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“It’s a codename! All codenames are ridiculous! They’re supposed to be!” She defended. “Besides, I usually go to Wyatt for help with them but he’s still in the hospital at the moment, so I have to make due.”

“That must be very hard for you.” Oz observed unemotionally, for some reason, seeming oddly unhappy about the mention of her talking to Wyatt about personal things.

“It is, Oz, it really is.” She swallowed, unexpectedly feeling a kind of intimacy in the moment. “You could… you could call me ‘Na talie,’ if you wanted.” She offered, shifting on her feet like an awkward fucking sixth grader talking to a cute boy. “Or ‘Nat.’”

“I would prefer that, yes.”

Mull beamed, feeling like she’d just made an important step. But then the smile faded, recognizing that she had said “Natalie” and not “Mull.” Which was odd. Natalie didn’t really deal with coworkers. Well, not the ones from the Consortium, anyway. Natalie usually kept to herself.

Mull wasn’t sure what the deal was with that. But she wasn’t going to complain. Oz needed help coming out of his shell more. And… and she liked the way her name sounded coming from him. Not that it was technically her name, it was Natalie’s, but it was pretty close and would do in a pinch.

She cleared her throat, trying to break the sudden odd feeling which filled her and hung in the air. “I… I guess we should get back to work, huh?”

Oz nodded, continuing up the stairs, surreptitiously taking the lead so that he was once again the one most in the line of fire from potential attackers on the floors above them.

The action didn’t make Mull happy. Oz was being careless with his life. And if one of them was going to get shot today, it sure wasn’t going to be him.

She raced to catch up with him, but to her surprise, the man sped up, trying to outpace her. For two flights they battled back and forth, until Mull hopped up onto the railing of the stairwell and vaulted up a flight, to pull herself over the bannister, skipping the last flight of stairs.

Oz arrived at the door a moment later, frowning, but she could tell he was actually having a good time.

She pointed at the door. “I win.”

“That was incredibly dangerous and you just needlessly risked your life to win a childish race.” He lectured.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a sore loser, Oz. I won and…” She trailed off, noticing that the door to their suspect’s apartment was ajar. She met Oz’s eyes meaningfully.

He nodded and tactically arranged himself at her side, backing up her next move. “How durable are you again?” He whispered, still concerned.

“Pretty durable.”

“Define ‘pretty.’”

“It would take… about 150 quintillion megatons to kill me.”

“Ah. Hopefully our guy doesn’t have access to 150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 sticks of dynamite in there then.”

“Well, in this town, you can never tell.” She paused. “Did you do that math in your head?”

“I like math.” He explained. “It’s orderly.”

“Ah.”

She pushed the door open with her foot, then moved to the side in case someone took a shot at them. When there was no sound from inside the room, she leaned around the doorjamb again, peering into the darkness.

“It’s clear.” Oz announced with complete confidence, starting into the room. “But I think we should call the police.”

Mull snorted at the idea, shouldering her way past him. “Why? We got this, Oz.”

“We are destroying evidence, just by being here. Altering trace fibers, moving things around, contaminating the scene with touch DNA…”

“What are you ‘touching’?” She laughed, amused to no end by the way the man’s mind worked. “You planning on fondling all this guy’s shit, Oz?”

“Microscopically, we already are.”

She made her way towards the apartment’s kitchen. “I don’t care about microscopes, Oz. Had one when I was a kid, broke it trying to miniaturize a hamster.”

The kitchen was clean in that way that told you that no one really lived there.

The sole evidence of the resident was a takeout menu stuck to the fridge with a magnet.

Mull looked at the appliance for a long moment.

“We should check that...” She decided, feeling the stirrings of fear inside her.

Oz’s eyebrows went up. “For what?”

“Sometimes people stuff bodies into refrigerators.” She said softly. “As a message.”

Oz frowned, his conception of the world not allowing for something so obvious. “You want to check the refrigerator…. for bodies?” He said slowly, like he was trying to decipher a foreign language.

“I always check my refrigerators for bodies.” She defended, trying to keep her voice low so that anyone in the apartment wouldn’t hear her. “Because I live in the real world!” She opened the door of the appliance… to find it empty, except for a can of Diet Coke.

Oz turned to look at her, silently gloating.

