Smoke & Mirrors

  contract was void, he had no reason to tell his employer anything. Wolf didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who gave intel out for free, especially if they fucked with him. It would explain why no one’s tried to kill us.”

  “Yet,” Sloane said with a sigh. “So what’s our next move?”

  Dex thought about everything he’d learned so far. Too many connecting factors to ignore.

  “Maybe my mom’s file and these deaths are connected after all. If these couples were murdered, it could be because of whatever my mom was collecting evidence on. The deaths started around the same time.”

  Sloane rubbed his hands over his face. He kept his voice low. “Okay, let’s say you’re right. Why are they after the file now, after all this time? Not having it hasn’t stopped them from killing these couples.”

  “True. But remember these are just couples who went to the hospital. What if the file contains more names?” It suddenly struck him. “Shit. The list. The one Shultzon mentioned. It lists all the First Gens from the First Gen Research Facility, the ones with anomalies. I bet if we ran those names through Themis, not only will we get hits for Therians who marked their Human mates and are now dead, but we’ll get hits on other Therians with Human mates, ones who may have possibly bonded and not visited a hospital or doctor.”

  Sloane’s expression grew anxious. “What if we’re wrong about them being killed? What if these anomalies we carry in our blood makes us kill our mates? What if we somehow fuck up our mates and then go feral and kill them?”

  Dex cupped Sloane’s face. “Stop. That’s not what’s happening here, okay? There has to be more to it. Without that file, we got nothing but theories.” He released Sloane and ran a hand through his hair. Thinking. “My mom was smart. She knew the danger she was facing by collecting that information. She would have made sure the file and the list were secure. Who knows how many agencies were after that information, yet everyone came up empty, even my dad. You heard him. Before the funeral, my parents’ house and his were broken into and ransacked. I bet whoever was after the information then is after it now, and for some reason, they believe I have it.”

  “What about TIN?” Sloane ran his fingers through Dex’s hair, soothing. It felt so damned good.

  “You mean our absentee fairy god-Therians?” Dex let out an indelicate snort. “What about them?”

  “You know they’re hiding something from us.”

  Dex closed his eyes, giving himself over to Sloane’s sweet ministrations. “They’re not hiding something, Sloane. They’re hiding everything. Sparks knows a hell of a lot more than she’s letting on. I mean, I know they need to live up to that whole ‘we don’t exist’ image, but we know they exist. We’re the ones in the middle of this. The least they can do is answer our questions.”

  “So why are we still listening to her?”

  Dex opened his eyes and met Sloane’s. His partner’s amber eyes burned with anger. Sloane wasn’t afraid to let his feelings on TIN be known.

  “Because we need her. We need TIN. Let’s face it. They may be a bunch of assholes, but they have resources we don’t.”

  Sloane scoffed at that. “Yeah, because they’ve been so forthcoming and willing.” He ran a thumb over Dex’s cheek, his anger melting into heartache. “TIN let you get kidnapped, Dex. They let Wolf into our home. Why didn’t they use those resources then? Why didn’t they stop Wolf? Even if the guy was the best operative TIN ever had, are you telling me they couldn’t have stopped him if they wanted to?”

  “You think they’ve been working their own angle?”

  “You don’t?”

  Dex sighed. “You’re right.” They’d seen TIN’s operatives at work. Hell, they’d been trained by TIN. It was because of that training that Dex had been able to defend himself against Wolf.

  “So what then?”

  Dex lay back down, and Sloane followed him. They huddled close together. “I think we need to see this through.”

  Sloane grimaced. “That’s what Sparks said.”

  “I can only assume she said it for a reason. Neither of us trusts TIN, but there’s a reason they’re letting this play out. Despite showing up when it’s convenient for them, they’re there. They showed up when I had my seizure. Whatever’s going on is as important to them as it is to us, so I think for now, we should play along.”

  Sloane let out a heavy sigh. He stroked Dex’s arm, and nodded. “Okay. We’ll play their game. For now.”

  Despite his worries, Dex was happy. Right now at this moment, in Sloane’s arms, everything was perfect. “This weekend, I’m gonna get Dad, Ash, and Cael down here to help us go through the boxes in the basement.”

  Sloane’s eyebrows shot up. “The basement?”

  “I haven’t gone through that stuff since I moved it all out of Tony’s house when I started college. Some of it I haven’t seen since I was a kid. Who knows what’s in there. Anyway—” Dex kissed Sloane’s jaw and closed his eyes. “—it’s just a few boxes.”

  IT WASN’T just a few boxes.

  “I may have underestimated the number of boxes down here.” Dex cringed at the dozens upon dozens of cardboard boxes in various sizes stacked from the carpeted floor to the ceiling. They were in pristine condition, with all the stacks up on plinths in case a pipe burst. He kept the temperature controlled and the basement aired out to keep the boxes from growing mildew. He also came down every week and dusted. Inside these boxes was his childhood, both with his biological and adopted family.

