Disclaimer: I own nothing of Psych and its related characters. This is just for my own enjoyment and the potential enjoyment of other Psych-Os like me, and no monetary gain was expected or received.
Rating: T+
Spoilers: Hard to say. Could be through entire series, but likely won't be many.
A/N: I wanted to do a Halloween story, like the ones the great and wonderful Loafer has done the past couple of years (read 'em: they're awesomeness defined). Her latest ongoing, "Enough Now," seems to have picked up a slight flavor of that at least as well, though whether it will actually be supernatural or just a red herring remains to be seen. I tried and tried, but couldn't come up with anything better than this, and it's not really Halloween-y, at least not yet. It is also, I fear, another ongoing. I tried to make it a one-shot, which explains the length of this chapter. Sorry. I am taking my medication, I swear, but…I may be on a manic spike. Hard to say: I get hyperactive and irritable and have a hard time sleeping, and those things are all pretty normal for me anyway, so it's hard to say. I have seven windows open on my laptop, all of them chapters of various fics I'm working on currently, and there's another three or four in the works without open windows. I will try to concentrate my fractured focus but even at the best of times I'm typically writing three or four stories at once. Oh, and this will probably be Lassiet down the road. Come on, you had that figured, right? In any event this story is…well…let's just say…I love the odd. I hope you like this one: I'm rather proud of it, think it turned out better than I was expecting it to. But it is odd, severely. It's meant to be.
Chapter One: A Non-Law Enforcement Hobby
Interior domestic: the man with salt-and-pepper hair sat at his own small kitchen table, reading the newspaper and sipping a cup of black coffee. He was tall and slim and had piercingly beautiful eyes the color of a perfect clear mid-afternoon sky. His ears were a trifle overlarge and his silver-shot hair was naturally wavy, so that the longer he let it grow the bushier it looked. His skin was fair and the collar of the dark blue t-shirt he wore beneath his plaid cotton button-down was not high enough to thoroughly conceal the dark hair that grew thick on his chest. On a silver chain around his neck hung a pair of intricately detailed silver dragons to either side of an polished Oriental jade cut crystal.
He read slowly, his eyes lingering and not infrequently hesitating over each word. The coffee cooled half-forgotten in his hand, and when his cell phone rang, he could not at first recognize the theme song to the TV show "COPS" as his ringtone.
"Bad boys bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?" the tinny cell phone speakers rang, and finally he recognized it as an incoming call. He dug the phone out of his jeans pocket and looked at the Caller ID display: O'Hara. He answered.
"Lassiter."
"Carlton, hi," O'Hara's cheery voice resounded in his ear. "Listen, were you planning on doing anything tonight?"
Studying, but he wasn't going to tell her that.
"Nothing specific. Why?"
"A bunch of us are going out bowling tonight, at Westwood Lanes. Some beer, a little bonding with your coworkers…wings, cheesesticks, maybe a little pizza. What do you say?"
"I don't know," he said reluctantly. Something small flew past his head, beating the air with leathery wings and squeaking shrilly. He ignored it. "You know I'm not much of a socializer. Or particularly well-liked."
"Come on, Carlton. Just give it a try. You're better-liked than you think you are, and it'll be fun!"
"Oh…okay," he said. "For an hour or so, maybe."
"Great! I'll see you then, partner. Eight o'clock."
Supersonic screeches circled his head as the little creature did laps around the kitchen, attempting to draw his attention. He signed off from the call with unruffled aplomb and returned to his paper. He took a sip of coffee, now long past tepid, and resumed his labored reading. The creature dive-bombed into the two or three inches of cold coffee remaining in his cup. With a long-suffering sigh, Lassiter folded his newspaper and reached into the coffee cup to dig the animal out. The little dragon, no larger than a hummingbird, screeched at him and attacked his thumb, wrestling it with teeth and talons too tiny even to break the skin.
"Pepper, settle down now," he said severely. The dragon broke off fighting and began to lick the coffee off his fingers with a scratchy pink tongue about the size of the blunt end of a toothpick. "Now, you know what caffeine does to you, so none of that."
