by Lyra Evans
Connor, meanwhile, looked as though he’d just become the before photo in a professional makeover show. His torn, white jeans were held up just below his actual waist, revealing the thick waistband of his boxer-briefs. The pants themselves fit him as though he’d broken in the knees himself, and the overlarge top may as well have been a poncho for all it functioned as a shirt. Connor’s muscled chest and stomach were clearly visible from the side of the shirt, as the openings flowed and moved even in the slightest waft of air. The sunglasses and flat-brimmed hat he placed on his head made him look like another creature entirely.
Not so Werewolf anymore. I guess that’s the point…
Connor would have looked at home in a group of permanently relaxed surfers walking back into town at the end of the night for a few drinks. Oliver looked as though he belonged in the kind of coffee shop that charged twelve dollars for a regular coffee, without milk or sugar.
“You both look—” Rory began, grin growing ever wider, “fabulous.”
“We both look ridiculous,” Oliver said, plucking at the plaid shirt. “Why couldn’t I just colour my hair or something to blend in?”
Rory brushed him aside with a hand. “For such a great cop, you have precisely zero understanding of effective disguises. The key isn’t just to not look like yourself, but to look like someone else.” She paused, with a dramatic hand flourish. “To be someone else, in fact.”
Oliver rolled his eyes, but he was too tired to fight much. Getting off with Connor had eased the tension in his shoulders somewhat, but that had been replaced with yawning exhaustion and niggling worry. The scratches on Connor’s arm and leg were definitely a concern, as was the bruise along his hipbone. Rory paid no mind to either, though the bruise was clearly visible in this outfit, and the scratch on his arm was in plain sight.
“We’re supposed to be other people?” Oliver asked, only vaguely aware of the content of his question. His mind was on Connor, and far away, on Logan’s body and the investigation.
“Essentially,” Rory said, crossing her harms over her chest and considering him, “Now give me details about your character. Who are you? Where have you been? What do you want?”
Connor made a derisive sound. “I’m Connor Pierce and what I want is to get back to my pack and clear my name.” Rory’s face fell. “So now we have our disguises, what do we do?”
With a shrug, Rory pulled the book from the window-bench and set it back on the shelf in its proper place. “Like I said, we need more info.”
“Okay, so let’s go get it.” Oliver made for the door. “No use wasting time around here.”
Rory stopped him, hand on his chest as he turned, and gave him a pained look. Her long hair was done up in a neat twisted bun. “Probably best you stay here, actually. You’re both fugitives, remember? Across border lines.” She shook her head.
“So—what? Just wait and hope the case gets solved on its own? Without us?” Oliver waved his hands in refusal. He could smell tang in his nose, tasting blood without there being any. “I won’t just sit with my cock in my hand while there’s a murder to solve and Connor’s reputation to clear!”
Rory pulled a face, and Oli assumed she was trying not to giggle. “No one is asking you to,” Rory said, shaking her head at him. “But you can’t leave the safety of this house until we have a viable plan for countering the evidence against Connor.”
“That could take forever,” Oli said hyperbolically.
“It won’t,” Rory answered. “I already got a Tweeter message from your Captain. She told me they press are already appearing at the crime scene. I sent that to my editor and he told me to shuffle out and see to what’s going on. Captain Marks says it’s already a circus.” Rory adjusted her hair. “So I’m just going to change and head out there.”
Oliver sagged on to the bedspread, his mind racing but his heart pumped slowly. The tiredness began to creep on him, unyielding in its grasp. He felt helpless, unable to do the one thing he always could—investigate. He’d spent much of his life training himself not to count on anyone else, to be self-sufficient. But here was a situation in which he was unable to rely only on his own abilities. He had to trust Rory, Captain Marks, Donna. And Connor. He and Connor were meant to be one now, no longer two separate entities. With Oliver’s instinctual urge to do everything for himself, was he really ready to be only part of a whole?
