by R. Cooper
“Whoa, rough talk.” Parker scooted closer and touched his food before Ray could yell at him for it. That was just gross, but then fairies didn’t have to worry about germs, so why would Cal care that he was getting his fingers all over Ray’s lunch? It would be more shocking if Cal ate it, but he didn’t even attempt it, just leaned in and pushed a piece between Ray’s parted lips.
His fingers were on Ray’s mouth. Half hard was no longer the problem. Ray breathed in and darted out his tongue, tasted sweet/salty/Cal, and looked up. It was a mistake. With Cal’s eyes on him, the growl slipped out.
Fucking fairies. They needed to learn about boundaries. Especially with a sensitive Were. Especially this fairy, with this Were. Parker might be bi-species and only part fairy, but he had the same need to be instructed on what was and what wasn’t public behavior. In fact, the only difference between him and a full fairy, aside from his useless, if pretty, wings, was that he could be serious for longer than two minutes, for all that he liked to pretend otherwise.
Ray’s teeth came out at the thought, and he bit, sank his teeth in just enough, not drawing blood but inflicting pain, because he still had some control, but Parker needed to learn what it meant when he did these things. Ray wanted to teach him this and everything else there was to know about Weres, every time he bared his throat or generally offered up himself on a platter. The idea made Ray’s head swim, and then he went even dizzier at the hot, fake little “Ouch” that Cal offered him, even as he turned the hand next to Ray’s mouth to expose his slender wrist.
Fairies were long-lived, disease-resistant, quick healers. But they could bleed like anyone else, something Ray, and Cal, knew only too well.
He was completely aroused by the display just the same, scent and instinct and the heartbreak of feeling so helpless making him release Cal’s finger and sway forward to exhale over his bared forearm. He could see the rain of sparkles at the edge of his vision, feel them land on his skin, and thought Why him? for the thousandth time. Why was his mate this man? This… half-fairy?
It couldn’t be more wrong. Fairies lived for sunshine, not the light of a fat, silver moon. They couldn’t even sit still, everyone knew that, and they had no concept of long-term monogamy. Why should they, living for so long? Ray had never heard of a Fairy/Were mating anyway. Cal might want him, did want him. But not for life, however long it ended up being for a half-fairy.
Ray closed his mouth and leaned back.
“I can feed myself,” he managed, in just a whisper. He forced himself to look away. He already knew Cal would be pouting. He breathed through his mouth to avoid the scent of hurt. His Cal, in pain.
“Dude.” Benedict looked incredibly uncomfortable. Ray didn’t blame him. “Can we please get back to the case, if you don’t mind?”
“Fine. The case.” Penn swept back into the group, plopping down at her desk and digging into her food without hesitating. “The white stuff on the floor? Lab says plain old chalk. The metal smell, they don’t know, possibly table salt, of which they found minute traces. They didn’t have anything else to work with.”
As though Ray didn’t know the smell of table salt. He frowned, then frowned harder when Parker pulled yet another lollipop from… somewhere. It was his one unexplained ability, pulling food from nowhere. He sucked it noisily into his mouth.
Focus, Ray reminded himself. He had a murderer to throw in jail.
“Only a few dozen spells need that.” Benedict was commenting. “If it was related to the murder.”
“Wow, you’ve really narrowed it down, guys, thanks.” Penelope’s sarcasm was almost lost around a mouthful of eel and cucumber.
“No, no, Ray Ray!” Cal bounced on the desk. “You’re missing the point of what Benny is saying. If it was a spell, despite the obvious strength of the killer, it had to be a human.”
“And spells are unique. Like recipes, everybody always adds that pinch of something special.” Benedict also fancied himself quite the cook. Ray stared at him.
“Yeah, like extreme rage,” he quipped, and Cal rolled his eyes. “So what’s your point?” He didn’t even really wait before he sighed and gave in.
