Chapter 12
12
SETH MAYS
Surprise trivia!
Which blood types are most likely to host Arcanavirus?
ELLIOT CRANE
I’m O+.
Is that the right answer?
I bet you’re popular with the Red Cross.
But no. B-types. Both + and -.
My dad was also O+.
Val is B+, though.
B is more common among Arc-human transformations.
And in recovered victims.
And they make up more of the population.
What about shifters?
Not sure. Arcanids of all kinds are still mostly B, but more O than A.
Why is that?
Nobody knows.
So B is more likely to get it, but O is more likely to transform if we do.
Looks like.
Is this something they’re checking now?
Doubtful.
The study just came out last month.
They should use that.
That’s probably the idea.
Lab test is done—chat again later?
Sure.
I held on to that Sure . I hadn’t really thought through my impulse to ask about future conversations, but he’d agreed to it—and quickly, too. I told myself it probably didn’t mean anything. That he was just being polite. But he hadn’t hesitated, and that made me feel oddly warm inside. Because it meant that he at least liked talking to me, even if it couldn’t possibly mean anything more than that.
Putting my phone to the side, I went over to the MultiSTAT machine to finalize the results from the toxicology analysis.
As I settled in to check out the blood panel, I yawned—not because I was bored by my job, but because I hadn’t been sleeping super well. I kept thinking about Elliot—alternating between being turned on by my memories and feeling like a complete fool for not being able to let go of those same memories. I also didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing that Elliot Crane lived in Wisconsin—if we’d been closer, I would have wanted a real relationship with him, and that would have been logistically much more feasible… but I got the impression that Elliot still wouldn’t have been interested.
I didn’t think he’d be disinterested physically. Obviously he’d been interested in my body. But I didn’t think that he would actually be open to a relationship. I couldn’t tell you why—he hadn’t said anything explicitly, exactly. Rule Two and Rule Three were in effect because, he’d said, we lived a thousand miles apart. But if we didn’t… He didn’t seem to have any interest in moving here, and I certainly wasn’t about to drop everything and move there, so the point was moot.
I pulled up the tox screen results for our most recent victim—Miles Volkov, according to his DNA—and frowned. His Arcana infection didn’t show up in the MultiSTAT—that was something that was rapid-tested for at the ME’s office because a body with an active infection was high-level hazmat, and they would postpone the autopsy for a few days if that was the case. But what did show up in the tox screen were positive markers for Benzodiazepines and chloral hydrate. Both drugs were sedatives—one designed to combat anxiety, the other known more colloquially as a date rape drug. The levels they were at suggested that the victim probably hadn’t given them to himself—unless he’d been deliberately trying to overdose.
I couldn’t help but hypothesize that Volkov must have been drugged, taken to Belle, and then brained with a rock and left, either dying or already dead, beside the path on the hill.
I sighed, then began typing up the report, glad that I wasn’t actually the one responsible for stopping this killer. Because I knew as well as any detective that our killer—who had left us two victims now—was going to kill again. Which meant that every new victim was someone who could have survived if we’d found the killer faster.
I did not envy the detectives that kind of pressure.
I finished writing up the tox screen report, then sent it off to Detective Maza.
A few minutes later, my phone buzzed, and I grabbed it off the desk. “Good afternoon, detective,” I answered cheerfully, assuming he had a question about the report.
“Hardly,” came Maza’s dour response. “I need you. Hit-and-run, 4th and Broad in the alley by the chophouse.”
“How do you have a hit-and-run in an alley?” I asked.
“No clue,” came the response. “But that’s what Caro said.”
“Be there in less than ten,” I replied, then grabbed the massive gear duffel and the van keys and yelled for Quincy as I headed to the parking lot in the back.
The answer to how can you have a hit-and-run in an alley was that the hitting part happened before the running part—the victim just didn’t make it all that far, at least judging by the blood out in the street. Either the victim or someone else had opened the alley gate, and the man had staggered—trailing blood—about thirty feet before collapsing .
