I turned and went back to the kitchen, worried and hesitant. I didn’t want Elliot to feel like I was trespassing, but I also wasn’t about to leave him alone. I was also hungry—it was a little past dinner time, and Elliot hadn’t made any sounds or moves to make food. I decided to just take him at his word—he’d said I was welcome here, so I went by the rules that had been in place when I had been living in the house and opened the fridge, looking for the makings of dinner. I noticed that although there wasn’t much there, he still had vegan butter and almond milk, even though I hadn’t been here since the middle of August.
“I don’t have anything,” he said, his voice soft and heavy.
“Sure, you do,” I replied, now looking in the freezer. There were several different bags of frozen vegetables and a package of frozen chicken breasts. I pulled them all out, dumped the wholepackage of chicken on a plate, and threw it in the microwave to defrost enough that I could cut it.
I set the oven to preheat, then made a basic white sauce using flour and the almond milk. Then I combined flour, baking soda, salt, and the vegan butter and almond milk. I’d nearly teared up when I saw that the expiration date on the milk was for December—he’d kept buying it, and because it was new and I’d also seen the regular milk in the fridge, I knew it hadn’t been because he’d wanted it for himself.
He’d gotten it in case I came back. But thinking about that too long would make me dangerously emotional, especially since stress and worry already had me on edge.
Pretending I wasn’t an internal wreck, I tossed the vegetables into the white sauce, cut up the less-frozen chicken and added that to the pot, then mixed together the baking ingredients.
“What are you making?” Elliot asked me, either finally noticing that I was cooking or hitting the threshold of the amount of silence he was able to endure.
“Chicken drop-biscuit pot pie,” I answered. It was something I’d made for Noah and myself often enough when we couldn’t afford much—frozen veggies, frozen meat sometimes, and basic baking ingredients. It was filling and fairly cheap, and didn’t take terribly long to make in the grand scheme of dinner options.
“You don’t?—”
“I’m hungry,” I interrupted him, a little shortly. I was tired, my joints ached from cold and crouching, and Iwashungry. And I wasn’t in the mood to put up with Elliot trying to convince me to leave, because it wasn’t happening. And I didn’t really want to fight with him about either that or the fact that I didn’thaveto make him dinner. “But I’m not an ass, so I’m going to make enough for both of us.”
I didn’t bother looking at him to see his reaction. His silence told me enough.
I was spooning the biscuit batter onto the top of a pan full of chicken, veg, and sauce when he spoke again.
“Was it still alive? When they…”
“I’m not a medical examiner,” I told him. “But I don’t think so.” I wasn’t lying to him, either. I felt like there would have been a lot more evidence of a struggle if the poor badger had been alive when they tried to skin it.
He lapsed into silence again.
“Seth?” he asked, as I put the pan into the oven.
My heart nearly broke at the vulnerability in his voice. “Yeah?” I turned around, and found him still staring down at the counter-top, his hands palm-down, splayed open. The skin around his knuckles was criss-crossed with the scrapes and scars that were the hallmark of his trade—I knew those hands. Knew what they felt like on my skin, knew the strength in them, the callus that made his palms and the pads of his fingers rough. They looked helpless the way they sat there, or maybe that was just the expression on his face.
“What do they want from me?” he asked, softly.
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I wish I did.”
He looked up then, and I didn’t really know what else to do, so I walked around the side of the island and opened my arms.
He leaned into me, not hugging me back, but accepting what I offered, giving me enough weight that if I’d moved, he’d have fallen off the stool. I held onto him, feeling the long, slow breaths that I could tell he was forcing himself to take, scenting the sharp tang of fear in the air, although whether it was mine or his, I wasn’t sure.
“What areyouafraid of?” he asked me, his voice slightly muffled by my shirt and chest.
“I don’t want the next dead badger to be you,” I admitted. Because the only thing I could think that the people who hadleft this one wanted was to make clear that they meant to do the same thing to Elliot. Maybe to other shifters, too.
“You think that’s what they’ll do?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe they just get off scaring people. Maybe they just want you to feel intimidated. To feel like they’re superior. Or maybe they don’t care aboutyouat all and just want to make themselves feel superior.”
He let out a breath, warm against my shirt. “So either they’re homicidal assholes or just regular assholes.”
I couldn’t help the twitch of my lips, although he couldn’t see it. “Pretty much,” I answered.
I stood there, the heat of his body still resting against me, for several minutes. Five, maybe as long as ten, it was hard to tell. My knee ached, and my back wasn’t terribly happy about it, either, especially after all the crouching I’d done earlier in the day, but holding Elliot against me—I wasn’t going to let a little pain stop that. Especially not under these circumstances.
I’d almost reached my limit when he spoke again. “They’re not going to catch whoever did this, are they?” He sounded hopeless.
I thought about it. “I’d give it fifty-fifty, honestly,” I told him. “The ATV tire treads were fairly distinctive—new, but with a nick on one of the treads that would make matching them pretty easy. And I have some blade typing to do, but I’m hopeful that if I can match the blade pattern to a specific style, they should be able to figure out where someone would buy it, then do some cross-referencing. At some point the Venn diagram gets small enough that you’ve got pretty decent odds.”
