Mikko Lawrence

The knocking wasn’t that of a cop, but it had a brusqueness about it that Mikko didn’t like.  Hollow, solid thuds on the fiberglass door that had been part of Mira’s contract with the living vampires.

Mikko helped Annie out of the tub before he went downstairs to deal with their unwelcome guest.  He ticked through his head about what bills they could have missed.  The electric bill wasn’t until the end of the month, and Mira had already paid it.  Water could be past due, but it was usually on a 3-month schedule, and he was pretty sure it had been paid two months ago.  He knew that internet companies didn’t warn you with an onsite tech about loss of service.  Trash was included with the taxes on the house.

Maybe Mira hadn’t paid the house taxes?  Anxiety thrummed through him, the area between his shoulder blades tightening.  They had almost lost the house to foreclosure four years before, not too long after Sloane left.  Losing Sloane’s income in the house, along with Genie and Frankie, it had almost taken the house from them.  Mikko had managed to sweet talk the tax collectors to get them a final extension so they could get together the money they needed.

He didn’t want to have to ask Arnia or Timber for help again.  That had been so fucking embarrassing.  Silently, he was grateful none of the kids were home to deal with this.  Genie and Frankie would have dropped Lina off at school before finding something to pass the time.

There was more knocking as he came down the stairs, and then he heard a familiar voice shout a curse out, the knocking stopping abruptly.

Speaking of Arnia . . . Mikko checked the eye hole, and the tension in his shoulders disappeared as he opened the door.

The man standing at the door was hunched over, wringing one hand out.  The skin on his knuckles was red, but not broken. 

He looked to be in his late thirties, but Mikko was pretty sure he was actually in his fifties or sixties.  Shifters lived a couple hundred years; they physically aged slower than humans.  Shorter than Mikko by a couple inches, Carlos was impeccably dressed in a three-piece charcoal suit with a lavender button-up and matching tie.  He stood straight, broad shoulders back—a posture that evinced quiet strength and confidence.

His black hair, peppered with grey and silver, was faded close to his ears, the top longer and falling over his broad forehead in a soft curl.  Sharp, expressive eyebrows crowded a straight, down-turned nose, both currently wrinkled in annoyance.  His skin was the color of walnuts with paler skin circling the area around his eyes and disappearing into the hairline just above his ears.  The coloring on his face came from the bear he shapeshifted into, a spectacled bear.

“What the fuck, Mikko?” he demanded.  He spoke with a slight Argentinian accent.  “What the hell is wrong with your door?”

Mikko stepped away from the door and allowed Carlos to come in.

Carlos glared at Mikko without any real heat and straightened his jacket before walking through.  The threshold let him in without a problem.  Carlos had been there many times.

“You look like a mob boss,” Mikko told him, heading for the kitchen.  “Want anything to drink?”

“Grow up in a mob family and your uncle’s an actual mob boss?  You learn how to dress like it.  Mikko, what the hell is wrong with your door?”

Mikko saw the light for the coffee was on, and the carafe was filled.  Genie or Frankie must have set it before they left.  He hadn’t noticed the smell. 

He reached to the cabinet over the coffee maker and pulled out three mugs.  As he tinkered with the coffee, he answered.  “You know Mira got the contract with the living vampires?”

“My brother-in-law helped y’all negotiate the terms.”

“Part of the contract included new doors with wards on them.  You were knocking for too long and too hard.  The wards took it as a threat and zapped you.”  Mikko had learned that the hard way when he was locked out, pounding on the door one night after everyone had gone asleep.

Carlos’s annoyance faded but didn’t fully disappear.  He ran his fingers across his red knuckles.  “¿En serio?  That’s impressive.  Guess the sanguijelas have some uses.”

Mikko nodded, going into the fridge to get milk for the coffee.  “It’s a nice security feature.  Fucked up a cop more than once.”

The annoyance disappeared entirely, and Carlos grinned, canines sharp.  “Maravilloso.”

