Dim Sum Asylum(32)
I was about to leave Trent to drown in the rain by himself when he grabbed my arm. There was a little bit of prissiness in me because of his words. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew people talked shit about me behind my back. Hell, sometimes they even waited for me to turn around. It didn’t matter. I bled blue probably as much as anyone on the force. It was just my bad luck I had generations of badges behind me, and people always seem to expect, I don’t know, more from me. My mother had, and Gaines certainly did. Now I had my partner pretty much echoing the same sentiment.
“Look, MacCormick… Roku… I didn’t have time to prepare for this. I was told a couple of days ago I was going to be your partner, so I tried to get my head around working with you.” His grip was strong, fingers digging into my arm. I’d worn softer manacles. “I read as much as they’d release to me and whatever was in the news, but there were a lot of people who shut down when I asked about you. Like they’d locked their lips and threw away the key. On paper, a lot of your cases look… sketchy. At least to me.”
I was sick of apologizing for who my mother was or the damned family she’d tangled me into because she couldn’t keep her hands off my waste of a father. As often as I heard how the department let me run wild, I’d also caught whispers of a cover-up because I didn’t pull my own weight. No matter what I did, no matter how high my close rate got, there were always shadows staining my work. Trent needed answers to questions that never should have been asked, doubts that never should have been raised, and other than telling him to fuck off, I didn’t have anything for him other than a reassurance I was worthy of wearing my badge.
“Most of that is because of… strings being pulled by other people, not me.” I debated extracting myself from his grasp, but I had a real fear I wouldn’t be able to. Trent Leonard was strong, a bit freakishly strong, even taking the whole Norse hewn-from-stone thing he had going for him. His eyes were flinty, and the edges of his scarring were pale, a snowflake crenulation on his tanned cheek. “They’re just cases. Typical of the crap that ends up in Arcane. Chinatown’s just got a bit more of the weird than other AC squads. But you could say that about any of the departments. Hell, have you seen our Lost and Found? We had a baby rainbow giraffe living down there for two weeks until the zoo finally came and took it in.”
“Your case files are not just weird, Roku. They’re all over the place. It’s like a stone soup of crime. People killing each other over a salamander, to a guy whose face got ripped off by a baby gryphon, and everything in between.” He loosened his hand but didn’t let go. Just stood there, holding me by the arm. “I’m just trying… look, I’m trying to be a good cop, and in order to do that, I’ve got to understand you. And not be afraid to ask questions—even stupid ones—but at the same time, you’ve got to cut me some slack. You asked me to be honest. You can’t get mad at me because I gave you what you wanted.”
It was always hard to admit it wasn’t wine on my face when I was busy pissing on myself, and Trent’s words… they stuck in my throat, a poisonous spider’s barbed web strung across the back of my tongue to catch my denial. He was right. I didn’t want him to be right. I wanted to nurse the ember of my twisted-about outrage and shove him as far away from me as I could.
That said more about me than him. I didn’t want to bury Trent in a deep hole because he ticked me off—that part was a given—no, I wanted to entomb my new partner because the damned asshole didn’t dance politely around things I’d sooner avoid. Like the truth.
“Okay.” It felt like I was coughing up a lungful of gravel, but I finally got it out. “I’ll give you that. You’re right. Just let go.”
“I don’t want to.” Trent’s murmur was nearly lost beneath another of the dragon’s low belling calls, but its sear broke through the ice on my skin. “I’ve got you, MacCormick. Here. On the side of a damned building. Hell, wherever you want to go, but you’ve got to let me in. You’ve got to tell me what we’re doing. I’m your partner here. And yeah, I’ve got to get some of the shine off my badge, but the only way I’m going to do that is if I know where your head’s at. And maybe what we’re up against. That’s all I wanted to say to you. The rest of it? It’s just noise.”
“I’m kind of hard on partners.” He might have thought I was talking about Arnett or any of the others I’d chewed through since landing a desk at the Asylum, but he wasn’t wrong about the death wish. Or at least the one I’d had for a long time after the Riots.
I didn’t want a partner. Didn’t need one. And I sure as Hell kept losing the ones I wanted the most.
I’d lost everything, including myself, and I wasn’t quite ready to have someone stand beside me. Not after sitting vigil over John’s ashes—over the girls’ ashes—and instead of finding peace, I’d found a self-loathing and guilt I hadn’t quite extinguished. It was past time to let go of the weight I carried. That was the whole purpose of punching a black star into your wings—so you could carry that death weight somewhere other than your soul.
It was a pity mine were only ink. The weight had nowhere else to go but under my skin.
“I know,” Trent teased, his face gentling with a smile. “I’ve read the reports. I knew what I was stepping into. Mostly. You’re a lot more intense than I expected, and that’s not a bad thing. But I’m good with being your partner. Okay?”