It was a tiny, sorry, mangled thing, the body on the beach. All its mush and slop was barely contained by its bruised, decaying casing. Like the remnants of a child’s meal splotted onto the floor and forgotten. But dull teeth and hooves and strangling tendrils of manes will do that.
Blue and bloated. Cold and wobbling, like jelly. One solitary finger stood true and pointing. A warning. Mocking.
Half-submerged in the water, Cuan could hear their braying laughter. Waves licked up his ears like sweet muzzles bidding farewell. It was always an ache to leave, no matter how many times he promised himself he wasn’t ever going back.
But the little one wasn’t going anywhere. Cuan could wait one moment more. Where else would he find such stillness?
“An odd place for a moonlit swim.”
Cuan’s eyes, as dark and glassy as the night’s water, snapped open to see a figure on the bank. It wasn’t big or imposing. It leaned slightly to the right and Cuan could make out the thin spindle of a cane. And even as cloudy as it was tonight, spots of white jade glittered like starlight on the surf. In the daylight, the copper blazed and you only caught glimpses of the green jade stone buried under the handle. It was beautiful, almost as though it was more for show than function. But it did have a job to do; Cuan knew that too well.
“We have a case.”
Cuan swam a little closer to shore. Just enough that the silt scratched against his thick belly. His roots fell heavy against his scalp and he inhaled his first lungful of air in days. He gazed darkly at the body in the brush.
“We have one here.”
Xiezhi met his gaze, steady and focused. Cuan had always liked that about him. Most still flinched even whilst sneering at him - those few that made it passed his chin, that was. Fewer still managed to stare at him in a way that was so condescending, unamused, and commanding.
“Get out,” Xiezhi ordered. “I’ll be in the car.” He dropped a bag to the rocky ground and stalked off.
Muted neighs and nickers bid him goodbye as Cuan finally hauled himself out of the water. Zhi had been strapped into his heavy coat, thick woollen hat and gloves of a sturdy hide Cuan had never been able to identify. But to Cuan the surface air felt warm. It tingled against his skin where the warmth valiantly tried to penetrate the bone-deep chill of the water. He gathered up an armful of mane; they were heavy weeds that pulled and tugged without that bottomless support of currents. With a practiced hand, he used a handful of strands to tie it up, already dreading untangling it once the seaweed dried and gave way for his softer, on-land hair.
Small mercies that the clothes Zhi had brought him were soft and light. A simple cotton t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. No socks. No point. His nails were too hard and would cut through them until he acclimatised again. The trainers had soft, squidgy bottoms and leather tops. No coat, thank gods. Zhi had probably stashed one in the car for him for later, but fuck he was so warm.
Cuan bundled up the bag and looked down at the boy on the brush. Had it been a boy? His stomach rumbled. Hunger? Probably. Vomit? Definitely. A hot rush of bile flooded his throat and saliva pooled in his mouth and Cuan was hunched over and lurching a stomach full of silty water, half-digested fish and blue specks of blood over the boy. One last insult.
With palms full of sand and scratchy green growth, Cuan scrubbed the salt from his face best he could and left the soft sounds of the shoreline behind.
Zhi at least had the foresight to keep the headlights off, but inside the car he had no such mercy. Cuan tucked himself into the passenger seat and the small cabin was filled with chomping and crunching as Zhi helped himself to gobfulls of treats from a brown paper bag he rustled with gusto. No doubt the gloves he’d left on - fully aware that Cuan would roll the window down as far is it could go - made it harder to grasp the treats tucked away inside. As he sucked noisily at the gloved fingers, Cuan forgot to be grateful. But Zhi only smiled brightly and popped the bag in the centre console.
The car purred to life and Zhi pulled them away from that backwater place. Now that the salt was drying and the wind was whipping his face, Cuan’s eyes felt heavy and dry and he let them fall closed despite the harsh scrape of plastic against his temple where he rested his head.
But Zhi didn’t think much of his rest.
“Who was he?”
He. So it had been a boy. Cuan shrugged, as gaelic as he could make it. “Just some child. Not much left for an ID.”
Zhi crunched and swallowed on the treats he kept plucking from the bag. “No,” he agreed. “Will he be missed, do you think?”
