Chapter 19
19
SETH MAYS
So there’s a killer using Arcana to hunt cops.
ELLIOT CRANE
What?
How?
Are you okay?
The victims all have active Arcana.
This is the fourth.
We all got traced again.
Except this time they rigged it to explode.
The ME has it.
I was right next to him.
Are you hurt?
Not badly.
A few cracked ribs.
Bump on the head.
I’m so sorry.
How do you feel?
Terrified.
Physically.
Any symptoms?
No.
Just terror.
Is Noah there?
He’s at work right now.
But he said he’d stay if I started feeling sick.
Good.
Do you want me to call?
You don’t have to.
Do you want me to?
Yes.
My phone started to buzz, and I had to swallow back a surprising ball of emotion at the fact that Elliot Crane was calling me. That he’d asked if I wanted him to call me, and then he had, simply because I asked him to. It wasn’t in keeping with Rule Two, and even though most of that was on me, he had been the one to ask first. So maybe I wasn’t the only one invested in whatever kind of friendship this was .
I slid the green button across the screen. “Hey.” I was pleased that my voice neither shook nor broke when I said it.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, and his rough voice was soft and gentle, and I was very glad that he couldn’t see me because I had to scrub away a tear that escaped my suddenly-full eyes.
“No,” I answered, and this time my voice did quaver. “But I don’t think I can help it.”
I wasn’t supposed to go into the details—to tell anyone the sort of information that was highly specific to the crime scene and that only the people who had been at the scene would know. The things that you didn’t tell the media because the only person other than those of us who worked the scene who knew them was the killer.
All of them poured out of me. The three older cases. The fact that I’d connected them through viral DNA. And then this case. I didn’t know the victim’s name—I didn’t even know if anyone knew. I didn’t know if the DNA of the strain we’d all been exposed to was the same as the others, although I would have bet a significant amount of money that it was.
And then I told him about this scene. About the explosion and the blood I’d inadvertently sucked into my lungs. My two broken ribs, four cracked ribs, and bruised torso. The contusion to my shoulder. The concussion.
Everything. Things I hadn’t even told Noah. I felt guilty about that—the fact that I was sharing things with Elliot that I hadn’t shared with my brother. Noah was my twin. We weren’t supposed to have secrets. But Noah wasn’t a cop, and he wasn’t good at keeping things to himself. He’d tell Lulu, and Lulu was terrible at secrets.
Elliot wasn’t going to tell anyone, at least not in Richmond. Well, okay, he might tell Hart, but Hart was a Fed, and I trusted Hart to not do or say anything that would be a problem. Hart might even know some of the details, since I knew he and Maza were pretty close. Hell, he might know more than I did, if Maza hadn’t been knocked unconscious like I had.
That, and if Noah knew too many details, he’d worry. I didn’t think Elliot was the worrying type. Besides, Rule Two meant Elliot wouldn’t worry anyway.
Except that he asked if you wanted him to call you. So maybe he did worry a little. Yet that made me feel better, not worse, the way it did when Noah worried. I wasn’t sure what that meant, or what I wanted it to mean.
When I finished, Elliot was quiet. For a long time, yet somehow I didn’t worry that he’d put me on mute and was ignoring me or that he wasn’t paying attention. So I waited.
“What scares you the most?” he asked me, his voice still soft, despite its roughness.
I swallowed. Talk about getting right to the core of it. “I don’t want to die,” I whispered. “I know too much about dying.” The minute it came out of my mouth, I winced. Not what you say to someone whose father had just been murdered.
“Do you believe in an afterlife?” he asked me, then.
“I—work with Ward Campion,” I replied. “I have to.”
“Ghosts can exist without there being an actual afterlife,” Elliot replied.
“How do you figure?” I asked him.
“We don’t know where ghosts go, once they move on,” he pointed out.
“Except that Ward can drag them back from there, wherever there is,” I said.
“So then why are you afraid of dying?” he asked .
I blinked. It was a valid question. I knew there was another plane of existence. I’d met ghosts. I knew a medium who could drag them back from beyond the veil. I wouldn’t cease to exist.
But most people, when they died, didn’t want to stick around. Ghosts like Sylvia and Archie—Ward’s resident ghosts—were extremely unusual, at least from my admittedly limited understanding. They didn’t stay here. They changed .
“I don’t want to leave people,” I said, knowing even as I said it how awful a thing it was to say to a man whose dead family presumably wasn’t staying in this plane for him. They’d moved on. Left him behind. “The dead change,” I murmured. “I don’t want to change that much.”
“And you don’t want to transform, either,” he said, an edge to his voice that I didn’t fully understand, but that stung anyway.
“I’ve seen it,” I whispered, my own voice sounding harsh, even though I was barely speaking. “What Noah went through.”
“So it’s the pain?” He was judging me. I didn’t blame him, because I was also judging me.
“It’s not the pain,” I answered truthfully. Pain doesn’t scare me. I live with pain. It’s like a barnacle or an annoying neighbor you’ve lived beside for a decade and are just used to, even if sometimes it’s much, much worse than at other times. “It’s the loss of control.” That terrified me. The idea that I wouldn’t have any agency about what happened to my body. That the body I understood—pain and all—would no longer be mine.
Elliot let out a soft grunt. “Then you’re smarter than most.”
That didn’t make me feel better .
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Fucking terrified,” I almost snapped.
“Physically,” he clarified.
“Oh. Sorry.” Embarrassment and shame flamed up my neck.
“How do you feel?” he repeated, and his tone was gentle. Kind.
Shit. “I—I hurt,” I told him.
“Congestion? Nausea? Bowel issues?”
“Not really, no. I—” I swallowed. “I’m scared, so kinda nauseous because of that. But not sick-sick.”
“That’s good,” Elliot told me. “No symptoms is good.”
“Yeah,” I said softly.
“How long is Noah at work?” he asked me, then.
“Until eleven.”
“Do you want to watch a movie?”
“Um. I could, I guess? And let you go.”
“I meant with me, Seth.”
The tears welled up again. “Oh,” I said, stupidly.
“What platforms do you have?”
We settled on Top Gun . And he stayed on the phone with me until I heard Noah come home.
“Night, Elliot,” I half-whispered.
“Good night, Seth. Take care of yourself.”