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“They were stirring long before you pulled the trigger,” Caelan said. “We ran by several animate limbs on the way to the pool. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“No, or whatever I saw my brain wrote off.”
“First werewolf would have arrived and I would have dispatched the boy before the dead got him. He knew he wasn't walking out alive. Why do you think he pressed you to find his sister?”
“'Dispatched?' That's what you call a murder?”
In the soft ambiance of lamplight, his eyes seemed dim, forlorn and human. “Not everyone retires snuggled in bed with family and friends gathered and their bucket list completed. The lives left incomplete, especially those innocent or good, are most haunting.”
Abandoning the sheet, I moved across the mattress to be beside him. “Do you remember your first kill?”
“A beetle or small lizard in my pen. I’ve killed to survive since I was a pup. Killed dozens of werewolves before a single human, but I’ve killed plenty of everything since.”
It took a moment to process what he’d said. “A pen?”
He stared hard at the carpet. “Where I come from, you don’t walk on two legs until you’ve proven steady on four.”
I rested my hand on his knee. “Sounds awful.”
“I am.” Caelan returned my hand to my lap. “I’ve killed so much, when I come across someone who hasn’t, it reminds me of everything I don’t feel.”
Respecting his space, I eased toward my pillow. “You could choose to feel.”
“I was bred to keep humans and Otherworld members safe. Feeling invites mistakes.” He waved at my thigh. “I felt Stephen’s death and look what happened.”
“You can't be bred for—”
He rose, pulled a set of keys from his pocket and jingled them. “If you’re comfortable, I need to be getting gone. Do not let anyone in. If they don't have me and this key, they can't come in, alright? I left a spare on the kitchen counter. If you're feeling safe come morning, call yourself a ride home and lock the door behind you. You can return the key when next we meet. You want to stay longer, let me know.”
“Thanks.”
“Sleep well.”
“Caelan?”
He paused at the door.
“There’s as much man in you as there is wolf.”
Once his truck had disappeared into the quiet night, I settled back in the sheets and turned off the lamp. There was nothing waiting in the darkness. Nothing. And yet my dreams were full of anticipation.
When morning brightened the curtains to soft grey, I called a cab and poked around his living room bookcase. The books were clean and dusted, the spines preserved, the edges of a few soft covers dented.
You could learn a lot about a person from what they read and how they treated books. Arcane laws and foreign regulations, texts on monsters, unusual species and rare sightings. Animal behavior studies. Criminal investigations. Top shelf, I found Carroll and Tolkien and Poe; Gaiman and Pratchett and Rowling. There was fantasy, and broken worlds, heroes with hardship and villains with vision.
And in a Barnes and Noble bag nearby, a hardcover on Theodore Roosevelt.
The cab arrived. I didn’t have any pants and couldn’t shimmy on a bloodstained dress, but hell no was I calling for Lisa, so I texted Caelan an SOS pleading for him to dispose of my dress and to let me borrow a tee and pair of sweats.
???
Caelan allowed me back at my house, but only with a guard on my front and back doors. After a breakfast of toast and strong black coffee, I checked my voicemail.
Work asking when I’d return. A friend from grad school with a question about transparent glazes. Work hinting at an upset donor. Becky asking after last night. Work, informing me that the museum suffered a theft the night prior, not in the main gallery but within the conservation lab.
The thief had ignored priceless masterpieces, targeting instead Ritual Conduit. Security camera footage caught a tall, thin man ambling along the gate seconds before the entire system short-circuited.
The fortune teller existed only in a relatively harmless form of smoked oil and varnish, but the idea of those watchful eyes somewhere out there, in the possession of my apparent stalker no less, gave me a stomach ache. Home didn’t feel safe anymore; I was beginning to feel no where was, as if I were a moth flown into a spider’s web and there was nothing but sticky, gossamer strands every which way I thrashed.
