With the sun still low in the western sky the next morning, we bumped over the steel and wood that made up the railway crossing that cut across West Maumee Avenue. Moose swung the Rubicon into the parking lot of a one-story red brick building approximately the size of a football field, but a little narrower on the near end and wider on the far. A single door and three tiny, narrow windows faced the street. Black tinting covered the glass. The tracks ran near enough to the back of the building that it would be impossible to drive anything larger than a golf cart between the wall and the raised rock bed.
I eyed the diesel engine idling there with a low, vibrating rumble. Three slatted freight cars waited behind it, each covered in beautiful, complicated graffiti. Anyone who didn't know would never guess what it was. They would just think it was gang symbols or geometric nonsense. "They're warded."
Moose hauled his bulk out of the Rubicon. "Of course. How else would they contain people with abilities?"
"They..." At the thought of people like Nick being loaded into freight cars, the chills came back, raising goosebumps along my arms. Eesh. "Where do they take them?"
He glowered at me. "Away."
With that chunk of fetid information sitting uneasily in my gut, I followed him along the narrow, cracked sidewalk to the front door. He pulled it open and held it for me, and I stepped into the strikingly sterile interior. White chairs with gleaming steel legs stood in neat rows with their backs pressed against white walls. Silver flecks shone on the white floor tiles. Bright white bulbs buzzed in cage-style fixtures overhead.
To my left, a white sign with red letters read: Anyone entering beyond lobby may be subject to a search of their person or possessions. To my left, another informed me that beings of all races have a right to legal representation. If I had questions about that right, there was a number to call. Straight ahead was a metal door covered from top to bottom in teeny, tiny, etched runes and beside the door, a tall man with buzzed hair and a chiseled jawline stared at me with solidly jet-black eyes through a thick window. When he blinked, I had a sudden memory of the pet hamster who'd lived in my bedroom for a brief time when I was eight. It had escaped one night by chewing through the cage door. I'd always hoped it had met a cute mouse in a nearby field and made thousands of hybrid rodent babies, but probably it had been dinner for some larger, faster creature.
A fancy little guy about a foot tall in tails and a top hat sat cross-legged in one of the chairs. His gossamer dragonfly wings were folded neatly behind him. He had an itty-bitty monocle, and a cane fashioned from a plastic swizzle stick. "I remember you."
I remembered him, too. He would have been hard to forget even if he hadn't been the first visibly non-human creature I ever encountered after surviving an altercation with a fugitive Moose had been tracing. "How's it going?"
"Every time I'm having what I believe to be the worst day of my life, you seem to show up."
Unjustified guilt welled up in my chest. "Sorry."
"Can I help you?" Chiseled Hamster Man asked via a speaker.
Moose flashed his badge. "We're investigating the Nick Adamos case on behalf of The Organization. Someone called ahead to tell you—"
"Yeah, I got it." His beady eyes turned toward me. Quick blink. "You have ID?"
I tugged my badge from my back pocket and held it up for his inspection. "Come on through."
The door buzzed. Moose opened it.
Cold—fierce, brutal, marrow-freezing, skin burning, breath-stealing cold—ripped through me for a split second and then I was standing on the other side of the door, gasping and blinking up at the black-eyed man.
"Soul scan," he said with a shrug.
I blinked up at him. He had to be nearly seven feet tall. "What the actual f—"
Moose staggered forward and bumped into me. I'd have face-planted right into Hamster-man's solar plexus if Moose hadn't grabbed my shoulder and held on. I'm not sure if he was saving me or himself, but we both managed to stay on our feet.
"I hate that thing," he says. "Hotter than witchfire."
"Is it?" The thin brown over one black eye arched up. "Interesting." He jerked his head toward the back. "Duty sergeant will help you out." He strolled back to his desk. Considering how long his legs were, it only took about three steps.
Moose and I made our way down a long, curved hallway.
"What is he?" I whispered.
"Viking."
I peeked back over my shoulder. "I'm not sure that's the whole story."
"Viking demigod. He's being punished with this job, so he gets off on making everyone else as miserable as he is. Don't push him."
"I don't push."
He peered at me with open skepticism.
"Rude."
