Page 20 of Wake the Dream

Chapter 6

Kieran

Finding it difficultto contain his excitement, Kieran dropped Illaria off at home on his way back to the station. She refused to get out of the car and clung tenaciously to the door like a little monkey, going so far as to press her boot against the dashboard when he tried to push her out.

“I want to come with you,” she insisted hotly. “If he’s lying like you say he is, then we need to get back there and shake him up. See what he’s hiding. Get some real answers out of him.”

Kieran shook his head and groaned, refusing to give in to her pleading. Herchildishpleading, might he add. “No, I’m sorry. This is where we part company for the day. Remember our talk about you letting me do my job? This is part of it. You go home and stay calm. Better yet, you go to work. I’ll go follow leads.”

Illaria slapped at his hands when he tried to pry her loose. “You can stop talking to me like I don’t speak English. I understand. And I hate you for being so secretive about where you’re going or what you’re doing.”

“I don’t care what you hate,” he replied. “Get out of my car.”

“This isn’t over, Shanahan.” Annoyed at the brusqueness of his tone and keen on showing him, she huffed out the door at last, slamming it shut behind her. Kieran paused long enough to admire the sway of her hips as she stalked away, then drove off back to the station.

If only he got paid by the mile. Wagering a guess, he’d say he spent more than half of his time behind the wheel of the car. His seat had a permanent impression of his ass.

Still, nothing could dampen his enthusiasm today. Not this time around.

Osgood had called this the unsolvable case? Kieran couldn’t wait to shove this new piece of evidence right down his superior’s throat. He finally had a lead. A concrete one.

He drummed his hands on the wheel, lips rounded in a whistle along with the tune on the radio.

Daniel had definitely been lying when he said he hadn’t heard anything from Yelena, and Kieran didn’t need to access the man’s phone records to finger the falsehood. He’d seen everything he needed to know on the laptop. Obviously, the contents of the web browser were off limits without a warrant, and whatever Daniel had been watching prior to the interview had been hurriedly clicked off. Which probably meant porn, even in the middle of the day. But the desktop background was a picture of Yelena.

With a timestamp.

From the night she’d gone missing.

Kieran recognized the dark hair and sparkling eyes from the photos he’d seen, the ones Illaria kept on the wall in their house. The hint of “otherworldly” in her features was visible even through the screen.

The other lady in the photo, however, was a complete mystery. The only item Kieran recognized in the photo besides Yelena was a harsh red-and-black logo on the wall behind them.

Claw.

A bar the local residents used as a place to blow off steam without fear of repercussions.

At once Kieran’s shoes squeezed his toes, too tight. Stepping out of the car, he winced when the material pinched around his big toe. His coffee sat in the cupholder of his car, forgotten and stale. He’d have to make a fresh pot at some point because he wanted to keep his momentum going, and the surest way to do that was coffee.

The pit stop at the office yielded the address and name of Yelena’s closest friends written in Illaria’s hasty hand: Forest (a sylph), Shula (fire sprite), and an elf of indeterminate sex whose name Kieran couldn’t pronounce. He put faces to the names thanks to information filled out during a census the mayor had forced each resident to complete and he’d initially thought to be ridiculous. In this case, it proved insanely useful.

Maybe he’d have to stop snickering about her policies behind her back.

Kieran studied the list, tapping it with his pen, trying to decide where to start. The most obvious choice stood out.

Shula. The woman from the screensaver photo, he now knew. She worked at Claw during the early evenings until they closed. Which meant he needed to hurry if he wanted to catch her before they opened.

“Are you headed off again?” Pembroke asked with an oversized yawn as he stalked the bullpen.

Was it time for shift change already?

“Maybe I just can’t stand to smell you today,” Kieran replied.

He hastily scanned the desk for anything he might need to deal with a fire sprite. Fire extinguisher, maybe? Having never engaged in a one-on-one before, he tried to think through the potential consequences.

Maybe he should have stopped to ask Illaria more about the friends. He knew from the report that she’d gone to Forest’s house to personally interrogate him the night her sister disappeared. Did she know about the candid selfie with Shula inside of Claw?

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