Cuan wasn’t sure how Zhi expected him to answer that. Humans were odd things. They were awfully good at procreating, that was for sure. But whilst some cossetted their young like precious pearls, others cast them aside, neglected them, beat them like flies on the rump.
But, on the other hand, the boy had made himself such easy prey. That wide black expanse was notorious for the Kelpies who lived there. Younglings were warned away from it lest they get snatched up and dragged to it depths. So, either the boy had been allowed to wander near such dangerous straits, or there hadn’t been anyone to warn him to stay away in the first place.
Then, perhaps it wasn’t such a hard question. “No. He won’t.”
Zhi hummed, as happy as the old man got. As terrible as some humans could be to babes, they were quick to anger should anyone else be the one to harm them. The Tusail - the original inhabitants of their world like the Kelpies and the draconids and the nymphs and all other manner of beings - were protective, but none of them had reached the levels of violence humans could stoop to once provoked.
Though perhaps that could be attributed to their youth. The Tusail had lived through centuries of loss and murder and starvation to harden them. They’d learned those lessons in the Early World - a world where humans were still an anomaly.
Cuan’s belly squealed into the silence and Zhi reached for the paper bag and brandished it at him.
“Xishuai?”
Cuan grumbled and pushed his head against the frame. A few inches more and he’d be hanging his head out of the window like an idiot dog. But it did chase off the musty smell of those sticky crickets Zhi loved so much.
“Not unless you want your car showered in them.”
Zhi scoffed and wiggled the bag. “You know you need to eat afterwards.”
“And I will. When my stomach stops fucking squirming.”
It was dark outside. No lamp posts for miles. The road was lit by car headlights. Zhi’s face was illuminated by the reds and oranges of the dashboard and his dark eyes were lively. He may be old, but something burned beneath that benign surface, kept tight and wrapped and under constant regulation. To that at least, Cuan could relate.
“Aren’t you going to ask me?”
“Hm?” Zhi didn’t spare him a glance, like he couldn’t be less interest in what Cuan meant, and that Cuan wasn’t imagining stretching his hands across the tiny expanse between them, wrapping them around Zhi’s neck, and bashing his head off the steering wheel. Just once. Just a bit. But he pressed them against his thighs instead, and was idly pleased that he couldn’t see his veins through the skin anymore.
Cuan grit his teeth. “You always ask.”
“And you always tell me to go fuck myself.”
Cuan sighed deep and irritated and heavy through his nose.
“Last time in fact,” said Zhi, “you said, me and my shrivelled old sack could throw ourselves in the river and drown, if we wanted to know what happened so badly. And that you’d drag my bloated corpse out yourself and parade it around the streets.”
That…had been exactly what happened, in fact.
“You planned a puppet show. In depth. I was impressed.”
“Last time didn’t go well.”
Zhi gave a breathy cackle. “I’d have thought it went quite well this time with that humour. If it wasn’t for the -” Zhi grimaced and shrugged.
The body. Boy. If it wasn’t for the boy.
“It was a gift - he. He was a gift.”
“Lovely. For who?”
Something like shame roiled in his belly. Some of it might have been pleasure and somehow that was worse. “Me. They wanted me to stay, this time.”
The old man exploded with energy. “Ha! Hey!” He thumped Cuan’s leg with strength no one ever suspected him of having. Cuan knew there’d be bruises. “That’s great! After last time I thought they’d laugh you off the shore.”
Cuan shifted his leg away from the old man’s enthusiasm. “What are you doing, sounding so happy about it? They should’ve. I wish they had. I hate it, Zhi. Every time you make me go back—”
“Ask you,” Zhi interrupted firmly. “I ask you to go back. I never make you. What? You think I'd stand a chance of making you do anything? Like you couldn’t throw me over a wall whenever you feel like it?”
Cuan glowered into the footwell. “You’re probably cursed. My…fucking, teeth would fall out and my dick shrivel off, probably.”
Zhi shook his head. “Not worth it.”
He was trying to distract him, of course. Gods forbid Cuan stopped going on these expeditions, these missions, at Zhi’s behest. Never mind they never amounted to anything. Never mind that whenever he slipped and mentioned Zhi’s name any and all progress was lost and the entire venture became a waste of time. Zhi was never going to get what he wanted out of the Kelpies of Talam. And the sooner he realised it, the sooner he could stop dangling Cuan in front of them like a particularly fat piece of bait.
