Sean Renard pays off the cab, and hurries up the path, coat drawn up against the rain.
He'd checked himself out of the hospital a little early, AMA, because after a couple of weeks, he was fed up with the beeping machines and terrible food, and he wanted to sulk somewhere, preferably with a drink. Where to go had been a decision – he hasn't exactly had time to look for anywhere permanent, and he doesn't want to trust his safety to a hotel. So he's come here – he's been avoiding it before, because it is rather more out of town. But it has good security, high fences and a gate code, and nobody knows to link it to him. Maybe he'll be able to sleep.
There's a light on, sounds of movement, and at first he thinks that his mother might have returned to town unexpectedly. Instead, there's a perfect stranger, making herself at home in the kitchen. She's not dressed like a thief, jeans and a loose cotton top. Medium height, slender build, pale skin and a tumble of dark hair, maybe a little younger than him. This house is a private family property, the key and code could only have come from his mother. So he makes an understandable assumption about her.
Isabelle isn't sure what to make of Portland, yet. After a good few years working her way up through LGC, she'd been hoping for a move to somewhere like Paris. Not Portland. But it was a serious promotion, and she has the advantage of being single and without dependents, and thus able to move at very short notice, so she'd rather stolen a march on others to get it. Hopefully, it will be interesting. Rather than being put up in a long-term hotel suite, or even a company flat, there's an actual house involved. It's a very nice house, too, the furnishings slightly more Old World and masculine than she might have chosen, but elegant and comfortable.
So. Bread, check. Milk, check. Interesting variety of tea, check. Large handsome man barging in through the door and glaring at her...check? Isabelle yelps and chucks the box of tea at him on instinct. He bats it out of the air with a snarl, and keeps coming.
"Who the hell are you?" and "What are you doing in my house?" are simultaneous.
"Where did you get the key?" he demands.
"I work for Lascelles..."
And then he twitches his head, and everything changes.
The thing about being frightened by a huge angry man suddenly in your personal space is that there isn't a lot of fear left over for when he turns into something else, Isabelle finds. She can't help a startled shriek, though, because that's not what anyone would expect. It looks as if something has raked acid claws across his face, from right ear and temple, across his eye and down to pull the left side of his mouth up into a toothy snarl. The proud wedge of a nose is untouched, and the other eye remains a stormy sea-green, gradually widening and filling with a dawning horror. She shrieks again as he twitches back, skin smooth over hard bones, and there are now two eyes mirroring her panic and confusion.
"What the bloody fuck was that?"
"You're not..."
There's no way to pretend she hasn't seen. He's holding her upper arms, and he can feel her trembling.
Of course. She works for his mother, yes. As in she is employed by her company. Not a hexenbiest, but a normal human being, who is now scared out of her mind by the monster in front of her.
It's automatic to fall back onto his police training, steer her into a seat on the couch, talk to her calmly and carefully. She's frightened, but she isn't hysterical or catatonic. Yet.
Isabelle watches her hands shake. Her terrifying encounter has rapidly descended into farce, with the scary...man now looking distinctly panicked, kneeling down and talking to her as if she's a child. A warrant card, with a headshot of him looking stern and commanding. Captain Sean Renard. He's a policeman?
She knows what she saw, though.
"That's the who, but what the hell are you?" she asks, bluntly.
It's late, he's tired, and she's still frightened, but she's also obviously persistent. She's not buying the idea that she hit her head, or imagined things. He's never had to explain himself, his other world, before. He might need some of that brandy after all. So might she.
And when he's stumbled through a brief, awkward exposition, that he's something other than human, and that he's not the only one, who he is and why he's in the house, she knocks back the drink, and sets her jaw.
"Show me again."
Carefully, reluctantly, he does. It's no less alarming, the way those hard good looks morph into scarred ruin again, but the rest of his face is apprehensive and without the looming, he's merely a tired man in a nice suit.
The damage is horrifying. His right ear is pretty much gone, and the raw wounds run down over an eye sealed half-shut, a lumpy furrowed expanse. The other cheek is withered away, twisting his lip and exposing teeth.
She doesn't faint, though, and a strange detached calmness falls over her. She wonders if it is shock. Watches her own hand lift, and touch the mangled cheek, feels the warm slick of scarred tissue.
