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Carlos had been very comfortably asleep when something started waking him up. He made a protesting noise and snuggled in closer to Cecil, who patted and shushed him and then went back to…arguing? That was it, Cecil was arguing with someone about something in a low, angry voice. He was also warm, though, and the patting felt nice, and Carlos wasn’t anywhere near actually being actively awake so he obligingly settled back in with a sigh. He’d wake up if Cecil needed him, he was sure of it.
The argument kept right on going. “Cecil, I’m just worried about you…”
“No, you’re hungover, and being hungover makes you paranoid,” Cecil shot back, but quietly. “Go home and sleep it off, Teddy. None of us are up to dealing with this today, not even you.”
Teddy humphed. “I need to at least check you out…”
“I’m fine.”
“Has ‘Dr. Espinoza’ been telling you that?”
“The only thing ‘Dr. Espinoza’ – and I think five PhDs more than earned him that title – told me last night before he passed out from sheer exhaustion was how much he loved and trusted me,” Cecil returned, even more quietly. “Again, Teddy: This is your hangover talking, go home and sleep it off before you say something I can’t brush off.”
The warning in his voice went unheeded. “If he loves you so much, Cecil, then why he was playing games with you the whole first year he was here, huh? Why did he keep pushing you away?” Teddy made a face. “He told me he’d fix it, after those little people behind Lane 5 shot him. Did he even bother to make up an excuse?”
Cecil’s jaw set. “He wasn’t ‘playing games’, and he did explain it to me – and I understand perfectly why he didn’t say anything before, I wouldn’t have either.” He shook his head at his cousin’s raised eyebrow. “It isn’t any of your business. Drop it.”
“No, I won’t. Dammit, I’m just trying to look out for you!”
“No, you’ve just been drinking your way through the album again and you’re treating me like I’m your mentally deficient baby brother!”
“You are my baby brother, and I think you’re just seeing what you want to see.” Teddy gritted his teeth. “And that’s dangerous, Cecil – he’s a ‘scientist’, what if he’s heard rumors and just decided having a relationship with you is the best way to satisfy his curiosity? He knows I’m onto him now, though, since Scott dragged them all into the bowling alley last night and he couldn’t avoid me seeing him. I know you don’t want to believe me, but I can prove it: He’s had you pretending that you’re still on your medication, just to make me think he was taking care of you – the way he would have been if he really loved you.”
Cecil’s pupils gained a red ring; Teddy’s had already had one. “Okay, one, he didn’t have to hear rumors, Old Woman Josie brought one of her roommates by the other day, who she introduced to Carlos as my uncle. Two, Carlos never even thought of avoiding you last night, he didn’t know he needed to – that was me, and I passed that on to Scott. And three, that isn’t the reason we’ve been doing that on the radio and I am still taking the muscle relaxants. And you owe me – and him – big time for what I’m about to do to knock your head back on straight,” Cecil told him angrily. He shifted, and then shook his sleeping boyfriend’s shoulder, hard. “Carlos!”
He’d injected just a touch of fear into his voice, and just like that, Carlos – who Teddy could tell actually had been mostly asleep – catapulted upright and wrapped himself around Cecil. Not just protectively, defensively. He looked panicked. “How…”
“Shh, no sweetheart, they didn’t get in.” Cecil was patting him again. “I just had to prove a point to this paranoid asshole I happen to be related to. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s okay.”
Carlos blinked and frowned, trying to make sense of that, and Teddy came to a couple of very unwelcome realizations very quickly. Because first, Carlos had jerked out of a sound sleep to try to physically protect Cecil – the way he was wrapped around him was telling, he’d been trying to put as much of himself between Cecil and the rest of the room as possible. Because he’d thought ‘they’ had gotten in – who were ‘they’? But still, it had been a move a man who was just playing games wouldn’t have made.
And second, Carlos had been crying before he’d gone to sleep; the puffy eyelids and spiky lashes were a dead giveaway. Something had gone wrong and a half the night before. The logical part of Teddy’s brain screamed in frustration, and internally he winced. He’d already known something had been wrong, Scott had told him something had gone really wrong down in the sinkhole, Teddy just hadn’t cared because it felt better to be a paranoid, overprotective asshole. Because at least when he was being a paranoid overprotective asshole he felt like he was actually doing something to look out for his baby brother.