He plucked the dragon up in his other hand and placed it gently upon the table top, where it proceeded to attack and shred the corner of his newspaper. Resigned, Lassiter rose from his chair and left the kitchen to look up a spell that might help him spend at least part of the evening with his partner and coworkers while not missing out on the valuable study time - he needed every minute of it he could get. With a high-pitched trill, the dragon flew off the kitchen table and latched onto his hair with all four legs and its wing claws, scrambled up, and made a nest for itself on top of his head. Its small but remarkably strong tail thwacked into his skull several times.
The dragons and witchcraft were rather recent additions to Detective Carlton Lassiter's otherwise relatively ordinary life. He certainly hadn't gone out hunting for black magic. His only exposure to the world of the arcane were his mother's stories of witch trials and Inquisitions when he was a boy, Marvel Comics' Doctor Strange, and the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, which he would never admit to anyone on the force he had read and quite enjoyed.
What he had gone out looking for, at a therapist's insistence, was a non-law enforcement related hobby. He tried cooking and baking, and rather enjoyed it, but with no one to do it for found it slightly depressing. Archery was fun, but the therapist groaned and said he needed to focus on things other than weapons. He had his Civil War reenactments, but only once a year. Horseback riding would make a nice hobby if he had his own horse and a decent place to ride it, but he had neither, not being made out of money.
He finally took up weekly tap lessons with Guster, not that they were at all at the same level, and that was okay. It did seem to clear his mind. But his therapist wanted him to go on from there, and find other things to occupy himself. He didn't even know where to start looking.
While talking to a bookstore owner about the details of a robbery, he glanced around at the stacks of antique books and found himself fascinated. He was dyslexic - even the simplest act of reading was a struggle - but he was always interested in the knowledge tucked away between the covers of a good book, and losing himself in a good story seemed like a way to occupy himself, a way that wasn't in any conceivable way law-enforcement related. His therapist couldn't complain about it if he took to filling up his bookshelves, right?
And so he came back to the bookstore after the robbery case was settled, and browsed through the inventory of dusty tomes, purchasing titles almost at random; many he recognized and some few he did not. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The Sea Wolf. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Kim. The Neverending Story. The Little Prince.
The book of sorcerous arcana was just one more unrecognized title he picked up thinking it would keep him occupied for some days. He certainly didn't think it was real. When he started to read and, accidentally, cast his first spell, he slammed the book closed and jumped out of his chair and over the back of it like he'd been pulled on a line. He didn't believe what he'd done, but he had seen it, and he typically believed the things he saw. Cautiously, he returned to the book. Over time, with a few more deliberate castings to check its veracity, he came to accept that it was real.
He'd made slow but steady progress down the path of sorcery in the years that followed, but within the last he seemed to have acquired a secret benefactor or, perhaps, tutor - unmarked, unsolicited packages kept arriving on his doorstep, with terse instructions from a sender unidentified. The necklace he wore had been in the first package, its purpose unexplained except for the strong admonition, in all-capitals, to WEAR IT ALWAYS, and despite misgivings he'd done as the instructions commanded, keeping it tucked well beneath his collar and tie so no one knew he wore it. Nothing seemed to have come of it yet, except further "gifts" from his unidentified source. Around mid-August he'd awakened one morning to find his patio barbecue grill alight and smoking gaily - he'd been morally certain, as he approached it with all the confidence of a man advancing upon a rabid porcupine, that he would open the lid to discover that someone had taken it upon themselves to grill a cat or other small animal. Instead he'd discovered a tiny rainbow-hued egg sitting in the middle of the glowing briquettes, the grill plate itself off and leaning against the barbecue's legs. A brown-paper parcel on the tile floor nearby proved to contain several hefty volumes on dragons, including an Audubon Society-style field guide that he was able to consult in order to discover that the egg in his grill belonged to a species called a Teacup Opaleye, a breed of dragon he was relieved to discover never grew to more than four to six inches in total body length. In accordance with the handwritten instructions he discovered folded inside the front cover of the largest book he kept the egg cooking steadily for three weeks, which cost him a small fortune in Kingsford charcoal, until finally the egg hatched and "Pepper" tumbled out. From the books he'd learned that the blind and flightless newborn dragon was called a hatchling first, a chick once its eyes opened after the first day, a fledgling once the baby membrane fell away from its wings after the second week to allow it to make its first clumsy attempts at flight, and a dragonlet from thence to maturity once it was strong enough to make extended flights after another week or so. Pepper was now in this final, adolescent stage of growth, becoming as cocky and obnoxious as any human teenager, and Lassiter had yet to learn whether he was in the keeping of a male ("drake") or a female ("dam"). There was no easy way to determine the gender of so small a dragon, according to the books, until maturity, when the skin of the male would turn from dull black to shimmering psychedelic rainbow. If Pepper turned out to be a she, then she would remain pepper-black. Lassiter had an inkling that his dragon was female, based solely on the fact that the dragon seemed to effortlessly boss him around.
