Lock & Key Read online

  “What’re you going to do?”

  He shrugged. “Lie. If I tell the cops about A9, they’ll inevitably alert all the supernatural groups in the city, and when that knowledge spreads beyond Auguste’s and Caoimhe’s inner circles, to the general supernatural population, there’s no telling what kind of chaos will ensue. We need to keep their existence under wraps until we come up with a plan to take them down for good. But for that to happen, we need way more intel about their inner workings. And getting that without alerting them will take time.”

  Kat sighed. “I understand. I want them to be exposed, but not at the sake of unrest in the city—or in other cities. The relations between the supernatural and the normal aren’t stable enough to survive a big shakeup like A9.”

  “Unfortunately not.” He shook his head. “You’d think after twenty-odd years, we’d be handling this whole transition better, but people, supernatural and mundane, are resistant to change. The fae want their own government, the vampires too, and the shifters just want people to leave them alone. And then you’ve got the magicians, caught between the humans and the nonhumans, while the regular humans are trying their hardest not to panic and hit the self-destruct button. When you think about it, we really suck at this whole civilized society thing. What we have is a very fragile house of cards.”

  “And A9 could make it come tumbling down”—Kat dragged her nails across the surface of the table—“if I’m right about their influence in the federal government.”

  “Yep. And so, I have to go lie to my own former colleagues to keep the peace. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “I was going to go with ‘sad,’ but I guess ironic works too.”

  He smiled wryly and grabbed a key for a rental car off the countertop. “Anything you want while I’m out?”

  “No, I think Yun took care of the clothing situation.”

  He snorted. “You should’ve seen my face when she walked in carrying six bags of new clothes. I thought my eyes were going to pop out.”

  “Did she buy them all herself? I don’t want her wasting money on me.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said, heading for the door to the stairs. “Yun’s been saving like a maniac for years. She’s got a nest egg bigger than most retirees. I’m pretty sure she’s been looking for a good excuse to splurge.”

  “And I’m a good excuse?”

  Liam paused in the doorway and shot her a meaningful look over his shoulder. “Of course you are.”

  17

  Liam

  Liam walked into the precinct for the first time in three years and nearly threw up in the trashcan by the door. The building reeked of nostalgia, from the scuffed tile floor and the leaky ceiling, to the smell of old coffee that permeated the air, to the tightly packed desks and the cramped office spaces with poorly tinted windows. For a moment, he was transported back in time, and he was Detective Crown again, waltzing back in after a trip to a crime scene with a dozen hunches piled up on his back and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts under his arm. For a moment, he felt like his old life was right at his fingertips, a set of reins he only had to grab in order to recover what had been lost.

  And then the memory of the crash flickered through the back of his mind, and the illusion was broken. His old life was gone. For good. The nostalgia was just a trick of his mind.

  Swallowing the disappointment, he trudged up to the front desk and said he needed to speak with an officer involved in the Samson Street case. The woman at the desk made a quick call, and a moment later, he was directed to head back to a grouping of desks he knew all too well. One of them used to be his.

  Liam shuffled toward the designated desk, the one at the very back, which hadn’t been his, thank god, but had belonged to a detective Liam knew well. Jackson Weights. The man must’ve been pushing sixty, and he’d probably retired in the years since Liam quit the force. The person at the desk now was a young woman, maybe twenty-five, wearing the blue uniform of a beat cop. She was busily typing away on the desktop computer and scribbling down notes and signatures on a stack of reports. She must’ve been assigned all the busywork for the Samson Street case.

  Taking a deep breath—this is a piece of cake, just a simple statement, like you took yourself a thousand times—he picked up his pace and came to stand in front of the desk. It wasn’t until the woman, who didn’t even notice his approach, turned to the left to grab another stack of papers from the corner of the desk, that he caught the nametag on her uniform shirt.

  Liam froze.

  The woman was Frances Baker.

  Oh, Christ. I can’t do this.

  But it was too late.

