Chapter 25
25
SETH MAYS
Why is everything so much harder?
ELLIOT CRANE
The whole world is different.
You have to adjust, baby.
It takes time.
I can’t do things. Basic things.
I’m dropping everything.
Your hands will steady out.
Your muscles and tendons have to re-figure out how they work.
I also can’t remember stuff.
Stuff I used to know.
It comes back.
Promise?
Promise.
Give it time.
I don’t have time.
I have to be able to work or I’ll lose my job.
Be careful.
Will your partner be there?
Quincy?
Yeah.
Let her help you.
Okay.
I did. I leaned on her far more than I ever had before—even the day after I left Devin. I had to.
I hadn’t anticipated getting called in, though. It just hadn’t occurred to me that anybody would try to make me go to an actual crime scene on my second day back, but Quincy and I were sitting in her lab, divvying up the day’s tasks into what I could do and what I couldn’t, which meant that Quincy was going to be taking on a lot.
And then her phone rang.
“Quincy,” she answered, then froze, her eyes skimming over to me. “Um. Yeah, but…” The guilt in her expression was more than enough to tell me that I was its cause. Because I was going to be more of a liability than an asset at a crime scene. “Are you sure you want us both there?”
Another pause while a voice that I suddenly realized was Maginot told her that yes, he did in fact want us both there, especially because we weren’t susceptible to Arcana anymore .
And because I might be able to smell or see something a human couldn’t.
I swallowed. He wasn’t wrong—I could hear him perfectly well, even though Quincy hadn’t hit the speaker button.
“Okay, on our way,” Quincy told him, then hung up and turned a nervous expression to me.
“I heard him,” I told her, trying to convince both her and myself that this would be fine. That I could sniff or whatever and then just sit in the van or something. “But you have to drive.”
“No problem,” she said immediately. “Seth…”
“It’s fine,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. It wasn’t fine. But hopefully I was the only person who needed to know that.
I had completely forgotten about the blood.
The smell of it hit me like a slap to the face when I gingerly lowered myself out of the high seat of the CSI van. My knee throbbed—it hadn’t stopped aching since my first shift, even though I hadn’t shifted in a week—as I stumbled at the stench. Thick, coppery, a little meaty. Nauseating, yet at the same time, it made my mouth water.
“Shit,” I hissed.
Quincy came around the front, reaching out. “Seth, are you okay?”
I closed my eyes, breathing through my mouth to try to get myself under control. Feeling my teeth filling my mouth, my arms breaking out in gooseflesh as fur tried to push its way through my skin.
No.
I didn’t know if thinking the word helped or not, but I was doing my absolute damnedest to not turn into a wolf at my first crime scene back on the job .
“Yeah,” I half-hissed at Quincy. “Just landed wrong on my knee.”
“Do you need help?” She took another very dangerous step closer.
“Nope. Just give me a minute.”
She stopped. She didn’t go away, but at least she stopped. “Is the pain worse now?” she asked, then.
I nodded.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, staying right where she was. It wasn’t helping, but at least she wasn’t compounding things.
I just nodded again, my hands in fists in what probably looked to her like pain—and it was, just not quite in the way she thought. I could feel my nails—no, not nails, claws —digging into my palms, and the sudden shift in the scent of blood from stale to very fresh told me that I’d cut into them.
Shit .
I sucked in a deep breath, struggling for control. Fighting my own instincts, my own fear, and every piece of me that told me I wasn’t strong enough, tough enough, disciplined enough to pull this off.
Another deep breath. Then another.
The tingling faded. I swallowed the saliva that had built up in my mouth, unfisting my hands and wincing a little at the holes in my palms.
I was okay.
Well, no, not really. But I wasn’t going to eat anybody at this crime scene, anyway.
I quickly pulled out a pair of gloves, putting them on to hide the claw-marks in my palms, then pulled on a surgical mask that I didn’t really need. It was SOP, but it wasn’t like I could catch Arcana again .
“Okay, I’m good,” I said to Quincy, who put on a mask and gloves of her own.
“Let’s do this,” she announced, and I gestured for her to lead the way.
The victim had been given a wide perimeter, and there was a K-9 unit with the handler dressed in a full hazmat suit. He gave me a nod as Quincy and I walked past.
