Page 22 of The Dog in the Alley

It grew back fast. And pure white.

I have to get my hair cut every few months, and before you say,Yeah, Hart, people get their hair cut every few months, I mean that Ihaveto. I cut it off to my shoulders, just long enough to tie back, and six months later that shit is practically to my ass.

Don’t get me started on how often my shower clogs.

The point is, that shit had fuckinghurt. And Elliot got it. Elliot gotme. He was the only person who ever really had.

For a while, back in college, I thought I was in love with him.

I wasn’t. I loved him, sure, but we’d figured out pretty quickly that we were better friends than we were a couple, and that was that.

When I’d moved away from Milwaukee, coming down to join the Richmond PD, which had been forced by an idealistic Democratic mayor to increase the Arcanid diversity numbers on the force, we’d gotten paired tattoos.

I had a stylized badger paw on the inside of my arm.

Elliot had a crescent moon with a single purple star on his.

Frustrated and wishing he were here to tell me what the fuck to do about my new friend, I rubbed at my arm through my sleeve. “Come on, doggo,” I said to the Xolo shifter curled up beside me. “Let’s go home.”

My canine companion stood up and shook himself, then hop-stepped out of his fluffy dog bed and looked up at me expectantly. I grabbed my bag, then the bed, and led the dog—who had to suffer through the unnecessary indignity of a collar and leash so that nobody realized he wasn’t an actual dog—out the door.

As soon as we got back to my apartment, I dropped the dog bed in the main room, then put two frozen pizzas in the oven and picked up my phone.

It rang twice as I flopped onto my beaten-up old couch. It was brown plaid and hideous, but it had been pretty cheap and it was fuckingcomfortable, which is all I really cared about. The dog looked up and whined when I landed, but I ignored him because Elliot answered the phone.

“Heya, Val.” He sounded mildly surprised, but pleased. Elliot is one of the few people besides my immediate family who is allowed to use my actual name.

“El. I got a problem.”

“Hit me.”

“Shifter. Xolo… itz…”

“Xoloitzcuintli?”

I frowned. “How the fuck come everyone but me knows what this is?” I demanded.

Elliot laughed. “It’s a First Nations thing,” he said.

“Bullshit. You’re fucking Ho Chunk and Mameceqtaw, man, not Aztec.”

“We are all the people of the Great Spirit.”

“Last I checked,yourpeople didn’t build pyramids and rip the still-beating hearts out of ritual sacrifices in the name of gods that no living person can pronounce, El.”

“Hm. You may have a point, although I think people who aren’t you can actually say Quetzalcoatl.”

I grunted, knowing he was only doing it to irritate me.

“Okay, fine,” he allowed. “But I still make it a point to learn about the other oppressed peoples who have fallen victim to the white man.”

I snorted. This was an old thing between us. Because Elliot loves me even though you really can’t get whiter than I am. Either ethnically or literally. “Great, asshole. But my problem is that my new friend isn’t on a database. Is there—”

“Are you seriously about to ask me if there’s some secret trans-continental First Nations database of missing persons?”

“No, I wasn’t, although if thereissuch a thing, I would be very much interested in hearing about it.”

Elliot sighed. “Val, you know as well as I do that indigenous people disappear at a much higher rate than the rest of the population. And nobody ever finds us when we do.”

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