by D. N. Hoxa
Oh, shit. Now I really wished I hadn’t asked him that. The pain in his eyes was almost too much to bear. I was so used to seeing him carefree and laughing that it was like a slap to my face.
“I’m sorry, Carter.”
“That’s okay. Truth or Dare?” His voice changed instantly. I hated that I was relieved.
“Truth.”
He thought about it for a second, which only made me nervous. What the hell was going on in that head of his?
“Why do you always look so sad and happy at the same time?”
Ugh. Worse than I thought. “Because I have a lot of pain, just like everybody else. I’m thankful for it, too. It gets me through,” I said in a rush. He didn’t even meet my eyes. The good mood was gone. “Truth or Dare?”
“Truth.”
I wanted to ask him about his dad again, but something stopped me. Maybe I needed to give him a break. That look in his eyes had been too much. I didn’t want to be mean, but since I wasn’t as creative with these questions as he was, I just used one of his.
“Tell me something about you that nobody else knows.”
He raised his brows. “Are you sure you want to know?”
Well, now I wasn’t. “Um…yes?”
“I wanna marry you.”
Oh, God. “For fuck’s sake, Carter. Can you be serious for once?”
All he did was laugh. “Truth or Dare?”
Yeah. That’s what I get for not wanting to ruin his fucking mood. “Truth,” I spit.
“Tell me something that’s bad about you. Really bad,” he continued. I rolled my eyes. “I’m being very serious, Sin. There has to be something bad about you. Nobody is like this.”
Why was it so hot in here suddenly? This entire thing had apparently been a very bad idea.
“I hate it when you make these jokes.” I really, really did. It got in the way. We could be great friends, Carter and I, if he could just let it go.
“Well, at least you know it’s bad,” he said with a shrug.
“Truth or Dare?” Screw it, I was going to ask him about his dad again.
But he grinned, then… “Dare.”
Goddamn it!
“I dare you to let it go. Whatever you think you feel about me, I dare you to give it up, together with all the bad jokes.”
Oh, that wiped the smile right off his face. He just looked at me for a second, drinking his beer. He had that look on, one that said a million things were going on in his head and he was glad nobody could see them.
“Truth or Dare, Sin?”
“Truth.” I would say dare, except I hadn’t lost my damn mind yet.
“Are you in love with him?”
My eyes closed involuntarily. I held the beer bottle to my lips. I didn’t want to play this stupid game anymore. Why had I even agreed to it in the first place?
“Can you keep a secret, Carter?”
“Secrets are my favorite things to keep.”
“I don’t know if I’m in love with him or not.” Lie. I knew, I just had yet to admit it to myself. “But it doesn’t matter. I know you think the Uprising had something to do with the death of your father. I’m going after them, Carter. All I wanna know is this: are you in?”
“Yes,” he said even before I’d finished speaking. “I was going to find them myself anyway, but the more the merrier, right?”
I smiled. “No more secrets until it’s over?”
He offered me his hand and I shook it. “No more secrets.”
Then we talked seriously.
Chapter Four
Damian Reed
I was convinced that coming back to New York would feel like a victory. It was the exact opposite. I sat in the living room of the penthouse with my former team—my family. They were happy to see me, and I was more than happy to see them. They wanted to know all about my month-long adventures, but I had to disappoint them. All I had done was wait and kill time, and now, it seemed, it was all in vain.
Well, not all of it.
Charlie McGaff, the young witch who had been abandoned by her family, was still there. When she came through the elevator and saw me, she barely said a hello, her cheeks burning, and she practically ran to Moira’s room. She hadn’t come out yet, but I could hear her heartbeat. She was still afraid of me and I didn’t blame her. After the fight with Mason, I still hadn’t had the chance to shower because the Bane hadn’t let me stand up at all.