Mikko poured the coffee out into the mugs and he offered one to Carlos.  He took it, and Mikko turned back to doctor his coffee.  “Milk or sugar?”

“Sugar.”

The sound of groaning stairs alerted Mikko to Annie coming down just before she entered the room.  “Hey, Carlos,” she said, reaching for the cup that Mikko had already made for her.  A little bit of sugar and a lot of milk for Annie.

“Annie, your hip still hurting?”

She shrugged, making a noncommittal sound.  “It’s healing.”

Carlos made a noise that told him how much he believed that but didn’t push it.

Mikko turned, handing the box of sugar to Carlos along with a spoon.  He watched in horror as Carlos filled his coffee with a truly obscene amount of sugar.  Carlos glowered, daring him to say something as he handed the sugar back, stirring in the huge lump that had to have formed at the bottom.

“Carlos, why you trying to knock our door down?” Annie asked.

That spurred Carlos and his glower changed forms.  It went from a quiet warning to actual irritation-bordering-on-anger.  “Why did you steal from Javi?”

Mikko didn’t skip a beat, tilting his head to the side in confusion.  “What?”

Carlos’s mouth thinned and he gave Mikko a flat look.  “I taught you the head-tilt-and-deny, Mikko.  You can’t play me, boludo.”

Mikko shrugged.  “I got that ring pawned.  Didn’t steal shit from him.”  All of these items were technically true.

“And the deaf girl that was with you?  Arguably, the best thief out of all y’all?”

“Did he tell you what was stolen?” Mikko asked.

Carlos raised one of his sharp eyebrows.  The man had to have had his own threading kit or something.  They were so precise and severe.  “Some piece of jewelry.”

“A necklace,” Mikko corrected him.  “One that used to belong to Mira before I pawned it five years ago.”

Carlos blinked.  They were all closer to Carlos’s wife, Arnia, and her brother, Amos, than they really were to Carlos.  Mikko didn’t know if Carlos knew about that particular portion of his history.

Then again, in their circles, and the way that Mikko said it—he could probably read between the lines.

And he did.  “One of her grandmother’s?”

Mikko nodded, keeping his expression neutral.  He didn’t want to show Carlos the shame he felt even talking about how the necklace had gotten into Javier’s shop.  “I offered to buy it off him.  He said no.  I didn’t even know what had happened until after we left.”

“Where is it now?”

“Far away.  Mira took it with her on a business trip.  It’s not even in this state.”

Carlos huffed out a sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose.  “Ay, he’s going to be pissed with me.  I vouched for you guys.”

“He tried to rip us off anyway!” Mikko argued, setting his coffee down.  “I gave him a diamond ring retailing for nine grand.  He tried to give me two hundred and fifty dollars.”

Carlos paused.  “He did what?”

“Yeah—thank God I know how to check if it’s real, but it was fucked, man.  I’m surprised ain’t nobody stolen from him before.  He’s a cheapshit liar.”

The impeccable eyebrows went from scrunched and annoyed to high on his forehead, a quiet anger kindling in his dark eyes.  “Well, that changes this entirely, don’t it?”

Mikko raised an eyebrow, but Annie was the one to speak.  “Do it?”

Carlos rubbed his chin, day old stubble pushing against his fingers as he did.  “If I thought he’d rip you off, I’d’a made sure his business failed.”  He grinned, all the mischief from the earlier smile, when he heard about the cop getting hurt, gone.  Malice replaced it.

Carlos downed the rest of his coffee, wiping his mouth off on the back of his hand.  “Alright.  I’ll make him go away.  But maybe next time, give me a heads up?  Wasn’t nice being blindsided with a pissed-off Luis this morning.”  Luis was Carlos’s brother.  “Javi called him screaming last night.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said without any real commitment, earning an eye roll from Carlos.  Mikko couldn’t really find himself feeling any sort of way about it.  Carlos dealt with much worse on a daily basis than an angry jackass like Javier. 

“Alright,” Carlos said, setting his mug down.  “Let’s go.”

Mikko and Annie exchanged confused glances.  “Go where?”

