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positivelybeastly · 6 months ago

Note

Ok, but what do you think was going through Hank's head between Trish dumping him and Cassandra Nova screwing him over? How did he spend those hours?

Also, this is your safe space to roast Trish Trilby into the freaking sun. (Please please please).

Also, (sorry if this is too much) Why do you think Cassandra screwed with Hank so much?

It was his first time putting on this new tux - all of his old ones no longer fit, naturally - and if he was frightfully honest, it had been rather a pain, doing it with his new digits; waistcoat buttons, dress shirt, bowtie, all just so remarkably fiddly. He had spent his whole life so uniquely talented with his hands that even a slight reduction in dexterity would have thrown him, but this . . .

But it would be worth it, he told himself, as he primped and preened a little bit in the mirror. It was, in its way, a self-confidence boost all on its own, to be able to dress himself so finely without tearing a hole in the silk or nicking himself with his own claws.

As he looked into the mirror, he even found it within himself to smile, and to like that smile, no less - he felt as though he could feel his old face coming through, which was a bizarre concept, but one which was something of an old friend to him by now. It usually came before acceptance, which was all to the good, surely? He had weathered this before, and he would do again.

"There is no exquisite beauty . . . without some strangeness in the proportion.” No doubt Poe would have had a nervous fit, to see a creature such as the Beast quoting him from memory, but then, what hadn't set that poor man into a nervous fit? Not that . . . Hank couldn't relate, of course, but . . . he cleared his throat, determined to be positive.

This was a big night, his first night out since he'd changed, and he was determined that it was going to be a big night.

Moving over to the answering machine, Hank carefully depressed the button, and erupted into a smile as he caught sight of himself in the mirror. In his head, he felt as though he could hear his old self clapping him on the back and telling him, you got this, boychik!

"Hi, Hank . . ."

A cocky grin on his face now, Hank pulled back a bit, adopting an almost sultry pose as he looked in the mirror, adjusting his bowtie. "Well hello, Trish." He couldn't help himself.

"RROOowr!" He did look good, didn't he?

"Are you ready for a balloon ride across upstate New York with champagne and . . ." His ears flicked. Trish didn't sound . . .

"I'm sorry I'm being such a coward about this, Hank, but I'm calling from Washington, and . . . it's not you, it's me."

Hank stopped mid hair primp.

"You're still the same lovely Hank inside, even since you changed so much, but . . . I know you can't help your eyes, but you look at me like I'm prey sometimes and . . ."

His arm fell down by his side.

"And the Enquirer ran a story about us . . . the word 'bestiality' was used three times . . ."

He felt - he felt -

"I couldn't do anything to hurt you, dear, lovely Hank. But this could ruin my career as a broadcaster."

He felt like he was going to be sick.

"Oh god, I didn't mean it like that."

How did you mean it, Trish.

"Oh, Hank . . . I'm making such a mess of this."

Are you.

"I'm so sorry."

Are you truly?

The answering machine beeped mockingly, asking him if he wanted to delete the message, replay it, or save it.

With an uncanny accuracy that would have made Gambit proud, Hank whipped the hand mirror through the air with enough force that it smashed the answering machine into plastic smithereens, the moulded shell of it collapsing to the floor in amongst the broken glass.

No.

No, that wasn't enough.

His body possessed by the same kind of predatory speed that filled prey animals with terror, he stalked over to the corpse of the machine and began to stomp, over, and over, and over again. Transistors, transducers, receivers, numeric keys, wire, it all ended up stomped into a twisted mess of shit, because that's all all of this was, it was shit, it was bullshit, it was all bullshit -

Bringing his paws up to the collar of his tuxedo, worn just this once, freshly tailored, costing a good few thousand dollars, from a tailor that Janet van Dyne had recommended to him personally, Hank tore it all to shreds in one fell rip.

It all came away in gossamer strings, light and thready and soft, and as it peeled away, Hank thought for a moment that he might quite like to reach up just a few inches higher, dig his claws into his skull, and do the exact same thing with his skin, and his fur, until the meat suit went the way of the monkey suit and he was himself again. Until the him, the real him, not this royal blue mockery, was what people saw again.