He made a noise. It might have been a laugh. Maybe a burp. Hard to tell with Moose.
The desk sergeant was a pretty young woman who was either human or something that easily passed for human. "Agents, you can wait in room one, just there." She pointed with one purple-nailed finger to the nearest door. "Mr. Adamos will be brought in momentarily. Please understand there is no monitoring in that room. If there is trouble, no one will come to help you."
Whatever chill remained in my bones turned to hot lava. "What trouble do you think there will be?"
Her big, brown, guileless eyes peered up at me. "Mr. Adamos is accused of an extraordinarily violent crime against a powerful creature. I wouldn't want to be alone in a room with him, restraints or otherwise."
I opened my mouth to declare his innocence, but Moose laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, directed me into room one, and pushed me down into a chair. "You're an investigator, not a defender," he said once the door was closed.
"He didn't do it."
"Then find the proof. You can stand out there and argue with a low-level guard all you want, and it won't help Nick. Do the job. Focus."
I folded my arms over my chest, realized that probably looked as petulant as I felt, uncrossed them, stood up, and started pacing.
Moose sat down and stared, unmoving, at a spot on the wall. His breathing grew so slow and deep, I wondered if he'd fallen asleep with his eyes open.
After three or four excruciating minutes, the door opened and two big, burly dudes with deep scowl lines marched Nick in. He wore an orange jumpsuit and orange canvas shoes. His hair fell over his forehead, clean and unstyled. So, they'd let him wash up last night. That was something, I supposed. His bright blue eyes fell on mine and a deep physical ache formed in my chest. Poor Nick. He always tried so hard to do the right thing. He fought against his own nature. He stood up against his own family. Everything about him was dedicated to serving the greater...
Hold up.
Why is it that my brain is buzzing instead of my lady bits?
"Take those things off him, now," Moose grumbled.
I looked closer at the shackles on Nick's wrists and ankles—made of some clear material that looked like crystal and glowing faintly with blue light, they were unlike any warded restraints I'd ever seen.
Nick held my gaze.
My lips moved faster than my brain, which is frequently the case. "No, leave them on."
Moose growled.
The corner of Nick's mouth twitched upward.
My cheeks burned. "It's easier this way." That's as much as I could bring myself to admit in front of Moose and the guards.
"Understood." Looking downright relaxed about the whole situation, Nick made his way to the waiting chair with small, restrained steps.
The guards glared at him.
"Thanks, you can go," I told them.
"You know, we're not responsible—"
"Yeah, we got it. Go."
They exchanged a look that clearly conveyed their opinion of hysterical women giving orders, but turned and left without further argument.
"You're okay?" I asked Nick.
"I'm fine."
Moose leaned his broad back against the wall and folded his meaty arms over the expanse of his chest. "Even though you're trussed up?"
"As a man, you underestimate the effects of my energetic vibrations on women. It is impossible for you to understand. These restraints allow Nowicki to focus on the facts of the case and only the facts."
So, his English was back to its normal, softly accented rhythm. I tried to console myself with that instead of crawling into a hole in the ground to hide.
"Is it something like the siren's call for a man?" Moose asked.
I peeked up to see that Nick was still watching me. "I imagine it must be similar, though not exactly the same. A siren can call a man to do anything. He will throw himself into the sea for her. He will throw someone else into the sea for her. Either way, it will be bliss to know her satisfaction."
"You sound like Gomez."
Both men peered at me with puzzled expressions.
"Uh..." I tucked a loose hair behind my ear. "Gomez Addams. In the movie, he says... well.... Pretty much what you said. Either way, what bliss." Dang, that hole in the ground would be great.
"Who is Gomez Addams?" Nick asked.
"Oh, man? You don't know Gomez? That dude was a cool cat." I'd never heard Moose so enthusiastic. He was grinning and shaking his head. I don't know if I'd ever seen him grin before then. "This one time, there was... like... a teacher or something. Dude had a beef with Gomez's boy, so Gomez gets out this big ass samurai sword and he..." The smile faded. He cleared his throat. "Don't matter. We got to focus."
I looked at Nick.
After a long moment, he looked at me.
