by Lyra Evans
Niko slammed back into reality, crystallizing into the present moment like a flash freeze, brittle and painful and cold. Fingers curling tightly around the phone, he turned slowly to Preston. Cobalt’s eyes were on him, but Niko couldn’t focus on him then. He could only see Preston, sitting placidly in his own kitchen chair, arms tied to it. He met Niko’s gaze, but there was a system-wide error playing in Niko’s mind. He couldn’t compute what he was seeing.
“What. Is. This?” Niko asked, biting out every word as he approached Preston with mechanical steps.
Preston didn’t look at the phone in Niko’s hand. “No idea,” he said, and Niko almost wanted to believe him. It would have been easier. Preston wasn’t the glitched number. He wasn’t. Why would he be? But Niko wasn’t one for easy answers for the sake of them.
He threw his weight from his feet to his arms, swinging them forward to grip Preston’s shoulders. In a motion so fluid it traveled like wind, Niko slammed Preston backward, chair and all, to the ground on his back. The crash cut through to Niko’s brain, but he disregarded the sound and the way Preston’s face morphed to a Wolf’s maw for a moment at the pain of impact. Cobalt was at Niko’s side, but Niko stood over Preston, phone up in his face.
“Why did you send me these messages?” Niko asked, his voice deceptively even. But his eyes gave away his fury, painting the threat clearly where Niko’s tone obscured it.
Preston still didn’t glance at the phone screen. But his expression changed slightly, more guarded, more tinted with frustration. “I don’t know what you mean,” Preston said, and Niko nearly shoved the phone down his throat.
Heart thrumming a violent rhythm in his chest, Niko thought he was on the verge of cardiac arrest, but he ignored it. Nothing else mattered but answering these questions. Even a shot to the temple wouldn’t stop him getting answers, if he had to fight Death itself.
“You sent me messages for weeks,” he said, staring directly into Preston’s dark brown eyes. “You pointed me to specific casefiles, specific events. Said they were all connected, all relating to the Woods.” Mind racing, playing out reels of memories at a flickering, hummingbird pace, Niko couldn’t breathe. “All a waste of time. All to make me look a fool. To send me on a fucking grail quest! So I’d be distracted from whatever—from the fucking—fuck!”
Rage and disbelief coloured his vision, turning everything to a red and purple haze. He couldn’t even speak clearly, his entire body shaking with frustration and anger and, most of all, self-loathing. How had he been taken in by this nonsense? How had he fallen so easily for such a stupid deception? How—
“Niko,” Cobalt said, his voice a soothing song from far away. Like the break of dawn through a torrential downpour. Niko spun on him, and he found Cobalt looking meaningfully at him. With only a look, a pleading calm in his pale eyes, Cobalt quelled the growing rush of emotion in Niko. “The last text. Remember the last he sent you.”
Niko hesitated, throat tight from the tear of his anger. The last text had been the warning. To get out. To escape. The police were coming for him. He was in danger.
But that made no sense. Why should Preston want him safe and out of custody? Why—unless—
“It was all a game,” Niko said in a hoarse whisper, unable to make himself louder. He rounded on Preston again, who lay unmoving on the ground. “You sent me the text to get out so I would look guilty. So the Chief would have reason to issue a Court-wide warning about me. So she would have cause to instruct the police, my former colleagues, to shoot me on sight.”
He was breathing heavily. A marathon sprint had sucked his energy and left him gasping. He was lost in the complexity of it all, in the sheer scale of the effort put into—
“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead, Niko,” Preston said. His tone was almost disdainful. Niko twitched, his muscles urging him to release the tension right into Preston’s face. But Preston’s expression was wrong. All wrong. Not smug, not scared, not flat. Mournful.
“You are doing little to help yourself,” Cobalt said, addressing Preston. It was a warning, wary and tight, and Niko didn’t understand that either.
“Force him,” Niko said suddenly, unable to bear it any longer. His body threatened to split, to tear itself to shreds if he didn’t sort out this madness soon. He looked at Cobalt, who seemed somewhat ashen now. “Sing to him. Make him tell me the truth.”