Boy or girl, the little dragon demanded as much attention as he could give it, and often as now made a rat's nest of his hair while he pored through his books in his slow, labored way, looking for one thing or another. But the dragon was not simply a high maintenance exotic pet; the creature exhibited uncanny intelligence and clearly had at least some rudimentary understanding, instinctual or in some way acquired, of magical research. If he wasted too much valuable dragon-keeping time hunting down some required spell or other, the dragon would take it upon itself to impatiently assist his researches, finding him the correct volume or sometimes even the sought-for page. He was not certain whether this was a standard characteristic of the species (the books said nothing conclusive on the matter, at least not that he'd found) or if Pepper was meant to be his Familiar, a subject his studies had touched upon lightly but of which he had not yet found an in-depth explanation of which he was able to make sense.
He shuffled through the ever-growing stack of leather-bound texts on subjects of the arcane, looking for that first, trusty spell book amid thirty-pound tomes with titles like A Dissection of the Elder or Germanic Futhark and A Treatise Upon Translocation Through Telekinesis, Popularly Termed Teleportation. His eyes caught and held for a moment on a title freshly arrived from the ether by the hand of his unnamed mentor - Cross-Species Communication Made Easy -- and wondered how long it would take his watchful surveillor to become frustrated enough with the slow pace of his progress before he began to receive the Black Magic for Dummies series. With a furious hiss, Pepper slithered down off his head and dove into the pile of books, emerging moments later tugging with disproportionate strength at the binding of the volume he sought. Lassiter made an abortive attempt to flip to the index, but the dragonlet nipped impatiently at his fingers and nudged the covers open with its snout, then flipped through the vellum pages until the book lay open at a spell that enabled him to create an identical twin of himself with which he would share consciousness but would be otherwise autonomous. The conjuration's duration of eight hours was more than enough time for the longest night-out he could ever imagine. The preparations were fairly complex but he had time enough before eight o'clock to manage it. Hopefully.
"Thanks, Pepper," he said.
He looked at the spell more carefully. The things he could do with this, if he could get good at it. Getting the jump on perps would become laughable. Of course, he was keeping this particular "hobby" a secret, but still, if he could keep people from finding out about it…
He shook his head vigorously. Best not to think about it. He couldn't take the risk of anyone finding out. His mysterious benefactor hadn't had to caution him to secrecy: he needed no one to think he was crazier than they already thought him. And on the off chance something he did caused someone to believe it of him? That might be worse yet.
He remembered all too well his mother's stories of witch trials and Inquisitions.
In the length of time Lassiter had been studying black magic, he had overcome some of the sense of surrealism that still suffused every layer of this undoubtedly absorbing "hobby." Just some. He still hadn't quite accepted that there truly was an actual world of magical arts out there beyond his condo walls, with other people studying the same things, practicing at, perhaps, a higher level. Sweet Lady Justice, even using it to do bad things, like hurt people and steal things. He could see how this could be used that way, easily. All the more reason to get as good at it as possible, so he could track down those people and stop them.
