Page 35 of Demon and the Raven

“So you want to fuck me in the face of death?”

His brows furrowed. “This just proves, again, like always, that there is not a romantic bone in your body.”

“You could put a romantic bone in my body,” I said with a leer.

“Get out, go sit in the car,” he ordered, taking Argos off his shoulders and passing him to me. “Take this cat, put him in the car first, then grab your bike and put it in the back. You can’t be in here anyway when the CSI folks show up.”

“I wasn’t saying I wasn’t on board with your life-affirming activities,” I argued.

“Out,” he repeated.

“You don’t even want to talk about this?”

His silence, combined with the pointing, told me we would not, in fact, be talking about it.

FIVE

After getting my bike as directed, I loaded it into the back, then picked up Argos, who was following along behind me, got into the passenger seat, and attempted to put him in my lap. He was not having it, preferring instead to sit at my feet in the darkness.

“These are the times when I wish you could speak to me,” I told him, then wondered if he’d retreated to the footwell because I’d turned on the car for a moment to roll down the window. To me, it really felt like he was hiding, but I had no idea what he could possibly be afraid of, and then, of course, I thought back to what Thero said, and my mind started running. Because Argos was a daemon, so maybe he was sensing whatever the big bad thing was, and it was making him jumpy. When I got home—or more likely in the morning with how late it was now—I would need to hit the books in the library to see if I could find anything about sealed rifts. Perhaps there was something that could help me figure out how strong of an entity would have to cross to cause a sealing.

Sitting in the car, I ended up dozing, listening to the wind outside, the trees as the breeze blew through the leaves, until the CSI people arrived. I watched as the four-person team split up, two walking around the ruins of one side of the house while the other two disappeared into the part still standing.

I leaned my head on the frame of the door and, still watching everything, took a deep breath of the fragrant summer air and decided to close my eyes for a few minutes.

“Hey.”

It took a moment, because I wasn’t sure where I was for a second, but then I turned my head to the sound of his voice and opened my eyes. I found Lorne standing next to my door, hand on the open window, smiling at me.

“The techs are done, and the state police are here, so you ready to go home?”

“What?”

He snickered.

“Why’re you—they just started.”

“No, they showed up an hour and a half ago. They’ve been gone about ten minutes now,” he said warmly, reaching for me, cupping my cheek in his hand for a moment. “You passed out from boredom.”

I smiled at him.

“I should have had you go home, but I don’t want you to be alone until I figure out what’s going on,” he explained before walking around the front of the vehicle and getting in. “I can tell you that the forensic team didn’t find anything out of place in her basement, and everything was undisturbed, so I’m fairly certain we can rule out robbery as a motive for the killing.”

“That’s good, one less thing,” I said as he put on his seat belt, started the car, threw it into gear, and pulled away from the curb. He made the U-turn in the street, and then we were headed for home. After a moment I coughed softly.

When he glanced over at me, seeing my face, his brows furrowed. “What’s wrong besides the obvious?”

“Obvious?”

“The murder,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah, I—I am. And I should have said something earlier, but your murder was more pressing than mine.”

Pulling over after going through the sole traffic light in town, he turned to me. The incendiary scowl was not good. “Your murder?”

Quickly—because the look on his face, coupled with his tone, told me I would be next on the chopping block for not sharing sooner—I gave him the rundown of meeting Thero, her news that Nott had been murdered, and that something sinister had entered Osprey through the secondary rift. “And Thero thinks,” I ended with, “that whatever came through might be something really bad.”

It took him a second. “Might be something bad?” he roared, which was really loud in the small space despite the open windows. “Might be?”