Cobalt hesitated. “I’m not certain that would work,” he said. Niko’s eyes bulged. Cobalt made an apologetic face. His skin seemed dry. “Preston knows the effect of my Song. If no part of him would ever want to tell us the truth, he could easily fake it and make it seem as though he is succumbing. We would be unable to guarantee it actually works.”
Niko swung an arm wildly in a furious display, narrowly missing Preston’s face in the motion. “You used it on Sade no problem!”
Cobalt nodded. “Sade was caught off-guard, unprepared for what I was doing. He was also not quite as intelligent as Preston.” He shot the Werewolf a look here and added, “Do not take that as a compliment. You deserve none.”
Preston cocked an eyebrow. Niko’s head was about to explode.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“It is a rather convenient caveat,” Preston said. Niko glared down at him, certain nothing had ever been less convenient in his life. But there was at least one thing Niko hadn’t yet done that might clear up his questions.
Yanking Preston upward, Niko tugged violently on the knots binding Preston to the chair to release them.
“Oh, are we done with the interrogation?” Preston asked, his voice wavering only slightly.
But Niko ignored him and grabbed his wrists roughly, pulling his arms forward so he was holding his hands palm up in front of him. Turning to Cobalt, Niko said, “Order him to keep his hands this way.”
Cobalt Sang the instruction as Preston’s eyes flashed back and forth from Niko to Cobalt. Niko held his own hands out above Preston’s open palms, and Preston’s concern grew visibly on his face. But the order stood, and he did not remove his hands.
“What are you—”
Niko focused deep and hard, searching through the layers of magic and matter to the base molecular structure of everything around them. He repeated the complex, minute details of Dr. Aspen’s test, filtering for gunpowder residue and blood specific to Sade. He pulled and pulled, struggling to maintain the focus necessary to hold up the trade. But he felt nothing. Nothing pulled from Preston’s hands, rising between their palms. Not a thing. No gunpowder residue. No blood.
Dropping his hands, Niko flagged. He was full-out panting now, his entire body hot. Cobalt downed the rest of his water next to him. Preston waited, motionless and confused.
“What did you do?” he asked, bracing for some kind of impact.
“A test,” Cobalt said. “And it appears to have come back negative.”
Niko shook his head. “So he paid someone to do it. He didn’t go to the crime scene himself to torture and kill Sade. He just—”
“I don’t think so, Niko,” Cobalt said. And where Niko was breathless with denial, Cobalt was lost in disbelief. “I daresay he isn’t responsible.”
Preston dropped his hands, and with them dropped his entire façade. He sighed heavily. “Now you’re catching on,” he said quietly.
Niko stepped back, unable to accept this. “But the misleading casefiles, the anonymous texts…why?”
Preston rubbed at his wrists where the rope had dug into skin and muscle. His jaw was still a deep purple. “Because you would never have trusted the information if you knew it was coming from me.”
Chest heaving, Niko sank back against the side of the armchair he’d somehow knocked aside. He didn’t remember doing that. As he glared at Preston, wondering why Preston’s answer sounded reasonable, Niko continued to circle the answer he needed, refusing to fully accept it.
“And can you explain why we should trust you now we do?” Cobalt asked, making to cross his arms an
d then deciding against it.
“The information was good, wasn’t it?” he said. Niko shook his head slowly.
“All cold cases or closed cases that might not be anything more than they appear,” Niko said, thinking it over. He’d been so certain after going through those cases, so certain there was more to be found. But was that confirmation bias? Did he expect nefarious conspiracies because he’d been told there would be some?
Preston frowned. “You want to take down a secret criminal conspiracy, and you think the paper trail will be obvious?”
Niko glared at Preston, remembering the way he’d undressed Niko with his eyes when they first met, back at The RACK, when Niko was pretending to be Cobalt’s pet under a different name. He remembered the skin-crawling feeling he got whenever Preston suggested Cobalt share him. He remembered the dark excitement in Preston’s eyes when Cobalt promised to use Niko as his toy at the auction to prove his commitment to ‘the lifestyle.’
