“You disagree?”
Santiago had history with Famine that caused him to jump at shadows, and his hatred of her was well deserved, but that was a coterie matter. Wu hadn’t earned the right to hear the heartbreaking details of how Santiago had lost his wife to Famine’s machinations, and I wasn’t about to betray his trust to satisfy Wu’s curiosity.
“No one has set me down for Cadre 101 classes yet, but it seems to me if Famine was going to start a fire to wipe out crops, she would focus on the destructive aspect. That’s her gig, right?” I tried putting what had been bothering me into words. “What’s happening with those cases isn’t just arson. People with no history of mental health issues are clocking in to work one day, their psycho switch is flipping without provocation, and they’re burning everything down around them before committing suicide. It’s too staged. It’s almost like…”
Wu leaned closer. “Yes?”
“It’s almost like someone is using Famine’s MO to commit crimes, like they’re trying to convince us she’s already breached, and they’re wiping out any evidence that links those acts to the true perpetrator in the process.” And they were doing a damn fine job of it. The scope of destruction was truly worthy of Famine and her coterie. “It’s War. It has to be.” I could even guess how she’d managed the trick. “Her coterie has to bargain for skin suits. They could have infiltrated those farms at any time through employees with desires big enough to gamble on a demon’s ability to deliver.”
“Skin suits.” He chuckled. “Talking to you is endlessly fascinating.” His amusement tapered. “You should be aware ‘demon’ is derogatory. I figured an upstanding citizen such as yourself would want to know.”
“I can’t get the word out of my head,” I admitted without throwing Santiago under the bus for making the comparison in the first place. “I mean to say charun, but my brain clashes with my tongue sometimes.”
While he was graciously accepting my apology for my political incorrectness, our server arrived to take our order. Wu reached across the table and closed the folio, but he didn’t draw it back to his side. That might have had something to do with my death grip on the leather, but I liked to think he would have afforded me the courtesy of reviewing the material had we not been interrupted.
“How is the infant?” he asked once our waitress bustled away to put in our ticket.
“She’s a baby.” Had a member of the coterie asked me that, I would have whipped out my cell and started scrolling through the digital equivalent of a wallet full of pictures. But I remembered the flash of his teeth so near Nettie’s tender skin and nixed that idea. “She sleeps, drinks, and fills up diapers.”
“In that,” he mused, “all young are the same.”
Something in his tone set my cop senses tingling. “Do you have kids?”
His lips parted before he moistened them. “I have friends with young children.”
That was not a no. Interesting. There should have been zero hesitation given the prohibition on charun breeding, and yet…
Maybe Wu had sired offspring before joining the taskforce.
“How did you come to work for the NSB?” I meant to be smoother, but I was too curious. “How long have you been with them?”
“I followed in my father’s footsteps.” His lips twisted. “You and I have that much in common.” He tipped back his head, staring at the ceiling. “I can’t remember when I joined. Several decades ago. Six or seven. I was a freelance consultant before that. Not much has changed in how I operate except now I have an office and benefits.”
“You’re talking sixty or seventy plus years of service.” I slow-blinked at him. “How old are you?”
I had gotten used to thinking of my coterie and me as contemporaries, even though deep down I was aware they were as timeworn as Conquest. But they had traveled so far. It made sense they were ancients. Wu talked like he had been born here. For whatever reason, that made my head throb.
“I lost count.”
For a second, I thought someone had tripped the fire alarm, but no. Based on the calmness of our fellow diners, the ringing was in my ears. “What does your father do for the NSB?”
“That information is classified.”
Smashing into that brick wall didn’t bother me much, considering how disoriented his admission had left me.
“Not everyone is as fortunate as you.” Wu chased condensation down the side of his glass with a fingertip. “Not all fathers are as worthy of a child’s trust as yours.”
All of a sudden, his soft spot for kids was starting to make a whole lot more sense.
“I did get lucky,” I acknowledged, “but I didn’t have to rely on genetics. My dad chose me. I have an unfair advantage. I wasn’t an amorphous life about to pop into existence. I was a scraggly girl with big eyes and an even bigger stomach. He took one look at me and knew I was his little girl.” A flush tingled in my cheeks. “That’s what he says, anyway.”
Wu crossed his arms over his chest and plucked at his fuller, upper lip while staring at me.
“What?” I hated mirrors, but I almost wished for one now. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You’re really you.” He rubbed his jaw. “I wasn’t convinced before, I can see the echoes of Conquest in you, but you’re Luce too.”
“How can you tell?” I hated the wounded throb in my voice, the need to be reaffirmed as my own person.
“The cadre don’t love the way humans do. Charun don’t love that way, not with our whole hearts. It’s biology, instinctual, to mate and to procreate. It’s hardwired into some to mate for life and others to mate for a season, for some to raise their offspring and for others to abandon them to fend for themselves, but you feel beyond depths I thought possible for your kind.”
Like a top spun, my thoughts whirled back to Cole, to our connection. And I wondered if he cared, if he could care, or if lust was the extent of his emotional range where I was concerned. That and his deep-seated hatred of Conquest.
“You’re thinking about Heaton.” Wu sounded disappointed in me. “Thinking about him always changes your scent.”
“Uh, let’s not go there.” I cringed. “I’m well aware of the scent I throw off around Cole.”
“Sadness.” His nostrils flared the slightest bit. “Thinking about him makes you sad.”
Relief swept through me, but on the heels of that came regret. That was what he scented on me. Not sadness. Unhappiness maybe. Grief. A wish that things could have been different between him and me, that I wasn’t standing so deep in another woman’s shadow he couldn’t see me through the gloom.
“We can’t have it all, right?” That was the closest I had ever come to acknowledging I wanted Cole out loud, and it stunned me that Wu, of all people, had coaxed that truth from me when I did my best to avoid thinking it, let alone admitting it. “What about you?”
He sat back, palms braced on the table. “What about me?”
“I assume, based on our fraternization talk, that you’re single.” Though the idea charun wouldn’t seek out emotional ties when reproduction was off the table struck me as sadder than my unrequited whatever it was. “No lucky charuness has caught your eye?”
“No,” he said, and for no good reason whatsoever, I was convinced he had just told me his first lie. “As I said, without the urge to mate, the other urges fade away too.”
And that was his second.
Interesting.
Maybe dinner had been a good idea after all. The longer I spent with him, the easier I read him. An open book he was not, but I could make do with flipping a few pages of frontmatter for one night.