Warning for raw text; I haven't even proofed this a little bit.
Golden Eagle
Copyright © 2019 by Lauren Gilley
She’d been in this interrogation room countless
times.
It was funny how something as simple as sitting
on the opposite side of the table could change the entire landscape.
She wasn’t panicking, though. Wasn’t worried.
Didn’t feel anything, actually. A professional sort of numbness, one she’d
donned like a shield and which settled over her heavily. Impenetrable.
They’d left the door open, to make things look
casual. But through it, she could glimpse Detective Romero leaned back against
the wall, shoulders slouched, chewing gum, gaze hooded. She’d seen him look
like that through the one-way mirror before, when she was observing one of his
interrogations.
Delgado entered, bearing two steaming cups of
coffee. Precinct mugs, and not the disposable paper they gave to actual
suspects. “Here we go,” he said cheerfully, setting one down in front of her.
He’d remembered she liked lots of cream.
He settled in across from her, smoothing his tie,
situating the chair. Like with Romero, all movements she knew well. Little
professional tics.
“We’re waiting for Abbot?” she asked. Couldn’t
imbue any sort of animation into her voice.
“Oh, well.” He shrugged and looked nervous. “You
know how it is. IAB wants to send somebody. Gotta go through all the paperwork.
That dumb shit.” He shrugged, but his smile didn’t go all the way on both
sides.
She nodded.
“He was chasing you?” he asked. And he sounded so
casual, like her friend and fellow detective asking a simple question.
But she was in this room, and nothing said here
would be taken casually.
Silence fell.
Delgado jiggled one leg, keys and change rattling
in his pocket, and glanced at her surreptitiously like he thought she might
fill that silence.
She didn’t.
And then she heard the yelling.
“Fuck you, no–” Lanny’s unmistakable voice said.
Romero pushed off the wall, hands-up. “Hey,” he
said, “hey, she’s–” His back slammed into the wall, the breath leaving his
lungs in a hard rush.
Lanny had shoved him.
He appeared in the doorway a moment later,
leather jacket hanging open, sweats underneath, breathing like a racehorse,
face still bruised. “What the fuck?” he said, half-growling. She could see the
tips of his fangs; emotion had rendered him careless. “She’s not a fucking
suspect, what the–”
Romero put a hand on his shoulder, and oh shit,
this wasn’t going to go well.
Trina stood, just as Romero was thrown backward.
Her hip bumped the table, and coffee slopped all over. “Lanny,” she snapped.
Everything seemed to stop.
Romero was caught in a tableau, half-falling, all
of Lanny’s strength holding him upright. Inhuman strength; he would probably
wonder at it later.
Delgado sat staring at her, motionless.
“Lanny,” she said again, voice flat.
He whirled to face her. The chaos on his face.
The terror and aggression. It was staggering.
She swallowed and said, “Stop.”
He dropped Romero and turned to face her. Dropped
him. He’d shown too much of his true, new self. There would be no way to come
back from it, she registered.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Who was it?” he asked, heedless of her calm
tone. “One of those assholes they lured Sasha with? A feral?”
She gave him a look. “Not now.”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
Romero collected himself with an indignant cough.
“Whaddya mean?” Delgado asked, looking between
Trina and Lanny.
“My partner,” Trina said, before Lanny could
answer. “Is just concerned. He wasn’t involved at all.”
“You can’t seriously be questioning her,” Lanny
said.
Delgado’s gaze kept flicking, back and forth; he
looked as unsettled as Trina had ever seen him.
“Lanny, get out, you’re only going to make this
worse.”
Romero got back to his feet – he’d been lying
stunned on the carpet for a long moment, catching his breath. “Man, what the
fuck?”
“Lanny–” Trina started again, uselessly. She
might as well give orders to the wall for all that he would listen.
Then Captain Abbot’s voice cut above everyone
else’s. “What the fuck is all this? Huh?” He bulled into the room with his head
down, his shoulders rounded for a fight, gaze already fierce enough to strip
paint. He looked at each of them in turn. “Which one of you idiots shot
somebody?”
Trina lifted two fingers in a small wave. “That’d
be me, sir.” She was still numb. They were only words, and true ones at that;
she found they came easily.
“In self-defense,” Lanny growled. A real vampire
growl. God, he was so fired after this. “She didn’t do anything wrong, Captain.”
Too aggressive, his tone too sharp. Fired, fired, fire.
Abbot swung around to look at him, and recoiled
visibly a moment when he got a good glimpse of Lanny’s face. His eyes looked
fevered; the tips of his fangs showed. “Jesus, are you high or something?” To
Romero and Delgado: “Get him the fuck outta here if he’s gonna be like this.”
Lanny growled again.
Trina had to stop this, shew knew. Whatever the
fallout, it was vital that she get Lanny to calm down. He was a gun half-cocked
lately, and this had all the earmarks of a full-fledged disaster in the making.
She slipped between Lanny and Abbot. Put her back
to her captain, ignored his spluttered protests, and focused all her attention
on Lanny. She’d been wanting him to keep acting like a human all this time –
but he wasn’t one, anymore. And it wasn’t his human side she needed to appeal
to. Not now – maybe not ever.
“Hey,” she said, low and soothing. “Hey, hey,
hey, look at me. Just at me.”
He did, his pupils dilating, his breath arresting
one long moment before he started sucking in deep, panicked lungfuls again. He
was locked in.