“It’s all clear of explosives,” he said, and I gave an involuntary twitch.
“Mays,” Detective Maginot greeted me, his low voice rich and smooth at he stood from beside the victim, brushing big dark hands over a pair of crimson slacks. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks.” I tried to sound appreciative. I think I at least managed not to sound miserable.
“Anything you can tell me?” he asked me, his dark eyes shrewd.
I took a tentative sniff through my mask, but it was muting everything. I glanced around, and suddenly became keenly aware that every eye was on me. And that most of them had been present at the scene that had made me like this.
I pulled off the mask, then offered a weak smile to the dozen or so eyes watching me.
I drew a tentative breath through my nose, eyes closed, trying to sort through the riot of scents that assaulted my nose.
Blood, old. Tobacco smoke, fairly fresh. Men’s spicy cologne, strong enough that it was probably Maginot’s. The smell of disinfectant wipes. The weird plastic-y smell of latex gloves. The distinctive scent of an old refrigerator that hadn’t been cleaned in a while—slightly rotten apples and stale meat .
I opened my eyes. “The body was stored in a refrigerator,” I said. “A food refrigerator.”
“Ugh. Gross,” somebody—Schitikova—said from behind me.
“What else?” Maginot asked.
I suppressed a flash of annoyance at being used like a performing monkey, even though Maginot’s tone made it clear that he was asking rather than demanding.
Something antiseptic. The problem with that was that Quincy and I came with plenty of antiseptics.
“There’s something else,” I said, “but I can’t tell if it came with us or the ME, or if it was already on him.” The ‘him’—our victim—was a white male who looked to be in his sixties or early seventies. His skin was a shade of bluish-purple that was quite alarming.
Maginot looked thoughtful. “Could you eliminate things if we let you smell them?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “No idea. But I’ll try.”
I really wished I hadn’t offered. By the time I was done sniffing every goddamn chemical in the ME’s van and in ours, my eyes were watering, my sinuses were clogged, I’d gone through a whole travel pack of tissues, and I hadn’t been able to find the smell.
“Sorry,” I said to Maginot.
“Don’t be,” he replied in a voice that was far more cheerful than I’d expected. “It means that whatever you’re smelling is linked to the killer.”
I frowned. “But you don’t know what it is,” I pointed out.
“True, but I have a theory—one I’d like you to help me with.”
“Okay…” I’m sure I sounded skeptical. I wasn’t skeptical of his theory, but I was skeptical that I was going to be of any use in helping with it .
“We find out what it is , we get a lot closer to finding the killer.” He sounded pleased.
I was not pleased. I didn’t like having been essentially demoted to a K-9 sniffer dog, and I didn’t like the idea of sniffing a whole bunch of chemicals. Because my nose hurt .
“So then I have to…?” I left the sentence hanging.
“I’ll come down to the lab with some possibilities,” Maginot replied cheerfully. “And you can tell me if they match.”
I had sniffed so many bottles of chemicals, antiseptics, creams, unguents, gloves, wipes, and God only knew what else that I had a throbbing headache, burning sinuses, and watering eyes.
But we’d identified the smell. Well, I was at about eighty percent confidence, telling Maginot that I needed to give it a at least a day before re-sniffing both because I had so much in my nose that I couldn’t see straight—literally. It was good that Noah was still driving me to work, although Quincy had offered to start so that he could go back to his own job.
The scent in question belonged to a type of antiseptic used to sterilize instruments and skin before surgery—chlorhexidine. It wasn’t something you kept in your medical cabinet. Which meant that either the victim or the killer worked in surgery—either a hospital or a veterinary clinic. The victim had been old enough that he was likely retired, which suggested that it was the killer who had access to the chlorhexidine, instead.
I supposed it made sense—someone who worked in a hospital would likely have access to medical records that would provide information about people who were in the most contagious stage of an Arcana infection. I almost certainly didn’t need to point that out to Maginot. My face also hurt too much for me to want to carry on a conversation with anyone, so I’d grumbled something about hoping it was helpful, then staggered my way out to Noah’s car—where he’d been waiting for the last hour and a half for me to finish chemically excerebrating myself.
“What happened?” was the first thing he asked me when I dragged myself into the passenger seat.
I looked over at him, with a nose and eyes that had to be bloodshot to hell. “Evidence matching,” I answered.
