Calm Down
MORGANA
L ucas makes a beeline for the stairs at my words, but I catch his elbow. “Don’t get rid of those clothes. We need to keep them.”
He blinks at me and then looks down at himself. The shirt is wrinkled and definitely has the smell of someone standing under hot stage lights for hours. “Damn, you’re right. The cops never collected our clothes. If Jackson needs leverage later, this could save our bacon. Maybe.”
“Exactly,” I reply as I walk upstairs, steering him. Slade peels off from behind me as we hit the top, and Lucas joins me in our room. The first thing I do is tilt my head at the bathroom, so he touches nothing we’ll need to wash.
Once there, I pop the window and let some of the scent of death seep out. Lucas sits on the edge of the large tub, unlacing his boots slowly.
“Do you need help?” I ask. He shakes his head, but I can tell he wants to say yes, so I crouch down and help anyway. The laces are stiff, and when I pull them free, I get a whiff of the theater’s ammonia-and-fear cocktail all over again.
Damn, that’s potent. I’ve never smelled stuff this keenly before.
We work together to strip him in silence.
The only sounds are the whirring of the bathroom fan and the far-off whine of the cop cars still arriving on campus.
When Lucas finally stands, he peels his shirt and pants in one long, shivering motion, like a snake discarding its own skin.
I grab a trash bag from under the sink and hold it open.
“Put everything in here,” I say. “Don’t even touch the outside.”
Lucas nods. He drops the uniform, the undershirt, the socks, and the little badge they clipped to his collar all into the bag. I twist the top, double-knot it, and write his name and the date across the plastic with a Sharpie.
“Better?” I ask with a grin.
“Not with being naked with my mate and having no desire to get playful. This sucks ass.” His voice is frayed but steady, and I get the sense that he’s trying to check on me as much as himself.
“I’m fine,” I lie. He doesn’t need to know that almost having to pry him from jail again is killing me… not yet, at least. “Shower. I’ll deal with Slade.”
Lucas looks like he wants to hug me, but he just nods and ducks behind the curtain, letting the water roar up to mask everything else.
No one is touching me until we get that yuck off; that’s for sure.
Across the hall, Slade’s already kicked off his shoes, and his button-down shirt is balled up on the floor. He’s pacing, shoulders tight, hands flexing and unflexing like he’s trying to keep from fidgeting. I step into the room, careful not to trip as I hold up the trash bag.
“Now for your clothes, darling. I want to keep this stuff so Jax can have it independently analyzed, since Detective Dipshit didn’t collect it.”
Slade stops, running a hand through his long, beautiful hair. “You think it will help clear us? Really?”
“No idea, but anything is possible.” I shake the bag for emphasis. “This might preserve the chain of custody, or whatever.”
He snorts. “Yeah, ‘chain of custody.’ Like that means shit to the people who run this town. I thought Bay City was bad, but it’s just hiding under a veneer of sweet tea and syrupy words here.”
“No surprise, though,” I murmur. “It had to be like this or Magnus couldn’t have thrived for so long.”
He sits on the edge of his bed and unbuckles his belt, then slides his pants down. His white undershirt, which is stained with sweat goes in next. He puts it all in the bag and looks up at me with a sigh. “Lucas is showering, right?”
“Yep. That smell is pervasive as fuck. You should grab a quick one, too.”
“Yeah,” he says, “we smell like a combo of corpse and sweat blended with wood polish. It’s pretty bad.”
“Doesn’t make you less attractive, just… harder to get close to,” I say with a small smile.
Slade’s mouth twitches, a half-smile that makes him look boyish. “Go take that somewhere safe,” he says. “I’ll meet you once I’m clean.”
I leave him to it and walk back to my room, passing the open bathroom door where Lucas is still behind the curtain. The steam billows out, carrying the sharp, clean scent of whatever body wash Lucas brought from his dorm. I peel off my shirt, sniff it, and realize maybe I need a change, too.
Stripping, I toss my stuff in the laundry, and head to the shower in the other bathroom.
The water is icy at first, then boiling, then settles into something tolerable.
I scrub until my skin is raw and my scalp tingles.
For a few seconds, I let myself pretend I’m not someone who just survived another police standoff and has to catalog the evidence to avoid being framed for whatever comes next.
Wouldn’t it be nice…
When I get done, Lucas and Slade meet me, and then we head downstairs to join the others.
The world has shrunk to a single point of tension where we gather to deal with all the shit being flung at us: the covered gazebo.
Together, we head outside with clean bodies and bare feet, ready to face the mess the day brought.
At least, I hope we’re ready—if anything else hits, I’m going to fucking riot.
Kaspar is sitting on the arm of the new sofa, arms crossed and his jaw working.
Iggy’s leaning over from his chair to the table, hunched over a laptop with two mugs of coffee next to him.
Liam is at the bar, mixing something in a big glass pitcher.
The smell of food wafts from the island next to the prince and me, and I’m suddenly extremely grateful the dragon made good on his promise.
The three of us—Slade, Lucas, and I—move as a unit to the couch. I sit next to my polar bear and leave space for the Fae on my right. Slade takes up a spot on the ottoman I have my legs on, resting against my chest. I’m not surprised he needs to be close after all this uncertainty..
