Page 85 of Forget Me Not

“I can’t protect you like this,” Ray ground out. “They might have been right to…”

“Shut up,” Cal answered, and put his forehead against Ray’s. “You hurtyourself, not anyone else. So shut up and listen to my heartbeat and rest… for me if not for you.”

An unfair ploy, but Ray was tired. He left his eyes closed to listen to muffled traffic and the sound of his m-a-t-e’s heart.

Chapter Eleven

IN THE darkened bedroom, with a cold, wet washcloth over his eyes, Ray was not supposed to be listening to the goings on in the rest of the house. Cal had reiterated that several times while exchanging a warm washcloth for a cool one. He’d also given Ray what Ray was fairly certain was a full day’s allowance of headache medication for a human, and some water.

Cal clearly suspected Ray was listening to everyone anyway; he had dragged his father outside and partway down the street to talk to him. Ray hadn’t heard the particulars of that discussion even while straining, but once in a while, Cal’s voice had risen. Emotion had carried more than the words.

Ray had been considering getting up for a while since then. Lying around in the dark while the others held mysterious conversations made him want to claw into a pillow. He had gone so far as to sit up, holding the towel over his eyes, when a shuffle outside the bedroom door made him remove the towel altogether.

After a knock, Calvin poked his head in. He didn’t seem surprised to find Ray awake, although after he’d come in and closed the door behind him, he said, “Lie back down. There’s nothing happening yet, and a moment of quiet is probably nice.”

The alarm clock by the bed said just over an hour had passed since they’d all arrived here. Cal had taken Ray’s phone from him.

Ray sat against the headboard and regarded Calvin in silence.

Calvin sighed heavily. He looked somewhere between frazzled and ragged. Getting yelled at by his son, or just being there while Cal had shouted, could not have been pleasant after an already stressful morning.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Calvin drew his eyebrows together, then sighed again before running a hand through his thinning hair. “We need to talk about what happened. You could file a complaint. Hell,Icould file a complaint. But… considering what’s going on… I am not sure that would do anything but create more problems for you.”

“If everyone in that store made a complaint, they would investigate, and the worst that would happen is those officers would get paid leave.”

Ray had had time to think, here in the dark.

“That’s not the worst that could happen,” Calvin said and gave Ray a meaningful look. “Two of them arrive, no visible name plates, badge numbers covered, heavily armored, guns drawn already in response to a call no one had time to make, much less for them to respond to.”

That must be what Calvin had discussed with Cal outside.

“You started breathing too fast before then,” Calvin explained to Ray, gentling his tone. “Collapsed against the endcap, then to the floor, claws out. Those guys in the suits, whatever they said to you, they took off the moment your breathing picked up. They apparently had no interest in sticking around to help a hyperventilating were… or to witness your execution.”

“Calvin,” Ray growled through gritted teeth.

“Cal called it that before I did. You weren’t going to keep that realization from him.”

Ray tossed the wet washcloth onto the floor, where it would soak into the carpet and probably cause a musty smell that would drive Ray crazy until he had the carpets cleaned.

If he lived that long.

He glowered at the spot on the floor, then at Calvin, although Calvin hadn’t done anything but try to help.

“They were there,” he bit out. “Not those two specifically. Those two were prepared. But others.” Ray rubbed his damp eyebrows and growled again. “There were more uniforms than there needed to be on the streets around that alley, when I first…” He gestured to his head. “There were uniforms I didn’t know waiting outside my hospital exam room. They had visible badges. They weren’t necessarily there as anything but a precaution. But… I didn’t know any of them, not well. Not what I’d call friendly.”

“And we don’t believe in coincidences in a homicide case.” Calvin abruptly sat on the edge of the mattress.

“Was this a homicide case?” Ray asked. Although once he’d voiced it, it felt like something he shouldn’t have. Like what they’d told him about magic: speaking the words could make something real.

“It was possibly intended to be a homicide case.” Calvin made a garbled sound as he scrubbed his face with his hand. “But yeah, these two aside, the others probably didn’t know why they were really there. That’s just, logistically, too big of a secret to keep among that many people.”

“I don’t know many of them. They don’t know me. They’d have no reason to believe I wouldn’t go wild. Hurt someone. That’s the best interpretation of it I have.”

“Well, it’s not Cal’s.” Calvin dropped his hand and looked over. “But I’m inclined to side with you on this one, as far as vast conspiracies are concerned. There might be one, but it’s a smaller group of people than he thinks. The rest… that’s just using a system already in place to get the results they want. The system is its own issue.”

An easily exploitable issue, to the right people, Cal might say. Which was a different form of malevolence.

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