Carlos was rubbing his eyes now, and leaning on Cecil’s shoulder, and he was giving Teddy a wary, half-puzzled look like he just wasn’t quite sure he didn’t need to protect Cecil from Teddy anyway. Teddy winced on the outside this time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I…I had a bad night last night. Cecil can tell you, being hungover doesn’t bring out the best in me.”
“Doesn’t bring out the best in anyone,” Carlos told him. The arm he had wrapped around Cecil became more cuddling and less tensely protective, though. “I have some hair of the dog in the kitchen, top shelf in the cupboard on the left – check it before you drink, though, I don’t know if it’s been tampered with or not.” Teddy’s eyes went wide, and the scientist frowned again. “Cecil didn’t already tell you?”
“Cecil was too pissed to tell him anything except get the fuck out and don’t come back,” Cecil said, nuzzling him. “But yes, Teddy, we’ve had some things tampered with, so be careful what you touch in there unless it’s on the counter – things on the counter are safe, anything else either rinse off or test first. Carlos hasn’t had time to test them all and neither has Ami.”
Carlos smiled, covering a yawn with his hand. “She’s such a good little science helper. If we weren’t on a grant, I’d give her a raise.”
Teddy raised a questioning eyebrow. “Grant?”
“Government grant, that’s what funds the lab.” The scientist gave him another puzzled look. “I thought everyone in town knew that. Some people don’t like the government oversight, but being under a federal contract for the work we do here keeps the police out of our way most of the time, and the City Council too. They can’t order me not to investigate things the way they do the other lab in town.”
Teddy hadn’t known any of that, but then he’d really never thought about who Carlos actually worked for or where the lab got its money – or, honestly, what Carlos actually did for a living other than ‘science’. He’d known the other local lab was nominally funded by the city, as was the one in Desert Bluffs, but the other labs were a joke and always had been. “Why’d they pick you for that job?”
Cecil very visibly took offense at that, but Carlos just shrugged. “I have a lot of unique skills, for a scientist, and I have more than one area of specialization. That’s what they told me when I got the letter asking if I’d be interested in taking over the lab here, anyway. They said they needed someone like me.”
That made sense, Teddy supposed. Night Vale was a strange and often dangerous place, and he seemed to remember that the last scientist they’d had heading up that lab hadn’t lasted too long. He also realized that he would have already known all of this if he’d just asked his cousin earlier, like back when the relationship between the two men had just been a one-sided crush; and if he hadn’t liked the answers to his questions then, he probably could have done something about it. Now, though… “So what happens when your contract ends? Was that your reason for playing games with Cecil before, you knew you weren’t going to be here that long?”
Carlos did react to that one, tensing up again and tightening his hold on Cecil, who was so mad his eyes were starting to turn red again. “Our lab’s contract won’t run out for another three and a half years. And I already told you I hadn’t been trying to play games with him, Teddy.”
“And I already told you it wasn’t any of your business,” Cecil snapped. “Oh look, waaay back there: The line I told you not to cross.”
Teddy gave him an exasperated look. “And I told you: I’m just trying to protect you.”
“I can look out for myself, thanks: I’m almost forty.”
Teddy’s jaw set again, and he stood up. “Yeah, well, according to your birth certificate, you’re twenty-eight.” The look of surprise on Carlos’s face made him sneer, some of his earlier paranoid animosity rushing back to the forefront. “Oh, didn’t he tell you about that? I was fifteen when Cecil was born. He went away for three months after he graduated from college and came back over a decade older – but he’s still my baby brother, and he always will be. And as long as you keep that in mind, ‘Doctor Espinoza’…you won’t ever have to find out what else I can do besides heal.”
Threat delivered, Teddy stomped into the kitchen to see about the aforementioned bottle of standby hangover cure. The house’s kitchen was old-fashioned and small and currently really messy because half of everything was stacked on the counter, and the detritus of different kinds of testing paraphernalia was scattered from counter to table. Some things had been quarantined in a plastic crate that had a piece of paper with a biohazard sign drawn on it stuck to the side. Teddy got into the cupboard and found the alcohol, washing his hands in the sink when the faint powdering of what looked like dust on the bottle made his skin tingle. He poured a bit of the contents into a clean glass and checked it anyway: the smell alone made it fairly obvious there was drain cleaner mixed into the whisky, so he added the bottle to the biohazard box and then went into the bathroom and found some aspirin instead. The man looking back at him in the bathroom mirror looked old, he decided; a fat old paranoid bastard, that was him. The fact that he looked so much like his mother didn’t help any – Bea had been a strong, wonderful woman, but not a pretty one. He felt a little flash of shame, thinking about her. His mother would have smacked him silly for the way he was acting right now. Not that she wouldn’t have threatened Cecil’s scientist-boyfriend herself, but she would have done it without alienating Cecil and Cecil would have actually told her what she wanted to know when she asked.
