The Detective

You fall asleep at dawn with the black phone on your chest.

When you wake at two in the afternoon it's still there, screen dark, warm from your skin. You lie there for a while scrolling back through the conversation from last night. Reading his messages in daylight feels different. Less like a fever dream. More like evidence.

He texts the way he talks. Full sentences. Perfect punctuation. Not a single emoji, which somehow feels like the most vampire thing about him.

You put the phone face down on the nightstand and go make coffee like a normal person.

The fire escape is empty. There's a neat little pile of sunflower seed shells on the top step and a note under a brick, written on the back of a takeout menu in surprisingly nice handwriting:

Sun's up, had to go. Not a stalker, just employed. Back at dusk. Your neighbor in 3B plays the clarinet badly. E.

You stand there in your socks, holding the note, and laugh for the first time in two days.

Your throat looks worse in the mirror than it feels. Four purple fingerprints on one side, a thumb on the other. You put on a turtleneck under your scrubs and a scarf over that, and you tell yourself it's fine. Lots of people wear scarves in November.

At six forty-five you walk into Mercy General like it's any other Saturday.

It isn't. Corbin is on a stretcher in Bay 2 with a concussion and no memory of anything after eleven p.m. The second level of the parking garage is wrapped in yellow tape. And at the charge desk, leaning against the counter with a paper cup of terrible hospital coffee, is a man in a charcoal overcoat who is very obviously a cop.

"Ava," Marcy says, with the brightness of a woman delivering bad news, "this is Detective Fairbanks. He wants to talk to everyone who was on last night."

The detective straightens. He's in his early thirties, with dark hair that needs a cut, tired brown eyes and the kind of stubble that says he's been working since yesterday. Good coat. Bad tie. He holds out his hand.

"Nolan Fairbanks. Homicide. Sorry to grab you before your shift."

"Homicide?" You shake his hand. His grip is warm and firm, and he holds on a second longer than necessary, watching your face. "Corbin's not dead. I just saw him."

"No, he's fine. Lucky." Fairbanks lets go. "I'm actually here about something else. You mind?"

He walks you to the family room, the little beige room with the box of tissues where doctors deliver the worst news of people's lives. You sit on the edge of a chair. He doesn't sit. He leans against the door like he's settling in.

"Couple things," he says. "First, the garage. Something put a crack in a support pillar last night. Structural engineer says it'd take a car at forty miles an hour. There's no car. Security footage from the second level is corrupted, just static from four-twenty to four-forty. You badged out at four-thirty-one."

"I left through the garage," you say. True. "I didn't see anything." Not true.

"Okay." He says it easily, like he's writing it down in his head. "Second thing. Yesterday morning the Marine Unit pulled a man out of the river near Wolf Point. White male, forties, no ID. No water in his lungs, so he was dead before he went in. And he had two puncture wounds on his throat. About this far apart."

He holds up his fingers. Maybe an inch and a half.

Your wrist gives a single warm throb under your sleeve.

"That's horrible," you say.

"It is. And it's the fourth one this year. Different rivers, different parks, same marks." He tilts his head. "I've been checking every ER on the Near West Side for anyone who's come in with something similar. Bites. Weird blood loss. People who seem confused."

"I haven't seen anything like that."

"Okay." That easy tone again. His eyes drop, slow and deliberate, to the scarf at your throat. "You cold, Ava?"

"Hospital's drafty."

"Sure." He pulls a card from his coat and holds it out. Det. Nolan Fairbanks, Chicago Police Department, Area Three. A cell number written on the back in pen. "If you remember anything. Or if anybody gives you trouble. I mean that. Anybody."

You take the card. He opens the door for you, and as you pass him he says, quietly, "Those look like fingers."

You keep walking.

The shift is a long one. A kid with a broken arm. A grandmother with chest pain who turns out to be fine. A man who swallowed his wedding ring on purpose during an argument with his wife, and his wife, who sits in the waiting room laughing so hard she cries.

You work. You're good at your job. For a few hours at a stretch you even forget about the mark.

Then around midnight you take your break on the ambulance bay ramp, the only place you can breathe outside air without walking anywhere, and the crescent on your wrist goes warm.

Not burning, like the garage. Warm, like a hand around yours.

You look up.

He's standing under the streetlight across the ambulance bay. Dark coat, no hat, snow drifting through the light around him like he's in a snow globe. He doesn't come closer. He just waits, hands in his pockets, until you sigh and walk over.

"You're stalking me now?"

"I'm standing on a public sidewalk." Lucien's eyes go to your scarf, and something in his face goes very still and very cold. "Let me see."

"It's fine."

"Ava."

You tug the scarf down. He looks at the bruises for a long time without blinking. When he speaks again his voice is perfectly calm, which is somehow scarier than shouting.

"Marek is going to regret his hands."

"Don't kill anybody on my account."

"I didn't say kill." Which isn't a no. He looks back at your face, and his voice gentles. "A detective came to see you."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I know everything that happens near you now. That's rather the point." His mouth tightens. "Nolan Fairbanks. Be careful with him."

"He's a cop."

"He's not only a cop." Before you can ask what that means, he goes on. "I didn't come about him. I came because of tonight. Word has spread through the court. A mortal holds the king's debt. Some are curious. Some are angry. And Lord Cassian Thorne has used the oldest right the court has. He's demanded to see you."

"See me how? Like a lineup?"

"Like a presentation. Before the full court." Lucien's jaw works. "If I refuse, Cassian will tell them I'm hiding you because I'm weak. Because you control me. And then everything I have built in three hundred years starts to come apart, and it comes apart over your head."

"So I don't have a choice."

"You always have a choice. I'm telling you which one keeps you alive."

The ambulance bay doors hiss open behind you. Someone calls your name. Your break is over.

You look up at him, at the snow catching in his black hair and not melting.

"When?"

"Tomorrow night. I'll send a car at nine." The corner of his mouth lifts, just barely, without a shred of real humor in it.

"And Ava? Tomorrow you meet my court. Try not to bleed."