“Get us a list of suspects, and we might be able to determine who. From their size, and also their personal tastes and—”
“A list of suspects.” Penn’s voice was flat. She and Ray looked at each other. Sometimes these two tended to forget that he and Penn did work when they weren’t around. Ray bent down to reach into the boxes filled with files at his feet and dropped a stack on his desk in front of them.
“Help yourselves. He was not a popular guy.”
“I heard.” Cal sucked his lollipop like he was going to get oil from it. Ray did not look at his mouth. “Didn’t you threaten to break his neck a few months ago?”
“I—Yes.” Ray shrugged. The moon had been full twice that month. Blue moons made him tense. And when Ray had been on the stand, the guy had implied he was incompetent. Ray flashed his teeth at the memory. “Yeah.” It had felt good too.
Benedict and Parker both blinked.
“What? I didn’t say it when I was on the stand. I said it later, outside the courtroom.”
“You should get therapy,” Cal finally remarked.
“You should get a shirt,” Ray tossed back at him. “And stop prying into my other cases.”
“Boys.” Penelope burped. “Let’s just split the stacks and get started, okay?” She wasn’t really asking. And thankfully, at last, Cal hopped from Ray’s desk to get an actual chair. He pulled it over next to Ray’s desk, but he wasn’t on Ray’s desk, and Ray could pull in the occasional breath that wasn’t full of sugary need.
“The M.E. confirmed the size of our perp, by the way. Broke the neck in one clean jerk, then twisted it all the way around. With some broken ribs that would have lead to some serious internal bleeding if he hadn’t been dead already. And….” She paused as they all glanced at Ray again.
He was probably strong enough to do it even without shifting. “It wasn’t me,” he insisted anyway, annoyed and just a little hurt because they’d all known him for years, enough to discount those horror stories from black and white movies.
For a second he was ten again, trying to explain to kids in the schoolyard that even if he did bite them they weren’t going to turn Were and that being Were wasn’t a bad thing anyway.
“Of course not.” They all murmured in unison. Then, damn it, Cal left this chair and came back to perch on his desk in a show of solidarity that Ray—and his dick—did not need.
“I’m not a murderer,” he grunted anyway, but quietly.
Cal was looking down at the files in his hand, scanning quickly over the details. It was, as always, startling to see Cal focus. Amazing, really. He was barely even twitching, though those wings were creating a breeze.
“Weird, isn’t it?” Cal remarked suddenly, under his breath and so low it had to be just for Ray’s ears. Ray looked up. Cal didn’t look directly at him. “When someone assumes things about you like that based on no evidence whatsoever?”
Ray stopped, and only then did Cal glance sideways at him, almost serious, eyes intent like he was waiting for Ray to answer. Ray closed his mouth, regretting it as the heavenly scent blanketed him. But when he didn’t speak Cal tossed out a dizzying smile and dropped his attention back to the files.
“What about Nasreen?” Penn called over to him. Ray kept his eyes on Cal, who didn’t seem to hear, but of course he had.
Ray briefly thought back to a time before when he would have never suspected such things from any fairy.
“There was no answer when I tried to call her,” he told Penn, his eyes on the line of Cal’s jaw, the slight point to his ears. “I’ll have to go see her, make sure she’s ready for whatever happens. If she’s really okay.”
Cal’s momentarily cherry-red lips curved, just a bit. He smelled indecently pleased and a touch jealous, all at the same time.
“I can go. You worry too much.”
Penn was being generous. Ray absently touched his nose and looked at her. He felt Cal’s gaze on him, on the gesture, reading it and knowing what it meant.
Cal already knew enough about him, so he tried not to react, but he still flushed. Ray could smell himself too, after all, not just Cal. And welcome and warm didn’t begin to describe the possessive, hungry scents emanating from him.
He was vaguely surprised Cal wasn’t humming. Ray had seen that look in his eyes before.
Somewhere, some part of him was panicking at the memory. The rest of him was just warm. He couldn’t ever be that naked in front of Cal again.
“No, I will,” he told Penn distantly, after swallowing. “When we have a moment.”
