With purpose in my stride, I stalked over to my backpack, unzipped the front pouch, and pulled out the phone. Sure enough, Wu had called me while I’d been out back. Hiding the phone against my thigh, I locked myself in my temporary bedroom before hitting redial. “What’s up?”
“I’m ready for that dinner now,” Wu said without missing a beat.
“You can’t already have the results,” I spluttered. “The lab has only had the material for an hour.”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“Can we do this tomorrow?” I could still smell charcoal burning. “We’re having a family cookout.”
A smile shadowed his voice. “I can wait until then if you can.”
“Why don’t you tell me now,” I gritted out, “and we’ll go out tomorrow?”
“I’m sorry, Luce, but I don’t know you well enough to take you at your word.”
Right then having world-ending powers sure would have come in handy. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, partner.”
“We don’t know each other yet. I’m trying to remedy that.”
Yeah. Sure. Mr. Altruistic. “When do you want to meet?”
“How about now?”
Goodbye, hot-off-the-grill feast. Hello, gelatinous goo reheated in the microwave.
“Sure.” Defeat rang through the word. “I need to shower and change. What should I wear?”
“Something nice.”
I had one dress hung in the closet, its matching flats tucked under the sewing table, and that was only so I had an outfit ready for church. “This isn’t a date.”
“I never said it was.” That smile was back, and I wanted to wipe it off his face. With my fist. “I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
I ended the call before saying something I probably wouldn’t regret but that might make the hour or so I had just agreed to spend in Wu’s company even more onerous. Trudging into the kitchen, I located my aunt and broke the news. Uncle Harold would have to find out through the grapevine, otherwise he wouldn’t let me out the door without giving Wu the third degree. There was no way I could shrug this off as a work thing like I had with Thom earlier. Me flashing ankle on a day other than Sunday would send my uncle into a tizzy.
With that in mind, I rushed through a shower, cursing Wu for the necessity of shaving my legs twice this week. I dressed, wove a French braid into my hair, then sneaked past my sleeping father to wait at the curb. The sizzle of burgers hitting the grill made my stomach rumble, and I pressed a hand over my abdomen like that might quiet its complaint.
Whatever Wu had to tell me, it had better be good.
CHAPTER NINE
Wu arrived seconds before I decided to hell with it and went inside to fix myself a to-go plate. He parked a sleek sedan at the curb and joined me on the sidewalk. He had paired expensive shoes with another white button-down shirt, this one fastened at his wrists and open at the collar, with black slacks. The matching jacket waited on a hanger on a rod strung across the backseat.
I couldn’t have stopped my eyes from rolling if I’d tried. And I didn’t.
“Ms. Boudreau,” Wu greeted me. “You’re lovely this evening.”
Compared to his city slicker good looks, I was dressed in petal pink flats with flecks of mud staining the sides that screamed country girl. The flowy dress was a skosh better. Its floral pattern was a nod to summer, and its gathered elastic waistline modest underneath a braided leather belt. The round, pleated neckline was easy to dress up or down with the right necklace, and the full sleeves fastened with pearl buttons at my wrists.
“What I am is starving.” I cast one last, pitiful glance over my shoulder. “You couldn’t have called an hour later?”
“You would have already eaten if I had.” He opened the passenger side door and held it for me. “I would have missed my chance.”
I leveled a glare on him. “How did you know?”
“I have my ways.”
After he ensconced me in his ride, I waited a full thirty seconds before pouncing on him. “What did you find out?”
A hint of a smile curved his lips. “We’ll talk about it over dinner.”
A smarter woman would have snagged another bacon-wrapped onion ring for the road. “Do you really want to talk about bodily fluids over a meal?”
“You’re a cop. Your father is a cop.” Wu snorted, and even that sound managed a lyrical elegance. “You can’t tell me this would be the first time you discussed a case over dinner.”
He had me dead to rights, but I wasn’t done yet. “That’s different. Dad and I are co-workers. We share a vocation. It’s only normal to discuss work and office politics for us.”
“You and I are partners,” he reminded me. “Both of us have ties to the NSB. Using your own logic, that means we can discuss work, that it’s normal for us.”
“That is future you and me.” A future that was three weeks away, and so distant, so alien from the life I led now, I had trouble imagining it. “Present you and me are barely acquaintances.”
“Then consider this a team-building exercise.”
“Yes. About our team.” I pegged him with a look. “Kapoor seemed downright shocked that I had been assigned to you.”
“Kapoor is not my immediate supervisor,” he said, sounding like this was an argument not worth repeating. “There was no reason to consult him on the matter.”
“So he told me.”
The car accelerated. “What else did he say?”
“He called you a whale.” And promised to harpoon you if you try any funny business.
“Why would he call me a whale?” Wu glanced down at himself as though checking for signs of a blowhole. “That makes no sense.”
