Chapter 29
29
ELLIOT CRANE
Are things improving any?
SETH MAYS
I’ve managed to actually get some sleep.
Not much.
More than before.
Has it helped?
Some.
Fewer headaches. Less brain fog.
Still tired, but less.
That’s a good sign.
I guess.
I’m sorry people are assholes.
Me, too.
It had been just over a week since I’d been laid off for medical reasons, and I absolutely hated admitting that I felt better. Physically, not psychologically or emotionally. But it is absolutely true that one’s physical health has a significant impact on one’s mental health.
It’s a lot easier not to bite other people’s heads off when you feel even marginally rested and not continuously hungry. It’s also a lot easier not to lose control of your emotions when you don’t interact with anybody but your own twin.
The first few days had been text after text as Quincy spread the word—I’d heard from Hart and Taavi, Ward, Maza, and even Maginot. Ward had offered to find something for me to do at Beyond the Veil, although it was clear that he didn’t actually have anything for me to do, so I’d have felt beyond guilty accepting. I’d even gotten a text from Schitikova, who said that he’d miss seeing me at crime scenes and hoped I would get better and get back to working in a lab soon.
It was a nice sentiment, even if trying to make polite and seemingly optimistic replies just made me more depressed. But that’s what you were supposed to do, so I did it, making polite chit-chat and feeling something inside me die every time I sent some platitude or other.
Not to Quincy or Elliot. Or Hart, although he hadn’t said anything patronizing or overly saccharine, as I was pretty sure that Hart didn’t have a saccharine or optimistic bone in his long, lanky body. Honestly, that made him a lot easier to talk to than the people trying to make me feel better.
But even those conversations—with Quincy, Hart, and even Elliot—left me surly and ill-tempered. Everything was leaving me ill-tempered. Which made me feel guilty, and that made me feel even more ill-tempered .
Just like how my anxiety kept me awake, which made me more anxious.
Do you ever wish you weren’t a shifter?
That you could go back and do something different to not catch it?
Not anymore.
I did for a while.
In school. In high school.
Then I got over it.
So you wouldn’t change it now?
I like being a shifter.
Why?
I like the way the earth smells now. The way plants smell.
I like digging in the earth and the feel of it in my claws.
I like how strong I am.
I didn’t know quite what to say to that. I was glad he’d told me, because it felt better knowing that, at least at some point, he’d wished he wasn’t a shifter, even if now he liked it. And I was glad he’d given me things I could maybe look forward to. Going for a hike and smelling the earth and trees in a whole new way. Being stronger—once I wasn’t too tired to use that strength, anyway.
What do you hate about it?
I stink. My room stinks.
Everybody stinks.
You’ll get used to that.
What else?
My skin itches and tingles every time I feel anything about anything.
That will get better, too.
I’m now extremely expensive to feed and unemployed.
Yeah, shifter grocery bills suck.
But you’ll find something.
And it’ll be okay.
My body hurts more than it used to.
That one I’m not sure about.
If I had to guess, I’d say it will fade?
Why doesn’t that make me feel better?
Sorry, baby.
You’ll find your way.
I promise.
How do you know?
Because I know you.
I didn’t have a reply to that for several reasons. First, because the only things I could think of were mean-spirited and born of pure frustration. And that’s never a good place to be talking to people from if you can help it—which I could, because texting lets you think about what you’re going to say before you stupidly say it. Second, because it felt weird to think that he thought he knew me.
Even weirder, I had to genuinely wonder if maybe he did know me. Did that mean that I was an easy person to read? Simple and straightforward? And if I was, was that a bad thing or a good thing? I’d always liked to think of myself as an optimist, although I hadn’t been terribly optimistic since contracting Arcana.
And if he knew me, then what did it mean that I didn’t feel like I really knew him? I mean, I knew things about him. I knew that he liked pastrami and pimento cheese. I knew he liked Star Wars better than Star Trek , and that he preferred beer to wine. I knew he liked chocolate and coffee, separately and at the same time.
But he wouldn’t tell me his birthday.
I hadn’t asked him since that first time, when we’d barely known each other a few days, so maybe he would now. But I was too afraid of rejection to ask.
And yes, that seems stupid and silly, even to me. Oh no, this guy won’t tell me his birthday. How devastating.
Knowing his birthday wasn’t the point. It was the fact that he wasn’t willing to share parts of his life with me. And yes, I am fully aware that I had agreed that we weren’t going to have a relationship: Rules Two and Three. But it also very much seemed like we’d moved into some strange in-between space that was in between not-a-relationship and a-relationship that wasn’t quite friendship and wasn’t romance, but also wasn’t just this-guy-I-know.
I knew what I wanted it to be. And Elliot had been clear what he didn’t want it to be. Unfortunately, those were the same thing.