Connor went to stand by the window, gazing out at the seeming limitlessness of the ocean beyond. His arms were crossed in front of him, his biceps bulging, naked to the sun filtering in the window. It was morning, it seemed. The hours that had passed between dusk and dawn were blurred to a muddy smear in Oliver’s mind. He hardly knew what time it was. But the sun peaked up over the horizon of the ocean, streaming yellow and red and pink and orange into the sky. It painted Connor in its illumination, and Oliver wondered how someone so beautiful and strong was also real.
The glint at Connor’s neck, the obsidian collar he still wore with his incongruous outfit, struck a chord in Oliver. His hand went to his own collar, obsidian stones a comforting weight around his neck.
“We can’t keep them on,” Oliver said quietly. Connor turned to look at him. It took an instant for him to catch up to Oli’s meaning. Oli watched the realization come, watched the clouds move in across Connor’s bright blue eyes. “They’re too unique here, too recognizable.”
Connor’s hand flew to his neck. “On what was meant to be our bonding night, we have to—remove the collars?” he asked, but it wasn’t a question directed at Oli. Oli knew the sound of that question, the desperate, incredulous anger at the sky, the gods, the Great Moon, whatever. The inescapable truth was that things were unfair. Life, love, learning—all entirely unfair.
Oliver got to his feet and went to Connor, placing his hands gently at the edges of the collar. “I’ll take yours, you take mine,” he whispered. “We’ll keep them for each other, as if we never really gave them. When we do, at the end of this, it’ll be like this whole mess never happened in between.”
It was a fanciful thought, full of hope and denial, and Connor pressed his lips to Oliver’s forehead. “Only it will have,” he whispered back, but his fingers found the clasp to Oliver’s collar anyway. They undid each other’s collars carefully, reverently, coming away with a different band in their hands. Connor’s collar was lighter, more supple and smooth in Oliver’s hands. Oli’s neck felt cold.
“I’m sorry,” Rory said, and Oliver nodded, vaguely, unsure what he was agreeing to. “You’ll get to put them back,” she said. “I promise.” She reached up and squeezed Oliver’s shoulder before turning to leave the room. “You guys can wander wherever in the house or the backyard, but stay there, okay? The front yard is best to avoid in case someone pops over to visit my parents and recognizes you.” She sighed. “I’ll let you know how things go when I’m done—”
But the glint of a gemstone decorating Rory’s suspended reading nook caught Oliver’s attention. “Wait!” he cried, and rushed over to the ladder. The tiny hanging gems around the edge of the nook were all different, in all the colours of the rainbow, but one of them was, unmistakably, peridot.
“You can update us live,” Oliver said, plucking the stone from the string it was on. Rory made a sound of indignation at his action. “I can enchant this to show us everything going on at the scene in real time.” Connor cocked an eyebrow at him, and Rory’s expression brightened.
“Right! Of course!” she said, and rushing out the door she added, “follow me!”
They did as bid and ran after her down to the basement of the house. She opened a door marked VR in a massive entertainment room and ushered them inside. It was dark—pitch black, in fact—to the point that Oliver could discern no details of the dimensions or furnishings of the room.
Connor snorted and coughed. “What is this place? I can’t smell anything,” he said, and as Oliver closed his eyes and drew on his other senses the way Connor had trained him to, he realized he cou
ldn’t smell anything either. Neither could he hear anything, short of the noises emerging from Connor or Rory.
“That’s kind of the point,” Rory said. “This is a Virtual Reality chamber. We had it installed a couple years ago when the fad broke. It’s fun to use at parties and stuff, or for research, but it’s a bit overwhelming to use for anything else. I had this girlfriend, Melody, who thought it would be fun to try using it for porn. Turns out, bad idea. Does not compute well, and the result is something I’ll never be able to unsee. Or hear. Or smell. Or feel. Yeah, just—don’t.” She shuddered audibly, and Oliver was glad it was too dark to see the face he was making. “That relationship was over fast, let me tell you. Anyway, point is, you can connect the spell to this room and experience stuff with me!”
Oliver’s expression shifted radically, though no one could see it. “Brilliant!” he cried, and as he moved to hug Rory he caught himself and stopped. “Let’s, ah, go back into the hall for this.”
