It was no less than they deserved, so they’d resolved to endure it and then offer apologies.
Momentarily derailed, Captain Abbot braced his hands on the edge of his desk and took several huge breaths. Trina wondered if she was about to have to administer CPR.
“Sir,” she said, and his glare was enough to make any vamp or werewolf cower. “It was completely unprofessional of us, and we’ll understand if you need to take some sort of disciplinary action. But we were afraid that announcing the trip would tip off the dealer we were trying to track.”
He stared at her a moment. “The dealer who sicced the dogs on our vics,” he said, slowly, repeating their concocted story back to them. “Who went underground. Who you tracked to Virginia.” His gaze flicked between the two of them.
“That’s right,” Trina said with a confidence she didn’t feel. They decided to admit to getting as far as Virginia on the off chance they’d been captured by a traffic cam or something. You couldn’t be too careful, Nikita had reasoned. The best lie was the one that stuck closest to the truth. “But like I said, the trail went cold.”
“We’ve got CIs on the lookout for him,” Lanny said. “And a reward’s been offered. If he shows his face again in New York, we’ll know about it.”
Their captain gave them a long, flat look. He didn’t believe them, she knew…but they had a spotless record, and Abbot wasn’t the sort to start thinking the worst of his people.
Finally, he let out a deep exhale through his nose; it whistled faintly. “You’re both damn lucky you’re my best detectives, you know that?”
Relief crashed through her.
“You’re both riding a desk for the next week. And my body-snatching problem? I want it solved.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Absolutely, thank you.”
They talked over one another and ducked out of the office before he could change his mind.
A half-dozen heads whipped back toward computers and open case files as they stepped back into the bullpen, and Lanny smirked. “Buncha vultures. Coffee?”
“Dear God, yes.”
They went out to the cart on the sidewalk, and once they had warm paper cups in hand, leaning against the stone retaining wall in front of the precinct, Trina took her first deep breath of the afternoon.
Fall was coming, the days a little shorter, the heat an echo along the ground, the air smelling cooler and sharper, the first faint hint of an autumnal ripening. She tipped her head back and stared up the crisp blue wedge of sky she could see, framed on all sides by the lines of building roofs.
Lanny pressed his shoulder against hers, an undemanding touch that she returned with pressure from her side.
He breathed a quiet chuckle. “Can you believe we pulled that shit off?”
“No. Gonna take a few more days to sink in.”
“Do you think they’ll really leave us alone?” He didn’t have to clarify who.
She winced. “I hope so. At least for a little while. That video…that’s the sort of thing that could cause one hell of a mass panic. They don’t want it getting out.”
“What about the other video?”
She frowned, and turned to gauge his expression. He looked mostly relaxed, a little tired around the eyes. Content. Healthy, which was the most important. But she saw the worry, too; faint, but persistent.
She offered a wry smile. “It feels like I accidently watched something top secret that would keep regular folks up at night if they knew the actual state of the world. Which. I did.” She sighed. “It’s terrifying. It’s unbelievable. But do I think that we could do anything significant to push back against it? No, I really don’t. So. I say we do what we can. Here in our city. For as long as we can.” Until the literal wolves gathered outside the door.” She reached up to touch his throat, the smooth place where a tumor had once lurked beneath the skin. “We have time now, and I want to take advantage of it.”
He covered her hand with his own. “Me too.”
Around them, pedestrians flowed down the sidewalk in an endless stream; cars belched exhaust, and people shouted, and horns honked, and New York greeted the coming of fall with its usual brash forthrightness.
Time, Trina thought with a smile. Nikita was probably right, and immortality wasn’t a gift. But time was. To her at least. They could figure out forever later; for the moment, she was going to relish every last bit of now.
*
Jake woke, and slept; and woke, and slept. He didn’t know how many times that happened, only that there was so much pain, and he just wanted to go under again.
Finally, he woke fully, to the beeping of monitors and the drone of the heat working. His eyes were crusted almost shut, and it was long moments before he could blink them clear. His head ached abominably, and his body felt leaden. He lay on a hospital bed, hooked to all sorts of machines, but he was in a fancy, paneled bedroom in the upper part of the house.
Someone was seated in a wingback chair beside the bed, but when he tried to turn his head, pain arced through his skull and his vision whited out.
“Easy, easy, don’t move,” Dr. Talbot’s familiar voice soothed. He stood up and moved into Jake’s line of sight, a paper water cup with a straw held in one hand.
Jake tried to open his mouth to ask what had happened…and couldn’t. His jaw wouldn’t work.
He sucked in a panicked breath through his nose.
“Easy,” Dr. Talbot repeated. “Your jaw was broken and we had to wire it shut.”
A high, distressed whine rose in the back of Jake’s throat.
“You have to settle down,” Talbot said reasonably. “Thinking about it will only make it worse.” He brought the cup forward. “Here, try to drink a little water, that might help.”
He wrapped his lips clumsily around the straw and managed uneven suction. He sipped water through his teeth, just enough to wet his tongue and throat. He almost choked, but managed to swallow it down.
“The good news is that, thanks to your regular injections, the healing is going much quicker than it would under normal circumstances, so we should have you back to normal in no time at all.” Dr. Talbot offered a kindly smile as he sat back down, closer this time, so Jake wouldn’t have to turn his head to see him. “Better.”
Jake managed to waggle his fingers in a gesture that caused Dr. Talbot to smile and nod.
He had so many questions.
Dr. Talbot’s smile melted into a more professional fa?ade. “At this point, after all you’ve been through, I think it’s become apparent that you’ll need to stay on with us if you hope to maintain gainful employment.”
That…
Oh.
Jake’s thought spun slow, but not so slow that he didn’t catch the underlying meaning in the doctor’s words: if he walked away from the Institute now, knowing what he did about the place, they would make sure he never worked again. It was either stay with them, or go hungry. Or, he thought, maybe even wind up at the bottom of a ditch, brakes mysteriously cut.
“Do we understand one another?”
He gave another little finger wave.
“Good. Then I can tell you that Prince Valerian was apprehended and is back in custody. The others, though, I’m afraid.” He sighed. “We’ve lost Sasha, and LC-5, and our security forces suffered a terrible blow.”
He pulled off his glasses and massage his eyes a moment, looking tired and despairing in a way Jake had never seen before. When he slipped his glasses back on, he studied Jake a moment, and then nodded. “I want to show you something.”
A flat-screen TV was set up on the dressing table across from the bed, and Dr. Talbot picked up the remote to turn it on. He shifted from the satellite feed to some kind of internal computer system, tapped through files, and then pressed Play.