Their Precious Own

by Lia Black

  “Certainly won’t get any work done here,” Derek glanced over his shoulder at the sets of eyes following them down the hall. “I know a place. I’ll drive.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Being stuck in a vehicle with Perrine was either hell or bliss, or a little bit of both. Underneath the antiseptic smell of his cologne, Derek could detect a fragrance of something oddly familiar, something nice that stirred him inappropriately. But wrapped around it was the scent of comfort; warm and sweet and sleepy, like clean sheets. He lit up a cigarette, exhaling the smoke in the closed car, hoping to choke out the smell.

  “Ugh,” Perrine fanned one hand towards him as he struggled with the crank to get the window down. The window didn’t budge. “Are you trying to kill me?”

  That seemed as good an idea as any, but Derek figured it wouldn’t go over so well with Gilchrist. He stopped at a blinking red street light, one of the few that still worked, and reached across, pushing his hand against the window. “Try it now.”

  Coughing, Perrine turned the crank and the window shuddered before dropping about four inches.

  “That’s as far as it goes.”

  Perrine was stretching his neck so he could breathe through the gap, resembling a dog trying to get a taste of fresh air as they started out again.

  Derek settled back into the driver’s seat and cranked down his own window a few inches.

  “Why do you smoke?” Perrine finally asked him once the car had cleared out a little.

  “Why do you care?” Derek turned into the lot of the bar he often called his office these days. It was a good place to come in the daytime because it was secluded and empty but for the quietly suffering alcoholics that hung out every once in a while. Plus, it was the only place he could get a Reuben that wasn’t made with that canned meat crap.

  “I care because I don’t want to be suffering through it. You should stop.”

  You should mind your own fucking business, was what Derek wanted to say, but he was already treading on thin ice. He turned the conversation around, back on Perrine. “Why do you have to use glamour?” He tapped some ash out the window before putting the vehicle into park and looking across the seat.

  “That’s personal. I am here to assist you in a professional capacity.” Perrine tried to get out by pulling the handle on the door, but when that failed he slumped back into the seat, rolling his eyes, and exhaling with exasperation. “Is everything on this side of the car broken?”

  “I don’t use that side,” Derek answered and got out, taking the time to finish his cigarette before he deigned to let Mr. Perfect out of the vehicle.

  It was beginning to drizzle outside again. The only time they ever saw the sun was behind a haze of ash-colored clouds. Once upon a time before Armageddon, or so Derek had been told, the sky and waters were blue, and the sun was so big and bright that a person could go blind by looking at it directly. It all seemed like a fantasy world. Some fairytale of caution to warn children about the perils of wanting too much. Well, Derek had never wanted much, and now all he really wanted was to close this case and be left alone. He had dreams of leaving this shit-hole town someday, but he had no clue where he’d go. Maybe he’d find a small settlement someplace that was friendly to strangers, and all right with leaving him to himself.

  “This is it?” Perrine frowned at the squat concrete building with its faded red canopy and malfunctioning neon sign.

  “You know someplace better?” Derek asked, tossing his cigarette butt into a puddle. Perrine hissed at him— actually fucking hissed— and retrieved the soggy butt, pressing it into Derek’s hand.

  “Throw it away in the trash bin. It’s no wonder your human settlements are so filthy.” Perrine moved past him, his long, pale ponytail swishing back and forth above his ass. He pushed open the heavy metal door and was briefly silhouetted against the amber glow from within. For a moment, Derek had the sensation of seeing him through candlelight. He shoved the fantasy out of his mind as he bumped aside Perrine’s body, which was blocking the entrance.

  A young woman’s voice drifted to them over the hum of the ventilation system.

  “Oh, it’s you, Detective,” Willa, the only waitress he’d ever seen in the place, called to him from behind the bar. “Just sit wherever. I’ll be by for your orders in a minute.”

  “Thanks, it’ll be the usual for me,” Derek said with a smile.

  “The usual?” Perrine asked from behind him. “You come to this…place so often that they have your order memorized?”

