It was really, really hard to get moving.
It was almost like there really was an invisible box around me. I breathed as slow and steady as I could, comparatively. “We’re going to make it out of this,” I said, wondering why I was saying “we” when I was plainly alone for the first time in years. “I’m going to get you all back,” I said, answering my own question. “I will find a way.”
I pushed off the brick wall behind me, and stepped out of the shadows. I wasn’t going to wait here all night. I needed to move under the cover of darkness, because this was who I was now. For the time being, anyway. I started to step toward the mouth of the alley—
And engine noise stopped me. I froze, just a step or two out of the shadows, and a light ran along the side of the building opposite me in the alley. It didn’t look like normal headlights, though I could hear the car. It felt more like…
A car cruised past the mouth of the alley, and as the headlamps passed the open aperture, that light didn’t stop moving down the alley walls. There was another light source coming from behind the headlamps, and it only took me a second—a second too long—to realize what it was.
A spotlight mounted on the driver’s side mirror.
It shone down the alley and lit me up. I put my hand over my face like I’d planned, but I knew how I suspicious I must look, hanging about in small-town Scotland in an alley in the middle of the night.
A car door opened, and I stayed frozen.
Who had spotlights mounted on their car mirrors?
Cops.
I’d been found.
26.
Reed
I landed outside the office, wishing I’d just used my powers to fly back from Texas rather than trying to feign calm on the jet ride with Angel. She’d been a decent traveling companion, staying gracefully quiet the entire way, unlike any of the other options I might have been presented with. She hadn’t even protested when I had flown off toward the office without her when we landed. Miranda would have groused that I was breaking the law, since the governor had yanked my free flight status over Minnesota airspace.
I was so beyond giving a shit.
Opening the door, I found Casey sitting behind the receptionist desk. “Hi, Reed,” she said, all chipper.
“Morning,” I said, more wood chipper, a little below a snarl. I had things on my mind. Also, it was more like evening at this point in the day.
I didn’t even make it through the hallway into the bullpen before Miranda seemed to spring out of a nearby wall, making me wonder if she’d been waiting in ambush, a paper in hand. “What the hell is this charge for a charter plane for an international flight?” She wasn’t angry, exactly, but she was clearly of a mind to work out the financial detail on this one.
“I have business overseas,” I said coolly, making my way up the aisle through the middle of the bullpen rather than skirting the edge. Heads were popping up—Augustus, Scott, Friday, even Veronika, Colin, and Kat. I guess the B team had made it back from their latest sojourn to California.
Also, I wouldn’t have called them the B team to their faces, because Colin was scary fast, Veronika was just scary, and Kat could pull tears out—guilty, terrible, pretty tears—at a moment’s notice.
“Hey, Reed,” J.J. called from his cubicle. He was peeping out of it like a groundhog on February 2nd when winter was about to go away. “You got a second?”
“No,” I said, clipped, and turned my attention back to Miranda. “Don’t worry about it, okay? It’s not credit card fraud; I chartered it myself. I’ll be back in a couple days.”
She gave me the raised eyebrow. “Where are you going?”
“Tahiti,” I lied, only a few steps from my office.
“That doesn’t sound like a business expense,” she said.
“Find a way to justify it,” I said, not turning back to answer her, “and if not, I’ll just pay the company back out of my own pocket.” I really didn’t care, but I didn’t have a credit card that could be charged for the hundred grand or better it had taken to get the plane. I doubted they were going to accept a personal check either, and I didn’t feel I had the time to explore other payment methods.
“I don’t think you realize—” Miranda started to say, but I slammed the door to my office and shut the shades.
That done, I stood there in the pale dark, twilight peeking through the slits in the closed blinds. I took a long, slow breath. I was about to violate a whole heaping ton of laws. Not exactly a first for me, but definitely the first time in a while. I clenched my phone in my hand.
How the hell was I supposed to explain this to Isabella?
There was a knock at the door, a brief and done thing that ended as someone opened said door and slipped in. I turned to find J.J. standing there, closing the door behind him. His hair was puffy, his look serious, and he said, without preamble, “I know where you’re going.”
“J.J…” I started.
“Dude,” he said, brushing my objection aside. “Really?”
“I’m not going to—”
“I know where you’re going,” J.J. said. “Do you have any idea how big a flag you raised around here by doing this?”
I hadn’t considered that. My crew was tight, and if they knew I booked a charter to the UK…well, then they knew almost everything. “Dammit.”
“I covered it up,” he said. “When the pilot files the flight plan with ATC, I’m going to change it in the system so it looks like you’re going somewhere innocuous, like Sacramento. But you need to be careful on these sorts of things.” He lowered his voice. “You don’t know who’s listening, even in here.” He wasn’t speaking meta low, but I realized he’d never said my destination out loud, even though he surely knew it.
Damn. In the heat of the moment, I’d forgotten that in addition to the Scottish authorities watching the hell out of things on that end, the FBI was probably still surveilling us on this end. We had the office swept for bugs regularly, but that was hardly a thing you wanted to hang your life on. “When was the last sweep?” I asked.
“Checked a few minutes ago myself,” he said. “It’s easy once you have the gear. But dude—I still wouldn’t go speaking it aloud anywhere you can avoid it. Remember Ca—uh, that really smart lady who could use targeted words to hear our conversations about her?”
“Got it,” I said, nodding. He meant Cassidy Ellis. “Listen…I need you to tell Isabella for me.”
He made a face. “Dude…you think I’m not coming with you?”
“J.J…” I said, exasperation popping out. “This is serious, man. I have to do this alone.”
“Are you nuts?” J.J. asked, waving a hand behind him to encompass the bullpen and all the people waiting within it, probably straining hard to hear our conversation through the door. “You gotta be joking right now. You’re gonna take the team and leave me behind?”
I froze. “I’m not taking the team.”
He squinched his face up further. “Whut?”
“I’m going alone,” I said. “The team is staying here.”
J.J. adjusted his glasses, giving me an “oh no you didn’t” sort of look. “You’re going to ditch everybody? You’re going to go—extract our friend—and you think you can just go solo, no one rolling with you?”
“No one is coming with me,” I said, hesitating.
“You heading into trouble?” J.J. asked, like I was dumb, and it was obvious.
“Hopefully not.”
He cocked his head. Again, I got the feeling I was dumb. “You’re going to her. She’s wanted. She’s—I assume—in some kind of trouble—”
“She got disempowered,” I said, not sure why I said that. It just sort of popped out. “She ran into another succubus,” I went on, when his eyes blew up wide, “a stronger one. This other girl…she ripped the souls right out of her, left her…weak. Turned the cops against her. She’s…” I ran a hand through my long hair. “It’s bad.”