“Shut up, Oz.” She made a face at him, then opened up the beverage to take a sip.

He gestured to the other side of the kitchen with his thumb. “Wanna check the oven next?”

She swatted at him in annoyance, then started silently towards the door to the bedroom. Which was closed. And people rarely closed the door to their bedroom when they were leaving for the day. Which meant that, chances were, the guy was still lurking inside.

She pointed at the door and Oz nodded again, taking up a position on the opposite side of the frame from her.

She had to hand it to the man, he had good instincts on how to be a killer. He might be a rule-follower, but he understood how to move through a dangerous situation. Which was pretty cool.

It had been a long, long time since Mull had worked with a real partner. And that had never been nearly as enjoyable as this. Working with Rondel had been… an absolute nightmare.

Oz prepared to breach the door, looking over at her to make sure she was set.

She nodded.

Oz kicked the door open, immediately stepping aside to get out of her way, so that Mull could make entry and engage any attackers they found inside.

But no attack came.

Instead, the suspect was simply sitting behind a desk inside, silhouetted in the darkness by the dim morning light filtering in through the dirty curtains behind him.

Oz started forward, utterly unintimidated by a mysterious suspect lying in wait for them. He was such a confident and fearless man when he was working.

He was an aspirational hero… who no one aspired to be, for some reason.

He was a trustworthy, moral person. Innately good.

One of the few remaining examples of that personality type left in the Caping industry in the city.

But his personal issues turned people off and not many tried to see the deeper perfection hidden within.

But Mull always had. She could see beneath the mask he wore.

He was… stalwart. Like a heroic knight or brave lawman.

“Willis Gibson.” Oz announced the man’s name like a school administrator calling a misbehaving student to his office.

Her mouth curved, enjoying the commanding tone he took on when he was dealing with people he believed to be criminals. There was a composed power to Oz, despite his often neurotic behavior. And she’d always found it so oddly erotic.

“We are with the Consortium of Chaos, here on official business, and we…” He trailed off when he saw the blood.

Both of the man’s hands had been pinned to his desk with butcher knives, and a third blade was stabbed straight through his forehead. The knife was used to pin a note in place.

And Mull’s blood ran cold, immediately recognizing the handwriting before she even processed the words.

“ Sorry Kitten, he wouldn’t fit in the fridge. ”

Rondel.

Her psycho ex had killed this guy for some reason.

And a surge of fear went through Mull as she considered that, immediately spinning around, half expecting the man himself to be lunging from the darkness in an attempt to kill Oz.

“We… we need to get out of here, Oz.” She decided, backing away from the body in growing terror. “ Now .”

For his part, Oz seemed far less disturbed by the body then she would have expected. Probably because he seemed to find living people disgusting already, it wasn’t like them being dead was really going to somehow make that worse.

He looked down at the body with a cold clinical eye. “Why?”

“Because Rondel killed this guy and he could still be here!” She wanted Oz as far away from this place as possible. There was nothing Rondel would love more than hurting Oz. He’d kill Oz, and he’d force her to watch.

“Mercygiver?” That seemed to interest Oz. “You sure?”

“Pretty damn sure, yeah.” She motioned towards the door. “We need to go.”

Oz pursed his lips. “Why would he kill this man?” He wondered aloud, then started to open up the desk drawers, obviously looking for clues. “It makes no sense.”

Mull shifted on her feet impatiently, but then recognized that there was no way she was going to get Oz out of this apartment. The man could be the most stubborn person in the world when he wanted to be. He always thought he knew best. “This is a really bad idea, Oz.” She warned.

“He’s not in the apartment at the moment. Which means that if this is a trap, he’s already waiting outside for us.” He started sifting through paperwork. “Which means the more we know about how he figures into this, the better.”

“There is no possible way Rondel didn’t sweep this apartment clean of anything we could use to track him, Oz.

” She shook her head. “He’s way too careful to leave anything behind.

I guarantee you, he went through every single inch of this place.

Whatever it is you think you’re going to find, if it was in this apartment, it’s long gone now. ”

Oz nodded, recognizing that she was probably right but too caught up in his rule-following to listen. And instant later he straightened. “So… we need evidence that wasn’t in the apartment yet …” He cryptically decided.

She frowned at him. “Huh?”