Текст книги "Windfall"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

Соавторы: Rachel Caine
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Lewis put his hands on my shoulders. “I think he was trying to save your life, Jo.”

“Bullshit. B ullshit!”I was suddenly furious. “This is—you guys just– men!You don’t make decisions for me, got it? I’m not some fragile little flower! I have a life, and it’s my life, and if I want to—”

“Throw it away?” Lewis interjected helpfully.

Okay, he had a point. I didn’t let it bother me. “Hey, I grubbed around at the dump looking for him! Hello! Leave a damn note if you’re stealing my boyfriend!”

And I realized that Kevin hadn’t answered my original question. His eyes were still frightened and blank.

“Oh God,” I said. “Did you use him? Kevin, did you call him out of the bottle and use him?”

He nodded. Rain dripped in silver strings from his lank hair to patter onto his soaked T-shirt. He was shivering. We were all likely to get hypothermia out there if we weren’t careful.

“Is he—”

“He’s gone,” Kevin said. It sounded hard and harsh, and I could tell he didn’t want to say it. “Sorry, but it’s like the bottle’s empty. He’s just—gone, he just screamed and he, you know… blipped out. I kept calling, but he wouldn’t come back. He couldn’t. I needed him, Jo, I’m sorry but I had to do it, Lewis was in trouble and—”

I knew. I’d done the same thing, hadn’t I? I’d called David even when I knew it was killing both of us.

And now I knew why Kevin hadn’t waded into the fight with his usual teen-angst enthusiasm. He couldn’t. Like me, he’d been drained of power. And it hadn’t been enough.

If he couldn’t sense David in the bottle, it was because David was an Ifrit.

Maybe he was in the bottle, maybe he wasn’t; Kevin probably hadn’t thought to order him back inside and seal it up. To him, David had just vanished without a trace.

I couldn’t help but feel a sick certainty that this time he wouldn’t be coming back.

I still had hopes, until Kevin dug the blue glass bottle out of his bag and put it into my hands, but it was no more mystical than grabbing an empty jar out of the kitchen cabinet. No sense of connection. It was an empty bottle, and God,I couldn’t feel David’s presence at all.

I couldn’t even feel him draining me, and that had at least been something, before.

“Back in the bottle, David,” I said, and waited a second before I slammed the rubber stopper home into the open mouth. I wrapped the bottle in a spare towel from the back of the Jeep, then buried it in my purse with the lipstick case and the Djinn sealed inside.

“Um,” Kevin said hesitantly, “are we—are you—”

“Do I want to kill your punk ass? You betcha.” My hands were shaking, and not from the chill. “I don’t care what David said, you didn’t have any right to do this. No right, do you understand?”

He nodded. He looked sullen and miserable, a combination only possible in teenagers.

“You evertouch anything I own again, and I swear to God, Kevin, you’ll wish I’d torched your ass in Vegas.”

“Like I don’t wish it already,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He gave me a blank, militant stare. I threw Lewis a furious look.

He shrugged.

I growled in frustration. “I have to get back to Fort Lauderdale.”

It wasn’t like me to run out, not when the storm of the century was building up force out there off the coast and roaring our way. He raised his eyebrows. “I thought I’d have to get Rahel to haul you out of here kicking and screaming,” he said. “And you didn’t come chasing all the way out here to find me, flattering as it might be, did you? What’s wrong?”

I told him about Eamon and Sarah, and watched his eyes go lightless and angry.

If it had been me, I’d have dropped everything to go to his aid, but I knew not to expect the same in return. Lewis was a big-picture guy.

“I can’t,” he said finally. Regretfully. “I’m sorry. This thing—” He nodded out at the black void on the east horizon. “One life saved might mean thousands lost. I have to stay here.”

“I know.”

“Jo—”

“ I know.”I swallowed hard and put my hand on his cold, wet, beard-roughened cheek. “Go do what you do. Eamon’s just a guy, not a Warden. I can handle him.”

I knew Lewis was thinking, You’ve done a bang-up job of it so far,but he was too much of a gentleman to say so.

“Yeah,” Kevin snorted. “Like you’ve done such a good job so far.”

Case in point.

I walked away, back to the Mustang, where Cherise was still sitting under her poncho. Shivering. Looking dazed and storm-tossed. Her high-gloss finish had been power-stripped, along with her self-confidence about her place in the world.

“Cher?” I said. She fastened a blank stare on me. “We can go back now.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, in a bright, almost normal tone, and slid off the trunk to go around to the driver’s side. Sometime during the hysteria, I noticed she’d remembered to put the top up on the convertible. Her hand was shaking uncontrollably as she fumbled for the door handle.

I gently guided her back around the car and opened the passenger side for her.

“My turn to drive,” I said. It took her three tries to get in the car, even with help.