  Franc had spotted Liam in her peripheral vision, and just as Liam prepared to backpedal and run the hell away, she glanced up and saw his face. Then she froze too, and both of them stared in shock at each other for what must’ve been thirty seconds, maybe even a full minute, the hustle and bustle of the precinct rendered nothing but muted background noise. In the end, it was Franc who broke free from her stupor first. She sat down her pen and exited the computer file she was working on, then rolled her chair away from the desk and stood up.

  “Detective Crown,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

  Liam still couldn’t form words. Franc hadn’t aged much in three years, so her face was still the round, youthful one he remembered, even though her expression, and the hard edge in her eyes, spoke of ample experience on the force instead of naïveté. When Liam had first met Franc, she was a rookie beat cop, fresh out of the academy, having come out of undergrad with a criminal justice degree and gone straight into training. She was enthusiastic and eager to learn, and perhaps a bit of a suck-up to her superiors. But she was smart and good at her job, and she was going places.

  Then came the night of the crash that killed Julia and Hayden. By some force of fate that was the complete opposite of luck, it was Franc’s car that had been closest to the crash scene. She arrived with her partner to find a totaled sedan with the bodies of a young woman and her toddler horrifically mangled and trapped inside the smoking vehicle, while a respected and decorated homicide detective lay dying in a field of glass on the roadway.

  From what little Liam remembered of that night, Franc’s tearstained face was a prominent feature, her choked voice trying to soothe away the devastation neither of them would ever forget. She’d visited him once in the hospital, after. He screamed at her and demanded she leave him the fuck alone. They’d never spoken again after that, not in three whole years. And now she was standing in front of him.

  Liam did his best to swallow years of guilt, like sand stuck in his throat, and said, “Yeah, it’s been a while.”

  Franc looked away, unable to maintain eye contact. “I guess you’re here to give a statement about your…” She checked a file on her desk. “Cherokee that was found at the scene of the attack on Samson Street.”

  Suddenly, Liam realized what Franc and the others must’ve thought when they found out the totaled SUV belonged to him: that he’d been killed in some supernatural skirmish.

  He felt sick, worse than before, and had to stop breathing so he wouldn’t gag. “Yes. About that.”

  Franc’s gaze drifted to his broken arm, now in a blue cast. “I assume you were driving the vehicle?”

  Liam desperately kicked his brain, forcing it into gear. “Actually, I wasn’t. My injuries occurred beforehand.”

  Franc’s eyebrows drifted up. “Oh? What happened?”

  Finally finding his stride, Liam sank into the chair in front of Franc’s desk and spouted a fanciful tale involving a car theft in a bad area of town. He claimed that a bunch of thugs had beaten him up and taken his keys, his phone, and his wallet, then drove off in his Cherokee. As a result, he was forced to bum a phone call off a passerby. He had a friend come pick him up, and they drove around for a while trying to find his SUV. Then they came upon the crash scene, but Liam didn’t get close enough to spot his Cherokee in the mess. At that point, he went to the
hospital for treatment, planning to make a vehicle theft report after he was discharged. But he got the call from the police before he had a chance.

  Franc finished jotting down his statement and quickly reviewed it. “Why didn’t you report the assault and battery?”

  Liam feigned embarrassment. “Well, I didn’t want to…”

  Franc gave him a stern look. “Didn’t want to let your old colleagues know some brutes got the better of you?”

  He faked a cough. “Yeah.”

  “You think you can describe these guys?”

  Liam considered the request for a moment, then had an idea. “Oh, sure I can.” He described in great detail the four half-fae goons Caoimhe had used to spy on him and Kat, and whose reports had been the catalyst that led to Marta’s attack on Samson Street, which killed three innocent people and totaled two vehicles, and damaged the roadway so badly it would have to be shut down for repairs. That’s the least you deserve for tricking me, Caoimhe.