We talked about what they’d done, too, all the cases they’d gotten the past month, and how the young witch had been a bigger help than any of them had expected. She was good with wards and potions, and she had a lot of magic to let out into the world. She’d fit right in with them, which was a pleasant surprise. I had honestly thought she’d be gone by the second week.
Half my mind was racing while I listened to the stories they told me. They all looked the same—except for Moira, who’d cut her beautiful hair all the way up to her shoulders. It suited her, but it made her look a bit older. It made me feel guilty for not having been here to see her for a month, though we’d spoken on the phone regularly. I smothered the guilt as best as I could by reminding myself that I’d had no other choice.
The guys hadn’t changed a bit. John was still wearing his black shirts, his hair cut short, his eyes as alert as ever. Emanuel had a week’s worth of brown stubble covering his face, and his hair had grown longer than I remembered, but it looked like he’d left it that way intentionally. And Zane hadn’t changed a bit. Not a hair on his head was different.
The image of Sinea’s face—so pale she resembled a ghost, a terrified ghost when she’d seen me, replayed in front of my eyes. I’d been at her apartment building waiting for her to come back, thinking she’d gone out with her friends for a drink, when I’d heard the noises. I’d smelled Amina’s sage perfume. I’d known right away that something was wrong. Luckily I’d had my sword with me, and by the time I found them, Mason was already on the ground. I’d wanted to kill him so badly. It was the perfect opportunity, even with Amina there to try to stop me.
Yutain had heard, too. The wind brought his voice to my ear like a lullaby.
Damian, stop it. Both of you, stop, he’d said, and I had. We weren’t in the New York Shade, but in the City,—in Yutain’s territory—and he didn’t want any trouble in it. I didn’t want any trouble from him, either. But Mason had had different plans.
I was almost glad I hadn’t gotten to kill him before Yutain did. The whole thing was spectacular. Artfully done the way he’d torn him apart with a single movement. I’d been about ready to burst out laughing at that point—right until I’d seen Sinea’s face, her panic, her fear.
And until Yutain told me what had happened.
Alexander Adams was not the man I thought he was. When I took the spies of the Sacri Guild to him, I thought it was going to be a done deal. They’d imprison him for making a very powerful, very illegal spell and locking it in a talisman, and that would be that.
It hadn’t happened quite that way. They had imprisoned him while I was still in Nova Scotia, but then Yutain had told me that he’d walked away. I’d discreetly given clues on how to get proof to the spies—enough proof to put Alexander Adams away for a very long time, so it didn’t make any sense.
Until Yutain told me why. Alexander Adams was with the Uprising, and I knew exactly what his role in it was. He was the wizard who controlled the entire operation—Amina’s boss, so to speak. The same wizard that the sari fae had talked about the last time I was in Estird and met them. And I’d had no idea about it when I led the Guild to him.
I’d also had no idea that the Uprising had enough people—powerful people in the Guild—to let a man like Adams walk away, just like that. And that wasn’t the end of it. Alexander Adams was in New York, too, and Yutain wanted me to make sure he was gone. He sensed trouble with the Guild if Adams stayed, and he didn’t want any.
But Yutain didn’t even need to ask me that—I was going to take care of Adams myself. Too
much risk. If he could walk away from the Guild so easily, there was no telling how many problems he could cause for Sinea, especially after Mason and Amina had ambushed her the night before.
“Say it,” Moira said.
I hadn’t even realized that I had tuned out of the conversation until her voice brought me out of my trance. “Say what?”
“Whatever it is you’re thinking, just say it. It’s not going to kill you,” she told me, drinking her wine.
I smiled. “There’s a man I need found. His name is Alexander Adams, and he’s here, in New York. He’s a Prime wizard, very powerful. He’s also the head of the Uprising.”
The team looked at each other in complete shock. We hadn’t really been searching for the wizard of the Uprising at all, only for that vampire Mason, so I understood the surprise. I’d felt it myself the night before when Yutain told me.
“Holy shit. The guy the sari fae talked about?” Emanuel asked and I nodded.
