He shifted, kicking the desk chair out of the way to mold her body to his, showing her—cruelly—just how perfectly they would have fit together had things been different. A wild surge of his emotion overwhelmed her—too many feelings to parse individually, but all racked with guilt.
He pulled back, but the sensation of his mouth still lingered on hers.
“I’m sorry for how I did it before,” he said. “I was feeling sorry for myself. Still am, but what the hell.”
She gripped his arms. “What? So now I’m supposed to run away and leave you to—”
He nodded. “Yep. Far and fast.”
Across their touch, his determination surged, washing out all other emotion.
“No. I’ve seen what the wraiths do to people.”
“We all have to die someday.” He grabbed her around the waist and shoved her into the corridor.
She turned to find him armed with his rifle and the ax. “But they won’t feed on your ‘life energy.’ They feed on your soul.”
Adam glanced down at her briefly in the office doorway, mouth twisting a little. “My soul’s half eaten already.”
“No, it’s not. It’s…” There were no words to describe what she felt in him. “I could make it so dark that we could all slip out to safety.”
“I assure you that we will be using that trick of yours, but your range isn’t wide enough to blind them all. To save us all. Just you.” He pushed her down the hall to the rest of the Segue group. Custo already had the stairwell door open.
“And I can do things in the dark, too. I disabled one wraith on the street…” she argued as she hurried alongside Adam.
“But not the one that got Patty. We have an entire army outside those doors.”
Then it was hopeless. “You’re not going to fight to live at all?”
“The green parlor,” Adam said to Custo, who ushered the others into the stairwell. Adam turned back to her, looked her straight in the eyes. “Talia, I am going to fight to the death. Please understand. I have to see to my brother.” Dark, bloody anger coursed through him, as if the word brother had a death grip on his heart. “You find the thing that did this to him.”
She pulled back. No. I don’t want to.
This was not the Adam that had just kissed her. This Adam was a stranger. Unyielding, implacable. Bent on fighting a creature ten times his strength. Out of his mind.
“Promise me. You’re the key. You find the source of the wraiths and you end this.” They exited into the hotel’s front foyer. Adam speared her with a look over his shoulder. “Promise me.”
“I don’t know how,” she repeated. His urgency was so strong, so intent, that it overrode every other feeling.
“You find out.” He shifted his grasp to hold her upper arm. “For Patty.”
The name gripped her and took her objections away. “For Patty.”
Talia glanced down the hallway. The group ahead had stirred the air so that dust motes spun in the flood of sunlight. Outside the percussive slices of the helicopter’s propellers battered the sky.
Adam followed Custo through a series of connecting doors—her arm and shoulder would never be the same—then handed her off with a push that sent her tripping into Custo’s grasp. The brief touch of Custo’s skin told her he was full of urgency and ready for a good fight. Behind him, Gillian’s face was pinched and red. Armand cursed. And Jim Remy was restlessly shifting.
Talia looked around. The room had no windows and was gray with shadows. She could darken a room this size completely. In Middleton, she had propelled a bullet to its target—she could do that again. Take the wraiths and soldiers out one by one. She could—
A loud crack snapped her into reality—Adam hitting the wall with the ax. His arms lifted, his shoulders bunched and tightened, and then the ax came down, splintering the wall. He reached into the black hole and pulled back with the weight of his body. A large piece of drywall came away. Armand stepped up and yanked more drywall. Others grabbed at the breach to create a big enough opening to move through.
“Adam,” Jim said. “Give me a gun. I’ll take up the rear.”
“Custo can do that.”
“You need Custo, and I want to stay here. Forever. I want to be with her.” Jim shrugged. Talia knew he meant Lady Amunsdale, the ghost he’d lost track of this past week. He had to be out of his mind.
Adam hesitated, then held out his handgun to Jim. A couple magazines followed.
Thick dust rose from the hole in the wall in a great gasping cloud. Beyond it, blackness stretched. Crawly things in there.
“You first,” Adam said in her direction.
Custo grimly nodded, and with a soft shove started Talia’s unwilling feet moving toward the black yawn. She stepped over the boards at her feet and into a narrow, musty hallway, time-drenched with webs hanging like specters to snag at her hair and brush against her arms.