But it wasn't that easy, now, was it?

The pants were next. Then the boots, the first of which he kicked off his feet and sent flying into a monitor that cost more than the suit, cracking it. He didn't care. Off came the other one. Another $10,000, down the drain. Who cared.

Newly naked, and not even remotely calm, Hank bent over and pressed his head into the cold, sterile metal of the lab that Charles had invested millions into, and screamed, an inarticulate sound of pain and fury and humiliation and shame. His brain felt as though it were throbbing. He could feel it pulsing against the bounds of his skull, just wishing it could escape the confines of this mortal shell, and Hank could only whimper and whisper back, me, too.

He rocked back, falling on his haunches, and stared off into nothingness. He sat there, for what must have been half an hour, refusing to cry, refusing to give her the satisfaction, refusing to be beaten, taking all of what he was feeling into his paws and slowly strangling it and packing the chopped up little corpses into littler coffins in his mind, hammering down the lids until all that remained were neat little boxes that he could compartmentalise and file away with the rest of it.

And when he was done, he breathed in deep, stood up, and walked away from the wreckage of his relationship, naked and without any more pretensions as to his exquisite beauty.

The first step was, of course, to find new clothes. The most immediate source was the field gear room, and he supposed it was as apropos as anything else. Any aspirations of a social life, he could now safely consign to the dust bin along with his aspirations of a human relationship, so why not don the garments of the X-Man he was consigned to be and only be? It was more honest that way.

He smoothed down the sides of the buttery smooth, new leather jacket, supposing he was glad that the kevlar-unstable molecule weave that lay beneath its surface meant it wouldn't rip like the tuxedo would.

Supposing so. As an identity, it would do.

The second step was to clean up after himself. Sweep away the glass and the plastic, throw out the broken monitors, order new ones, bill it to the Professor's account. If he questioned it, he could either accept Hank's mumble that there had been an experiment that went awry, or he could tickle at Hank's brain and then recoil because that entire area of Hank's mind probably felt like acid to the touch.

Either way, replacements were on their way.

The third step . . . and Hank was, for the moment, glad that the sub-basement was, in essence, his stomping ground and no-one else's, because that meant there was no-one to stop him . . . was to find the Enquirer story that Trish had mentioned.

He could practically hear Jean in his brain, telling him not to do this; hell, he could hear Scott and Logan in his brain telling him not to do this, and that was how he knew he really was going around the twist, because those two existed in his mind now and they were in agreement.

But he couldn't help it. He had to know.

Sitting down at his chair, he leaned back, his muzzle perched on his paw. His desktop stared at him, and he felt a pang as his wallpaper rotated through picture after picture of old teams, old faces - his, old face.

He hadn't had the heart to change it yet.

The cheerful placidity of his handsome face stared out at him from the cowl of an old brown and yellow X-Factor uniform, and even as he matched the other Hank's gaze, the piercing yellow of his newly lambent eyes shone back at him through the reflective glare of the monitor, replacing the soft blue he remembered.

He shrunk away from it, and instead slid on his digital manipulators, the mechanical prostheses that allowed him to type without fingers. He stretched them, feeling the wire and metal and electrical impulse sensors in the tips flex around his digits, and began to type.

'Enquirer Trish Tilby.' 410,000 results, most of them articles citing her as a source, dating back to the outbreak of strange, seemingly mystical possessions of every day objects and the emergence of X-Factor. Not specific enough. His fingers twitched.

'Enquirer Trish Tilby Hank McCoy.' 290,000 results, the first hundred, at least, of which were simply coverage of their relationship over the years. There, again, was his old face, staring out at him, as if mocking him, entreating him to do what he always did and pursue knowledge, instead of listening to the little voice in his head telling him he was only making things worse. His fingers twitched again.

'Enquirer Trish Tilby Hank McCoy . . .'

He swallowed.

'Enquirer Trish Tilby Hank McCoy bestiality.'

And there it was.