He and Cecil had grown apart, Teddy decided. His own fault, most of it, for not wanting to know…well, pretty much anything after his baby brother had come back from ‘Europe’ five years ago. It had become way too easy, after that, to just not ask Cecil any questions at all. Most of what Teddy currently knew, he only knew because he’d heard it on the radio – and he’d turned the radio off a time or two when he’d started hearing too much.
When he came back into the bedroom, Carlos was leaning over with his arms resting on his folded legs while Cecil carefully rubbed his back, trying to avoid the bruises and friction burns. Cecil gave Teddy a dirty look. “He’s willing to let you get away with bad behavior, I’m still not sure if I am or not.”
“Everyone had a hard day yesterday,” came from Carlos, although he didn’t lift his head.
“That isn’t Teddy’s problem,” Cecil rebutted, albeit gently. “Teddy’s problem is that I haven’t gone over there and taken that damned album away from him yet, even though this isn’t the first time this has happened.”
“Album?”
“My baby album, Aunt Bea kept it up until I was almost out of college. But every time Teddy gets drunk and goes through it, something like this happens.”
Teddy sat back down on the end of the bed with a sigh. “It’s the first time it’s happened in a while, Cecil. Oh, and the bottle of whisky is in the biohazard box now – drain cleaner inside, something that made my skin tingle dusted on the outside.”
“Probably cocaine,” Carlos snorted. “The other things she dusted were cocaine.”
“She…”
“The Old Woman Without a Face, Teddy,” Cecil told him. “She was in our kitchen a few days ago, remember? While I was on the radio? We think she must have done some of it then.”
“I have precautions in place to keep her out of the kitchen now,” Carlos added. “I’m just glad she hasn’t though to try the bathroom yet, no way do I want to put a camera in there.”
“A camera?”
“Because a camera can see where the light bends around…well, you probably aren’t interested in that part. It’s just that the camera can see her when a person might not be able to, so she avoids areas with cameras.” Carlos forced himself back into an upright position with a groan. “We were going to tell you, we just haven’t had a chance – and we were both pretty certain she wouldn’t go after you, they need you alive and kicking.” He dropped a kiss on Cecil’s cheek and climbed out of the bed, very obviously trying to avoid moving too much or too fast. “Can you two not restart the family feud while I take care of business, please?”
“I’ll be nice,” Cecil promised, blowing him a kiss. “And I need to take care of business myself.”
“When I come back,” Carlos promised, and limped out of the room.
Teddy frowned after him. “I’ll help you when he comes back; no way is he lifting you when he’s walking like that.”
Cecil rolled his eyes. “He wasn’t going to, he was either going to use the desk chair or bring the urinal back with him. Which I hate, but you do what you have to do.” He raised an eyebrow. “I’ll be able to have a walking cast when?”
“When your tibia grows back enough bone to actually hold weight,” Teddy answered matter-of-factly. “Six weeks, and I’ll bring you some calcium supplements to help things along.”
“Those taste like chalk.”
“Nine weeks.”
“Can I dip them in chocolate?”
“I don’t care, just as long as you take them – and not with soda or coffee, it’s counterproductive.” Carlos came limping back in, stopping to lean in the doorway and reaching for the pull-up bar mounted there. “Oh no, tell me you haven’t been playing Drop and Pop to get the kinks out of your back, the way the rest of the firehouse tough-guy squad does.”
“I’d be lying, but I’ll tell you that if you want me to.” Carlos managed to get his arm up high enough to wrap his fingers around the padded bar…and then he froze, eyes widening. He glanced around the room, looking nearly panicked, and swallowed hard when his eyes came back to the bed. “Hey Teddy,” he said, in a surprisingly casual tone considering the look on his face was anything but, “could you help Cecil get into the bathroom while I do this? I hate to make him use the urinal if he doesn’t have to – and he hates to see me pop my back this way.”