“Took you long enough,” Liam says, but there’s no bite in it. He hands me one of the drinks he was making, and I sip it, uncaring what the fuck alcohol it is. I just need some comfort.
Iggy looks up for a moment, clocking us as a group. “You guys okay?” he asks, which is a stupid question but exactly the one I need.
“No,” I answer. “But it’s over for tonight.”
I look at my glass, studying after I swallow it down. It’s not juice; the color is off, more chartreuse than orange.
Oh, well. Whatever it is , it’s better than dead-body air and dry mouth.
The professor closes his laptop and stands, stretching his arms above his head until his spine cracks.
For a moment, he looks older than any of us, which is patently not true.
However, his seriousness always puts him right up there with Kaspar in looking like he’s going to die of something shoved up his ass that’s biting him.
“What’s our next move?” Slade asks softly as I run my fingers through his hair. “This fucked up a lot of our previous plans, which is annoying. Now we have to regroup again.”
“We go on as usual, of course. They haven’t arrested anyone, and we have other things to do besides sit around and twiddle our thumbs. Those morons will take forever to deal with the evidence and shit they got today, plus Balor has to do the autopsy.”
Kaspar nods. “Agreed. Morgana has many things to attend to as dean, and the lawyer is doing… whatever he and those mercenaries do. The rest of us should continue on as normal, and give them no reason to suspect Lucas and Slade anymore than they do now.”
I rub my eyes, and when I speak, my voice is firm. “Then we adapt, improvise, or survive whatever they throw at us together. That’s the key here, right?”
The only sound is the hum of Iggy’s laptop. I arch a brow at them, and they finally chime in with grumbles of assent.
“Better. Now, onto the next thing.”
“Then let’s recap,” Kaspar says, breaking the almost-tranquility. “Two people died in less than a month on a campus that seemed to have a non-existent crime rate before.”
Liam frowns. “Did you check that stat?”
“Of course I did, Li. But I assume that’s because everything was being covered up by Magnus and his cronies.
No colleges in existence have clean slates like the security at this place act like State U does.
No drunken fights, no drugs, no sexual violence?
I’d love for that to be true, but I’m definitely not naive enough to believe it’s true. ”
The Prince waves a delicate hand at the whiteboard. “Then the location of these deaths isn’t random,” he says. “It has to be strategic because otherwise, the kills could occur in places where they would essentially stay unsolved by these dimwitted supe cops.”
Yeah, I can see that logic.
His dragon bestie snorts, little electric sparks zinging over his forearms. “Duh. The damn bodies have been almost professionally staged, for fuck’s sake.
And they were arranged to be found by wealthy heirs to different kinds of supe empires.
Just because Slade knows he hates his parents doesn’t mean everyone knows it. ”
“So this could be less about the people who were killed than the ones being framed?” I ask.
Liam shrugs. “It’s possible, maschula . I don’t know what that kidnapping out west is achieving because we don’t have full bios on those new friends yet.”
“Great,” Slade mutters, voice muffled. “Bringing my parents’ territory and city into this even more than what we saw at that damn event. Just what I needed.”
Iggy leans into his computer, clicking a few links and typing, and then he frowns. “The chatter online about it is...bad. Some of the forums are saying the guy they suspect is the son of Council members out there. He’s one of the players, I guess, and one of the guys Rogue had with her.”
“Council member kid?” Lucas asks, his eyebrows raised.”Fuck, that brings in heavy weight. I mean… local Councils like here aren’t nearly as powerful as ones in places as big as Bay City. That’s going to get Society notice.”
“Especially since he’s connected to two Guardians, remember?” Iggy glances up at us, his face grim. “Though, my guess is they’ll try to keep it away from their bosses. No one seems to know who we can trust anymore.”
I tap my finger on Lucas’ thigh. “Yet we aren’t seeing any show from the Sibbies or even my taskmasters at the Society yet. Weird.”
“Because they’re too busy covering their own asses to notice we’re getting picked off,” Kaspar says wryly. “They never get involved until it’s far too late to stop things.”
The Prince sets down his cup with a click.
“My theory is that unless it’s a public moment, they simply don’t care.
The structures of multi-realm governing are obviously crumbling; look at how this faction is operating with little resistance.
My father has been struggling to contain the Hand for a very long time and failed.
They must have been coordinating with someone who's helped them, just like now.”
Everyone looks frustrated and I get it. This shit has gotten so big that it feels impossible to wrap our heads or hands around it.
“Here’s what we know,” I say. “The bad shit is escalating. Whoever’s behind it is using human proxies and rogue supes, but they’re definitely being directed what and where to hit.”
Kaspar nods. “The police are being bought, threatened, or both.”
“Which means we can’t rely on the system, so we're on our own but for the allies we pick. Despite that, we have a few advantages.”
Lucas leans in. “Like what, babe?”
“Like we know something is going on and they think they have fooled everyone. We are building a network they don’t know about. We have a lot of powerful people at our disposal, which might help us beat them.”
Iggy snorts. “I’ve never pegged you for an optimist, M.”
“I’m not,” I say, meeting his eyes. “But I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose to a bunch of assholes like we saw at that stupid party. Fuck that.”
If they want to bring the fight to us, we’ll build a foundation so strong they don’t have a chance of rocking it.