by Lyra Evans
When Cobalt released him from the hug, he seemed unwilling to release him entirely. Instead, he shifted his muscled body to gather Niko close to him, sharing warmth and skin and the safety of creature contact.
“Where was your father?” Cobalt asked. Niko flinched internally, not wanting to discuss it. But he was here now, and this place was so intimate to him, so deeply buried in the core of his heart, it felt as though he was more vulnerable here. More open than he wanted to be.
“At home, drunk,” Niko said. “Or at the bar, drunk. Doesn’t matter, really.”
Cobalt looked as though he meant to ask more questions, more confused than he’d perhaps ever been around Niko, but now Niko admitted one thing, all the others wanted to escape. He saw himself, only ten, tiptoeing between his bedroom and the kitchen because he would have to pass the living room on the way. His father was passed out, beer bottles and some harder stuff littered around him, the television bathing him in a dim yellow light. It was the only bath he’d have that week, likely, and Niko knew better than to wake him.
He’d pilfer whatever food he could find in the kitchen—usually canned goods that had been there since his mother was alive—and stash them in his bedroom until he could take them out of the house. His father never cooked—what a ridiculous notion—so Niko ate whatever he could scrounge. Crackers and cheese most nights, or a couple eggs if the elderly woman next door had thought to pick up some essentials for them. His father worked long hours and didn’t always have the energy, didn’t he know? He worked hard for Niko’s sake, to keep them out of the poor house.
Except Niko essentially lived on the street already, barely eating enough to maintain his meagre weight. And if he wasn’t careful and his father did catch him taking food, or making any noise at all, or just being alive at the wrong time and place, Niko suffered mightily for that. He never hit Niko, that he could remember; instead he would lock Niko in the tiny bathroom for days at a time, making trades to keep him trapped there. So he could learn what it meant to starve. If you keep stealing my food when you aren’t supposed to have it, that’s what’ll happen. But all his father ever managed to punish out of him was the vague memory of a time when they’d been happier. A family.
Niko was, of course, to blame for everything—the state of the house, his father’s poor pay, his mother’s death. He had never been certain how that was possible, but for years Niko had believed him. Until he learned the truth.
The night he’d gone to the bathroom to find his mother unconscious on the floor, toilet filled with blood, the tiles spattered with it, was something he’d never get out of his head. He called for his father, begged his mother to wake up, but she was bleeding and pale, and Niko didn’t know what to do. When his father had finally come in, he’d told Niko to go to bed, that he’d take care of it.
Niko hadn’t slept all night, but he had been too afraid to leave his room again. By morning, he heard people come in, and when he peeked out the door, he saw people in blue uniforms rolling out a stretcher covered in a sheet. His father had said she’d been too sick and died. Later, he told Niko pregnancy had made her weak, that she’d been sick all through carrying him and it had come back with a vengeance to kill her. Only years later did Niko realize what had happened, what his father had done.
Abortion was legal, of course, but his mother had always wanted a big family. His father had not. There were still ways to cause a miscarriage. Old ways. Dangerous ways. But they were easier than arguing in a doctor’s office. Some were even unnoticeable. Even for the mother.
Cobalt stared straight ahead, his jaw rippling with tension, his eyes cold as ice. He held Niko with a barely contained fury that Niko had known once. He had felt it too,all those years ago, when he realized. Now he felt little. It was a cavern in his heart where that information was buried. Letting it out only accentuated the emptiness of the cavern.
“Did you have him arrested?” Cobalt asked, his voice quiet and calm. It didn’t fool Niko, that calm.
“There was never any evidence,” Niko said, staring at his hands. “The medical examiner at the time thought it was just a septic miscarriage. No reason to investigate further. I only figured it out when I was already a cop. Put the little pieces together.” He shrugged, reaching for the duffel again to find something to eat.
“Did you confront him yourself?” Cobalt asked, and Niko thought it was a reasonable question. From the outside. Niko chased things down relentlessly, seeking justice, intent on proving his theories right.
“No,” he said, peeling the wrapper off a protein bar. “Wouldn’t know where to go to find him even if I wanted to.” He’d been out of touch with his father for years now. It was a conscious choice on both their parts, though it hadn’t always been.