It had been called in as a witnessed hit-and-run, which provided a perfectly plausible explanation for the bruising, scrapes, and swelling that mottled the victim’s body. Half his face was a mess of road-rash, but the part we could see showed him as mid-twenties or early thirties, fairly attractive, a carefully trimmed goatee and otherwise smooth brown skin. He was a faun, dark horns curling up out of thick black hair, black fur on his lower legs under loose, dark blue denim shorts.
I felt guilty for thinking that at least this victim wasn’t going to put us all at risk of catching Arcanavirus. At the same time, the look I shared with Quincy over the body suggested that we were both thinking—and feeling—the same thing.
Maza was at the entryway to the alley, staring down at some of the blood spatter, talking on the phone to someone about how long he was or wasn’t going to keep this part of Broad Street closed. It was almost rush-hour on a Tuesday, and traffic coming out of downtown was going to become an absolute mess—because the smear on the pavement and the trail meant that we were going to be doing quite a bit of documentation, so it was going to be a while.
Maza’s dark eyes were unfocused, his black hair sticking out at slightly odd angles from running his fingers through it. There were dark circles under his eyes and a bit of an unhealthy pallor to his skin that suggested he hadn’t been sleeping—or probably eating—well.
He wasn’t the only one. I’d been doing better since my last phone… conversation with Elliot. It wasn’t like we’d actually talked talked, but the connection, and the fact that he kept texting me, made it feel like whatever we had wasn’t over. Which was probably not long-term healthy, since we weren’t going to have an actual relationship—Rule Two—but I wasn’t ready to let go of him yet.
And yes, I am fully aware that whatever it was we had going on was only going to make it harder for me to let go of him, but I didn’t want to actually think about that.
So instead I thought about the fact that a faun who had just been hit by—according to the witness accounts—an SUV had decided not only to get out of the street, which made sense, but to keep running down a dark alley. And that part didn’t make sense unless he had some reason to think someone was chasing him.
But the witness hadn’t said anything about the SUV stopping.
And it wasn’t my job.
The ME’s van pulled up shortly after Quincy and I had arrived, and we’d gotten to work on marking the blood in the street, picking up fragments of headlight plastic that had presumably broken on impact with the victim’s body, marking the blood trail, and indicating a couple of likely tire marks on the curb that suggested the driver had actually swerved into the curb—maybe even at the victim—rather than swerving away into the far lane.
There were no skid marks that suggested the driver hit the brakes.
Sure, that might mean that our victim had jumped or fallen or run out into traffic so suddenly that the driver hadn’t had the time to react by swerving or breaking, but that was being far more generous with humanity than I was inclined to be.
I wasn’t a detective, but I’m also not stupid. No sign of braking, tire scuff on the curbs, plus a victim who had just been hit by an SUV getting up and running —that said to me that whoever had hit him had been hunting him, targeting him. Maybe he knew them and had made an enemy of them, or maybe they had just seen him walking and decided that he didn’t deserve to live because he was a Nid.
I was afraid it was the latter.
Don’t get me wrong—either way, it was horrific. But the idea that someone had an enemy fit better within the idea that there were reasons that bad things happened. Certainly, murder isn’t ever justified, but if this faun was a criminal, a bad person, then there was some sense that the loss of his life wasn’t as bad as if he were completely innocent.
The human mind will try to justify anything, to make sense of anything. It makes people feel better if they feel like some kind of order or balance is being maintained in the universe. But if the violence was arbitrary, a random act of hatred, then anyone could become a victim. Anyone —no, sorry, any Arcanid—could be run down simply for walking down the street.
And I didn’t want to think about the fact that it could have been Noah walking down Broad Street. It could have been Hart or Mason or Taavi. Or Elliot. People I cared about.
I’ve worked enough homicide scenes—or even non-homicide death scenes, like the homeless woman who was found dead on Brown Island a few weeks back—to know full well that justice and reason played very little role in the way people treated each other. Violence, greed, and neglect were all too common among both families and strangers.
