Gregor

“Hey Detective Morales, what do you have for us?” We walked into Detective Marcy Morales’ office after she messaged me to let me. She had some information for Xavior and me about the bicycle thefts.

“Hey there, Detective Lyndon. Brantley. I’ve got a treat for you today. Pull up some seats,” Marcy said. She was a technomancer with the cybercrimes department. I almost envied her laid back style. She was dressed in a t-shirt, hoodie, jeans, and sneakers. Xavior wore a polo and jeans with sneakers. They looked comfortable and professional, while I was in a white button-up, tie, and black slacks feeling like I was barely presentable.

We grabbed seats and sat on either side of Marcy’s impressive desk full of gear. The long braid of brown hair swished along her back as she got herself organized again. Marcy made a hand gesture that pulled an image up on her local display. She used the same hand to throw that image to a larger display behind her desk.

“Okay. Here are all of the bicycles and their last locations. Blue are privately owned bikes with tracers or trackers of some kind. Orange are the city-owned bikes with trackers on them,” she nodded up at the hundreds of dots on the screen.

“When we tried to trace the bikes to see if they reconnected with the local network, I didn’t find anything,” Marcy was smiling, so I knew there was something else she’d found. “But when I expanded out to other networks, I started finding connection failures. Because of how the system works, the bikes stop working once they leave the network for an extended period of time. There are other bike networks, but since these don’t match any profiles in those systems, they’re seen as errors.”

She made another expanding hand gesture that broadened the visual radius out to encompass the western part of the country. “When I match the failure IDs in the other systems with our missing bike list, we get this.”

The map lit up with bikes hundreds of miles away from the Bay City area. She spread the map out even further, and there were bikes as far away as the east coast. I sat there in mild shock, wondering how we’d ever get that many bicycles back to the city. They’d have to hire someone to magically transport them.

Xavior was staring at the map, head moving from one cluster of bikes to another. Something had caught his interest. “Can you isolate clusters of bikes? Bring up locations from where they disappeared, and coordinate to where they ended up?”

“Sure, give me a few minutes,” Marcy said. Her deft hands made patterns in the air that looked like a combination of typing and spell work.

“What are you thinking?” I asked Xavior.

“If I’m right, this is going to be a public relations problem. I don’t think anyone stole the bikes. I think most of them are misplaced,” Xavior said with a hint of a smile on his lips.

I wondered why he would find a public relations problem funny. I shrugged and looked at him with a slight grimace, about to ask a question when Marcy finished her query.

“Here you are, Detective Brantley,” She said. “Oh, wow. Look at that.” There were clusters around the city, and those clusters matched other collections all over the country.

“It’s the fae,” Xavior said with some confidence.

I looked at him even more curious. “How do you know it’s the fae?” I asked.

“They have a network of passages they can use. Tunnels that don’t exist in this space-time. It lets them travel long distances in a short amount of time. Jordan took me through one once when we were trying to avoid some fans of his. We were in Manhattan in less than thirty minutes.”

I’m sure I had a mild look of awe on my face. “Why isn’t this common knowledge?” I asked. And who’s Jordan? I thought. The obvious conclusion would be that Jordan was likely a fae, but that only made me more curious.

“It is, for fae. Only fae can access the paths. The entrances and exits change every so often. No one bothers to learn where they are since they move. The fae can find them by instinct. However, this seems to identify some of the entries and exits. Or at least where they used to be. It appears walking through the tunnels has become mundane for the fae.”

“You’re saying the fae are taking the bikes through their passage system, and when the bikes stop working or the entrance locations change, they end up abandoned?”

Xavior nodded, “Yeah, pretty much. I recognized the location of one of the clusters. I’m somewhat guessing on the rest of them, but I would bet one of my very expensive sports cars on my hypothesis.”

“Why bicycles, though? They could use vehicles or motorcycles,” I said.

“Well, the passages aren’t big enough for a vehicle, and they could use a motorcycle, but electronic things don’t do very well in those passages. As bikes are mechanical, for the most part, they would be faster than walking, but wouldn’t likely break down in the passages,” Xavior stated.

“How do you know so much about these passages?” It hadn’t sounded like he’d only been through them once. His sly smile had me raising my eyebrows at him, and Xavior laughed.

“Can you send us these images, Detective Morales? We’ll need to show the captain so he can get in touch with the right representatives from the city.” Xavior got a nod from Marcy, and that was that.

I shook my head at Xavior and shrugged. He was right, the PR would be tricky, but thankfully, we wouldn’t have to deal with it.

“Sure. I’ll have it in your inboxes in a few minutes.”

“Thanks, Detective.” We put our seats back where we got them and went to tell Captain Lang that he would need to call a city meeting to let the different area and cultural representatives know what happened to all of the missing bikes.

“You think the fae will help bring the bikes back?” I asked Xavior.

“Probably. If one of the fae exits jumped, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to them to go back to the other location or that the bikes couldn’t be picked up by someone else. Plus, whoever designed the system probably never expected the bikes to leave the hundred-mile radius of the city the bikes originated from.”

