“If Grady and Robin are dead, I don’t want any part of her. I signed on to live.”
“You dickhead. What happened to them up there is nothing compared to what He will do if we come back empty-handed. Get out of the fucking car and help me look. She’s just a girl, and we’re not going back without her.”
Campus life hummed through the apartment building at Talia’s back, students building bright futures and making lasting connections. Heart hollow with loneliness, her hand lingered on the brick for a moment, and then she fled alone into the trees.
Shadowman fights the lashes of darkness that harry him unwilling back to Twilight. The fae veils of Shadow ruthlessly bind him, silence him, rob him of any power that would permit another trespass across their boundary. Even as little as a word of warning.
He roars into the storm, but Twilight is cold to his pleas.
His daughter.
The deathless ones have found her.
The punishment for his transgression with her mother: to witness the hunt, perchance his daughter’s destruction, and in so doing, learn never to break the laws of Twilight again. So the sins of the father are visited upon the child.
In his mind’s eye, he can see her. She clings to Shadow for cover, the proof of her fae heritage. Skimming the farthest reaches of the Otherworld she flees, but she cannot cross to safety. Her mother’s mortality will not allow it. Thus, she is doomed to Between.
Run, child, run. And when the deathless find you again, scream, and I will come.
Then blood will tell.
THREE
“Not now,” Adam said. He pitched his voice low for Custo’s ears only.
They crossed the lobby of the FBI’s Phoenix field office, signed out with the guard on post, and exited into the blast of record heat. At 117 degrees, the city baked in a concrete-and-clay oven seasoned with sprigs of cactus and palm trees. Adam held a hand up to shield his face from the glare of the sun as the light seared across red-tiled rooftops. They strode to their rental car. Custo took the driver’s seat.
Adam opened the passenger door, burning his fingertips on the handle—damn hot—and slid in, adjusting the a/c controls to blow near arctic. Custo glanced over, green eyes transparent in the filtered light, his short dark blond hair spiked from his own drying sweat.
“How’d it go?” Adam asked, snagging a water bottle from the six-pack at his feet. While Adam had been interrogating their latest source, Custo had the unenviable job of bringing the locals up to speed on wraith capture and holding strategies.
“Local feds are skeptical, but informed.” Custo pulled away from the lot. “Apparently, Homeland Security has released a report on the wraith phenomena, though detailed accounts are lacking. The Phoenix branch is running a search on area crime with the parameters I provided from Segue. Anything on your end?”
Adam shrugged his frustration. “The kid claims he knows a woman matching Talia’s description. Says she runs with the university street crowd, possibly an addict and a prostitute.”
Custo scowled. “Another dead end, then?”
“I don’t know. The kid said the woman always has a book, used to hang out in the university library until they kicked her out. Says she talks smart and can pass for one of the students.” Adam shifted in his seat. In spite of the heat, excess stress and tension had him edgy, his body complaining for a hard run. He contained the energy with grim determination. First things first.
“He was sure it was her, just a strung-out version of her.” Adam stared out the window. The deep blue of the sky paled to white overhead as the sun fell farther to the west. Night coming on. Another day lost.
Two months had passed since Talia O’Brien and her roommate, Melanie Prader, disappeared. The Prader family had peppered the University of Maryland campus with a picture of her face and had even managed a TV news spot, the girl’s mother pleading over a bold caption that read: Have you seen Melanie?
For all his resources, Adam had done little better. He reached beyond the campus to a statewide and then national missing-persons search for both Talia and Melanie. He looked at government institutions, cults, organized crime, calling in favors and motivating the flow of information with the flow of cash. He’d covered the Internet as well, his people insinuating themselves onto message boards, friendship lists, as well as public and private forums. Disturbing forums.
And he’d been inundated with hits:
“Hooked up with the hot one with the short hair in a bar in Chicago…”
“The woman with the long hair looks exactly like my sister’s kid’s preschool teacher…”
“The blonde chick lives in the basement of a campus library. Fifty bucks, and I’ll tell you which one…”