Chapter 31
31
ELLIOT CRANE
Do you know anything about interior design?
SETH MAYS
No…
Why?
I have been hired to make a dining set.
I was sent photos of various pieces to copy.
They are not even remotely the same
And I have no other instructions.
Did you ask them?
I was told to “do what feels right.”
That does not seem very helpful.
Not in the slightest.
So what the fuck do I do?
I am not the right person to ask.
Because I’m guessing that they’re paying you more than I’ve ever had in my bank account.
And I don’t know how rich people think.
You’re not helpful.
Nope.
I’m a potato, remember?
Do you think if I asked a potato it would know?
You should try.
Let me know how it goes.
I’d been about to shut off my phone’s screen when another message came in.
Can you stop by BTV at any point today? It was Ward Campion.
Sure , I sent back. I don’t have anywhere to be until noon. What time?
Anytime , he replied. I’m here.
It was about nine-thirty, so I finished my coffee and shoved the rest of my peanut butter toast in my mouth, wincing a little as my knee protested the speed at which I’d stood up. I brushed a little peanut butter and some crumbs off the corners of my mouth with a thumb, then half-limped my way to the door, grabbing keys and a bag that I didn’t really need, since all I was going to do was wash and fold clothes and sheets, anyway. But it felt more like going to work if I had a satchel with me.
I’d had to turn in my tablet, since that belonged to the state of Virginia, but I kept a notebook in the messenger bag, along with whatever book I was currently reading (I’m one of those tree-killing monsters who still likes paperbacks, even though I usually didn’t splurge and buy them most of the time) and some odds and ends like Aleve, one of the few pain medications I could take, and some sanitizer and bandages in case I cut myself doing something stupid.
That used to be nicking myself on some piece of equipment, but was now just as likely to be a cardboard box papercut or my own claws against my fists while trying not to turn feral.
I locked the door—Noah had already gone in—and headed down to my car. I took whatever shifts they could give me, but Noah had switched to a more normal-people schedule when I’d gone back to work so that he could take me in and pick me up, and so that he could keep an eye on me.
I was trying to convince him that he’d be fine keeping whatever schedule he wanted and going back to sleeping at Lulu’s sometimes, but I hadn’t thus far been successful. Not that I wanted him to stay at Lulu’s, exactly, but I could tell he wasn’t happy, and the tone in his voice when he talked to Lulu on the phone or said goodnight on the evenings that Lulu came over for dinner was wistful enough that I felt more guilt than I did dislike of Lulu.
Lulu is fine, really. There is nothing wrong with Lulu. No red flags, nothing that should make me actually dislike them. I just do. Which probably, I am aware, means that I’m just being jealous of my twin’s time, which probably isn’t all that healthy.
But I’m not very good at healthy relationships. Please see every relationship disaster I’ve ever been in, plus the whatever-it-is thing I have going on with a badger shifter who lives a thousand miles away. I should never be the one to judge the relative health of anybody else’s relationships.
I drove over to Beyond the Veil and found a spot on the side street on my way toward the back. I got out of the FJ Cruiser, limping as I walked the half block to the BTV offices because my knee had decided it still hated me.
Rayn, the touch-psychic who worked the front desk, looked up when I came in. He was wearing a close-fitting mask in the same light blue as his short-sleeved button-down.
“Hello, Mr. Mays!”
“It’s just Mays, Rayn,” I corrected him, the same way I always did.
He nodded at me, the movement oddly wooden and fleeting, the way it always was, although he seemed a little more jittery than usual. Not that I was one to judge. “Okay,” he agreed. “Mays.”
I knew he’d go back to the ‘mister’ the next time I came in. If I came in again. I certainly wasn’t going to be bringing any bones around anytime soon. I’m sure Maza would just stop in himself now.
“Ward asked me to come in,” I told Rayn, and he nodded.
“He’s in the conference room,” he said. “There’s no client, so you can go back.”
“Thanks.”