He read it, of course. To not read it would be like leaving an itch on the surface of his brain unscratched for the rest of his life, he simply had to know, and it, was . . . exactly as tawdry and sad and cruel and garish and dehumanising as he thought it would be.

Dehumanising.

Now, wasn't there a word? How. Specific. De-human-ising.

'We do believe all planets have a sovereign claim to inalienable human rights

'Inalien... If only you could hear yourselves? 'Human rights.' Why, the very name is racist.'

The sound of Chekov and Azetbur buzzing in his brain made him feel suddenly, violently angry, and he grabbed his keyboard and mouse and flung it to the side like a child, breathing heavily as he heard them clatter and smash, kicking at his desk and feeling it bend under his foot before he brought up his legs and hugged them.

He wanted to get off the ride. He wanted to get off.

He wanted to get off the ride. He wanted off.

He wanted to get off the ride, he wanted off, he wanted off, he wanted off -

A ragged, injured breath escaped him, and he slowly stood back up, his movements stiff and jagged as he slowly cleaned up the new mess he had made. Hank very gingerly picked up the keys that had gone everywhere, dropping them into the garbage like broken teeth, feeling so very much like he wanted to cry, but refusing to give her the satisfaction. He refused. He refused.

. . . He needed to do something constructive. He needed to. He desperately needed to think about something that wasn't this.

Shambling as if drunk, his body cycling through modes of movement as if trying to work its way back to something that felt vaguely human, vaguely normal, Hank moved back towards his anatomical computer console and called up the last file he'd decided to load into it.

'CASSANDRA NOVA ENTITY. THREAT LEVEL: EXTREMELY HIGH. CURRENT STATUS: DECEASED.'

Large, blue paws settled on the terminal and he leaned forward. Something else, now, was gnawing on the edge of his brain like a worm, and this . . . felt . . . important. What was he missing? What hadn't he done? It had been a little spooky, he'd been a little - frazzled, after Nova had gone stomping through the Institute the way she had done, but he'd done all of the routine checks, hadn't he?

Yes. Yes, he had. Basic autonomic processes, breakdown of homeostatic baselines, blood sample, tissue sample, radiological readings, and all of it had come up appropriately strange . . . no known matches in the Avenger database, nor S.H.I.E.L.D's, nor even the Shi'ar. She was strange. Genuinely strange, the kind of life that they'd never seen before - and its first instinct had been to try and kill them. Why?

Why does anyone try to kill anything?

. . . Because it's threatened? But what could possibly threaten Nova? Telepathy, adamantium, gravity, gunpowder, it had all been so much waste. Nothing had phased her, really. What could phase a being of such awe-inspiring power? Not a physical threat, surely . . .

But what about a mental one? Or. A genetic one? What was it he'd said again? She was beyond the biological Twilight Zone. She was, in a word, uncanny, unknowable. What was it he'd said again? He'd been in the middle of saying something. Not just now, back then.

Hank took off his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his muzzle, dialling back through his memories, trying to fumble at the moments just before Cassandra Nova had started to touch at his mind and fry his brain. Before can feel too funny bad smell in my eyes . . . what had they said? They had said something.

'This could become a war for the domination of the bio-sphere.'

'They'll be gone, replaced by us. Or something even stranger.'

'How come she looks like you, Chuck?'

Hank's eyes flew open, Logan's voice ringing in his ears.

'How come she looks like you, Chuck?'

"No . . ." And yet, even as he denied it, Hank was cross-referencing the tissue sample he'd taken - and the DNA contained within - with Cerebra's genetic library files. He didn't need it to tell him what it did, but it was trivial, how quickly it returned a result. In an instant. Ping. Done.

'Exact match: Charles Francis Xavier.'

He . . .

He and the esteemed Headmaster needed to have a talk. Now.

So, there is an actual canonical reason why Cassandra Nova fucked Hank over so badly, and it kinda depresses me because it is just so very typical - it's because fucking him over was useful to her.

What better way to make a genius work in your favour? Hurt him. Hurt him so badly that all he can think about is getting back at you by doing something clever, something that will astonish and amaze and redeem his moment of weakness, of humiliation, of abject failure.