  Franc read over his statement one last time, and nodded. “Okay, I think I have everything I need. I’ll pass this on to the detectives working the case. It’s kind of turning into a mess, honestly. A few bystanders saw some magician lady set the car on fire—Lord, that poor family—but no one could really provide details about her appearance because it all happened so fast. And then there was some weird fight a few streets over immediately afterward, and there were rifle rounds found, and…” She bit her tongue. “But you don’t need to worry about that, of course.”

  “Well, we all need to be worried about crimes committed in our city, but I know what you mean.” He stood up. “Not a cop anymore.”

  Franc smiled sadly. “That doesn’t have to be a permanent situation, you know?”

  “I know,” he replied, almost a whisper. “But it’s going to be.”

  Before Franc could try to guilt trip him—because she was damn good at that, he remembered—Liam turned tail and practically ran out of the precinct. Several detectives and uniforms returning from their lunch break caught sight of him as he rushed through the lobby, eliciting a series of mutters and exclamations as they realized who he was. At least three people called his name, but he didn’t stop to acknowledge them. He couldn’t. He’d done enough damage just by lying to Franc, and he couldn’t stand to be in this building anymore.

  He felt like he was suffocating.

  Liam burst through the door and staggered onto the sidewalk, propping himself against a brick support column to stay upright. He was shaking, palms sweaty, and he could feel a panic attack on the horizon of his mind, creeping up like the rising sun. Afraid more cops would try to talk to him if he loitered, he hurried back to where he’d parked his rental car, climbed in, slammed the door shut, and tried his hardest not to scream.

  Well, that could’ve gone worse.

  18

  Kat

  Kat had drifted downstairs after Liam left for the precinct and was quickly reminded of something: Liam’s used bookstore was a mess. There were boxes of books in two corners, new arrivals waiting to be unpacked, and most of the shelves were cluttered and disorganized, which made it almost impossible to skim the titles and find what you were looking for. Kat knew Liam worked multiple jobs, and that his PI stuff took up most of his time, but she still felt it would be better if he had a bookstore you could actually walk through without tripping over something. So, in her boredom, she decided to make good on her earlier promise to clean the place.

  Having dropped all the blinds so she couldn’t be seen from the street, she spent half an hour stripping all the books from the shelves and organizing them by genre and author on the floor. Then she added in the new arrivals. Satisfied all the books were grouped correctly, she began to load them back onto the shelves in an orderly fashion. She was halfway through the science fiction and fantasy section, slipping a few slightly worn copies of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn books onto her current row, when someone knocked on the door.

  Kat sat the books down and crept around the back of another shelf, peeking through the gap in the blinds to see the person standing on the front steps. It was Yun, not a customer or an A9 goon, and she was holding yet more shopping bags in both hands. Kat crossed to the door then opened it in such a way that she wasn’t visible from the street. You could call her paranoid, but after being abducted in the middle of the day by Marta and crew, she wasn’t going to take any chances of being seen if she wasn’t wearing a concrete disguise.

  Yun entered, humming a song that was also blasting into her skull through headphones connected to the phone peeking out of her pocket, and Kat shut the door behind her. The thunder god was halfway to the checkout counter before she registered the mountain of books piled up on the floor. She sat her bags on the countertop, plucked off her sunglasses, and slid her headphones down her neck. “Are you doing a reno or something?” she asked.

  Kat sauntered back to where she’d been working and picked up the Sanderson books again. “Well, I had to do something. I was bored, and I didn’t want to watch TV all day. Plus, this place needs a little reorganizing, don’t you think?”

  “Can’t disagree with you, no.” Yun smirked. “You know, I’m pretty sure Liam only kept this place running because one, his dad left it to him, and two, it’s literally the bottom half of his house. But if you actually manage to pretty the store up enough to attract real customers, he might bring in a few dollars for once. Maybe you can earn your keep that way.”

  “Earn my keep?” Kat shoved the books onto the shelf. “So I am in debt?”

