Storm exited my bed so swiftly that Beastie yelled in surprise as she dropped off his lap. She hissed to show her displeasure. As Storm looked around for his shoes, I made one last ploy to find out what he was hiding.
“Come on, Storm. If you don’t tell me what is going on with you then I will just end up dreaming it. You know I will.”
This wasn’t entirely true. I couldn’t control my visions and dreams or what messages the wordless psychic song of the world chose to send my way. My psychic ability had almost never shown me anything to do with the lives of the people I actually knew and cared about. This was a very frustrating fact, and one that Storm didn’t need to know about.
Storm had found his shoes and was pulling them on.
“Well?” I said, going to plant myself firmly between him and the door. This brought to me within touching distance of him. He put his hands on my waist and firmly guided me sideways so that he could reach the coat rack on the back of my door. Seeing that his jacket was not there, he looked towards my couch. It was not there either.
“You’ve got me intrigued now,” I said. “You might as well tell me because I never give up once I am intrigued. I’ll be making sure to have as many dreams of you as possible from now on.”
I shouldn’t have goaded him like this, but I sensed that if he didn’t spill it now than he wouldn’t spill it ever. And how was I supposed to help him if he wouldn’t spill it?
Storm had spotted his jacket. It was on the small table near my window that I used as both my dining table and my desk. It was right on top of the files that I had left there yesterday evening, and which I had completely forgotten to put away.
Before I could stop him, Storm picked up his jacket. As he began to put it on, his eyes fell onto the files. He froze with one arm in his jacket and one arm out. I winced. I wasn’t supposed to take the files out of the office, and this situation was worse than that.
As he picked the files up, I went over to snatch them from him. Or I would have, if he’d let go. He held onto them with an iron grip, damn him.
“What the hell is this?” he said.
“Look, I know I am not supposed to bring files home—” I began.
He interrupted me. “I’ve been gone from the office for less than a week, and already you’re breaking the rules?”
My attempts to ease the files out of his hands only made him more interested in them. As his eyes dropped downwards, I gave a sharp tug. Naturally this made matters worse. The files spilled onto the ground, and all of the contents fell out. Case notes, photos, autopsy reports. Everything.
“Darn it! Look what you’ve done!” I chided him.
Now Storm could see exactly what they were and his faced turned dark as thunder. “What the hell?” he muttered. He crouched to rifle through the papers.
“I was going to tell you,” I said. “Maybe.”
He scowled up at me. “Maybe?”
“Ah, you know. On a needs to know basis. If you needed to know, then I would have told you.”
I gave him a cheeky grin. Maybe it was the irascible supposed Angel of Death in me that was making me enjoying this so much. Not that I had been able to confirm if I was the Angel of Death or not. Theo’s magic spell had been supposed to combine the two warring separated sides of my personality, but I had also hoped it would cure me of my amnesia. It had not. There was still a big blank spot in my head where my memories of the first fifteen years of my life should have been.
Storm snatched up the files and waved them at me. “What the hell is this, Diana? These are not the files I gave you.”
“Aww. There’s no point being upset.” I batted my lashes at him. “I was bored with the ones you gave me. There was only one good one and I have been investigating that one. I swear. But if you really want me to close cold cases you should let me look at absolutely everything in the archives, don’t you think?”
He waved the top file at me, probably the most forbidden of these files. I had kept coming back to this one over and over these past few days. It’s song had been a persistent and irksome thrum, jibing at me that it was important. Storm looked very annoyed to find it in my possession.
“This one is not a cold case,” he said. “It’s a closed case.”
I took it from him and opened it up. “See this file is a weird one. Half the contents are missing. Where are they gone? And I couldn't even find a mugshot of the suspect, this Steffane Ronin guy—”
“What do you mean, they’re gone?”
“They’re gone. Absent. Incomplete. When I found the file it was mostly empty. There isn't even a log of it on the computer system. Isn’t that weird?”
Storm frowned. He tried to take the file from me but I held onto it. “That’s unexpected right?” I insisted.
He unwrapped my fingers from the file in order to remove it from my grip. I rather enjoyed the feeling. He was much stronger than me, and annoyingly it wasn’t long before I was forced to surrender. In other circumstances I think I would have enjoyed surrendering to him, if only he’d make use of those other circumstances.
“I’ll look into it,” he said grimly.