Hurt him because that's easy and it's fun and his insecurities make him predictable in how he'll lash out and try to compensate. Hurt him so that he uses his genius for you, and the only thing that stops him from acting in your favour is someone who can see through his neuroses spotting what's going on.

Someone who is paying active attention to Hank's mental health, like Jean Grey.

It's also partly the reason why Hank ended up being the host for Sublime in Here Comes Tomorrow. It wasn't just a case of convenience.

Hank is the perfect Sublime host. Why?

Partly because Hank is constantly evolving. He is mutation in action. He is the biological imperative to adapt and survive.

'Primordial Earth,' huh?

The only other person who would come close is someone like Darwin. And even then, I suspect Darwin wouldn't be as compatible as Hank. Why?

Because Hank is also two other two things that make him the perfect host. A genius - and mentally ill. He is vulnerable. He is susceptible to manipulation. When isolated, he can become desperate. He panics. He becomes emotionally unstable. Irrational. In need of support.

And that's exactly what Sublime wants. That's exactly what Cassandra Nova wants. That's what they find useful.

Hank is soft, and tender, and useful. Unfortunately for him.

#Anonymous #outofmuffins #blood tw

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solynaceawrites · 4 years ago

Text

Wires [4]: Frustration

Rating: Mature Archive Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death Categories: F/F, F/M Fandom: Devil May Cry Relationships: Dante/Original Female Character(s), Implied Nero/Kyrie, Implied Vergil/Original Female Character(s), Implied Lady/Trish, Dante/Lirael Thorne, Dante/Lir Characters: Dante, Morrison, Nero, Original Female Character(s), Lirael Thorne, Lir Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Violence, Gore, Dark, Horror, Supernatural Elements, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Serial Killers, Angst, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut Summary: In Red Grave City, a serial killer stalks the streets. Lirael Thorne, recently transferred from Fortuna and looking for an escape from her past, winds up on his trail. Hunting him with her veteran partner, Dante Redgrave, they try to piece together the wires that bind the three of them together. In a race to catch him before he leaves more victims in his wake, the things thought buried will come to the surface, tearing lives and comfort apart.

»»————-　⚜　————-««

“Death and life are the same thing- like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and back are not the same . . . They can neither be separated, nor mixed.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

»»————-　⚜　————-««

Lir takes Simon Marson’s statement with a grain of salt. It’s not that she doesn’t trust him—she doesn’t trust lawyers as a whole, but nothing so far has given her a reason to believe he’d outright lie—just that she’s learned firsthand how memories get clouded and fuzzy, particularly about routines. Sure, their victim worked for him. And, yes, she probably did the exact same thing every day, going to her paid internship at her father’s office Monday through Saturday, taking Sunday off, and spending Friday night bar-hopping with her friends. Yet there’s simply too much Marson was unaware of. The questions of who her friends are, what she did when she wasn’t working, her hobbies, any potential lovers, hell even where she lived, are all ones he provided no answer to or understanding of. To him, Sophie truly existed only in the hours between 8:00 am and 6:30 pm. Which isn’t exactly unusual, but it makes her job of following those leads harder, and she ends their interview feeling more irritated than she had when she started.

Dante, too, must be frustrated, because he says nothing at all to her when he leaves the observation room to join her at their desks, merely clacking angrily on his keyboard as he types his report. Lir does the same, transcribing the interview with Marson and her notes to send to Morrison later. A stiff drink is what she needs, maybe a call to Joan for a bit of relaxation, but she settles for chewing aspirin and drinking the bitter coffee unique to precincts. By the time she’s done recounting the events of the last thirty-six hours, her fingers are stiff and the throbbing in her temples has turned into a fierce clawing that makes her eyes water, and she’s keenly aware of the fact that they’re fast closing in on the forty-eight hour mark and how much more difficult this investigation is going to be beyond it.

“You eaten?” Dante asks. Lir shakes her head, and he picks up his phone, dialing quickly. “Me neither. ‘Bout to keel over, if I’m honest. You good with pizza?”

“Sure. Whatever toppings are fine.”