“I know you don’t see it,” Zhi said, like Cuan knew he would. They had the same discussion every time he left the water. “But what your doing is…Cuan, it could change everything.”
“They’re Kelpies." Cuan bit Zhi’s rousing speech off at the but. “I don’t know what you’re expecting, but they’re Kelpies. They’re not good for much.”
“So are you.” It was said so matter of fact, yet Cuan flinched as if the words had been spat at him. “And look what I expect from you.”
To go back to that fucking water time after time on a fruitless errand.
“You’re a fool.”
“Never a truer word spoken, my friend.”
And just as he said every single time, “I’m not going back.”
Zhi petted his knee. “Well. That’s not true.”
That awful hot and snarling temper which had ebbed away under the surface, pricked at all of his edges again. Despite spending most of his life on the top, the calmness that came with being under the water never truly settled over him on the surface. But it was always worse in those first hours back on land.
Cuan had worked for Zhi for decades now, and he was the same mild mannered, insufferable shit as always, and knew just how to get under his skin, or hide, or whatever layer Cuan was wearing that day.
So Cuan denied him the fuel to do so, and fell silent as they drove.
The close rural night gave way to urban amber lights which flickered like fireflies. Space and cold air were choked by steel and stone. Cuan had lived a long life, but these rickety places on the edges of society had always pricked at his gooseflesh. He was glad to watch it flit by him as Zhi drove deeper into civilisation. It was almost soothing, taking off the worst edges of his anger, and Cuan felt his eyes closing again.
The clip and clatter of Zhi’s seatbelt snapped his eyes open. Cuan’s head hung low and his breaths were sharp. It matched the throbbing in his ribs. He hadn't noticed the pain until now, but it’s what he got for trying. And he had tried. He’d tried so hard this time. He’d refused to hunt, but he’d raced and fished and kept sentry duty. He’d even watched over the foals and sat patiently through the fussing and mockery the maithers showered him with in equal measure. He remembered a tussle - fun and playful and not in defence of his life or liberty. And it had been good.
But Zhi gave him a hard look with one hand on the door handle and Cuan turned away from him in shame. Beings were dying, Tusail and human alike, and he was sitting around feeling and ache for frolicking.
Zhi reached into his coat and plucked a rich red apple from some hidden depth. Bright and crisp and green. Fresh and sour. Saliva pooled in Cuan’s mouth and hand snapped out from protecting his middle to snatch it up.
Zhi stepped from the car and Cuan pulled himself out after him.
The air was hot and stinking. Fetid rot and sweat, which the moon had done nothing to cool. She had already bedded down and left a steel grey sky in her wake. Cuan ignored the pang in his gut. He missed her, when she was gone. But, it could also have been more bile trying to make itself known. Or that he was starving. Or both. He wrapped as much of his mouth around that succulent apple as possible and tore off a hunk of the pulpy flesh.
Zhi had brought them to the Mason’s Quarter. It was one of the few integrated cities in Talam, heralded as a centre of enlightenment and culture. The sleepy not-quite-morning was softened by the hazy glow of the streetlights, burnished copper bands and all. Cuan always felt a pitiable tug when he looked at them. They were lit by clusters of will-o’-the-wisps, creatures once charged with leading folks to their fates, their destinies and towards great adventures. Now they were scrambled together in little balls to give light to affluent streets in Talam. Captured and put to work – like many of Cuan’s nightmares of silver chains and being forced to obey a master. No, he much preferred the old flame torches that lined the common ways, or the human settlements which burned gasses, even though the smell was unbearable after a time and made him dizzy.
Cuan though he caught a wee blue face and turned his own away.
Zhi slipped through the pockets of light and into the mouth of an alleyway carved between two hulking buildings. Detectives scurried in and out. Some clutched trap boxes covered in curtains to lull the creatures inside to sleep.
“Do I need a gunshot to get you to move?” Zhi called from the alley and Cuan scrubbed apple juice off his chain and faithfully followed.
“You smell like river scum.”
