Heart and Soul (Shayne Davies #3) - Jackie May Page 0,2

go at this hard, and he won’t stop until he finds that black chin. Brenner will throw himself at this the only way he knows how: all caution to the wind, a bull in a china shop. My anxious butterflies scoff. More like, china in a bull shop. A human doesn’t belong in the underworld. He’ll be crushed. You can’t possibly keep him.

“I know,” I say to both the butterflies and Brenner, “I know, you want to jump on this—”

“Let’s go to the Agency.”

I grasp both sides of his collar, as though jerking on a dog’s leash. “We will.”

“Let’s go.”

“No, but—”

“This changes everything. Henry Stadther was hiding this. He knew something about those revenants.”

There, Brenner’s just given me an inch. I’ll take a mile. “Exactly! He knew something, and now he’s dead, Jay. Do you know how hard it is to kill a master vampire? Do you have any idea how long he’s lived? It’s…this is huge. Whatever happened, it’s a kick to the hornet’s nest. All the most powerful underworlders in Detroit will rampage for better positions on the food chain. Trust me, we don’t want any part of that.”

“What, so we do nothing?”

I shake my head. “No, I’m saying that this is way bigger than us, so we have to play the table, not the cards.”

Sighing, Brenner leans his head back against the wall, obviously frustrated to hear yet another of my endless poker analogies, or metaphors, or whatever the hell they are. I have to suppress a sigh myself. This is such a perfect moment for me to slug him in the shoulder and call him a jerk, even though on the inside I’m thrilled that Brenner finally feels comfortable enough to be exasperated by my bullshit. It’s such a real boyfriend moment.

“This is high stakes, Jay,” I explain. “Lots of players in the game. We’ve got a seat at the table, but we’re small fry. Everybody else has a way bigger stack of chips than us. We make one mistake, we’re out. So we hold our cards, and we wait.”

Brenner throws his hands up. “Wait?”

“Stay out of the crossfire,” I continue. “Play the table. Let the big stacks knock each other out. They’ll do most of the work for us. Some of those big stacks are on our side. The Agency is working on this.”

“Are they, though? We haven’t heard a thing.”

“A rogue necromancer creating revenant vampires? That’s top of the pile, trust me.”

“We should be working it. I don’t care what they say.”

“I’m not saying we won’t. I want to nail those bastards as much as you do.” I tug on his collar to emphasize my words. It’s such a fine line I have to walk on this issue. We both want the same thing. Our reasons, however, are very different.

Gently, Brenner pulls my hands from his collar. “It’s mine, Shayne.”

I’ve heard this before. On this subject, I know better than to fight him, even if I disagree. “I know.”

His eyes kindle with an iron will. “When we get to it, they’re mine for the killing. It has to be me.”

Well, I might have passed on the opportunity to revel in his real boyfriend moment, but I simply cannot deny myself a real girlfriend moment, so I lay the guilt on real thick when I say, “Right, it has to be you, even if that means getting yourself killed. Because it’s either you or them, right?”

Brenner eyes me cautiously, wary of a trap. “That’s right.”

Too easy. His ass is mine. “Oh, that’s right, huh? It’s you”—I poke him hard in the chest, my voice dripping with contempt—“or it’s them?” I turn my palms up. “Nobody else?”

Brenner exhales, breaking eye contact with me.

Now that the advantage is won, I soften my voice. “I get how important this is. You blame yourself. You think you owe a debt. Here’s the thing. The person you think you owe…I’m sorry she’s gone. But I’m not. I’m right here, Jay. For me, it’s not either you or them.” I pull his chin toward me, so I can look into his eyes. “It has to be you that comes out of this. I don’t care about them.”

The air crackles between us. My heart soars with the intimacy of the moment. At last, after what seems like a lifetime, I’ve finally satisfied a small part of my aching need to make Brenner understand what he means to me.

In response, he says something I’ll never forget. Pulling his face away from my fingers,