  “My partner and I came here a lot. To get work done.” Derek was making an effort to try and not hate Perrine. It wasn’t going to be difficult to keep their relationship strictly professional. Unlike Marc, it was pretty clear they didn’t have much in common— the least of which was that Perrine wasn’t human. Derek slid into the booth he usually occupied in the corner. It was a half-round style and let him see most of the room. Candles and dimly lit beer logos kept the area dark and gave the walls a reddish-amber hue, while the dark carpeting was all but invisible underfoot. He pulled out his cell phone, where he had stored all of the case records to date.

  “You have a cell?” he asked, holding up his phone.

  “No.”

  “What? How am I supposed to get ahold of you?”

  “Their frequencies disrupt my glamour. I have a pager.” Perrine said. His dark eyes were scanning the room. The place was nearly empty. There were a couple of men hunched over their drinks at the bar, shooting Perrine looks over their shoulders.

  Derek sighed, exasperated. The Clan had control of all the tech, yet this one still used analog.

  “Here, just glance over mine. Do you want anything to eat or drink?”

  “No. Thank you,” Perrine said absently as he accepted Derek’s phone. Willa approached the table, tray in hand.

  “Okay, so what can I get youoooh.” Willa’s eyes went wide, staring at Perrine’s hands. Derek looked down and it became obvious what she was looking at. His long, excessively elegant fingers were tipped with tapered black talons and the skin there was gradated and patterned with deep bronze coloring.

  “Shit,” Derek swore. So he wasn’t kidding.

  Willa’s gaze flicked between Derek’s face and Perrine’s hands, and it was obvious she was making an effort not to look any higher. “Detective, I-I’m sorry, but the owner doesn’t allow his type in here.” She seemed to be genuinely apologetic, if not a little frightened.

  “Seriously?” Probably because it was disrupting his casework, the notion of the bar owner not allowing Variants made him mad. As much as Derek found the Variants distasteful, he’d never think of keeping them from going wherever humans went.

  “Sorry, Detective. I…if it were up to me, I really wouldn’t care, but, if the owner finds out… I really need this job.” Willa’s tone was pleading and Derek reined in his anger. It wasn’t her fault. He knew that distrust and hatred of Variants was rampant in the settlements, he just hadn’t really considered that he’d witness it so overtly, or that somehow, he’d be affected.

  “It’s fine, Willa. Not your fault.” Derek tossed a few credits on the table for her just to keep things amicable and picked up his phone from where Perrine had set it on the table. Perrine’s hands were curled into fists but his expression was blank as he stared at them. As soon as Derek shifted in his seat, Perrine was up and out of the booth, heading for the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Willa said to Derek again as he got up and went past her.

  Derek patted her lightly on the shoulder. “It’s okay. I’ll still come in on my days off.” If he ever got a day off, that was. Although it wasn’t really Perrine’s fault either, Derek couldn’t help but be a little annoyed that his presence might mess up his routine— if not completely ruin his ability to eat at his favorite restaurant.

  He followed Perrine outside, who went right for Derek’s car, and, despite the rain, waited at the passenger door without turning around. Derek moved up behind him and used
his key to unlock it, jiggling the handle just so to get the door to open. With so few people having cars, mechanics were a rarity and parts were hard to come by. As long as the engine worked well enough to get him from point A to point B, and the Clan kept the ration of fossil fuel topped up, Derek didn’t care what the car looked like.

  “We’ll go to my hotel room, but you need to be gone by six,” Perrine said once Derek slid into the driver’s seat. Perrine was facing forward, staring out the windshield.

  “I didn’t know.” Derek felt like he should offer some explanation about what had happened in the bar but Perrine waved it off.

  “It’s fine. I suppose I should have expected it. Can we just forget about it, please?”

  “Uh, sure. Where are you staying?” Perrine’s expression was so impassive, Derek wasn’t certain if the situation bothered him, or if Derek was just projecting his annoyance at the situation onto Perrine. It was hard to tell with Clan, and even though Derek was pretty sure now Perrine was not one of them, he shared, or at least emulated, their lack of emotional response.

