Caged, page 9
There was a certain musky scent to the male body that went largely unnoticed when they were clothed. It wasn’t so unnoticed when they were naked, and though it wasn’t a bad smell, per se, it wasn’t an aroma I enjoyed while trying to eat lunch. I unzipped the pouch at my waist and peered inside. “Bizbee? Could you please hand me Alex’s birthday present?”
“It’s no’ his birthday yet,” Bizbee argued.
“Yes, I know, but I need it. I’ll replace it later.”
Kristine and St. John were both staring at me now. St. John let out a short bark of laughter when Bizbee held up a large Batman T-Shirt and a pair of plain black shorts. I took them and thrust them at St. John.
“If you’re going to provide us with such stimulating company for the duration of our meal, perhaps we could agree on a sort of dress code?”
“I don’t need young Alex’s birthday suit—I’ve got my own.” He waggled his eyebrows.
I sighed and shoved the clothes closer. “Please.”
“If I agree to gird myself against your delicate eyesight, would you answer a question for me?” St. John asked.
“Depends on the question. And how quickly you can get dressed.”
He took the clothes, but didn’t put them on right away. His expression grew serious, sobriety changing his appearance completely. His red eyes lost their shine, dulling to a plain maroon, and his smile faded, making him look older, less playful. “You were talking about Kevin,” he said quietly. “Has there been some progress? Do you know what happened?”
“It’s my understanding he poisoned himself trying to get high,” I said, keeping my tone gentle. “You were his friend?”
St. John nodded. “Kevin had a checkered past, and it made him blessedly slow to judge. He was not as put off by my…individuality as some.”
“I’m sorry, St. John, but no, we don’t have any more information,” Kristine said. “If you need to talk, you know where to find me.”
St. John smiled, a ghost of the grin he’d started with. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He turned to me and held out the clothes. “It was a pleasure to meet you.”
“A memorable meeting to be certain,” I agreed, accepting the clothes back.
Two things struck me as I watched the fox shifter leave the cafeteria. One, his posture changed. He still strode with the confidence of a man comfortable in his own skin, but there was a stiffness in his spine now, less of the fluid grace from before. And two, the shifters sitting on the other side of the cafeteria watched him go with a little more interest than seemed warranted. Majesty got that same look whenever I got out my sewing kit and he spotted the spools of thread.
I assumed the second thing explained the first.
“That was interesting,” I murmured.
Kristine took a sip of her tea. “St. John is that.”
“Sounds like he hasn’t had the easiest time here. That must have made losing a friend even harder.”
Kristine sighed. “No, he hasn’t had an easy time. And it was very hard for him when Kevin died. But to be fair, the friction between him and the rest of the pack isn’t completely due to the fact that he’s a fox in a wolf den.” She hesitated, then shrugged. “It’s a matter of public record, so I suppose there’s no harm in telling you. St. John is a thief, and near as I can tell, he has been his whole life. He’s got arrests older than some of my clients. He is, however, very charming. When Ruth first assigned him to Brenna on his arrival, I worried that he might be too charming for her.”
“Too charming?”
“Well, Brenna is young, and St. John can be very persuasive.”
“Brenna is his therapist?”
“Not anymore. Brenna reassigned him to me.”
I paused with a spoonful of clam chowder halfway to my mouth. “Why?”
“My impression was that Brenna got over-invested in his recovery and had trouble handling it when he…backslid.”
“Had trouble leaving behind the life of crime?” I guessed.
“I believe so. Actually, I was very impressed with Brenna for requesting the transfer. A lot of therapists, especially new therapists, feel a need to prove themselves, and they stick with clients even when their instinct tells them they’ve gotten too invested. As I said, St. John is charming, and I think Brenna’s head was turned. All together, it just wasn’t a good therapeutic relationship.”
“Do you think there was any romance there?” I asked.