“Niko, I—”
“Don’t need pity or apologies or any of that,” Niko said, shutting it down. He pulled free of Cobalt, peeling off the ‘uniform’ for the cleaning service and pulling out some warmer clothes to sleep in. The room was well sheltered from wind and rain, but without a source of heat, the air still cooled at night. “What I do need is to figure out this fucking case and find Preston.”
Cobalt said nothing, watching silently as Niko pulled a t-shirt on and gathered the ledger from the duffel to study. He got up to change after Niko, setting the ridiculous uniform into the bag, as if they might need it again. As he dressed, Niko’s eyes wandered up and caught on Cobalt’s Soul Stone.
“Whatever you need, Niko,” Cobalt said, the Stone disappearing beneath a shirt he donned.
Staring at the space where the Soul Stone vanished from his sight, Niko wondered whether Cobalt really meant that. And whether they defined ‘need’ differently.
Chapter 12
Niko woke with a start. An unfamiliar buzzing, brash and uneven, played a disruptive tune against the wood of one of the crates. He snapped upright, having slumped over sideways when he fell asleep. He realized, as he grabbed for his burner phone, that he’d been asleep in Cobalt’s lap. Cobalt, meanwhile, was holding the ledger they’re recovered from Preston’s condo and reading it high, his arms up so as not to disturb Niko’s sleeping.
“What is it?” Niko asked into the phone, still bleary-eyed and disoriented. He expected Starla’s disgruntled response on the other end, but he got someone else.
“Oh thank the Firs,” Uri whispered, as though he was speaking from inside a closet. Perhaps he was. “Are you safe? Are you out of the city? Have you—”
“Where did you get this number?” Niko asked sharply, ready to pull the phone apart and bolt.
“Star gave it to me, relax, Nik,” Uri said, his voice even lower than before. “She’s still holed up somewhere, and no, I don’t know where. But I kept calling and hounding her, so she gave me your burner number. Said you have a backup in case.”
Niko wondered about the backup Starla meant then remembered she’d given Cobalt a phone too. “Right. Yes, we’re somewhere safe, for now,” he said, side-stepping the specifics of their location. “Why do we need to be out of the city? What’s going on now?”
Uri let out a ragged breath followed by some shuffling noises. “It’s not good. Chief’s losing her mind. I’ve never seen her look this dishevelled. Like, she had her hair up in a bun and wasn’t wearing makeup last I saw her.” Niko tried to picture this and failed. Though there was certainly perspective to keep, messy hair and a lack of makeup was essentially a nuclear-winter-type scenario for Chief Banyan.
“I never realized she hated me this much,” Niko muttered to himself.
“That’s just it,” Uri said. “She doesn’t. She’s never looked so grim as when she gave the shoot-on-sight order for you. She was almost green. I don’t think any of this is sitting well with her.”
“Then why is she doing it?” Niko asked. His own tenuous safety gritted at the edge of his words.
“Pressure from up top,” Uri answered. “She’s been hounded almost constantly by media and the fucking Courtiers. Some in partic
ular. The Lindens have been spewing shit non-stop, talking about how you’re a danger to society as a whole, that you’ve abused your power for the last time. They’ve always had a hard-on for ‘abuse of power’ bullshit in the judicial system. But this morning Lucius Linden was on every news channel going on about how you’re clearly working with Selkies again, which makes this the third time Selkies have helped you obstruct justice.”
Jaw tight, Niko pressed the heel of his hand into one of his eye sockets, trying to wipe away the sleep and dryness. “Third?”
Uri sighed. “The first when you interrogated Hemlock, the second when you let Sincloud kill Vermillion Oak instead of taking him in.”
Niko seemed somewhat surprised by that last one. “Oak was a Selkie, you’d think he’d consider that a win. And I didn’t let Cobalt kill Oak. It was self-defence, remember?” He added the last almost as an afterthought. It hadn’t been self-defence. It had been clear-cut murder, from a Fae perspective. But Cobalt’s role as Royal Guard to the Selkie King and the Prince meant that his job specifically required him to execute Oak. Which complicated matters. And Niko’s ethics.