“Softie,” Cal whispered, and Ray hurriedly looked back down at his work to stave off the memory yet again. He stared at his lunch, which had lost some of its appeal. He snuck a few glances up as the minutes ticked by, oddly fascinated by the sight of Cal Parker motionless and concentrating.
Cal was good at this job, despite his initial reluctance to do this work. He hadn’t wanted to do what would make his father happy, until he’d realized just how good at it he really was, and that it made him happy too. It turned out, when something made a fairy happy, they didn’t like to give it up.
At the very least, it was a possible explanation for all those old stories about fairies kidnapping innocents, even if there was no fairy realm where time stood still. It probably just felt that way, getting swept up and letting yourself be seduced into forgetting that a fairy’s attention didn’t last forever.
“Detective!” Ray was so distracted, Ross’s voice made him jump. The officer was smiling at him and waving some paperwork. He stepped wide around Cal to reach Ray’s desk and hand him the papers. “I got those results from the print lab for you.”
Uniforms were often nosy and sometimes hung around in the hopes of sucking up or learning something. Ross always smelled like strong ambition, but he was one of the officers who had never had anything to say against werewolves, even if he’d had plenty to say about fairies, so Ray gave him a vague smile and started to flip through the first report. No prints found but the lawyer’s, his secretary’s, and his last client of the day, who had already been accounted for.
“Why, thank you so much, Officer Ross.” Cal was overly sweet, probably flirting with Ross too. Ross was good looking, in a clean-cut way. Short hair, square shoulders. Cal’s wings were moving like mad now and didn’t slow until Ray pointedly thanked Ross again, and the man reluctantly moved back out into the bullpen.
Ray knew Cal was studying him, likely irritated, but with someone as driven as Ross around the wolf was screaming for him to mark Cal as his, to bite his sweet skin and drag him away, piss at his feet, do whatever it took for the rest of world to understand and back off. He didn’t dare respond. He already felt the ache under his skin, the itch, like he ought to shift.
Too smart to look up this time, Ray just moved his pencil holder to hold his papers down in the mini-Cal windstorm and finished eating in the hopes it would make him feel a little less starving. Then, when he felt a fraction calmer, he opened a file too.
BY END of the day they had a short list of suspects. All with above average build. All with anger issues and who were at ease around Beings or magic. Not that the last requirement meant that someone who didn’t know magic couldn’t have learned it. After all, plenty of convicts learned the law in prison too. Nor did it explain what spell they’d worked in that room or why. Maybe just one to avoid detection. Though that could have been worked anywhere and not only at the scene.
Whatever it was, after a day working a case in Cal Parker’s presence, Ray was too tired to think about it for now. Penn had left too, about two hours after Benedict had announced he had to go home since he had a lot of work to do in the morning, and taken Cal with him. Not quite kicking and screaming, but close.
Not for the first time, Ray wondered how the man did it. It was like Benedict was immune to Fairy allure and to Cal’s in particular. Or not, because Cal frequently embarrassed him, but he kept coming back. In fact, their friendship seemed to have remained solid and unshakeable for nearly their whole lives in a way that Ray envied.
When Ray had just made detective, Calvin Parker had once made it a point to invite him out with the other detectives when they’d gone to a bar after work. It had been an honor and a public statement of support for the new Being detective, and until then, Ray hadn’t realized the guts it must have taken the man to get involved with a fairy at all, even if it hadn’t lasted. It had been, if not a scandal, then a dent in the man’s sterling reputation.
Calvin Parker had never gotten a promotion after that, but Ray had never seen even a hint of regret in him. Not much else either, to be honest. Calvin Parker was a hard man to know. But brilliant and respected, and Ray had been pleased to have been singled out for his attention. And after several glasses of black label, Detective Parker had taken out his wallet and showed him a picture of his son and Benedict as children, a Halloween picture of all things, with both of them dressed as cowboys.
They’d had the same easy, friendly body language then that they did to this day. Best friends and soul mates in a different way than Ray was used to thinking of the term.
