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“I shouldn’t have said that,” I mumbled through my fingers.

“Valentine.”

“I’m sorry.”

He sighed.

“I shouldn’t have—” But I’d already said that.

Taavi’s warm, slightly damp fingers pulled my hands away from my face, and I had no choice but to look at him.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Disappointment, maybe. Anger. Guilt.

All I saw was worry.

That wasn’t… good, exactly. But I probably hadn’t totally fucked things up. Probably.

And then something sparked in those beautiful, mismatched eyes.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said.

I stared at him. “You’ll… what?”

“I’ll make you a deal,” he repeated.

“Um. Okay?” I had no idea where the fuck this was going.

“If you still want to marry me in six months, ask me again.”

29

Beingthe enormous coward that I was, I hid from Taavi most of the next day until he cornered me and told me to cut it the fuck out. And then he’d kissed me, thoroughly. And then informed me that we needed to get groceries. And the ordinary habits of life did a lot to get my head out of my ass, and things went back to normal.

I was back at work at Beyond the Veil, feeling conflicted not about my love life, but about my professional one. It was the same old problem—same old crotchety elf. Rather than being relieved to get back to a job that didn’t force me to apprehend murderers or face down getting stabbed on a daily basis, I was… missing the job that did.

Sort of.

I didnotmiss working for the RPD, even if I did like some of my former coworkers, like Dan Maza and Caro Little-Bruneski and Dani Bowman and Seth Mays. But I still got to occasionally hang out with them, such as last Friday’s pizza-and-beer gathering at Caro’s place. I’d brought Taavi and gotten to meet Caro’s husband and two kids, as well as Bowman’s partner. It was nice. Weirdly normal.

But it didn’t satisfy the increasing itch that I’d had since I left the RPD. The one that said I wanted to make more of a difference. And it wasn’t as bad as it had been back in September before the whole Culhua debacle—both because I now had something else to give my life meaning (that would be Taavi) and because I’d taken Elliot’s always-wise advice and had started finding my own cases, at least sometimes.

But it’s hard to find cases that fit the things I wanted to do that didn’t just end with Ward talking to some dead people and finding the answers. Doc’s solution to my problem—because I’d also decided to be an adult and talk to him and Ward about it—was to send mewithWard to more things. One, it freed Doc up to do more research and work on his book project, which I knew involved witches and warlocks and creepy old Virginia families, and, two, it meant I had things to do more often, which was better.

But better wasn’t what I wanted.

And given that I’d just taken more than a month off to go solve my best friend’s dad’s murder, I couldn’t exactly complain about that to my extremely tolerant and very nice bosses who had babysat my cat, my car, and held my job for me.

So I was trying not to be a, in Beck’s term, cranky-pants. I wasn’t doing a fantastic job of it, but I was mostly keeping my grumbling to a low enough level that not even Doc could hear me.

The problem now was that I’d only been back at work for a week and a half, and I was already starting to get antsy.

I wasn’t still stressing about Elliot and Gregory, either. Smith had called a couple days ago to let me know that they’d gotten exhumation orders on the remaining four shifters—Redsky, Bowan, Swiftwater, and Boushie—and that he’d also found an unlogged fingerprint on a pill-bottle in Swiftwater’s evidence box that was a match for Lance Hasenfuss, a beat cop who had made it onto the suspect list for Gregory’s murder. And while Hasenfuss’s fingerprints would normally not be noteworthy if he’d been on scene, when Swiftwater had been killed, Hasenfuss had been suspended for inappropriate conduct, so he had exactly zero reasons to have been on the scene.

Hasenfuss’s car had also contained a couple tokens for the Mrs. Bubbles Car Wash—and he had, according to Smith, an annoying habit of playing with coins, rolling them over his knuckles, flipping them in the air, tapping them on things. It was something a few of the other cops had complained about, since it was distracting and he sometimes dropped whatever he was using—not always a Mrs. Bubbles token, but a penny or quarter or any coin he happened to have in his pocket—at crime scenes.

The FBI also executed a search warrant on Reynolds’s house and found bottles of something called diethyl ether, which, according to Smith—and Mays when I called to check with him later—matched Tara Redsky’s description of a chemical being used to knock her out. The bottles had been old enough to have been used in her murder.

All that had been more than enough to get Olsen and Smith arrest warrants for Hasenfuss, Reynolds, Baker, and Dopfer, who had been arrested and were currently being held without bail, as of last week Thursday.