After all, you were more likely to get murdered by someone who knew you than a complete stranger.
Which meant that this poor faun was more likely run down by someone who knew him than a random motorist who just happened to hate Nids. I guess that should have made me feel better, because it meant that the odds of Noah or Elliot being the victim of random anti-Nid violence was… Well, it was still shit.
I didn’t live under a rock, which meant that I was acutely, painfully aware of what the news had been covering over the past few years. I’d worked some of the deaths at the MFM riots in Richmond. I’d seen Hart limping and wincing in pain after the riots. And I’d seen his face after he’d taken down a ritual cult that practiced Arcanid sacrifice. Another cult.
At least we hadn’t had another cult since. Not a sacrificial one, anyway. Cults saw a pretty big boom worldwide after the Arcanavirus first hit a little over three decades ago. Most of them weren’t like the two that had done their best to turn Richmond into an Arcanid graveyard. Most were benign—people who, now that magic was actually real , wanted to tap into it. People who wanted to find a way to make sense of it. To find a new way of understanding the world that accounted for something they’d been told for centuries didn’t exist or was the product of evil. Of Satan.
Most people had tried to adapt to their new magical reality. Chose new faiths that reflected a world with magic in it. Tried to modify their faiths and traditions to include something that they hadn’t had to accommodate before.
Of course, there were also those who refused to change their ways, their beliefs. People who decided that if the Bible said that magic and witchcraft were evil, then they were evil. The widespread presence of magic wasn’t a contradiction to that, but, rather, a confirmation of the widespread sinfulness and wickedness of the world. To them, the Arcanavirus pandemic was a curse from God, judgment spread across the world designed to eliminate the corrupt so that the pure could be separated and sanctified.
Those people scared me a lot more than the neocultists who danced naked in the rain and offered up candles and berries under the full moon. Magic was real—whether we chose to accept it, embrace it, or reject it was up to us. But those who saw it as a curse, as judgment, were far more likely to reject the people who were changed by Arcana—to view them as less worthy.
And when some people are seen as less worthy, they become easier to discriminate against, easier to legislate into a second-class, easier to kill.
I looked down at the faun’s broken body, pooled blood congealing against the cracked pavement. His dark eyes, their pupils horizontal and dilated, were open, already filming over. He was lying on his back, one leg twisted in a way that suggested it was broken or dislocated, one arm curled in toward his chest. Blood stained his jean shorts, his shirt, his skin. I imagined some of the fur on his twisted leg was probably matted with it, but it was black, so you couldn’t see it.
Tierney looked up, his light eyes serious. “I’m going to check his pockets for ID.”
I nodded, pulling an evidence baggie out of my bunny suit.
Tierney efficiently ran his hands over the faun’s jean shorts, paused, then fished a wallet out of one pocket. It was damp with blood. Tierney opened it, red smearing on the blue of his gloves.
“Odell Jones,” he read. “Thirty-one years old.”
“Cash still on him?” I heard Maza’s low voice behind me. He sounded tired. “Cards?”
“It looks like it,” Tierney answered. “Cash and cards.” He flipped through the wallet. “A Subway card. Starbucks card.”
The weirdest stuff gets you at crime scenes, sometimes. But the fact that this faun, Odell Jones, ate at Subway, drank Starbucks, that hit me harder than the fact that he was only a year older than me and had probably died from massive internal hemorrhaging.
I silently held out the evidence bag, and Tierney dropped the wallet inside, the bloody exterior leaving smears down the plastic. I swallowed, grateful that my mask made it hard for anyone else to see my facial expression, and went about labeling the bag. It would go with the rest into the crate that would be labeled O. Jones with today’s date and Maza’s name.
An entire life, whittled down to sheaves of paper detailing things like time and cause of death, a tox screen, gruesome evidence photos, and bloodstained clothes and shoes. And a bloody wallet with a Subway card and a Starbucks card.