“Timber told me that if I saw you limping again, I had to take you to the doctor.”

Annie protested.  “No, it’s okay.  We were going to the free clinic anyway.”

“No seas boluda.  You’ll be stuck there for eight hours if you go.  Waste of a perfectly good day.  I’ll take you to my doctor.”

“A mob doctor,” Mikko said flatly.

“Nah, a regular doctor.  He owes me a favor anyway.  And I owe y’all for dogsitting Bennie this summer.  Makes us all even.”

Bennie, or Benito, was Carlos’s giant Dogo Argentino (a breed Mikko only knew because of how obsessed Carlos was with his dog).  He was a huge, white beast of a canine but he was the calmest, sweetest creature.  Mikko had used him as a pillow for a nap more than once.

“We dogsat for him to repay Arnia for bailing Frankie’s ass out with a cop,” Annie said.

Carlos looked towards the ceiling, a pensive look on his face.  “No . . . that doesn’t sound right.”

“Yes, we dogsat him every weekend for four weeks to pay her back!”

Carlos shook his head.  “I mean, you repaid her, but you gave me a brand-new favor, so I gotta pay you back, too.”

That was the biggest fucking stretch that Mikko had ever heard from Carlos.  And he’d watched Carlos, a notoriously awful poker player, bluff during poker.

“Come on,” Carlos said.  “Let’s go.  If you go now, you’ll have a better idea of what’s wrong sooner, and then you can figure out a game plan from there.”

Mikko glanced at Annie again.  It was the same argument she had made earlier.

“Fine,” Annie growled.

Coincidentally, it appeared that Carlos’s friend was a sports medicine doctor.

“I.  Owe.  You,” Carlos said for the hundredth time.  “And he owes me.  Wipes out debts.”

They sat in a tiny waiting room, a windowless box with vinyl-covered chairs and a sad bead maze for kids in one corner.  The floor was cheap blue industrial carpeting, the walls painted an ugly beige.  The air conditioner wheezed out cool air from the vent above their heads.  It was nicer than being in the free clinic, though.

A nurse had taken Annie back almost an hour earlier.  Carlos and Mikko sat next to each other in the tiny waiting room.  With Carlos in his impeccable suit and Mikko in a stained T-shirt and jeans, they made an unlikely pair. 

The receptionist hadn’t even blinked when they came in, smiling warmly at Carlos.  “Mr. Vásquez—Dr. Vega told me to expect you.”  She smiled softly at Annie.  “I need you to fill out this form.” 

The receptionist had been ready for them.  That was suspicious.

Mikko wanted to see how long Carlos could ride his ruse that this all “just happened to work out”.

“What exactly does he owe you?” Mikko asked.

“I saved him from a Molotov cocktail.”  He smirked.  “That I threw into the window of his house.”

Mikko blinked.

None of them ever asked about Carlos’s mob ties.  As far as they understood, it was something that was mostly in his past.  He didn’t have any influence over the local criminal sphere or illicit operations.  He rarely involved himself in any “deals by the docks” or whatever it was that the mob even did. 

Yet he still had some stories that always made them doubt how uninvolved he really was. 

But in the end, he had never made them feel unsafe or put any of them in any danger.  If anything, he kept an eye out for them.  Mira’s mother’s car had been stolen several years back and Carlos had gotten it back for them.  He had bailed them all out from the cops more than once.  He always knew someone who could fix something broken in Mira’s house.  He always showed up for them.

“So, how long were you planning this?” Mikko asked him.

Carlos glanced at him, tilting his head to the side.  “What?”

“The head-tilt-and-deny does not work every time.”

“I didn’t deny.  I deflected.  That’s level two of that technique.”

Mikko rolled his eyes.  “You just happen to have a friend who’s a sports doctor?  Who ‘owed you a favor’?  Whose receptionist told us he was expecting you?  Who had a new patient form ready for Annie?”

“New patient intake forms are always available with the receptionist.”  Carlos shrugged, settling back into his seat, leaning his head against the wall.

