He gave a curt nod and let Baku take a breath, rubbing his hands together. “Something locked us in the Shift a few minutes ago,” he rasped out, “so let’s get this done and get the hell back to the facility while we still can.” How had he flipped his switch from violence to normal so fast?
“Yeah,” Remy added, flickering a wary glance at Asher and back to the lawyer. “This guy give me the creeps way down deep. I couldn’t feel him before, but now…this one scare me, brah.”
“I couldn’t use the Shift, either,” I said. “What happened when you tried to come through?”
Glancing up, he said, “We went to the washroom and slipped into the first layer, so we could follow you outside unseen. When we tried getting back to the true reality, we might as well have been pushing on a brick wall. We just had to stand there and watch him attack you.” His lip curled up, and he glared down at the guy. “We nearly gave ourselves hernias trying to break free, and then it just let go as if someone purposely opened it at that moment, and we pretty much fell down here. I suppose we have you to thank for that, asshole.”
Baku started up with his wicked laughter again, both his human and dragon-like mouths open wide with it. Every hair on my nape saluted.
I grabbed the lawyer’s bruised face and lined it up with mine, reconsidering my guilt over his bloody face. “Are you doing something to Izan? Is that why the Shift is locked?” I asked. “Who are you really?” I considered asking him about the walking dead comment, but I wasn’t about to embarrass myself if he was only messing with us. Since I had a pulse, and there wasn’t a wraith in me, I hadn’t the foggiest clue what he’d been insinuating.
Baku lurched up and licked my face. Ugh! “It was a pleasure being inside you again, Adaline. I shall be there again soon, and if you do not give me what I want, then I will take it from you.”
Again? Asher clenched his teeth, no doubt pondering another round of fisticuffs with the lawyer. Remy gave me a funny look, probably wondering the same thing I was about just who the flying hell was Adaline, since my full name was Addison. I had enough nicknames; I so did not need another one.
Scrubbing his slobber off with the remains of my skirt, I faced Asher, who still seemed to be staring the guy to death, and tried to keep my utter horror out of my eyes. Maybe the first time we’d tried to share power had been a fluke failure. “Will you try to do this with me one more time?” I asked.
“Allow me.” Baku thrust his hands up with incredible speed before I registered any movement. One of his fists closed around my throat, and the other around Asher’s, who was forced to let go of the lawyer.
I struggled in his grip, damn glad I could still draw in air, terribly aware of the strength in that hand that could probably break my neck like a twig. Asher thrashed, roaring wordlessly. Remy let go of Baku’s legs and tried to crawl up his body, probably to pin him down, but the lawyer kicked hard, and the gentle giant went ass over teakettle backward.
The ambient temperature around my physical body dropped at least twenty degrees. Was something else about to come through the veil? Shit. I unleashed my storm and gripped the lawyer’s wrist, trying in vain to pull his hand from my throat. I forced my power into him, hoping it would be enough to make him let go before the veil opened and spilled out a few dozen wraiths.
My essence fell into him faster than I expected, like rushing at a door only to have it swing free and send me falling on my face. Something sucked out my Machine mojo like an industrial-strength Hoover. It was Baku, swallowing it down like a fine wine, the knot of cold he caused in my stomach growing instead of shrinking.
“Oh, that can’t be good,” I ground out, my hands shaking.
Asher jerked as if he’d been electrocuted, so I guessed Baku was siphoning his power, too.
“What doing?” Remy shouted.
“Stay back!” I screamed as he stepped closer.
Only a few seconds passed before an invisible force slammed into me. I landed hard on my back, blinking up at stars, both the sky kind and those caused when I’d had my bell rung. Baku hadn’t just released me but had thrown some of my own power back at me. At the same time, he must have pulled us all down to the true reality, because we were once more on the Chicago street, still empty of cars and people. Normal people couldn’t sense the dead, so had the wraith done something to send them away?
Asher coughed beside me, and Remy groaned somewhere nearby. I rolled over and inspected Mr. Grumpy, running my fingertip over his scraped hand. “Are you all right?” I asked.