He flashes her a grin before speaking into the receiver, and Lir uses the time to read back over Trish’s findings. They aren’t pretty. While there were no ligature marks, showing that Sophie was neither restrained nor strangled, there were heavy levels of Rohypnol in her blood, meaning she would have been unable to do anything at all. In fact, Trish notes that the dose probably would have been fatal, given the fact that Sophie was well over the legal limit for intoxication, clocking a BA of 0.16%, putting her at the threshold for alcohol poisoning. Did she normally drink so much? Lir runs her fingers over the paper, frowning slightly as she thinks. Joan hadn’t said much more about Sophie’s habits other than her cocktail of choice, and they hadn’t asked for a receipt, a stupid oversight that needs to be corrected. Because if that much liquor was’t common for Sophie, it means either she was drinking a lot more, which could lead them to recent stresses.

Or that the killer was feeding her margaritas all night to make sure she was too weak to fight him.

“There was no phone recovered from the alley, right?” she asks. Dante gives a grunt as he hangs up the phone, and she leans back, stretching to relieve the tension in her shoulders. “We’ve got to find her friends, talk to them.”

“What about the mother?”

“Gone. Parents divorced when Sophie was . . .” Lir checks her notes. “Six. The original custody agreement was for the mom to have supervised visitation, but she went no contact when Sophie was twelve. The last Marson heard from her, she was living with her new husband in Portland.”

Dante whistles. “No contact? Think Marson was abusing her?”

“Maybe. But why would Sophie hang around, if that was the case? You watch your dad beat on your mom for six years and wind up working for him?”

He grunts and leans back, crossing his arms over his chest and staring thoughtfully at a spot just over her right shoulder. “Abuse doesn’t always make it to the kids,” he says after a moment. “Sure, maybe pops was an asshole, but he was probably smart enough to keep it behind closed doors. Or maybe there wasn’t anything goin’ on other than two people who didn’t want to be together anymore.” He pauses to take a sip of coffee. “Could have been mom, too.”

“Right.” Lir massages her temples, and the pressure there subsides enough that she no longer feels like her eyes are going to burst. A migraine is the last thing she needs right now, but that’s exactly where she’s headed if she doesn’t get some sort of rest soon. “So, we have a victim whose father knows nothing about her personal life, a killer who was smart enough to make sure we couldn’t trace her beyond the bar, and, after nearly forty hours, no real answers.”

“Sounds about right.” Dante’s grin is bitter.

“Fuck.” She drums her fingers on her desk. “Crime scene still roped off?”

“As far as I know. You plannin’ a visit?”

“Yeah. I need to get some air, and I want to take it in now that it’s quiet.” Lir grabs her coat from the back of her chair as she stands, sliding it on before leaning to open her desk and grab her gun and badge. Fastening them to her belt, she mutters, “Maybe something got missed.”

Dante gets up, stretching with a loud yawn. “Alright. I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t need—”

“I’m not babysittin’ you, Lir.” His eyes are somehow both grave and mocking, and she’s not sure which irritates her more. “There’s a killer. None of us should be goin’ out alone, especially with the statistics about who else might show up there to get their jollies.”

That gives her pause. “Right. Okay. You driving?”

He dangles his keys. Lips twitching, she turns and heads down the stairs and out to the lot, listening to the quiet thumping of Dante’s shoes as he follows her. For someone so big, he doesn’t make a lot of noise when he moves, and she wonders idly if it’s a force of habit or just how he is as she slides into the passenger seat of his car and fastens her seatbelt. Like always, he flicks on the radio and finds a classic rock station before starting the drive, and he ignores her popping two aspirin into her mouth and chewing them dry.

The ride back to the alley passes in the silence between them. Lir looks out of her window, the rain sliding along the glass turning the world outside to a muted painting of blurred shapes and bright flashes of color on an otherwise dreary background, and thinks. Sophie Marsons had gone to the bar, as was her usual weekend habit, and ordered her preferred drink. Had she gone with friends? Had they danced, and laughed, until a stranger stole into their group, with eyes only for Sophie, eyes full of murder that she might have mistaken for desire? Despite what she had said to Dante about their victim being chosen randomly, Lir has little doubt that she knew her killer. Statistics point to it, the inevitable need for the comfort brought by familiarity that a new killer needs to do his work. Statistics, the voice of her old academy instructor rasps in her mind, are statistically incorrect.

