Page 43 of A Subtle Scar
I can see you were roped into a case under the IIAT,Julia wrote.I have made arrangements to add another week of vacation time for you once that case in Brunswick is done. Consider it a thank-you for ending up doing work while you should be on vacation.
Well, clearly, the jig was up, but I’d expected that after I put in the request for a media manager. With any luck, Dustin and the rest of the security crew would allow me back into my office through my forcefully extended vacation. Julia was not to be taken lightly, it seemed.
“Baby, are you okay?” Hermes said. His golden hair had taken on a copper tinge in the evening light, and he looked very relaxed and warm the way he was leaning back in his chair and stretching out his legs. His feet were so close we’d touch if I turned my chair a little to the left. I didn’t.
“I’m fine, but I am not ‘baby’ to you.”
He cocked his head. “Right. Uhm, do you prefer sweetheart? Honey? Or do you want me to make something up? That’s more personal, right? Hmm, you have ebony hair and sky-blue eyes, so how about snow prince? Do you want me to call you my little snow prince, baby?”
How even was this? How? Did this immortal think he had the right to…anything, really? I looked around.
Oh, I wanted to tear him a new one, verbally, because I was under no illusion about my physical or magical strength as compared to an immortal, but there were too many people here, and I was not going to be the mage who started screaming at two immortals who’d deigned to offer their help in solving this case.
And fuck, that was an issue. If I did tell them—successfully this time—to fuck off, the case would be left to Rice and her team and me. I shook my head. I knew how to solve a case, didn’t I? Rice knew how to solve a case. Her team did. We had a necromancer, and if things got really bad, I wasn’t above begging Lucifer to help. We didn’t need these two idiots.
“Excuse me,” I said, grabbed my phone, and headed out of Rice’s office and toward the emergency exit. It took me past the necromancy office. Someone had stuck a handmade paper sign to the door. It featured a dead and plucked chicken attempting flight. Maybe I’d ask Deacon about that if I needed a distraction.
Once in the stairwell that was also the emergency exit route, I walked up two stairs and leaned against the cool gray concrete wall before I brought up Lionel’s number. I did a mental double-check of the time zones before calling.
“Fuck.” It was close to midnight over there or even later than that, and I wasn’t going to call Lionel, who was essentially a colleague, about my immortal problems when he was most likely asleep in the arms of his own immortal.
I stared at my very long contact list. If this were a professional problem, I’d know who to call, and I’d do it right away. But this was personal crap. The most personal conversations I’d had with anyone were probably the ones at the bar of my favorite club in New Cassel when I was just hanging out and shooting the shit with the Doms and subs and other switches there. In fact, that would feel so good, right about now. Not talking. Fucking. Being tied down and controlled. Fuck.
The door opened, and Charon strode through, again moving in a way that made me want to watch him, and so I watched him.
“Needed a break from all the murder and blood?” he asked. He didn’t sound patronizing, just genuinely curious.
“Sure,” I said.
He nodded and let the door fall shut behind him. “It’s terrible that some people can see nothing wrong with wanting to do all those terrible things. I never understood. I must’ve seen it or heard about it a million times, but I have, as yet, I have to understand the reasoning behind it.”
“There isn’t any. There’s just want and power, and then there’s blood and grief, and that’s the long and short of it.” I heard myself say the words, but…it was like I wasn’t even saying them. Like I was speaking without thought.
I’d done that a long time ago. But not since…not since. I hated the feeling of it, because it made me remember what I’d lost. Who I’d lost.
With the violent force old memories have sometimes, it all came back in that fucking moment in the fucking Brunswick PD stairwell. My body was light and heavy all at the same time, as if I hadn’t eaten, as if I weren’t really in the space I knew my body occupied, as if someone had tied me down well and was forcing me to just feel.
But none of the safety of being restrained in a consensual way was there. None of the control. Instead, the feeling of wanting to hold something that was gone forever, as if holding on to water with your bare hands, dominated every thought. I hated it. It scared me. It was like standing on the narrow, narrow ledge of a very tall building and unclasping your fingers from the mortar to raise your arms to the sky.
Back at boarding school, I’d gotten these episodes a lot, and sometimes I’d ended up puking or fainting, on rarer occasions both. It wasn’t panic attacks. It wasn’t anything physical. My parents had paid to have me sent to therapy twice weekly, but that hadn’t helped.
What had helped was forcing myself to stop. Stop longing and missing and caring so much about myself. Not about others, that wasn’t an issue. I had empathy. But the moment I removed myself from the equation and just focused on managing myself, it had all become simple. These kinds of things, I had put them in an air sealed container and frozen them. They were not supposed to just sneak up on me.
I was glad I didn’t go into a puking and-or fainting fit now, but I was incredibly weirded out to find that a fucking immortal gently shaking me by the shoulder and cupping my cheek seemed to help me find my footing again. Step back from the ledge.
“There, that’s how normal breathing works,” Charon said. “Can you hear me now?”
I nodded.
“Good. Maybe we should all take a break for the day. Are you staying at Lucy’s place?”
I opened and closed my eyes a bunch of times. Maybe Charon would vanish if I did that often enough, but no. The immortal was still here, his calm face filling my field of vision.
He cocked his head. “We should just go there. I’ll get Hermes to teleport us. Can you wait here for a moment?”
I looked around and realized I was sitting on the stairs now, and I had no memory at all of how I’d gotten there. I’d been standing up. Maybe I had fainted after all, lost some time, and Charon had gotten me to sit up.
“No. I’m—The Four Seasons. I booked a room there.”
