After escaping from the werewolves that wanted her dead, Marcy Davins is living the life as an art curator in a south american museum. She's got a new name, a new job, a new boyfriend, even an adopted daughter... All in a world recently introduced t...
The ten women were dead and the department's coroner had capped their eyes and laced their mouths shut with silver thread, but Caelan Harlowe felt very much as if they were staring at him as he bid Dr. O'Riordan good evening and stepped into the hall. The victims were very much deceased and very heavily filled with funerary preservatives, however, that otherwise, in most circumstances rather sturdy reasoning, didn't relax him as in years past. He didn't look over his shoulder because looking back at nothing was the quickest route to true paranoia, but in the back of his skull he could almost hear the rustle of sheets and the soft, tentative barefoot shamble toward their first victim.
His hand slid over the gun holster and into his pocket. He pulled out his cell, checked for messages. Nothing he wanted to respond to, though he did.
Fear wasn't a new sensation to him, though this particular type was a novelty worn more thinly than the layer of blush so artfully dusted across the dead girls' pallid cheeks.
He didn't mind being afraid for himself. He was in the driver's seat, for better or worse. Even if it was largely an illusion, the idea that he had some control, be it over how he survived or how he ... didn't, left him relatively content. He'd been watching out for Number One since the day he'd been weaned.
Sure, he watched out for people and he rescued some and saved them where he could. He was an officer of the law, if not a particularly upstanding one. And yes, he felt terrible when someone got hurt or wounded and his heart would pang whenever he found the choices were him or them, but he was never afraid for them.
It was cold and it was callous and though he tried not to be, he was raised to follow his instincts- nature and nurture one in the same. Eat or be eaten. If someone died, it may have been unfair or unfortunate, but such was fate.
He checked his phone again at the station.
More calls and texts he was obligated to respond to. A few puzzling requests for interviews (he'd have to read more into the abrupt uptick in his popularity). An email from his boss he planned on ignoring until Kreighton got off his fat ass and waddled into his office.
Not one message, across any medium, he wanted to deal with. Radio silence from the person he wanted to hear from.
He sank into his desk chair almost forty minutes after arriving, taking a moment to regard the freshly painted -- and faintly coffee-tinted walls of his new office in downtown Hartford. Centuries of tradition had kept the supernatural from the mundane, with a few mostly-human specimens serving as go-betweens, but with the public reveal of werewolves and several other creatures of the night, and the wildfire spread concerning 'Reapers' and their teams, they'd been officially given their own operations center. Well, it wasn't like werewolves came out of the woods and poof! There was the supernatural investigations unit. It'd always been there (as had a few secret areas and task forces), a little whisper of background noise you never notice unless the world's gone silent.
He read over the reports from the most recent girl -- a woman, technically, but she'd been out celebrating her 20th when she'd had the contents of her throat relocated to the jeep's steering wheel.
He finished the report and glanced at his phone again.
It'd been months.
He'd been, and he hated to admit because every time he thought about it his stomach really did take a nose dive down a roller coaster of unease, he'd been worried sick about her for months.
It was his fault. He knew he was making the wrong choice when he let her go but he'd done it anyway because he couldn't stop the devil on her shoulder but he knew how to stop the monsters around them both.
Miss Finn had been in early in the morning (another day ago at this point) to scream at him about finding her son and locating Marcy. It was their daily ritual. She would ask what progress he'd made, knowing the answer was, "No new leads, sorry, Ma'am." He would look over his coffee and say, "No new leads, sorry, Ma'am." and raise his eyebrows at one of the deputies to get this woman the hell out of his office, and Cal wouldn't leave until she'd given him, piece of shit he was, a good and strong verbal beat down.
After he'd finished the reports for the night and prepared to head out to the bar and finally home, he checked his phone again.
Evita, Stephen's wife, Cal's rational right hand woman, had called twice. No voicemail.
He figured it had something to do with the bill the office had sent to Calico after she'd smashed several of his mugs in the process of trying to literally box his ears in, or at the very least, burn him with his own coffee. She'd been real pissed the day she realized he'd been drinking cold brew.
Caelan didn't care about the mugs, better to sweep up bits of shattered ceramics or change a shirt than have to explain a brawl.
Of course, a brawl was exactly what he intended. So he'd mailed the petty letter asking for $89.36 and expected to visit the house to confirm she got it. He fully expected to have it out with her in the woods to end this damn charade. She was losing it. She needed to see that, and he didn't think she would until she was flat on her back with his teeth on her throat.
He frowned at the caller id. Evita had probably gotten to the mail first and swept in to solve the problem by offering to put it on her card. Cal would never know, and thus Cal would keep coming back to terrorize his-
"Bossman?"
Jorge poked his head around the corner, rapping his knuckles uncertainly against the door frame.
Caelan lifted his head to regard the scrawny computer forensic specialist.
"She's on the copier again," he said. "We can't get her down."
For a moment Caelan thought Miss Finn had stormed in at this unreasonable hour, and then Jorge lifted his other, shaking hand, a hand full of tiny scratches.
"It's a cat," the sheriff said with just a hint of glossy irritation in his smile.
"I know, boss, but she's so mean."
"Fine," Caelan said after waiting just long enough for Jorge to think about the fact that he, Jorge, was a full grown werewolf cowed by a ten pounds of ratty fluff. He rose, and in doing so missed a third call from Evita.
💗 See you soon! 💗
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