Nocturne | ONC 2024

Three: Small Talk

It got more awkward. He had no idea how it had become more awkward.

The staff behind the coffee shop counter were casting them strange looks across the room; mostly at Nikolai, who couldn't have looked more out of place in the yellowed artificial light, surrounded by counters of pastries and the debris from earlier customers. A coffee cup sat untouched by his hand, bought, Aaron suspected, for appearances only. The vampire played absently with the small bag of fur collected from the site with his other hand, expression brooding. Aaron hadn't insisted on heading back to the scene to hand it into forensics; logging it once they got to the station would have to do.

The man didn't seem remotely in the mood to talk, but the silence was making Aaron fidgety. He wasn't the small talk type himself, but Nikolai's silence was so oppressive, and with such an air of strained patience, that he had to open his big mouth and break it.

"Any ideas?" he said, nodding to the bag. "You think it was one of them? Against that group?" They were the only ones in the shop apart from the staff, but with Nikolai sitting next to him, still as a statue and wearing sunglasses inside at 5am, it felt faintly ridiculous to be dancing around the subject.

"It's possible, if they came up against a Kennel. Or a Bloodhounder."

Aaron swallowed hard. The vamp gangs were the worst he had to deal with in his day to day job, but the werewolf Kennels weren't much better, and certainly not when the two joined forces. He'd had dealings with a couple of Bloodhounders, gangs created when a small vamp coven and a small werewolf Pack teamed up to claim territory they couldn't win otherwise, and in his experience they brought out the worst in each other.

This whole thing was making early retirement sound appealing, which wasn't something he ever thought he'd be saying at twenty-nine.

"If you want help with this paperwork, Evans, you might want to hurry it up." The bag vanished back into some hidden pocket, and Nikolai's gaze was trained on the first streaks of colour showing in the sky over the rooftops. Aaron cursed himself for an idiot. Dawn. Right.

"I need you to sign in at the station and fill in anything that you got from that scene, and we need to talk to Bill," he said, but with a sigh added, "We could do that tomorrow, I guess."

Nikolai looked at the coffees between them.

He stifled another sigh. At least he'd got caffeine out of this, even if his new work partner had disengaged from the entire point of the exercise before they'd even left the scene. "I'll walk with it."

Nikolai twitched slightly as they left the shop, even though the sun was barely high enough for Aaron to see by. To his surprise, the vampire had brought his coffee with him when he left, despite not touching it once. He held the cup loosely in one gloved hand, as if he wasn't familiar with such a thing.

"You didn't have to get one," Aaron said, "I'd have been fine with taking out."

Nikolai glanced at him, then away again. His fingers tightened slightly on the cup.

Aaron figured it was about time he shut his mouth.

-

"So the new partner's an arsehole. Can't you ask for a reassignment?"

"It's not that easy, Dad," Aaron sighed, rubbing a hand across five-day stubble. After several night shifts in a row, getting out of bed of an evening was enough of an effort without bothering to try and make himself look better than he felt on the inside.

His father stared at him from across the room, the teacup in his hand in danger of slipping from his grasp. A deep furrow of concern marred his brow, and he didn't even know the half of it.