“I think so, yes.” The sari fae hadn’t given us a name, but it was an easy guess. He fit the description perfectly.
John was already on his phone, bring up the data he could access from the Guild. I’d already put Ryan Asher, the Guild assistant on the job, too.
When I’d called him, he had some good news to give me. Apparently, I was no longer being tailed. I was cleared from the Guild reports, and there were no more records about searching for an Alpha Prime anywhere in the database. He’d checked three times. Just like I suspected. For now, Sinea was safe—from the Guild.
The Uprising was a different story.
“So what exactly are we going to do with him? Kill him? Take him to the Guild?” Zane asked, his dark eyes sparkling with mischief.
“The Guild already had him and they let him go. I suspect he’s got people in there—someone very high up—to have walked away so fast.”
“So we’ll kill him.” Zane grinned. “I haven’t done that in a long time.”
“How bad is he?” Moira asked.
“I don’t even need to know,” Zane said.
John shrugged. “Me, neither.”
“He’s a threat to Sinea,” I said reluctantly.
The same second, all of their eyes moved to the floor.
“We’ve seen her a couple times,” Emanuel said. “With the team, on the hunt.”
“Yeah, she’s…” Moira said and took a second to think about the right word. “…pissed.”
Yes, pissed about summed it up. I’d already seen it firsthand.
“You’re going to include us all in this, aren’t you?” John said.
“You already have your job. Who’s going to handle the cases?” Bane, Inc. was a private investigation agency now. They had a reputation to uphold.
“We’ll handle the cases. We’ll also handle Alexander Adams,” Moira said. “Give us some credit. We can multitask, can’t we, fellas?”
The boys all smiled. It did make me feel better.
“Right, then. Let’s get to work.”
Alexander Adams was staying at the most expensive hotel in the City. He wasn’t trying to hide. As soon as John started searching for him, he had no trouble finding a dozen footages of him in two different restaurants, a shopping mall, and tonight he was in a human club, being entertained by a dozen human women. None of his people from the Uprising were with him.
Not only wasn’t he trying to hide—he was showing off. To me. It did make me angry, but it also made things a lot easier for me to contact him. Set up a meeting.
How much did he know? I wasn’t sure, but I was going to assume that he knew everything while I planned our next meeting. That way, there would be very little space left for surprises. I assumed that he knew about me, about Sinea, who she was and what she could do. I assumed he knew that the Guild suspected her, too, and knew that I’d tried to frame him for it to get them off her back. He knew that I’d been tailed by the Guild, and that I’d left the talisman I’d bought from him at the inn in Nova Scotia as proof for the Guild to put him away without trouble. He knew all of it, and he was going to be as prepared as I was.
John and Zane went to deliver him the message. They couldn’t get through to him personally, but they did speak to his bodyguards—three ghouls and two darkling sorcerers. The message was simple—I wanted to meet with him again, and the meeting would have to take place within the Shade. I’d have preferred a more secluded area out here in the real Manhattan, but Yutain insisted it had to be in the Shade. He really didn’t want any trouble in his City, and I wasn’t going to argue with it. Supernaturals were much better equipped to handle attacks and injuries from magic than humans were anyway.
I let Adams decide on the time for two reasons: based on how many days he asked for, I’d have a loose idea on how big a preparation he was going to make to take me out. The other reason was that I wanted to have some time, too, to plan and prepare. Finding the right location within the Shade was going to be tricky but not impossible. I needed spells, but what I needed more were people. Unfortunately, aside from the Bane, I couldn’t risk anybody else, not when it came to Adams. He’d made that talisman in three days. He was not someone to kid around with.
All these thoughts kept spinning in my head as I walked down the street in the Shade, searching.
