Talia watched as Zoe’s gaze slipped briefly to Adam. What were they up to?
“May I present to you a princess of the fae, daughter of Lord Death, Talia O’Brien. Talia, if you’d like to say something.”
Wha—? Talia looked with alarm at Zoe. There were no secrets here.
Adam cleared his throat. “Talia is recovering from an injury at present and can’t speak. But I would like to say thank you for your hospitality. For all the help you’ve given over the past day or so. As for the monsters out there, the wraiths, we have a plan and are doing everything that we can to stop their spread.”
The gathering applauded.
Talia watched Adam turn to Zoe. “Can we have some music? Something slow. I’d like to dance with Talia.”
Zoe nodded, looked thoughtful for a moment, then stepped to the side to whisper into the ear of someone just offstage.
Adam took Talia’s hand and led her to the dance floor. Her breath quickened as the crowd parted. The gathering circled as Adam led her to the center of the space.
“A little bit of shadow, please,” Adam asked her loud enough for everyone to hear. “No more hiding. Show them how you glow.”
His words, coupled with the warmth in his eyes, did, indeed, light something in her. She bid the shadows to fall lightly on the room as the deep thrum of a bass guitar, beating like a heartbeat, signaled the start of their song.
Adam’s arms went around her. Everything was going to be okay. The way they fit together so perfectly it just had to be. No demon or monster could triumph against anything so wonderful. Not when she’d finally found the answers she needed. The connection she needed.
The melody line of the slow song skipped over the rhythm, keening of haunting love. Adam stroked a hand up her back to rest on the skin at her shoulder, his fingers in her hair, his body moving slowly with hers.
“I’m going to have to take off for a while,” he murmured.
Talia held her breath, her heart contracting with the falsehood she sensed in him. She had half a mind to confront him with it. But what would he think of her? Would he pull away at last?
“I’ve just got to do some legwork, and then I will be back,” he said, his tone placating as if he knew she’d object.
“Can’t you wait until this is over? I can come with you,” Talia whispered. Please let me come with you.
“I have to speak with some informants. They’re cagey. They won’t talk to me with anyone else there.”
Another lie. So be it.
Talia raised her chin and confronted him with her last secret. “You might as well know...I can feel what you feel. Another one of my freakish gifts.”
His brows came together, but he didn’t release her.
She continued, “You’re lying to me. I know it. My whole body is screaming lie. Ever since we went after Custo, you’ve been different. Closed off.”
“You feel what I feel.” Adam grazed her forehead with his lips. “That makes sense. I knew you could see through me, I just didn’t stop to think why.”
“I should have told you—”
“Shhh. It’s too late for regrets. What am I feeling now?”
Talia swallowed hard, let him turn her on the dance floor. “Grief.”
“Custo—” Adam started. Talia felt him take a deep breath against her body. “Custo shouldn’t have died like that. Tortured and broken.”
Talia leaned back to look Adam in his eyes. “His death was not your fault.”
Adam glanced away. “He was at my place, following my instructions, fighting my war. I may not have taken his life, but I sure as hell put him in the line of fire.”
“He was fighting my war,” Talia said. She could not explain the weight of responsibility she felt over Custo’s death. If she’d just mastered her differences sooner, perhaps both he and Patty would still be alive.
“The world’s war, then,” Adam said. “The point is, he’s gone. I’ll get past it, but not until the demon is destroyed. In the meantime, I’ve got to work. There are some things I have to do alone. Set in motion. Later, you can help me scout out a new place for your convalescence. Somewhere with a little more privacy.”
Another lie, but carried with such sweet love that she had to let it go.
The side of his mouth lifted in a kind of half smile. She’d have to settle for that, though she didn’t like it.
“Now will you just dance with me?” Adam pulled her close again, not waiting for her answer.
Talia wound her arms around him tightly to keep him as close to her as she could, while she could. The melody soared higher to its climax, as if with hope, but the words were about loss. About sundered love.