“You funded a sex trafficking ring,” Niko said, voice empty and distant. “You get paid exorbitant sums by stupidly rich people to do horrible things. You enjoy torture, and you keep fucking claiming the Woods is dead. Why the fuck would you send me information to investigate it except to keep me spinning my wheels?”
Preston sighed, running a hand through his unkempt hair. He looked more like the Werewolves Niko was used to seeing now, without his finely pressed clothing and coiffed hair. Without his designer shoes and manipulative smile. In the cabin, away from the trappings of high society Maeve’s Court, Preston was any other Wolf. Except he wasn’t.
“Because the Woods isn’t dead,” he admitted finally, but it gave Niko no more satisfaction than finding out Preston was behind the glitched number. “I’m part of it. And I’m fucking tired.”
Without warning, Niko snorted a laugh. “Tired of making millions illegally? Of taking advantage of your privilege and treating other living beings like merchandise? Tired of getting away with whatever you want? Your life must be tough.”
Preston nodded. “Maybe I am the monster you think I am,” he admitted, and even his voice was different than it had been. It was edged differently now, with no undercurrent. It rang true, though Niko didn’t want to hear it. “But there are worse monsters than me, and I can’t keep letting them go on the way they are.”
Cobalt sat himself on one of the wooden chairs, leaning against the kitchen table. He looked pensive, wary, and tired. Niko wanted him to speak up, to say something indicating Niko wasn’t insane. That Preston’s bullshit moral awakening was too little too late. That he didn’t buy into this shit. But Cobalt said nothing, as though he was weighing it out.
“Fine,” Niko said dismissively. “If you’re so damn tired of it, then why not go to the police? Why not fucking turn them in? Why the subterfuge and spy games?”
Preston stared at Niko. “Are you kidding? You forget, I know just how far the Woods reaches, just how corrupt every institution in this Court is. The Courtiers, the justice system, the police, businesses—they’ve got branches in everything. I might be tired, but I’m not suicidal.”
“So why take the risk feeding me information?” Niko asked.
At this, Preston shared a look with Cobalt. Niko felt his hackles rise at the brief moment. How were they so chummy so quickly? “You’re the only cop I’ve ever come across who can’t be bought,” Preston said, as though it was obvious. “No blackmail, no bribery. And you don’t give up. Not for anything. Clearly.”
Niko brushed this off. “There are plenty of officers who have ethics.”
Preston shook his head. “Everyone has a price,” he said. “It’s a matter of finding it. But you—your price is the truth. And that doesn’t work for blackmail purposes.”
Niko rolled his jaw. Complaints from previous boyfriends and partners and friends popped into his head, telling him he was a workaholic, that he needed to let things go, that he couldn’t solve them all. But he had solved them all. All his cases, anyway. Eventually. Even when the department denied him overtime pay, saying he’d exceeded is limit for the month or the year. He’d continue to work the case on his own time until he cracked it. No matter what.
“How can you be so sure? Just because I refused to shut up about you after the auction?” Niko asked. “Lots of other people were there, but I never mentioned them. Maybe some of them paid me independently.”
Preston gave him a pitying look, and Niko rolled his shoulders back, fighting the urge to punch him. “Even if I wasn’t entirely certain they did not, I know you. You didn’t mention their names because you had no evidence to support your claim.”
“I had no evidence with you beside my own statement,” Niko shot.
Preston nodded. “True. But I’d like to think I’m special. I just got under your skin.” Niko crinkled his nose and rolled his jaw. “But more to the point, I looked into you, Niko. I did my research. I was instructed to gather all the information on you I could, and I am very talented at that. So if anyone knows just how straight you are, it’s me.” He glanced between Niko and Cobalt a moment, then added, “Pardon the phrasing.”
Ignoring the last, Niko gave up trying to seem corrupt and got to the point. “Fine, so you didn’t think I’d trust you outright, but when Cobalt and I showed up at your door here you could have just fucking told us the truth right away,” Niko said. “Why the front, pretending you would call the police or attack or whatever? Why pretend at all?”