Quincy called me later that afternoon to tell me to watch the news that night if I wanted to see footage of Maginot and Maza arresting the Arcana Killer.
I asked if they were sure.
“Maginot is, yeah,” she replied, and her voice sounded tired.
“You don’t seem excited about it,” I observed.
“I miss you,” she told me. “They didn’t even try to hire anyone, and yesterday I got a two-line email telling me that they had just eliminated the position so I shouldn’t expect a new partner. We’re just going to rotate the way we do when someone’s sick.”
“That sounds like a terrible idea,” I said, trying to decide how I felt about that. I mean. It was a terrible idea. It was going to lead to burnout, because when someone did get sick, everyone else was either going to have to work overtime or shorthanded. And someone was sick or on vacation or somewhere at least eighty percent of the time, so that just meant that they were all going to be exhausted.
But at the same time, some part of me felt a little bit pleased that they weren’t even going to try to replace me. And that pleasure went away the instant I realized it also meant that I wouldn’t be able to apply for my own job back, since there wouldn’t be a job there to apply for.
It was probably a consequence of a too-low state budget that had been hacked to pieces by the split control over the two parts of the state government as the MFM-Anti-Arcane side fought with the pro-Arcane rights side. But it felt like a great big, official fuck-you to me.
“It sucks,” Quincy confirmed.
“That doesn’t fully explain your lack of enthusiasm about catching the killer,” I pointed out. “Do you think they arrested the wrong guy?” It happened. I had a lot more confidence in some of the detectives than I did the others, but Maginot and Maza were two of the ones I trusted. I didn’t know their records, but I felt like they either got the right guy or they didn’t get anyone—I’d never felt that they arrested someone just to arrest someone.
“No, he’s the killer,” Quincy replied, her tone confident. “He’s an anesthetist, so he gets put on surgeries from multiple clinics. He was assigned to all the victims, and we even found one more who died in her basement last week, since she’d gotten too sick too fast to go to the hospital or anywhere else.”
“Jesus,” I muttered.
“He was using the chlorhexidine to clean up—swabbing under their nails, washing the bodies clean of anything that might indicate his presence. And then he’d used it on himself, cleaning any wounds caused by his victims attempting to stop him from killing them.”
“But how did he infect them?” I asked.
“Surgical consult appointments,” she replied. “They meet with an anesthetist, who explains to them what is going to happen the day of surgery—about a week before. So then he injected them then—probably some bullshit about it being an antibiotic or something, Maginot didn’t say.”
And most people wouldn’t have known that was unusual—since most people didn’t have multiple surgeries, and he could have avoided people who had and would know better.
“Do we know why he did it?” I asked Quincy.
“Not actually,” she replied. “Everyone’s got a theory, though.”
“Second donut pool?” I asked her .
Quincy was quiet a moment. “No donut pool,” she told me somberly.
“No donuts?”
“We all agreed—it doesn’t seem right without you there,” she said softly.
That made emotion well up against the back of my throat. “Do me a favor,” I said, sounding a little froggy around the lump.
“Anything,” she replied.
“Start up the donut pool again,” I told her. “And tell me the theories.”
“Okay,” she said, sniffling a little. “What’s yours?”
I thought about it. “He could be one of those religious fanatics who thinks that Arcana is a sign of the apocalypse and is trying to bring about the end of the world, but I feel like there’s not a lot of overlap between people who believe that and people with degrees in medicine.” And anesthesiology was an absolute bitch of a specialty. It required precision and intelligence. “Which means that there’s something else going on.”
“There are religious doctors,” Quincy said. “It’s not unheard-of.”
“True, but do you know any who think Arcana is a religious scourge?”
She was quiet for a moment. Then, “No, I don’t. I know doctors who think that people who get Arcana deserve it because they’ve taken too big of risks, but none who take the God angle.”
“Exactly,” I said. “So it has to be something else.”
“Olivia thinks he must have had a lover who got sick and died, and this is some sort of weird revenge thing,” Quincy said.
The idea that the killer was trying to get revenge on someone made sense to me—it must have taken a lot of rage for someone to try so hard to repeatedly infect other people. To use other lives in order to do it—because if he had access to the virus, he could just as easily have chosen to make an explosive device that would simply aerosolize the virus itself.
But he used people to do it. People who had trusted their lives into his hands—or would have, if they’d gone through with their surgeries.
That was the part that confused me. If his anger had been aimed at specific people—cops or EMTs or even lab techs—he could just as easily have rigged bombs at our places of work. If the target had been individuals, Detective Maza, say, it would have been even easier to track him down at work or even at home.
But the way the bodies had been left, the way they’d been open and accessible to the general public, that was a completely different thing altogether. If it was revenge, it was revenge on the whole damn city of Richmond. And that’s probably why he’d kept going, even after successfully infecting an entire crime scene team.