  “I’m staying at the Bentley Hotel,” Perrine muttered and Derek couldn’t help but shudder in revulsion.

  “That place…”

  “Is a shit hole, yes. But they allow my kind in there. It’s temporary, until I can find an apartment that doesn’t discriminate.”

  Derek put the car in drive and began heading towards the seedier part of town— the same area where Marc was killed. “I didn’t realize that it was so difficult…”

  “Why would you? You’re human. I’m used to being a pariah—even in Apex.”

  He’d said it so casually that Derek let it go. He knew that the Clan saw shifters as lower-class citizens— not as low as humans, but they were considered an embarrassment because of their base animal nature. From the look of Perrine’s hands without glamour, it seemed he wasn’t a shifter of any recognizable sort. No fur or scales or other animal attributes, and he certainly wasn’t a troll or hob. His build was too lithe, his movements too graceful, and he was too fucking pretty. No amount of glamour could so fundamentally change someone’s appearance. But what he was, Derek still had no idea.

  The Bentley was just as shitty as Derek remembered. There were derelicts stinking up the lobby; one, a likely shifter Variant, sat on an old couch, smelling like wet dog. The once-burgundy carpet in the lobby was stained and gritty underneath Derek’s shoes as he walked across it. They took the stairs up to the third floor because both elevators were on the fritz. The scent of urine inside made Derek’s eyes water.

  When they got to Perrine’s room, Derek saw that someone had scratched a sigil through the many layers of paint; a series of straight, intersecting lines and little carved-out hollows. At each connecting point and the center, little round, red stones were embedded.

  “Yours?” Derek indicated the seal.

  “It’s not like they’ll ask for a security deposit,” Perrine said as he jiggled the key in the lock and finally pushed open the door.

  Derek had been prepared for the worst, so when he saw nothing even close to that, it made him hesitate in the hall.

  The floor had been taken to the bare wood and scrubbed a uniform color. The cracks in the tiles that made up the entry were difficult to see because someone had bleached out ages of grimy, mildewed grout. The bed was draped with a bright white coverlet and even the furniture appeared to be brand new. There were no stains on the walls or ceilings because they had been painted such a bright white, it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. The room looked more like something you’d find in a travel brochure for a really nice hotel, not the less-than-perfect room they’d give you once you got there.

  “Well? Is there a problem?” Perrine tossed his keys onto the dresser and began to shrug out of his black suit coat.

  “No,” Derek came into the room and closed the door. “It’s just so… clean.”

  “It has to be clean,” Perrine said, loosening his black tie. “Take off your muddy shoes there, on the mat, and come in. You can sit at the table here.” In between gestures, as Perrine spoke, he was glancing at the clock on the nightstand. Derek stepped out of his shoes, feeling as though he should pay attention to make sure they were not askew, and hung his coat on a wall hook.

  “Can I use the restroom?” Had this been any other room in the Bentley, Derek would have preferred pissing in an alley. Seeing what Perrine had done with the main room had Derek convinced the bathroom had to be at least as clean.

  “Go ahead. Kindly, see that you don’t stink it up.”

  “No promises,” Derek said, just to be difficult, and went into the bathroom. Sure enough, everything in the bathroom was scrubbed down with so much bleach that the glare of metal fixtures and white tiles hurt Derek’s eyes. He did his business then washed his hands with Perrine’s lemon-scented anti-bacterial soap, looking at his face in the mirror. He looked tired and scruffy, much older than his thirty-three years. Of course, next to Perrine, even if he were twenty-two and in peak condition, he’d still seem flawed. Perrine was just too perfect, and it appeared that everything around him had to be as well. As far as Derek was concerned, with him as his partner, Perrine was going to have to get used to disappointment.

