Laurell Hamilton - Never After

I stared at the sandwiches lining the à la carte buffet, finally choosing a tuna on sourdough. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast except for a few cookies, and even though I didn’t have any desire for food, I knew it would help me cope with what was going on. I added a Jell-O salad cup to my tray and watched as Camille piled hers high with a meatball sub, a Caesar salad, and a couple of brownies.

“If I tried to eat that much food at once, I’d throw up.” I handed the teller a ten and she gave me back my change.

“All Otherworld Fae have high metabolism,” Camille said. “We’d starve if we ate like the women over Earthside. I think something happened during the Great Divide to our people. Even though my sisters and I are half human, we take after our father in this regard. The downside is, our food bills are a bitch.”

She flashed me a smile and I actually laughed. The release felt good, though the minute I heard myself, I sobered again.

Camille steered me to a table by the wall, out of earshot of the main room. As we settled in to our food, eating silently, the pale green of the hospital walls began to get to me. It was depressing and drab. No wonder people who were stuck in here didn’t get well very fast. It should be a warm beige, or a cheery yellow—something to perk up the spirits and infuse energy into the sterile hallways and rooms.

We were just finishing when Chase came in. He hurried up to our table after stopping to get a cup of coffee and a Danish. As Camille pulled the chair out for him, he slid into it and wearily began stirring sugar into his milk laden coffee.

Camille leaned forward. “Did you find out anything?”

Chase frowned, looking at me. “Yeah, a little. But I need to ask you, Siobhan, what’s going on? Apparently Mitch was holding on to consciousness when he was brought in, enough to tell the doctor that he had to get home to you—that you were in danger. Care to elaborate on any secrets I should know?”

I bit my lip, not wanting to bring the cops in on this, but it appeared there was no other choice. With Camille’s help, I ran down everything that had happened, and why. When we finished, Chase was shaking his head.

“So this Terrance guy, he raped you and then your parents were going to marry you off to him?”

I nodded. “It’s the way, in some of the Pods. While rules are different among the varying Were tribes, the selkies are old—very old—and don’t adapt well to social change. You say that Mitch told the healer I’m in danger?”

Chase nodded. “He was raving, so the doc wasn’t sure at first what he was talking about but apparently he kept insisting that you and the baby were in danger. The doctor asked him who did this and all he would say was one of the web fingered caught him. Any clue as to what that means?”

I caught my breath. “ Web-fingered? Are you sure?”

“Yeah. The doctor said it caught him off guard. He has no idea what Mitch was talking about.”

I pressed my fingers to my temple, trying to forestall the looming headache. “Oh Great Mother, I need some tea. Camille?”

She nodded and slipped out of her seat. As she headed over to the beverage counter, I said, “ Web-fingered is another name for the Finfolk. Camille and her sisters know them as the Meré. They’re evil. We were thinking Terrance might have some Finfolk blood in him. It sounds as though Mitch recognized it.”

“Then it’s a good bet he’s the one we’re looking for. He really messed up your fiancé, Siobhan; I’ll say that for him. And by FBH laws, I can run him down and catch him, but I have to warn you—according to treaties, the Supe Community can demand we extradite him for trial, since he attacked a Supe rather than a human. But we can at least try to catch him.”

Chase flipped open his notepad. “Will you work with a police sketch artist to create a drawing of him?”

I stared at him. Extradition? I’d been afraid of that, and now the last thing I wanted was for Chase to find Terrance. If the Puget Sound Harbor Seal Pod demanded extradition, there was a chance that Terrance would be set free on the grounds that he had prior claim to me. And a chance —even if it turned out to be slim—was too dangerous. No, it was best if Camille and her sisters could help me find him before the FH-CSI. That way, there would be an end to this. But I didn’t want to alienate the detective, so I murmured my cooperation.

When Camille returned with my tea, we promised we’d head over to the FH-CSI headquarters after we checked in on Mitch again, and after I called his parents. Chase slipped out of his seat and left, giving me a gentle nod as he went. I stirred my raspberry tea, letting the scent waft up to comfort me, wondering how the hell it had come to this, and how come now , when I had so much to lose?

Sharah verified what the doctor had told us about Mitch’s injuries, adding that his coma was his body’s way of shutting down to begin the healing process. She didn’t sense any loss of function in his brain, and his silver cord was intact so he was fine—just sleeping so deeply we couldn’t reach him at this point.

I called Mitch’s parents and the Pod elders, and gave them the news, leaving my cell number as Camille and I headed out to talk to the sketch artist. It seemed odd, pretending to care when I fully intended to give the man a vague description. I debated whether to tell Camille that I planned to throw the sketch, but she might feel obligated to tell Chase, and he’d get angry and cause a big scene I really didn’t need right now.

Instead, I asked her to call Delilah while I went in and talked to the artist. “Can you find out what Delilah and Tim have discovered about my hacked computer?”

“You’re sure you don’t need me for moral support?” She gazed at me and I had the uncomfortable feeling she could see through me like Saran Wrap.

“No… no, I’m fine. Thanks, though, for everything.”

I went through the motions, giving vague answers that sounded legitimate enough to fly under the radar, and in the end, the generic-looking face on the page could have been any number of men walking through the mall. I forced a worried smile and said, “That’s him, all right.” The sketch artist was happy, Chase was happy, and I was relieved.

Camille was waiting for me when I came out. We headed out to her Lexus. She motioned for me to be quiet until we were safely inside the car, then said, “You were hacked, all right. Delilah thinks somebody’s combed through all your files. Tim said there’s a doozy of a Trojan that snuck through. You must have clicked on an attachment in some e-mail you got, and it executed a program that created a direct path into your files. There’s a good chance that someone—and I think we can bet on it being Terrance—managed to download a copy of every single document and image you have on your computer.”

“Then everything there… Terrance has snooped through everything we have on there? My journal, our pictures…” My stomach lurched and I couldn’t tell if it was the baby, the food, or my own feeling of being violated yet again. Mitch and I had some compromising shots of us tucked away, taken with our digital camera so we wouldn’t run the risk of someone else seeing them.

“Damn it, Terry’s done it again. He’s invaded my life and broken my boundaries.” The thought that Terrance had seen those pictures, that he had all my ID information, that he had access to our financial information and everything else that Mitch and I stored on our computer, made me want to scream.

Camille grimaced. “Babe, I hate to say this, but he probably has your passwords, too—apparently there was keystroke logger spyware bundled into the package, and so everything you typed onto the computer was logged onto a host machine. The upside is that Tim thinks he might be able to trace it, because that kind of spyware leaves a footprint. There should be a trail leading back to the IP address that the information was sent to.”