He didn’t argue with any of Mikko’s other points.

“So, are you paying with cash or plastic?”

Carlos rolled his head along the wall to look at Mikko.  “Mob pays mob doctors.”

“You said he was a regular doctor.”

“Mob doctors are regular doctors.  They just ask less questions when they have to sew up stab wounds or remove ice picks from shoulders.  But their bread-and-butter typically comes from normal patients.”

“Did he even owe you?”

“Oh definitely.  I really did save him from a Molotov.”

“That you threw.”

Carlos nodded. 

“Carlos.”

Carlos’s face twisted in frustrated annoyance.  “Ay, no te precupes, Mikko.  After everything that happened in October—everything that happened to all of you—we can help you out.  Just leave it.”

It finally came together for him.  “It’s not just you.  It’s all of you.” 

Growing up, Carlos, his wife, his wife’s best friend, and his wife’s brother, they had always looked after Mikko’s family.  Carlos, Arnia, Timber, and Amos had been an unlikely group of shifters that they had become close to.  And they were all behind Annie going to the exact doctor that she needed to see. 

“Amos was furious when he found out what happened to Sloane.  He cares about all of you, but you know him.”

“Sloane’s always been like his kid.”

“Yeah.  And on top of that, he, Arnia, and Timber got called out to a fake case and taken on a ride.  It wound up being a bust, and he eventually tracked it back to Ilona.  He was livid that he was so thoroughly tricked by some vampire bitch who wasn’t even on his radar.”

Mikko thought for a moment, considering what Carlos had said.  Some bitch who wasn’t even on his radar.  “He feels guilty that he didn’t know Sloane was a vampire.  Or that she was in so much trouble.”

Carlos nodded.

“And he can’t do anything to fix things for Sloane.  So, he’s working with the people around her.”

Carlos nodded again.

“Is this guy even a mob doctor?”

Carlos chuckled.  “Yeah, he is.  But Amos is footing the bill.”

And there was the truth at last.

“Why isn’t Amos here doing this himself?”

“He’s on a case—a real one now.  Shifter courts have him investigating some top-secret shit.”

Mikko didn’t say anything.

“Arnia and I were honestly trying to figure out a reason to come round your place, but then I got that call from Luis, and I got lucky that it was you two home.”  He shrugged.  “And anyway, Amos isn’t too good with people.  You know that.  He’d have been a shit companion to the doctor.”

Carlos wasn’t wrong.  Amos didn’t have the best social skills to begin with.  Mikko could only imagine how he would be at something as sensitive as the doctor.

“Fine,” Mikko finally said.  “I won’t tell Annie.”

“Gracias.  He would never leave me alone if he found out I squealed.”

Mikko barely wanted to be under Amos’s scrutiny normally.  If he was pissed?  Definitely not.

The door next to the receptionist window opened, and the same nurse that had walked Annie in stuck his head out.  Seeing Mikko, he said, “She wants you in here with her.”

Mikko had asked Annie if she wanted him with her, and she had said no.  He had wondered if she would crack.

The nurse led him back down a white hall, passing the reception desk and two rooms that had warnings about radiation on them.  Blood pressure cuffs and tables with vials for blood were pushed neatly against the walls.

He entered a room halfway down the hall to find Annie wearing a cotton gown that closed in the back, her battered black converse left on her feet.  Her locs were held back in a protective braid.

She sat on the examining table, a piece of the table paper in her hands where she was tearing into it with small rips.

The nurse closed the door behind him, and Mikko sat in a chair in front of the examining table, next to the computer the doctor would use.  There were diagrams on the walls of different muscles and bones in the body along with common sports injuries.

“How are you?” he asked.

She shrugged, continuing to tear into the paper with tiny little movements, turning the paper to get a stepping pattern to her tear.  “They gave me an X-ray.  Then, I guess they couldn’t see nothing, cuz they gave me an MRI.  It was loud.”

Mikko nodded, reaching across the gap between them to put a hand on the knee closest to him.  She didn’t react, but she also didn’t reject the touch.