The urge to indulge in ocular gymnastics made my eyes twitch. “He meant you’re a big deal.”
Wu nodded in clear agreement. “I am.”
“Maybe what he meant was you have a whale-sized ego,” I muttered.
If he heard, and I’m sure he did, he let the potshot pass uncontested. “Why not ask me your questions?”
“I don’t know you, which means I don’t know if I can trust your answers.” The coterie was aware of Kapoor, they respected his tenacity, which was more than I could say for Wu. “Kapoor, on the other hand, has done me a solid. He has protected my coterie. Multiple times.”
“He protected them at a cost,” Wu reminded me. “He did you no favors.”
“I’m well aware.” I gusted out a sigh. “That doesn’t change the fact that their lives and safety are my responsibility, and I’ve been falling down on the job. Until I can manage on my own, I’m not going to bite the hand that feeds me.”
“You’ve become possessive of them in a short amount of time,” he observed.
“They risked their lives protecting Jane Doe. I had no idea who or what she was, but they did, and they still kept her safe. For me.” Thom and Santiago had almost paid for that protection with their lives. “Thom saved my dad after War revealed herself, and Portia…”
She had risked it all transferring her essence into Maggie in the hopes she could revive my best friend.
The way it had been explained to me was some charun, like Cole and the guys, could manifest their own skins. Others, like Portia, required hosts to survive foreign terrenes and function within those societies. The latter were divided into two groups: viscarre and emocarre, or parasitic and symbiotic.
Portia fell into the latter category, the connection to her host a mutually beneficial one. Otherwise, I never would have entrusted Maggie to her. Not that I’d had a right to bargain with Portia as though Maggie’s life were my own in the first place. Desperate to save her, I had struck the bargain demanded of any host without first asking permission. I wasn’t sure Maggie would ever forgive me that.
“I don’t deserve their loyalty,” I told him, “but I have it. Now it’s up to me to earn it.”
“I expected it would take longer for you to accept them.” He angled his head sharply to one side. “Perhaps it
shouldn’t surprise me. Some ties run too deep to sever, even the ones you attempt to carve from under your skin.”
There was only one member of my coterie who had taken to self-mutilation to free himself of me.
The reminder was not welcome.
Wu, who must have noticed the shift in my mood, redirected our conversation. “Have you been able to locate War?”
“No.” Miller was hot on her trail, but she was covering her tracks well. “We’ve shifted our focus onto anticipating Famine’s breach. We hope to reach her before War sinks her hooks in her.”
“Are you hoping to reason with her?” Curiosity spiked his tone. “Do you think you can win her over?”
“There’s a chance she might come back like me, right?”
“There has never been an Otillian like you,” he said with utter conviction. “Expect treachery. Famine might come into this world blind and deaf to its facets, but she’ll learn them fast. Any weaknesses she senses in you, she will exploit.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“One bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast one hundred thousand slices of bread.”
“You did not just say that.” A surprised laugh bubbled up in me. “Are you serious? Is that a real thing?”
“Yes, I did. Yes, I am. And yes, it is.”
The rest of the drive passed in a flurry of animal trivia that would have bored another man to tears. Wu, however, appeared to have a near-eidetic memory. He also seemed to have filled his brain vault with a crap ton of useless informational tidbits that made me wonder how he spent his downtime.
We arrived at our destination, a rustic lodge-style restaurant located three towns north of Canton. The line backed out onto the wraparound porch, and music poured through the parking lot from speakers mounted under the eaves. Wu opened the car door for me, and the air smelled delicious. While I was starting to drool, he grabbed a thick folio from the trunk.
“It tastes even better than it smells,” he promised. “Come on. I have a reservation.”
“Of course you do.”
Wu cut straight to the front of the line, and I followed with my head ducked to avoid the glares cast in our direction. Oblivious to the disturbance he’d caused, Wu bent the ear of the hostess exchanging names for pagers at the door. Her eyes brightened at the attention, and she honest-to-God giggled at whatever line he dropped to convince her to seat us on the spot.
We ordered drinks, both of us opting for sweet tea, no alcohol lest this seem date-like, and she returned thirty seconds later with chilled glasses filled with amber liquid and a silver tray of lemon wedges with a small mesh strainer for catching errant seeds.
Once she left, I cocked an eyebrow at him. “You had a reservation, huh?”
“Yes.” He lifted his menu, flicked it open. “I made it under another alias.” His lips twitched. “Benjamin Franklin.”
“You dropped a hundred dollars on a table? Here?” I surveyed the cozy dining area, the overall décor that of a bait shack on its last leg. It was an illusion, of course, and you didn’t have to stare hard to see through to the pristine tabletops with their pressed linen napkins stuffed with polished silverware. The vintage advertising signs hung on the walls weren’t reproduction. They were originals, a little rust-eaten, just enough to fit the theme, but gorgeous with their bright pops of color. “What do you like about this place?”
