Page 25 of The Devil's Embrace

“It’s interesting what you find funny, that’s all. It’s…unexpected. You are unexpected.”

He frowned. “What, did Bruce tell you something weird about me or something?”

“Bruce had never mentioned you before he found out you’d been assigned the case.”

Cal shrugged. Made sense. There was no reason for Bruce to be talking about him with anyone. “So why the surprise then? You make it sound like you know me, but we’ve only just met.”

“It certainly feels like I’ve known you longer,” Aodhan confessed, still staring at him with a hard to read expression that was all intensity and little else. “You’re very easy to talk to. That’s…” he seemed at a loss for words, so Cal helped him out.

“Interesting?” He chuckled. “I’m guessing from your comment, you and I grew up on different sides of the track. You come from money?”

“I do.”

“It shows.”

“I can’t tell if you’re insulting me or not,” Aodhan admitted, but Calix merely shrugged a second time and motioned to the room.

“What’s this?” There were chairs lined up in one half of the room with a glass box set before them like a stage of sorts. Most of the seats were occupied. “There’s got to be like one hundred and fifty people here.”

“More like two hundred.” Aodhan’s hand rested on the small of Cal’s back, and he urged him toward the last row where there were only a few empty seats left. He grabbed a glass filled with purple liquid off the nearby table and handed him one. “Let’s sit before we lose our chance.”

Everyone sat facing the glass box, mingling and chatting with each other. Masked waiters and waitresses roamed about, offering up drinks and hors d’oeuvres on golden platters. The guests were dressed in a mixture of cocktail and grand ball attire, some clearly meant to upstage with their outfits. There was no identifiable color palette, and though Cal could overhear someof the chatter going on around them, none of it was particularly noteworthy.

“You sure we’re in the right place?” he asked. Aside from the location—a massive mansion in the middle of nowhere—there wasn’t anything all that spectacular about what was going on. Just a bunch of rich people getting together to gossip and play dress up. If there was a murderer amongst them, there’d be no way of singling them out from the rest.

Aodhan wasn’t paying as close attention to him now, however. His eyes were locked onto the glass box at the front of the room. The glass had turned opaque as though to hide something within.

“Remember what I told you in the car,” the doctor said suddenly, eyes still stuck there, as though anticipating something. “No matter what happens next, we aren’t here to make any arrests. We’re guests, just like everyone else.”

Don’t play cop, was what he was really saying.

“This isn’t my first day on the job,” Cal stated, slightly annoyed. “Are you forgetting which one of us is actually in charge here?”

“Not at all.” He pulled his gaze away from the glass just long enough to stare Calix down. “Are you?”

“I—” Gasps from the crowd cut off whatever he’d been about to say, and his head swiveled back to the front to see what had caught everyone’s attention. Only for him to have the same exact reaction. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s a mermaid,” a very excited woman who’d taken the seat to his right moments ago exclaimed. She covered her mouth with both hands, absolutely giddy by this revelation. Her outfit appeared to have been made of spun gold, her yellow hair pulled up in a complicated twist. Nothing about her seemed familiar, but she spoke to Calix as though they were old friends. “They’re so rare, the Intergalactic Conference had them added to theendangered species list almost one hundred years ago. It’s said they’re meant to reevaluate and decide whether or not to change that to extinct.”

“He looks pretty alive to me,” Cal said, and she giggled, her hand moving to rest on his knee.

“Doesn’t he? How fantastic! What a delightful treat! And to think, I almost skipped this month's revelry.”

Month? They got together like this monthly, and yet neither the police or the press were able to identify any of the two hundred some people in here? That seemed odd at best, suspicious at worst.

And Cal was the suspicious sort.

He drained the contents of his glass in one deep gulp, barely tasting the sugary alcohol that passed over his tongue and burned down his throat.

He’d bet money, of which he had very little, that behind some of these masks were the very people who went about their daily lives claiming to try and put a stop to this elite club, or whatever it really was.

Fakers, the lot of them.

He fit right in.

That familiar melancholy threatened to sweep through him and he fought against it, forcing himself to take in the creature currently thrashing on a gurney, much like the one he’d been wheeled into the hospital on just the other day. The major difference was the length of it.

To accommodate the five-foot-long tail, the metal gurney stretched longer than a normal one would. The tail was held down by white straps in two places, with another resting against the man’s stomach and his chest. They’d gagged him, and there was no sound coming from the room even though it was obvious he was struggling and trying to speak around the white cloth.

---