And good sweet God in heaven…there were dragons out there somewhere? Big ones? According to the field guide that had introduced him to Pepper.
It left him wondering what else was out there. Yes, indeed it did.
With a mental shudder, he pushed such thoughts out of his mind and set to work learning this new spell, stumbling over the difficult pronunciations and digging through those packages from his mysterious tutor that contained herbs and other ingredients for the odds and ends the recipe required. He stopped to wonder just how and why he, of all people, had ever started down this most unlikely road, and then Pepper bit him on the ear and screeched at him, which he took to mean he was wasting too much time.
"Ease up, Pepper. Latin class was a long time ago, and I have enough trouble just with English," he said.
Rrreeep! the dragonlet screeched at him, letting him know that excuses wouldn't cut it. With a sigh and a roll of the eyes, Lassiter got down to business.
At roughly six-forty-five, Lassiter at last had a completed potion. He scooped some into a mug and, with only a few misgivings, drank it down. A strange sensation, quite indescribable, and suddenly the world doubled. He was looking through two sets of eyes.
He turned to look at himself. Both of him did. He raised his right hand. It was not a mirror image: both of him…raised his right hand. He needed to learn to make himself autonomous from himself, a complicated proposition. With some effort, he made one of himself put his right hand down and raise his left hand instead. He slapped five with himself. Pepper landed on the shoulder of the self standing further into the room. That was the self he'd leave home, the one he was fairly sure was the created one, who'd disappear after eight hours. Some effort, and that one turned away and went and sat down at the desk to start studying, pulling A Dissection of the Elder or Germanic Futhark, by far the most appalling tome to his dyslexic soul and needing the most study, being a book about runic writing, towards him. He turned away from himself and headed out the door to his bedroom to prepare himself for a night out. Honestly, he was dressed just fine for a night out with…well, he supposed he could call them "friends," although only O'Hara really fit that description even slightly, but he wouldn't look right to them and, most importantly of all, the necklace he wore was visible. He didn't want to have to make up some explanation why he was wearing a necklace of dragons and something Sergeant Allen would undoubtedly call a "power crystal" - something that probably was.
Before long he was decked out in a well-pressed dress shirt - the sky blue one that O'Hara liked the best - and charcoal slacks and was debating a tie. It would certainly hide the necklace, but even he could see it might be too much for a night out, though there had been a time when the only thing he changed between his work clothes and "civvies" were his shoes. In the guest room, Pepper gave out a frustrated screech and fluttered over to a book lying on the bed and flipped to a page inside. He looked and saw a spell to make objects invisible. It was a relatively simple process.
Reading in the guest room and casting in the bedroom was a unique experience, but when it was complete the necklace was indeed invisible. He left the top two buttons of his shirt undone - about as casual as his coworkers would ever expect him to be. He grabbed his keys out of the Depression glass candy dish on the end table by the front door and headed out.
Westwood Lanes was on the other side of town from his condo, but still he got there early. Nevertheless, he saw O'Hara's lime green Bug in the lot, and McNab's periwinkle AMC Gremlin - Lord only knows how that car was still running. The two of them were leaning against the front of the building, chatting and waiting. O'Hara saw him and waved like she hadn't seen him in years.
"Omigod, Carlton, come here!" she said.
"Hey, boss!" McNab said, just as cheerily if a little less excitedly.
Hands in his pants pockets, Lassiter shuffled over to stand nearby, looking down at his feet. Back at home, he looked up from his book for a moment to contemplate exactly why these two seemed so damnably glad to see him, at least until Pepper landed on his head and began pouncing up and down, demanding he get back to work.
"Hey, y'all," he said at the bowling alley, in his sudden unexpected sense of shyness lapsing into a "Hankism" he rarely affected. O'Hara giggled and put on a Southern accent.
"Why Detective, I do declare, it is good to see you this evenin'."
"Yeah yeah, make fun," he muttered, back home, while trying to make sense of the runic symbol for the "th" sound. At the bowling alley, he merely smiled a little and nodded politely.
