Chapter 6
She was sick—the flu, she thought, given the feverish feeling that she’d woken up with this morning. She’d downed a bunch of acetaminophen, which seemed to have helped for the last few hours, although it was starting to feel like she needed to take more.
But it was too soon. She shouldn’t need to take more for another two hours at least.
She needed to get this done. Then she could go home and sleep it off. Take some more acetaminophen and maybe some aspirin and a decongestant. Make tea. Rest before she had to go to work at the laundromat.
I gasped as I forced my fingers to let go of the towel.
“Okay, kid?” Hart asked.
I nodded, then looked up, meeting first Hart’s lavender gaze, then Raj’s golden-brown, then Cass’s blue-grey.
The fourth member of the team, Drew Shao, was still upstairs in the office, doing some sort of search on the computer.
Financials or business contacts or email or something. It wasn’t my job to know.
“I think the maid had Arcana,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure she’s the only one who handled this after it was completely sterilized.”
The hotel where they’d found Yvonne Gates-Adams, the murdered woman, used an intensive machine-cleaning process for all their linens to the point where the only thing I got off them was the thoughts of the maid who had hung them in the room.
Magical cleaning or hanging laundry out in the sun to dry were the only ways to guarantee the destruction of the Arcanavirus, and a hotel did enough laundry that outdoor drying wasn’t feasible.
They might be looking at a law suit if this maid really did have Arcana and guests traced infections back to them, though.
It was illegal to work in public service or an open office if you had Arcanavirus, so most people just stayed home if they had any symptoms that even might be Arcana.
Unless you were working multiple jobs to make ends meet like this maid had been.
“Anything else?” Raj asked. “There’s blood spatter on it.”
“Nothing,” I replied. “Blood doesn’t tell me anything.”
“Aren’t you a death witch?” Hart asked.
“Shit,” Cass breathed, her slight accent drawing out the word. “You’re a death witch, too?”
I nodded. “Yes, but that really just means I can see and speak to ghosts.”
“And kill people with your bare fucking hands,” Hart put in.
I shot him an alarmed look. I didn’t want that part of my life to be spread around, even if it was the less truthful and more palatable version that Ward and Mason thought they knew.
“That isn’t something I’ve trained to do,” I replied, which was true.
I just didn’t mention the fact that I’d done it, especially because I didn’t know what Hart did or didn’t know.
“What have you trained to do?” Raj asked, and I sensed there was more than simple curiosity, although I didn’t want to be a list of skills that could be exploited by the FBI.
“Not kill people with my bare hands,” I retorted. It was a defensive response, and I knew it, but I couldn’t help myself.
Hart let out a laugh.
Raj blinked, his expression surprised, but not alarmed. “Well, I think we all appreciate that particular training,” he remarked mildly.
Hart snorted, and Cass shook her head. “Jesus,” she whispered. “You really got slammed in the magic department, didn’t you?”
“Slammed in the magic department?” I repeated, confused.
“It’s another way of saying that you have a lot to deal with,” Raj explained. “A lot to have to keep under control.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I guess so.”
“But nothing from the blood?” Raj asked.
“No,” I replied. “I don’t get anything from anything animal or human.”
Raj looked thoughtful. “So nothing from bone, then?”
“No,” I confirmed. “Nothing from bone, hair, blood, skin, nails, claws, feathers—nothing that came from any kind of animal.”
“But plants?” he asked, then.
“Dead ones,” I replied. “I can get a read off wood or woven cotton or linen.”
“But not wool?” he asked, suddenly.
“No,” I answered. “Not wool.”
“Hm.” The sound Raj made was thoughtful. But then he shook himself, nothing more than a shiver, and turned back to me. “Are you okay to read the next thing?” he asked me.
Taking deep breath, I nodded.
In the end, they had me read three more towels, a notepad and pen, a vase, two chairs, a bedspread, four pillows, and the room key.
I learned more about the maid, who was working two jobs to save up for a car and had just started a new relationship with a guy named Chris, and more about Yvonne Gates-Adams’s fears about what would happen if her shifter status were exposed publicly.
She didn’t have a job—she’d left it to help run her husband’s senatorial campaign the previous year—so while she’d had to register as a shifter, nobody had any reason to pull her status for a job search or the now-mandatory state checks of any position that had regular contact with minors or in the medical field.
