“Just a change of plans, one you should like. I think we should eat in the lab. I already put in an order for us, and I’ll bring all the food down while you get things set up.”
“But I bleached the room last night. It might make your asthma kick up.” Oliver narrowed his eyes. Something was up. “Why don’t you want to eat here when it was your idea?”
Gwen’s strained gaze flickered between him and Felipe. She opened her mouth twice before she pushed up her glasses and slowly replied, “Because there is a...pestin the dining room, and I didn’t think you would want to eat with it there.”
“What kind of pest? Should we be eating out of the kitchen if there are pests?”
“It isn’t in the kitchen, Oliver. It’s only in the dining room,” Gwen said flatly. When Oliver went to look around her into the dining room, she moved in front of him and stood on tiptoe until all he could see was the top of her head. “There’s afrogin the dining room.”
Oliver recoiled at the thought. The day that frog jumped on him was the worst day of his life. He still couldn’t think of them or hear them without shuddering. Drawing in a tight breath to avoid shaking out his hands, Oliver frowned at a swell of laughter coming from the dining room. Gwen raised a brow as if daring him to challenge her logic, but it made no sense. When he glanced over his shoulder at Felipe for answers, he held up his hands in a confused shrug.
“There’s no way there’s a frog in the dining room. There would be utter bedlam unless it was contained, and I wouldn’t have to worry about that frog jumping on my face. Just tell me the real reason you don’t want me to go in.”
Taking both of Oliver’s hands in hers, Gwen pointedly held his gaze. “Oliver Barlow, I need you to trust me that you don’t want to go in there and you don’t want to know why right now. I will explain as soon as we leave, but it would be better for all of us if we ate breakfast somewhere else.”
Fear burbled in Oliver’s gut. He trusted Gwen with his life, and while she didn’t look afraid, something was definitely wrong. She wouldn’t invoke frogs unless it was an emergency. Oliver was about to agree to leave when he heard a voice that froze him where he stood. It had been three years, but he would know that sharp laugh anywhere. That man had haunted his thoughts for months after he left.You make everything difficult. Oliver flinched. It couldn’t be him. It didn’t make any sense that he would be there.
Ignoring Gwen’s pleas not to look, Oliver stepped into the mouth of the dining room. He followed the voice amid the chaos and spotted him sitting at a table surrounded by other investigators and society members. Where else would he be but surrounded by a knot of admirers and friends? While his brassy blonde hair had darkened a little with age and was cut shorter than Oliver remembered it, his angular features and languid posture remained the same. There was no denying Christopher Ansley was back.
Oliver’s heart pounded in his ears, and his breath hitched in silent panic when Ansley caught him staring and gave him a cat-like grin. Before he could speak, Oliver turned from the room and ran, heedless of who might see him. Someone was calling his name, but Oliver couldn’t be sure who. Thundering down the basement stairs two at a time, Oliver didn’t stop running until he slammed the laboratory door behind him and pointedly set the lock. The only people he cared about could get in if they wanted to, and Christopher Ansley certainly wasn’t one of them.
***
FELIPE WATCHED OLIVER’Sface go terribly blank half a second before he did an about-face and took off like the hounds of hell were chasing him. A conspiratorial wave of laughter broke in his wake from the dining room. Calling after Oliver, Felipe had only taken a step to follow him when Gwen caught his elbow.
“Let him go.”
The head inspector and a few others lingering in the hall looked to Felipe as if for answers, but he only gave them a scowl and turned back to Gwen. Releasing a heavy sigh, she shook her head as Oliver sprinted down the basement stairs out of sight.
“And that was what I was trying to prevent.”
“What the hell happened?”
Gwen nodded toward the dining room. “Hehappened. If you’re going to look, be discreet about it. I don’t want him to come out.”
Casually strolling around the corner into the dining room to peruse the daily menu, Felipe traced the mildly annoyed glances of the usual diners to a much louder table full of men. Most were investigators he knew along with a handful of werewolves from the Brooklyn pack and society staff from other departments, but the man at the center was only vaguely familiar. He reminded him of the pictures of Lord Alfred he had seen in the paper during Oscar Wilde’s trial, only this man was sharper and more robust. In his twenty years at the Paranormal Society, Felipe had liaised with branches across the country, and while he couldn’t immediately place the man’s name, he remembered the same drawling smirk from a train robbery case two years back. If he worked at another branch, what about him had sent Oliver running and Gwen quietly fuming?
“Who is he?” Felipe whispered as he slipped back into the foyer.
“Ansley,” she said, the distaste evident in her voice. When recognition didn’t dawn on his face, Gwen frowned. “I guess Oliver didn’t tell you. Come on, I’ll explain while we wait for the food. I hope you don’t mind that I ordered for you.”
“Not at all.” As Gwen spoke to the women in the kitchen, Felipe turned the name over in his mind. Where had he heard it before? He thought he had worked with Christopher Ansley at a different branch of the Paranormal Society, which fit what he remembered of that case, but how did Oliver—Oh. “He’sthatAnsley. Oliver’s Ansley.”
“Not anymore, he’s not. Don’t even imply that. He’s a horror, and we hate him.”
“That bad?” Felipe asked, taking the tray laden with meat and eggs that he assumed was meant for him while Gwen carried hers and levitated Oliver’s beside her. Felipe hadn’t had a truly spectacular break up since he was a young man. Most of his relationships had been temporary from the start, so the partings were amicable.
“You saw Oliver’s reaction. I’m just glad you’re here. Ansley’s far less likely to try to get back with Oliver if you’re around.”
“If they broke it off—”
“Oh, it was broken off,repeatedly,” Gwen replied over her shoulder as they trekked down the stairs to the basement. Oliver’s tray careened ahead of them and waited by the door. “That’s why it was so bad. Every time I thought we were rid of him, he reappeared like a bad cold. But that’s what Ansley does. He comes in, sweet talks his way into Oliver’s life, sows chaos, and then, he leaves when he can’t handle the mess.”
Felipe couldn’t imagine Oliver being involved with someone like that. Oliver loved order and routine, and he had made it very clear when he first reanimated Felipe that he didn’t let chaos into his life. Then again, when Oliver had mentioned his prior relationships in passing, it was almost always in a self-deprecating way about his failings as a partner. Luckily, those instances had dwindled over the past few months. If Christopher Ansley had been the source of those neuroses, Felipe hoped the man stayed away from them for his own sake.
“Anyway, my plan had originally been to keep them apart until Ansley leaves. From what I gathered, the case that brought him here isn’t a murder, so unless he sought Oliver out, he wouldn’t have gone to the morgue. Out of sight, out of mind, and you know Oliver is fantastic at laying low when he doesn’t want to deal with people.” Outside the laboratory door, Gwen waited as Felipe pulled the key from his pocket. “Isn’t it lovely how he’s been at the society for less than a day, and he’s already riling Oliver up?”
Felipe unlocked the first door and hoped Oliver wasn’t too upset. “I’ll do my best to mitigate the damage until he leaves.”