And that was a lot of rage.
Rage that might come as the result of the death of a loved one—so Olivia maybe wasn’t wrong.
But that felt too romantic to me. Maybe I’m a cynic, but none of this could have been born of love.
I wouldn’t wish this shit on my worst enemy. Not that I have any.
Not even Devin. I don’t like Devin, but I don’t think of him as an enemy .
What would make me wish Arcanavirus on other people? Not having it, that’s for damn sure. But I’d had a nasty case. Some people had much less severe illness, even if they ended up transforming at the end of it. But someone who worked in medicine would know how bad it could get.
What would make me hate someone enough that I’d want to inflict Arcana on them?
Certainly, if they’d killed someone I loved—like Noah. So maybe Olivia was right, and it was a lover or spouse who had died. Or maybe a child.
Or maybe it wasn’t a person he’d lost.
“He’s not a shifter, is he?” I asked Quincy. If he was, he’d have to be registered, as I knew all too well.
“No,” she answered. “Not a vamp or a ghoul either.” Not something she had to say—neither could work in the human medical profession legally after their transformations. I knew an ex-surgeon—well, ex-human-surgeon—who had gone into veterinary medicine when his transformation into a vampire had pushed him out of human medicine.
“Human?”
“Looks human,” she replied. Which meant he could have been an Arc-human of some sort. The House of Delegates had tried to pass a law requiring all Arcanids and all Arc-humans to register, but that one had failed. Orcs, fauns, elves, vampires, and ghouls—or so the argument went—didn’t need to register because one look at them told you what they were. Only shifters didn’t look inhuman, so clearly we were more dangerous because we could pass as human. And, for some reason, that was simply too upsetting a thought for the legislature to accept.
Arc-humans had just barely escaped the same fate, since genetically they still were human, and we weren’t.
Would becoming an Arc-human lead someone to the same kind of bitterness and resentment that I currently felt at being a shifter? Not that I’m saying I want to go out and kill people, because I definitely don’t. I don’t even want to wish Arcanavirus on people—even the stupid ones who think it’s a divine scourge or won’t infect them because they have money and blue blood.
But if your whole life was upended, if no one you knew or cared about understood what you were going through—I had Noah and Elliot and even Hart to a certain extent. They’d all had Arcana, and it had changed their lives as it had changed mine.
But what if Noah hadn’t been a shifter? What if I’d also never met Elliot? Or never gotten to know Hart?
If I were totally alone, I might become much more bitter. Blame the society around me for not keeping us all safe.
“I think he’s an Arc,” I said out loud to Quincy. “And either he doesn’t know how he got it, or he got it from a patient who somehow faked their mandatory test.”
I heard Quincy suck in a breath. “How would you even do that?” she asked. “It’s a blood test.”
“They use the rapid urinalysis for surgery because they don’t want to break the skin any more times than they have to,” I murmured.
“How do you fake your pee?” Quincy wanted to know.
“You go into the bathroom. And they leave the room when you put your gown on, so you could tuck some in an armpit or in the waist of your underwear or something.”
“Why would you do that?” she asked.
“Because you’re a selfish asshole,” I answered. “You don’t want to have to bother rescheduling your surgery.”
“But they?—”
“Came in with Arcana,” I said. “All of them came in sick—which you could excuse if someone were asymptomatic, but I’d bet not all of them were.”
Quincy was quiet for a long minute. “I’m not betting against those donuts,” she said, finally. “Do you think there are other people he gave Arcana to who canceled their surgeries?” she asked.
“It would be confirmation that I’m right if there were—and they’re still alive.”
“You have to tell Maginot.”
I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “No, I don’t,” I replied. “Not my job anymore, remember?” I’d tried to keep the bitterness out of my tone, but I don’t think I entirely succeeded.
Noah and I watched the man led away in handcuffs and scrubs that night on the local news—Noah liked to stay on top of it, even if I could have done without local news entirely. He was average height, dark hair, fair skin, with an angry set to his jaw. His name was Mitchell Roche. The news didn’t provide any other details that I didn’t already know—they didn’t say whether or not he’d ever had Arcana, much less whether or not he was an Arc.
I didn’t tell Noah my theory about Roche. He’d want to know how I had gotten there, and he wouldn’t have accepted anything short of the truth about how I’d come to those conclusions. And I still wasn’t comfortable telling him how much I hated being what I was. What he was.
I’d told Elliot. Quincy hadn’t asked. And there really wasn’t anyone else I talked to about heavy shit besides Noah.
I might have understood—in theory, anyway—why Roche was so very angry. Why he resented having contracted Arcana from one of his patients. What I didn’t understand was why he’d then turned that anger against others. I would have understood better if he’d targeted the person who’d gotten him sick.