“That’s because you look like you’re hurting yourself when you do that,” Cecil told him. His eyes had widened too, and he tugged the bandages down off one entire row of tattooed eyes and then slipped his hand under one of the pillows and pulled out a handgun, nodding at his boyfriend. “Do it now, though, I want to see if Teddy has the same reaction I do – and I want him nearby if you fall this time.”
“This time?” Teddy asked, standing up, and then Carlos forced his other arm up and yanked down as hard as he could on the bar. Which came crashing down and took him with it, loosened screws scattering, which was also when Cecil flipped off the gun’s safety, cocked it, and fired down into the bed. There was a feminine scream, and then Carlos flung the detached metal bar across the floor so it slid under the bed, causing another shriek of pain to erupt. “What the…”
“She wasn’t here when we went to bed last night – I know, I looked,” Cecil said, sounding shaken. He was still holding the gun ready, pointing downwards. “Carlos?”
“She must have gotten in this morning, probably right before Teddy got here – she had time to loosen the screws on the bar, but not time to do anything else before she had to hide – or at least I hope she didn’t, because I didn’t check anything in the bathroom just now,” the scientist said. He tried to sit up, groaned, and stayed where he was at on the floor. “Dammit. And I haven’t seen our kitten this morning either, I hope she didn’t hurt it. One of the cameras must have stopped working.”
“Did you throw your back out just now?”
“Something like that. It’s just…spasming, it’ll stop in a few minutes.”
“I’ll shoot her again for it anyway,” Cecil promised. There was a rustling noise, and his eyes went wide again. “Teddy get back, she’s coming out!”
Teddy had barely jumped backwards when ‘she’ came crawling out, moving faster than he would have expected for someone who had just been shot and then hit with a steel bar. She had the steel bar clutched in her hand, in fact. She was dressed in discolored rags layered over what looked like a black wetsuit that covered her entire body, including her face. And she was shimmering just a bit in a very odd way that made Teddy want to look away from her and made his head hurt when he didn’t. The featureless face turned in his direction, and a voice that sounded much more hoarse than it had when he’d heard it on the radio ordered, “Don’t interfere. It has to happen or everything will end – including you, half-breed.” The flat black face turned back in Carlos’s direction, and she began to slither forward, leaving a blood trail on the wood floor. “This one first, though, so he’ll stop getting in the way of what needs to happen. Hold still, little scientist, and I’ll make it quick – you were going to die anyway, they wouldn’t have let you come here in the first place if you’d had anything to live for or anyone who cared if you did.”
Cecil’s eyes went fully, incandescently red; he tried to shoot her again, but the gun wouldn’t fire – and Teddy stopped him from lunging off the bed to get to her. On the floor, Carlos had turned dead white; he was trying to move away, but she was moving faster. The bar lifted, Cecil screamed, fighting Teddy’s hold…and then space split in the center of the doorway and a gigantic gray tiger-like animal glowing with blue aether erupted into the room, trailed by a little gray fluffball that bounced into the center of Carlos’s chest and mehrowled proudly, tiny tail waving in the air. The large demonic cat swatted the bar away and snarled down at the shimmering faceless woman, and she screamed a denial. “No, you don’t understand, he has to die! He has to! It will all end…” And then the massive jaws clamped around her and the cat shook its head once, then again, grhowling. There was an audible crack, and the cat dropped the limp body and sniffed it, pawing at it just a bit. Apparently satisfied that she was dead, it padded back to Carlos, who reached up to scratch the demonic cat’s ears, much to Teddy’s shock. “Am I glad to see you!” he said, and the cat nuzzled him while the kitten squeaked happily and nuzzled them both. “Is this your normal form, you’re completely free now?” The cat nodded its huge head, then sniffed at him and nudged the center of his chest, bowling the kitten over. Carlos looped one arm over the cat’s thick neck and it sat down, pulling up upright so he could lean against the doorframe. He chuckled painfully when it licked him, scooping up the fussing, offended kitten with his free hand. “Thanks, buddy. Time to reabsorb this little guy, then?”
