She managed to make her voice sound uncertain, as if it took bravery for her to speak up. She was good at pretending—like Edward good. Again I realized that maybe I didn’t know her at all. It was interesting that Olaf hadn’t been able to tell what animal she was by smell . . . or had he met everyone else before? I couldn’t remember if he’d met Milligan and Custer or not.
“Come out where I can see you, little cat,” Olaf said, his voice already full of what passed for teasing for him. It always came out as threatening to me.
“Are you saying you’re not glad to see me, Otto?” Nicky said from his bit of wall near but not too near Olaf. He even smiled when he spoke. They’d run in the same mercenary—sorry, private contractor—circles at one point in their careers. They’d both had a certain reputation among their fellow contractors and had come to admire each other’s work, though they’d never actually worked together. And just like that, Nicky took Olaf’s attention off Pierette and put it squarely on himself.
Olaf unfolded from the chair and suddenly seemed even taller than normal, as if he slumped just a little bit most of the time. I don’t think that was it, but he’d done something to make it very clear that he literally towered over everyone in the room. Nicky pushed away from the wall, still smiling. Milligan and Custer stood straighter; they’d already spaced themselves to have room to fight before they’d chosen their bits of wall. Ethan stayed by me like a good bodyguard; he looked fragile beside Olaf, but then he looked fragile beside Nicky, too. I guess everyone did, even the SEALS.
“Everybody, ease down,” Leduc said, which proved that he was better at his job and more observant than this case was showing. Again, I got the idea I wasn’t catching him at his best, whether it was years too late or just emotional issues.
“We’re easy,” Nicky said, grinning happily, as if saying, Let’s have fun, or let’s get violent, or let’s do both. He’d had that grin from the first moment I met him.
Newman said, “Anita is going to go question the friends that went with Jocelyn to the club the night of the murder.”
“I will go with her,” Olaf said.
“And I’ll tag along,” Nicky said.
“You have some kind of badge?” Leduc asked.
Nicky smiled at him, giving full-face attention. Leduc’s eyes did the slide thing as if he was trying to decide where to look on Nicky’s face, because like most polite people, he didn’t want to stare at the scars. Thanks to Nicky, I’d discovered that I always stared at just one eye on anyone I was giving good eye contact to, and it was always the right eye. I’d tried to change that for Nicky, but he’d thought I was being weird like everyone else. In the end I’d explained my discovery, and we’d both decided that I’d stare at his face the way I did at everyone else’s even if that made it look like I was staring at his scars.
“As members of the preternatural branch, we have the ability to deputize people if we think they’d be an asset on a case,” Newman said.
“It’s your case, not hers, and I know you didn’t deputize someone you don’t know.”
“I met him in the field on the same case where I met Forrester, Jeffries, and Blake.”
Leduc looked Nicky up and down like he was taking measurements. “So, what’s your specialty that makes Blake want you on her cases so often?”
“Tough motherfucker,” Nicky said, face sobering so that he said it straight-faced and serious.
Custer laughed from the wall.
“Are you making a joke?” Leduc asked.
“No,” Nicky said.
I smiled; I couldn’t help it.
“Nicky is a good man in a fight,” Edward said, finally coming forward instead of just watching us.
“Are we amusing you, Blake?” Leduc asked.
“No, sir.”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“Nicky has that effect on me sometimes.”
“He’s part of her poly group,” Olaf said, and that surprised me more than almost anything he could have done. I hadn’t expected him to spill my secrets to the cops, if I couldn’t spill his. I mean, the kiss had given things away, but him using the poly vocabulary probably wouldn’t help with Leduc.
I shot Olaf an unfriendly look.
“What’s a poly group?” Leduc asked.
Ethan answered, “Poly group and polycule are terms for the permanent members of a nonmonogamous group, a coupleness formed of more than two people.”
We