Kristine sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Honestly, there wouldn’t have needed to be any romance for St. John’s case to tug at Brenna’s emotions. He didn’t have the easiest time when he first arrived.” She winced. “We have a lot of new wolves here, and it can be very hard for them to control their behavior at first.”
I thought of the looks some of the other shifters had given St. John as he left. “I see. Was he hurt?”
“More his pride than anything else, but a few of the wolves did get a good nip at him. He didn’t help matters by sneaking around in fox form. What you saw today isn’t uncommon. St. John likes to skulk about, listening to conversations that are none of his business. And of course, everyone knew he was a thief, so whenever someone caught him near their quarters, tempers flared. And when a new wolf shifts in anger…”
“I can’t imagine that does a lot for his feeling of pack loyalty,” I said.
“No. But even though his control over shifting is very good now, Liam won’t release him until he’s sure St. John won’t…abuse the opportunities having an alternate form like that can provide.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid he’s going to be here for a while. Reforming a thief is like reforming a gambler. It’s hard to replace that adrenaline rush.”
I stared at the door St. John had left through. “It must be hard for a man with that sort of confidence to adjust to being seen as weaker than those around him. As a target.”
“He most certainly does not like to be a target,” Kristine agreed. “I don’t like to say he asked for it, but the truth is St. John is a man who spent a good portion of his life preying on people weaker than him. He wanted to think his cunning would let him remain superior to those around him despite being a small predator surrounded by much bigger predators. He was wrong.”
“Shouldn’t have picked on a witch,” Peasblossom said.
“No sympathy for the devil, Peasblossom?” I said, glancing down at the pixie.
Peasblossom crossed her arms. “None. He was eavesdropping.”
“Be that as it may,” Kristine continued. “As much as I understand why Brenna reassigned him, the fact is she’ll need to learn to empathize with her patients without over-empathizing. A therapist needs to be able to hold a patient apart from her, so she can relate to them without allowing herself to be dragged into the same emotional web.”
“That will come with time,” I said.
“Yes, it will.” She paused, munching thoughtfully on another carrot. “I’m sorry if this comes across as rude, but can I ask how you became a witch? I mean, does someone choose to be a witch, or are you born one?”
“Most people have at least some magical potential, and if they wanted to be a witch and were willing to put in the work, they could become one,” I explained. “A witch’s magical ability is passed down through the family line, so if enough women in the family decide to hone their magical talent, then each woman is born with more and more potential, but she still needs to practice.”
I took another spoonful of soup, chewing thoughtfully on a big piece of clam. “Then there are those like me. Humans who were, for some unknown reason, gifted with power.”
“Gifted by whom?” Kristine asked, leaning closer.
I shrugged. “Could be a god. Could be a prophecy. Could be a really powerful magic user.”
“So you got lucky,” Kristine said.
I swallowed hard, the soup suddenly sitting like a rock in my stomach. Lucky.
I hadn’t felt lucky when I’d first realized I was different. The seizures, the nightmares. The whispers from those around me, the fear that maybe I had been possessed by a demon. The first witch who’d offered to teach me had instead nearly turned me into another sort of nightmare. “That’s one way to look at it,” I mumbled.
“Must be nice having magical powers.” She sighed. “Though I suppose even if I were a witch, that doesn’t mean life here would be any easier.”
“They don’t seem to warm to witches as a rule, no. Not to mention, if you were a witch and part of the pack, it probably would have been you who had to create the collar for Stephen.”
Kristine stared at me with her tea lifted halfway to her mouth, her eyes widening until the smear of pink eyeshadow over her eyes disappeared. “I forgot about that. Oh, how did I forget about that? You made the collar.”
I held up a finger. “No. No, I just delivered the collar and activated the spell. My mentor created it.”
“Still, I suppose that explains the dirty look Stephen gave you.”
Sort of, I thought bitterly. “You mentioned life here isn’t easy. I would think they would treat you better, since you were married to a pack member.”