Aphra wrinkled her nose and slipped her blouse over it as Cuan got closer. A strip of skin like velvet flashed below the eaves of the fabric. One of the scene technicians tripped over his own feet and dropped to his knees, inches from the body.
Zhi cursed. “Spare me from green boys who can’t walk the second they get an erection.”
Aphra sneered and glared down her sweet and slender cotton covered nose at the prostate technician. “Sorry, Zhi.”
Zhi tapped her shin with his cane. “Quiet, woman. You—" he thrust it at the technician. “Are you up to date on your nymphanoid training?”
The sorry thing stammered on the ground. Cuan’s stomach squealed ugly like a pig as he chomped down another globule of apple, core and all.
“All but the last unit, sir.”
Cuan gave the little shit points for not stammering, but his eyes never left Aphra and the tent in his coveralls was getting difficult to ignore.
Zhi thought so too, and his cane struck that soft point between hip and groin. Lovely for a bite but not for punishment. The tech tried to curl in on himself, but Zhi pushed down, relentless.
“Then you should know you’ve got no place on my crime scene. Hmm?”
The tech whimpered. Whether it was in pain at the thought of being separated from Aphra or from Zhi’s cane, he wasn’t sure. So he finished off his apple and fished another from Zhi’s pocket. The man was busy.
“No sir, it’s fine—”
It wasn’t. Wood nymphs like Aphra had a hard enough time as it was. The tides were only just changing for them, and people like Zhi did not take it well when people tried to treat them like the old ways. So, Zhi pressed harder.
“What’s your name?”
“M-Mikel, sir.”
Zhi shook his head, shifted his weight and then swung the cane like a club. Mikel’s nose burst open in a splatter of red.
“Try that again.”
Cuan didn’t like green apples as much. They weren’t as sweet and fleshy, but he scarfed it down anyway. He could still hear his stomach over the snivelling.
“Marcus! It’s Marcus!”
Aphra rested a hand carefully on Zhi’s shoulder. “Mikel was the tech I spoke to, earlier. He was nice. All trained up and everything.”
Cuan swallowed thickly. “Anyone seen him since that one turned up?” Aphra sighed and shook her head. “Hey, do you have water?”
“I think you’ve had enough of that for a while. Seriously Cuan, you’re rank. Where have you been?”
But she still tossed him a metal bottle with a screw cap and Cuan fumbled to shove the rest of the apple down his neck and gulped the water to chase it down. He screwed up his face at the metallic taste from the bottle but emptied it all the same.
“Marcus. I don’t allow liars on my task force. You’re going to get up. You’re going to go back to your precinct. And you’re going to tell your Captain that if they send me another sack of shit like you, they can solve their own crimes from now on. Okay?”
Wisely, Marcus nodded, but cast one last longing glance at Aphra whose leg twitched against Cuan’s like it wanted to swing. But then the tech grabbed his kit from the floor and limped from the scene.
Ros, who’d been buried in a pile of evidence bags when Cuan had arrived, waved him off cheerfully as he came to stand on Aphra's side and bumped her hip with his. “Who’s his captain?”
Zhi smirked. “Weaver.”
Cuan’s stomach clenched and he almost pitied that poor little pervert.
“How is it that I can smell you over a dead body?” Ros tossed Cuan another bottle of water.
“Mind your business,” Cuan grumbled and took a long draught.
Ros held up his hands. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just feed and water you like a good boy.” He tossed Cuan a bag heavy with nuts and dried fruits and he scooped out a greedy handful.
“’Ood ‘oy.”
Zhi hummed. “Could we pay attention to the eviscerated human now, yes?”
The three of them snapped to attention. Aphra took the lead.
“Thirty-one-years-old. Lou Fairway. He owns a shop a few streets away - ah ah!” She kicked Cuan in the ribs where he’d bent down, and he hissed and dropped bejewelled the hand he’d been examining.
“Don’t touch, idiot. You get so stupid when you’re just out the water. He was a silversmith. That could just be gold plated.”
The ring was a thin thing. Non-descript for the most part. The kind of ornament people wore for sentiment over statement. Cuan despised jewellery - confining, choking contraptions. But something about the engravings, the geometric cuts and the single solitary stone glittering in the dim light pulled at some ghostly tendril in the back of his mind.