“I don’t get it either, but they’re using it as an excuse to argue Selkies don’t care about sovereign borders or laws or whatever. Like they’re just willy-nilly running around the Three Courts, taking control of people, and committing crimes” Uriah sighed again. “And ridiculous as that sounds, they’ve got a lot of support. Big crowds are gathering outside the Court House, calling for your arrest and the closing of all our borders. Which is impossible, because Selkies live in water. What are we supposed to do, build a fucking wall to block out the ocean?”
Niko felt the emptiness in his stomach like a knife to the gut. He was exhausted and worn and hungry, but he couldn’t make himself eat anything. All this uproar for the murder of a convicted sex trafficker and rapist. Sade was somewhere in the afterlife laughing his ass off.
“So Chief Banyan bought into all that?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Uri said. “I think it’s just the pressure. Like I said, she looks sick all the time. The Captain’s tried to talk to her, to get her to re-evaluate, but she’s threatened him and anyone else who tries to defend you or your rights with expulsion from the force and disciplinary measures.”
“Fuck,” Niko said, remembering his Captain’s face when he’d arrived at Sade’s murder site. Captain Baobab had done so much for Niko, much more than he knew, and for him to risk his career… Niko shook his head, though Uri couldn’t see it. “Don’t defend me. Just—”
“It’s bullshit, Nik,” Uri said, cutting him off. “You’re getting treated worse than the fucking scum you’ve put away. Even fucking Hemlock got treated better when we took him in, and he fucking tried to kill you. In front of us.”
The bullet scar on Niko’s chest felt raw at the memory. He’d been proud to take that shot, frankly, but now it hardly seemed to matter. A minute success against a tidal wave of failures.
“Is there any new evidence?” Niko asked. “Did Star—”
“I tried looking into properties in the jungle-forest,” Uri said, sounding rushed. “I can’t get specific ownership details on all the properties without a warrant, which we’re obviously not getting, but I can tell you there are only a handful out there. There’s a grouping of them together on the Western side, near the rocky shoreline. Seems like it might be a small commune of sorts, pretty harmless. The other few are scattered about in different places. I’ll send coordinates to Star in an encrypted email. Maybe she can make more sense of it. I can’t be seen to be looking into anything but you at the moment.” He sounded apologetic and beaten down. Niko wished now more than ever he’d made a clean break from Uri after they split up. It would have been better for Uri, in the long run. But after Cobalt left, Uriah had been there. Not as an ex-boyfriend needling in, like Niko had expected, but as an actual friend. The long road they’d walked meant something to Niko, now. Maybe more than his romantic relationship had meant…but Uri didn’t deserve this mess. None of them did.
“Thanks,” Niko said, when what he really meant was I’m sorry. He hung up and turned to Cobalt, who seemed to have gathered everything.
“I take it you mean to head to the jungle-forest immediately,” Cobalt said. His dark skin was washed in harsh light from the flashlight, but even the unflattering angle couldn’t dampen the appeal of the planes of his face, the rich depth of his skin, and the ethereal quality of his gaze. But beneath the constant beauty was the subtle shadow of weariness. He was tired too. He didn’t have dark circles under his eyes, nor was his skin turning a strange shade of grey like Niko’s, but something in the line of his mouth and the edge of his jaw spoke of tiredness.
“You didn’t sleep?” Niko asked. He hadn’t meant to himself; it just took him. He didn’t even remember falling asleep. A tiny voice in his mind asked him if Cobalt might have Sung to him, but Niko brushed it aside. Cobalt would never have done that. He made that much clear on their last case.
Cobalt held up a bottle of water with a fifth left. “I’m drinking; it’s all right,” he said. Niko noticed a handful of other bottles from their stash, now empty, sitting off to the side.
“Have you made any progress on the ledger?” Niko asked, sliding his thumb across the screen of his phone to call up the photo gallery.
“I’m afraid not,” Cobalt said. “The numbers here do seem to match up with transfers from prominent Courtiers and other affluent people into Preston’s account,” Cobalt said, referencing the list in Niko’s files. “But as for the meaning of the symbols and letters next to the numbers, I still cannot identify a consistent code. I have hypotheses about two entries, but otherwise—”
“Which ones?” Niko asked, leaning over to see the ledger. Cobalt flipped to the last marked page.