Kristine pushed her sandwich away. “I didn’t mean to insinuate that the pack isn’t good to me. They are, they definitely are. One or two people are uncomfortable having a human around, but I think that’s mostly a few hold-outs who think I should have let Brad change me when we married. I think they believe my decision to remain human has something to do with feeling like humans are better than shifters, or something like that. Which I don’t.”
“Is Ruth one of those people?” I asked.
Kristine propped an elbow on the table and cradled her chin in her hand. “She is. But don’t judge her too harshly, she’s not a bad person. Actually, it was largely because of Ruth that I stayed after my husband left me.”
Peasblossom lowered the grape she’d taken from my plate, her little pink face pinching with anger. “He left you with his pack and ran off?”
Kristine caught a drop of condensation dripping down her glass with the tip of one finger. “It’s complicated. Before I was a full time therapist here, I had a private practice treating people suffering from addiction. I had a patient, a woman, and…” She covered her face with her hands, pressing them against her cheeks as if hiding from a memory. “I lost my professional distance. I liked her, a lot. We were alike in so many ways, and there were so many times when I thought…”
“There but for the grace of the Goddess?” I said quietly.
She nodded and lowered her hands. Her face was flushed now, and her eyes too bright. “She used to use drugs with her brother, and then he was sent away to prison for dealing. One day she showed up to a session and told me he was getting out. She was so happy and excited. And she’d been clean for two years.”
“It’s hard to see people we love as a threat,” I said, offering a hand in sympathy.
Kristine patted the back of my hand where it lay over hers. “It’s a mistake we all make at some time or another. I tried to counsel her, tried to help her see why she should take it slow, why she needed to be aware that old feelings might come back. I actually…”
This time when she looked away, it felt like shame, like she couldn’t meet my eyes. “I was so worried about her. But I had other appointments I couldn’t miss. I violated privilege. I told my husband where she was going to meet her brother, and I asked him to go. I thought he could use Sonar’s collar to disguise himself, hide in plain sight and just make sure nothing happened.”
“What happened?” Peasblossom asked, her voice sounding all the tinier for the concern in her tone.
“Ruth overheard me talking to Sonar, asking if I could borrow the collar. She told Liam.”
“And he wouldn’t let Brad do it,” I guessed.
She nodded. “He was right, of course. That was the first step toward a slippery slope. That’s the thing about working with addicts, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you have to take care of them, protect them from the consequences of their own actions. But once you go down that road, it’s too easy to become codependent. I wouldn’t be any good to her like that, and I realized that.” She took a slow, shuddering breath. “That doesn’t make what happened any easier to accept.”
“She used drugs again?” Peasblossom whispered.
Tears welled in her eyes. “She did. And she died.”
I squeezed her hand, my heart twisting in my chest in sympathy. “I’m so sorry, Kristine.”
She nodded and cleared her throat. “Brad was devastated. So was I. I’m sorry to say, I didn’t handle it as well as I should have. I still blame myself for Brad leaving. For a long time after that, I was as bad as any of my patients. I blamed him for what happened to her. By the time I got hold of myself, he was gone.”
“He left you and his pack?” I asked, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice.
Kristine laughed, a short, humorless sound. “That should tell you how bad it was. After he left, I must have been truly pathetic, because even Ruth was nice to me. After Brad left, she insisted I stay on. She’s the one who formally hired me to work at the center. I still have some of my private clients, but most of my work is here now.”
“Did Brenna ever come to you?” I asked. “After her patient died, I mean? It sounds like you were in a unique position to understand what she was going through.”
“That’s a tricky question,” Kristine hedged. She cleared her throat and wiped the last tears from her eyes. “Brenna, Ruth, and I all see one another for therapy, a sort of mental health checks and balances. If Brenna told me something, it would be privileged.”
“I don’t want to ask you to violate privilege.” I drummed my fingers on the table. “Brenna’s patient Kevin overdoses on heroin and wolfsbane. Brenna shows up at a rich accountant’s house where she bites a service animal provider, Paul, then vanishes. Paul kills the accountant, then dies of wolfsbane poisoning in Ruth’s office.”
