Just hours ago Custo had begged Luca for one more night, and Luca was giving it to him. Should he have begged for a week? A year? A hundred years? Would it have mattered? What an excruciating, horrible thought.
And an irrelevant one.
Custo had a single night, but no way to track the wolf. Annabella was well beyond her strength, emotionally and physically. And he couldn’t even lend his immortality to the wraith war, because he needed to be by her side in case the wolf returned.
He looked at the pristine, yet tainted card again. The White Tower. What kind of pompous name for a congregation of angels was that? This was exactly the reason he wanted nothing to do with them. Absolutely nothing.
Well, screw ‘em. He wasn’t going. He had a number of strikes against him already, what was one more? He’d lied a million times before; they should be prepared for it. He’d been a thief in his past life, too, always looking for an advantage. Well, he was going to steal every single moment he could. If he had to leave Annabella, she would know that he fought the sky to stay with her.
“He’s like you, isn’t he?” Adam asked, his intensity growing. “He and the others with him?”
“Yeah,” Custo answered. But he didn’t know what privilege permitted them to exist on Earth. To exist on Earth. He didn’t know how to apply, or if his escape from Heaven (or the circumstances thereof) made him ineligible. As always, his decisions were tainted with regret.
“I’d like to go with you tomorrow,” Adam said.
Of course he did. Big brother Adam always had to see things through.
“If nothing else,” Adam continued, “I’d like to see if they’d be willing to cooperate with Segue to fight the wraiths. I’d give anything for Talia to be relieved of that duty.”
Custo went cold. Talia. How could he have forgotten her? Talia had been saddled with an unimaginable horror. A life of rending the boundary between the worlds to force the crossing of the reeking dead.
He’d been too self-absorbed to track the direction of Adam’s thoughts, but it wasn’t so hard to guess their path. Adam had witnessed firsthand the ability of the angels to destroy wraiths without any threat to themselves.
Custo put a hand to his aching belly. An angel might risk pain and lingering discomfort fighting the wraiths, but little else. With Shadowman so clearly unwilling to help, what other recourse did Adam have? None. Adam needed the angels, and he needed Custo to help him find them.
The White Tower would be impossible for a mortal to locate on his own, even Adam with his untarnished heart and networks of information. For one time in Custo’s life, he was in a position to help Adam, to give him the connections he so desperately needed in his war against the wraiths.
Movement from Annabella caught Custo’s eye. She was using some kind of cream to wipe the makeup from her face. The skin under the white foundation was almost as pale. Her thoughts were a scatter of Peter, Jasper, and Wolf. The name Wolf was new, and Custo didn’t like it, as if Annabella and the animal had become something to each other.
Maybe the angels could save Annabella from the wolf, too. Why hadn’t they already? He’d like to have their response.
Custo cleared his voice, but his answer still came out tight. “I’ll let you know when I’ve located the tower. Might take some…doing.”
Adam nodded. “I need to go. I can almost smell the wraiths from here.”
“I’ll call you when I know anything,” Custo said. He’d probably be combing the city with his mind all night, searching for the bell-clear thoughts that marked a host of angels.
Not the way he wanted to spend his last night.
Adam left just as the hallway thickened with people. Custo closed and locked the door—no gushing visitors for Annabella—then turned to size up her condition.
She’d managed to get most of the white off her face, and the spider lashes were gone. Though wrapped in a robe, a tuft of white at her knees told him she was still in her costume. All those hooks and eyes were too much for her, and she wouldn’t have wanted to ask anyone else for help.
“Let’s get you back to Segue and tucked in for the night,” he said.
She nodded, passing a hand over her face, but he caught a hint of her face contracting with tears. She stood and removed her robe so Custo could help her out of her costume.
Applying his big hands to the little hooks, he considered what to say. It was pointless to tell her that she wasn’t responsible for Peter’s death. She’d only point out that it was because the wolf wanted her that he was dead. She might have been able to forgive herself if they’d managed to push the wolf back into Shadow at the end of the performance, but that effort had failed.
He’d have to try another approach.
“About five years ago—no, wait, it would be seven years now—” Custo kept his tone as flat as he could. He didn’t want pity. “It was after the first rumblings of the wraith war. Some international arms-dealing scumbag put a hit out on Adam.” He swallowed the stone in his throat and finished, “I hit him first.”