The cat nodded again, turning its shoulder to him, and he kissed the kitten’s head. “Thanks for going to get your daddy, that’s two I owe you,” he said, and then pushed the kitten against the gray-blue glowing fur, where it lost cohesion and was absorbed almost immediately. “Wow, wish I had more time to study that. You’re heading home now, Khoshekh?”
In answer the demonic cat licked him again, then bounded over to the bed to do the same to Cecil. Who giggled, a sound Teddy hadn’t heard him make since he was a little boy, and threw his arms around the big cat’s neck. “Thank you so much,” he told it, stroking the glowing fur. “We’re going to miss you, Khoshekh …but I’m so glad you’re free. My contract wouldn’t let me help you before, I was just as trapped as you were.”
The cat purred – which was disturbingly loud, guttural and rumbling – nuzzled him again and licked his cheek…and then turned a glowing blue eye on Teddy and grhowled low in its throat. Cecil rubbed its head. “It’s okay,” he reassured it. “He’s hungover, it turns him into a paranoid, overprotective asshole. He’ll make it up to us.”
Khoshekh made a snuffling noise that conveyed his doubt of that, gave Teddy one more sideways, patently disapproving look, and then padded back to Carlos in the doorway, cuddling up to him and nuzzling his hair and coincidentally taking some of his weight to help him stay upright. Cecil grabbed Carlos’s cell phone off the nightstand, took a deep breath and hit speed dial, tapping three times on the screen’s tiny keyboard before saying anything. “Scott, it’s Cecil, we need your help,” he said, sounding airheaded and just slightly panicked and nothing at all like a man who had just shot a murderous intruder hiding under his bed and then hugged a giant demon cat for saving his boyfriend’s life. “Carlos threw his back out, he’s on the floor and I can’t get to him. And I thought I heard something move in the kitchen just now.” He nodded and mm-hmm’d once, said thank you, and then disconnected and set the phone down next to the gun with a shaking hand. “He got the message, he’s on his way.”
Teddy frowned. “He knows about…whatever this is that’s going on?”
“That someone’s trying to kill Cecil? Yes, because we told him,” came from Carlos, who was scratching Khoshekh’s ears again. “He’s been helping – he brought me back over here every day at noon for Cecil’s fifteen minutes on the radio, and between all of us we made sure Cecil was never left alone. I knew he and the other guys in the squad wouldn’t be in on it.”
“No, Scott and his boys wouldn’t play games like that,” Teddy agreed. He eyed the door, noticing that Carlos was now out of the way so that the aforementioned desk chair could go through, choosing to ignore the fact that Khoshekh was making a very physical statement just with its stance that it was protecting the scientist, most likely from him. He had to lift the chair over the still uncomfortably shimmering body of the Old Woman Without a Face, which was awkward because he had to try not to step on the body or in the blood trails while he was doing it, but once he had the armless chair in place Cecil scooted to the edge of the bed and accepted his help sliding onto it without comment. Probably because most of his attention was still on his boyfriend, who was petting Khoshekh and smiling at him.
The cat grhowled a warning at Teddy again when he pushed the chair through the door into the short hallway, but it was purring by the time they came back from the bathroom and Carlos was looking a lot more relaxed. Teddy figured Koshekh had something to do with that, and he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing but he knew he wasn’t going to be able to get close enough to find out so busied himself checking Cecil’s cast instead. Scott showed up a few minutes later, armed and wary, and Khoshekh just made a little rumbling noise at him, confirming Teddy’s theory. “You got big,” Scott told the cat approvingly, ruffling its tufted ears. “I can see you’ve been helping there, thanks. Want me to take over now?”
Khoshekh huffed, gave Carlos one last affectionate lick, and then phased out pretty much the same way he’d appeared. Scott braced the scientist so he wouldn’t fall over, glancing behind him and frowning. “Threw your back out?” he asked quietly.
Carlos gave him a warning look and almost imperceptibly shook his head, then nodded. “She’d loosened the screws holding up my pullup bar; I felt it wiggle when I reached up to grab it and then I saw them poking out. There wasn’t any place she could have been hiding but under the bed, and Cecil and Teddy were right there…so I yanked the bar down and Cecil grabbed the gun out from under the my pillow and shot her.”
“Good thinking, using the sound of the bar coming down to cover the sound of the gun cocking,” Scott approved, nodding to Cecil. “Did Khoshekh drag her out?”
