms around him.
“I was too weak to fight when they threw a rope over the beam and used it to drag me up. It burned. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t fight, my throat on fire and my chest breaking. I thought I heard barking. And then I thought my heart exploded.” He sighed. “It didn’t. I just passed out. Val and Taavi found me. Val kept me alive. He almost died, but he saved my life.”
I felt a few drops of moisture hit my arms where they wrapped around Elliot’s chest, and I pulled him tighter to me.
“Nobody saved Dad,” he rasped. “Why did someone save me , but not him?”
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I wish I did.”
Back on the couch, Elliot had settled with his head on my thigh, blanket pulled up around his body, one hand over my knee. He was so still that I thought he might have fallen asleep, but when I brushed the hair back from his face, his eyes were open, blinking occasionally as he stared without emotion at the last quarter of the football game.
I kept running my fingers through his hair, toying with the white streak stark amid the black. He let out a heavy sigh, the hand on my knee flexing.
“I need to go out,” he said, suddenly, then sat up, pulling off his shirt.
“Out where?” I asked, startled.
“ Out .”
He wanted to shift. “It’s dark and cold.”
“I can see fine and I have a lot of fur,” he replied, standing up and stripping off his jeans.
“El—”
“Come with me,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to forestall my argument, or if he really wanted me to come along. I studied him, trying to figure out the answer. “Please,” he said.
I sighed. Better I went with him, anyway, even if I didn’t want to. “Okay,” I agreed, although I knew I was going to pay for it later.
Naked, he stretched once, and I swallowed, unable to keep from appreciating the muscular lines of his chest and hips and thighs. And then he shifted, his body rippling as skin gave way to fur and bones reshaped themselves, dropping him first to inhuman knees, then to all fours as he shook his head and cracked his jaw with its now much-sharper teeth.
I took off my own clothes, then followed suit.
It still hurt, quite a bit, actually, especially since I’d already abused my knees a lot over the previous week. But I wasn’t going to complain. Not today. I blinked a few times to push the disposable lenses off my eyes, which were now totally the wrong shape for them, and followed the grey-brown blur that was Elliot to the back door.
He grabbed the door’s rope with his teeth, pulled it open, and shuffled out into the night.
I followed, using the outside rope to pull it back closed, and hoped this wasn’t going to be as stupid an idea as I was afraid it would be.
I smelled it first—the particular stench that signaled death. We’d run across the Cranes’ property, out into the woods so Elliot could dig himself silly while I sat there trying to alternate which front paw was on the ground getting cold, waiting for him to finish what he needed to do.
We’d run back, the blood circulating warmth back into my cold feet, but I skidded to a stop before we hit the edge of the woods on the far side of the back yard and that particular scent hit my nose.
Elliot stopped beside me, lifting his striped head to give me a quizzical look.
I couldn’t explain, not without a mouth that could speak, but I sniffed again, deliberately exaggerating the motion.
Elliot mimicked the action, then cocked his head at me. Whatever I was smelling, he wasn’t.
I huffed out a breath, unhappy and worried. The only reason I would be smelling death at the edge of the yard is if there was something dead in the yard, and there hadn’t been the several hours ago when we’d left it.
Which likely meant that someone had left whatever it was in the last few hours.
And that someone was almost certainly the same someone who had left two other dead animals on Elliot’s property.
Although I wasn’t consciously thinking about doing it, I could feel the fur on my neck and back rising, my upper lip curling back from my teeth and a low growl slithering its way out of the back of my throat. Beside me, Elliot pressed closer to my side, the tension in my body making him nervous, even if he didn’t know why.
We approached the house slowly, and I felt the minute Elliot smelled it, too—he tensed, a low, gravely growl coming from his chest.
I stopped first, bending to sniff at a footprint in the slowly freezing mud. I could smell salt, beer, urine, and stale tobacco. Could have been any bar in Shawano. Or bowling alley. Maybe a few basements, too. During prohibition people had put bars in their own houses and invited their neighbors rather than risk the speakeasies in places like Green Bay.
I dropped low to the ground, following the footprints toward the back door—the smell of death grew stronger the closer we got. Through blurry vision, I could see a reddish smudge on the glass and a crumpled form that I was pretty sure was too small to be an adult shifter—hopefully not a shifter at all.
Elliot moved past me, a whining growl sliding from his throat.
I wanted to tell him to be careful. To not get too close in case whoever had left it was still here. But I didn’t have words, so all I could do was growl softly.
Elliot looked back over his furry shoulder at me and let out a grunt. I hoped that meant he was saying he’d be careful. Or maybe he was telling me that he knew what he was doing. Or maybe he was just telling me to back off.
I whined a little louder, trying to get him to not go where he was going. Because what if they were still here? What if they were waiting for us to come back? What if the dead animal—whatever it was—was bait?
I wanted to go the other way—trace the boot prints around the side of the house, to see if there was still a car there. But I also didn’t want to leave Elliot here on his own.
When I whined again, he turned to look at me, and I backed up along next to the footprints, trying to lead him away from the back door and its dead occupant.
He looked back and forth between me and the dead whatever-it-was, and then gave in and came to follow me, letting out an unhappy sound. I turned and began to follow the footprints—finally noticing that there were multiple sets—at least two, maybe more—and that they went in both directions, as thought their owners had come around the back of the house, deposited the animal, and then went back the way they came.
I hoped that meant that they weren’t still inside the house.
The only vehicles we found in the driveway were my Cruiser and Elliot’s Tundra. I followed the footprints around to the gravel of the drive, marking where they stopped at a pair of tire tracks that didn’t belong to either of us.