If Sophie wasn’t the first, then there’s another victim out there.

Cold, bitter rain lashes her as soon as she steps out of the car. Huffing, watching her breath condense and twist in the air, Lir pulls her hood up around her face and tucks her hands into her pockets, wishing she had a slicker even if the garish yellow color of it would make her stick out like a sore thumb. Dante joins her, grimacing as he sets a black trilby on his head, water dripping from the brim steadily. “Good thing we already got forensics,” he mutters.

“Mm.” Making a non-committal noise in her throat, she ducks under the crime scene tape and walks into the alley, where she stands and takes it in. Without pedestrian and vehicular traffic on the street, it’s unnervingly quiet; is this how it was at four in the morning? Nothing but silence as the dull oppressiveness of the city while Sophie was carved open like livestock?

Lir is moving towards the dumpster when something rustles behind it. Pausing, she stares at it, her brow pinched and her hand moving slowly to her gun, waiting. Cat, she thinks, or rat. Something digging for scraps now that humanity has gone away. But the silhouette she can just make out on the other side is too large, and, as she watches, a tanned hand grips the edge before a rain-soaked head pokes cautiously around, the eyes that she sees wide enough that the whites are like spotlights. Behind her, she hears Dante hiss, the faint splash of water as he slowly comes up beside her. Looks like he was right. Someone else had shown up, and now all that’s left to do is figure out whether or not they’re the murderer.

“Police,” Dante barks. “Don’t move!”

The man jumps to his feet and takes off, and Lir lets out a string of curses as she darts after him. They always fucking run, guilty or innocent, because seeing a cop always makes them feel like they’ve done something wrong. Bearers of bad news, thugs with guns, she’s heard it all, and she wonders how this guy thinks of the police even as she chases him down the winding alleys of a city she’s already growing to hate. “Thorne!” Dante shouts, his voice dwindling as the distance between them grows. “Goddamnit, Thorne!”

Up ahead, the black coat swirls as the man rushes through the maze. Sometimes all she has is a glimpse of fabric as he turns a corner, others, on the straight, narrow stretches, she can make out more of him, and her mind catalogues these snapshots. Slender build. Dark jeans. Heavy boots. The glint of a ring. A pair of wild eyes peering over his shoulder. Despite knowing she should draw it, Lir leaves her gun holstered. Don’t you ever, her instructor had said gravely, take that thing out unless you intend to shoot, and she’s got no desire to fire a bullet that would at best embed itself harmlessly into a wall and at worst ricochet and cause more damage.

Her hood falls back, rain plastering her hair to face and neck. In her chest, her heart is a drum, and her blood roars in her ears, equaled only by the low whistle of her breathing as she tries to control it to fight off fatigue. Keep moving, she tells her legs, don’t fucking stop until you know who he is.

At her hip, her radio crackles, only to be ignored. Right now, it is only her and her prey, locked in the chase until one of them is forced to stop. Guilty people run, sure. So do frightened ones. Which is he? Killer or morbid onlooker, dangerous or afraid?

Lir never gets the chance to find out. They burst into a side-street, the cars around them blaring horns of fear and anger at this sudden intrusion, and a hand clamps onto her shoulder and yanks her back as a truck passes through the space she’d been about to step into. By the time it and its trailer clear out, the man is gone, and a scream bubbles in her throat that she fights to swallow. She knows who grabbed her—the scent of Dante’s cologne, muted by the rain, wafts into her nose, accompanied by the spiced, salty blend of sweat and deodorant—and she allows him to lead her back to the sidewalk, where she doubles over with her hands on her thighs and struggles to slow her breathing from the harsh, jagged pants to something close to normal. At this angle, she can make out the way water has turned the leather of his shoes a dull brown. Never gonna look nice again, she thinks, and closes her eyes against the swell of nausea that comes from exertion on an empty stomach.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Dante growls, his voice rasping and hoarse from chasing her. “You ever stop to think for a damned second that we’d need backup? Or that chasing that idiot could have gotten you killed?”

