by Chant, Zoe
Sofa cushions had been unzipped, their stuffing flung out onto the ground. The refrigerator door had been left open, the shelves swept empty, the kitchen floor littered with broken jars and overturned cartons of creamer. Every drawer had been dumped out.
Everything that could be searched had been searched. And then, when whoever had done the searching hadn’t found what they were looking for, they had started venting their anger. It looked like someone had put their foot through the TV screen.
Lindsay was crying now. Her hands were over her mouth. “Boone—I can’t believe this. Why would somebody do this? What did they even want?"
Boone wasn’t going to tell her that he knew how any of this felt. He couldn’t even begin to know what Lindsay was facing. And he wasn’t sure he knew how to answer her question, either.
Except he realized now why Annemarie had said she’d already thought Lindsay was home. She must have heard some of the rummaging around.
They’d been so close to catching whoever had done this. If they’d just gotten here a little sooner...
He said, “Stay outside for a minute. I need to clear it.”
“I’m not letting you go in alone,” Lindsay said.
Even in the midst of what had to be one of worst moments of her life, she was brave.
“You’re not trained,” Boone said.
“And you don’t have a gun,” Lindsay pointed out. “Neither of us are going to be working at maximum efficiency here. But I think we’re safer together. We can leave the door open.” And just like that, she took the keys back from him and clutched them in her fist, the sharp metal ends poking out between her fingers. “See? Like brass knuckles.” She turned her hand, examining it. “Or Nightmare on Elm Street.”
“I’m not going to laugh at your jokes,” Boone said. He tried hard to make sure that stayed true, fighting to keep his mouth level even though he wanted to at least smile. “This is a bad decision.”
“I’m not letting you go in alone,” Lindsay repeated. She set her jaw even more firmly this time. She looked intense, like a fighter about to go in the boxing ring, and suddenly so scorching hot that he was distracted even from all his worries and all his threatened flashbacks.
It didn’t seem to fall to him or anyone else to tell her that she had to stay behind.
“If I tell you to run, run,” Boone said.
Lindsay eyed him hard for a second and then nodded. “Agreed.”
They crept into the apartment, stepping softly over what debris they could avoid. He noticed that he didn’t have to tell Lindsay to watch where she stepped. She was already threading her course behind his, avoiding running into anything that would make a sound. She would have been a natural at reconnaissance.
In a way, whoever had overturned Lindsay’s apartment had at least done them a favor by doing it so completely. All the doors were open, including the closet doors, so Boone could usually see at a glance if a room was empty. Even the shower curtain had been ripped off the rod, scattering the plastic curtain rings all over the floor.
For some reason that was what provoked Lindsay to have to choke off another sob. If Boone had to guess, he’d say that the shower curtain was worse because it was just so obviously unnecessary. It couldn’t have hidden anything for longer than a second, but it had been torn down anyway.
Boone swept through the rooms once with the front door open and then again with it closed and locked behind them. When he was satisfied that they were alone, it felt like he was finally letting himself breathe again.
He realized that without meaning to, he’d made a movement to holster a sidearm that he wasn’t holding. That he hadn’t held in years.
Whatever he’d thought back at the parking lot, they weren’t okay. They weren’t going to be okay until they fixed this.
But he made himself say what he needed to so that Lindsay would know she could break down. “No one’s here. It’s just us.”
Lindsay’s lower lip shook a little. She said again, “I can’t believe this.”
“I’m so sorry, Lindsay.” He tentatively laid his arm against her shoulders and was relieved when she stepped closer to him, hiding her face against his chest. He knew that there were no words that would help with any of this. Holding her tight felt like the only thing he could do that would make a damn bit of difference.
Except one thing, that was.
He looked around at Lindsay’s scattered, smashed belongings, and some part of him—the dragon part, maybe—would have sworn he could almost smell the lingering presence of whoever had done all this.
And Boone thought, I’m coming for you.
Chapter Eleven
Tucked up against Boone, all Lindsay could do was cry and make a kind of fruitless, pointless mental inventory of everything that would need to be tidied up and everything that was broken beyond repair. It was going to take her hours to get her home back in order again. Hours and a lot of cash, given the broken TV and smashed dishes.
Not to mention what was missing. Whoever had trashed the place had—this almost went without saying—taken her laptop and her iPad. The computer stuff was password-protected, but she didn’t know how long it would take to break in. Maybe no time at all, if you knew what you were doing. And it seemed like this person knew a lot about destroying other people’s privacy.
This had been her home for years. She hated that someone had done this to it.
But she couldn’t just stay in Boone’s arms all day, crying her heart out.
Can’t I? It sounds like exactly what I want to do.
We will make them pay. That startled her—it was that voice again, the one that was slightly colder and slightly surer than her own. They will regret disturbing our sanctuary.
All this dragon stuff was going to her head, making her spurt off cheap Tolkien impressions in some kind of deranged inner monologue. My precious, my precious.
She pulled back and wiped her eyes, trying to get a hold of herself.
Boone gently brushed her hair from where her tears had made it cling to her cheeks.