What did Zoe know about the future to select such a song for her first dance with Adam?
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Adam murmured, feathering a kiss across her lips. He led her from the floor.
Talia caught his surreptitious glance at Zoe when they returned to the chair at Abigail’s side.
Zoe obviously knew plenty, and if Talia had to drown her in shadows to get some answers, she was going to do it. Adam was going nowhere without her.
CHAPTER 19
Adam emerged from the dark fete into a muggy New York City night. Above him, a blocky road of glittery sky led through a concrete and glass corridor. The urban smells of stale exhaust, dank gutters, and a life mix of alcohol, food, and metal layered the city’s vital, industrious air. He breathed deeply, taking it all in.
He was glad he was going to end the war at night. Night, like death, was the conclusion of one thing and the beginning of another. Night cast the world in shadow, and therefore, night was Talia’s time. He headed for the deepest falls of darkness to be close to her as he headed toward death.
Adam kept to the alley and zigzagged through the laundry of an adjacent building north of Amaranth to cut across to Fourteenth Street.
No point in trying to track the ship Abigail called the Styx. Adam didn’t trust his sources anymore, and instinct told him that he could accelerate a meeting with the Death Collector if he went through personal channels.
As he walked, he dialed his parents’ number, the number to the picture-perfect family home in the Hamptons where the nightmare began.
Jacob’s intervention.
Punching the combination of numbers released the memory in the box again. Sounds, images, smells escaped to the surface of his consciousness: Jacob’s distended jaw widening. His inhuman teeth. Dad’s tumbled malt whiskey, its peaty smell permeating his study. Jacob’s effortless clutch and sick kiss. Mom’s piercing scream—Adam could still hear it in the back of his mind.
Never in the six intervening years did he think it would end like this.
The phone warbled at his ear. If there were a God in heaven, Jacob would pick up.
Jacob picked up. “Thorne,” he said.
Rage skimmed cold and clammy over Adam’s skin. How that monster could still use the family name—
Didn’t matter. Not anymore. He calmed himself with a controlled breath.
“Hello, Jacob,” Adam said. It was some comfort that he could still guess Jacob’s movements. Jacob would’ve needed a place to stay after his escape from Segue. The family compound had everything he required, including the satisfaction of rubbing Adam’s face in the painful dissolution of the Thorne family legacy.
Silence on Jacob’s end, then, “It’s only a matter of time before we find you and your...harpy.”
Adam bit back a retort and stuck with his plan. He’d rehearsed several tacks in his mind; this seemed the best way to go.
“Well, you can consider me found,” he said. “I need to speak with the demon. Talia wants to cut a deal. I’m acting as her intermediary.”
Jacob grunted. “Whatever she has to say, you can say to me. I’ll get him the message.”
“No can do. I have to speak with him directly. In person. Nonnegotiable.”
“Come now,” Jacob said. “You’ve been fighting T
he Collective for years. Caged me all that time. I doubt very much that you would capitulate now.”
Exactly so. This kind of change of heart would require a tremendous inducement.
“Talia’s pregnant,” Adam said. He wished it were true, too. Something of her, something of him to leave behind. A little hope for the future.
“Not likely,” Jacob drawled. “Even if she did screw your pathetic, mortal self, it would be way too soon to tell.”
“Talia’s half fae,” Adam explained. “The rules of mortality don’t apply to her. She says she can sense a spark of life within her when she’s in shadow. She bled some after the attack on my loft and it scared her. We’re willing to cut a deal, the specifics of which I’ll save for the demon.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t need to. Just contact the demon and ask him what he wants to do. You’ve got my mobile number.” Adam ended the call. No more arguments. No going back.
Adam jogged down a row of cars parked along the street. He’d need something without an alarm system, easy to hot-wire.
