Thomas again, because I love him. We're back on the boat. Set between Changes and Ghost Story.

(Please forgive me, I was in a bleak place when I wrote this. TW for mentions of suicide.)

It's never a good thing to get a message that says, "We need to talk," but that was all the text read when it popped up on the screen of my phone. "I'll meet you there."

It was long past midnight when I stepped onto the deck of my boat. Someone had pulled down all the yellow crime scene tape. It took exactly eight days for CPD to drop the investigation due to lack of evidence.

The fact that they couldn't even turn up a body didn't help.

"Sergeant?"

"Well." The slight figure in the shadows stirred from her seat on one of the built-in benches outside the cabin, about five feet from where my brother had been shot. Somebody had cleaned the blood off the wall, or that might have been the rain. "Not anymore."

She held a bottle of Belvedere in loose fingers, and had been crying, not that I could see her face in the shadow beneath her baseball cap.

"How long have you been here?"

Murphy shrugged, watching me unlock the cabin.

"Come on," I said. "You'll catch pneumonia sitting out here. Give me that." I pulled the bottle of vodka out of her hand and caught her arm as she stumbled down the stairs, over the bulkhead and into the living quarters beneath the deck. Not drunk, not yet, but she had taken something, too. I could smell it through her skin, feel the slow, opiate lull of her pulse from three feet away.

"I'm fine," she snapped, wrenching her arm from my hand.

"You're not," I countered, leaving the bottle on a shelf too high for her to reach. "Murph—"

"No. You don't get to—" she interrupted, angry. She stopped herself, took her hat off and threw it on the table, ran both hands through damp hair that had been chopped off raggedly at her chin, dyed dark, fading unevenly to blonde. "Thomas, I need to tell you something," she continued, quiet and tense. "But you have to swear you won't tell anyone else. Not yet. I want to be sure."

I nodded at her to continue, apprehension already filling the pit of my stomach like molten lead. There was only one reason why she would want to come here.

"I think I know what happened to—" she stopped short, biting her lip, unable to bring herself to say his name. "I think I know what happened."

I nodded again, unable to speak around the knot in my throat. She took a piece of folded paper from inside her jacket and handed it to me between trembling fingers. I unfolded it on the table, beneath the dim overhead light.

A still from a security camera, a black and white picture on printer paper. The image was time-stamped from the day we had gone to fight the Red Court in Mexico. The subject was a fair-haired man in a dark baseball cap, dialing a payphone outside a bail bonds place. His face wasn't completely visible but it was undeniably her good friend, the immortal assassin, in a neighborhood just off the harbor.

Some distant part of me considered all of this, piecing it together. Her partner, missing and presumed dead. Her boyfriend, the hitman. The date, the harbor. Empty night, no wonder she was falling apart.

"Where'd you get the photo?" I asked through a mouthful of ashes.

"Pawn shop across the street had cameras." She set her phone down on the table next to the photo. The screen was cracked, spiderwebbed across the faintly blurry background picture; the two of them at some kind of fair, a sunset and a Ferris wheel. I didn't know either of them could smile like that; her or my brother.

Murphy quickly tapped the screen, bringing up a page of missed calls. One unknown number matched the timestamp on the printed photo. "There's a high-rise renovation about a block from there. More than a mile from the docks." She nodded at the photo, holding on to the dispassionate, professional façade she had cultivated over years of police work. "I've seen him make a longer shot. Makes that British Marine look like a kid with an air rifle."

"Why would he… why was he trying to call you?"

"Don't know," she said tightly. "But now he's not answering."

"I thought they were—" Well. Not friends, exactly. Friends don't shoot each other. "You think the Reds hired him? A contingency plan?"

She looked up at me, lips parted like she wanted more than anything to say yes. "No," she breathed. "I don't think so. That isn't their style."

"The Council, then," I suggested, hoping to have someone to blame, eager for a target to hunt down. "Or someone on the Council, one of the traitors—"

Karrin shook her head, eyes begging me not to make her say aloud the dark thought we both shared. "Jared owed him a favor. I know he was worried about what that favor would be. He told me as much. He had to have known about the cameras. Makes me wonder if—"

"No," I heard myself mutter, moving backward until my legs hit the bunk. I sat, gripping the edge of the mattress. "No, you don't think he—"

Neither of us would say it; that he could have called in the hit on himself. It made a horrible kind of sense. Harry had tried that poison mushroom trick on the Leanansidhe, years ago when we'd gone on that suicidal run through the Nevernever with Michael Carpenter. Would he rather die of his own volition than serve as Mab's pet monster? Rather than live to have the people he cared about witness it? Rather than put us in danger?

Probably.

"I'm sorry." She sat next to me, covered my hand with hers. This was hardly the first time she had delivered bad news to the next of kin, somehow able to stay strong for my sake, even though he had been her family longer than he had been mine. "You deserve to know. I'm sorry."