Xavior and I celebrated by taking a couple of the bikes out for a spin to the local bar to grab a couple of beers. When we sat down and ordered a couple of appetizers to go with the drinks, I finally asked the question that had been rattling around in my brain since he brought it up.

“So who’s Jordan? Are they going to be upset that you told us about the passages?”

“Jordan? No, he won’t be upset. I doubt any fae would be really since only fae can enter them. The passages are akin to a dragon’s den. They don’t exist in this reality. It takes a dragon to access a den, like it takes a fae to access the passages. I could maybe find a fae passage, but I probably wouldn’t be able to get into it.”

“No one’s ever accidentally found themselves in these passages?” I was still curious about Jordan, but I didn’t want to pry yet.

“I suppose it’s possible, though if someone did accidentally encounter and enter a passage, it’s likely because they have enough fae ancestry for the passage to recognize them as fae.”

“Jordan is fae then?” I shouldn’t be so obsessed, but besides Vanessa, Xavior hadn’t talked about anyone else he’d been with. I was torn between wanting to know and avoiding it altogether. I was afraid of how it would make me feel to learn more about his private life, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Oh yeah, Jordan is fae. You couldn’t mistake him for anything else.” Xavior pulled out his phone, played with it for a minute, then turned it toward me. He showed me a picture of him standing with a tall fae, with long, brown hair, chiseled features, and it hit me that I recognized him. Not only recognized him, but anyone else that saw the picture would recognize him too.

“You’ve dated Jordan Gohansberg, the CEO of MajicMovies? Is this at a movie premiere?” I was floored and definitely felt like I was out of my depth. Vanessa was a high profile attorney, so it made complete sense that Xavior would date a CEO. He probably had a whole portfolio of beautiful, famous, and high profile people he’d dated.

“Yeah, it was for some kind of space adventure or some such. And dated is a strong word. Jordan and I have attended events together over the years. I invested in his company when he first started it. Besides that, the sex is outstanding.”

I nearly spit my mouth full of beer across the table. I sputtered and tried to regain my composure as Xavior laughed and tossed napkins at me.

“You gotta lighten up, Lyndon,” He laughed.

“I wasn’t expecting… well, not that anyway.” I took another drink and tried to swallow past the lump in my throat. I realized whatever fantasy I had entertained about Xavior was just that. I couldn’t measure up, which was a ridiculous thought altogether because I was with Keith, and none of that should matter.

“Fae are pretty exciting in bed; if you ever get the chance. I definitely recommend it,” Xavior said.

I shook my head and chuckled. He was right. I needed to lighten up. We were co-workers, and we could be friends. Friends should be able to talk about their lives.

Xavior took another drink, then looked at me. “You never told me how you and Keith met.”

I hadn’t thought about it in a while, and remembering it warmed me from the inside out and reminded me why I was with Keith, to begin with.

“You’re smiling. It must be pretty good,” Xavior said.

“We were working a traffic accident together. Keith was on the bus that showed up while I was directing traffic and helping with clean up. No one was hurt too much. Scrapes and bruises mostly. I picked up a piece of glass or something jagged, and it went through my glove. Cut the crap outta my hand. I walked over to his bus for some skin glue and a bandage, and he proceeded to dote over me and my tiny cut for thirty minutes. His driver was snickering at us the whole time. As I was about to go back to work, he gave me his number and asked me out.

“Our first date was the same movie you went to the premiere for with Jordan. He hated it, and I was a nerd about it the entire time. We went for ice cream after that and decided we wanted to go out again. Our second date was a picnic in perfect Fall weather. We moved in together about six months later and have been together since.”

I watched as Xavior nodded. “That’s fucking adorable. Based on when the movie was released, you two have been together five years?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Are you two thinking about little Lyndon’s yet?”

I was, but I wasn’t sure Keith had family in mind. “We bought a house together a year ago. We’re still fixing it up. It’s got three bedrooms, two baths. So I’m hopeful.” It didn’t directly answer his question, but it let him think what he wanted, even with doubts, which I’m sure he could smell. Xavior nodded though I caught an odd smile on his face.

“Speaking of boyfriends and home improvements, I should probably get going.”

“I’ve got the tab this time. See you tomorrow?”

“Yep,” I said as I got up. “Night, Brantley.”

“Night, Lyndon.”

We heard later that when all the city and cultural representatives saw the data, they looked shocked—the representative from the fae most of all. A community notice went out later that asked folks who used the bicycles to be aware of the difference between private and public bikes, along with the request to not leave the city with the bike. It was suggested that if they did, they either alerted the service where they left the bike or brought the bike back to its origin city. The rate of bicycles disappearing slowed down to one or two a month, which made everyone happy.

We were building a reputation for solving cases. I liked that, certainly, but with the recognition, we’d likely get more difficult cases, which meant that I would be putting Xavior in more danger.

While we worked well as a team, I knew we probably shouldn’t work together anymore. My instincts between protecting Xavior and wanting to be near him were warring with each other. He’d probably tell me I was ridiculous, but I couldn’t help but feel conflicted and a little selfish. If something happened to him that I could have prevented, it would break me.