  “Holy shit.” Ash gaped at the sea of boxes. “You’re a pack rat!”

  Dex wrinkled his nose. “Hey, this isn’t all mine. Some of it’s Sloane’s.”

  Sloane very smartly covered his laugh with a cough. Most likely because Dex was well aware that Sloane had a total of three boxes that were stacked neatly in one corner.

  “This is going to take days to go through,” Ash said as he walked through the maze of boxes. “Are they in any kind of order?”

  “Um, no,” Dex admitted.

  “What the hell? You’re always so freaking anal about organization. How does sorting this shit out not make sense? You—”

  Cael elbowed Ash in the ribs. Hard.

  “Ow, what?” Ash murmured, rubbing his side.

  Dex shrugged as he turned away. “Most of this stuff is from my childhood. Some stuff belonged to my parents. I haven’t opened these boxes since they were packed years ago.”

  “Oh.” Ash cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

  Dex took a deep breath as he turned back to the others. “Can you guys, um, be careful with this stuff?”

  They all nodded, and Dex thanked them. Sloane pulled him to one side, turning him away from the others. This was harder than he’d thought it would be, and they hadn’t even started.

  “You don’t have to,” Sloane said quietly, holding him close. “We can do this.”

  Dex took another deep, steady breath and let it out slowly through his mouth. “No, I need to. It’s time. Besides, it’s all my stuff, so I’m the most familiar with it.”

  “Okay, but if at any point you want to stop or it gets to be too much, you just tell me, yeah?”

  Dex nodded. “Thanks.”

  “So how do we want to do this?” Tony asked. He turned to Ash. “This is your department.”

  Ash walked around the room, assessing the boxes, their sizes, positions. He started moving some stuff around, arranging boxes by size, moving them closer to the stairs and to one side so the majority of the stuff was now at the front.

  “We can take boxes from this side here, check them in our own section, and when we’re done inspecting, seal them up again, label them, and move them to the far end of the basement.”

  Dex agreed. “Sounds like a plan.” He handed out the permanent markers he’d brought down, along with tape and box cutters. Taking a deep, steady breath, Dex grabbed the first box. It was big but barely weighed anything. Man, he wished he’d at least stuck a year on these things. Then agai
n, he kept telling himself he’d get around to it and never did. Everyone else grabbed their boxes and snagged themselves a spot to get comfortable in.

  Some of these boxes had been packed by Tony back when Dex’s parents had died. Dex had no idea what he’d find. Putting on his big-boy pants, he cut open the first box and grinned. He discreetly looked up, waited until Cael had his back turned, and then swiped the furry blue stuffed toy from the box. Sloane arched an eyebrow at him but didn’t say a word as Dex snuck up on Cael.

  “Grr!”

  Dex plopped the toy on Cael’s shoulder. His brother took one look at it and squealed, jumping so high he almost landed in Ash’s lap. Dex doubled over laughing.

  “You shit!” Cael growled, glaring at him.

  Dex could barely breathe. The indignant expression on Cael’s flushed face was priceless.

  “What the hell is that?” Ash asked, eyeing the blue stuffed toy in Dex’s hands.

  “My Pet Monster,” Dex replied when he was able to form coherent sentences again. “Dad got it for Cael one year, for Christmas, I think it was. Cael took one look at it and burst into tears. You should have seen him. He was so adorable, with his little chubby cheeks, shrieking his little face off.” Dex went to pinch Cael’s cheek and had his hand slapped away, making Dex laugh. “When he was in his cheetah Therian form, he’d chirp furiously, batting at it with his claws. He hated this thing.”

  “Still do,” Cael muttered. He turned to his dad, looking unimpressed. “I mean, really, Dad. That thing is—to quote Dex—fugly.”

  Tony shrugged. “It’s a monster. It’s supposed to be. Besides, the lady at the toy store said it was very popular among boys your age.”

  “Well, not all boys like monsters,” Cael muttered as he went about opening his box.

  Dex chuckled and returned to his own box. It was filled with stuffed animals. “True.” He reached into the box and pulled out another stuffed toy, this one cute and cuddly. “Remember this guy?”

  Ash eyed the stuffed toy warily. What exactly was he expecting the fluffy doll to do?

  “Is that a lion or a bee?”

  Dex wriggled his eyebrows. “Both.”

  “So… how would that work?” Ash cocked his head to one side. “That’s not physically possible. Besides, bees hatch from eggs. Are they suggesting a lion impregnated a bee? Or vice versa?”

  Dex stared at him. “Are you really trying to biologically explain a child’s toy? From the eighties. We’re talking about an era with babies born in cabbage patches and where people thought wearing spandex out in public was a good idea.”

  “I’m just saying, it’s not possible.”