I wondered what his favorite drink was. If he liked tea or coffee or something with so much sugar and syrup that it couldn’t really be called coffee anymore.
I’d never know. And that made me sad. Not because I thought I would like this guy, but because any life lost is a waste. A thousand cups of coffee never drunk. Meals never shared. Friendships never made and promises never broken.
All of the little things that made up life, just… gone.
And why?
Because of a grudge or revenge? Or just because he happened to have hooves instead of feet?
I lay on the floor of Noah’s living room, staring up at the ceiling and trying to muster the energy to sit up so I could take another swig from my bottle of beer .
“Why was this one so bad?” my twin asked, nudging my foot with his.
“I don’t know!” I half-wailed, half-whined. It didn’t make particular sense why Odell Jones’s death was this much more upsetting to me than any of the others I dealt with on a daily-to-weekly basis. Sure, it was clearly a case of a suspicious death , to borrow the term used by the police when they went to the media, rather than natural causes, but so were a lot of the cases I saw.
Domestic violence turned deadly.
Gang warfare.
Jealous rage.
Robbery.
Drunken bar fights.
And yet, this hit-and-run was doing a number on me emotionally in a way that I hadn’t experienced in a long time. No, I still didn’t know whether or not this particular hit-and-run had an ulterior motive besides anti-Nid hate. I was still hoping that was the case, though. Because maybe then I’d be able to push past it.
“Do you have any faun friends I don’t know about?” Noah asked. I’d given him the basics, which was allowed, since it was all over the news already, anyway.
“I don’t have any friends you don’t know about,” I retorted. “Faun or otherwise.” Except sort-of Elliot. Noah knew Elliot existed, of course. I’d mentioned him while he was still here in Richmond, although I hadn’t gone into the specifics about the benefits side of our acquaintances-with-benefits arrangement. I also wasn’t quite sure if Elliot qualified as a friend . It felt like he did—or should have, anyway. But I didn’t know if he would agree with that classification.
“Do you have a fear of being run over?” Noah asked.
“Not really, no,” I answered honestly .
“Sethy, something is bothering you about it.” He wasn’t wrong.
“No shit,” I retorted. “Now tell me what , and then I can do something about it.”
Noah sighed. He’d taken one look at my face when I’d shuffled my way back into the house and called Lulu to cancel their plans.
I honestly didn’t think I felt even remotely bad enough to warrant that , but Noah was insistent. So we ordered Chinese food and gorged ourselves on fried veggie egg rolls and sweet and sour chicken and shrimp fried rice and beer, and Noah tried to get me to tell him why a hit-and-run was getting to me. Which I would have, except I didn’t know .
“Maybe it’s not this case,” he finally said, still prodding my foot.
“Then what?” I asked. That isn’t Elliot . Not that Elliot was bothering me, exactly. I liked texting with him. I liked talking with him. I liked… well, obviously I liked that part. I just didn’t want it to end—and, honestly, I wanted it to keep growing, but goddamn Rule Two was sitting there like a giant, drooling troll in the middle of the bridge demanding that I pay its toll.
“Another case?” Noah asked.
I was about to say I didn’t think so when it occurred to me that it very well might be. “Maybe,” is what I said out loud.
Noah’s foot stilled on mine. “Maybe?” he repeated.
I sighed. “I can’t talk about it,” I mumbled.
“You can tell me.” We’d always told each other our secrets when we were kids. Where we’d hidden our treasures. About our crushes and our fights with friends. Our pubescent heartbreaks .
When Noah had figured out that he wasn’t meant to be Nora.
When I’d realized that I felt things for boys that everyone always said I’d feel for girls.
“I can’t, though,” I told him apologetically. I already told him more than I was supposed to. “It’s ongoing.”
“Ongoing?” Noah is way too smart for me to use that as an excuse. “As in, serial killer?” His voice rose in pitch and volume.
“Shut up, Nono,” I hissed, as though any of our neighbors were paying even the slightest bit of attention.
Noah waved one hand. “Nobody’s listening, Sethy. And even if James and Krista could hear you, they’re both high as kites anyway.”
