Remainders: Blood & Bone Series 3.5 Page 4

  “This is good. Did you make it yourself?”

  Sabira tore her eyes away from the sight of Grace’s tongue chasing sauce across her lips and made affirmative noises.

  “I love tortellini.”

  They ate and watched, and before she realized it, they’d finished one episode and watched it countdown into a second.

  “What do you think of Sisko?” Sabira asked, tucking her legs under herself. She leaned back into the couch, one arm stretched between them. Whether consciously or not, Grace shifted to mirror her posture, fiddling with her own empty wine glass while she made a show of considering the question.

  “First of all, I have watched DS9 before.”

  Sabira stifled a smile. “Got to make sure your geek cred is all current.”

  Grace made an undignified noise and nudged Sabira’s shin with her foot. “Please, my geek cred does not need any help.”

  “Well, if your film taste is any indication I suppose that’s fair.”

  “Sure, also there’s job. I think that makes me a nerd for life.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Oh, uh, I’m a level designer for an MMO.”

  “What, like World of Warcraft?”

  “Yeah, only I don’t work for Blizzard. They’re down in California.”

  “You’re right,” Sabira mused, “that is a lifetime’s worth of geek.”

  Grace kicked her again, but she did it with a bright smile that made something twist in Sabira’s chest. The wolf’s reddish blonde hair glowed darker in the somber yellow lights, like rich honey poured over amber, and her eyes shown bright, surrounded by soft laugh lines that would deepen into a cheerful set of wrinkles in another decade or two.

  “What?” Grace asked.

  Sabira gave herself a mental shake and reached for her glass.

  “More wine?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Chapter 4

  Grace Clanahan

  Grace drove to her family’s home in Queen Anne Hill instead of driving back to her apartment in Bothell. It was late, after midnight, but she had a key and the edges of a wine headache from her evening with Sabira.

  “So can I call you Sabira if you won’t let me call you Sabsy?” she’d asked. And Sabira had laughed, that small repressed little chuckle of hers that softened all of the strict lines in her face, and granted her permission.

  She let herself into the pack house, got a glass of water from the kitchen, and hauled herself upstairs to where her parents kept her room. It was more like a guest bedroom these days, her father having packed up and given her the last of her personal effects. But she still had some old clothes in the closet, handy for full moon nights when the pack slept over. No one came out to say Hi or ask what she was doing there so late, which left her to change quietly and crawl into bed with a tired sigh.

  Grace didn’t know what the hell she was doing, but she’d had a lot of fun hanging out with Sabira. Behind that stiff, professional exterior, the woman had the kind of squishy nerd heart that spoke to Grace. After watching more Star Trek, she’d uncovered the woman’s Xbox—first generation and dusty from disuse, but the fact she owned it as well as a couple dozen games had made Grace smile.

  Sabira was nothing like Adam.

  Grace pulled the blankets up around her chin and burrowed into her pillow, wondering where that thought had come from. Of course Sabira wasn’t anything like Adam, being a woman, younger, British, and laconic where Adam had been ebullient. It was just because they had both worked with Patty, she supposed, that was an obvious parallel. It was natural for her to compare them a little bit. Adam had been a spark of sunshine to balance out Pat’s natural gloom, and the whole pack had taken to him because of it, including Grace. She had been more than taken with him, she’d been very nearly in love with him, or so she’d thought. Now, more than a year since his death and some days she caught herself wondering if what she’d felt was love. As the memory of him grew fuzzy and desaturated she worried that whatever she’d felt, maybe it hadn’t been anything. After all, she was a wolf, and Grace knew intellectually that when it was the real deal—like what had gripped her brother with this mysterious Ethan Ellison—it couldn’t be a feeling that disappeared in twelve months, or that faded faster than the memory of might have beens.

  It still hurt losing Adam, but it was a dull distant kind of ache that only hurt her still when it caught her from a blind spot, took her by surprise. The rest of the time, it was very nearly forgotten and that scared her a little bit.

  Whatever she had felt, whatever might have happened between them, it was all moot now. Adam was dead, and Pat had a new partner. It was practically habit to befriend Sabira Mallory, and it didn’t hurt that she was pretty and a geek and seemed unruffled in a way that meant she let Grace impose on her space and time.

  “Pretty?” Grace murmured to herself.

  She rolled over and went to sleep.

  In the morning she ate breakfast with her parents, asking them about plans for the next full moon and if they’d heard from Pat—they hadn’t—and afterward, she fussed with her cellphone, debating whether to send another text or be reasonable and drive home. But a part of her was itchy to do something other than working from home or cleaning her apartment.

  Sent to Sabsy >> hey, whatcha up to today?

  And then she waited. Grace felt like she was full of pricking needles until her phone vibrated with a message.

  Received from Sabsy >> doing a little work.

  Sent to Sabsy >> oh did u go into the station?

  Received from Sabsy >> no working from home. Why?

  Sent to Sabsy >> idk if I mentioned but I can do more than just eat food. I can cook it too.

  Received from Sabsy >> you might have said something about that. Offering to cook for me?