“This amount here,” he said, indicating the large sum at the top of the page. It was marked in red rather than blue. Certain listings had been done this way, but Niko wasn’t yet certain why. “Seems rather hefty. It appears to be a payment from Preston to someone else, rather than a deposit into his account. I believe this timeline syncs with the approximate time Vermillion Oak began to traffic in earnest.” Niko looked at the date on the banking file. It was around the time Niko had been undercover with Sade, when Sade had started sounding crazy, ranting about ‘the Woods’ to himself.
“You think that’s Preston’s investment,” Niko said, nodding. It made sense. There was a set of deposits following that investment, and a few of them seemed clustered around weekends. “Then these might be payments for Selkies from buyers at the auction.”
Cobalt leaned his head to the side, stretching his neck. “Perhaps,” he said. “But there is no way to be certain of that. After all, Oak would have likely insisted the payments go through him, would he not?”
Niko weighed it out. “Maybe. We’ll never know for sure now,” he said. A prickle of uneasiness fizzed between them, and Niko regretted his wording. It hadn’t been meant as a dig at Cobalt. “Then what was the other one you have a theory about?”
Cobalt pointed to the last entry. It was in blue, and the sum was rather large. The symbols and letters next to it formed a very short ‘word,’ where the other entries were rather long.
“This sum was transferred to his account only a few days before he was last seen in public,” Cobalt said, indicating the corresponding banking information. The account from which it was transferred was an unknown one, originating somewhere in Nimueh’s Court. Because of the Treaty, MCPD had to formally request account information through the Nimueh’s Court Police Department, which then had to obtain a warrant and contact the bank in question themselves. They would also assess, on their own, whether or not the information was in fact relevant to the MCPD case in question. But as Niko’s ‘case’ wasn’t actually on the books, there was no possibility for him to obtain any of that information. “The banking information then lists the withdrawal of a significant amount from his account, and
no action since.”
Niko frowned, piecing together what Cobalt was implying. “You think he was paid to disappear?”
Cobalt nodded his head once. “I think it very likely.”
Niko looked through the bank records. “But he took a tiny fraction of his full wealth,” Niko said. “If he was going to disappear, why not drain the account?”
Considering this, Cobalt plucked the fishing lure from the crate-table. He studied it with darkening eyes. “Perhaps he was only meant to disappear for a short period of time. Perhaps it wasn’t a payment, really, but collecting on a debt. Perhaps Preston was intent on getting certain affairs in order before he vanished into the wild.” Cobalt looked at Niko, his gaze impenetrable. “After all, he took only his Autumn and Winter clothing with him. Seems as though he intended to return for the Spring. That would be in a couple months’ time, no? Long enough to avoid any connection with any particularly news-worthy affairs, I imagine.”
Niko simmered in silence, his eyes seeing not what was before them but the various events of the past three months. The journalists, the Court hearings, the mess with Sade, the questions about Cobalt’s whereabouts, the rise in anti-Selkie opinions—Preston had been absent for all of it. And now with Sade’s murder, not one person had mentioned Preston’s name in days. Except Niko. And as Niko was the only one pushing Preston’s name in the press, this turn of events certainly favoured him. But could he have been planning this from that long ago?
“He disappeared like a week after you left,” Niko said. “You’re saying he had this elaborate plan to frame me from then? That would mean he had to somehow guarantee Sade would be released.” Niko pulled up the photo of Preston with Keilani Palm. Was she really working with Preston? Was she involved in the Woods? And was Preston perhaps the head of the Woods after all?
Palm had seemed like the most reasonable of the three Courtiers at the hearing. Where Linden spouted the anti-Selkie nonsense she likely adopted from her husband, and Cypress followed along like the sycophant he was, Palm seemed to have more reasonable questions. But that would be the perfect cover, wouldn’t it? Let Linden and the minions make the case for you, then push through the ruling as though your hands are tied. They just made the better argument. The fundamental rights of our citizens are at stake.