“She crawled out on her own,” Cecil told him, unable to hold back a shudder. “She brought the steel bar out with her – Carlos threw it at her. And she said…she said I had to die so everything wouldn’t end, but she was going to kill Carlos first because he was ‘going to die anyway’. I tried to shoot her again when she went after him, but the gun jammed.”
“I just cleaned it last week, so I’m not sure why that happened,” Carlos put in. He shifted so that he was leaning against the doorframe again, just enough to stay upright. “Check on Cecil, Scott; I’m not going anywhere.”
Surprisingly, to Teddy anyway, Scott stood up at once and came over to the bed. “Shot through it?” he asked.
Cecil scooted over and showed him the hole. “I looked over the whole house last night after you left, before we went to sleep. There was nobody here but us and the kitten. I checked around our neighborhood, too, and the sinkhole, the bowling alley, and Teddy’s house.” He did not quite glance sideways at Teddy, who had looked away, jaw tightening, when he’d mentioned looking. “ I didn’t see anything suspicious, even the police had called it a night at that point.”
“She had to have gotten in this morning, Scott,” Carlos put in. “One of the cameras must have stopped working. It’s a lucky thing Teddy showed up when he did.”
Cecil rolled his eyes – fondly, but still somewhat exasperatedly. “Carlos, sweetheart, please stop trying to defend him,” he called over. “He was going to stand right here and let that bitch kill you in front of me, and he stopped me from trying to stop her.”
Teddy huffed, ignoring the way Scott’s eyes had widened. “You have two broken legs…”
“I have one broken leg, which is in a cast,” Cecil corrected him. “And that wouldn’t have mattered anyway – not like she was able to get up off the floor either, all I had to do was use my weight to pin her and let the bullet I put in her do the rest. I may be rusty, but it was still a kill shot.” Teddy looked away again, and this time Cecil flinched and looked away too, his hands clenching in the blanket. “Teddy, you’re my big brother, and I love you, and you showing up this morning even hungover and with the worst of intentions saved our lives, and I’m grateful…but I can’t deal with you anymore right now, I just can’t. Please, just go home and sleep it off, please.”
Teddy wanted to be offended, part of him was offended…but going home was probably a good idea, his not-so-sterling hangover personality was upsetting Cecil and it wasn’t like he was needed medically. He spared a moment to be thankful the dead woman hadn’t actually managed to hurt anyone, because Teddy wasn’t sure he’d have been able to…control himself to do a proper healing at this point. And if he’d accidentally-on-purpose done any of the things he could do that weren’t healing to Carlos, especially considering his earlier threat, Cecil would never have forgiven him. He nodded and stood up. “I’m sorry, Cecil. I…I’ll come back over tomorrow to check on you, alright? Drop off those calcium supplements?”
“Yeah, that would be fine,” Cecil told him quietly, still not looking up. “Just…be careful driving home, Teddy.”
Teddy waved that off. “I’m fine…”
“No,” Scott contradicted immediately, “you aren’t. So be careful.”
That was unexpected, especially considering the look on the fire chief’s face when he said it. Teddy just nodded, though; he wasn’t going to get into it with Scott, especially since they were going to have to work together more often now. “Call if you need me.”
Scott nodded back, slowly. “I’m really hoping we don’t have to.”
Teddy accepted that too, and left.
The minute the front door closed behind the bowling alley owner, Scott’s phone was in his hand and his attention was back on the other side of the room. “Tim, I need you over at Espinoza’s house, bring your kit – no sirens, though. Unless…Carlos?”
“It’s not that bad,” Carlos told him. “I got caught on one of the screws when I threw the bar at her, and then trying to get away from her made it…well, worse.”
“Shit.” Tim, the fire station’s paramedic, echoed that sentiment, then asked a question. “Oh hell no, we just got rid of him – he’s so hungover he can’t see straight, Tim, I don’t even like that he’s driving right now. Yeah…yeah, okay, thanks.” He disconnected and tucked the phone into his overshirt pocket. “Cecil, have you checked the rest of the house?”
“I haven’t stopped since Carlos realized she was under the bed,” the other man told him. He’d let go of the blanket and was tugging fretfully at the bandages on his arms. “Nobody else here, not even in the crawlspace under the house, and I don’t see anything suspicious or blinking or anything either.”