But if I was right, he’d instead created the opportunity for patients to do the right thing, or the wrong thing. According to a text from Quincy, Maginot had liked my theory. Roche had made it possible for people to stay home and not transmit the virus to their surgical teams. And then he’d punished them when they’d done otherwise.
Maybe he’d been lonely. Maybe he wanted other people to be like him, to understand his rage and frustration, but also his experience.
And maybe trying to understand the psychology of a killer was an exercise in madness, futility, or both.
I cut a ground turkey meatball in half, soaked it in tomato sauce, then shoved the whole thing in my mouth. I’d cooked—spaghetti, marinara sauce with roasted mushrooms, turkey meatballs. Parmesan for Noah to top it off. It was the first time I’d cooked in almost two months.
I’d made myself tired, doing it, but not exhausted. That was an improvement. I’d hoped to have enough stamina to also make something for dessert, but I hadn’t, falling back instead on the fact that Noah was keeping the freezer stocked with ice cream—regular for him, vegan for me. I’d wanted to do cookies or brownies… but I’d had to sit down—in Elliot’s repaired chair, my head resting on crossed arms.
When Noah’d come in and found me, he’d tried to shoo me out of the kitchen, but I’d insisted on finishing the entrée, at least. He’d made garlic bread—the basic kind, with butter spread across a loaf of french bread and sprinkled with garlic powder and a little parsley.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Noah asked when the story finished and the news people moved on to the weather.
“No,” I told him. “No point.”
“Seth…” His tone held an edge of warning. Like he was calling me out on my bullshit.
I put my fork down. “I’m glad they caught him,” I said, knowing my voice sounded about as flat as Quincy’s had when she’d said basically the same thing to me. “But it doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t heal Tierney or get me my job back, or bring back any of the people he killed.” This was always true of arrests, but most of the killers we caught hadn’t targeted us. I wasn’t used to being the victim—wasn’t used to the hollow feeling of injustice that I’d thought would be assuaged when the killer was caught… only to find that it wasn’t.
I suppose it made me more sympathetic to the victims of the crimes I’d been investigating for years, but I didn’t much like it. It made the work feel hollow. Still necessary, but hollow.
“You hate it, don’t you?” Noah asked me, then, and guilt stabbed through my gut. Because of course he knew that. Noah is my twin. He knows me better than I know myself—just as I know him better than he knows himself. We’d vowed once that we would share everything—our lives, our deaths, everything. It had been a childish promise, made in the heat of emotions fueled by hormones, but it was one that had bound us our whole lives.
“Yes,” I answered him honestly.
“It gets better,” he said softly. “The loudness, the smells, the fatigue.”
“So they tell me,” I replied blandly.
“They?” he asked softly.
“Elliot. ”
Noah spun spaghetti around his fork, a skill I’d always been envious of. “You talk to Elliot a lot,” he observed mildly, looking up at me through his eyelashes. I didn’t buy the innocence act—because I’m his twin and I’m not stupid.
I shrugged, shoveling a non-twirled forkful of spaghetti into my mouth, trying—and failing—to keep sauce out of my beard. That’s what napkins are for. I chewed a couple times before answering, hoping that having food in my mouth would obscure any stray emotions that got through my careful facade. “He’s a shifter, too,” I told Noah.
“So’s Taavi, but you’re not texting him.”
“Elliot isn’t Hart’s boyfriend,” I replied.
“But he is Hart’s friend,” Noah pointed out.
“Well, yeah. That’s why he was here to begin with,” I said.
“You still haven’t answered the question, Sethy,” my brother prodded.
“I didn’t hear a question, Nono,” I replied, skewering the other half of my meatball. “I heard a leading observation.”
He rolled his eyes. “Who is he to you?” he asked me, pointedly.
“A guy who’s been answering a lot of questions about being a shifter,” I answered.
“Your new boyfriend?”
“No.” It was the truth. It wasn’t what I wanted the truth to be , but it was the truth. “Just a friend.” Sort of.
Noah made a sound somewhere between a hum and a grunt. It was the sound he made when he thought I was full of shit.
“Not much point in dating someone who lives in Wisconsin from here,” I said, keeping my tone even.
“Wouldn’t be the first long distance relationship in the history of the world,” Noah observed .
I shrugged again, sticking the meatball half in my mouth.
Noah sighed. “I want to see you happy, Sethy,” he said gently.
“Me, too,” I told him. “Although I’m not sure the universe agrees with us.”
Noah took another bite of his pasta. “You’ve definitely had a rough six months,” he agreed. “But things have to look up at this point, right?”
It was my turn to sigh. “You know you should never say shit like that, Nono. It’s like daring God not to make it rain.”