I shuffled my way back to the conference room, my stomach tight. The last time I’d been in there had been with Elliot—working, first, then… Then we’d ended up back at his hotel room. I flexed my hands, trying to make the tingling skin go away, to regain control over the primal drive to shift that came with any strong surge of emotion.
It was less intense now than it used to be. Everything was—the sounds, the smells, the sensations. Or maybe I was just getting used to it.
I paused in the doorway, feeling my eyes go wide as I saw the table for the first time. “Holy shit.” I felt my neck flush as the words slipped out of their own volition.
Ward, who was sitting at the table, looked up and grinned. He wasn’t wearing a mask, although there was one on the table beside him. “It’s gorgeous, right?”
I nodded.
He ran a hand over the shining surface. “Works brilliantly, too,” he said. “Thanks for helping him with it.”
“Oh, um. Sure.” I shrugged, the color rising even higher up my neck. Hopefully he just thought I was shy.
“Ask him why he’s blushing,” came a sardonic and creepy voice from behind me, making me jump a little, even though I knew who it belonged to.
“You can keep that to yourself,” I muttered under my breath to Lady Sylvia Randolph as the ghost laughed a spine-chilling laugh at me.
Ward sighed, although I could see the corners of his lips were turned up in amusement. “Sylvia, please don’t harass the nice people who come here to do favors for us.”
“It’s not harassment,” the ghost argued, gliding past me—I got out of the way quickly. I hadn’t ever made physical contact with a ghost, at least that I knew of, and I didn’t particularly want to find out what it would feel like to touch an insubstantial dead woman… as opposed to the very physical dead people I used to touch for work all the time. Somehow bodies were less disturbing than ghosts. To me, anyway.
“What would you call it, then?” Ward asked her.
“Witty banter,” she replied cheerfully, then turned to smile at me. “Isn’t that right, darling? ”
I wasn’t going to argue with a dead woman, although I didn’t disagree with her, exactly. She didn’t seem malicious, anyway. “Yes, ma’am,” I agreed.
“I like him,” she said to Ward. “We can keep him.”
Ward rolled his grey eyes. “Thank you for that, Sylvia.” He turned his attention back to me. “I have a job for you, Mays,” he said.
“A job?” I repeated. I couldn’t make myself get too excited. I didn’t want a meaningless pity job, even if I did want something more interesting to do than stacking cans.
Ward pushed a decently-sized box toward me across the table. I stepped into the room to look at what was inside, finding folds of fabric that weren’t immediately identifiable. “What do you need me to do?” I asked him.
“Well, for one thing, we were hoping you could tell us about how old this is,” he replied. “And what’s on it.”
“Can I touch it?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
I carefully pulled out the green fabric, which, upon further examination, appeared to be what I would have imagined a woman’s day dress might have looked like in the nineteenth century, although I wasn’t sure if it was actually that old. Some of the small communities around where I’d grown up had strict rules about clothing—Mennonites and Amish—and I’d seen quite a few modern women wearing clothes that were pretty dated in style, although not this fancy, when I was a kid. “This looks like blood,” I said, referring to several rusty brown stains on the fabric.
Ward nodded. “If it is, it isn’t human,” he told me. “If you can tell us what it is that would be helpful.”
I nodded, myself. “Probably,” I replied, thinking about what I had the capacity to do with the equipment and supplies I had in the storage locker I kept. It had been a while since I’d been in there, and I wasn’t entirely sure what chemicals I did and didn’t have.
“Obviously, we’ll cover the cost of any supplies you need,” Ward said smoothly, and I felt my neck heat again.
“That wasn’t?—”
“When I said job , I meant it,” the medium told me firmly. “We need your skills, and we’re willing to pay for them. And whatever you need to do them.”
I nodded, still a little embarrassed, but also aware that, practically speaking, this was going to be one of the only ways I’d get to keep doing what I actually liked doing. And I could use the money. “Where did it come from?” I asked.
“One of our Lost Lineage families has had this in a trunk in their attic for at least a decade or two,” Ward replied. “They have a story about what it is and who it belonged to, but I’d like to get some actual scientific confirmation of those details.”
I nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” I told him. “I can probably tell you what kind of blood this is, if it is blood. If not, I can probably figure out what it is. Whether or not I can give you a date or date range could be more difficult, but I’ll do what I can.”
Ward smiled at me. “Great.”
I hadn’t been in the storage unit for a while—months. At first, I’d been excited about having a chance to do lab work again, but now that I’d gotten here, I discovered that being in here with all my old lab equipment post-firing only made me more depressed about the state of my ex-employment.
But I’d told Ward I would test the fabric he’d given me, and so I was going to do it, whether it made me even more bitter about my life circumstances or not. He’d also ordered me to bill him for everything I used for every test, even if I didn’t have to go out and buy it because I already had some.
It was clearly a pity job.
I hated it.
Yes, I know. I hate everything. Which is only mostly true. There were things I didn’t hate. Pad thai. Cake. Chocolate. Coffee. Sleep. I hated trying to go to sleep, but the sleep itself was pretty great.
I didn’t hate Noah. Or Quincy. Or Elliot. Or Ward, even if I was being a bit resentful of the fact that he was giving me pity jobs. I didn’t even hate Lulu. I just didn’t like Lulu.
I sighed, going into the minifridge that lived in the unit—which also meant that the unit had been expensive as shit, because most storage places do not want you to have power in your unit for various, mostly good, reasons—to start pulling out some of what I might need.
I’d identified the blood as belonging to a chicken. Dating the fabric had been a bit more of a challenge.
First of all, it wasn’t like you could carbon-date fabric. Well, you could , I suppose, but the range you have on fabric life-span from that isn’t accurate enough to pinpoint a decade. And I couldn’t radiocarbon date from my little storage shed.
What I could do was determine what the fabric was made out of and what kinds of dyes were used in it—if it had polyester, for instance, or if the weave was fine enough to have been done on a machine… that sort of thing. I’d already gotten Ward’s permission to take a tiny sample of the fabric, which would let me do things with it that I co uldn’t do just by wetting bits of it and rubbing them with swabs—which is how I’d sampled the blood.
Looking at the fibers under a microscope told me that they had been machine-woven, which post-dated them as after the early 1800s, most likely. They were also extremely worn and frayed, suggesting use or age or both. And then I got to start playing with the fancy equipment. A spectrometer would have been most useful, but I had other things I could use.
To determine if it was—as it appeared to be—cotton, I tested for reactivity to alkalies, which was positive. To make sure it wasn’t simply a reaction to the dye, I decided to see if I could figure out what had been used to dye the fabric that color green.
The color was evenly distributed—another sign of cotton—and soaked into the fibers, but there are a lot of ways to dye fabric that had been used post-machine-loom-invention, so I needed to try to figure out how it got that way. Based on the lack of color variation in the threads themselves, I assumed that the cotton had first been bleached. Which raised a few questions I didn’t know the answers to.
Fortunately, I’d brought my laptop, and I set up my phone as a hot spot so that I could check things like when people started bleaching cotton (unhelpfully, the answer is about 10,000 BCE, although modern techniques using sodium hypochlorite didn’t come into use until the end of the eighteenth century), types of green dyes post-1800, and then, based on the earlier results, whether or not I could accidentally poison myself with extremely old fabric dye.
The reason for that last one was that the fact that the shade of green on the fabric might very well have been Sheele’s Green, invented in the late eighteenth century and applied to fabrics into the 1860s. It would be a very useful pinpoint if that was, in fact, the dye being used, but the down side was that the lovely color was produced by copper arsenite, aka, arsenic. It was colloquially referred to as arsenic green .
Deciding I very much didn’t want to add arsenic poisoning to my life experiences, I put on a second pair of gloves, the safety goggles I’d been ignoring because I wasn’t doing anything volatile, and a mask. Just in case.
The sample I took tested positive for arsenic.
Which meant that my fabric had to have been made between 1804 and 1860.
I texted Ward.
That’s fantastic! He sent back.
Also, it’s chicken blood, I added.
Interesting , he replied.