They sat there for a moment before there was a gentle knock on the door.  Mikko pulled away from Annie, and Annie muttered, “Come in.”

A Mexican man in his late fifties with a round belly and apple cheeks stepped in.  He wore a white coat that had Dr. Vega embroidered on it.  When he saw Mikko, he held out a hand.  “Dr. Francisco Vega,” he said.

Mikko shook his hand.  “Mikko.”

He looked between Mikko and Annie.  “Relationship to the patient?”

“Boyfriend,” Annie said.

Dr. Vega sat on the plush rolling stood in front of the computer, next to Mikko.  “Nice to meet you, Mikko.”

Mikko nodded, glancing at Annie.

“So, the good news is that you will not need surgery.”

Annie looked up sharply.  “Huh?”

“That’s what most people worry about when they come in here,” Dr. Vega said as he typed on the computer in front of him.  He was entering login information.

“So, what’s wrong?” Annie asked.

“Arthritis,” he said.  He clicked on something, and a grey and white picture came up on the screen.  Mikko couldn’t understand what he was looking at.

Annie blinked, nose wrinkling in confusion.  “What?”

“This is the MRI of your hip,” he said, pointing to a long strip of white.  Mikko finally parsed the image as Annie’s femur.  The long part of it was white.  But the end of it, where it fit into her pelvis, was mottled with white and grey.

“Here,” he said, pointing at the edge of her hip.  “You see where it looks like this white bit is thicker?”

Annie nodded.  She didn’t need to get any closer to see it.

Mikko on the other hand, wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at.  There were all sorts of thick and thin white bits.

“That’s where your bone is thickening due to loss of cartilage.  Cartilage is a cushion between joints.  Yours has worn away.  Your pain is because of that.”

“Shifters can get arthritis?” she asked.

He nodded.  “You can get most conditions that humans, like myself, get, but you bounce back better than us.  A lot of conditions we get, like arthritis, the things that get broken or wear away—we don’t get them back.  You do.”

Annie bit her lip, mulling that over.  “So, what do I do?”

“Well, you’re a shifter so fortunately, unlike humans, this will grow back a bit for you.  It won’t be what it was, but it will be better.  It usually takes about a year to grow back.”

She was relieved.  Mikko could tell from the way her frown was smaller than usual.

“In the meantime, you’ll have to take it easy.  No heavy exercise but normal things like walking, biking, or swimming are fine.”

Annie frowned.  “I’m a fighter.”

Dr. Vega smiled sympathetically.  “You’re going to have to stop.  If you continue down this way, you’ll have to get surgery.  Maybe even a hip replacement.”

Mikko could tell from the way the lines around Annie’s eyes tightened that she was getting angry.

“Any medicine she can take?” Mikko interrupted, putting his hand on Annie’s knee to help ground her.  She put her hand over his almost absently.

“I’m going to recommend you take 600 milligrams of ibuprofen three or four times a day.  If it gets really bad, you can go up to 800 or 1000 each time.  I can give you a prescription, but over the counter also works fine.  It’s also less expensive than a prescription.”

As he explained this, he wrote down the dosages.  “Fortunately,” he said, scribbling out a number he had written incorrectly, “this was caught early enough that you don’t need any expensive treatments.  I’m also going to walk you through some physical therapy exercises that will help.”

“But I can’t fight.”

“I mean, you can.  And I’ll see you here again in six months with bone grinding against bone and a decimated femoral head.”  He pointed to the ball at the end of the femur that slotted into her pelvis.  “And then we’ll have to do surgery.”

Annie glared at him but if it bothered him, Dr. Vega didn’t let it show.  “I’m going to go get some printouts of physical therapy activities, and we’ll go through them before you leave.  Okay?”

Annie’s glare didn’t waver, but Dr. Vega handled it like a pro.  He stayed in his seat, looking up at Annie.  He waited patiently.

“Fine,” she spat.

Dr. Vega clapped his hands together.  “Excellent.”

He left the room with Annie glaring daggers at the door as he went.