Soon enough, Sergeant Allen pulled up in her fire-engine red Toyota Prius - if any car didn't deserve to be sports car red, it was that one: Lassiter could pick it up and throw it, like a roller skate - and joined them, and shortly thereafter Miller, Dobson, and Franks drove up in their respective vehicles, all respectable except for Miller's ridiculous olive drab Nissan Cube - like the auto industry needed knockoffs of the horrible Kia Fusion hamstermobile, the rolling ammo box. Lassiter would sooner buy McNab's Gremlin than slide behind the wheel of that monstrosity of modern innovation - and that seemed to be the lot. Some laughter, the shaking of hands and clapping of shoulders, none of which Lassiter joined in, and they all went inside to pay and get their rental shoes.
He didn't particularly care to slip his feet into used shoes, no matter how freshly Lysol'd. He put up with it for the sake of the evening and the knowledge that he could probably dig up a curative spell if he did contract Athlete's Foot or some kind of wart. He grabbed a fourteen-pound ball from the rack against the wall and followed O'Hara over to the lane the attendant had opened up for them. O'Hara started plugging their names into the scoreboard: Juliet, Buzz, Trish (for Patricia, otherwise known as Sgt. Allen), Rick (for Miller), Greg (Dobson), and Mike (Franks). In the last position she put…Carly.
"Carly? Really?" he said, both at home and right to her at the lanes, hands on his hips and eyebrows in the "I'm very put-out" position.
"Oh, lighten up, Carly," she said, giggling, as Buzz and Dobson came up from the bar with a pitcher of beer and a tray of seven mugs. "Come on: the best part of bowling with the guys is getting buzzed."
He accepted his mug of beer. "I'm…surprised Spencer and Guster aren't here," he said, casually. It took him a second to realize he said it at home, so he said it again, concentrating on saying it with his other mouth. "I'm surprised Spencer and Guster aren't here."
"We didn't ask them," Juliet said, almost primly. "Tonight is for cops. That said, I expect they'll be by sooner or later."
"I'll try to curb my enthusiasm," Lassiter said dryly. Secretly, he was proud of his partner. Ever since she and Spencer had broken up some months ago she'd been friendly with the fake psychic but far less likely to call on him for assistance or even to call on him at all than previously. She had, in his considered opinion, taken back her self-respect and dignity as well as her professional pride and he was extremely glad to see it.
They bowled, and he studied. McNab was on a hot streak, throwing strike after strike. Lassiter felt glad for the big lug - he needed a win every once in awhile. Back at home, he was growing increasingly frustrated with the Germanic Futhark. Finally he slammed the book closed.
"I give the fuck up!" he shouted. Everyone turned to look at him, and he realized he had said it at the bowling alley. Stammering, he quickly amended, "I'll never beat McNab tonight."
"Join the club," Juliet said, and bit the end off a mozzarella cheese stick lackadaisically.
Embarrassed, he slumped down in the back of the booth to await his turn to bowl, and at home he sat over the closed book with his face in his hand until something nudged against his elbow on the desk. He looked down and saw a brown paper package that hadn't been there a moment ago. With a shrug, he opened it up. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles fell out into his hand, along with a note on heavy parchment, written in the elegant, flowing hand he'd come to recognize.
I admire your perseverance in the face of your affliction: you carried on with intense determination far past the point another in your condition would have given up. But now, the time has come to quit torturing you. Try these: you'll find going forward far easier.
He put the glasses on and, curious, opened the book again. At first he noticed no difference - runes still looked like gibberish to him - but then Pepper pulled another book toward him, one written entirely in English but of a complicated bent. He read a few pages. He blinked. He read a few pages more.
"Holy horse cakes," he muttered under his breath. Glasses that correct dyslexia? Wonders never do cease. He could use these at work - tell people they were reading glasses he'd picked up off the shelf at Wal-Mart. He was of the age where most men got presbyopia. That wasn't his problem yet, thank God and Sweet Lady Justice. How much quicker would he be able to get through paperwork and case files? Nobody would think anything of it because nobody knew he was dyslexic.