I had managed to hold it back all day, until then. It wasn't even cathartic — just futile, bitter, stinging tears. She put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me into a hug, quiet while the clock on the bulkhead wall ticked away the minutes.

"Sorry." I tried not to sniffle, wiping my eyes on the sleeve of my shirt. "Not very vampire of me."

"I'd still stake you, Raith," she said, mustering a half-hearted little smile, squeezing my hand again.

"What now?" I asked, because it was the only coherent thought I'd had for a week.

"Don't know," Murphy said softly, her words slurring a bit. Whatever she had taken was starting to kick in. "I don't know if I can do this anymore. Don't know if I want to." She stared out the porthole where rain pattered on the deck, and we sat in silence for a while, clinging to one another like the victims of a shipwreck. "Thomas—" she started like she wanted to ask me a question, hesitating.

"What is it?" I asked. "There's something else."

She closed her eyes and nodded, pain in the lines of her face. It hurt to see; I had never known her to be less than stoically optimistic. Too much of a threat in her own right to register as a potential meal to the Hunger, even now; vulnerable, wounded, still not quite prey. Even sitting so close, her hand in my hand, fingers intertwined. Even when she leaned in, her lips grazing mine, gentle at first and then insistent, lacking the uninhibited passion that typically accompanies delusional lust. Just warm and sweet, soft and reassuring. And not meant for me, but I let it go on for far too long before I pulled away.

"We can't do that—"

"No?"

"You're my friend. I don't want to hurt you."

"Not even a little? How disappointing," she said with another weak smile. The tears that welled in her eyes didn't fall, made them look bigger, bluer, and she drew a deep, shuddering breath. "Thomas, please. I don't want to feel like this anymore."

I understood then why she had come here instead of asking me to meet somewhere else, why she had doped herself up. She didn't want sex, she wanted the other thing, had come here without intention of leaving. It had been a few years, but nothing could erase the memory of Justine, her expression determined and sorrowful as she pulled me into her arms, willing to trade her life for mine.

… And how it felt after, how eager I had been to give up when I thought she was gone, how the end just wouldn't come fast enough.

"If you won't," she warned me, "I'll have to do it."

"You wouldn't."

"Wouldn't be the first time I thought about it. Wouldn't even be the first time I've tried. Nobody would be surprised. Nobody. If they found me out here, no one would question it."

"Don't say that. Karrin, you don't mean that—"

She looked me in the eye, unflinching, refusing to defend or explain herself. She didn't have to explain. In the span of a day, she lost her best friend, a relationship, her career. Of course she meant it — or at least for the moment, she meant it with every atom of her being. If I let her, she would walk out onto the deck and pull the trigger herself.

"He'd kill me."

He would have for this, brother or not.

"He can't." The whisper against my ear was furious and betrayed, heartbroken, a voice to everything I felt; raw and awfully human. "He's gone. And I want to hate him for it, and I can't, and I want to tell him that I — I'll never get to tell him."

I couldn't bear to hear another word. She was done talking to me, appealing to the Hunger instead, every slow, deliberate touch now edged with violence. Dragging my demon out to meet her own, and it reveled in taking without trying. She gave, as eager as rising flame, and I didn't even care that she wasn't thinking about me. It would be easy. I could feel her slipping under already, her self-control fracturing. It would be a mercy. We were halfway there already, no point in stopping.

I knew I was rationalizing. I did it every single time, and sometimes it worked.

But this time… the thought of losing one more person terrified me more than what she might try to do if I stopped. I slipped the pistol from its holster at the small of her back and set it out of her reach. She didn't even notice, now crying in earnest. The tears on her cheeks glittered red-gold in the navigation light shining in the portside window. Every drop that landed on my skin seared like molten metal, blistering.

There it was — what she had wanted to tell him. How long had she carried those three little words around, unable to say it aloud, hoping he understood?

Too late now.

"Stop. Please, stop." I caught her hands, holding fast as she struggled for a moment before collapsing against me, wracked with silent sobs. I held her as tight as I wished someone would hold me, ignoring the burn of her tears, the meager protection it afforded her from someone like me. I couldn't let her leave, couldn't let her be alone, and as wrong as it felt before, this was somehow worse. "Shh. It's alright," I said, allowing my will to slip into the words. "It's okay. Look at me."

She looked up at me, tearful eyes slipping out of focus, still and compliant. "Thomas," she said softly, dazed. "I'm cold."

"We were outside in the rain, remember?" I reminded her, moving her to the other side of the bunk. I got a sweatshirt out of a drawer and wrapped her up in it.

"I feel sick," she mumbled, confused.

"You've been drinking," I explained. "It's alright. I'm going to make you a few hundred cups of coffee and get you sobered up," I said, "and we're going to forget all about this silly idea. The sun will come up in a few hours and everything will be okay."

"Okay," Murphy whispered, nodding numbly.

"Like it never even happened, alright?"

"Alright."

Next: Skeleton