Nocturne in Tears & Silver

Dorian.

You know what pisses me off more than people stealing kids?

Not a fucking thing.

I took this job pro bono, which was not something I did often.

The old lady at the corner store said she hadn’t seen one of the regular kids in a few days-- an orphan who would stop in after school every day.

She worried over him especially, compared to the other kids who frequented her shop. She knew the home he was stuck in wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination.

She said he showed up like clockwork until just recently.

Given the fact I still hadn’t gotten over my own kids going missing for a brief time thirteen years ago, I could empathize with her concerns better than most.

It didn’t take me long to verify the kid hadn’t been seen by anyone at all in days and hadn’t even been reported missing until the old woman came to me for help.

His guardians were surprised he wasn’t staying with friends, though from what I’d gathered in just a few hours, he didn’t have any friends.

Except for the old lady.

From what I could figure of his timeline, the kid vanished into thin air after school.

Even Macy’s technological magic hadn’t brought up an answer yet. A camera caught him walking away from the school but then... nothing.

Maybe he'd been grabbed, thrown in a car. The alternative was vanishing into thin air.

A lot can happen in no time at all whether you’re prepared or not. Thirteen years ago, my own kids had been kidnapped multiple times in one night and they were smart as well as reasonably prepared. More so than I’d realized until they explained what happened.

The beast protected what was his, his mate, and his children. It nearly ripped itself clear out of my skull for the chance to find the ones who had the audacity to kidnap them.

And of course, their kidnappers fled before I could track them down. Cecilia had been a mess at the time– I couldn’t have left her.

Even if the kids weren’t hurt, as parent, you could only mull over all the ways things could have gone wrong.

All these years later, it still haunted us.

The strangest thing? Neither of them were traumatized. I mean, as far as kids went, mine were fucking weird even before that.

But you’d expect a kid to be shaken, being kidnapped for an entire day. Both of them were eerily calm.

Cecilia cried more than anyone from the whole ordeal. Even bringing it up now hit a nerve.

We’d lost before. We knew what that pain felt like.

That little boy would be found. If not for the concerned woman at the corner store, for my own peace of mind.

“Hey. Asswipe. Standing there breathing down my neck won’t make anything go faster," Macy said. "And I’m going to chuck this ashtray at your gigantic fucking head.”

Macy didn’t even look up from the screen, but lifted said glass ashtray in warning.

“You know, ‘a few days’ is a long ass time to dig through footage, and some of these cameras are actually password protected.”

If I wasn’t standing behind her chair, then I was pacing.

There wasn’t anything better for me to do until we had a lead and the most solid option involved Macy hacking into cameras facing the street and going through old footage in the right time frame.

It was a race against time– most security companies erased footage after only a few weeks.

Macy was like a stray cat who had become our emotionally distant adopted child. Once her siblings were grown and no longer needed her, she seemed to fully embrace her duties as my assistant, since evolving into a full-fledged IT expert.

When standard investigation techniques fell through, Macy had usually been able to deliver with… less-than-savory methods. But, right now, everything was falling through in an infuriating way.

People I interviewed vaguely remembered the kid’s existence– but no one cared enough even to find out his name.

No friends, no family - the kid was a ghost to all but one person.

I looked at the photo of the boy that was attached by a paperclip to his file. He was smiling at the camera.

I missed when my kids were that age. I’d give anything to be ‘hunted’ by Tessa or just... talk to Paul.

The kids going to college left the house with a strange emptiness I hadn’t quite adapted to.

Maybe it was time to talk to Cecilia about having another baby. Assuming she’d ever leave her office long enough for me to ask.

We dealt with the empty nest syndrome differently. I brooded and smoked way more than I should have. She went to work and threw herself into it.

I might have been reading too much into it, but things had felt distanced between all of us: Me, Cecilia, the kids.

So… maybe a baby would bring us together again.

I’d heard people talk about pregnant women glowing– but I swear it was literal with Cecilia. The room visibly brightened when she walked in, it never got old to me. We’d never been happier than with those kids around us.

There was an unexpected peace in the chaos– and I found myself craving it again.

Fuck, since when was I so sappy?

A ball of paper bounced off my head, and ripped me out of my daydream.