I didn’t get anything else from the man who killed her.
And I was exhausted, hungry, and frustrated.
I wanted to be able to be more helpful, and while I’d gone deep into the impressions on every single object I touched, I couldn’t find things that weren’t there.
The team was packing up, tablets going into messenger bags or backpacks, computers being shut down.
I sat in an extra office chair that Hart had pulled up next to his desk for me, waiting for them to sort themselves out so that I could figure out how I was getting home.
Hart had grabbed me this morning from Beyond the Veil, and I assumed he was going to take me back, either there or, hopefully, to my apartment where I had a freezer with a bunch of frozen meals and a pantry with cans of beans, soup, and tomato products, as well as rice and pasta. In other words, dinner.
“Hey, Tony,” Hart called.
“What, Keebler?” came the response.
“Any chance you can take the kid home?”
“Sure, if that’s okay with you, Rayn?”
I looked up, surprised to be asked, finding his gold-brown eyes focused on me. “Yes, of course.”
A few minutes later, I followed Raj out of the Federal Building, which was a boring, nondescript cement-and-glass squat tower, to a dark blue Subaru sedan.
He hit the key fob, and the car let out a soft set of chirps, the yellow fog lights flashing in the twilight.
He paused near the back of the car, and I stopped, too, looking at him.
“Do—do you want me to open the door for you?” he asked, a slight furrow to his brow. “Or will that not bother you?”
“I—I think it’ll be okay.” I really should have taken the time to dig out my gloves when Hart picked me up, because it would avoid the problem I was currently facing. “Do you drive a lot of people around?”
He started at me for a few seconds, then blinked. “No, not really. Hart sometimes, but mostly he drives because he’s a control freak.”
I smiled a little at that—Raj wasn’t wrong.
Hart really did like to be in control of pretty much all situations and became very agitated if he couldn’t be.
And then he usually went out and got coffee or something sugary.
The more out of control he felt, the more likely the rest of us were to also be given caffeine or dessert.
Then I steeled myself and gripped the door handle, letting out a breath when no thoughts that weren’t my own slithered into my head.
I settled into the passenger seat, careful to keep my hands to myself.
Raj got in on the other side, then looked over at me.
“Time got away from us,” he said. “It’s a bit late for dinner.
” He grimaced as his stomach growled audibly, which reminded me that I hadn’t had anything other than my peanut butter sandwich for lunch.
I’d run out of jelly, so I’d had to stick to plain peanut butter.
And I would for the foreseeable future, too, at least until I managed to get to a grocery store or place an order online.
About the only good thing that came from robot-operated warehouses was the reduction in number of people who handled the stuff I ordered online.
I didn’t like a lot of things about those particular places, but sometimes it was just easier to buy something I knew had most likely only been handled by a robot than to risk something having been packed by a pissed-off human.
Raj glanced over at me, and I realized he expected some sort of response. “I’ve got frozen dinners,” I told him, not sure if he was concerned I’d miss dinner or not.
“We could do better than that, if you’d like,” he said softly.
I looked over at him. “I—don’t understand?”
He was watching the road, his features more relaxed than I’d seen them before—of course, we’d always been working.
I’d been distracted by other people’s thoughts or my own failures, and he’d been trying to figure out what I was telling him—or, rather, what the details I could tell him actually meant in the bigger picture of the case.
His gold-brown eyes glanced over at me. “Would you like to get dinner, Rayn?” he asked.
“With you?” I asked, then winced. It had sounded awkwardly surprised, even to me, and I’m usually fairly oblivious to the tenor of things that come out of my mouth.
“I mean, yes, please,” I hurried to add, feeling a flush creeping into my cheeks.
I don’t know why I was being even more awkward than usual, but I didn’t want to offend him or make him think I didn’t want to have dinner with him.
Another flicked glance. “You don’t have to,” he said, his voice low and even, but with something in it I couldn’t identify.
“I—I’d like to,” I managed, feeling my face flush even more. I didn’t know what to say to Raj, really, other than things about work, but I certainly didn’t have any objections to eating dinner with him. Or any meal. And I was hungry.
He nodded slightly. “What are you hungry for?” he asked, then.
My face felt like it was on fire. “I—I don’t know,” I replied, half-swallowing the words. “I don’t really go out much. Takeout sometimes.”
He glanced over. “Sandwiches?”