Preston laughed. “You appeared at my door holding a gun,” he said. “If I’d said, ‘Don’t shoot! I’m the one whose been sending you information on the Woods because I’m actually trying to help you!’ would you really have believed me? Do you even believe me now?”
Niko sucked on his teeth. Preston took that for an answer and made a gesture to illustrate his point. Cobalt got to his feet and poured out more water into his bottle. He leaned against the counter in the kitchen, looking as though he struggled to take it all in as much as Niko did.
“So if you aren’t running the Woods,” Niko said, eyebrows raised, “then who is?”
Niko expected a hedge, an excuse, a caveat. But what he got was Preston struggling against his own mouth. He moved as though he was trying to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth and failing. Niko watched with narrowed eyes for a moment, having seen this same behaviour before. The most recent incident was in the serving staff at the Shady Cove Manor crime scene from the auction case. The staff were bound by illegal contracts not to speak ill of their employers or reveal secrets. The contracts were forced trades, demanding staff silence. Niko studied Preston closely, and when he finally gave up trying to speak, Preston only rolled his eyes and gestured toward his mouth.
“A contract?” Cobalt asked, considering Preston.
Niko nodded slowly, getting to his feet. “It looks like it. Convenient.”
“Is it?” Preston asked with a flat look. Niko ignored the comment and held his hand out in front of Preston’s chest, searching for the feel of the trade magic that bound him. “If you want to touch me, you only need to ask,” Preston murmured, and Niko glared at him as he flinched beneath the threat of Cobalt’s sharp look.
It took an effort of will to maintain the magic necessary to pinpoint the contract binding, but eventually Niko did. Like a spider web made of unbreakable silk, it wove its way around Preston from all sides. Without much hope, Niko tried to make a simple trade to change it, alter it enough to free Preston’s tongue, but the magic rebuffed him, knocking his hand back as though he’d been struck.
“That’s some powerful contract,” Niko said, rubbing his fingers where the magic had rebuffed him. They stung slightly. “I suppose you can’t even discuss the circumstances of making the deal?” Preston’s mouth seemed glued shut again. He closed his eyes and raised his arms in an exasperated shrug. Niko nodded. “But you can talk about the Woods in general?”
Eyes glittering, Preston smiled. “If you’re protected from being connected to a crime, the
re’s no real concern in people discussing the crime, is there?” Niko frowned, glancing at Cobalt. The Selkie had settled into one of the kitchen chairs again, nursing his water bottle. He watched Preston silently, shaking his head. It seemed a gesture not meant to condemn one specific comment or idea, but rather the concept of Preston altogether. Niko thought he understood that feeling.
“So prove it,” Niko said, leaning back. “Tell us how all those cases you pointed me to connect.”
Preston frowned. “They’re connected by the Woods,” he said. “Each of them relates to some crime or enterprise taken on by the Woods. But they’re all individual. Some even I can’t specifically detail. That was supposed to be your job, Detective.”
Niko frowned again, shaking his head. “He’s bluffing,” he said to Cobalt. “Wasting our time. Not sure why yet, but—”
“As a show of good faith, I can explain one of the cases, however,” Preston interrupted, both urgent and frustrated at once. Niko raised his eyebrows in a pointed look. Preston rolled his jaw. “One of the cases was the death of a young man who appeared to have crashed his car, no?” Niko refrained from reaction. Preston nodded to himself. “A drunk-driving incident where no one was charged or punished. Doesn’t that seem odd?”
Niko knew the details of that case the way he knew the backs of his eyelids. “The kid was considered the offender, driving under the influence, and because he died, there was no one else to arrest. Can’t arrest a bartender for serving him drinks or a shop clerk for selling him bottles. What else is there?” But Niko had known when he first looked over the case something wasn’t quite right. It seemed clear cut, but it felt off.
“So it seemed,” Preston said. “But not a few items of evidence were difficult to explain from the scene. Items belonging to other people not the victims. A lack of proper documentation on the car and no sign it belonged to the driver. Why would he be driving along that late, on that stretch of road, in a car not his own?” Preston asked the obvious question, but at Niko’s heavy sigh, he moved along. “Then again, maybe he wasn’t.”