“Quit with the creepy ass smile and try to get a name from that plate number," Macy said sharply. "It’s a long shot, but that vehicle slowed down shortly after the kid left the view of the last camera to catch him. If you’re really lucky, that’s the kidnapper. It’s either that or he got dragged into a building along the way and yes, before you open your fucking mouth, I’m working on a proper list of addresses in that area not covered by the cameras. So shut up.”

I hadn’t even said anything! Jesus.

“Great work, Macy.” I muttered, and uncrumpled the paper. I went for the door, grateful for a task.

I had three potentially useful contacts in the station at the moment.

Now, the problem wasn’t so much whether they’d help as whether the handful of people who hated me would hinder the situation.

There were a few who had a problem with me for professional reasons, and at least a couple who had more personal grudges.

Thus far, the worst was the police Chief, who hadn’t forgiven me even for some of my prior sexual transgressions pre-Cecilia that may or may not have involved fucking his wife.

The station’s layout hadn’t changed much over the past handful of decades, and I had an easy time ducking into corners and shadows to keep myself out of the eye of those who would rather kick me in the crotch than help me.

If it were the weekend, I’d probably have sent Tessa for this since she had more friends at the station than I did. She’d been working her way toward a job there for years with a healthy number of people cheering her on.

I didn’t see much benefit to all the red tape and restrictions, but she was determined and I wasn’t about to crush her dream.

“How’s the family?” I dropped into the empty chair across from Lieutenant Thompson and gave a lopsided smile to the momentarily startled woman.

It was one of the times being a vampire actually helped, since she was fascinated. She also adored Tessa and was most likely to bend a few tiny rules for our sake.

She smiled brightly at me as her heart rate returned to normal. “Dorian! It’s been a while since you came to say hi! Everyone’s great. How are the kids doing?”

“Too busy and refusing to come back home. They keep insisting they’re not kids anymore, too. Rude, huh?”

“Very!” She laughed and looked me over. “Now, I know you’re not here to chat about our kids. So what do you want?”

I slid the wrinkled paper to her. “Nothing big. Just need a name to check into before I go making drastic accusations that’ll get us all in trouble.”

“Ahh. It would be nice not to have you in here getting lectured again," she noted as she took the paper and looked it over.

“Lieutenant.”

My body immediately tensed at the distinct male voice behind me. I withheld a groan. Damnit. Yet another higher-up at the precinct who hated my guts.

“What are you doing?”

I didn’t need to look behind me to know it was Captain Blake.

He’d had it in for me from the day he started at the precinct, and I loathed his stupid face, his golden hair, and brooding, pissy attitude. I got enough of that from Macy.

“Oh, Captain. Sorry, Mr. DeGaste just stopped by to–”

“Chat about our kids,” I interrupted, waving a friendly hand at Blake to dismiss him. The Captain’s eyes fixed on the paper in the Lieutenant’s hands and his gaze darkened.

“I wasn’t asking you.”

I bit back a snide remark, telling myself getting into fisticuffs with a Captain would not be welcoming news to my wife. Nor would it be conducive for my kid getting a job there.

Rein it in, Dorian.

“He just needed a bit of information,” the Lieutenant said with a smile, trying to placate the man.

“Who are you going after this time?” Blake demanded, looking at me.

“Whoever’s in that car.” I said, gesturing at the paper. “A kid went missing, and that’s likely who took him. I’m on a time crunch here. The quicker I can get that information, the faster I find the kid or rule them out and keep looking.”

“I’m always blown away by your arrogance, thinking your cases are somehow more pressing than ours.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes they are,” I replied coolly, holding back a smirk.

Blake stepped into the room, and internally, I scolded myself. Fuck. Was I about to get into it with this guy?

I’d already begun working on my phone call: Sorry, honey. I did it again. Please bail me out. Would it help you to know that he started it? Also, what do you say about having another baby with your very mature husband?

Blake passed me and picked up the paper on Thompson’s desk. He looked it over, and I watched his teeth clench. He was holding back a sneer as he tossed the paper back down. “Run the plates.”

He left abruptly. Surprised, I looked at the empty door. Lieutenant Thompson was just as shocked, and her eyebrow lifted when our eyes met.

“The Captain… really doesn’t like you, Dorian.”

“No shit.”

Before long, Thompson had a name for me. The rest I could find without help and gladly went to do more digging.