“That’s good, but pull it back in now, just keep an eye on the doors,” Scott told him, then glared at Carlos, who was painfully – it was obvious – trying to pull himself to his feet. “Sit your ass back down, Espinoza, you know better.”
“And so do you, because you’re married,” Carlos rebutted, very calmly. “So get your ass over here and help me.”
The fire chief was surprised by that, but he went over and helped the smaller man stand the rest of the way up, giving the blood on the floor where he’d been sitting a frown but not commenting on it. “That much, huh?” he asked quietly.
Carlos smiled. “More.” He made it over to the bed with Scott’s help, easing down onto it. Cecil showed him the hole in the mattress, and Carlos leaned in and kissed him over it. “Nice shot.”
Cecil shook his head. “She still came out…”
“Because crazy people don’t know they’re supposed to stop when you kill them,” Carlos said, resting his forehead against Cecil’s with a sigh. “We need to check the body, get that thing off of it so I can study it…”
“We aren’t doing anything,” Scott said. “People who are bleeding don’t get to do things, it’s a rule. I’d let Cecil help me, but he needs to stay there with you.” Which made Cecil give him a look so grateful that Scott honestly wanted to go chase down Teddy’s truck and strangle the hungover bastard. Instead, he took a closer look at the bleeding wound. “Okay, yeah, you got caught on a screw – and it’s still in there, because part of it is sticking out. Which means you moving? Not a good idea, genius.”
“I’d already been moving,” Carlos argued, but he didn’t resist when Cecil and Scott very carefully made him lay down on his side. “It’s not that bad, really. I can still feel my legs.”
Cecil tangled his fingers in his boyfriend’s hair. “Sweetheart, stop; you’re just digging yourself a deeper hole.” He wasn’t stupid – he knew the I’m fine, nothing to see here act was just that, an act. Which was being put on just to make him feel better, though, so he leaned in for another kiss before angling to look at Carlos’s back for himself, humming thoughtfully. “You know, Scott, we might not need Tim: There’s a Phillips screwdriver over there on the table…”
“Cute,” Scott told him. He ducked into the bathroom and came back with a towel, tucking it around the wound to catch the blood. “The screw is probably plugging the hole, actually – he’s really not bleeding all that much. This should keep most of it off the bed, though.”
Cecil snorted. “The bed already has a bullet hole in it.”
“That just gives it character,” Carlos told him. “And maybe we could hide things in it…”
“Lube?”
Carlos chuckled in spite of himself, wincing when it hurt. “Bad, you are just bad. But it’s not a bad idea…”
“TMI!” came from Scott, who had moved down on the floor with the body. “Okay, I have the mask off – and this woman is completely dead, so no worries there. There’s a little box strapped onto her forehead, is that what this shimmering shit that’s making my eyes hurt is coming from?”
“Yes, probably,” Carlos confirmed. “Take it off of her, hopefully it will shut off by itself. Just be sure you don’t put it on yourself, not even looping the strap over your hand, okay?”
Scott got to work doing that, fighting with the catch on the strap. “What happens if I do put it on? I start shimmering?”
“Light starts bending around the part of you it’s on,” the scientist corrected. “After the first time I was able to study what little bit of camera footage I could get of her, I realized that’s what she had to be using. But that technology is still…problematic, and because of the way it works it can screw up the way your brain processes incoming information, not to mention permanently changing your brain chemistry over the long term.” He sighed. “Cecil said she’s been around for a while like this, so my guess is she’d been driven completely insane. How does she look?”
With the box removed and the shimmering stopped, Scott could actually answer that. “Dead, but other than that…average-looking, brown hair, brown eyes, probably mid-thirties. And there’s scar tissue on her forehead where the box was, my guess would be she just didn’t ever take the thing off.”
“Jesus.”
“Still not here, Espinoza, although I’d be happy to let him do this job too.” Scott pulled out his phone again and took some pictures of the dead woman, and then he dialed. “Hey Trish, tell the whiner he doesn’t have to get up – at least, not for me, anyway. We have a situation, so no meeting today…yeah, it is, how did you…oh. Yeah, they had a break-in.” He angled a look up at Cecil, who mouthed something at him. “Looks like attempted robbery to me, and things got violent so everyone’s a little shaken up. No, he should be fine, just out of commission for a day or two. Yeah…no, I don’t think so, but tell Tony to check his bar before he drops and pops – that’s how they took Carlos down, by loosening the screws on his pull-up bar while he and Cecil were asleep. Yes…yes, I will. Or Trudy will, since being my wife apparently made her the first link in the ‘guess what just happened’ calling chain for the fire station. Yeah, yeah…you know I’m not, Trish. Okay, thanks, bye.”