He found his way out, followed by the other two, and stood in the entrance to the room, holding the peridot aloft. After a moment’s thought, he turned to Rory.
“Do I just…bind the peridot to the room? Or…” he began, never having done so before. Rory tilted her head, considering it, then kicked the wall next to her. A panel opened up in the smooth surface, revealing a board of magically enhanced inputs and outputs. Several kinds of gemstones were dotted into the board, creating a strange matrix of magic flowing into and out of stone upon stone. There were also carvings along the edge of the board and some of the stones were glowing. Oliver swallowed hard. This was magic more complex than he’d ever seen before.
“I think you have to bind it to one of these,” Rory said, pointing at a set of stones along the bottom of the panel. “I’m just not sure which one.”
Oliver hesitated, motionless and stymied for a moment, before rolling his eyes and leaning in to the panel. The bottom set of stones were all different. Jade and topaz were likely not what he wanted. Emerald seemed much too narrow a usage to be the right gemstone for binding the peridot, and frustratingly, there was no obsidian. He supposed using obsidian stones would have made the VR systems prohibitively expensive for most people. There was still alexandrite, however, and aquamarine. Both were used for area magic, though aquamarine was generally used for sustained spells, while alexandrite was used for short-term but powerful spells.
Sucking on the inside of his cheek as he thought, Oliver examined both stones and where they connected to the others. The logic of the panel seemed to suggest that the alexandrite was a triggering stone, meant to kickstart the magic in the unit, sending all the other stones and spells into a frenzy to make them work. The aquamarine, however, seemed to be connected to more of the stones, with several other ones feeding into it, rather than the other way around. At the back of his mind, a memory surfaced. A younger Oliver laughed and moaned softly as a beautiful redheaded Fae nibbled at his neck, pinning him to the wall of a projection room at the back of a movie theatre. Sky had always liked fucking Oliver in places they were likely to get caught. Oli remembered seeing the shimmering aquamarine stone, suspended in the air in front of the magnifying lens, alight with magic as the movie played on without them.
Taking the chance, Oliver held the peridot to the aquamarine stone, and cast a set of binding spells on the two stones. When he was done, he laid out the groundwork of the scrying spell into the peridot and clicked it against the aquamarine stone once before finishing the incantation. The peridot began to vibrate and flicker in his fingers, and for a moment, Oliver was worried the force of the magic would shatter the tiny stone.
Breath held, Oliver watched as the peridot shook and flashed, until finally, it shone a bright white. Oliver squinted, shielding his eyes, and Connor and Rory both turned slightly away from the stone to protect their vision. After three seconds, the white light faded away and the peridot glowed clearer, like a raindrop frozen in time, tinged in the green light of a forest.
He handed it to Rory, and she tied the stone around one of her earrings. “So you’ll get everything as long as I wear it?” she asked, and Oliver nodded.
“It’ll be like we’re with you there. But the spell won’t last forever. The peridot is very small, so I don’t imagine we’ve got more than a few days before it would need another spell or another peridot to take over. But I’ve a feeling this whole mess will be resolved by then, one way or another.”
Rory nodded, pinning her hair away from the ear with the peridot. They followed her back upstairs where she gathered up her things and made for the door. Before she left, she popped out one of her earrings and offered it to Oliver. It was a bright orange-yellow topaz stone, preferred by reporters and the media. Oliver held it in his fingertips and gave her a questioning look.
“Put it in your ear and it’ll function as a phone for us. Or like an old-timey two-way radio,” she said. “You can talk directly to me, and I can talk to you. But no one else will be able to hear us. That way, I can ask pertinent questions when I go to the scene. You can ask them through me. I don’t usually part with them, but this is important.” Oliver smiled sadly.
“Only one problem, Ror,” Oli said. “I don’t have pierced ears.”
Connor reached out a hand. “I’ll do it,” he said. Oliver handed it to him, goggling at his head.
