“Where were you on the night of the 21^st?”

There are a series of set questions that I can fall back on, and even in circumstances such as these, I can still perform my job. He’s my soulmate, yes, but I still have my mind. Or at least I do right now. Who knows what will happen with prolonged exposure?

I’ve never met another one of my kind in person, communicating through letters exclusively, and this topic is taboo for us. I am in unknown waters.

“At the funeral parlour. My Book of Names has no one listed for collection on that day. I can only assume then, that I was where I am supposed to be.”

“Assume? You mean you don’t know?”

“I have lived a long and eventful life, Special Agent Hedge. I do not recall what happens on every night of it.” Henry adjusts himself on the chair to cross one leg over the other. He looks completely relaxed. There’s no tension in him.

He’s either innocent or one of the most proficient liars I’ve ever met.

“I need you to remember this night though, Mr. Thistle. It’s very important that we know if you were anywhere in the Midbrook area on the night of the 21^st.” I lean forward on the table, my elbows taking my weight.

The more engrossed I get in the interrogation, the more I feel like myself again. More in control. Something to focus on that is outside myself.

“Am I going to need a lawyer, Special Agent Hedge?” Henry asks, his tone light as a breeze. “Because this doesn’t seem like you are taking a statement. It sounds like I am being accused.”

I take a deep breath.

“Mr. Thistle, if you have nothing to hide, then you have no need of- “

“It is the Angel Killer, is it not?” Henry interrupts me. “Terrible business that he hasn’t been caught yet. But my job is in treating the corpses of those who were once alive. Not creating them.”

It is the most I have got from him so far and there is some victory in that.

“What do you know about the Angel Killer?” I ask, at war with myself.

If Henry turns out to be the killer and implicates himself, I’ve won my case and I’ll get a murderer off the streets. In the process, I’ll be sending us both to death row. Dragons do not outlive their soulmates.

“Two of the boys killed were brought to me to tend to,” Henry replies. “Walnut casket for Eshpea, the flowers were begonias. A simple pine coffin for Rhanis. No flowers. The family were not well-off and could not afford to send him off in the same style.”

So, he has a photographic memory for those details, but not his whereabouts?

“You’re familiar with the case then. And what was done to them?”

Henry does the most ordinary thing I’ve seen him do yet. He runs a hand through his hair. It slides through his fingers like strands of silk, slipping back into place like he’s done nothing. But it was a sign of distress. A tell of some description. Of what though?

“I saw the marks on their bodies. A terrible thing. They were young fairies, barely out of their adolescence. They met a terrible fate,” Henry drops his hand back into his lap. “All I could do was ensure that their loved ones could help them pass onto the next life without the possibility of them coming back.”

Does he feel remorse or pity? I can’t tell. His eyes are no longer looking directly at me, but at a space between us on the table. Even if they were, they are nothing more than onyx pits, devoid of anything readable.

I cannot discern if he is telling the truth or covering his lie.

“Before you tended the bodies, did you have any connection to the victims?”

Henry looks up, and there’s now wry smile on his face. “There is not a fairy in the realm I do not have a connection to. For I have tended their fathers, their grandfathers, their great-grandfathers, all the way back through their ancestors. In a way, I am the one constant in all fairies’ lives, in the end.”

I swallow.

“Did you tend my parents?”

Damn. Personal question. Unprofessional. Not allowed. It shouldn’t have slipped out. Why did I-

“Hedge? Yes, I did. Nakass (31) and Myni (29) Hedge died at 12:46 a.m., Saturday December 30_th, 1992, from circumstances unknown,” Henry recites, and I realise it is my parents’ obituary that he has memorised. “Nakass was a lifelong resident of Midbrook. He lived with his wife and ran a small business from home dealing in antiques. He is survived by his son, Jax Hedge. He is preceded in death by-“

“That’s enough,” I say, my throat raw.

I had been barely a year old when my parents died, and with them any hope of living a normal life. Like so many soulmates, they had died instantly upon the passing of the other. No cause of death was released, no one knew which one of them had been the one to die first. They simply were gone.

And I was raised, carefully, by the Nuns at St. Ogdos the Destroyer’s Orphanage. Kept out of contact with other children. Educated through correspondence. Allowed to mature until I was old enough to make my own choice on whether to risk becoming bonded.

For all the good it appears to have done me, in the end.

“Apologies. I forget that not all share my view on death and can be upset by it.” Henry reaches forward as though to rest his hand on mine, before he thinks better and withdraws it.

“And what is your view on death, Mr. Thistle?” I ask, fighting down the memories that are bubbling inside me, fighting down the urge to take his hand across the table and hold it in my own anyway.

“That it is inevitable, final, and of great comfort to those who can experience it,” Henry looks me straight in the eye. “The only person who you can be sure will always be there for you, in the end, is me.”