Baku—still inside the lawyer—stood over me, and I gripped Asher’s wrist, hauling myself closer to him. Baku closed his eyes and inhaled the night air. “I’ve forgotten what a rush that is. Behold your gift, Adaline.” He threw his head back and opened his mouth. The blue Machine energy he’d swallowed shot out like a laser, obliterating the veil right above us to leave a black scar against the deep blue night. Hundreds of wraiths poured into the sky as if they’d been waiting at that precise spot knowing what would happen. There were several different classes of them, from half man, half insect to more humanlike, all with hollows where eyes should have been but weren’t.
Holy mother of crap.
Chapter Seven
“Brah!” Remy roared before rolling away and ducking behind a truck on the street, staring up. “Too many. We need to gets gone before they eat us for dinner!”
“What the hell is going on?” Asher scrambled to his feet and herded me away from Baku, who continued his skyward vigil where the wraiths swirled around like a funnel cloud. “How could he even touch our energy, let alone inhale it like cocaine? We have to get out of here and gather the sentinels. This is going to take all of us.”
Come on, heart, don’t explode on me now. “He said something about a contest with Izan and a promise Izan made to him,” I whispered so Baku wouldn’t hear me. “What do you suppose he meant by that?”
Remy dashed over to us, ripped me away from Asher, and tossed me over the lawyer’s Mercedes. I came down hard on the street, scraping up my knee and elbow. Blood flowed harder from under my bandage.
Before I could ask him what the ten shades of hell he did that for, I noticed the tornado of wraiths diving toward Asher. Yep, that would explain it. Remy might not have been able to see them, but he must have felt them coming while we’d been blabbing.
“Look out!” I shouted, but Asher had already jumped over the hood of the car to me. I summoned my storm and launched it toward the wraiths, the sensation like wind rushing through my pores. They phantom bugs swept upward, caught in the brilliant vortex, scattering in every direction as my energy burned out.
“Why can I see them now?” he asked. “And why does it look like his wraith is riding on the outside instead of the inside?”
So he could see them all? He never had been able to before. No one had but me. “How the hell should I know?” I probably shouldn’t have beamed inside because Asher had joined me on the wrong side of crazy, but I did.
He leaned around the car. “Remy, can you see them?”
King Kong hugged the side of the truck he hid behind. “When you two touching a second ago, I see the veil open and something come out, but now only feel the cold and the squirming in my guts like normal. How many come through? When they start coming down, my whole body freeze up inside, and I sense them coming closer, going for you. I guessing lots come through.” He hugged himself, which appeared an odd thing for a muscled moose to do.
Why Asher but not Remy? And why only when I touched Asher? Issues for later. “Hundreds,” I said. How would we send back so many at once? And how could we ice Baku if we couldn’t use our power against him, because he’d just eat it?
The lawyer licked his own blood from his lips and smoothed out his thousand-dollar suit. “I’ll be watching you, Adaline,” he said, “so play your part well.” He smiled, bright and mischievous. “Enjoy the rest of your evening. I’ll be sure to pass on your greetings to Glenna.” After giving me a mocking
bow, he sauntered off while we all stared after him like idiots.
What he’d said finally registered loud and clear. “Glenna. Oh my God, he has my mom!” I shrieked. “Izan was supposed to be protecting her. What if Baku’s hurting her?” She’d been the Architect before me, and Izan had hidden her away when the former Machine had been wiped out a few decades back. If she was still a Machine Architect, all of the wraiths could come through her and use her energy to regrow their bodies, and then we wouldn’t be able to kill them or send them back through the veil. So why wouldn’t he have used her already? Wasn’t that his goal, to be reborn here? Maybe there couldn’t be two Architects at the same time, and my arrival in the Machine had taken her powers away? “We have to find her. Now, Asher, we have to go now!”
Where would a wraith keep someone locked up? In the Shift? Some dive in the Bronx or in an abandoned warehouse somewhere else in the true reality? Why hadn’t Izan protected her?