  “In terms of the whole rescue thing? Not really. Liam wouldn’t hold that over you.” She dug around in her plastic shopping bags and started pulling out various toiletry boxes. Shampoo. Deodorant. Soap. “But you do realize that since you have no income—and you can’t get a legit job without ID—that you can’t actually rent a place in the city, right? Which means you’re pretty much limited to slumming it in crappy motels or…staying here.”

  Kat flushed. “Liam expects me to live here permanently, doesn’t he?” She hadn’t really thought about her long-term plans for living arrangements. She’d been more concerned about not getting ripped to pieces by Marta or shot up by Reagan and Kline. But now that she had time to consider a future that was plotted further out than a couple days, she realized she was a tad clueless about how to navigate the world as a “regular” person.

  “I don’t know if he expects it, but I certainly hope you do. You’re a good influence on him, and if you really want to thank him for helping you, you can continue being one.” She tugged a large bottle of red hair dye from the bottom of the bag.

  Kat wondered what the heck that was for, then she vaguely recalled a bit about changing her appearance in reference to the whole ghost Kat plan. “Are you referring to his drinking problem?”

  “Noticed that, did you?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you also notice that he hasn’t had a drop to drink since you fell into his lap?”

  Kat blushed harder. “Did you have to put it that way?”

  “Don’t dodge the question.” Yun pointed a warning finger at her.

  “Well, I mean, I hadn’t specifically noticed that, but now that you mention it…”

  Yun leaned against the countertop, mollified. “You’ve got to understand, Kat, that Liam hasn’t skipped his daily indulgence in three goddamn years. Not once. He drinks every single day. And then, out of the blue appears this woman with crazy powers, pursued by an evil underground organization, and all of a sudden, Liam forgets about the alcohol and jumps back on the heroic horse he abandoned a long, long time ago.

  “Now, I’m not saying you should feel obligated to stay by Liam’s side forever and police his drinking with your incredible ability to accidentally drag him into supernatural boss fights, but I would really, really appreciate it if you did indeed stick around for a while, at least until he gets through the withdrawal phase. Which should start pretty soon, I think. The longer he goes without a b
eer, the more he’s going to want one. If we can get him over that hurdle, get him totally clean…maybe he’ll finally be able to drag himself out of his depression pit and move on.”

  “Move on?” Kat wiped her hands on her jeans and stood up. “From what? His divorce?”

  “Divorce?” Yun stared at her, stunned. “You mean he didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Oh, Christ, of course not,” she grumbled. “That fucking moron.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Yun pinched the bridge of her nose. “Liam’s wife, Julia, didn’t divorce him. She died in a car accident, along with their four-year-old son, Hayden. Three years back.”

  Kat felt like a bucket of ice water had just been dumped onto her head. “No…that’s…”

  Yun drew her lips into a tight frown. “Terrible, yes. And made even worse because Liam was the one driving.”

  “Oh, god. What happened?”

  “No one knows. Not even Liam.” Yun rubbed her arms, as if she too were cold, as if dredging up Liam’s horrible past bled all the heat from the room. “He doesn’t remember what caused the crash, probably because he sustained a bad head injury. One minute he was driving along, and the next he was on the road, having been flung right out of the vehicle—despite wearing his seatbelt. He was left in critical condition: cracked skull, shattered ribs, two broken arms and one broken leg, damaged organs. His right orbital cavity was broken so badly he nearly lost his eye. He was in the hospital for six months.”

  “And his family?” Kat stammered out, not sure she wanted to know.

  “Didn’t make it out of the car. They were pronounced dead at the scene.” Yun sighed. “The thing that haunts Liam the most isn’t the crash itself though, you’ve got to understand. It’s the fact he doesn’t know why it happened. It’s that damn gap between everything being fine and everything being ruined. And the reason why that haunts him so much is because he was tired that night. He was coming off an extended shift, having worked a really terrible homicide case over the weekend, and he went to the airport to pick up Julia and Hayden as they were coming back from a visit to her parents’ house in Cali, and then…”