“A drinker,” Ros said. “But no smell of alcohol on his breath. Father of two -"
Zhi cut him off with a quirk of his brow. “Are we omniscient? Have humans evolved that ability now?”
Ros grinned happily. He’d never allowed Zhi to bully him out of his boyish charm. “Found his wallet, boss.”
An array of bagged items, the ones Ros had been fussing over earlier, had been collected and labelled and tucked away in a protective box and sat on the ground against the wall of the alley.
Cuan took a closer look at the wounds on the body. Flaps of skin had been peeled back from the slashes on his arms. But it was too far north for pishtacos, and flesh snakes didn’t normally hunt in such well-populated areas; and neither would have been responsible for the claw like markings cutting the body from throat to groin.
Cuan looked up at Ros. “Where’s the rest of the blood?”
Ros shrugged. “In ‘im is my best guess.”
But Aphra had caught Cuan’s line of thinking. “It’s congealed. Injured post-mortem, then.”
“Poor Lou.”
Zhi grumbled. “So not rogue Weres either.”
No. The alley would be scattered with far fewer of Lou’s bits and pieces if it had been Weres.
Ros seemed disappointed. “It’s always s nice when it’s Weres. We’ve so little to do.”
But Lou’s innards had been dragged from the bowels of him. Literally, too, as the brown stains around them attested to. Organs had been pulled out like butcher’s offal and a couple of ribs had been snapped off.
“So we have signs of what, three different Tusail?” Cuan said lowly. “And all of them at some point or other decided they weren’t hungry?”
“Could have been interrupted.” Ros said.
Zhi tutted and Aphra rolled her eyes. “Then we’d be looking at two bodies or more. Use your head, twat.”
Cuan snuffed and rubbed his nose. “What’s that smell?”
“I’ve told you - it’s you!”
“How can you smell anything other than yourself right now?”
“Old blood and piss and shit, Cuan. Honestly!”
Cuan levelled Aphra and Ros with dark eyes. He braced himself and took a few experimental huffs of the pungent air. It clung to the soft hairs of his nose and the sticky walls of this throat on the way down. Cuan wanted to gag on it. But, underneath the spoiled flesh, rancid of organs and fetid liquids, there was something else. Something cloying and sickly.
“Flowers,” he coughed. “It’s flowers. Did you find any?” He scrubbed his face and staggered to his feet and Zhi shoved a handkerchief that smelled faintly of rentinol - leather and earth and solid things.
Ros toed Lou gently but revealed no bright burst of petal or leaf. “We’ll flag it for the medic to look into.”
Aphra checked his shoulder with her hip. “Thanks, Cuan.” To Zhi she said, “We did find something worth showing you.”
She walked to the head of the body. Lou’s face was mostly untouched down his left side to his shoulder. He was a greying man amidst the mulch of the rest of him. Ros ushered Cuan ahead of him and stood back as Zhi hovered over the spot Aphra pointed to. Cuan gulped down sour breaths filtered through the think scrap of handkerchief. That fucking smell. His legs held a tremor - an instinctive desire to escape. His stomach clenched. Apple and nut and water gurgled around in a tumbling, acidic spin.
“Cuan.” Zhi commanded him and Cuan’s body calmed a little. Enough to pay attention. “Come and see.”
Zhi stepped away so Cuan could take his place. Day break was coming on thick and fast and there was more daylight to see by. On Lou’s shoulder was the burnt mark of an orb. A brand. Three thin, precise cuts had been sliced through it. Inside the middle slice, something white peeked through, shiny and clean and pure. A pearl.
Cuan’s stomach screeched into the silence. He knew that mark. Cuan had seen it a hundred times. More, even. He’d sown the skin near it back together. He’d clapped the shoulder it rested upon. He’d embraced the being it had been carved into. They’d been - hm. Cuan’s throat burned and his eyes watered. He’d cursed the last fucking thing he’d seen wearing it to death.
A sour rush of hot bile flooded his nose and mouth and Cuan lurched and heaved and gagged and choked. The vomit splattered on the ground. Small flecks splashed back on his face. Loose strands of hair tried to drink it back up. Fuck. Fuck. His eyes teared up.
“Oh good,” Zhi said from somewhere above him. “You do remember.”