  When he came out of the bathroom he had to stop and reorient himself. Mr. Perfect was sitting with one leg drawn up, in one of the chairs near the small table. He was wearing shorts and a loose-fitting t-shirt and his hair was free from its tie and falling down around his shoulders. He looked...casual, and seeing him suddenly so relaxed caught Derek off-guard. Perrine had a very lean build, like one of those high school track stars who could eat anything and burn it off with their enviable metabolism. Even dressed down he looked perfect, at least in Derek’s mind. His glamour was still flickering here and there, giving Derek teasing glimpses of the real Kayle Perrine—the pointed tip of an ear, or the deeper patterned hues of a shoulder or jaw— but no more clues about his lineage.

  There was that scent in the room, lingering just under the bleach, and it made Derek think of home. Not the tiny one-bedroom apartment he lived in now, but his family home on one of those rare occasions when everyone was still alive and it almost looked like a day that the sun would make it through the clouds. Feeling bold, he sauntered over to Perrine, dropping down into the seat across from him as he might when chatting up a hot guy at the bar.

  “So you know you can drop the glamour,” Derek suggested, bringing up the files on his cell phone and sliding it across the shiny laminate surface of the table towards Perrine.

  “No. I can’t,” Perrine said. His gaze rested on the information on the screen.

  Derek wasn’t going to argue. He felt too relaxed, and thought maybe he should give the guy a break. “Fair enough.” He changed the subject as he saw how intensely Perrine was staring at the screen. “I haven’t gotten the paperwork yet from today’s victim. I’ll probably hit the morgue on the way home and get the medical examiner’s report.”

  “Today’s victim?” Perrine looked up from the screen, his dark eyes wide.

  “Yeah,” Derek leaned across the table and brushed his finger over the screen to bring up the photos he’d taken with his phone. “Zoom in, she’s up there on the mast.”

  Perrine covered his mouth with his hand.

  “Oh my…how…”

  “Did the body get up there? I think the vampire who murdered her would have that answer.” The term “vampire” was akin to a racial slur and Derek knew it.

  “You’re so sure it’s Clan?” Perrine’s expression went hard again and he raised an eyebrow.

  “Not entirely, no, but so far I haven’t seen anything to make me believe otherwise.”

  “Hm,” Perrine glanced at the image again briefly and had just started flipping through the other pages of the report when there was a knock on his door.

  Instinctively, Derek’s hand went into his coat after his gun. “You expecting somebody?”

  Perrine’s eye
s widened again and he glanced quickly at the clock. “Fuck. He’s early…”

  “He?” Derek got up and headed to the door.

  “No. You stay right there!” Perrine demanded, jumping to his feet.

  Right, like that would ever happen. Gilchrist might be afraid of the Variants, but Derek had been pushing his luck for so long, he didn’t think an extra shove would make much difference. He pulled open the door to find a young human man standing there. Good-looking, decked out in clothes that looked painted on him, and way too much eye-liner. Everything about him screamed rent-boy.

  “Hi, are you Mr. Perrine?” The man drawled, his eyes raking so blatantly over Derek’s body that he nearly answered yes. Perrine wriggled in around him.

  “I am Mr. Perrine,” he said, out of breath from wrestling around Derek’s bulk blocking the door.

  “Oh, I didn’t know there would be two of you, I’ll have to put a call in to my manager…”

  “No, no need. He was just leaving,” Perrine glared up at Derek, who realized how flushed Perrine’s skin was and that him being out of breath might not be simply from trying to get past him. Oh, this was interesting.

  “Fine, fine,” Derek shook his head, moving around Perrine to collect his phone and get his coat and shoes. “Just make sure you’re showered and dressed by seven tomorrow. We need to hit the scene before the ship gets dismantled completely.”

  “Great, yes, just go.” Perrine was giving off a level of impatience that indicated he’d lost some of his careful control. Derek had a disturbing thought then; could Perrine be Clan after all? If so, this young stud was probably dinner. Derek wasn’t certain how he should feel about that. Prostitution wasn’t illegal, and some were even willing to serve Variants for the right price. Maybe a few believed they’d be lucky enough to end up as some vampire’s blood-thrall—a temporary prince or princess whose only job was to look good and give blood when their masters wanted it. A real rags to riches story, or as close as they came to that here.