Our neighbors—the people we shared a very thin living room wall with—were pot growers and smokers. I don’t begrudge people the occasional joint or edible, especially as someone with chronic pain, but our neighbors maybe overdid it a little. I couldn’t complain too loudly, though, because Noah had absolutely traded food for pot from them to make the medicinal brownies that lived in our freezer for the nights when the pain kept me from sleeping at all.
I don’t get to be a fun edible user—because the last thing I wanted to do was build up an increasing tolerance so that I’d need a lot more in order to do the same thing. As it was, I was usually eating a square every week or two. Only at night, though. I know better than to drive or go to work with that stuff in my system.
Fortunately, the crime lab was don’t-ask-don’t-tell about recreational or medical drug use. I knew the RPD was most definitely not, but other than when I got hired, nobody at the lab had ever asked me to pee in a cup for them. Which was a good thing, since the odds were high that I’d trip it at some point.
“Noah, I can’t talk about it,” I repeated.
“So it is a serial killer!”
I sat up enough to glare at him. Noah has an unhealthy obsession with true crime podcasts—and probably would have an equal obsession with streaming shows if I didn’t insist that I got enough of that at work, thank you very much. Maybe he watched them with Lulu, but that was not my problem.
“Nono.”
“ Fine . You can’t talk about it.” A pause. “Are you sure you can’t at least tell me what’s bothering you? Without any of the other details?”
How do you tell your shifter twin brother that you’re afraid of catching Arcanavirus because it might turn you into what he is? It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to be a shifter—although I didn’t, mostly because I knew that it would make my life much more difficult if people knew—but that I didn’t want to have to endure the process of becoming one. I’d seen some of what Noah had gone through, and it looked like it hurt like hell . I’m already in enough pain. I don’t need any more.
And yes, I also didn’t want to be a shifter because I didn’t want to have to be registered with the state. I didn’t want to have to worry about being the person who gets fired when there are budget cuts because someone has to go, so why not fire the shifter? I didn’t want to have people look at me, if they knew, like I was going to bite them or eat their children.
I’m already a big guy—people, women especially, already cross streets to get away from me because I’m imposing. Add shifter to six-three-and-big and I’d become a social pariah .
Okay, even more of a social pariah. But now I’m a pariah mostly by choice.
There’s also no way to explain that to someone who is a shifter without coming across as the worst sort of hypocritical bigot. I love you, but I’m afraid of being like you just isn’t a good look on anybody.
I could feel Noah’s blue eyes staring at me. “It’s just—” I sighed. “It feels really personal,” I said, feeling foolish. It did feel personal. I just couldn’t explain why without sounding like a complete asshole.
“Because of the victims?” Noah asked.
“Nono—”
“You can’t say, I know.” He paused a moment. “Which means I’m right.”
I sighed again. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been wrong, I was supposed to say the same thing. But Noah usually isn’t, when it comes to me.
“What about them?”
“Nono, stop.” I closed my eyes, not wanting to stare at the cracked beige paint of the apartment ceiling anymore.
Noah fell silent, although I could still feel him studying me. Assessing. Trying to figure me out.
“You know you can tell me anything you want, right?” he finally asked.
“I know.”
“Whether the popo want you to or not.” Noah insisted on calling police ‘the popo’ ever since he’d first heard the term.
“I can neither confirm or deny—Hey!” Noah had thrown one of the decorative pillows from the couch at me.
“Don’t be an ass, Sethy.”
I rolled onto my stomach—careful not to spill my beer—and wiggled my butt at him .
The other pillow hit me in the ass.
“Distract me,” I demanded. “Put something fun on.”
Behind me, I heard Noah blow a breath out through his nose, dissatisfied with the fact that I wasn’t going to tell him what was wrong, but giving in nonetheless.
“Fine. Birdcage ?” It was one of our joint agreed-upon comfort movies. One that both of us liked.
“ Birdcage ,” I agreed.