Page 108 of Forget Me Not

Ray bared his teeth. “People keep telling me to rest. I don’trestwell.”

Penn had another snorting laugh for that. “Naturally, you don’t rest.” She glanced back toward the house. The two of them were no doubt under observation. “So why doyouthink they chose the village? Obviously they weren’t going to do it in the station, but the village?”

Ray didn’t turn around to look for any furious and worried half-fairies with their noses pressed to the window glass. “Because things like that happen more in places like the village than up at the bluffs, or on the older boulevards with the Victorian mansions. And no one in the village who might demand an investigation would be listened to.”

“True,” Penn agreed slowly, and paused to wipe her eyes although Ray hadn’t seen any tears, “but not a deep enough dive, Ray. It’s like Calvin said—there are easier ways to be rid of you than this. They chose this and the location to try it. If this is some high-level officers, or someone in in the mayor’s office or on the city council—or a friend of a friend of one of them because they all know each other, and play golf, and are neighbors together—and they are commanding either outright dirty cops or complicit uniforms who do what they’re told and don’t especially mind some dirt under their fingernails, then this wasforsomething.“ Penn made her points bluntly. “They chose you. Designed a spell. Chose a place. Lured you there, however they did it. Golden boy to sacrificial lamb—wolf—in the span of a few years. They ordered all those cops there with the excuse that the village is volatile, even though no one was doing anything but watching. All those cops just standing there, all of them armed, all of them told, maybe repeatedly, that the situation is unstable. Hell, I don’t know most of them. They might have been hiredbecausethey also thought beings and the village were unstable and liked the idea of playing cowboy hero cop.“ She took a deep breath but went grimly on. “Then a being detective goes feral. What else would they do but shoot you? That cements the idea that all weres are wild, that all beings are volatile, that the village is out of control. And it reminds village residents that they are expendable, because if a detective’s life doesn’t matter to the PD, theirs certainly don’t. And if they got angry in response to all of that? It’s even better as far as certain people are concerned. Gives them more of an excuse to crack down.”

Penn was unstoppable now. “If the village is the Wild West in the minds of the humans who don’t live in the city or who live in the nicer parts, they will gladly authorize a bigger budget for the department, grant them and everyone else more power there. Or just look the other way as they arrest, evict, and remove the older nonwhite and gay humans, and fairies and the elves in the historic buildings, and, with those customers and residents gone, essentially make the area uninhabitable to all the elderly homeowners who still live around the plaza. They’d have to sell their properties to move. And with that, the village wouldn’t be the village anymore.”

Those properties included houses without mortgages and rent-controlled buildings. That was why the poor, queer, nonwhite humans and all the beings had ended up there in the first place. In a small city with limited space and a rising value put on what space remained, the village wasn’t history, or a place where people lived, it was the potential to make millions upon millions.

“The new landlords couldn’t raise rent on existing buildings,” Ray pointed out, but he could see what they would do. “Not all of them. There are ordinances.” A fact he knew without knowing why he knew it. The answer was probably on that drive.

“Unless they are given good reasons to tear the buildings down. Then they can sell the property again to a developer for a bigger profit if they wanted, or rebuild.”

“Newer buildings are not allowed to be rent-controlled until at least a decade after construction.” Ray sighed it. More information that he’d learned for a reason he didn’t know.

Penn must have heard him but was focused on something else. “Or burn them. Any structural fire could render a building unsafe enough to be torn down.” She made a little ticked-off noise. “Or they could use unrest and the resulting lower property values to buy up condemned buildings at a lower cost. Send mysteriously vanishing security teams after any squatters, security teams who would be unprepared for an elf who fought back. That could be several companies on their own or in collusion. Just proving who owns anything could take months, if not years, if there are corporations behind it. Fuck, even catching the low-level crooks, the ones who might set the fires, or the guards, won’t do much. Corporate masters and politicians will leave those guys hanging in the wind.”

Ray’s growl was involuntary, but though it silenced her, Penn seemed to approve.

Ray cut it off, although he could still feel it in the center of his chest, near the warm curl when he thought of Callalily.

“There used to be a protector.” The growl returned for a moment despite Ray’s efforts. “They used to defend themselves in the village and Old Town. They had one small patch of the city for their own, but they were left alone there. Calvin hoped things would change, that more help wouldn’t be needed. That the police would do what they claim they are there to do… instead of what they actually do.”

His growl slipped away.

“People like most of those in the village do not have the recourse of those in the bluffs. No one will listen to them.”

“Money!” The tension in Penn’s voice made it almost a low screech. “It’s always about money. We should’ve known. Fuck. I’m going to have to look at paper trails. Can Benny do forensic accounting? No, that’s specialized. But he could probably take a look, if I manage to find anything. What?” She gave Ray a glance with attitude, not that he’d stopped her or said a word. “They’re still letting me in the door. I’m going to use that as long as I can.”

Ray raised a hand both to calm her and give himself another moment to think through his headache. “It doesn’t matter if I was investigating anything,” he realized out loud. “Maybe that moved up their time frame, but they would have done this either way, if a land grab was their goal.”

Penn closed her mouth then spent several long moments frowning into the yard.

“Did you know,” Ray began idly, his thoughts bouncing around the way Cal’s must after a bag of jellybeans and a pumpkin latte, “that the same few families in this town have been mayor, or on the council, or at the head of local committees since the Nineteenth Century? I got books from the library that mentioned it,” he added at Penn’s baffled expression. He considered what he’d just said. “I put a paper clip on that page to mark it.”

“Ah.” Penn slowly inclined her head. “So it’s going to be a long and difficult battle. Got it. Us against the proverbial dragons—not actual dragons.”

Ray quirked a smile and didn’t know why, because he felt as close to crying as he had when his father had died. “And bloody.”

Penn snapped her sharp teeth.

Ray wanted to ask if the goal was to stop them all, or to focus on saving the things under the most immediate threat. Then he remembered that he was one of those things. Without thinking, he turned to look inside the house.

“For now, we should go back in.” Penn, in her way, knew Ray’s thoughts. “I can feel him itching to hug you. And slap you. And hug you again.”

Ray looked at her tired but impassive face. “What amIitching to do?”

She hummed. “Normally, I would make a joke about how I can’t say to spare my blushes, but we both know you’re maybe an hour from passing out. Me too… except the fury has given me a second wind. Might as well use it.”

Ray lightly touched the back of her neck.

“Sap,” Penn told him, but stood there and allowed it for as long as he needed it.

***

LIS MOVED the laundry to the dryer. Cal, Benny, and Penn quietly argued about something. Calvin was half-asleep, reading glasses askew, on the far side of the couch, the papers in his lap slowly falling to the floor one by one.

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