“That’s the point. What do you care anyway?”
“I don’t,” Jack said. “I just don’t get why you’d want it. The fucking world’s turning upside down. Some seriously scary shit on the street lately. My business has doubled, but the guys coming in to pick up their stuff are looking over their shoulders like the boogeyman’s behind them. And now Adam-fucking-Thorne gets off his high horse to place an order for L-pills. Shit. Makes me want to retire early and move to a nice tropical island somewhere.”
“How much do you want?” Adam took the bag, fumbled inside for a vial of pills. He was too tired to illuminate Jack on The Collective.
“It’s free. I saw a news clip of you beating the shit out of a monster in Arizona before the station replaced it with pretty pictures of you and your lady friend like some kind of conspiracy cover-up. Don’t know why they bothered. It’s all over the Internet anyway. Can you tell me what the fuck that thing was?”
“Wraith.” Just saying the word doubled his heart rate, adrenaline flowing to fuel this last push. Just a few more hours and it would all be over. He could sleep forever, then.
“Are there more than one of those monsters?”
Adam nodded, standing. “Lots more.”
“Fuck.”
No kidding. Adam rose, opened the bag, and pocketed the pills. Without looking back, he headed toward the exit, leaving Jack to contemplate the future.
As for his own, all the things he had left to do in his life could be numbered on one hand. He had to get back to the club, give Talia the flash drive, somehow get out without her following, find the Styx, and open the way for Shadowman to kill the demon via the little pill. Pretty straightforward.
He took a cab back to the club, amaranth, according to the abused sign above the main door, but entered through the rear. The place was quiet, which had Adam’s heart accelerating. Where was the music?
Adam kicked open the dressing room door. Empty.
A kid dressed in jeans and a tee, almost normal-looking in spite of the tattoos crawling up his neck, shouldered some equipment through the back entrance.
Adam stopped him. “What’s going on here? Why’s it so quiet?”
The kid scowled. “Everyone’s getting ready for the fete. I’m trying to figure out how to work the stupid fog machine. Zoe says Abigail sees fog, so I gotta figure out how to get the stupid fog machine to work in the next hour, or I won’t have time to get ready.”
The kid was going round in circles. Adam cut him off. “And Talia?”
“Lady Shadow?”
Uh, okay… Adam nodded.
“Upstairs, asleep. Zoe says not to disturb her.”
Asleep. The perfect opportunity—leave her a note and the flash drive with everything that she needed to know to survive and then get out while she was still sleeping.
“Thanks.” Adam headed for the stairs.
“Hey!” the kid called after him.
Adam paused, looking over.
The kid shifted his weight, as if nervous. “You her man?”
Adam’s mood darkened. What a question. Her man?
He’d certainly dedicated his life to Talia’s cause, even before she knew what she was meant to do. The network of resources he’d established had therefore been set up for her purposes, her ends. The lives that had been sacrificed had been lost to protect her, so that she could end the wraith war. And all this was done freely.
That’s not what the kid meant, though. Not the way he held his breath waiting for Adam’s answer. The kid was speaking literally and not a little hopefully. As if he might just have a shot with a faery princess. Poor kid.
Maybe Abigail had been blabbing about the window again.
Adam’s body stirred at the memory. The way he’d buried himself in Talia as they hovered over the city, her impossibly perfect, silky skin under his hands. Her heat squeezing him, her shadows filling the room. The glimmer of a beauty, hers, recognized not by his mundane senses, but by something deeper. Maybe his soul, if he still had one. He thought of the pills in his pocket, the fact that he’d trade his life to make sure hers was safe, that strange beauty untouched.
“Yeah,” Adam answered. In every way possible, he was her man.
“Oh.” The kid sighed heavily. “Okay, then.”
Adam left the kid with his dashed dreams and headed up the stairs.
The narrow hallway at the landing had doors off to each side, but Adam bet the one with the handwritten DO NOT DISTURB!!! sign was Talia’s. The three exclamation marks screamed Zoe.
He let himself quietly inside, shutting the door behind him, turned, and stopped in dumb shock.
The scene from the painting Sleeping Beauty shimmered in reality before his eyes. The artist had to have been a visionary like Abigail, but with the talent and technique to capture the sight on canvas.