He knew she could too. Justine was a talented liar. She also had a keenly developed truthsense. All she had to do was ask him a direct question and listen carefully to his reply.
A hand touched him on the bicep. Startling, he whirled to look into Tatiana’s gaze. The Queen still looked frightened, but she was beginning to show signs of other emotions as well – worry and confusion, along with the beginnings of anger and distrust.
Distrust for him.
“Julian, are you paying attention at all?”
Not a word to anyone, Justine had said.
Staring at Tatiana’s distrustful expression when he had done not a goddamned thing in the world to earn it, he decided to take Justine’s admonishment literally.
Pivoting on one heel, he snatched his cloak off the back of a chair and strode for the hallway, ignoring the calls and questions that flew after him. With one slicing gesture, he pointed at his two guards then at the floor at their feet, ordering them wordlessly to stay where they were. They remained in place, immobile.
As he strode toward the front door, he slung the cloak over his shoulders and pulled the hood over his head, holding it in place with one fist. The two Light Fae guards stepped aside at his approach.
The last thing he heard before he left the house was Bailey, as she said bitterly, “I knew you should never have asked him to come.”
Then he stepped out into the sunlight. Searing pain stabbed the skin on the back of his hand, and he broke into a lope that brought him to the car.
The keys were in the ignition. Lunging into the driver’s seat, he slammed the door, started the car and gunned down the driveway. A glance in the rearview mirror showed Tatiana, Bailey, Soren and the Light Fae guards, all standing on the front doorstep and staring in his direction.
He was fleetingly pleased to see that his two guards were nowhere in sight. They were following orders, at least for now.
The others had to have realized something was seriously off, but he couldn’t count on them piecing things together in the right way. Even if they did, and they attempted to do something to help, they might just make matters worse.
If they didn’t… well, fuck them.
He dismissed them from his mind. He had a plane to catch, and a deadline to keep.
Like Justine said, he better get a move on.
Four
L
ying so far north of Los Angeles, San Francisco had a much cooler climate and entirely different weather patterns. As the Nightkind plane taxied into SFO, beads of moisture gathered on the outside of the windows from the dense, heavy fog that had rolled in some time earlier that day.
Julian welcomed the fog. It provided an effective cover from the deadly sunshine. From long years of experience with living in the Bay Area, he could tell that he would be able to walk outside freely without needing the cloak, at least for the next couple of hours, and the fog might actually linger until nightfall.
During his trip to LAX, and the subsequent flight, he had received several calls and texts. None of them were from Yolanthe or Xavier, the two people he would have actually chosen to talk to, in case they had discovered any leads on Justine’s whereabouts, so he ignored all the messages and let the phone calls roll over to voicemail. Maybe if enough people took note of his prolonged silence, they would start talking to each other and figure out that something had gone wrong.
Once the airstair had been put into place, he exited the plane, strode through the massive, overcrowded airport to the area allotted for pickups, and approached the first parked police car he saw.
Putting a hand on the edge of the roof, he leaned close to the window to look inside. No key in the ignition.
“I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the car, sir,” a male said severely from behind him.
Straightening, Julian turned to face a young human, one eyebrow raised.
The cop’s expression changed drastically. “S-sir,” he stammered. “I mean, your majesty. No wait, that’s English royalty. You’re a–a–‘your grace,’ right? Or are you a ‘my lord’?”
There was no way Julian could maintain silence after that. On the plus side, the cop would definitely remember every detail of their meeting. He said dryly, “ ‘Sir’ or ‘sire’ will do just fine. I need your keys.”
“Certainly, sir. Sire.”
He was too preoccupied to be amused. “One or the other. I don’t need both at once.” He held out his hand peremptorily, and the cop dropped his keys into the palm of his hand.
“Where shall I go to pick up the vehicle, sire?” the cop asked.
Without replying, Julian climbed into the police car and, switching on the vehicle’s siren, he drove off. He had very little time now to get to the Golden Gate Park, and the museum.
Cutting sharply across the highway, he settled into the fast lane and shot the car’s speed to over a hundred miles an hour. In the heavy fog, it was a suicidal pace. What saved him were his preternatural reflexes.