The scolding makes her angry all over again. “I’m sorry,” she snaps, straightening to glare at him. “Should I have let our only lead so far go?”

“If it meant surviving? Yeah, you should’ve. Or were you hoping to wind up like Marsons?” His eyes are cold with fury, his cheeks flushed with it. “I told you, I fucking told you—”

Lir’s phone rings, cutting off whatever tirade he’d been heading towards. Scowling, she answers it. “Thorne.”

“You with Redgrave?” Morrison asks, crackling with static.

“Yeah.” Dante makes an impatient motion with his hand, and she holds up a finger in the standard request for a minute of silence.

“Get your asses over to Tellula Park. He’ll know where it is.”

There’s something so foreboding about Morrison’s tone that Lir knows the answer to her question before she even asks it. “What’s there?”

Morrison sighs. “Another body. Looks like our killer didn’t want to wait for us to catch him.”

“We’ll be there.” She hangs up, then looks at Dante, frustration and defeat welling within her to make her voice curiously flat. “There’s another victim in Tellula Park.”

Dante curses. “Our guy?”

“Morrison said it was,” she replies.

He glances around, studying the street sign at the intersection. “C’mon. Car’s about two blocks away. We’ll have to book it if we don’t want Morrison to rip us new assholes for taking our sweet time.”

Lir nods. Dante turns and starts down the sidewalk, and she follows, craving a drink and a good night’s rest and maybe a bit of company, angry to have wasted time on some idiot onlooker when the killer was busy leaving them another corpse, another family to notify, another twisted web. I didn’t know, she thinks, and that just makes her feel worse. Tunnel vision, that’s what she had fallen into, too focused on what was in front of her nose to take a second to really contemplate if a killer who took such care not to be noticed would have been so stupid as to come back to the scene of his crime in the middle of the day with cops still around.

They’re sweating and miserably damp by the time they reach the car. Dante pulls towels from the backseat for them to sit on—something her father had done, to keep water from damaging the seats—and turns on the heater to fight some of the chill. It’s only once they’re on their way to the new scene that he says anything at all. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Lir’s head snaps towards him at both the words and the sympathy within them. Not that it’s unusual for cops to know how their partner feels, but usually that takes years of working together, not days, so either he’s particularly good and reading the people around him or he’s projecting. “What?”

“The new victim,” he explains. “Wasn’t anything you could have done. We had and have nothing to go on, and you chasin’ that guy didn’t get this one killed. Or,” his mouth twitches, “do you think you’re better than every other cop on the force?”

“Of course not,” she protests hotly. “I just . . .”

Dante cracks the window and lights a cigarette that he pulls from the pack in his door. “Look,” he says, exhaling smoke, “I get it. You’re new, gotta prove yourself, and this guy is a pain in the ass. But you ain’t got any control over him, or what he does. Only thing you can do is learn, be better, so you can catch him.”

It’s spoken in the same tone he might have used to console a weeping toddler, and she bristles. “You don’t know me.”

“No, but I read your file.” He glances at her as he tosses the cigarette, still half-lit, out of the window. “You know what was top and center on the behavior section? Empathetic. You feel things, Thorne, feel ‘em deep, maybe, and that’s great for gettin’ inside the head of whoever’s doin’ this, but it means he can get inside your head, too, if you let him.”

She sinks into her seat, thinking of her dream, and gooseflesh breaks out across her arms despite the warm air blowing from the vents. “So what’s your drive, then? Fame? Promotions?”

Dante snorts. “Nah. Just don’t like bastards who hurt women, that’s all.” He pauses, then exhales slowly. “Look. I’m not gonna rat you out to Morrison. You made a decision that anyone else would’ve made. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fucking stupid decision, but . . . It stays between us. Right?”

There’s a rush of gratitude that she hates feeling. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay,” he agrees amicably.

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