“I’m sorry. I wish we’d just stayed here.”
But Lindsay didn’t want to get into playing might-have-beens. “If we’d stayed here, all that would have happened is that they would have broken in and done this to us.”
“They blew their one and only chance of surprising us, though,” Boone said. “We know what they’re capable of now.”
She’d been using “they” as a simple way to avoid saying “he or she” every time, since they couldn’t be sure, but now she was curious. “Do you think it’s more than one person?”
“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?” He looked around at all the mess. “I’ve seen this done before, more or less. It was never just one person. But some of this—some of it I don’t know that a person could even do.”
Lindsay thought about the extent of the damage. “Like they wouldn’t be strong enough?”
“Yeah. Like even two or three people wouldn’t be strong enough.” He let out a deep breath. “I know Eleanor wasn’t human—not completely. And I know I might not be anymore. But whoever is after us—I don’t think they’re human either. I don’t think we have any idea who we’re dealing with.”
“Then maybe we need to find out.”
It felt like an eternity ago when she had sat down to try to map out what they knew—the little islands of certainty in the vast ocean of confusion. Henry. Ursula. Avoid the cove.
And now they knew a little more, maybe. Their pursuer wasn’t human. Boone could turn into a dragon now—and that same fate might be waiting for her just around the corner. And every detail of her identity was in the hands of someone who could only want them dead.
“So,” Boone said, “research?”
“My laptop is gone,” Lindsay said. “All my devices.”
“Shit.” Boone scrubbed his hands up through his hair. “Okay. Most of the plan is still the same. Gather up whatever you can to bring over to my house, and—�
�
There was a hard, authoritative knock at Lindsay’s door.
She almost jumped out of her skin. But compared to Boone, she looked like a model of James Bond-level coolness, because Boone turned towards the door with a snarl forming his lips. His hand dropped down to his hip like he was some Old West gunslinger looking to draw a weapon that wasn’t even there.
She had to remember to ask him about the war. As soon as things calmed down—which at this rate would be never.
The knock repeated itself: BAM BAM BAM.
She touched his shoulder gently. “It’s okay. I’ve got a peephole. I’ll just check and see who it is.”
“We don’t know who we’re looking for,” Boone pointed out.
True. The best-case scenario was that it was a neighbor she already knew. She didn’t know how safe a stranger would have to look right now for her to trust them. A six-year-old girl in pigtails, maybe? With Thin Mints for sale?
But she didn’t want to just cower in fear behind her door, afraid to answer it. So she just squeezed Boone’s arm and went to the door, moving as quietly as she could in case it would come down to her cowering. She put one eye to the peephole.
On the other side of her door was a woman in a cheap black suit. It hung strangely off her shoulders, like the fit wasn’t right, and it made her look boxy and robotic. Her face was round and bland and immobile in a way that somehow made Lindsay think of a bowl of a pudding. The impression wasn’t helped by her haircut, which looked like it had been done with a pair of gardening shears.
Looking at her, Lindsay felt an unmistakable but irrational wave of nausea. It was like...
The only thing she could compare it to made no sense.
It was like the one time she had tried, as a kid, to eat a plain peanut butter and jelly sandwich that had been made on special Superman bread that had been dyed vibrant blue and red. Somehow, her whole mind had revolted against the colors on the bread being wrong, especially against the ordinary familiarity of the peanut butter and smooth grape jelly. Every bite had felt like it was sticking in her throat. In the end, she’d spat it all out.
That was what this woman reminded her of. She was a subtly repulsive combination of familiarity and wrongness.
But she had to be imagining things. Worse than that, she was being a jerk. There was nothing wrong with the way this woman looked, was there?
Not if you break her features down one by one, the smooth voice in her head said. It’s only when you put them together that you can tell how wrong they are.
Lindsay didn’t know what to do. She wanted to trust her instincts. Every muscle in her body wanted to walk away from the door right then and there.
But then she saw the woman move to hammer her fist against the door again. The knock was hard enough that the door vibrated in the frame, jumping forward to touch the tip of Lindsay’s nose where she was huddled against the peephole.
BAM BAM BAM.
“Ms. Garza? This is the San Marco Police Department.”
Shit. That settled the question of whether or not she was opening the door. Now she felt like she had no choice. Lindsay had always been antsy around cops—every time she drove by a cop car, she always felt like she had to slow down to a crawl. It probably actually annoyed the hell out of them.
“I have to,” she mouthed at Boone.
He looked less convinced, but gave her a reluctant nod.
“Stay out of sight.” That time she actually whispered it, since she didn’t know that she could get it across to him with just lip-reading.
He shook his head violently.
Lindsay nodded back with just as much force. Yes. They had to know she was here—she lived here, if anyone was here, she would be—but they didn’t have to know about him. She motioned him back, where the door would hide him.
Boone kept his hand on his hip, on the gun that wasn’t there, and finally moved. His body looked coiled with tension, like a spring waiting to be released. It was comforting to know that he was there and on high alert.
She opened the door.
