Most of Joey’s day off was spent catching up on long-overdue sleep. When he wasn’t sleeping, though, he was thinking about the conversation he’d had with Caden. Everything made so much more sense now: Caden keeping his identity a secret, his intentions in joining the team. It didn’t totally exonerate him from what Joey saw as crossing a boundary—had Caden been planning to steal the watch?—but his reasons went a long way toward explaining his motivations.

Their interaction in the alley, though…what had Joey been thinking, touching Caden’s face like that? Caden brought things out of Joey that he had never done or said before. When had he gotten so bold?

He couldn’t say that he’d fully forgiven Caden, but it was a relief to know the truth. Caden hadn’t taken advantage of Joey while he was keeping his secrets.

After a full day of lazing about at home, Joey was a bit more bright-eyed when he made it back to work the following day. It seemed a bad idea to tell anyone he’d talked to Caden, so he kept mum, but everyone commented on the change in his demeanor.

“Just how many ‘Z’s did you catch?” asked Mac that morning between sips of over-sugared coffee. “You look like a whole new person.”

Joey shrugged. “Just feeling better, I guess. No…particular reason.”

“Shoulder’s fixed?”

“Rest did it good, probably.”

It was just Joey and Frankie on Joey’s first gig of the day. Mac and Indira went out as another team this time, because apparently Mac wanted Joey and Frankie to get over their cold war.

It wasn’t working. Frankie tried to chatter with Joey on their way to the assignment, but Joey just couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Maybe he’d be more willing to talk to Frankie if she were at all apologetic about her attitude, but she’d dug in. While she didn’t bring Caden up in conversation, the topic loomed over the pair of them like a storm cloud.

Maybe if Frankie hadn’t been so vicious towards people of Caden’s…species…then Caden would have felt comfortable telling the whole team why he’d faked his papers. Maybe Mac could have helped work something out about the watch. Maybe Caden could have told them the truth a lot sooner and Joey could hold his hand about it.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Frankie pulled the van into a parking lot of a medical center with a crowd of people milling around outside. Joey and Frankie had gotten the van because train passengers got upset if you went around with duffle bags full of weapons on the El. Mac at least could hide his bow and arrows in a guitar case; any bag with Frankie’s weapons in it had spikes poking out the sides.

A doctor in the crowd had spotted them pulling in and correctly assumed their identities, so she hustled forward to meet them. “You’re here to help?” she asked, eyes reflecting panic even through her calm demeanor. “I’m Doctor Archer.”

Frankie shook the doctor’s hand. Dr. Archer glanced at the machete on Frankie’s hip, then looked back up into Frankie’s face. “Hey, doc’,” greeted Frankie. “We heard there’s something loose in your clinic?”

“Several somethings,” Dr. Archer informed them. “There’s just the two of you?”

Throwing a look Joey’s way, Frankie said, “We’re enough.”

Several months ago, Frankie might not have said that. A little burst of pride shot through Joey’s chest. He may have been mad at Frankie, but he realized he still valued her opinion, at least about work stuff.

“The doors are locked,” Dr. Archer was saying. “I’ll beep you in. Last I saw one of them, it was in the MRI suite.”

The clinic was mostly quiet once they were inside, but there were faint growling noises coming from down the hall. Without speaking, Joey and Frankie followed the signage on the walls to the MRI room. The growling grew louder as they approached, until it was clear that Dr. Archer had been right about the location of at least one of their quarries.

Standard procedure had Joey going first to assess the situation, so he cracked the door to get a look. Behind the door was a hellhound tearing at a pillow from a stand next to the MRI table. The hellhound didn’t notice the door opening and Joey just stared at it for a moment, then before he really thought it through, dug his phone out of his pocket and snapped a picture.

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“What was that for?” asked Frankie when Joey had gently closed the door once more. “Something special you wanna show me?”

Joey flashed the photo at her briefly. In it, the hellhound almost looked like a normal dog, albeit an unnatural color, jaw pulling at the pillow while its paw held it to the floor. “Just nostalgic for my first gig.”

A crease in her brow, Frankie asked, “For getting your arm almost bitten off?”

Unable to come up with another explanation, Joey just shrugged. He wasn’t going to tell her what he planned to do with the photo.

