Dim Sum Asylum(53)

“Not a problem,” he reassured me as he padded into the room. He waited for me to sit back, my hands cradled protectively around my cup, then scooted the coffee table away. Setting his own mug down, he sat down on the table, his knees nearly brushing my shins, and studied me carefully.

His eyes were… unnerving. I’d grown used to the gray-blue he’d hidden behind, so it was going to take some getting used to the nearly electric icy stare he gave me now. The rest of him was the same, barely a hint of faerie in his solid features, but now I could maybe see a bit of something sharp in his cheekbones and strong jaw. He’d picked up his cup again, his broad thumb making long strokes along the curved white stoneware, and from what I could see, Trent wasn’t in any hurry to hammer things out.

So I tossed the first stone into the metaphorical lake to see what was lurking beneath the dark waters between us.

“Are we doing twenty questions? Or do we pick a topic, then talk it to death?” I braved another sip of the brew, and it hit me again, punching its way through my nervous system. “Because I’ve got lots of questions here, Leonard, and you haven’t been around to answer them.”

“Again, day off and needing time. Want to start with the case or…?” His focus shifted again, caught by something dark winging by the broad windows, its shape mostly hidden by the shuttered blinds. Turning back to me, he continued, “Or do you want to tell me about what happened yesterday after you left the station? And showing up at Kingfisher’s before anyone contacted you, and holding a bag with another netsuke you say tried to kill your grandfather, a known yakuza crime lord.”

The sheer size of him loomed in front of me, and Trent’s slight shifting on the coffee table forked up a nervous hash in my belly. I was still a little tender in the head from the gin I’d been served, and I hated the cracked-brain feeling it gave me, but mostly I disliked the tingle of paranoia whispering under my thoughts. Gin did shitty things to my mind and even shittier ones to my body, but mostly it strung me out until I couldn’t tell which way was up. Like being uneasy about what felt like an apex predator trapping me against a couch with a hungry, angry heat radiating off of his massive body.

Suddenly I wasn’t all that happy about my gun being so far away. But I knew it was the juniper berries talking. Or so I hoped.

“How about if we start off with you and….” I hated being called a splice, and the few I’d known before Trent were older, unhappy people who’d either fallen victim to their parents’ odd need to have a winged kid or somehow thought adding a bit of mystical insect to their bodies would make their lives go sweet. I didn’t know where to start with him. Didn’t know what to say. Confusion muddled my already murky thoughts, and I reached for the first thing that popped into my head. “What are you?”

“Besides human?” he teased, but his eyes went a bit flat. “Thrym. They think. I don’t know for sure.”

“I don’t know that one.” I was pretty good with Western Europe and Asian faerie, but my knowledge of interior Europe was a bit sketchy, especially since many fae in those regions avoided other clans by burying themselves deep in the wilds and mountains. “Russian?”

“Scandinavian. Frost faeries, a little bit like the Goku in front of Kingfisher’s, just more….” He jutted his jaw out, creasing his brow until it hung heavily over his squinted eyes, then relaxed. “Coarser features and big. They make snow and ice.”

“Hence the popsicle-tong fingers,” I murmured, mostly to myself, but I caught Trent’s wry, abashed grin.

“Yeah. One of the… side effects of the splice,” he conceded. “My turn. Were you with your grandfather yesterday afternoon? While Jie was being killed?”

My breath froze in my lungs, an acidic kick adding to the already sour brew I had going in my belly. Placing the coffee cup on the corner of the table, I asked, “You think I murdered her and I’m using my grandfather to set up an alibi? Is that the real reason we’re off the case?”

I wouldn’t think it of Gaines. He’d been my other parent for the most part, the house I’d gone to when my mother worked an all-nighter and I’d been too young to stay in our Chinatown apartment, but that didn’t mean there weren’t others in the department who’d throw me under a bus if they had the chance.

“I don’t,” he replied softly. “I know you. You might go a little maverick once in a while, but you’re a solid cop. One of the best C-Town has. If you were going to go off the rails, you wouldn’t start by killing someone you’d known since you were a kid, and you sure wouldn’t get caught doing it.”

“While I appreciate your faith in me, you haven’t known me that long.” I snorted, counting the hours I’d spent with him and thinking I had sandwiches older than our relationship rotting away in my fridge. “What the heck do you know about who I am or what I’d do? We haven’t been partners that long, remember?”

The tired I felt suddenly appeared on Trent’s face, deepening the crow’s-feet near his eyes. He looked away, this time not following any movement outside but simply drifting off to stare at the wall. For the longest time, I thought he wasn’t going to say anything. I was about to slap his knee to get his attention when Trent finally spoke, his voice a light feather of sound against the pound-pound of my headache.