  Grace bit down on her lip and sent back an affirmative, asking if she could come hang out if she promised not to be too distracting.

  Received from Sabsy >> you’re still in the city? Sure, it’s fine.

  “Score.” Grace yelled her goodbyes and ran out to her car.

  She swung by a grocery store on the way to pick up a couple of things for dinner, then stopped at a Pete’s coffee for sweet maple lattes and pumpkin scones.

  “’Tis the season,” she murmured buckling the coffee carrier into the front seat and pulling out carefully.

  Sabira let her into her apartment with a yawn that morphed into an appreciate gleam when she caught sight of the coffee.

  “You can come over any time you want if you bring coffee,” she said, unburdening Grace’s hands.

  She grinned back, feeling warm and happy. “Careful, I might take you up on that offer.”

  Sabira smiled at her over the rim of her cup and took a satisfied sip. “Make yourself at home. You can put something on the tele if you want.”

  “What are you working on?”

  Sabira collapsed on her couch and picked up a sleek Kindle, gesturing with it. “Research. That’s the part they skim over in all of the crime dramas, just how much reading goes into solving a murder.”

  “A lot?”

  “A lot more than actually chasing down suspects or getting into…what’s the expression, a Mexican standoff? That’s probably racist.”

  Grace nodded, scrunching up her face. “I think so.”

  “Then just a regular standoff with guns. They make it seem really action packed but there’s no real life montage when it comes to trying to figure out what’s going on in the first place. You’ve probably heard of all of this from Patrick.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Grace said with a shrug. She pulled out two plates and a couple paper towels and carried the scones to the coffee table, sitting down on the other side of the couch. It wasn’t a large piece of furniture, more like a love seat, built for a small living space, and less than a cushion of space separated them. “Pat doesn’t talk about his work. Never has, but especially not since…”

  Sabira gave her a long look,
sipped her coffee, and then said. “Since his partner died?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you know him?”

  Grace started, her half-formed musings from the night before washing over her again. She met Sabira’s dark eyes, feeling her heart beating fast in her chest like she was nervous, though she didn’t know what she had to feel nervous about. “We were friends. Becoming friends. It’s more like what we could have been than what we actually were.”

  Sabira blinked and looked away, giving her space. “Lost potential. That must…sting.”

  “You could say that. So, what case are you working on? Can you talk about that?”

  “A murder. We’re not sure who or why yet, but the circumstances are unusual, hence the research.”

  Grace pulled out her laptop. “I have to answer some emails.”

  The two of them read in companionable quiet for a while, enjoying their coffees and then the scones. Grace raided the fridge again around lunch time and then they walked around the block to Sabira’s neighborhood coffee shop when she said that she was feeling stir crazy. In the afternoon, Sabira turned Star Trek back on the television and let it play while her eyes wandered back and forth from the screen to her Kindle. It was obvious that she’d tired of whatever she’d been reading for her case. Grace snuck a look when she went to the bathroom, a little disturbed to find it displaying a series of archaic symbols and a description of a blood-letting ceremony. Whatever this murder case was, it looked dark.

  Grace set the ereader down, feeling stupid. Of course it was dark, it was murder.

  When the sun started to go down, she got up, stretching the kinks out of her muscles and went into the kitchen to get dinner going. Her father was the real star in the kitchen, and he’d made a point of passing on his skills to the rest of them with varying results. This meant that Mal was nearly as good—maybe better—than Jonathan Clanahan at food prep, Vector came in at a close second because there hadn’t been anyone else in his family around to prepare meals, and the rest of them knew enough to keep themselves fed but not necessarily enough to impress Chef Ramsey. Grace stuck to her strengths, mixing up pancake batter and then digging through Sabira’s cupboards before she thought to ask if the woman actually owned a waffle iron.

  Sabira frowned and paused the tv on a grey-skinned Cardassian touching a confused looking Doctor Bashir. She got up and joined Grace in the kitchen, directing their search towards a series of under counter cabinets. Finally she unearthed a small circle shaped waffle iron, still in its box.

  “Perfect,” Grace said taking it from her and shooing her back to the living room.

  “Are you making breakfast for dinner?”

  “Yup.”

  “Bacon?”

  “I’m a werewolf. Of course there’s gonna be bacon.” Grace peeked through the pass through and caught the edge of a smile flickering over her host’s face.

  “Can we drink wine with waffles?” Sabira asked a little while later, surprising her.

  Grace jumped and looked to find the other woman standing right behind her, staring over her shoulder at the pan of sizzling bacon with a surprisingly greedy expression. Grace could heel the human’s heat like a brand all down her back.

  “Why not? It’s Saturday.”

  “You can stay here if you want,” Sabira said, moving to open a bottle. “If you want to drink and not drive all the way home. I don’t mind.”

  “Yeah? You’re sure?”

  Grace piled waffles and bacon onto plates and carried the food to the living room. Sabira followed with the wine. They sat together on the couch, the sliding door cracked open a couple of inches to let in the sweet smell of rain off the balcony.

