Chapter 36: Investigation - Part 2 (Patreon)

Daniel had written the number on a torn strip of paper and set it on the coffee table, squared to the edge like that would help. He'd made tea neither of us wanted and let it go cold on a coaster. The card sat beside the paper, scorch mark up.

"You could just text him," Daniel said.

"I could." I picked up his phone anyway and dialled the number by hand, digit by digit off the strip. "Where's the fun in that."

I put it on speaker and set it on the table between us. Daniel leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching the screen like it might do something interesting on its own.

It rang. Once, twice, long enough that I started composing what I'd say to voicemail.

"Here goes nothing," I said, mostly to myself.

A third ring, and then a click, and a voice that sounded like it had been dragged up from somewhere several floors below waking.

"This had better be good."

I recognized the flatness of it before I placed the name. Tristan.

"You gave me a real number," I said. "I'm almost disappointed."

A moment of silence, then a slow exhale down the line, the sound of a man rewriting his opening line from scratch. "Sweetheart, I give out fake numbers to people who annoy me. You made the cut. Congratulations."

"I want to meet. My friend and I."

"Your friend." Something shifted, a chair creaking, fabric against a receiver. "The one whose house you came out of."

Daniel's mouth opened. I gave him a look that said don't, and he shut it again, leaning back into the sofa cushions with his arms crossed.

"That one," I said.

"Office. When."

"Now would be fine."

"Now would not be fine." A sound like he was rubbing his face, or maybe just breathing too close to the mic. "Five o'clock."

"Why so late?"

"Because I work late, and some of us didn't spend the small hours accosting strangers in alleyways." A pause. "Five. Don't be cute about it."

The line went dead before I could answer that.

"Charming," he said.

"He's consistent, at least." I picked up the piece of toast, decided against it, put it back down. "Five o'clock."

Daniel scrubbed a hand over his jaw, stubble catching against his palm. "That gives us most of the day to figure out what we're actually asking him."

"We're asking him who's paying him." I said it plainly, because it was plain. "Everything else depends on the answer."

"And if he won't tell us."

"Then we find another way to make him useful." I didn't elaborate, and Daniel didn't push. He'd known me long enough, in whatever form I currently wore, to recognize when I'd already worked past the polite version of a plan into the one I'd actually use.

He got up, collected the two mugs from the table, the toast plate balanced on top. At the kitchen doorway he paused, looking back at me over his shoulder.

"You know he's going to ask what you are. Properly ask, this time. Not alley small talk."

"I know."

"What are you going to tell him?"

I thought about the alley, the way Tristan's hand had found the card in his pocket a beat too slow to be truthful the first time, the way his grip hadn't shaken when I'd pinned him to the wall. A man who'd met worse than me before and lived to be irritated about the early hour.

"The truth, probably," I said. "Or enough of it to be useful."

Daniel didn't look reassured by that. He carried the mugs into the kitchen anyway, and I sat with the phone and the eight hours between now and five o'clock, turning the conversation over the way I used to turn over a stubborn equation, looking for the variable that would make the rest of it behave.

*

The building had no number I could see, no sign, just a metal door set into brick like an afterthought. Daniel stopped a few feet short of it and looked up at the blank stretch of wall above.

"You sure it's here?"

I checked the card again, turned it over in case the address hid somewhere on the back. Nothing but the number and the name. "It seems like this. Though given the man, the card could be fake."

"Number wasn't."

"True." I knocked.

Locks worked on the other side, three distinct clicks, none of them hurried. The door opened on a chain, and Tristan's face filled the gap, cigarette clamped between his lips, unlit.

He looked at me, then at Daniel, then took the cigarette out of his mouth without lighting it.

"Don't stand in the open." He shut the door long enough to slide the chain, then pulled it wide and waved us in with the same hand holding the cigarette.

Daniel and I traded a look before crossing the threshold. He coughed once the door closed behind us, smoke thick enough to see moving under the single lamp. I breathed it in without comment. Gehenna had taught me worse things to breathe.

The office inside surprised me by being clean. An oak desk, a chair behind it worn soft at the arms, two plainer chairs in front. Tristan dropped into his seat and put his boots up on the desk, crossing them at the ankle.

"So," he said, working the unlit cigarette between two fingers, "what do you two know."

I sat without waiting to be asked, arranging myself in the chair with my hands folded in my lap. "I'd prefer if you started. This is your territory after all."

His eyebrows went up a fraction, more amused than offended. He didn't answer right away, just looked at me the way a man looks at a hand he hasn't decided whether to fold.

Daniel took the chair beside mine, angling himself forward, elbows finding his knees. "Do you know what happened to Liam?"

*

Tristan's boots came off the desk one at a time, unhurried, and he leaned forward on his elbows, cigarette finally set down in a chipped ashtray at his side. The lamp caught the grey at his temples when he smiled.

"I might know a thing or two," he said.

"Then tell us." I kept my hands folded, kept my voice level.

He shook his head, slow, like the request amused him more than it offended. "Not free. Not with a case that already smells like it's got teeth in it." He tapped two fingers against the desk, once. "Rules first. An answer for an answer. Either of us can stop whenever we've got enough, no hard feelings. First one's on the house, seeing as you came all this way."

Daniel shifted beside me, jaw tight. "Why would we play your game."

"Because the alternative's the door." Tristan spread his hands, palms up, unbothered. "You're welcome to walk through it any time. But you drove out here for a reason, and I've been sitting on something for weeks that you clearly want. Neither of us has to trust the other for that to be worth doing. It's not charity, Mr. Rowe. It's just the only deal on the table."

