Sloe Ride (Sinners, #4)

“Shite, I’m tired.” The Gaelic came easier to him sometimes. Better than English when his tongue was too curled up in his mouth to speak.

It was tempting to close the door. His office hours were done for the day, and the siren of a final cup of coffee called to him. Well, murmured at least. Quinn regarded his much abused and now clean coffee mug. The watery porridge sluice did help him clean his space, and he’d quickly discovered there wasn’t a lot on his desk he couldn’t live without. He had a minor debate on whether the tiny cactus needed yet another rinse but didn’t think the prickly ball could take much more dousing.

“Steady on, Spike. You’ll be okay.” Quinn hit the power button on his laptop and sniffed at his shirt, sure he’d somehow gotten splashed in the onslaught. “Let’s go back to the insane asylum and shower.”

One thing about having a family of cops—besides running amok over their siblings’ privacy—was the fear of death they could put into a university administration about where Quinn should park his car. He hadn’t permission to use the closest structure. Only tenure, some odd ranking of politics and possibly a mythical ritual performed with eggs from a virgin platypus, could provide that, but somehow Kane’d wrangled him a spot.

A few hundred feet of grass and sidewalk lay between him and the second Audi he’d begged from the dealer. Digging his keys out of his coat, Quinn muttered at the fob, still confused by the plethora of buttons needed to open and start a single sedan.

The cold was brutal on his face, scraping at his cheeks and nose, and Quinn sniffed at the air, wondering if a hard rain wouldn’t be too far behind the thick fog rolling up into the hills. His sniff reminded him of Graham, with his prim, martial walk and tilted-up nose.

“Like a stork,” he chuckled, staring down at the fob. The path to the structure was clear, a brisk five-minute walk, and then he’d be tucked inside a car with a suspension as thick and unwieldy as a truck. “Five more weeks, Q, and you’ll get your baby back. They promised.”

Something lingered on the wind, a sharp sting in the chill. Quinn glanced around, letting his eyes drift over swells of faded landscape dotted with sparse-leafed trees and beds of dormant ice plant, a slumbering wealth of green and purple waiting for the first burst of spring. The hall loomed behind him, unimpressive compared to the colleges’ other buildings but renowned for the nearly mazelike confusion it cast on unsuspecting freshmen.

He’d grown up in the hall, Quinn mused, turning his back on the building. Stumbling up its concrete steps and through its plain doors, he’d gotten his first whiff of old papers, dead languages, and centuries of layered culture and fallen in love. Next to his parents’ home, the hall was the closest thing to home—probably even above his own house—and Quinn briefly debated if he could somehow sneak a futon into his office and camp out there until the nonsense moving against him was over.

Pleasant thought—he smiled, finally deciphering the spray of rubbed-off buttons on the fob—but impractical. If only for the lack of a shower and the clomping of feet in the outside hall as soon as the front doors were thrown open for the day.

“Oh, but it would be awesome.” He wrinkled his nose. “Okay, maybe not for Harley and her litter-box excavations.”

He was five feet from the short wall cordoning off the structure when Quinn caught the scent again, slightly pungent and abrasive. It grew stronger, fouler as he turned the corner to use the pass-through into the structure, when the rankness hit him full in the face.

The Audi had been white. Not a color he wanted in a car, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially when he’d pretty much gotten the last one blown up. A fire he could handle. This time Quinn wasn’t sure he had it in him to stay conscious, much less do anything productive—like dial for help.

His fingers were cold, numb from the shock slowly shutting his body down, and he had a hard time finding his phone despite his messenger bag being nearly empty. He finally found it hidden behind his tablet, but it swam away from him, avoiding his grasp. Another glance at the car changed nothing. Did nothing but etch the horror of what he’d seen further into his brain.

Profane.

Quinn’d never truly contemplated the concept before—not until he stood cold from shock and horror in the middle of a campus parking structure and took in the remains of a young woman spread across the hood of his borrowed car.

He’d spoken to her only a few hours before. Listened to her tell a long, convoluted story about how she couldn’t write five thousand words on probably the easiest topic the British Industrial Revolution had to offer. They’d danced about the topic until he’d pushed her into a corner and half walked her through the steps of researching cosplay and steampunk. Short of writing the paper for her, Quinn’d sighed and let LeAnne Walker head on her merry little bouncy way.

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