He stopped short at a rusty piece of shit, window cracked for summer ventilation and begging to be stolen. Too easy. Adam stuck his fingers in the partition and forced the glass down just enough to reach his arm over and open the button lock. He sat in the driver’s seat and took the screwdriver from his rear pocket that he’d lifted from the stash of random tools near the DJ station at the club.
His mobile phone rang as he inserted the screwdriver into the ignition and turned it like a key. The car started right up.
Adam answered, “Thorne,” same as his brother.
“He’ll see you,” Jacob said without preamble.
Good. “Where do you want me to meet you?”
“Come on up to the house. We’ll take a stroll down memory lane.” Jacob’s tone was upbeat with sarcasm. This time Jacob hung up on him.
It had been six years since Adam drove the two and a half hours of summer traffic to Southampton. At that time the gridlock was extremely tedious—he’d had better things to do than answer his mother’s summons for some trouble over Jacob. What trouble could Jacob, businessman extraordinaire and favored son of the Thorne legacy, possibly have? No trouble was too difficult for Jacob’s ambition and ego to surmount.
It was ego and ambition that was the problem.
But now the drive went quickly, traffic at night was thin and fast, speeding Adam’s way out of the city and into oblivion. The greenery of Sunrise Highway blurred on the edge of his vision as time melted the distance to a reunion with his brother.
No, not his brother. His brother was dead.
Suddenly Adam was on Gin Road, the narrow lane of tall walls and hedges behind which New York elite lived during the summer season. Neither he nor his brother would be going to any of the formal parties anymore.
The gate to Thorne House parted before Adam could buzz his arrival, and he started down the gravel drive that led to the beachfront compound. The main house was lit up, every room ablaze so that the sweeping lines of the white summer home gleamed against the deep sky.
The message was clear: No shadows welcome here. Only Life.
Jacob was right to be suspicious.
Before Adam parked the car in the wide circular drive, he took the vial of L-pills from his pants and popped one into his mouth to hold in the pocket of his gum line. The rubber coating would protect him until the moment he was introduced to the demon. Then a quick grind between his back molars. Death would be uncomfortable, but relatively quick.
Adam’s heart leaped once, a last-ditch complaint against its planned demise, but he thought of Talia. He wouldn’t have her bleeding and ruined like Custo. Not when there was something he could do about it.
Adam got out of the car and started toward the front door of the house.
Déjà vu. Six years. Full circle. Home.
Mom and Dad wanted an intervention. Well, Adam was about to intervene.
Four steps led to the elegant front door. That was Mom—elegant and formal, even on vacation. Adam gripped the handle and opened the door, each movement an echo of the memory of the last time he was here.
No. This was the last time, Adam reminded himself.
The entryway was white. Clean. Graceful. A chandelier sparkled overhead like suspended drops of magical rain over a round marble table, where Mom would’ve had a bowlful of colorful flowers to break up the coldness of the space. And beyond, the living room, the panoramic windows of the night-black ocean brightened by the lit series of decks that led to the sand. Everything in its place. So much of Mom here.
And Jacob, the new Lord and Master of the Thorne family summer home, where was he?
“In here,” Jacob called.
Dad’s study, where Jacob had killed him.
Adam walked the long hallway to the French doors of Dad’s private space, his refuge of “work” when Mom’s friends were over.
Steeling himself, Adam pushed open the door.
Jacob sat, straight-backed, behind Dad’s desk, as if he thought he belonged there. Adam’s vision went red. If he had carried a weapon, he might have used it.
Instead, he fisted his hands, his knuckles aching with the pressure. Talia. He didn’t fight for Mom and Dad anymore. They were gone, lost to the past. Talia was the future.
Jacob wore a gray pin-striped vest, white shirt, and tie—Adam had called him The Banker long before any of this happened. Jacob threw a pen onto the papers spread about on the desk and relaxed into Dad’s leather chair.
“I’m just going over Thorne finances. By my rough accounting, you’ve spent nearly fifty million in six years.” Jacob mimicked Dad’s tone, the one he’d used whenever Adam had exceeded his allowance and drew on his company account for whatever lark he was up to that week.
