The problem now was that he didn’t want a good hot fuck. He wanted Laddin. And even more shocking, the idea of putting Laddin in the same category as any of his hundreds of distraction-of-the-moment girls filled him with disgust. Last night’s no-consequences sex aside, his relationship with Laddin had advanced well beyond the for-now category.
He knew what was happening. He’d been in enough serious relationships to recognize what he was feeling. First came friendship. He genuinely liked Laddin, which was hard to believe, given that he usually despised chronically upbeat people. But Laddin made him smile. A lot. And that was rare.
The next step was respect. Laddin had kept his head as he fought alongside Bruce against both sets of fairies, and more significantly, he’d stood up to Nero during that long interrogation. That took balls—anyone could see that Nero was Laddin’s superior officer. In addition, Laddin had seen things that no one else understood. He’d said what Bruce could barely articulate about his childhood—that he’d tried to run interference between his father and his younger siblings. Or he had for a while, until the day his father had cut his balls. At that point he became angry and mean. Like father, like son, right?
He flinched away from that thought and forced himself to chew on something else. He’d eaten the fairy apple. What did that mean? Could he really save the planet? Not likely. As a young firefighter, he’d envisioned himself saving whole buildings of people—imagined a grateful woman dashing into his arms because he’d put out a fire in her house, or rescued her aging parents from who knows what disaster. But even in those fantasies, he’d never saved a planet. He was a paramedic and a firefighter, not a superhero. And he sure as hell wasn’t qualified to solve this mystery. That was Josh’s territory.
He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. Where the hell was Laddin? Why wasn’t he here babbling away about something? The guy was the perfect distraction—a sounding board and comic relief. He was also sexy, honorable, and he made Bruce feel like he wasn’t all that bad. The fact that a stand-up guy like Laddin found something to value in Bruce eased a pain inside him that he’d been carrying for a very long time.
And Laddin ought to be back by now.
Bruce got up from the bed. The apple had given him renewed energy. Hell, his brain was going like a hamster on a wheel. If anyone ought to be resting, it was Laddin, who’d had all the work and none of the extra fairy juice to handle it. So Bruce pulled on some clothes, grabbed a couple of sandwiches from the kitchen counter, and headed out to the barn to force the guy to take a break. Or at least to eat. Neither of them had eaten anything since last night.
He pulled the barn door open all the way before stepping inside. His nose wrinkled at the smell of smoke, but it was familiar enough to be comforting—like coming back to the firehouse after a long day. You could smell the day’s disaster, but you were still home.
“Laddin?”
No one answered, which was weird. He stepped farther into the barn and had a moment of remembered terror staring at the burn marks on the floor. He’d examined every single mark on his body from those fairies, and the memory of being pinned down while Laddin struggled alone to help him made violence burn in his blood. It was a visceral response that spiked his adrenaline and made him want to blow up the entire structure.
But he wasn’t here to relive his personal trauma, he was here to find Laddin, and so he forced himself to look away. He wasn’t going to think about it. He wasn’t going torememberanything. He was going to find Laddin, and they were going to fuck each other senseless to put a good spin on a lousy day.
So where the hell was the guy?
He saw Laddin’s suitcase closed up and ready for transport. It was right next to the closed van, and he knew for damn sure that Laddin had done that. When they’d left that morning, everything had been open, burned, and messed up. So Bruce mentally pieced things together.
Laddin had come in, closed up the van, and gotten his suitcase. But something had distracted him, grabbed him, or turned him into magical goo. Panic rose quick and hard in Bruce’s body. And with the adrenaline already there, the change was quick and fast.
One moment he was a man looking around the barn, the next second he was on all fours as a wolf, sniffing for Laddin. Fortunately he found him quickly. The smell was so strong that his wolf mind wondered what was wrong with his human nose to have missed it. Either way, Bruce found Laddin huddled beside the front bumper of the van. He went straight for him and tried to burrow into his arms.
Except Laddin wasn’t letting him in.
He was sitting curled in on himself, his arms wrapped around his legs and his head buried deep into his knees. He was a tight knot of compressed energy held so hard that he was vibrating with it. Not shaking, but actually vibrating with how hard he was gripping his own body.
And Bruce couldn’t break in. He tried everything a wolf instinctively knew how to do to comfort someone. He nosed in, he blew his breath on Laddin’s skin, and he licked what he could touch. It didn’t help. That was how he knew that Laddin didn’t need an animal—he needed a man.
Bruce shifted again and was pleased to realize he did it easily. Apparently all he had to do was think about what Laddin needed and bam, his body accommodated his wishes. So now he was on all fours, squatting beside Laddin, as he spoke in the gentlest tone he had.
“Hey, Laddin,” he said. He didn’t expect a reaction and wasn’t surprised when there was no response. So he took a deep breath and started talking for real.
“My first multicar traffic accident was brutal. I suppose everyone’s is, but this one wasbad. I’d seen street pizza before, but this incident was something I still have nightmares about. It was January, on the freeway. Someone was driving too fast on black ice and plowed into someone else, who ran into a truck, and then everything went to hell after that. My partner had a pregnant woman, DOA. I was cleaning up her husband, who wasn’t going to make it either, but I had to try. And everywhere you looked, all you could see was disaster.”
He paused to steady his breath. He didn’t want to remember this but knew that Laddin needed to hear it.
“In any accident, all we think about is finding the victim, stabilizing the bleeder while watching for fire, and getting them ready for transport. That’s it. Find, stabilize, transport. The sounds, the smells, and the noise—it’s all chaos. We put one foot in front of the other until it’s done. We don’t think about it, we do our jobs.”
He leaned back against the van bumper, blowing out the memories as he relaxed his body.
“And then it’s done. We’re back in the firehouse and no one’s talking or we’re talking obsessively. Depends on the person. Me, I’m quiet. Then I’d find the nearest girl and I’d plow into her as fast and as furious as I can. But that only takes a guy so far. Eventually you have a moment when it’s just you and your thoughts and suddenly you’re back there again. And this time you can’t shove it away. You smell it again, breathe it again, and the feel….” He shuddered. “I scooped gray matter off the pavement as we lifted his body onto a gurney. He was still breathing because the body does amazing things at times, but we all knew where it was going. We did our job and moved on.” He swallowed as the memory rolled through him.
Then he looked at Laddin, who had lifted his head off his arms. His dark eyes were barely visible in the shadows, but he was watching Bruce. And he was listening.
“I scooped part of a man’s brain off concrete, and it still haunts me.” He leaned back against the wheel of the van. “What you went through today was worse. A thousand times worse. And I’ll bet you never trained for that.”
Laddin lifted his head. “There hasn’t been time,” he said softly.
Bruce shrugged. “I’m not sure you can train for murderous fairies, anyway.”
Laddin let that hang in the air for a while. Eventually he relaxed his grip on his legs and set his chin on his knees. “I keep thinking this is like the rabbits, only it’s so much worse.”