Seraphina Angels’s shop was located in Avalon Street, which was near the East River, somewhere close to the edges of the Shade. It was just a few buildings down from the same place where Helen Marquez and her friends had unleashed the spell on humans just a month ago. I had seen her shop then, and I’d remembered something about it that I thought would come in handy at some point. I just never imagined that some point would come so soon.
The shop was called Tailored Time and it was huge—two stories full of white mannequins dressed impeccably, among them some of the most bizarre clothes I had ever seen. Seraphina Angels was a Sacri sorceress and her family’s specialty was time travel—the only legal manner of time travel there was in the world. Her clothes, infused with her magic, could take you back in time, for a price.
The bright lights all over the ceiling inside could blind a man. My eyes were more sensitive to light than those of most creatures, but even to a normal human, this would have been too much.
Seraphina Angels didn’t think so, apparently. The shop stretched before me, wide and crisp clean, every white tile on the floor shining to perfection. Around me were the mannequins, wearing clothes from possibly every single year since the very beginning. In the middle of the rectangular room was a spiral stairway with golden railings that led to the second floor. Behind the stairway, the room was wider, and there were about six large, wide tables with all kinds of fabrics spread over them. There were six people sitting behind them, working the machines, some sewing by hand, all of them completely immersed in their work. They must have not heard the bell over the door when I entered, or if they did, they paid me no attention.
But Angels heard. She came from around the corner, passing a stone statue of a naked man reaching out to the sky by the wall, and when she saw me, she stopped in her tracks. I had never met her before, I’d only heard about her, but it would have been easy for her to recognize my species at first sight. Vampires were hard to miss among supernaturals. We didn’t breathe and that makes more of a difference in appearance than most would think if they’d never met a vampire before.
“Good evening, Ms. Angels,” I said with a curt nod and slowly walked deeper into the shop, wearing my most polite smile.
She was as tall as me, standing on her six-inch heels. Her pink dress hung loose around her big frame, except for the waist, where she’d squeezed a golden belt around it so tightly, it looked like she was going to break in half any second. That must not have been very comfortable, but what did I know? Her blonde hair was pulled in a bun to the side of her head, and her half-moon glasses were rimmed with gold, too. The pink lipstick on her thin lips matched the color of her dress perfectly. She pursed them tightly as she watched me approach her
. Before I did, a bird flew down from the second floor and landed on her shoulder gracefully—her familiar. She looked like a pheasant, except instead of brown feathers on her body, hers were white. Her red eyes were wide open, and she stared at me with the same surprise as her master.
“Who are you?” Angels said, her voice surprisingly strong and deep.
“My name is Damian Reed. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Angels. I’ve heard great things.” I offered her my hand. For a second I thought she wouldn’t shake it, but she did.
“The Typhon, huh?” she finally said, looking sideways at her familiar, who in response made a fluttering noise rattling her long tail feathers. “I’ve heard things about you, too. Not so great, I’m afraid.”
I smiled. “But you do look like a woman capable of making up her own mind.”
Her thin blonde brows rose on her forehead, her skin glistening. She didn’t look a day over forty.
“I absolutely am,” she said with a nod. “But I’m afraid I don’t serve your specialty here, Mr. Reed.”
“I’m here for your specialty. I need to make a quick visit to the past and I hear you’re the best person for the job.” I did hear this. There wasn’t any other sorcerer out there who was more accurate than Angels.
“I am the best, naturally,” she said, and her pheasant rattled her feathers again. “I’ve never served a vampire before, but my mother has, bless her soul. I remember she told me that your kind was a handful to work with.”
“I assure you, you won’t have any trouble from me. All I need is to go to 1843 London for a few minutes.” It was over a hundred and eighty years ago, and my memory wasn’t the best when it came to things that happened over fifty years ago, but I do remember the night I needed to live again with semi-clarity. There was a spell somewhere in my memories that I needed found, and this was the quickest way I knew how to get to it.
“Ah, the Victorian era. Such fun times, were they not?” Angels squinted her eyes at me. “Were you alive then?”