“Are you sure it was wolfsbane poisoning?” Kristine asked.
I sighed. “I suppose it could have been something else. I’m comfortable saying he was poisoned. Can you think of any other poisons that would work on a werewolf?”
“No.” Kristine toyed with the unraveled edge of plastic on her sandwich, but made no move to unwrap it. “And what would any of that have to do with Kevin?”
“There you are.”
I jumped in my seat, and Peasblossom let out a yip of surprise. I spun just as Liam arrived at our table, his aura reaching me five steps before he did. I winced and grabbed my soda as if it could offer me some protection from the sudden heat.
“Hurry up and finish, we need to deliver the death notification for Paul.”
I took one last bite of my soup and washed it down with a swallow of Coke. “We’re going to see his family?”
“No, I have an officer doing that. We’re going to see May.”
“Hey!”
Liam frowned as I slapped my hands down on my tray, covering the pile of honey packets I’d been hiding from Peasblossom under the napkin.
“You haven’t eaten your grape yet,” I chastised her.
“I don’t want a grape, I want honey!”
Liam growled.
He actually growled.
Peasblossom and I both stilled.
Kristine held up her own untouched sandwich to Liam. “Hungry?”
Chapter 9
“I met St. John.”
Liam didn’t respond right away. He kept his eyes on the road, giving my simple announcement a lot more consideration than I’d expected.
Interesting.
“And what was your impression?” he asked finally.
I tapped one finger against the zipper on my waist pouch, choosing my words more carefully than I might have if Liam weren’t so carefully controlling his own reaction.
“I think some men mature slower than others. Some so slowly that it feels like it won’t happen at all.”
Liam exhaled a loud breath and rolled his shoulders as if he couldn’t get comfortable. “In a lot of ways, St. John has a lot in common with Stephen. He’s naturally good at a lot of things. He’s smart, he’s quick, and he can be charming when he wants to be. But like Stephen, he thinks he’s got it made, and he’s not willing to put in the work to be more than he is.”
“Which is?”
“A thief.”
He bit out the last word, and the venom in that one syllable pushed me back in my seat. I started to ask why he was angry, then stopped. A little voice whispered in the back of my mind. Pieces of a puzzle trying to come together, trying to tell me I’d missed something.
“St. John was eavesdropping on Kristine and me,” I said, mostly to myself. “He asked about Kevin. Whether we’d found out anything new.”
There. The vein in Liam’s temple jumped. Realization struck me, so hard and fast I kicked myself for not thinking of it before.
“You think St. John stole the wolfsbane that Kevin was using when he died.”
“I know Kevin couldn’t have stolen it on his own. The kid was funny, and he could make you like him even when you knew he was manipulating you, but he was one of the clumsiest people I ever knew.” He snorted. “Tripped over things so often, that’s what people started calling him—Trip. There’s no way he could have stolen any wolfsbane.”
“But Ruth said none of her wolfsbane was missing,” I pointed out. “If you think St. John stole it, where do you think he stole it from?”
“If I knew that, then he wouldn’t be walking around a free man,” Liam said grimly. He paused to glance at me before returning his attention to the road. “Why all the interest in St. John?”
“I just think it’s interesting that two people died of wolfsbane poisoning in the span of a few weeks.” I looked at Liam. “I’m guessing that’s not a common occurrence?”
“Folklore is full of suggestions that wolfsbane is a cure for lycanthropy,” Liam said, flicking on his turn signal as we approached a traffic light. “It’s not unusual for one of our clients to ask about it when they first arrive. They don’t always believe us when we tell them it’s an old wives’ tale, so we have to be vigilant. Security at the front door keeps an eye out for anyone trying to sneak it in, and all packages delivered to the center are inspected just in case someone does find someone willing to ship it to them.”