He returned to the book on runic writing, confident now that he could figure it out in the reasonable certainty that each symbol would appear to him as it was meant to appear rather than appearing backwards or upside down or inside out or whatever. At the bowling alley he began to notice that the pleasant buzz he felt from the beer was deepening, and he couldn't let it go any further. Neither did he want to stop drinking, and no else seemed inclined to do so. So he reached into his pocket and surreptitiously pulled out his secret weapon: an amethyst crystal. If Allen saw it, she would coo over its "spiritual powers." He didn't care about them, if they existed. What he needed was what the Ancient Greeks had been aware of, what had caused them to name the stone "amethyst." With just the slightest invocation of generalized magical power, the stone neutralized the intoxicating effects of alcohol - amethyst: "not intoxicating." He dropped it into the bottom of his mug. Now he could drink as much as he wanted, and get all the pleasant side effects of alcohol with none of the impairment.
It was a funny thing, really. How one self was in danger of getting drunk while the other self wasn't even remotely tipsy.
The pizza came, and he helped himself to a slice of Supreme while Buzz went up to bowl his set. He looked up from his book as his eyes chanced upon a strange sight: Juliet tiptoeing up behind McNab, intent on what he did not know.
Buzz approached the foul line, bringing the ball back in a smooth motion preparatory to bringing it forward again and releasing it down the slippery lane. Before he could, however, Juliet came up behind him silently and, in a remarkably deep, barking, commanding voice, shouted, "McNab!"
Startled, the big man threw the ball right into the gutter. O'Hara collapsed into a chair by the ball return, laughing helplessly. McNab spun around and his eyes sought out Lassiter where he sat at the back of the booth. Lassiter raised both hands.
"I swear to God, McNab, it wasn't me," he said.
Buzz looked at Juliet, still laughing so hard she was practically in hiccups, gave out with a singular laugh of sheer disbelief and, quite gently, pulled her out of the chair and onto the floor.
"I'm sorry," Juliet said, still laughing her ass off. "I'm so sorry, Buzz. I couldn't help myself. It was so perfect. I didn't mean to ruin your great score, I just couldn't stop myself. The devil made me do it."
Everybody was laughing now, including McNab. Sergeant Allen patted McNab on the arm as she got up to bowl. McNab came back to the booth to sit down.
"I think you're still winning, if it makes you feel any better," Lassiter told him.
"Oh, that's okay, boss," McNab said in his usual genial fashion. "I shouldn't really care one way or another. The point is just to have fun, right?"
Lassiter thought about it and was surprised to acknowledge that he was having fun. He hadn't expected that at all. Even the Germanic Futhark was kind of amusing now that he could read it properly.
They bowled a few more frames, and then, as was almost destined, a loud voice broke over their table.
"Lassy! Jules! Buzzter! Guys! Hey, guys! Fancy meeting you here tonight! Of course, I knew we would, because I'm psychic."
"Aw, Shawn! Gus! Hey," Juliet said, brightly but somehow falsely. "What a pleasant surprise. But how unfortunate: 'Lassy' and I were just leaving!" She grabbed Lassiter by the shirt sleeve and tugged at him, whispering, "Get me out of here, now."
Fun or not, he was more than willing. They made their apologies to the group and headed for the front doors, returning their balls and changing their shoes. They went outside and Lassiter headed for his Fusion, but was surprised when Juliet did, too.
"You're coming with me?" he asked.
"I, good sir, am legally impaired," she said, with some asperity. "I stopped being roadworthy sometime before I pulled that dumbass prank on McNab. You, for some reason, seem just fine, despite the fact that you drank at least as much as anyone else tonight."
He supposed that did look interesting. "I ate quite a bit," he said, lamely.
"I did too," she said.
"Well…you know, I'm Irish, and…beer's a baby drink."
"Irish people get drunk off beer all the time," O'Hara grumbled, flopping down into the passenger seat with her arms folded belligerently across her chest.
Lassiter climbed in and started the ignition. "Take me to your place," Juliet said.
"What?" he said, one head turning towards her sharply while the other shot up from his book just as sharply.