Something washed across the woman’s face, an emotion that was there and gone too quickly for Lindsay to detect or identify it.
The woman said, “Lindsay Garza?”
“Yes?” Lindsay said politely.
“My name is Detective Ann Mullen. I’m with the San Marco Police Department. We received reports of a possible incident of breaking and entering at your apartment.”
So someone had seen the trespasser. It was like an ice cube had slipped down the length of Lindsay’s spine.
She didn’t know how to handle this. (That seemed to be her motto lately.) Could she even make a formal report about the damage and theft? When she thought there was a good chance they were looking for some sort of supernatural entity? When the motive for the break-in had been her witnessing a murder that she’d only reported anonymously? She had to think on her feet. She tried to pretend that this was a crisis she was facing at work, where she was used to pivoting with bizarre new turns of events.
And where she had had experience with people stalling meetings out until the end of time.
First of all, deflect. Answer only questions that nobody had actually asked. “I just got home.”
“You drive a yellow Toyota Corolla?”
It was going to be unfortunate for her if Detective Mullen ignored her deflections because she would just ignore her answers completely.
“I don’t understand,” Lindsay said. “This is about the break-in?”
“Your furniture looks like it’s in disarray,” Mullen said. She kept moving her jaw around like she was chewing gum, but Lindsay didn’t see any. “The yellow Corolla is yours, isn’t it, Ms. Garza? Wasn’t that parked overnight at the boardwalk?”
So that was why Mullen was being as deliberately evasive as she was. Neither one of them wanted to talk about the break-in. Lindsay wanted to talk about nothing, and Mullen wanted to talk about the murder—the murder that she now almost certainly thought Lindsay or someone connected to her had committed. She must have been assigned to Eleanor’s case and then seen the same car in the parking lot here... But that would be such a strange coincidence, wouldn’t it? San Marco was a small town, but it could have afforded to send one officer to the murder and another to a reported break-in, and—
And we don’t have a police department.
They didn’t have town police or detectives. They were handled by the county sheriffs.
No one had seen the break-in. Annemarie had heard it, but she hadn’t even known that was what she’d been hearing. The only person who knew about the break-in... was the person who had done it.
Lindsay tried to keep her face frozen. She couldn’t afford to give away any reaction. She might have Boone on her side, just out of sight, but he was unarmed.
And Mullen just might be a monster.
Play dumb. Play innocent.
And lie. You’re not talking to a cop, you’re talking to the person—or thing—who killed Eleanor.
Who killed a dragon like Boone.
Lindsay tried to ladle as much world-weariness into her voice as possible. “Detective, I just got home. I had a date, I left my car at the boardwalk, I picked it up this morning, and I came home to find my apartment completely trashed. I have a lot going on. Yes, I drive a Corolla, I wasn’t aware that was a crime.”
“Let me come in,” Mullen said. There was nothing persuasive about her voice: a wolf at the door threatening to blow her house down would have been more convincing. “We can start looking over the damage done. Who was your date last night?”
“That can’t possibly be relevant to whoever broke into my apartment. My date has the airtight alibi of being with me.”
“We need to assess the burglary.” Mullen stepped forward.
Lindsay moved to block her. She braced herself against the doorframe, trying to fill as much space as possible. Her heart was pounding in her chest, harder even than Mullen’s knocking had been. “
I need to assess the burglary, if there’s even been any burglary.”
If Mullen had been the one to do the breaking in herself, she knew what was missing, but she didn’t know—not for sure—that Lindsay knew. Thus far, she hadn’t lied in any way Mullen could really disprove. Hopefully that would mean she could sow some doubt here.
“This is important information for the report. Let me in, Ms. Garza.”
“I don’t know if I’m filing a report,” Lindsay said. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
Hell if she knew. She’d absolutely have filed a report if this had happened to her on any other day, under any other circumstances.
“That’s my business,” she said coolly. “And there’s no crime if I don’t file a report.”
She actually wasn’t sure that was true. Not everything worked that way. It wasn’t like a murder victim’s family had to agree to press charges for a murder to be prosecuted. But she was about as much a cop as Mullen was, and maybe if she said it forcefully enough, Mullen would take her word for it.
“Who was the man you were on a date with last night?” Mullen said. She wore a small, nasty smile now. It was like her mask was slipping. If Lindsay wasn’t playing the game the way Mullen wanted her to, Mullen would give up on it too: that was what the smile seemed to promise.
“I’m not telling you that.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have to.”
“He was tall, wasn’t he?” Mullen said. “Tall and broad-shouldered. He had dark hair...”
“If he had dark hair, he probably still has it,” Lindsay said. “Considering it was just last night. And I think this is the end of this conversation, Detective.”
“This isn’t over, Ms. Garza. I can be patient.” She smiled that skin-crawling smile again, and Lindsay suddenly knew that she hadn’t seeded any doubts in Mullen’s mind at all. She hadn’t made Mullen think that she was some innocent woman who just happened to get confrontational when she was confused.
Lindsay knew who she was. And Mullen knew that she knew.