“Closer to a hundred, I should think. I tapped the overseas accounts,” Adam said. His current pursuit was far from a lark.
Jacob sneered with distaste. “What a waste. And now you want to play house with that little whore?”
A cold wave of rage rolled over Adam. His voice was rough, almost broken when he spoke. “Talia is not a whore.”
“Well she spread her legs for you, and her mother spread her legs for Death.” Jacob smirked at having finally hit a nerve. He laced his fingers across his stomach and rested his elbows on the armrests of Dad’s chair.
Adam’s tongue touched the little pill in his mouth. A bite, a grind, and Death himself could answer Jacob’s taunt. But his brother was no longer his responsibility. Talia was.
With effort, Adam let the insult to her go. It’d be unwise to let the argument escalate. There was a good chance Jacob would lose his grip on whatever vestiges of civility lurked in his monster mind and turn wraith. Much better to keep him on track.
“Will the demon be joining us here?”
Jacob stood and pulled down his vest as he walked around Dad’s desk.
A flicker of movement and Adam reeled backward, his body slamming against the built-in bookshelf to the right of the door. Pain knifed through his jaw. He blinked hard against the spots swimming in his vision and focused again on his brother.
Jacob seemingly remained stationary, adjusting a cuff link on his sleeve with too-nimble fingers. The cuff was dotted with red. “You’ve stained my shirt. Now I’ll have to change.”
So fast. Too fast. Must have just fed.
The pill was still hard in Adam’s mouth. He shoved it aside with his tongue and spat blood. Straightening, he said, “The demon—”
Another flicker of movement and pain exploded behind his eyes. The room swam. Adam’s back connected with the edge of a piece of furniture, which broke with a resounding crack. Thick, wet heat trailed out of his nose and smeared across his cheek as he landed facedown on the rug.
“Disgusting, Adam. Bleeding like an animal.” Jacob planted a foot on the center of Adam’s back, along his spine, bearing down so that Adam’s nerves radiated SOS signals in hot electric
al currents outward from the point of contact.
“How I’d love to break you in half,” Jacob said, voice on edge.
“You’re the animal. You’ve just fed and you’re still out of control,” Adam gasped.
The pressure intensified.
“Sitting behind my father’s desk as if you were still a human being,” Adam continued, the rug rough on his jaw. Muscles contracted over his scalp as his spine bowed.
“My father, too.” Jacob dug in and pain roared through the long muscles of Adam’s back.
“No, the demon’s your father. Your keeper. You answer to him.”
“And why not? He gave me immortality. What is Thorne money to the power of time?”
“My father gave you immortality, too. It’s called a soul.”
“Dad was weak. The demon is not.” The pressure abruptly disappeared.
Adam fought the gorge in his throat as he pushed himself up to his knees. “Is there a meeting or not?”
Jacob shrugged. “Yes. Yes. He wants to see you. But he permits no death near him, so you’ll have to lose the little pill you’ve got in your mouth.”
Adam flushed, then chilled. He touched the pill with his tongue again.
“Did I mention that the demon can see the future?” Jacob laughed.
The Sight.
“He saw this coming.” Jacob nudged Adam’s shoulder with the toe of his shoe. “Even had me come here to wait for you. You’re that predictable.”
Adam was certain that Zoe knew full well what he intended to do. If he were destined to fail, why didn’t they stop him? He might have made a different decision.
“I’m going to need that little pill, and then we can go meet with the Death Collector,” Jacob said.
Crush it now and end Jacob? A week ago, Adam wouldn’t have thought twice. Even now, the temptation was sticky sweet, muting the pain that throbbed in his face and back. Oh, how he’d love to see Jacob’s expression when Death struck him down.
Jacob’s mouth tricked up. “I know you won’t use it on me, Brother. Not even for Mom and Dad.”
Abigail had to have seen a chance. Crazy old bat had to have seen this eventuality.
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