Damn it.
“I wasn’t drinking in the bar. I was drinking in my apartment,” I informed him. “Which is perfectly fine.”
“Shit, that’s better than fine. Lead the way, Marshal.” Yet Bishop pushed past me through the bar flap, where he grabbed an unopened bottle on his way through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
“Get back here!” I shouted as I followed him. “Donotopen—” But I heard the seal crack just as I scented the bloom of whiskey—goodwhiskey—in the air.
“You are one brazen motherfucker, Bishop,” I growled.
“Said the pot to the kettle,” he mumbled as he jogged up the steps toward my apartment. “Marshal, the only way to stop me from drinking this whole bottle in the next half hour is to pour some of it for yourself.”
“So, why exactly are we binge drinking at one in the morning, like college kids?” I asked as I tipped the bottle over my glass for the third time in fifteen minutes.
It was a juice glass, not a shot glass. No shifter trying to get drunk could afford to waste time with shot glasses.
Bishop huffed at me from the couch, across from where I sat in my favorite armchair. “Because extreme tolerance to alcohol is the worst part about being a shifter, and binge drinking is the only solution.” He drained his fifth glass and set it on the coffee table between us with a thunk.
“Use a coaster, asshole. What are we, animals?”
Bishop blinked at me for a moment, his eyes freshly re-glazed with intoxication. “Animals! Ha!” Then he burst into laughter. “Weareanimals. That’s the whole damn problem.” His smile faded as he poured another.
We were already two-thirds through the bottle.
“Seriously. What the hell are you doing here?”
He took a drink. More than a sip, but less than a gulp. “Austin kicked me out.”
“Bullshit.” I sipped from my own glass, frowning at him over the rim. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“Not in so many words,” Bishop admitted. “But I got the message.”
“Which was what?”
He threw the rest of the glass back, and this time he set it on a rubber coaster. “That I am good at nothing more than getting in his way.” He shrugged as he poured another. “He’s not wrong.”
“Yes he—”
“I don’t know how to…detect. I can Google shit with the best of them—I’m notold—but I don’t know what I should be looking for. Everyone else on our little task force has a purpose. Something they’re good at. Something to contribute. But I…” Bishop shrugged, staring down into his glass.
“I’m sure you’re good at…something.” But after nine drinks in less than an hour, I was riding more of a buzz than I’d managed to tie on in at least a year and a half, and it felt like too much work to figure out exactly what Bishop Mattheson might be good at.
Other than drinking.
“I am,” he insisted. “I fucking excel at kicking ass. Breaking skulls. I’m even better at that now than I was as a human.”
“Yeah. We all are.”Comes with the claws.
“But you just released the skull I came here to break. Took away my purpose, Marshal,” he half slurred.
“Quit calling me that.”
“Why? You’re the Marshal, aren’t you?”
I nodded. Then I turned up my glass. “But I’m off duty at the moment.” At least for the hour it would take me to sober up. If I stopped drinking right…now.
Instead, I poured another.
“But my point,” Bishop said, as if he’d just re-boarded his own train of thought. “Is that all these people are involved now, all trying to do the right thing. To catch this killer. To avenge my wife’s death.Mywife. I’m the one who failed her. The worthless motherfucker who couldn’t keep her safe. I’m the one who lost her. And here I am twiddling my fucking thumbs, while everyone else seems to know what to do. I’m as useless now as I was when she was alive, and—”