  “Yeah,” Sabira replied, accepting a plate and smiling down at the little stack of fluffy waffles.

  “What?”

  “Where did you get strawberries?”

  “I bought them.”

  She glanced at Grace, so that she could see how the smile lurked in Sabira’s eyes as well as the corner of her lips.

  “I love strawberries.”

  “Good guess on my part.”

  “Yeah.”

  They watched Netflix and devoured the food. Sabira poured wine until she had to open a second bottle and kept pouring. Grace felt pleasantly stuffed and floaty between the carbs and the alcohol. She curled her legs up under her, sticking her frozen toes under Sabira’s hips. The other woman either didn’t notice or didn’t mind because she let it happen without complaining.

  “I think I’m starting to see the appeal of this,” Grace mumbled, while the tall brunette alien giggled drunkenly with the little red-headed alien.

  The credits rolled and Sabira grabbed the remote before it could autoplay the next episode. She flicked over to a channel menu, flicking through to the local News.

  “You mind?” she asked.

  “Is this a cop thing?”

  Sabira turned to King-5 and dropped the remote on the floor between them. She ran her fingers through her long, dark hair, shaking out the knots until it fell is a soft curtain over her shoulders.

  “You have beautiful hair,” Grace murmured, watching her fingers as though hypnotized. She leaned her cheek against the back of the sofa, head feeling heavy and body lethargic. Sabira glanced at her. “I always wanted hair like that.”

  “I like your hair,” Sabira said.

  Grace snorted and blew out a sigh, making her frizzy bangs flop up and down on her forehead. She knew her hair was a mess this time of year thanks to the cold weather that liked to swing back and forth between dry and damp. The reddish blonde hair she’d inherited from her father liked to dry in a cottony hallow around her cheeks, until Grace suspected she bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Orphan Annie.

  “You don’t look like Orphan Annie,” Sabira retorted, laughing at her and confirming that Grace was more drunk than she’d thought if she was speaking her internal monologue out loud.

  The other woman reached over and swept Grace’s bangs off to the side and out of her eyes. She stared down at her with this private little smile on her face that made Grace’s face heat up.

  “I tried to dye my hair blonde in college,” Sabira admitted.

  “How’d that go?”

  “Terribly. My best friend said—” she cut off to stare at the television.

  Grace tuned into the report in time to catch the reporter describe, “Miriam Jankowski was sixty-three and living in Mountlake Terrace with her two grandchildren. No suspects have been named in connection with her death though police are reporting this as a probable homicide. Any information about suspicious persons around the Mountlake address should call this number…”

  “Shit,” Sabira murmured softly.

  “What?”

  A picture of sixty-three year old Miriam Jankowski flashed on the tv, split-screen with an image of police entering and leaving a quiet, rundown suburban residence.

  “Cause of death exsanguination and missing blood. That fits my cases.”

  “Missing blood?” Grace demanded, sitting up. She felt a cold rush through her nerves, putting a damper on her nice boozy haze. Her mind went immediately to vampires and she shivered.

  “Yeah. That’s what I’ve been researching. Ritual uses for blood.”

  “What about vampires?”

  Sabira sighed and switched the tv back to Netflix, queuing up the next episode of DS9. “That would be the obvious answer. But there weren’t any bite marks on my vic. I don’t know. There are a surprisingly large number of things people can use blood for in magical practice.”

  “That’s disquieting.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sabira said, shooting her a quick look. “I didn’t mean to bring up the case. We shouldn’t stay up to late.”

  “You work tomorrow?”

  “I think I’m going to have to go up north and talk to whoever is in charge of this Miriam Jankowski’s case, see if it matched mine.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Grace tried to tamp dow
n on her disappointment. What had she expected? She’d already intruded on two of Sabira’s evenings; it would have been weird if she’d tried to hang out again tomorrow, wouldn’t it? She was being clingy, which she knew wasn’t an attractive look, but she’d had more fun the last couple days than she could remember having since Roisin went to school and made a bunch of new friends that meant she was too busy to entertain her big sister anymore.

  They curled up on the couch for another hour or two, only breaking the silence for Sabira to explain an alien or a plot point to Grace—she’d watched the newest movie, but her knowledge of the nineties television shows proved severally lacking in nuance.

  “How do you know so much about Star Trek?” Grace asked, smothering a yawn.

  “I used to watch it with my teta—my grandmother. She pretty much raised me and she loved American television.”

  “Oh.” Grace watched her, feeling inexplicably sad. Sabira met her eyes, frowned, and then shook her head.

  “My parents are fine if that’s what you’re thinking. They were just busy with work. They’re doctors. My father’s mother, my teta, moved with us to Seattle because of the civil war. She loved Star Trek more than anything and they used to play reruns of older seasons on Channel 13. We’d watch them every afternoon when I got home from school.”

  “I like that,” Grace murmured. Her jaw cracked around another yawn.

  Sabira stood up with a stretch. “I’ll grab blankets for you. Do you want me to close the door?”

  “No, it’s nice.”

  “All right. If you’re sure.”

  Chapter 5