Turning on his knees, Asher centered himself in front of me, his eyes fierce and his voice calm. “We’ll find her, I promise, but first we have to deal with this rift, and then you need to talk to Izan. Something major is happening here, and we need to know what it is.”
My panic evaporated in an instant, locked in those jade-star eyes. I wanted to get lost in them, to feel his arms around me like when he’d carried me to bed last night. God, really? The world damn near falls apart before me, and I’m crushing on the one I could never have? Slapped with a healthy dose of reality, I focused on the sky again. Only a few wraiths continued to swirl around the rift. Why weren’t they attacking?
“Okay.” I exhaled hard. “This rift is huge.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Asher said. “Just watch my back while I scramble the layers of the Shift so no more can come through, and we’ll get out of here and make a plan.” Only Asher could move the layers of false reality around. He could use it to protect a certain place, or as a patch to close up a rift.
He took us off the still-carless Chicago street into the parking lot beside the bar and raised his arms. A haunting melody of ancient words tumbled from his lips. I drowned in whatever strong emotion imbued his crystal voice. My soul seemed convinced he sang directly to me, stirring my deep places. My whole body hummed and pushed out the distant alarm bells ringing in my head.
Those blue markings lit beneath his skin as he continued to chant. He was so beautiful when he went all mystical. Would you shut up?
The rift faded as he moved the layers of the Shift around to hide the hole Baku had made, his tattoos growing dimmer as he used up his Machine mojo. His conduit should have been sharing power with him, taking on some of the burden, and it pissed me off yet again that it wasn’t me.
The three of us landed back at the Machine facility deep within the Shift before I realized Asher had touched me, which made it easier for us to transport together. As Baku’s words rattled around in my head, I tried not to hyperventilate. “I need to find my mom, but we have to find and kill the wraiths that came through before they can be in a body long enough to take control. I don’t know what to do first.”
He hesitated a moment before snatching his hand back and shoving it into his pocket. “Keep it together, Plaid. Remy will gather the sentinels and take care of the wraiths. You need to get Izan to talk to you this time. I have a feeling getting your mother back isn’t going to be easy, if it’s even possible, given what Baku just did to us.”
“Like I can make Izan do anything.” I tried to swallow my utter helplessness that Mom might be in a wraith’s tender care. She’d disappeared the day I was born, which I only knew because Asher had gotten tired of me asking about her and finally spilled a few details. Even though I couldn’t remember her, I still had a desperate need to protect the woman who’d given birth to me. “It isn’t like I can take him by the ear, since he doesn’t have a body, and the only time I ever see him, he’s a reflection in a mirror.”
“Make him listen, kolohe. Please.” There was tightness in Remy’s voice, and I didn’t need to stretch my mind to know who he worried about. I felt protective of our delicate and timid Outfitter, too. Remy lumbered out of the common room, and we followed into the gray hall of the many locked doors. He disappeared into the training room where most of the others would be.
I hugged myself as Asher and I headed for the girls’ washroom. The huge mirror would be the perfect place to summon our strange founder’s presence into my mind so we could chat.
“If we can even trust Izan,” I muttered, then wished I’d kept the thought inside my head.
Asher sighed, scrubbing a hand across the shadow beard that was always there, even right after he shaved. “We don’t have much choice.”
I stopped and turned into him, desperate to run my hands up his chest to calm myself. Why did I still want to? Yes, he was hotter than Hades, but he was also an ass, and I wasn’t an idiot. Maybe part of me missed the faceless guy from my old, forgotten life who kept haunting me—the one I knew instinctively had been a profound presence in my world at some point—and my heart was searching for someone to fill that void. It wasn’t like Asher and I had anything in common or had shared even a single moment where he didn’t appear like he’d rather have been gargling glass.
“Seriously,” I said. “What if Izan really did lead the wraiths here? What if he’s tired of trying to save us, or has given up on my pathetic showing as the Architect, and he sold us out to the dead?” How was I supposed to keep humanity off the endangered species list, anyway?
