Heart of Glass [manxman]

Chapter Thirteen

"You're quiet this evening," Louis said, breaking what had been almost a half-hour long silence.

I looked up from the stove, noticing him watching me, head cocked from the sofa. I shrugged, looking back at the pot of noodles I'd been stirring. "Not much to say." Actually, I was still testing the waters. Since Monday, when we went to visit Dana, I'd more or less dropped off the radar.

There hadn't been any strategy meetings. Instead, Louis had notified everyone of the situation with Dana via email. There hadn't been any new assignments as investigative was tied up with the investigation on the apparition and the emotional tracker, as well as looking into the situation with former director Rainier. Louis had texted the Glass Hunter regularly throughout the week, as well as sent a wayward text to Alexei asking about the protective order.

I hadn't requested one, just as planned, but there'd been no signs of anything coming for me, thankfully.

Since I hadn't had much time around Louis in the last week, I hadn't had much of an opportunity to see how far along he'd gotten on the connection between the Glass Hunter and I. Regardless, I was prepared. Throughout the week, I'd worked on an astral projection spell that would put me in the clear. At the very least, it would poke some holes in Louis's theories.

Later on in the evening, my astral form would come over, knock on the door, tell Louis that the investigative team had contacted me—which, they had in order to update me on the status of Rainier, but they'd included mentions of a third assignment as well—and complain about the noise. I had a paper with the words the form would say and when it was ripped, the form would come and proceed to dispel any suspicions Louis had about my identity. If Louis happened to go off my assumed script, there was also a nifty little charm I had in my pocket that could be activated to change what the form was to say. Instead of it following a script, it would say whatever I mouthed, allowing it to respond to Louis believably.

It took a lot of magic and wasted a lot of resources, but it was the most realistic astral form I'd seen from a spell, so it would be worth it.

Until then, though, I had to figure out how to make noise. If things went my way and we ended up with a repeat similar to last week, I could moan a little louder, something that would actually prompt me to come over and bang on Louis's door to bitch about noise. Minor things, like a dropped pan or door slamming typically didn't irritate me as much as they made me want to file a nasty complaint to the housing department about building thicker walls.

"Demon got your tongue?"

I snorted. "If they couldn't even break my arm, they certainly couldn't get to my tongue." I looked away, staring at the oven, sliding over a few inches to chop up more peppers as another silence began to settle in. I was trying to get comfortable, trying to lose myself a little in the monotony of cooking, while also ignoring the intensity of Louis's gaze.

Ever since I'd arrived, he'd watched me, studying me, waiting to see what I would do or how I moved. Connections, searching for more pieces of evidence to link the Glass Hunter and Alexei. Despite so many pieces already resurfacing, so many details that added up, he was missing definitive evidence. There was no way to prove that another Hunter at the academy didn't have a similar past to mine. There was no way to certainly say what the tracker had alluded to while he was threatening me. For all Louis knew, my past with Rainier still bothered me; I was a prominent Hunter during my time Hunting alone, pre-Aquireign; there were other possibilities other than the fact that I was the Glass Hunter.

Seeing the soulmark, Louis finding his own dog tags in my apartment, removing my mask, those were all things that would confirm it, without a shadow of a doubt. Anything less, and I had room to manipulate it, so it was no longer a possibility.