Ray raised his head again to scan the surrounding area, the people in front of the nearby coffee shop who didn’t seem to be paying Ray any attention. He could brave the pumpkin smell to get Cal some sort of raspberry drink, but the noise of the coffee shop might keep him from hearing any signs of distress.
Cal had been used as way to hurt Ray. Whoever tried it might try again, even if Cal hadn’t thought of that yet. Murder was far more straightforward than curses and spells. And it sounded as if Cal, and likely Benny, had annoyed plenty of people on their own even if Ray took himself out of the equation.
Ray might lose himself if Cal was hurt in any way. He was already unstable, pieces of his memory missing, possibly never to return. If Cal were gone, maybe Raywouldend up tearing through the streets with bloodied teeth and claws like a movie monster.
He did his best to banish the image of his grief leading to the grief of others and restlessly scanned the neighborhood again. For the first time, Ray accepted, if only to himself, that he should not be working right now. If he couldn’t protect himself, he couldn’t protect anyone else.
Hypervigilance, he heard again as Cal had said it. It didn’t stop him from glancing around to keep an eye out for anyone suspicious.
The people nearby were ordinary citizens going about their day. Stopping off at Bubble, Bubble to buy a gift candle or some herbs. Going to the nail salon or the coffee shop as a treat. A tiny, tiny figure, possibly part pixy or elf, stopped in front of a group of newspaper racks, most of them empty, to grab a free local paper and then a flyer from the yellow plastic rack for house and apartment rentals. The graffiti on the side of the rack readThey reap where they never sowedin black marker.
On the glass of one of the empty racks was a big sticker, a green dragon, beardless and winged, sitting on top of a bunch of money. Someone had marked over that with black marker too, drawing a beard on it. Ray didn’t know if that was a joke or was supposed to mean something offensive. He didn’t know a lot about dragons. Being wealthy meant any cases involving dragons were handled with kid gloves, by people a lot higher up than Ray and Penn. Dragons existed in a strange in-between place. They were beings, and often foreign and speaking languages that were not English, but they were beings with some money, and therefore, some power. Power, but not acceptance. It didn’t seem like a comfortable way to live. Maybe that was one of the reasons the dragons generally stayed away from human affairs.
There was a case involving a dragon, Cal had said, raising tensions in the village and elsewhere. Ray filed that away to read up on later.
Two humans sitting outside the coffee shop at a wire table were playing checkers on a small travel board. Ray didn’t really play checkers, or chess, or any strategy game. He didn’t have time. Other humans around him had often played poker, but no one sensible would play that with a were, so Ray had never learned the rules, never been invited to.
The person who attacked him must be interested in things like that. Revenge would have been simpler. This was complicated. Even if the spell had gone wrong, this had been more scattershot than precise. Aimed at disruption, possibly. Two detectives removed from duty or hampered from their work, in addition to the fracturing of Ray’s personal life.
Cal was not around to look at Ray’s colors, so Ray let himself dwell on that notion. Ray had very likely been helpless in that alley. Why not kill him? That would have had nearly the same effect.
He had been left there to awaken and recover and….
Stumble into meeting Cal—again. That couldn’t have been predicted, or not with any certainty. But he would have run into someone. Anyone he worked with, or any civilian who wandered out of one of the surrounding buildings unaware of the police half a block away.
With that in mind, Ray started over. No one had known more than fifteen minutes to a half an hour in advance that he or Penn would be at that crime scene. Assuming this amnesia had been the intended outcome and that Ray could have been spelled anywhere, it meant something that his attacker, or attackers, had chosen that place. That public place.
Or, if Ray had become that predictable, inviting Cal and Benny to that crime scene meant that there would be reasonable odds that Ray would show up. But he pushed that to the side to focus on the other pieces of the new puzzle.
Possibility One: disoriented and unwell, Ray would have bumped into either a civilian or more police officers and embarrassed himself. Except that this seemed a lot of effort just to get some mild jokes aimed Ray’s way while destroying his life.
Possibility Two: Ray was supposed to be wild and frenzied at the removal of the mating bond, or despondent and depressed, and would either tear into the crowd or very publicly harm himself. That wouldn’t just destroy his work, that would end his life, one way or the other. It would also have repercussions for any other weres around, and probably most of the other ‘scary’ beings like trolls. Ray was a symbol, in Cal’s words, whether he wanted to be or not.
Ray put a hand to his stomach while he mentally played out that scenario. If Ray went feral, especially in public, he would be arrested, if not shot in the street, and disgraced. Penn as well, if she stepped in to try to help him. Whether Ray’s death was intentional or through reckless, gun-happy officers was a difference that didn’t matter, in the end.
Ray would be dead. There would be an outcry. Humans who had never liked Ray would use the incident to justify further restrictive policies about beings on the force, or possibly anywhere. Penn’s career would be over. And Cal would… Cal would cry more pretty tears and never go near the station again.
All their work would have been for nothing.
Ray heard Cal’s voice in his mind again, clear as day, telling him that would have always been the outcome. Ray was always an animal to them, the way Cal was always a tricky fairy they didn’t want around.
The hairs on the back of Ray’s neck rose.
Possibility Three presented itself easily after the first two.
Cast a spell to remove the bond. Destroy Ray. Destroy Penn. Destroy their work. Unleash a grieving, wild were in the city—no, not just the city. In this case, in the village. The feral werewolf might maim, or kill, some innocent passerbys but that was an acceptable loss.
And if the perpetrators happened to see Cal and Benny heading toward Ray in that alley, why not wave them on? Why not have the innocent victims be people Ray knew and cared about, ensuring Ray would never recover?
Ray tossed his head but couldn’t banish the callous thought, the coldest, cruelest idea that he didn’t want to consider possible. But he had done his job for a long time and had seen humans do terrible things to each other for much pettier reasons.
He had heard of cops doing terrible things as well. Never in front of him. Never anything blatant, because they were scared of Ray, or because Ray wasn’t really one of them, but he heard later. Saw mild punishments handed down for it, or nothing at all. And he could tell, when he spoke to people unconnected to the department, that they had fear where they shouldn’t, and distrust and hatred, and that was used to explain guns, and armor, and more equipment than a small city would ever need, even to fight an army of trolls.
He’d never heard of such a thing, a were killing their—killing their own. He could not and did not want to imagine it, but someone had, or could have. And that someone might be someone Ray saw every day, someone he worked with. Someone he trusted, or had trusted, a long time ago.
If he admitted that possibility, there was no going back.
Ray was already a failure of a ma—partner and a poor excuse for a were.
