No third beat touched Adam’s fingers. A smothered sob wracked him as a warm fleeting presence brushed by—Custo!—which Adam knew was only palpable in Talia’s half-light.
A depression formed, tendrils of curling darkness reaching out as if whipped by an unseen wind.
Adam slowly rose next to the bed and peered inside the layers of shadow for a trace of Custo’s passing. The loss hollowed him, scraped out his heart, stealing the breath and words he so desperately needed to say good-bye and thank you and I am so fucking sorry.
But there was only darkness. Darkness and Shadowman.
Shadowman stood trapped within a vortex of intense, swirling shadow. The wind slowed and died, coming to rest in a rippling cloak about his body. Shadowman twitched his cloak aside, and Adam perceived a gleaming light beckoning within the deep like a bright promise.
A glow moved within and across the darkness. Custo. Gone. Adam felt like a limb had been severed from his body. Something vital missing, yet the ghost-pain of it remained to haunt him.
The wind picked up, binding Shadowman again.
But the rod of Death’s scythe was long. He whipped out the curved blade, speared the wraith’s just-stirring body, and dragged her out of the world. The “fireflies” within the wraith floated free into forever, the consumed souls released at last to the hereafter.
As darkness swallowed Shadowman again, he brought up his bloodthirsty gaze and met Adam’s.
Adam understood. Spencer was right. The answer was so simple. No one else Adam loved need fear The Collective.
Yes, Talia could free Death with her scream. But anyone else could, too. They just had to die to do it.
Cold will hardened in Adam as he stepped away from Custo’s broken body. This wasn’t good-bye. No. Now he planned to follow Custo’s lead. If Custo could give his life to protect his friend, to screw Spencer, to kill a wraith, Adam could, too.
But there was no way Adam would spend his life for his selfish brother Jacob. No, if he were going to court Death, it would be for the demon himself.
SEVENTEEN
TALIA watched as the soldiers moved stealthily into the center of the room, fanning out to search the dark while that coward and traitor Spencer lounged on the wall next to the bedroom, giving orders from his headset.
Where was Adam? Why was he taking so long? One more minute and she’d go in after him herself.
One soldier’s trajectory headed perilously toward the open air of the window. With his senses muted, he wasn’t aware of his danger, even as his boots crushed glass underfoot.
Talia retracted her shadows slightly from the sharp drop of the loft’s broken window. If the man fell to his death, it would not be because of her.
The man stepped out of the shadows into sunlight. The sudden deluge of stimuli and imminent danger had him flailing for balance. But he recouped, shuffled forward, and peered cautiously over the edge. He took up position there, as if Talia and Adam planned to escape that way. Not likely.
The wraiths, one a bald, thickset male, and the other, a tall and lithe female with the graceful poise of a ballerina, slinked across the room.
“Been lucky all my life,” the male wraith muttered. “I deal with a demon, and my luck dries up. I pull the short straws every time now.”
Demon.
The female held out her hands to feel her way across the dark. Her fingers fluttered across the shoulders of a soldier twice her weight. She found his mask and used it to lift his body out of her way
The soldier thrashed and screamed, though his cries sounded smothered in the darkness.
“Oh, I’m not going to eat you,” the female wraith sneered and dropped the man to the floor. “Treaty won’t allow it.”
Treaty. Spencer. Custo.
The female’s hand found the long wall that led uninterrupted to the hallway. She was headed to the bedroom.
Not going to happen.
Talia gripped her knife, drew her arm back, and threw the blade across the shadowy room.
Talia couldn’t aim to save her life, but that didn’t matter in shadow. The knife sailed through the air at an awkward spin, and would’ve probably dinged the female wraith on the shoulder with its shaft, but Talia corrected its course with an upward shift and twist of shadow and drove the blade into the wraith’s left eye.
The female wraith screeched as she hit the wall and then slid soundlessly to the floor, grabbing at Spencer as she collapsed. They fell in a lovers’ sprawl of twining limbs. His labored breath broke the silence of the room. Pushing up, he crawled off her corpse, trapped on one side by a wall, and on the other by the sofa. He was almost clear when the wraith grabbed his ankle.