Dropping her duffle bag, Frankie unzipped it and sorted through the weapons inside, finally drawing out the source of the spikes: a baseball bat with giant nails hammered through it. Joey hadn’t seen this one before. “You’re going to get blood all over the MRI suite,” he pointed out.

“Let me have my fun.” Frankie grinned at him but Joey looked away. “I’ll get it in the corner and you Box it. Good?”

Meeting her eye again, Joey nodded. He remembered from last time with a hellhound that his brush wouldn’t work to hold it. Frankie stood at the door, counted down from three with her fingers, then flung the door wide and charged through with a battle cry.

It went just as she said: she cracked the hellhound upside the head with her spiked bat, sending blue blood and saliva flying, then backed the thing up behind the enormous MRI. Joey ran up behind her and reaching around, deftly flicked the Box open. Within seconds the hellhound was trapped, Box warming in Joey’s hand.

“Okay?” said Frankie. Neither of them was breathing hard.

Honestly, it was amazing how far Joey had come in such a relatively short time; just a few months and he had a handle on most situations. When business had kicked up so high that he’d been going out alone with Mac, he’d been nervous about being on a team of two. Now he’d found a strong center of himself that he hadn’t known before that allowed him to remain (mostly) calm in this type of dangerous situation.

“Yeah, fine,” he answered Frankie, and they returned to the hallway to search for the rest of the creatures.

They were proceeding warily down the hallway towards the physical therapy center when Frankie spoke again.

“Look,” she began, and she sounded so solemn that Joey did turn to her, confused. “I know I was a dick. About the gobl—about Caden.” There was a sound of crashing down a hallway to the right, so they both walked in that direction, but Joey slowed down a little to give Frankie time to talk.

This was an apology he definitely couldn’t miss.

“You know, if that’s its—his name.”

“What were you a dick about?” Joey prompted after she was silent for a moment.

She cursed under her breath. “Okay, it was my wife who told me I was being a dick.” Abruptly, she stopped walking and turned to face Joey, who followed her lead and stopped as well. “She likes to ask me hypotheticals, like ‘would you still love me if I was a worm’, stuff like that. Most of the time it’s funny. But I told her about what happened at work that day, all pissed off, right?, yesterday. She knew something was up with me but I didn’t want to talk about it until then. Then she asked me ‘would you still love me if I were a goblin?’”

Joey had been watching Frankie, but now he directed his gaze at the carpeted floor of the clinic hallway.

There was the sound of Frankie taking several deep breaths, each time as if she were about to speak but couldn’t figure out what to say. Finally, she continued, “I thought about it for an entire hour while we made dinner. Because I love my wife, you know I’m crazy about my wife. And I remember what you said that day after we met with the werewolf, you remember? About how I wouldn’t act that way about black people. And like, I’m not white either, Aotearoa is really racist, too, so like, I know, I really knew deep down. And what is my problem?

“It’s that I’m scared,” she said quietly. “I was scared of someone who’s not like me.” Her voice turned hard, then. “But he lied, bro. And that’s not okay.” Joey finally looked up at her again, and her small frame was braced, knees bent, feet apart, red duffle over her shoulder and shirt and bat splashed with blue blood.

Inhaling sharply through his nose, Joey finally returned, “Can you really blame him for lying about who he is?”

Frankie cursed again, shifting her weight. “Like I said, I was a dick.”

“I didn’t hear an apology in there.”

“I’m sorry, damn, man,” she said, turning to look down the hallway, clearly uncomfortable. “And I know you liked him, so I’m—sorry about that, too.”

There was a long pause. “Thanks,” he said, finally.

“Whatever,” Frankie dismissed. “Let’s go trap hellhounds, Jesus.”

The rest of the gig was actually fairly simple, though some exercise balls were destroyed in the physical therapy room and Joey’s jeans also got sprayed with blue blood—damn, hopefully that would come out in the wash. Whatever, he had a Tide pen. Dr. Archer agreed to send their invoice to the right people and ushered the group of patients and doctors standing in the cold back into the clinic.

When Joey and Frankie were back in the van on the way to their next assignment, Joey surreptitiously pulled out his phone. Caden’s contact was still ‘Lying Liar who Lies’, so Joey changed it to Caden’s name, then sent along the picture of the hellhound.

Thinking of you.

After a moment, the reply came through.

🤣

Joey smiled at his phone and tucked it away.