Speak of the Devil

CHAPTER 5

It took Adam more than an hour to get to my place. Lugh did his best to keep me calm while I waited, but I was seriously rattled, and I was lucky I didn’t spend the whole hour bent over the toilet. I was so creeped out that when the front desk called to announce that Adam had arrived, I jumped so high I almost hit my head on the ceiling.

I was glad he was finally here. But my front door was locked, which meant I had to walk by … it… on my way to let Adam in. Feeling like a little girl in a haunted house, I held a hand up to my eyes to shield my vision. I didn’t even take my usual precautions to confirm the identity of my visitor. Luckily, it really was Adam, and not some homicidal maniac out to kill me.

“Where—” he started to ask, but I just pointed in the general direction, still trying not to look.

He nodded briskly and took a couple of steps toward the dining room. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him take in the scene and frown.

“I see you took good care of the evidence,” he said dryly as he pulled on some gloves.

“When I first opened it, I thought it was rubber,” I said, and my voice hardly sounded like my own. I liked to think of myself as a tough chick, but I wasn’t feeling so tough right now.

Adam must have finally noticed what bad shape I was in. He gestured to the living room. “Why don’t you go sit down? You look like you’re about to pass out.”

I’d have liked to argue with him, but I was afraid he was right. I made my way rather unsteadily toward the couch. Adam squatted to examine the hand, his body thankfully hiding it from view. I was pretty sure that was deliberate, and I felt absurdly grateful to him. He studied it in silence for what felt like forever, looking at it from every angle without touching it.

“It’s embalmed,” he informed me. “And from the looks of it, I’d say it was already embalmed when it was cut off.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, still feeling the chill that had descended on me the moment I’d realized what was in the package.

“Don’t you need a lab tech or something to make a determination like that?”

He glanced at me over his shoulder. “I’ve been a cop for fourteen years, and I’ve seen a lot of corpses. I can make an educated guess, though yeah, the lab guys will have to confirm it. I’m thinking there’s a funeral parlor somewhere that’s misplaced a hand.”

That was better than thinking someone had been killed specifically for the purpose of sending me this love note. But I still wasn’t exactly basking in relaxation.

“I’m going to have to call in a team,” Adam said.

“This bubble wrap should hold a print nicely, though if this is from the same guy who’s been leaving you the phone messages, I doubt he’d be so accommodating as to leave prints.”

I doubted it, too. My anonymous caller used some kind of voice-altering device when he called, and he seemed to be quite a pro. I couldn’t even say for sure whether it was a man or a woman, though I had automatically assumed man. I’m not sure why.

“Um, Adam?”

“Yeah?”

“If you call in a team, how am I supposed to explain that I didn’t call the police about the death threats?” I’d talked it over with Adam when I’d first started getting the threats, and he’d agreed with me that there wouldn’t be much the police could do. He’d also agreed with me that I was better off keeping a low profile as far as the police were concerned. There’d been a lot of seriously bad shit happening around me in the last couple of months, and more police attention was not something I needed.

“Tell them the truth: that you didn’t think there was anything they could do about the calls.” Adam covered up the hand with the sheet of tissue paper, then tore off his rubber gloves and came to sit on the love seat next to the couch.

“This isn’t something I can sweep under the rug for you,” he said. “We need to figure out who that hand belongs to and confirm my guess that the victim was already dead and embalmed before the hand was severed. Otherwise, we could have an actual murder here.”

I leaned back into the cushions of the couch and groaned. He was right, of course. The police weren’t going to be happy with me for not having reported the death threats, but I was just going to have to suck it up.

“You still convinced you wouldn’t be better off with a bodyguard?” Adam asked me.

For half a second, I wondered if Adam really had sent me that hand, hoping to scare me into letting Saul stay in my spare room. But no, that wasn’t Adam’s style. He’d always been remarkably straightforward.

I guess I was quiet long enough that Adam assumed I hadn’t changed my mind—which I hadn’t.

“Maybe you should consider staying at Brian’s for a while,” he said. “And no, I’m not saying that because I hope you’ll let Saul stay in your apartment while you’re gone. It’s just that whoever’s threatening you is obviously escalating, and I suspect it’s going to get worse.”

Great. Just what I needed.

“I’ll deal with it,” I told Adam. I wasn’t any more likely to ask Brian to let me stay with him than I was to ask him for money at the moment.

Adam shook his head in disgust. “What is it with you? Why do you have to do every fucking thing on your own? Why can’t you accept help when it’s offered?”

I’d usually have bitten his head off for a comment like that, but I guess I was feeling rather vulnerable right then, so I answered him.

“I’ve learned from long, hard experience that the only person I can ever truly count on is myself. I just… don’t dare lean on anyone.”

He regarded me with cocked head and furrowed brow. I think he was genuinely concerned about my well-being, which was kind of a nice change. Usually, I had the feeling he only cared about Lugh and that he despised me.

“Is there some reason you can’t accept help and count on yourself at the same time?” he asked. “Just because you went to stay with Brian for a little while wouldn’t mean you were putting your entire life in his hands. You can still defend yourself even if you’re with him.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” I said, and it was true. Adam couldn’t know the utterly devastating feeling of trusting someone and having them fail you. It was easier just not to trust, to rely only on myself.

I expected Adam to get mad at my obvious brush-off, but he didn’t.

“How do you know I wouldn’t understand?”

“Because you’ve never …” I let my voice trail off, realizing how foolish it was to make any kind of sweeping generalization about Adam. The fact was, I knew almost nothing about him other than what had happened since Lugh had joined me.

“Remember for a moment that there are basically two people in this body,” he said. “I suspect my host has dealt with more betrayals and disillusionment than you can possibly imagine.”

I knew next to nothing about Adam’s host, although I had met him briefly when Adam had— highly illegally—transferred to Dom’s body to heal what would have been a fatal gunshot wound. I’d decided from that brief meeting that Adam and his host were more alike than not, but I had no good way to justify that conclusion.

“What happened to your host?” I asked.

Adam was silent for a moment, perhaps consulting with his host to confirm it was all right for him to share.

“He came out when he was eighteen,” Adam said, “though by that time he’d already experimented with both men and women. He likes women just fine, but he prefers men. His entire family disowned him— mom, dad, two brothers, and a sister. His dad gave him a bunch of money, in exchange for which he was never to call or otherwise contact any member of the family again.”

I’d always wondered how Adam could afford his impressive house on a cop’s salary—even on the salary of a high-ranked cop. I guess this explained it. I swallowed hard, regretting that I’d insinuated he’d always had it easy. Adam and his host were obviously fond of one another, and assuming Adam had as much ability to read and understand his host as Lugh did, then he probably did understand exactly what it was like to be betrayed by the ones you counted on.

“I’m sorry,” I said, even though it was a lame, generic thing to say. Seriously, though, what else can you say to a confession like that?

“I’m sure in the end that my host is better off having no contact with his family. Such a toxic environment would have turned him inside out. But believe me, that doesn’t make it easy.”

I’m not sure if it was because I was so shaken up by the hand, or if it was because Adam and I were suddenly so in sympathy with one another, but I said, “I’ll see what I can do about staying with Brian for a while. And Saul can house-sit while I’m away if it works out.”

“It will.”

I shook my head. “Don’t be too sure.”

“Don’t tell me you two are fighting again.”

I winced. “Not exactly. We just had … an awkward moment, let’s say. We’re going to talk again today, and we’ll probably get it all hashed out and settled.” Wishful thinking, perhaps, but what else could I do? “I’ll let you know what happens.”

Adam nodded his agreement, then proceeded to call in his brothers-in-arms to investigate the hand.