"Take me to your place," she repeated. "I'm not quite ready for this night to be over, and in any case it's either ask to stay over at your place or ask you to stay over at mine, so you can kindly drive me over here in the morning so I can get my car. I've never been to your place when it wasn't a crime scene or a work-in-progress, so I'd really like to go with the former possibility, thank you."
Through supreme effort, he only allowed his panic to show at home.
"You…want to stay over?" he said, as casually as he could manage. "I don't really know that that would work."
"Why not? You have a guest room, don't you?"
"Yeah, but…the bed is all…covered with old books and…boxes of stuff I need to go through and…throw away or put in storage. Haven't gotten around to it, yet. I don't generally expect to have guests, particularly of the overnight variety."
"Oh. You can't just…shove all that stuff off onto the floor for one night?" she said. "I'd help you pick it all up again in the morning."
Shit. Such a reasonable solution. But he didn't want to have to come up with explanations for the Bunsen burner or the titles of most of those books, the wolfsbane and St. John's-wort and other cut and/or planted herbs here and there around the room. Most especially, he didn't want to have to explain the two and a half-inch dragonlet or the second self currently hyperventilating in that room, which still had several hours of existence remaining.
The lie came to him remarkably smoothly.
"Those old books and those boxes are all dusty and dirty, and the sheets are just covered in it," he said. "I don't have clean sheets for you to use."
"Oh," she said, and her pretty face screwed up in a moue of disappointment. "Well, you have a couch, right? I could sack out on that."
"Just a loveseat, I'm afraid."
"Well, I'm short, and I always sleep curled up."
She wasn't going to give up. Well, there was one thing he could do. He got up from his desk and went over and locked the guest room door, trapping himself and Pepper inside so no one could get in at them. "Okay, but you can take my bed," he said, in the car. "I'll sleep in the armchair."
"Carlton, you can't do that," she admonished.
"It's okay. I sleep in the armchair a lot. It's pretty comfortable, and sometimes it's just easier for me to sleep sitting up."
"Well…all right, if you're sure," she said, reluctantly.
"I'm sure. It's just fine, O'Hara," he said, thankful that he had restricted all arcane books and accoutrements to the guest room, which served as his office. He didn't have so much as a brass dragon paperweight out on display anywhere else. Except around his neck, but that was invisible right now, and he wouldn't be breaking that spell any time soon.
He drove back to Prospect Gardens and parked in the underground parking facility nearby. He climbed out of the car and Juliet followed him out of the garage and into the imposing condo complex, a little wobbly and more than a little…jolly? Up the elevator to the fifth floor, and to the corner unit 536, where he unlocked the front door and let her in, with only some slight trepidation.
"Let's go out onto your balcony," Juliet said. "It's such a nice night. I can't believe how nice and warm it is."
"Good idea," he said, and in truth he was quite relieved at the suggestion. He led the way.
Juliet stood in the middle of the space and looked around by the light cast by the lights above the sliding glass door. "It's really nice out here," she said, appreciatively. "You've got nice furniture, and I love how you've planted out the window boxes. Just beautiful. You can almost forget there's someone else's balcony right next to this separated by just a wrought iron railing."
She approached the railing and Lassiter raised a hand to stop her, but before he could get the words out, trouble appeared. A German Shepherd popped up on the other side of the railing and started barking at Juliet most fiercely.
"Jesus!" she said in alarm, recoiling.
"Say 'Hi, Shannon!'" Lassiter said.
"Hi, Shannon!" Juliet said, in a sweet, cheery voice, though not without some uncertainty. The dog stopped barking and just looked at her for a moment, as if considering, and then got down off the railing and disappeared behind some patio furniture on the other side of the balcony.
Juliet breathed a sigh of relief. "So the dog's name is Shannon, eh?"
"No idea," Lassiter said. "I just had to come up with something to call him."
"Er…what now?" she said.
"The dog is an a-hole," he said, matter-of-factly. "I tried everything to get him to leave me alone: talking to him nice, yelling at him, threatening him with my gun. I even tried German commands, just in case he was a failed police dog. Nothing worked. Then I thought…maybe all he's looking for is a little attention. Give him a name. And I did, and whaddaya know…it worked."