He made a few more calls, relaying the same message – and the same misinformation about a break-in, just in case anyone else was listening – and then went back to the body. No gun, although she had several knives, a blowgun and darts like in a movie, and several sealed vials of colored liquids which were labeled in some kind of code with colored ink. She also had half a baggie of cocaine, three single-use tubes of superglue and several colored gel-ink pens, but no radio, no phone or communicator, not even an earpiece. Scott wondered aloud about the missing items. “How do you think they were giving her orders?”
Carlos snorted. “I don’t think they were – I think they probably lost control a long time ago, but somebody decided they could use her the way she was. My guess would be they had an information drop somewhere that they knew she’d check. And she was probably getting a lot of other information from eavesdropping and then deciding how she was going to ‘help’ based on that. No idea if the information transfer was going both ways, but I doubt it.”
“I think she may have thought it was,” Cecil put in. “Her ‘campaign flyers’ were full of what were obviously supposed to be coded phrases – I mean, she wrote them into the printed documents with colored ink, like some kind of covert-agent Mad Lib – but my guess would be they didn’t mean anything to anyone except her.”
“Yeah, because they were all different.” Carlos snorted again, a bit drowsily this time, which was worrisome. Cecil scooted closer and dragged one of the blankets up to tuck around him and he sighed. “Thanks. And yes, even though I want to say it’s just cool in here…I do know it isn’t.”
Scott frowned. “Tim will be here any minute now,” he said, mostly for Cecil’s benefit. He moved the dead woman’s belongings up onto the table, making a neat little pile for Carlos to go through later – all except for the knives and the cocaine, which he put back where he’d found them. “The knives have dried blood on them, and I’m pretty sure I know whose cocaine that was since it’s in a holiday Ziploc baggie with little snowmen on it,” he explained when Cecil looked curious. “I’ll set Tony on that idiot later, if he’s even still alive. But those are the kind of things that need to go with the body when we dump it.”
“Sinkhole?” Cecil asked.
“That’s what I was thinking, yeah. We’ve already got people using it as a garbage dump, one more black trash bag going in isn’t going to attract anyone’s attention.”
“Especially if we toss some thermite down there after it,” Carlos added.
“You just want to blow something up,” Scott told him. “Although I agree that we should do some semi-controlled demolition in there sooner and not later; it won’t be long before we’ve got looters or squatters or who knows what else crawling all over what’s left of the buildings.” The sound of a vehicle outside had him standing up, looking at the security monitor. “That’s Tim, I’ll go help him with his kit.”
He left the room, and Cecil let go of the ‘I’m fine’ façade he’d been projecting because Scott was there and buried his face in his boyfriend’s shoulder. “Oh Carlos, I’m so sorry. Teddy…”
“Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Carlos put his arm around Cecil, patting his back gently. “It’s all okay now, he’s gone.”
Cecil sniffed. “She was going to kill you, and…he wouldn’t let go!”
“I know, I know.” More patting, and hoping Cecil didn’t remember that he could do…things to people, because Carlos didn’t ever want Cecil to think he needed to do something like that to the man who thought of him as a baby brother – not on Carlos’s behalf, anyway. “He’s got fifty pounds and four inches on you, Cecil, and you have a broken leg. There’s no way you could have gotten him to let go.”
“I shouldn’t have had to.”
It was practically a whimper, and Carlos kissed his temple and stepped up the patting, cursing himself for being stupid enough to not have something that would warn him if one of the cameras went out, and for falling on a god-damned screw on the floor and getting hurt, and for not realizing before he’d gotten hurt that the hungover version of Teddy was so irrational that he could be classified as, well, dangerously deranged. Because it hadn’t been the Old Woman Without a Face raising a steel bar over his head and about to kill him that had scared Carlos so badly he’d actually felt his heart stutter in his chest…it had been the look on Cecil’s face when Teddy was holding him back, and at the same time forcing him to watch.