Weird, I sent back. Because that particular shade of green wouldn’t have been worn by just anyone. It was the height of fashion, and last I checked, fashionable antebellum ladies weren’t running around murdering chickens.
In this family, they might have been , came the response.
I’m going to want to hear more about that , I told him.
My phone rang.
“So why were society ladies killing chickens?” I asked Ward when I answered.
He laughed. “These society ladies were light-skinned Black women who had moved to Richmond from New Orleans, where they’d been trained by their grandmother in Voodoo,” he answered.
“Oh, wow. Didn’t see that coming.”
“This family is fantastic,” Ward replied. “Mason is going to be ecstatic.”
“I can imagine,” I said. Mason Manning was an occult historian, so the idea that this family had been practicing Voodoo in antebellum Richmond had to be right up his alley.
“I’ll bring it back with a full report tomorrow,” I told him.
“Bring me the full cost breakdown,” he reminded me, pulling the smile from my face, not that he could see it. I’d actually gotten into the research, and being reminded that I was doing a pity job brought me down from my high.
“No problem,” I told him, forcing cheerfulness back into my tone.
“See you tomorrow!”
I hung up, then stared morosely down at my phone.
That was it.
The job was done.
Ward would pay me, probably more than it was worth, I’d guess, and then I’d have to argue with him. It didn’t really matter which one of us won, either way what he was giving me was coming to me out of pity. Yes, I’d done work for him, but if they already knew that the family had been in Richmond in the antebellum period and practiced Voodoo, they didn’t need me to identify chicken blood and arsenic green.
I sighed, then started cleaning up, sending Elliot a text as I got to work.
Did people start doing things for you out of pity after you shifted?
I’m sure they did, but I was a kid.
What happened?
Ward gave me a job he didn’t need done.
The table is amazing, by the way.
It took you that long to go down there?
And how do you know he didn’t need it done?
Because they already knew what the tests would have told them.
But they didn’t know that’s what it would tell them, right?
Was anything new?
I mean. They probably didn’t know the dress was toxic.
My phone started buzzing again. I answered it and put it on speaker.
“Yeah?” I asked Elliot.
“How is a dress toxic?” he wanted to know.
“It was dyed with arsenic,” I replied.
“To murder someone?”
I chuckled. “No, because people didn’t understand chemistry yet,” I answered. “It was a particular color known as Sheele’s Green, named after the German scientist who created it.”
“Why are Germans always the ones coming up with fucked up chemical shit?” he asked.
“Well, this was in the nineteenth century,” I replied. “So it wasn’t Nazis.”
“No, just the assholes who invented mustard gas,” he replied.
The timeline wasn’t far off. “Possibly,” I admitted. “But the intention was to make a pretty color, not to actually poison people.”
“But it did. Poison people.”
“Oh, yes. Including Napoleon. ”
He snorted. “That little shit deserved it,” he remarked.
“You know he wasn’t actually as short as everybody thinks?”
“No?”
“Nope,” I told him. “The imperial measurement system changed its standards, so the original measurement of five-two is actually five-seven by our modern standards.”
“Still shorter than me,” was Elliot’s response.
“But average height for his time,” I pointed out.
“What’s average now?” he asked.
“In the US? About five-nine-and-a-half. Depends on where you are, though. Countries with better overall diet and health tend to be taller.”
“So we’re on the short side?” I could hear the irony in his tone.
“We’re around Brazil and China,” I replied. “Scandinavian and Germanic countries are taller.”
“Stupid Germans,” Elliot replied. “Although apparently Val’s family wasn’t a shining example of that.”
“Hart’s like six-four,” I said.
“He is now,” came Elliot’s comment. “But that asshole was shorter than me.”
“Really? How short?”
“Five-nine.”
I blinked. “That had to have hurt,” I remarked.
“Absolutely,” Elliot agreed, understanding immediately what I meant. It was a good reminder to me that other shifters weren’t the only ones who understood what it was like to have your body taken away from you. Hart’s whole body had changed on him, too. “So where’s BTV’s lab?” he asked me, then.