"Ouch. Does doing that hurt?"
He blinks, surprised. Obviously, this is meant to be horrific and intimidating, then. The muscle shiver, and the sealing over of the flesh under her fingers is disconcerting, leaving her snatching her hand back from a chiselled jaw.
"No. This is what – who - I am."
He's still alarming, but he also looks exhausted. Whatever he is, he's fresh out of hospital, and now he's stopped posturing and snarling, it looks like it's all catching up with him. Isabelle sighs.
"The same huge, scary badass in a good suit you were five minutes ago? You know, you are sufficiently terrifying without the game face, okay, and I'll probably have a nice little nervous breakdown about that later, but right now my brain has just gone numb." She gets to her feet, and he cautiously stands up, too. He's a foot taller than she is, at least. "You also look like you might actually fall over in a minute, and I can't move you if you do, so go and lie down, and I'll put my stuff in a smaller bedroom. Because I absolutely understand why that super kingsize double is in the master now."
Leaves him standing there, staring after her. Maybe he has driven her to madness, because brisk practicality is not the reaction he was expecting. (Neither was the light touch of a hand to his face, or her concern.) This is supposed to be his house, how is she in charge? He can hardly throw her out onto the street at this time of night, though.
Isabelle tries to be calm and reasonable about it all. (Keep it together, woman, walk, don't run.) This isn't the first executive houseshare she's done, after all. Though she's never had a housemate who looked like that before. (Either version of him, ohgod.) She locks her door, because she isn't stupid, even though she's fairly sure that anything short of actual stonework wouldn't slow him down that much. Then she climbs into the bed, pulls the covers over her head and shakes for a few minutes. What the actual hell is her life?
A few minutes on her phone, and she has more confirmation that he is who he says he is, a very sparse professional bio, a number of news items about his recent shooting, mentions of him in previous cases. A well-respected and effective officer, a rapid steady rise through the ranks to his present position. Absolutely no mention of the fact that he's apparently something other than a tall handsome policeman. She knows what she saw, though. And knows what she felt, when she touched him, warm and living and turning her world into something infinitely more strange.
Really, he'd seemed so panicked and out of his depth, even trying to be collected and professional. He's obviously used to being in command of a situation, and she seems to have frightened him nearly as much as he'd frightened her. Bites back a slightly hysterical giggle. He'd have had a fun job explaining to his mother that he'd just tipped her new deputy director into a breakdown.
She's met Elizabeth Lascelles, and the idea that the man could be her son would be ludicrous, even with a teen pregnancy, except she now knows that the woman is - the same something, wesen, as him. She's apparently been working for a witch for the last decade or so, and alongside who knows how many other creatures out of fable and fairytale. Tries not to think about who she might know, have gone to school or Uni with, bloody hell, even dated, without knowing.
Maybe she'll wake up in the morning, and this will all be a vivid hallucination from her travel meds. Except...(her hand flexes)...that had been entirely too real. Storybook monsters shouldn't look tired and shocked and be in need of a shave.
Renard stares at the unfamiliar bedroom ceiling, stupefied by exhaustion, painkillers and confusion. He prided himself on his iron self-control, he always had. He rarely woged, unless he meant to, and he absolutely didn't casually reveal his nature to others. To have misjudged so badly, he must be more out of it than he thought.
He could have killed her. He can't say that he hadn't meant to frighten her, either. Finding someone in the house, given that he'd been shot at so recently, he was on edge, understandably so. He refuses to feel guilty about it, the feel of her shaking under his hands.
He really wants to know what his mother is doing, sending the woman here. 'Up to something' is rather a default state with hexenbiests, and with his mother, definitely so. He hopes it isn't anything illegal that he is going to be forced to take notice of. LGC has a public reputation for being very strong on ethical practices - natural ingredients and no animal testing - but there are reasons why the proprietary formulae are so guarded.
She'd touched his face, and asked if it hurt. Which was a first. People don't touch him gently. People rarely touch him at all. They don't put soft fingertips up to his cheek and look at him with large bewildered eyes and confuse the hell out of him. He doesn't even know her name.