I paced a short distance away, shaking out the traitorous hands that ached to go walkabout all over him. Even in the face of complete annihilation, my ridiculous urge to touch something for comfort didn’t diminish even a smidge. I needed something to soothe myself, but I didn’t know what. Something sweet, with coconut in it. My body craved so hard it hurt, but nothing I’d shoved into my mouth during the last few weeks made any difference.
A strange stirring flitted through me, like a still image captured from a movie reel surrounded in mind-blowing emotion. The faceless man on his knees on a dock. Just a faint image of dark hair lifting in the breeze, but his beauty hit me soul-deep. Sunlight sparkled on the water behind him. A wave of intense joy crashed over me, but the harder I tried to extend the vision, to see his features, the more daggers stabbed into my brain. When I tasted blood at the back of my throat, I let go of the visual until it drifted back out into the fog.
Blinking away the images, I rubbed my temples. Who was he? Had the dock been at the house where I grew up?
“What exactly did Baku say?” Asher asked, snapping me out of my mental wandering.
I gave him the short and dirty edition, ending with, “He said if I knew who I was or what Izan had done to our world, or something like that, I wouldn’t be Izan’s willing puppet. And then he kind of insinuated that he wasn’t the only walking dead in Chicago.” I tossed up my hands and rushed away so I wouldn’t have to see what expression went with his silence. “This has to be some sort of sick joke, right? What if I can’t fix this?”
His stare burned my nape as I stopped by the door to the barracks where the washrooms were located. A moment later, his footsteps marked his approach, and his warmth folded over me like a quilt—not touching, but close, so painfully close. “You’ve done more than should ever have been expected of you. Don’t lose faith on me now. Let’s just go and find out what the deal is between Izan and Baku. Whatever it is, I can’t believe Izan set you on a collision course with that wraith. Addison? Are you listening?”
I crimped my eyelids shut and held my breath so it wouldn’t shudder. Hearing him say my name set off a nuclear reaction in me that started in my toes and reverberated all the way to my head, convincing me I could fly around the universe. Or crush a dragon mantis’s head with my thumb.
When I didn’t feel so choked up, I said, “I take back what I said before. Maybe you are getting better at the comfort thing.”
A pause, then, “Can the sen
timental crap and get going, Plaid.”
Thirty seconds sounding like a human being. Epic.
Chapter Eight
I stared at my disheveled and bleeding reflection in the wall-to-wall bathroom mirror. Tired of the brown contacts I had to wear everywhere because my eyes couldn’t pass as normal, I swiped them out and put them in a container I kept in the medicine cabinet all of us girls shared.
“Come on, Izan,” I said, blinking to adjust. “You can’t ignore us after Baku dropped that bomb. Talk to me, man. Even if it’s just to tell us you’re okay, because I’m kind of worried about you.”
“Leaning closer to the mirror isn’t going to help.” Asher propped his butt on the end of the counter, his arms crossed in a Lucifer-does-Playgirl pose. “It isn’t like he’s actually in there.”
I loosened my grip on the countertop and pressed a palm over my bandage to ease the itchiness. “I know. I’m not stupid.” Izan usually projected himself inside my head and tricked my mind into thinking I saw him in the mirror, but the illusion was so good, I almost believed it.
“Dammit, did you rip your stitches again?”
“I’m fine,” I snapped out, more because my nerves were fraying down to nothing than because I was pissed off. Turning to the mirror again, I said, “Izan, I mean it. Tell us what the hell is going on in the next thirty seconds, or we’re going after Baku and my mom without you.”
That squeezed feeling pressed against my skull as it always did when Izan visited my headspace. “You are not yet ready to challenge him,” he said as his image wavered on the far side of the mirror. He appeared to be a young Aztec boy wearing a tan leather loincloth. His long black hair floated around his head as if he stood in zero gravity. Black war paint streaked his expressive face.
I rubbed my forehead with one hand and grabbed the counter again with the other.
“What’s wrong?” Asher scanned the room and came to his feet. “Is he here?”
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