“It’s mine,” I replied. “And it’s not a lab. It’s a couple pieces of equipment in a storage shed. There’s a lot I can’t do, even if I can test for arsenic.”
“You use it a lot?”
“Not really. Definitely not anymore.”
“Why not?”
I sighed, finishing collecting the glassware and instruments I’d used into a bin. I’d take them home and wash and sterilize them. My locker did not have a sink or a drain. “I don’t really have anything to test without working crime scenes,” I answered.
“You took evidence in there?” Elliot asked me.
“Not exactly,” I answered, picking up the box with one hand and my phone with the other. “Sometimes I would test theories that I could take back to the real lab. And every now and then Hart would bring me something when he worked at BTV.” As I talked, I hit the little switch beside the door, plunging the space into darkness, then walked the few feet to my car, the door closing and locking behind me. I set the phone on the top of the car to pull out my keys, then unlocked the door.
“So won’t BTV still ask you to do things?”
“Probably, from time to time. When they need me.”
“They don’t need you often?”
“Nah. I came to them with something—a bone, a blood-stain, even a lost object—far more often than they ever came to me.” I let out a breath as I got into the Cruiser. “But that’s not gong to happen anymore. Or, rather, I’m sure Maza or Maginot will still bring them evidence, but it won’t be me doing it.”
“You didn’t test those things?”
“No need,” I replied. “Ward can just summon whoever it was and talk to them. Or Rayn can tell them about the object, if it’s not blood or bone or a body part. They don’t really need me.” I swallowed back the break in my voice, blinking moisture out of my eyes. I didn’t want to get emotional. One, Elliot had dealt with enough of my emotional shit, especially for someone who wasn’t in a relationship with me. Two, crying while driving is dangerous, and you really shouldn’t do it.
Elliot was quiet as I turned out of the storage facility toward home.
“So tell me more about arsenic dresses,” he said, finally.
I blinked. “I mean, it wasn’t just in dresses. They put it in lots of things. Paint, fake plants, wallpaper.”
“So it was poisoning people in their houses?”
“Yeah,” I replied, warming up to the subject. “That’s what got Napoleon, actually. The arsenic in the wallpaper is probably what gave him cancer.”
“Shit. Maybe I should have you take a look at my walls.”
“Your house older than 1860?” I asked him.
“Nope,” came the response. “Mine dates back to the lead-paint era.”
“Do you lick the walls?” I asked him.
“I did as a kid.”
“Wait… seriously?”
“I’ve been a shifter since I was eleven. And in my defense, I was a badger every time I did it.”
“Your parents let you do that with lead paint in the house?” I must have sounded horrified, because he laughed.
“Fuck, no. My mother swatted my nose every time I did it. I’m also pretty sure they didn’t have any lead paint, since they built it, so most of our walls are wood panel or glass, anyway.”
“You have glass walls?”
“Floor to ceiling windows, yeah.”
“Sounds gorgeous.” I was honestly a little jealous. The idea that Elliot had light and access to—well, I suppose it depended on what the windows looked out on. “Good views?”
“Dad’s garden or the woods,” came his response. “So yeah.”
“Damn. Now you’re just making me wish I could see it.”
He chuckled. “The house is pretty amazing. It’s part of why I moved back up here to the ass-end of nowhere.”
“You haven’t always lived there?” I was learning all sorts of things about Elliot today. I turned onto Laburnum, not too far from Noah’s apartment.
“No. I went down to Milwaukee with Val when he took the job with the Milwaukee PD, then to Madison when he moved down to Virginia.” He paused a moment, and I was trying to decide how to respond when he continued. “I came back when Dad died, and just… stayed. I couldn’t stand the thought of selling the house with everything my folks put into it.”
I wondered, as I pulled into the apartment parking lot, what it was like to actually have positive emotions connected with the house you grew up in. To want to preserve those memories by keeping the house they’d built. “You like it there?” I asked him, definitely envious. The idea of living in the woods, having a garden that wasn’t one pot on a windowsill that contained a tiny aloe plant that I’d been keeping alive for years—it wasn’t thriving, but I kept it alive despite a lack of anything but extremely indirect sunlight.
