“I know you will.”
Pushing open the inner lab door, Felipe found Oliver pacing across the room and shaking his hands out in time with his breath. Oliver glanced over at Felipe and Gwen with a harried look before continuing. As Gwen arranged the trays on the unused bench, Felipe set to work filling the percolator. Frenetic energy rolled across the tether in bursts that set Felipe’s heart and hands juddering. That was better than silence, at least.
“Frogs, Gwen? I can’t believe you invoked frogs.”
“What else could I do? Nothing deters you, except frogs, and you learned that lesson the hard way. If you could have just taken my word not to go in or look, I wouldn’t have to resort to underhanded means.”
“Ihadto look! How else would I know what I was up against?” Felipe bit back a laugh at the exasperated look on his lover’s face. “You know not knowing is far worse than knowing.”
“Is it, Oliver?” she asked with her hands on her hips as their forks hovered dangerously above their trays. “You’re so stubborn. I was going to tell you Ansley was back as soon as we left the foyer, so he didn’t see you and vice versa. I was trying to avoid all of this.”
Gwen glared at him, but her animosity was lost beneath a string of coughs. Oliver’s hands stilled and his eyes swept over his best friend’s face a second before he sprang into action. Propping open the back door with a brick, Oliver steered Gwen toward the fresh air even as she rolled her eyes.
“Bring Gwen the first cup of coffee,” Oliver ordered from the alley. “Please. I told you eating down here was a bad idea, but it’s fine. We’ll eat in the alley like stray cats.”
A small smile crossed Felipe’s lips at their good natured arguing as he brought Gwen a cup of syrupy coffee to hover over and sip. When Oliver was sure Gwen’s breathing wasn’t getting worse, he went back inside to retrieve three chairs. Felipe propped the door open more securely with the portable cart and loaded it with the coffee carafe, their cups, and anything that risked tipping over as they cut their food. Dining with their trays precariously balanced on their laps wasn’t the easiest way to have breakfast, but it was oddly peaceful with the sun drifting over the loading bay staving off the last of the morning chill.
As he ate, Felipe’s eyes roamed over the back of the Paranormal Society, though he could only see one stretch of brick wall before it disappeared sharply behind another building. The society’s protection spell had a nebulous quality in the loading bay that it didn’t have in the front. Where that had a hard delineation outsiders couldn’t pass, it wasn’t as obvious where the veil started and ended in the back. Felipe could see people in adjacent buildings moving around, but no one paid them any mind and the sounds of the city beyond were muffled. Felipe knew the chemist made deliveries to the morgue and undertakers had to come pick up the bodies when Oliver finished with them, but he had never stopped to think about the logistics of the spell that draped over Oliver’s world.
As he cut through the last of the meat on his plate and swiped it through an egg, he listened to Gwen and Oliver prattle about the absurd things investigators had expected of them. Those constant surges of tension that had drifted across the tether finally dissipated.
“Are you still all right with going out to the Bowery today?” he asked, though he hoped the answer was yes. He really didn’t feel like sifting through Herman Judd’s grave dirt.
“Yes, I should be fine.” Oliver stared at the piece of barely toasted toast in his hand and frowned. “I overreacted upstairs. Truthfully, I had hoped to never see Ansley again, but it’s been over three years and we’re both adults. I can manage to be civil if I run into him in the hall. With the way things ended, I highly doubt he would want to see me while he’s here.”
From the pained expression on Gwen’s face, Felipe wasn’t so sure.
Chapter Five
Histories
Oliver braced himselfoutside the tenement. Even from the street, the noise and smells were palpably worse than they were only a few miles away at the Paranormal Society. People pushed carts down the busy street, calling out their wares, as others headed off to work. Some lingered, eyeing the steamer, though a few landed squarely on Oliver and Felipe. Even in a city as full as Manhattan, they recognized outsiders at a glance. Oliver felt keenly out of place as a group of children sped past him and a haggard man on the other side of the shadowed sidewalk flicked a cigarette into the gutter before disappearing into an alley. The stink of decaying garbage, urine, and sulfur permeated the air while the Third Avenue Line barreled overhead, rumbling through the cobbles beneath Oliver’s feet. If he could create hell on earth, this part of the Bowery with its cacophony of smells, sounds, and roiling darkness would be it.
At the tilt of Felipe’s head, Oliver let out a sigh and followed him inside. The inside of the building was somehow worse. They went up the narrow steps single file, ducking against the greasy wall as a woman dragged down a basket of linens. Voices carried through the too thin walls and echoed across the tiled foyer, and with each landing, the building grew hotter and darker, though Felipe seemed unfazed by it. By the time they reached the Judds’ apartment on the uppermost floor, it was unbearably stuffy and dim. Felipe stopped and waited for Oliver to brace himself. At least Felipe would conduct the majority of the interview if Mrs. Judd was home.
Knocking heavily on the door, Felipe took a step back. A baby wailed on the other side, followed by two women’s sharp voices. With a huff, an older woman with a well-lined face and grey hair opened the door. Despite being built like a teapot, she glared imperiously at each of them and waited with a raised brow.