“You don’t have pierced—” Oliver began, but as he watched, Connor pressed the pin of the earring to the fleshy part of his lobe and forced it through. His jaw gritted tightly, Connor showed no outward signs of pain or difficulty except the wrought tension that stilled his body. “Fucking hell, Connor. You didn’t have to—”
“I did,” he said, staring defiantly at the both of them. “You’re both doing so much, given so much. For me. For my kin. This is nothing to that.”
Oliver said nothing, did nothing, managing only to survey his lover with sad eyes. He’d have done anything for Connor, to protect him. But Connor, like Oli, was unused to relying on too many other people. He trusted Donna, perhaps, but he rarely called on the rest of his pack for help. Even the idea of asking for help made him uncomfortable. On the serial killer case, Connor had been visibly affected by Logan’s decision to call in Oliver as investigator. And that was Oli. Just Oli.
“I’ll see you both soon,” Rory said, nodding to Connor and opening the door. “Or, well, you’ll see me. Which is obviously the better end of the deal.” She winked at them and disappeared beyond the door with only the final instruction of, “get some rest! Even with my makeover talent, you look like shit!”
Oliver laughed once, shaking his head then turned to Connor. Connor was looking at the spot where Rory had been. Oliver reached out and ran his hand up Connor’s arm.
“We’ll be fine,” he said, trying to believe it himself. “Rory’s the best investigative reporter in the Three Courts. She’ll get the information we need to solve this thing.” He pressed a quick kiss to Connor’s arm. “Don’t worry.”
Connor nodded once, shrugging vaguely at Oliver’s assurances. When he looked up, so strangely earnest and clear, his lips quirking upward at the side, Oliver knew what was coming.
“I thought I looked pretty good.”
Chapter 7
The guestroom of the Birch house was somewhere Oliver knew well. He’d stayed there several times since Rory became his part-time roommate, and her parents had even come to refer to it as his room. Lucia and Eriol Birch had given them free reign of the house, assuring them that they were to make themselves feel as at home as possible, though they knew this wasn’t a vacation so much as a temporary internment.
“Whatever we can do to make this easier on the both of you,” Lucia said, and Oli hugged her. Though Fae lived long lives, her bones already had the frail quality of a person coming to the last stretch of their life’s journey. She felt fragile in his arms, almost insubstantial, but Lucia Birch could still war with the best of them, if she needed to. Being Maeve’s right hand wasn’t a job for the faint-h
earted.
“I’m sorry for the position I’ve put you in,” Connor said to both of them. There was a wan quality to his eyes as he spoke, as though he hadn’t ever spent this much time apologizing to people and thanking them in the same breath. Oli thought his pride was wounded, and that was fixable. But seeing Connor’s gorgeous, angular face pale and drawn, Oliver wondered if maybe there was more to it. Connor seemed at once out of air, and itching to move. “You both have so much to lose, so much on the line, yet still help us.”
Eriol reached up and clasped Connor’s shoulder, his diminishing form almost a caricature of the older generation when faced with Connor—the pinnacle of powerful youth. “What is the point of having anything, if not to share it with those who matter to you and your loved ones?” he asked, and Oliver felt the familiar burning in his chest, the warmth that spread outward and tugged at the parts of himself he long ago lost touch with.
Connor nodded, and the Birches left for the day, intent on keeping things in their lives as normal as possible. It was imperative that no one watching the house spy a difference in the usual routines. Or Oli and Connor would be out of a safe-house, and the Birches could be charged with anything from harbouring fugitives to treason.
Oli took Connor to the room he always occupied while in Maeve’s Court. It was smaller than Rory’s, but not by much. The closet was normal-sized, here, but even then it was double the space Oli had in his apartment for his clothing. The walls of the room were painted an ocean-crush blue and adorned with artwork of cliff sides and crashing waves. The bed was queen-sized with a bleached, beach wood frame. The quilt and comforter were gauzy and light in texture, comfortable and warm, but breathable enough to sleep covered in the warmest nights. The pillows were fluffed and pert, and the chandelier in the room looked as though water dropped off coral scavenged from the reef just off the coast of Maeve’s Court.