Moving slowly, Trina reached up and laid one hand
on the side of his face, and the other on his throat. His skin was clammy, his
pulse racing against her fingers. “I’m okay,” she said. “Not even a scratch. I
mean, I’m out of shape – thank God I didn’t have to run that far – but I’m
good. See? Come here, smell if you need to. No blood.”
And he did smell. He stepped in close and
dropped his face into the side of her throat, scenting her. Touched her hair,
her shoulders, her arms. Pulled back to rake his gaze over her. He was shaking.
“Did it? Are you–”
“Fine. Totally fine. Let’s put the sharp teeth
away, okay?”
“The – sharp–” He flicked his tongue over a fang,
and his eyes widened. “Shit. I…” He hyperventilated some more, and Trina
tightened her hand on his neck.
“It’s fine. It’s fine. Just take a sec, and dial
it back.”
A few more hitched breaths, and then a deep one.
Another. He blinked and his pupils started to shrink back toward regular size;
the glow faded from them. That had been new; she’d thought she’d seen Nikita’s
and Alexei’s flash in moments, but she’d never been staring at them like this
when it happened; hadn’t known for sure that something ethereal and inhuman flared
to life in their irises.
“That’s better,” she murmured, squeezing at his
neck in regular pulses – pulses that his own pulse slowly matched. “You okay?”
He ducked his head, and nodded. “Yeah.” His voice
was still rough, but no longer with a growl; with regular old shame. He rubbed
a hand down his face. “Yeah. I’m…shit. Sorry, guys.”
No response.
Trina finally glanced toward the others in the
room. They’d all clumped together, a line of slack-jawed mortals with wrinkled
dress shirts and bad haircuts. At another moment, she would have laughed, and
ribbed them about looking like cops out of a crappy made-for-TV movie.
But now, with Lanny still shivering beneath her
hands, she felt the morning’s first curl of real dread. Romero, Delgado, and
Abbot didn’t just look shocked, but truly frightened. Dazed, almost. It didn’t
matter that none of them probably believed in the supernatural; they’d all seen
what she’d just seen in Lanny: that there was something very, very different
about him now.
“What the hell?” Abbot said, voice
uncharacteristically faint.
“Go,” Trina whispered to Lanny, and gave him a
gentle shove toward the door. She wanted him to go home. To get the hell out of
the precinct and find Nikita or Jamie or anyone else in their pack to sit with
him. Even Alexei, whose vampiric experience far surpassed Lanny’s own.
He let go of her reluctantly, and made a tiny
sound almost like a whine. She had vastly underestimated the distress a vampire
would feel for a mate in danger – though she shouldn’t, she thought with a
mental headshake. She’d seen Nikita in Virginia.
“Go,” she said again, and found a reassuring
smile for him. “I’m fine.”
He gave her a look that threatened to crack her
shields, baleful as a stray dog, full of regret and worry. But then he did go,
and Delgado and Romero followed a moment later, at a safe distance, practically
creeping.
Go faster, she thought. He was in no state to try to laugh
and shrug off what they’d just seen.
Abbot cleared his throat.
Trina pushed all extraneous thoughts away and
turned to him. She was the one with the composure here, even if her fate was in
his hands. “Will IAB be here soon, sir?” she asked.
He blinked in response to her tone, flat and
professional.
“I’d be happy to give you a statement, first, if
you’d like.”
He blinked a few more times. “What the hell’s
with Webb?”
“Trust me, sir: you wouldn’t believe me even if I
told you.”
22
Alexei was freaking out.
He’d dreamed of Ekaterinburg. Of the exact black
of the sky that final night, of the smear of yellow light from the upper
windows. Of the barking voice of the men who’d ushered them across the
courtyard. Papa’s arms strong and close around him; the steady pounding of his
heart against Alexei’s ear. He’d dreamed of his little spaniel, Joy, jerking
and yipping on his lead, because Anastasia hadn’t wanted to leave him behind.
The crunch of snow beneath black boots.
He’d dreamed of the Cheka that had killed his
family. Their black fur hats, and their long black coats, and the vacant black
of their eyes. Monsters, all of them monsters.
And he’d awakened moments ago, to daylight, and
his heart in his throat, and to the scent of cooking food, and the echo of
Gustav’s words last night.
Your mother’s killers.
It didn’t matter that Nikita hadn’t pulled the
trigger himself: he was one of those black-clad monsters. He always had been,
and people didn’t change, did they?
He lay, disoriented, pulse pounding, ears
ringing, for a long moment, gulping air through an open mouth. Then he became
aware of the sound of humming. The sizzle that went with the smell. Someone
cooking breakfast – and humming old big band tunes from the forties.
Two hands gripped the back of the velvet sofa
where he’d collapsed in the wee hours, and Jamie’s face appeared above his.
“Dante’s making breakfast,” he said. “He’s kind
of a weird dude.”
Alexei licked his dry lips. “You don’t say.”
He sat up. Daylight fell in warm panels through
the open drapes of Dante’s living room, sparkling off the shiniest of his
displayed treasures.
A peek over the back of the couch revealed Dante
standing at the stove, his hair soft and loose on his shoulders, wearing his
velvet dressing gown, head tipping back and forth as he hummed and turned bacon
with a fork.
“He wakes,” he said, all British, and sent Alexei
a grin over the kitchen island. A sharp grin, but a worried cast to his gaze.
Alexei rubbed his eyes. “Are you Basil this
morning?”
“Mostly. Come over here and eat, the first batch
is already done.”
Wow! I loved the part with Lanny flipping out over Trina and can’t wait to read about what caused it. Come on December. :)
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