I let out a yip, then turned back toward the house. I tried to remember if the front door had been locked, and hopped up onto the front porch. I’d seen dogs—and some particularly large cats—do this before, and while Elliot certainly couldn’t have operated a door knob, I was pretty sure I could.
It took a couple tries, but I did manage to get the pads of my front feet to grip the knob and turn it—and no, I had not remembered to lock it. I definitely needed to remember to do that from now on.
I took a deep sniff, determined that nobody else was or had been in the house, and then shifted back with a long, low groan, my whole body spasming with pain.
“Seth, baby, I’m so sorry.” I could feel Elliot’s fingers running through my hair, feel and smell his skin under my cheek.
I tried to sit up, made a strangled sound, then managed to at least lift my head. “Call Smith,” I rasped.
“Seth—”
“We need to call him,” I insisted.
I felt and heard him sigh. “Okay, but only once you can get up.”
I let him help me up, stifling most of the sounds I wanted to make to keep from worrying Elliot any more than he already was.
“Phone,” I insisted, and Elliot let out a sigh, disappearing into the house. I leaned against the wall, trying to take the weight off my left leg, which was beyond pissed at me.
Elliot returned and handed me my phone, and I hit the button to call Smith.
It was almost five in the morning before Smith and Lacy finished up with the back porch and the unfortunate skinned possum. Smith had called Lacy in because he said I was now officially ‘too close’ to the case to touch anything having anything to do with it.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” was my response to that.
Smith had crossed his arms over his chest, his auburn hair sticking out at funny angles and his clothes rumpled, telling me that he’d definitely not been awake when I’d called him, except his voice always sounded rough and gravelly, so I hadn’t been able to tell over the phone. The bags under his eyes darkening his fair skin also suggested he wasn’t sleeping much better than I was.
“I let you keep working it before, despite the fact that you were clearly friends with the victim, because you’d helped with Gregory Crane’s murder,” he said. “But now that you’re dating the victim, I can’t let you touch it.”
I’d growled at him, and he’d rolled his eyes at me.
“It’s going to take more than that to threaten me,” he told me.
I sighed. “I’m sorry, it’s just… Fuck.”
He reached out and squeezed my bicep. “I know,” he said, and his rough voice was gentle. “I’m going to get them,” he told me. “And stop this.”
I sighed. “And will some other assholes just take their place? Again?”
Smith echoed my sigh. “I hope not,” he replied, but his tone didn’t give me a lot of confidence.
It wasn’t that I thought Lacy wouldn’t do a good job—having worked with both Roger and Lacy since August, I had confidence in both of their work. I just didn’t want to give it up because it felt like somehow I would be able to do more to protect Elliot if I knew everything that was going on. Like the fact that I loved him would somehow give me the ability to see something that no one else could. The opposite was more likely true, and I knew that, but it didn’t change how I felt.
So instead of working, I was left to pace the house while Lacy did what I thought of as my job and Elliot sat at the kitchen island drinking coffee. I’d made two pots so that the two uniforms, Smith, and Lacy could also have some, and Elliot made a third after the first two hours.
As they left, Lacy had squeezed my hand. “I’ll let you know what we find,” she said, her voice sympathetic. “But take the day off tomorrow.”
“I don’t?—”
“Take the day off,” she repeated, nodding in the direction of the kitchen, where Elliot was presumably still sitting at the table, holding an empty coffee mug.
She had a point, so I nodded my agreement, and we said our good-nights, although I had the feeling Lacy wasn’t actually going to go to bed.
I closed—and locked, this time—the door behind her, then went back to the kitchen, where Elliot was still sitting on a stool, staring into his empty coffee cup.
“El?” I wasn’t sure when I’d started calling him that intentionally. He hadn’t corrected me or even given me a dirty look, so I’d figured he didn’t mind.
But now he didn’t look at me at all.
I walked over to where he sat and leaned with my back against the counter, not bothering to pull out the stool next to him. His shoulders were slumped forward, his hands curled loosely around the ceramic of the mug, expression the kind of blank people’s faces get when they just can’t process anything else. I gently nudged his shoulder. “Hey.”
He emitted a soft grunt, which was at least a response.
“We should get some sleep,” I said softly.
I watched him blink, slowly, once, twice, then faster, a handful of times, before a single tear slid out of one hazel eye and dropped onto the back of his hand.
Stomach clenching, I slid one hand over his, covering the drop of moisture. “Come on,” I urged gently.
He let me take the mug from his hands—I left it on the kitchen island—and turn him on the stool, coaxing him down and guiding him into the bedroom.
He immediately curled up on the bed, not bothering, like he normally did, to take off the t-shirt and sweat pants he’d pulled on when I’d called Smith. I smothered a sigh, then pulled the blankets up to the curve of his shoulder and back. And then I pushed off my sweatpants and got into the empty side of the bed in my t-shirt and trunk shorts.
I expected Elliot to ignore me, but as soon as I’d settled myself, he snuggled up against my side, squirming his way under one arm so that he could rest his head on my shoulder, his right arm on my chest.
I pulled him closer, resting my cheek against his black-and-white hair.
I felt him sigh heavily, then nothing else, although the next breath he drew shuddered a little.
I gently kissed his forehead. “Sleep, El,” I whispered against his skin.
He sighed again, softer, but said nothing.
I listened for his breathing to slow and even out, but it didn’t, although he lay still.
“Seth?” he murmured, finally.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
I kissed his forehead again. “I’m here for you,” I told him. “Whatever you need.”
He nuzzled up against me, and I both heard and felt a soft vibration coming from his chest. It took me a second to realize what it was—Elliot was purring.
I didn’t say anything, but I smiled against his skin.