“If I could cook, I would have done that,” Benny revealed. “It’s what my family does in a crisis. Cook and force people who don’t want to eat to eat. Food is medicine, sometimes.”
These people were pack. That had been taken from Ray too, when Cal had been removed. Even before Cal had been removed, they had tried to take this.
Ray let out a breath. “Do you still have a protection charm for me?” he asked, concealing most of his reluctance, at least until he reconsidered the idea. “And another one for Cal? And Calvin, at this point. I assume you’re already wearing something for yourself.”
Cal made a shocked sound. Benny just beamed and dug a charm out of his pocket, a polished bit of stone not attached to any string. “I can make more.”
The stone was warm and vibrated in Ray’s palm. Ray quickly put it into the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt. “Thank you.”
Benny watched Ray do that, eyebrows raised in what might have been disbelief, but then smiled again. He made to step away, hesitated, and then leaned in. He put his hand on Ray’s arm, a careful, light touch, before slowly reaching up to place his hand at the back of Ray’s neck.
“Pack, right?” Benny asked, serious for all that he was smiling. “Figure we ought to do this again.”
Ray swallowed. The stone in his pocket seemed to shake. Then Benny stepped back, his hand falling away. He coughed a few times. “Anyway.”
“No one from the station has called me to check in.” Ray swiped his hand down Benny’s arm, leaving a trace of his scent.
Benny turned toward Ray, frowning now, and keeping his voice down as Ray had done, as if perfectly aware Ray had chosen to confide this in him and would deal with eavesdroppers later.
“Maybe they think you’re invincible.” Benny lied, or might have lied. It was sweet of him. “You used to seem that way.” He shrugged. “For like the first month maybe, anyway. Then I realized that you just get hangry, and that you puffed up around Cal. And you, uh, act a certain way when the other cops are around, and that you kind of… are intensely aware all the time of everything that you can see and smell and hear but you can’t change.”
Ray stared.
Benny shrugged again, a nervous gesture. “But you’ve never actually hurt anyone that I’ve ever seen. In fact, you once stepped in front of a car to keep it from hitting me. It wasn’t going fast, but my point stands.”
“You’re his family,” Calvin added, eavesdropper number two.
Pack, Ray thought, but couldn’t get past the lump in his throat to say it. Pack was family and not-family. Hard to explain with words. He nodded instead.
“Everyone is like pack to Ray,” Cal offered quietly. “Just to different degrees. Circles within circles. But this… this is the tightest one.”
Cal alone would be the tightest circle. That was how the bond worked. Ray didn’t voice that either. He nodded at Benny again and was pleased when Benny nudged his arm. “Go eat.”
Ray glanced at the other two, Calvin’s patient, vaguely pleased expression, Cal’s frosty one that said clearly that Ray would not be helping them until he’d eaten.
Ray ducked his head. “I’ll be in the kitchen.” He said it for all of them, but especially for eavesdropper number one. “Eating.”
“Please do.” Calvin went back to his work. “He wasn’t kidding about the hangry.”
***
RAY CLEANED the entirety of the takeout cartoon Benny had left out for him without bothering to reheat it or even tasting much of it. He checked his phone as he shoveled noodles and chicken into his mouth, emailed his mother to tell her he was making sure to eat and that was Cal was working, and that he loved her. He didn’t tell her anything else. Cal probably already had, anyway. Ray had some notifications about online bills going through, and a few texts from Penn, none of which were about what had happened in Guerrero’s today.
Cal might have told her, or he might be leaving that to Ray, or Penn might have heard about it through work but was being careful. The overall tone of her texts was cautious, or maybe optimistic… not that Ray had ever described Penn as optimistic in all the years he’d known her.
She’d confirmed no significant contact between Ross and anyone else. It wasn’t inconceivable that others had decided to take revenge into their own hands without consulting him, but letting so much time go by first made that unlikely.
Ray mentally filed away any connection between his current situation and the former Officer Ross as incidental.
They want me to stick around here.Penn telling Ray that felt important. She could have been out investigating, even without Ray. So they were keeping an eye on her, whether or not they’d ordered her to stay close.But I can still get some things done.Faulkes is on your case.
Ray already knew that, but suspected those two messages together meant Penn was watching the lieutenant.
No card for me to sign.Penn’s final message, from about thirty minutes prior, felt more pointed and angry.
Come over when you can, was all Ray sent her in return, but in-person suited him better.
He straightened up the kitchen and listened to the activities in their HQ. Benny and Calvin were evidently reading through old, and he meantold, folk tales and stories about werewolves and wolf shifters from around the world. Ray assumed to find out more about the bond, or possibly about how magic affected it. They were learning the hard way that most of the stories that humans had written down about his kind were not love stories.