"So, uhm, anyway," I said. "We've already established that it's quite difficult to resist the siren's call. She called. You came. Everything after that is a blur, correct?"
"That's right," Nick said.
"Still nothing? No flashes of memory or crazy dreams?" I asked.
"No, nothing." He steepled his hands in front of his perfectly crooked mouth and tapped his pinkies together. "She was always something of an absurd optimist, a Pollyanna if you will." His attention drifted off into space. "She travelled all the way to China to buy silk flowers from the most renowned maker of them just so she could create a garden in winter for Persephone." His shoulders drooped. "She cried for a week when the silk rotted."
In six months, I had come to believe that a person can start to feel like just about anything is normal if they experience it often enough. And yet, some days challenged that belief.
"She wouldn't be frightened without a good cause. If anything, she'd fatally assume the best of someone stalking her. You need to find out what she was upset about."
Moose rubbed his big bowling ball of a head. "This be a lot easier if you remembered something."
"But I don't."
"It's got to be a spell," I said. "Nobody could hit you hard enough to cause physical damage like that."
Nick nodded. "I've reached the same conclusion." He leaned forward and laid his hands on the table. The chains clanked with the motion. "I'd had hopes that this place would inhibit the magic. Or maybe that these shackles would. I had no idea The Organization possessed this kind of magic. It is extremely powerful." He avoided my eyes.
Intentionally?
In the first days of our relationship, we had come close to... something. We'd stopped short when we realized how complicated it would be. I could never be out from under the influence of his magical pull on me. Neither of us could ever truly trust that what we had was real. And even if the sex was as truly extraordinary as it probably would be considering his strength and agility, his tenderness and passion...
"Nowicki?"
I jumped. "Uh, yeah? What? Okay. What?"
Nick's eyebrow lifted again. "I was just saying that Mx. Landry could probably make a fairly decent list of my enemies. At least, the enemies that have been around in recent decades and are walking free. I don't think anyone would have used Agalope to get to me. Our connections were too far in the past, but whoever did this went to pretty decent lengths to set me up."
Moose cleared his throat. "Uh, boss?" He ahemmed a second time. "I don't mean to offend, but, I mean, I'd be no kind of an investigator at all if I didn't. Are you sure it was a setup? If you don't remember..."
"Anything is possible, my friend. Anything at all."
***
When the goons came back for Nick, he stood up to go with no complaint or hesitation. He looked at Moose first. "We've worked together a long time."
"Truth," Moose said.
"Talk to Mx. Landry. Between you, you know nearly everything."
"I'll do that."
Then he looked at me, and I indulged myself with a brief moment of drinking in his beauty, without the filter of his magic. He was handsome by any standard with his bright blue eyes, pale skin, red lips, and black hair. The earliest hint of a beard stubbled his square jaw. One side of his mouth tipped slightly higher than the other. One eyebrow arched higher. One ear stuck out a fraction of a centimeter further. He didn't always look so very human. That he did was proof of his inner peace. When he was calm, it was easier for him to hold himself together. Literally. Only twice before had I been in a circumstance to be with him and unaffected in supernatural ways. Those times, we were in some kind of half-physical/half-ethereal spirit realm forest. This was all perfectly real. My heart beat slow and hard in my chest and then my damn lips took off on their own again. "Think we could buy some handcuffs like that on Amazon?"
The corners of his eyes crinkled adorably.
"I don't know what to look for," I confessed. "Chantelle says that I need to consider my inexperience a clue."
He tipped his head as if considering that. "She would know. Still, you have the best instincts of anyone I've ever worked with, ever. And that's a long time. Sniff around. Follow your gut."
One of the guards grabbed his arm a bit harder than was necessary.
Nick leveled a cool glance at him.
The guard's Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. "Times up and then some." His voice shook a little.
It was the first time I really understood how much the supernatural community feared Nick's power. That man—or man-shaped being—dealt with banshees and rabid werewolves, demons, fairies, and dragons on the regular. And he was so scared of Nick he could barely hold himself together. My chills came back as it occurred to me that, in all honesty, I had no idea what Nick was really capable of. Ripping off a siren's head with his bare hands may well be the very least of it.