  “Neither is a cross-dressing rabbit, but you don’t see me trying to debunk a legend.”

  “First of all, that bee-lion—”

  “Bumblelion,” Dex corrected, trying his hardest to keep a straight face.

  “What?”

  “His name’s Bumblelion.”

  “Of course it is, and you’re a dweeb. As I was saying, first of all, Lionbee is not a legend. Nowhere near in the same league as Bugs Bunny.”

  Ash watched cartoons? Who’da thunk it?

  “Second of all, if you’re going to create a children’s toy, then you should be prepared to answer questions regarding its origins.”

  Dex shook his head. “You have no imagination.”

  “Screw you, Justice. I have plenty of imagination. Now this is a toy.”

  Ash reached into his box, pulled something out, and threw it at Dex. The pink-and-blue Nerf football hit Dex in the head and bounced off.

  “A toy that causes physical pain. How could it not be your favorite?”

  Sloane, Tony, and Cael laughed while Dex and Ash continued to debate the plausibility of several cartoon characters. Five hours and twenty-nine boxes later, all they’d come across were toys, books, games, videos, and trading cards. Everything was in top condition but well loved. His more collectable stuff, sealed in its original packing, was stored upstairs in his attic. Maybe now that Sloane had moved in they could fix it up. Dex had always wanted to do more with that space than stuff it with more boxes.

  “Hey, check this out. I haven’t seen one of these in years.”

  Sloane pulled out an old-school tape recorder. It was big and clunky, but Dex remembered when it had been state-of-the-art.

  “My dad loved that thing. He was a total tech geek. He was always bringing back the latest gadget. He’d tinker with it, take it apart.” Dex laughed at one particular memory. “One day my dad brought home this super fancy answering machine that cost God knows how much at the time, only to take it apart. Then, when he tried to put it back together, it caught fire. Don’t know how he did it. It used to drive my mom nuts.”

  Ash snickered. “Guess we know where you get your talent for causing property damage.”

  “Don’t get me started,” Tony muttered before his lips curled into a smile. “Chief used to say a prayer every time he sent us out on a call. Chances were if Daley was assigned a case, something was gonna blow up.”

  Tony laughed, a warm, rich sound that sadly Dex didn’t hear often enough.

  “We were on stakeout for this homicide case we were working, and John got hungry. So he popped into this convenience store down the block to grab some chips and a sandwich. I don’t know what he did, but one minute he’s inside, next thing I know he’s running straight for me like the devil himself was chasing him, yelling ‘Start the car! Start the car!’ And I have no idea what’s going on, but I start the car. Next thing I see is some big guy chasing John down the sidewalk waving a hefty slab of salami. John jumps in the car as I take off. We’re burning rubber, and I ask him what the hell happened. Turns out they had one of those old-school food automat things where you pop in a dollar’s worth of quarters and it gives you a sandwich.

  “So John decides he wants some pie too, and he puts in the money, and that thing just blows a fuse or who the hell knows. The doors fling open, trays go flying, food’s hitting the ceiling, the walls, the floor. It’s like the thing short-circuited or something, and the more John tried to fix it, the worse it got. When the owner came around and saw the thing going berserk and John trying to stop the food from catapulting out, he lost it.”

  Dex was laughing so hard he could barely breathe. He could picture his dad trying to stuff all the food back where it was supposed to go, panicking, and then taking off, waving his arms as he yelled at his partner to start the car.

  “So what happened next?” Cael asked with a giggle, Ash and Sloane still laughing.

  “I stop the car about five blocks down, ready to punch him in the face, and he holds up a bag of my favorite chips and a can of Diet Coke, and he says, ‘Shit, I forgot to get you a napkin.’ I took one look at him, whip cream in his hair, a slice of swiss cheese hanging off his shoulder, and various other foods covering his person, and I all but peed myself laughing.”

  Dex wiped the tears from his eyes, hoping no one would notice that they were as much for how much he missed his dad as they were for the hilarity of the story. He appreciated how Sloane, Ash, and Cael asked Tony to tell them more about his and John’s shenanigans on the job. Every so often Sloane would meet Dex’s gaze and smile warmly at him, letting him know he was there for him if Dex needed anything.

  An hour later they took a break for some pizza and listened to Tony tell a few more stories of Dex’s parents before they got back to work. They’d checked roughly half the boxes in the basement.

  “Aw, looks like there was a mini tech geek too,” Sloane said, grinning broadly as he held up a red Walkman with cartoon stickers on it and matching red headphones. Tears welled in Dex’s eyes, but he kept them at bay.

  Tony chuckled. “You used to love that thing. Never went anywhere without it.”