“You know, I do,” Elliot said, and it sounded almost like he was surprised at his own answer. “I always thought there was no fucking way I was going to move back to Shawano, but it’s grown on me. I like the woods. I like being close to the reservation, being a part of the Nation.” He let out a little half-bark of a laugh. “I even like shocking all the small-town conservatives in the town.”
“Jesus,” I muttered as I slid out of the driver’s seat. “I can’t imagine liking that.”
“You always lived in Richmond, city-boy?” he teased.
“Nope,” I told him. “I’m from ass-end-of-nowhere Virginia, up in the Appalachians. The closest named thing to a town near us is called Swoope.”
“How many people live there?” he asked.
“Not enough to put on a sign,” I answered. “That was our post office, but they didn’t bring our mail—we had to go there to pick it up.”
“Okay, you definitely win for smallest-town.”
“I’m not sure I’d use the term ‘win,’” I told him, only half-teasing.
He laughed. “You home yet?”
“Why?” I asked him. “Trying to get rid of me?”
“Trying to figure out when I can ask you what you’re wearing,” he retorted so quickly that I knew he must have already been thinking about it. That, coupled with the question itself, made my blood heat.
And that was bad.
My skin immediately started tingling, and not in a sexual way—in a I-might-suddenly-sprout-fur kind of way. My neck flushed, and my fingers itched as my nails thickened.
“Not a good idea,” I ground out between my teeth, alarmed at the odd sound to my own voice.
“You’re right,” Elliot said quickly. “I didn’t think about that.”
I couldn’t decide if I was more frustrated or more ashamed. “Sorry,” I mumbled around aching teeth that were a little too big for my mouth and the increased saliva that came with them. Tears pushed at the back of my eyelids, and I struggled to both blink them back and hold the wolf part of me at bay. I leaned against the open back door of my car, one hand braced against the roof, the other holding the phone as I stared in at the box full of lab equipment that needed cleaning. I tried to focus in on the details of the glassware, the stains, the streaks of chemicals. My eyes felt weird, my contacts off-center—because of course a wolf’s eyes aren’t the same size and shape as human eyes.
“No—this one is my fault,” Elliot said, his voice soft and gentle. “Deep breaths, baby. In and out.”
“I’m going to go,” I mumbled.
“No!”
I’d been about to thumb the red circle, but even with the phone far away from my head, Elliot’s sharp exclamation was loud and clear. I wasn’t sure if it was my sharpened hearing or the volume of his voice.
“Why not?” I asked him, my mouth feeling a little more normal. At least I no longer felt like I was about to drool.
“I want you to stay with me,” he told me, his tone more even, softer. “I want to know you’re okay.”
I drew in a long breath, then let it out again. “I’ll be okay,” I told him.
“I want to know you are,” he repeated. “Please.”
I swallowed. “Okay,” I half-whispered.
I stayed out at the car for another several minutes, until I was certain I wasn’t going to lose control of myself while carrying a box of highly breakable glass upstairs. Elliot stayed with me as I climbed the stairs, box tucked under one arm, talking softly about the things coming up in his garden. He hadn’t done anything with it this spring, but a lot of things were blooming and growing, anyway .
I wasn’t really focusing on what he was saying, but the steady, even rhythm of his voice was soothing, calming.
Once inside, I put the box in the kitchen—Noah both hated doing dishes and knew better than to try to touch anything that looked like it had been in a lab—then went straight to my room.
“I’m safe and inside,” I told Elliot.
“Did you want me to leave you alone?” he asked me.
“N-no?” I didn’t. I liked the roughness of his voice, the way he made me feel as though he cared.
“Okay,” he said. “Because I will if you want me to.”
“No,” I repeated, more confidently this time.
It was wreaking havoc with my emotions, though. I was already falling hard for him—had been since day one, to be honest—and the more caring he was with me, the more patient and gentle, the worse it was becoming. I didn’t want him to stop, but I also knew that the more attached I got, the more painful it would be when he inevitably broke my heart.