I turned the business card over once between two fingers before setting it flat on my knee, weighing the offer the way I'd weigh a contract clause. He wasn't wrong. Distrust cut both directions, and a man who dealt in secrets for a living had no more reason to hand his over for free than I did.

"Fine," I said. "Ask away."

Tristan's smile didn't move, but something behind his eyes did, a small recalibration, like he'd expected more resistance and filed away that he hadn't gotten it.

"Go on then," he said, nodding toward Daniel. "Since you're so eager. Ask your questions."

*

I didn't waste the free question on his name or his methods. Those were noise. "What do you know about Liam's current whereabouts."

Tristan picked the cigarette back up, didn't light it, just rolled it between two fingers. "Probably not more than you two, assuming you're actually looking for him and not just very committed liars. Man vanished without a trace. No trail, no body, nothing on any camera I could get my hands on." He paused. "There was old magic at his flat, though. Residual. Enough to make my palm itch when I walked in."

"How do you know that."

"That's question two." He smiled, tapped the ash he hadn't made yet. "My turn."

"Fine."

He studied me for a moment, unhurried, the way a man reads a used car before he decides whether to trust the odometer. "You're hunting a missing man. But you don't look like a worried friend. You look more like someone making sure a corpse stays lost." He shrugged. "Which is it."

"Neither." I kept my hands folded. "I'm not his friend, and I'm not trying to keep anyone lost. Does that satisfy your curiosity."

He looked down at the cigarette in his fingers like it had said something to him instead of me. "Interesting," he muttered, mostly to himself.

Daniel glanced at me. I nodded.

"Why did you start watching my house," Daniel asked.

Tristan answered plainly enough, no games in his voice for once. "Client's paying me to find him. You're the closest thread still moving. Man doesn't have family worth mentioning. Watching his best friend was the obvious play."

"Who hired you," I said.

He paused this time, actually paused, and the pause told me more than whatever came after it. "Don't know. Stranger, cash in a bag, a phone number and nothing else. Didn't introduce himself. I don't ask." He set the cigarette down again, precise, like it mattered where it landed. "My turn. If you're not his friend, and you're not looking to bury him deeper, then what exactly are you to Mr. Dawnstar. Strangers don't come looking like this."

I let the silence sit a while before I answered. My jaw worked once, tightened, released. Each word got weighed before it left my mouth. "I know him intimately. More intimately than anyone else does, I'd say. That's all I can give you for now."

Something shifted behind his eyes, slow and pleased with itself. "Lovers, then."

I nearly choked on the air in my own throat. I covered it by turning it into the next question, voice tighter than I wanted it. "What was the old magic you found at the flat."

"Don't know that either. Unfortunately." He spread his hands. "Didn't get the chance to dig. Agency put the place under lock before I could go back for a proper look. Second visit, whatever was there was already gone."

He picked the cigarette up again, turned it once between his fingers, and this time his voice dropped, flatter, more careful.

"Last one. You say you know him intimately. Better than anyone. But you're nowhere. I did some digging after you jumped me in that alley, and there's no record of you. No name, no address, no paper trail, nothing that says you exist outside a room I'm standing in." He set the cigarette down on the desk between us, deliberate, like laying a card face up. "So, who are you? What are you?"

*

That was the real question. Everything else had been throat-clearing.

"That's what you've been circling since you shook my hand in an alley," I said.

He didn't deny it. "Didn't want to spook you before I had a read on you." He nodded at the desk between us, at the cigarette he'd set down like evidence. "You've already gotten more out of me than most people do in a month of trying. Fair's fair."

I looked at Daniel. He gave me nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

"Would you believe me," I said, "if I told you I'm not exactly human."

"Already had that figured out somewhere around the part where you deflected a punch without blinking." He leaned back in his chair, unhurried. "What I want to know is what exactly you are."

I could have lied. I'd lied to better men than him for less reason. But the enchantment sat right there on the desk, patient, and I'd watched him use it once already.

"I'm a succubus."

He didn't move for a second. Then he picked the cigarette up, turned it, set it down again, slower this time, like he was giving the words room to land somewhere sensible.

"So." He said the word carefully, tasting it. "Man gets dumped by his girlfriend, decides to solve the problem the old-fashioned way, summons himself a lover straight out of Hell. And now she's wandering London looking for him." He spread his hands. "That's the story."

I didn't correct him. It would've taken longer to explain the truth than to let the wrong one stand, and there was no version of "I am him" that improved my afternoon. It annoyed me anyway, a small itch under the skin, the shape of a lie I hadn't told sitting comfortably in someone else's mouth.

Daniel's mouth twitched. He looked at me sideways, entirely too pleased with himself for a man who'd contributed nothing to the conversation.

I gave him a look that promised a reckoning.

Tristan watched the exchange with the flat interest of a man reading two hands of cards he wasn't holding. "That's not a no," he said, to me, not to Daniel.

"It isn't," I said. "It also isn't your business how I feel about him. Only that I'm looking."

"Good enough." He tapped the cigarette against the desk edge, ash that wasn't there yet. "You've convinced me you're after the same man I am. That's more than most people manage in an afternoon." He looked between us, Daniel first, then me, weighing something behind the tired lines of his face. "Could use the help. Lovesick succubus and her vampire side piece."

"I'm not—" Daniel started.

"Quite a company," Tristan said, over him, already reaching for a lighter he didn't use.