“Their snow crab legs.” He noticed me soaking up the ambiance, and what I hesitated to label as approval suffused his features. “The surf and turf isn’t bad either.”
“No, it’s not the food,” I decided. “You like that this place is one thing masquerading as another.”
Fine dining in a dilapidated cabin. The caliber of diners spoke to the quality of the food and the appeal of the environment. The more I studied the staff in their pressed tees and starched shorts, casual but not, and the drinks breezing past, craft beers with hand-printed labels, no household names in sight, the more certain I became that it had cost Wu more than a C-note to charm his way past the head of the line.
After selecting a perfect wedge, he squeezed lemon into his tea. “Is that so?”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re wrong.” His smile blossomed at my immediate scowl. “I was only following orders, Ms. Boudreau.”
“Cute.”
“Thank you.”
I counted backward in my head from ten. “I didn’t mean —”
“I know what you meant.” He sipped his drink and deemed it worthy of his taste buds. “Do you want to talk now or after dinner?”
“Now is good.” I didn’t want to give him a reason to linger over coffee and dessert.
“As you wish.” He produced the black folio and flipped it open on the tabletop between us. “I believe this is all the information you requested.”
Several pages of printed material, including photographs and X-rays, had been paperclipped together, and a clear evidence baggie the size of a Post-it note had been stapled to the top sheet. I rubbed my fingertip over the plastic, rolling the tiny cylinder inside to get a better look at the device. About the size of a grain of rice, I had a good idea of what it was before I flipped it out of the way and read the first page of the report.
“These results didn’t come from the lab.” I kept skimming page after page. “The NSB is microchipping charun like animals. I’m guessing that happens during the mandatory examination. They’re already digging around in us, so who’s going to notice an extra lump?”
When Wu didn’t contradict me, I knew I was on the right track.
“You’ve got a mole on the White Horse cleanup team.” That made the most sense. “All they had to do was use one of those handheld scanners you see in animal shelters to read the chip. After they located the registration number, the data was at your fingertips.”
Wu sat back and let me stumble through the rest.
“The ubaste we hunted wasn’t a recent breach. It was part of a litter born to a female who was brought here during the last Otillian reign of terror.” I scratched my nail on the paper. “This information clears Famine. The creature was either sick, or someone set it on this path.”
“Ubaste are low-level charun. Their cognitive function is on par with a pig or similar animal. It’s smart enough to figure out how to survive, and it’s trainable, but it has very little agency outside of meeting its basic needs.”
“You ruled out sickness quickly. Is that not a possibility?”
“Unlikely. Charun are hearty. We’re immune to most human viruses and diseases.”
“So either this guy developed a case of agency or someone set him up with a hunting ground and told him to go hog wild.”
Thom’s idea that the ubaste might be a distraction seemed most likely. We already knew War had been here far longer than the coterie had realized. There was no telling how she had spent her time outside of the procreation required to fill her coterie’s roster. This seemed like just the type of red herring diversion she would favor, a confusion tactic, and it’s not like she didn’t have plenty of time to plan. She was no doubt several steps ahead of us.
Wu read far too much into my silence. “What are you thinking?”
“This guy was a gift from War.”
“You believe she used the ubaste to distract your coterie.” He figured it out so quickly I had no doubt he had already been thinking along the same lines. “What would she gain from that?”
“Other than distracting us from the search for her and Famine? I’m not sure. White Horse got involved thanks to a small contract set up by distraught pet owners – Crap.” I dug my phone out of my pocket and started texting Miller. “We need to send someone to check and make sure those concerned citizens weren’t actually members of War’s coterie dressed in human skin suits.”
“I’ve been following the arson investigation in the papers.”
Done with my warning, I set the phone aside to play attentive co-diner, and that meant
replaying what he’d said to catch the change in conversation. “Santiago thinks the fires are portents of Famine breaching.”
“You disagree?”
Santiago had history with Famine that caused him to jump at shadows, and his hatred of her was well deserved, but that was a coterie matter. Wu hadn’t earned the right to hear the heartbreaking details of how Santiago had lost his wife to Famine’s machinations, and I wasn’t about to betray his trust to satisfy Wu’s curiosity.
“No one has set me down for Cadre 101 classes yet, but it seems to me if Famine was going to start a fire to wipe out crops, she would focus on the destructive aspect. That’s her gig, right?” I tried putting what had been bothering me into words. “What’s happening with those cases isn’t just arson. People with no history of mental health issues are clocking in to work one day, their psycho switch is flipping without provocation, and they’re burning everything down around them before committing suicide. It’s too staged. It’s almost like…”
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