  “My parents bought it for me on my second birthday.” Dex gently took the cherry-red Walkman. It looked just as it did when he was five years old. The last time he’d played it. He hadn’t wanted to l
isten to it much after his parents died. “You never let me give up the music,” Dex said softly, turning to Tony. “I was so lost and angry. I didn’t want to do anything that reminded me of them, and music was such a huge part of their lives, of our lives. I didn’t even want to look at it.”

  “But Dad would play music in the house and take us to the movies,” Cael said, wrapping his arms around Dex and squeezing him tight. “He didn’t want you to lose that part of them. It meant too much.”

  Dex was too choked up to reply. He didn’t know what he would have done without Tony. His adoptive dad had seen him through the dark times. He’d only been a small boy, but he’d begun to retreat into himself, shy away from everything and everyone. Tony had been there with him every step of the way to make sure he didn’t lose himself or the memories of the parents who’d loved him.

  “What’s this?” Sloane asked, holding up what looked like a shoebox.

  Dex walked over to Sloane and smiled. “Shit, I forgot about those.” He gently took the shoebox covered in stickers and childhood scribbles.

  “Why is that lion wearing a lab coat?” Sloane asked with a chuckle.

  Dex arched an eyebrow at him. “That’s not a lion. It’s Doc Brown.”

  “Oh. Well, it looks like he has a mane.”

  “Honestly.” Dex shook his head in shame at Sloane. He looked around the room. “Where’s that tape recorder you found?”

  Ash glanced in the boxes around them before reaching into one. “Here it is.” He passed it to Cael, who turned it over to Dex.

  Propping the player on one of the sealed boxes, Dex pulled the shoelaces securing the box loose and opened it, a big dopey smile on his face. “They’re mixtapes. My dad used to make them for me.” He looked through the tapes of classic rock and old eighties tunes. Man, he’d played the hell out of these things. Every day he’d listen to them. His mom set rules, allowing him to listen for a certain amount of time. Otherwise he would have just sat there in his own little world of pop tunes playing pretend as the world went on around him.

  “My birthday mixes are all here.” He went through the tapes, each one written in his dad’s barely legible handwriting. He’d drawn little stickmen with guitars or mullets on some of them. He came across a few he couldn’t remember. “Hm. That’s weird.”

  “What is it?” Tony asked, walking over to him.

  Dex showed him the cassette. “Bee Gees. ‘Smoke and Mirrors.’”

  “Why is that weird?” Ash asked.

  “I don’t remember this tape.”

  “That’s not hard to believe,” Sloane said gently. “You were five, Dex.”

  Dex held up one of the black cassette tapes labeled “Dex’s Birthday 1984.”

  “There are forty-eight songs on this tape, and I can list them all. I can tell you every song that’s on each one of these tapes, except for these five here.” He slotted the cassette back into the shoebox before holding up the first in the lineup. The Bee Gees tape. “I have no idea what songs are on here, or the other four. Not to mention all these other tapes are sixty minutes in length while these five are one hundred eighty.”

  “Let me see that for a second.” Tony took the tape from him and inspected it. “This is Gina’s handwriting.”

  Dex stared at him. “Mom?”

  Cael studied one of the unfamiliar tapes. The other four also had his mom’s handwriting.

  “Why do you sound so surprised?”

  “Dad was the one who made the mixtapes. Mom did video. She wasn’t a fan of the recorder.” He pressed the Eject button, then slipped the tape into the recorder before pressing Play. It was weird of his mom to have made a tape. Had she just forgotten to give it to him? The gentle melody and soft lyrics of the Bee Gees song hit a little too close to home, and Dex couldn’t help the tears that filled his eyes. He smiled and went to turn it off when the song faded and a voice he never thought he’d hear again had his heart in his throat.

  “Hi, baby. It’s Mom.”

  “Oh God.” Dex covered his mouth with his hand as the tears rolled free. His hands shook, and he closed his eyes as he felt Tony’s hand on his shoulder. Her voice was just as he remembered. Over the years it had started to fade, no matter how hard he’d clung to his memories of her, of the times she’d read to him, of her beautiful voice as she sang to him, little by little they became harder to recall. It was so good to hear her voice.

  “I know how much you love your dad’s mixtapes, so I’m confident you’ll hang on to them. You’re such a good boy, Dex. I know you’ve grown up to be a good man, and handsome, just like your daddy. I’m sorry we couldn’t be there to see it. There’s so much I want to say to you. The truth might be hard to hear, but no matter what happens, what you feel, please never doubt that your father and I loved you with all our hearts. What we did—”

  Dex threw a hand out and stopped the tape. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “You don’t have to,” Tony offered gently. Dex turned to him and tried his hardest to keep his emotions under control, but it was so damned hard. It hurt. It hurt so fucking much. Dex caught movement from the corner of his eye and was aware of Sloane ushering everyone upstairs. Dex was grateful. He was having trouble breathing as it was.

  “She knew. When she made this, she knew something was going to happen. That means she had to have recorded this before that night at the movies. She knew she