“They stand together,” was how Calvin Parker had put it. “But not enough,” he’d added, his voice cracking for a moment before the single malt had smoothed it out. “It takes a lot to keep a fairy grounded.”
At the time Ray had been more than buzzed and very confused. Now he just assumed it was the forethought of a smart man, who knew his son better than his son would admit. Ray hadn’t even met Cal yet, and he’d already been warned away.
He sighed. If Calvin had really felt that way, he should never have introduced them. But then, like Ray, he’d been more vested in justice being served than in worrying about any broken hearts.
Three days into knowing his son, Ray had realized the obvious, right there in his living room, and he’d been trying to save himself ever since.
It didn’t help to be alone in his house now with the scent of Cal all over him.
Ray’s “love cave” as Cal had repeatedly called it, was just a house. A lair only in the sense that it was his, and safe, but a regular house otherwise. Living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and spacious closets because he was on the large side. Fridge full of beer and steak which, though pricey, was really the only thing that eased the cravings between hunts.
He thought about avoiding his living room, but with Cal so close to him all day, after weeks without a glimpse of him, he didn’t need the room to relive the memory of that first painful moment.
The whole night was as clear as the water in a scrying bowl, from the second the door had closed behind Lex and Ray had crossed his arms and faced his uninvited guest, to how he’d finally had to tell Cal to leave.
He remembered standing like that, stiff, his posture so defensive that he’d known it. It had only left him more agitated without even knowing why, and he shut his eyes.
He reopened his eyes at the memory that had been taunting him all day, pulling himself back from the brink and inhaling desperately as though any trace of Cal had lingered in his home in the years since that night. He was shaking when he exhaled, so very tired he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist a little crutch tonight.
Not scotch, though a glass or two would have been nice.
He wasn’t meant to deny his nature like this. It wasn’t right. But he had a beer and then went to bed without finishing his book or that letter to his sister. He knew why he was exhausted and also how to fix it, so he didn’t shower either, leaving the scent of Cal all over him as he undressed and slid into bed.
Then from his nightstand, he pulled out his last resort for a good night’s sleep. He was still on edge from his arousal earlier. It had taken forever for his erection to go down, with Cal’s eyes on him nearly the whole time, knowing.
Desire like that was like being n
either here nor there, between being Wolf and Man, like being aroused with no relief in sight.
Ray shut his eyes and debated shifting before sighing and shaking his head. Senses even more acute might be the death of him right now, so he shut off the lamp by the bed and stayed human as he put the towel up to his nose.
Cal had left it behind after a department softball game, and his human male sweat had been all over it. Ray had felt foolish picking it up, creepy taking it home, but there were very few options when your mate wasn’t available, and this was one of them.
It still shimmered faintly in the right light, but Ray kept his eyes closed and stayed in the dark and just breathed it in, relaxing enough to sleep.
AS THOUGH Ray once again somehow had traces of glitter still on him—something that was seriously damn well impossible—Parker’s gaze had been especially intense on him all day. Cal couldn’t read minds, Ray had had to remind himself, it just felt like he could.
Ray had detected Cal’s trail at the station before he’d set foot inside, so at the coffee cart outside he’d bought four coffees, one with extra sugar and full of flavored syrup. In fact, it was mostly syrup. He’d handed it to Cal without a word and then looked away before he could blush or do something else stupid like admit to guilt over using Cal’s scent to fall asleep.
Cal had gulped it down and then shared his sugar high with most of the station, male and female, Being and human, while Ray and Penn ran down locations on some of their suspect pool. They’d even called a few in for interviews that hadn’t gone anywhere.
Benedict had left for his other job around noon, when Penn had also insisted Ray eat more than just donuts with his coffee. After two burgers, rare, they’d decided to head out for the rest of the interviews. If working at his desk next to Parker was bad, being trapped in the same car with him for hours at a time was torture. Exquisite torture. His smell and body heat so close, that running mouth offering startling thoughts on everything from string theory to the perfect glaze for pastry.
