Dim Sum Asylum(46)
Trent’s contact lens sat on the curb, an innocuous grayish disc seemingly too thick to have been in someone’s eye, much less worn about for hours on end, and when I coughed to get a rush of icy water out of my lungs, it blew over, tumbling across the narrow sidewalk. My partner’s feet shuffled in the circle of snowflakes surrounding us, and I regretted losing the warm comfort of his body when he stood. I couldn’t see much else. It hurt too much to turn my head, and I gave up after a mewling effort, too worn out to do anything but breathe.
Crouching over me, Trent eased me back, resting my bruised body against the curb. His sneakers were no longer white, muddied by the road’s filth and wet from the frost. His one sparkling blue eye was vivid against his skin, the color of storms and winter fury, but the other was flat and human, a lie he’d told with a piece of frosted plastic. He seemed larger, more forceful, and when he brushed his fingers across my lips, I couldn’t help but flinch, recalling the searing burn he’d shoved into my mouth.
“Are you okay?” Trent cupped my face, letting me steal his heat. “It’s a netsuke, I think. Another one. Once I got it out of you, what’s left of it curled into a ball. I shoved it into an evidence bag, but I don’t think that’ll hold it if it comes to life again. Because, you know, plastic.”
“You’re faerie.” I sounded like I’d swallowed a ball of lightning and chased it with a fifth of rotgut gin, but there were so many questions flying around in my brain, I couldn’t not talk. Every word hurt, and I scraped each one out, regardless of the pain. “Or at least half. You’re like me.”
“I’m nothing like you, Roku. Wish I was but I’m not.” His handsome face darkened, and that single brilliant tempest-blue eye turned bleak and sad. “I’m a damn splice.”
Twelve
TRENT AND I never got our talk. We didn’t even try. Every time I brought up what happened, he shut me down, and between the trips down to the ER, a few scrapings at the arcane morgue to make sure I wasn’t carrying any debris from the scorpion, and general running around like chickens with our heads cut off, there simply wasn’t time. I’d allowed myself to be dragged down to Medical again. Then Gaines dropped me off at home, ordering me to the station for a midmorning debrief. When I woke up, Bob the Cat had already helped herself to breakfast by chewing through the new bag of cat food I’d stupidly left on the kitchen counter, and I cursed my coffee maker for brewing slowly.
I hadn’t known what to do with Trent. What to say to him. How to even handle the damning evidence of his fae blood. I had a lot of questions but no answers. Certainly none I could find in the spilled kibble or the coffee grounds I dumped in the sink before I left for the station. I needed time to think and a bit of peace to work out how to talk to my new partner about picking me raw and open while hiding everything about himself.
An eternity of shuffling about with barely enough time to eat, much less sleep, and I was dead on my feet, despite the fitful sleep I’d gotten in. My bone marrow was weeping with fatigue. Oddly enough, my tipping point was when Gaines informed me the SFPD was denied entrance to the benevolent society’s building, so the reconstruction unit had to find another way up.
This led to a long discussion about paperwork duties between me, Gaines, and my new partner. We’d spent a good hour being yelled at about being irresponsible, a one-sided conversation mostly directed at me, but Trent caught the foamy bits of the word tsunami hitting me. I excused myself from the debacle with a short, curt reminder that I had a long-standing date with a set of headstones and a handful of tangerines, then left Gaines to chew on my partner a little while longer. It was Saturday, and I didn’t have it in me to face my dead, but familial obligations dug their claws in, and I made a quick stop at the graveyard, promising the girls I’d be back the next day. When I was calmer. Saner. Or maybe simply more alive.
They needed more from me than flowers, fabric koi, and citrus. I wanted more time to visit with the ghosts of two little girls who I missed so much I woke up crying sometimes in the middle of the night, imagining one of them calling out to me for water or something inane like picking up a dropped stuffed animal they needed in order to sleep. I said a quick prayer and left before I broke, unable to do more than stumble through sharp memories, bleeding out with every step I took away from their graves.
I’d gone back to the station to finish up the last of the forms I needed to fill out for Gaines and passed Trent on the way out. His eyes slid away from my face as he walked out the door. And that was the last time I saw Inspector Trent Leonard that afternoon.
We were supposed to have the Sunday off, but I’d gone in anyway, digging through stacks of useless interviews and staring at pictures of dead people and broken statues. The casters down in the morgue hadn’t come back with any findings despite me calling them at least six times that day alone, and after the polite but firm Fuck off, Inspector, I’d hung up feeling more frustrated and broken than before.
By four in the afternoon, all I’d achieved was a low-grade migraine and a sour stomach from eating vending machine burritos with shady no-expiration-date sour cream, so I headed home, intent on drowning my brain in a few glasses of whiskey.
It was funny how I still ended up looking for my family when I needed grounding, so it wasn’t a surprise when I somehow ended up standing in front of a trio of gravestones I’d just visited the day before.