“With your face?” I knew it wasn’t meant to be a serious question.
“My nose, yeah.”
“What does that mean?”
“Identifying a chemical by doing a comparison sniff test.”
“Chemical.”
“Yeah. Antiseptic.”
Noah’s blue eyes, so like mine, were wide with horror. “For how long?” he asked, his voice breathy.
“The last three hours.”
“ Jesus .”
“Can we go home now?”
He shifted the car into gear. “Yeah. Jesus, Seth,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Three hours sniffing chemicals?”
“Not my favorite day,” I told him.
“No. Jesus,” he said again.
“I don’t think I sniffed Jesus at any point,” I tried to quip, although it sounded weird and flat, even to me.
“You’re going to damage your nose,” Noah told me as he pointed us toward home .
I didn’t suggest that it would be better if I did, because then I wouldn’t be hypersmelling everything all the time, but I knew that would likely upset him, so I didn’t. “I don’t plan on making a habit of it,” was what I said, instead.
“Did it work?” he asked, finally.
“I’m pretty sure I found what we were trying to identify, yeah.”
“Pretty sure?”
“By the end of three hours, things were a little fuzzier than I’d like. I’m going to give it another test tomorrow.”
“Another sniff, you mean?”
“Yeah.” When my sinuses no longer felt like they were trying to bleed out my nostrils. I’d even checked with my fingers a couple of times to make sure my nose wasn’t bleeding—running, yes, but no blood so far. I chose not to mention that to Noah, either.
“Other than that, how’s work?” Noah asked as he pulled into the apartment parking lot, after we’d driven home in mostly in silence.
“Shit,” I answered truthfully.
Noah looked over, startled. “What happened?” he asked, alarmed.
“Nothing happened,” I replied, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. “I can’t do anything. I drop half of everything I pick up—beakers, petri dishes, pens, a tablet, my phone…” I sighed. “I’m useless in the lab. I can do paperwork and I can push buttons. But I can’t dust for prints, I can’t handle anything breakable, and I have to sit down every fifteen minutes or pass out.” I didn’t tell him about the surges of emotion and frustration that led to near-shifts at least once every few hours.
“You’re still recovering,” Noah said, his voice soothing. “It will get better.” He scowled as he shut the door of his little blue Honda. “They shouldn’t be asking you to go back so soon.”
“Yeah, well, they did,” I snapped back, forcing myself to start up the stairs. Then I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck. “Sorry, Nono. I’m just tired and frustrated.”
He put his arm around my waist—mostly. “It’s okay, Sethy. I understand.”
I nodded, then let him guide me up the stairs and into the apartment, where I collapsed on the couch, deliberately keeping myself mostly upright so that I wouldn’t have to expend the energy to sit up straighter when Noah brought me food.
He’d made chili—ground turkey, beans, tomatoes, peppers, jalape?os, corn, hominy—and cornbread slathered with vegan butter and honey.
It was good, even though I could barely smell it around the chemical burns in my nose. Well, ‘barely’ by my new standards, which was almost as good as it had been before shifting had supercharged my olfactory senses.
I ate four bowls, actually feeling full—something that had become rare, particularly following the meals I ate at work. I was still self-conscious about eating so much that I felt full around anyone but Noah, even though I knew it was foolish. I was too thin and needed to eat more, but it was hard to control the nausea that came with every anxiety-ridden moment of my day outside the safety of the apartment. It was easier to eat a little, slowly, than it was to carry around the amount of food I needed in my stomach alongside the churning acid of anxiety.
Noah took my dishes. “What should we watch next?”
We’d been going through movies and finished tv series that we could binge start to finish if we were so inclined— except that I kept falling asleep and missing things, and then Noah had to rewatch parts of them.
“I think I should go to bed,” I told him. “I’m still exhausted.”
Noah nodded, trying to keep the disappointment from his face. “Okay. You need help?”
I shook my head, pushing myself to my feet and grimacing at the stabbing pain that throbbed through my knee. “No, I’m okay.” I could get myself to bed.
I wasn’t actually okay.
But curling up and hoping I really was tired enough that I’d lose consciousness fairly quickly seemed like a great way to not have to deal with any of the emotions I was experiencing. Or the pain. The question was whether or not the pain was going to overrule the exhaustion.