She laughed, a little disbelievingly. "And how did you come up with Shannon?" she asked.
"My Uncle Pat had a Shepherd named Shannon a long, long time ago, and that dog was kind of an a-hole, too. Seemed appropriate."
"How exactly do your neighbors manage to keep a German Shepherd on the fifth floor of an apartment complex?" she asked.
"No idea," he said. "Especially since I was fairly certain this building had a 'no pets over thirty pounds' clause in the lease papers. But hell, who doesn't like a good German Shepherd? The thing that gets me, though, is the fact that I've never once heard anybody talk to the dog, or call the dog, or yell at the dog. I've never seen or heard a neighbor from that condo at all. As far as I can tell, the only one that lives there is the dog."
"I'm glad he never came over the railing at you," Juliet said. "German Shepherds rip people to shreds, and they can jump six-foot fences."
"I know, O'Hara, I'm a cop, too," he said, blandly. "But if he came over that short little bit of fencing at me, he would be dead, plain and simple. I like dogs, I truly do, but if the sign on that guy's door says 'Beware of Dog,' then the sign on my door says 'Beware of Gun.' Which one are you more afraid of?"
Juliet shook her head. "Carlton, Carlton, Carlton," she said.
"What?" he said. "If it makes you feel better, I knew I wouldn't have to shoot him. Annoying as hell as he might have been and vicious as he sounded, he always wagged his tail while he stood there yappin' at me."
He gestured to the furniture. "You wanna have a seat? How 'bout a drink? Maybe some water, to try and counteract the headache you're maybe gonna have in the morning?"
"Yeah, water, good idea," she said, dropping into a redwood Adirondack chair with a sigh.
"Be right back," he said, and headed for the kitchen. In the guest room, he was being as quiet as possible as he continued to read. Fortunately, Pepper had curled up on his head for a nap and was asleep, making tiny high-pitched snoring sounds he was fairly certain weren't audible beyond the room. He couldn't hear them from outside, anyway.
He poured a couple of glasses of ice water and carried them out to the balcony. He handed Juliet one and sat down in the other Adirondack chair.
"Thanks," she said, and took a sip, then sat the glass down on the table between them. She kicked the leg of the barbecue grill. "Charcoal grill, huh? That's the best. You ever have anyone over for burgers or wieners or steaks or something?"
"I never have," he said, casually sipping from his own glass of water. "I don't have that many friends."
Actually, the only time he'd used the barbecue since he'd moved into Prospect Gardens was to grill a dragon egg. Steak sounded like a damn good idea. Even a burger wouldn't be at all a bad thing.
"You have me," Juliet said. "But then, you spend so much time with me you probably prefer not to spend very much downtime in my presence."
"I like spending time with you," he said. "I figure you'd rather not spend any more time with me."
"I like spending time with you, Carlton," she said. "You're my best friend."
Alone in the guest room, unseen and unheard, he sighed deeply as traitorous thoughts assaulted him. Pepper awoke, squawked, and dove off of his head and into the stack of books on his desk. The dragonlet emerged a moment later tugging at one of the smaller tomes in the collection, one Lassiter hadn't gotten around to yet, and flipped it open to a specific page. Lassiter looked: it was the recipe for a love potion.
"No, Pepper," he said, severely. "Even if I wanted to…I wouldn't do that to O'Hara."
A/N: The dog is my next-door neighbor's dog, and everything I told you about him is true, except for the fact that he lives in a house with a yard, not a fifth-floor condo. I only found out today that my uncle's dog's name was actually MOLLY, not Shannon, but I'm going to keep calling him Shannon because that's what he's used to by now. Besides, he looks like a Shannon. In my defense, as to the memory-lapse, I was three when I went to San Antonio and met Molly. The necklace is mine, and no, I never take it off, although it used to have a blue heart-shaped crystal in between the dragons, which was just too girlish for Lassy and, I decided, me. I wish I had a pet dragon.