“Where did you get those?” he demanded while studying my phone screen. “I erased the files.”
“The digital files, maybe.” I grinned up at him. “Senility isn’t a good look on you. There’s this thing us youngsters call paper. The Chinese invented it in like 105 A.D. or something. You were probably a toddler at the time.” I pocketed my cell. “Have you ever heard of a printer?” His lips flatlined. “No? Then this will blow your mind —”
Wu loomed over me, but I had been loomed over by the best and wasn’t intimidated. “Who has the prints?”
“Lots of folks at this point.” I hooked my thumbs in the belt loops of my jeans. “What does it matter without the bodies?”
“We don’t leave evidence behind,” Wu growled with all the fervor of an oft-repeated mantra. “Photos are evidence, paper or not.”
Still annoyed he had been sneaking around behind my back, I saluted him and jumped in the Bronco. “I wish you the best of luck retrieving them.”
“Oh, no,” he crooned, catching the door before it shut. “This is your mess too. You’re going to help clean it up.”
“No thanks.” I wrenched the door from his grasp. “I’ve got a full plate.”
“That wasn’t a request.” He tapped on the window. “We’ll meet at your house after your shift.”
“I’ll pencil you in,” I lied. “Later, gator.” I hesitated. “You’re not a gator, are you? I’ll be honest, Droseras freak me out, and that was before one almost ate me.”
“It’s rude to ask a charun their species,” he informed me primly. “Most prefer to keep their true selves hidden.”
That was certainly the case with my coterie, and, I had to admit, ignorance was my personal preference as well. “How can species remain secret with so many being bagged and tagged?”
“Consider it doctor/patient confidentiality. Charun of the same species are often grouped together to receive their physicals or are kept in the same facilities to make catering to their biological needs easier, but most are grateful to find kin on this terrene. This is one instance where a shared secret is more often kept than individual ones.”
“I suppose this means I’ll be in isolation when the time comes.” Sterile environments gave me the heebie-jeebies, so worries over my future thirty-day vacation at Hotel Hysterectomy had been shelved too high for my brain to reach them. “Are there other Otillians in the program?”
“Most would rather die than forfeit their honor by aiding an enemy terrene.”
“I’m a traitor no matter how you look at it, huh?” I scanned the bright blue skies stuffed with fat clouds, tuned in the laughter of children racing buggies across the asphalt, their parents shouting warnings to look both ways before crossing, and had zero problems with wearing that label. “Either I betray my heritage, or I betray my family.”
“You have three sisters,” he pointed out. “Aren’t they also family?”
“Blood doesn’t make a family.” Heart and home did that. “War almost killed my dad.” My throat tightened. “She did kill my best friend.” The Maggie who had been carried out of my backyard wasn’t the same person who depended on paper, rock, scissors to make her life choices. “I won’t paint Famine or Death with the same brush until I’ve met them, but War is my enemy, and if they side with her, that makes them my enemies too.”
He picked at the rubber seal cupping the window. “Your coterie supports your stance?”
“They don’t think I’m going to stick around, if I’m honest.” I gave a tired laugh. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe I don’t exist. Maybe I am a construct.” I turned over the engine. “But right now, I feel real. I feel like I’m a person. I feel like I have everything to lose, and I’m going to hold on for as long as I can.”
“You’re a brave woman,” Wu said quietly. “We’re lucky to have you.”
The more time I spent with Wu, the more he confused me. Most of the time, he was a well-dressed pain in my ass who was too imperious for his own good. But when he talked about things that mattered, he wiped off the gloss and left what appeared to be a real person exposed. Matte finish was a good look on him. “Luck would have been not meeting me at all.”
Without Conquest, this terrene and all its inhabitants would have known peace.
“You’re buying into your own propaganda,” he chided, stepping back. “Conquest is a title, not a person. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.” He let that sink in before adding, “You’re the best chance this terrene has at finding a more permanent solution. You could save hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe even break the cycle.”
My palms went damp where they gripped the wheel. “No pressure.”
“Until tonight,” Wu said, and he made it a dare.
Okay, so in hindsight it might not have been wise to spread photographic proof of charun existence to the humans desperate to solve murders, but destroying evidence went against everything I had been taught. Had I understood what I was seeing, the larger implications for charun, I would have called Wu sooner. Crime scene preservation, chains of evidence, these were my defaults, but it looked like they were about to get reset.
The eight hours I spent sitting across the desk from Rixton passed at a snail’s crawl. There was no point in us putting in legwork on the Hensarling, Culberson, or Orvis cases when there was charun involvement, but it’s not like I could unveil the existence of what humans would consider demons. The only choice I had was to lie, and I did, in ink and in voice, until I choked on them.
The one respite from my guilt came when I drafted my letter of resignation. I printed it off, folded it up, then slid it in an envelope and scrawled Chief Jones’s name on the front. I should have turned it in right then and there, but I wasn’t ready yet. I might never be. But that wouldn’t change the inevitable.
In search of a hard push that would send me tumbling over the edge, I caved to Wu’s request and met him at my house around midnight.
The glass on the bay window sparkled in the headlights as I pulled into my usual parking space. I couldn’t tell where Flavie had pulled up what, but I trusted she had gotten the job done. The new siding gleamed as I hit the stairs, punched in the alarm code, and let myself in.
Another ugly truth I hadn’t wanted to confront reared its head as I inspected the place for livability. Dad couldn’t bunk with the Trudeaus forever, and I would have to leave for a solid month after my two-week notice played out at the department. This place had to be move-in ready for when Dad got steady enough to fend for himself. Not that he would have to, considering I planned on hiring a part-time nurse. The reality was in-home care or a nursing home, and I wasn’t about to check Dad into one of those.
Following a hunch, I took the stairs up to my room and found Wu sitting in the open window across from my bed. His black tactical pants, heavy boots, thin turtleneck, and tight beanie all followed a similar theme: stealth mode. “Is that really what all the super-secret agents are wearing on covert ops these days?”
“I brought you a set.” He flicked his wrist toward a chair in the corner. “Now we can match.”
“That was almost a joke,” I accused. “Don’t tell me you actually have a sense of humor buried in there.”
“I would have strangled you for the stunt you pulled otherwise,” he stated matter-of-factly.
“Nah. I’m a valuable commodity. The worst you would have done was huffed and puffed and blown my house down.” I gestured around us, indicating the space as a whole. “Right now, it wouldn’t even take much effort to knock the old girl to her knees.”
“I’ll give you some privacy.”
“Thanks.” I crossed to the chair and rubbed the stretchy shirt material between my fingers. “I appreciate —”
Movement caught the corner of my eye as Wu executed a seated backflip out the freaking window. I rushed over and leaned out, but he had already stuck the landing and was walking away. “Show-off.”