The interior was wet enough to squish. I sighed and hated myself for wasting the energy, but the truth was I was tired and cold and shaking too. I banished the moisture from the car and our hair and clothes, leaving a sharp, fresh ozone smell and, unfortunately, frizzed hair. Cherise didn’t seem to notice. I turned on the car’s heater and pointed all available vents in her direction.

I had to reach over and fasten her seat belt for her. She wasn’t responding to suggestion.

The Mustang rumbled and growled as I backed it up and weaved it around the Jeep, catching Lewis and Kevin in the headlights. They looked fragile and bruised, far too small to go up against the fury of nature gathering out to sea. Lewis gave me a nod and a small, funny salute. Kevin’s eyes were lingering not on me, but Cherise. I bumped the car over the uneven, buckled road until we were back at clean surface again, and then opened it up to a run. It drove tight and fast, hugging the road and responding to a touch like an eager lover.

I’d missed Mustangs.

Cherise said, “So you’re, like, a witch, right?”

“What?”

“A good witch?” She didn’t sound too sure of that.

I sighed. “Yeah, kind of. I hope.”

She nodded jerkily. “Okay, sure. That makes sense.” Hollow words, and an empty, scared look in her eyes.

I’d forgotten what it must be like, to have your certainty in life taken away, to find all the science and order and logic taken away. To find out humankind wasn’t the center of the universe, and things weren’t simple and controllable.

It hurt. I knew it hurt.

“Cherise,” I said. We rounded a curve and the headlights washed a riot of vegetation with color. I caught the glint of green eyes, quickly gone. “What you saw—that doesn’t happen all the time, okay? It’s not that the world is a lie you’ve been told. It’s that there are some truths you haven’t heard yet.”

She shrugged. “I’m okay.” The words were just as wrong as the movement, mechanical and dead. “So when you were working at the station, were you just—was it just some kind of game? Were you ever really—”

“This stuff doesn’t pay the bills,” I said gently. “Saving the world really isn’t all that profitable. You’d be surprised how little you get paid for that kind of thing.”

That won a smile of surprise.

“Not really,” she said. “Crime pays better than virtue.”

“You hear that on TV?”

“Read it,” she said, and leaned her head against the window glass. “Damn, I’m freaked.”

“Anybody would be. Take it easy, okay? Ask questions. I’ll do my best to answer you.”

She hesitated a second, then waved a hand out at the storm assembling over the ocean, like a million soldiers ready to attack. “Can’t you stop that?”

“No.”

“Just no?”

“When it’s that big and mean? Yeah. Just no. Maybe Lewis can do it—”

“The old one or the young one?”

“What?”

“You know, the old guy in the flannel or the young one in black?”

Old guy?I threw her a look. “He’s my age!”

“In your dreams.”

“Not the young one, the—the—” I glared. “ Lewisis my age. Kevin is the punk-ass kid.”

“Well, the punk-ass kid was nice to me,” she said, and shrugged. “What? It’s not my fault I’m twenty-two and you’re—not.”

Oh, I was sogoing to get my own car.

We drove in silence for another ten minutes before I said, because I couldn’t resist it, “I’m not old.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, and sighed, and put her head back against the upholstery. “You just keep telling yourself that.”

I gunned the Mustang up to one hundred thirty on the way back through the storm.

Surprisingly, we didn’t die in a fiery crash, but that was probably just God looking after fools and children, and as I blasted past the WELCOME TO FORT LAUDERDALE road sign and had to kill my speed to just under sixty, due to traffic, my cell phone rang. I fumbled for it and took the call.

“Eamon?”

“The same.” That lovely voice sounded as calm and deceptively friendly as ever.

“Got what I asked for?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’d hate for Sarah to suffer.”

“Is she awake? I want to talk to her.”

“What you want really doesn’t concern me, love. As we seem to have a storm kicking up hell, I’d like to get this ended as soon as possible. No point in dying tonight, especially from something as stupid as fate.”

My hand was clenched tight around the cell. I forced it to relax. Ahead on the road, some grandpa in an ancient Ford Fiesta swerved into my lane doing thirty-five; I instantly checked perimeters and glided into the left-hand passing lane to whip around him. Tractor trailer ahoy, lumbering like a brachiosaur. I managed to slip around him and behind a white Lamborghini that wasn’t any more patient with the current traffic than I was. I drafted him as he negotiated his way to free airspace.

“Where?” I asked. Eamon’s warm chuckle was unpleasantly intimate.

“Well, why don’t you come to my place? Maybe we can enjoy a nice drink after we conclude our business. Possibly Sarah might be open-minded enough to…”

“Shut the hell up,” I snapped. “I have a Djinn. Do you want it the nice way or the hard way? Because all I have to do is tell him to kill you, you know.”

“I know.” All of the needling humor dropped out of Eamon’s voice, replaced by something hard and as chilly as winter’s midnight. “But if you do that, you won’t get your sister back. It took a lot of research—which was accomplished with a lot of screaming on the part of my research subjects—but I know the rules. I know what the Djinn can do, and what they can’t. And you’d best not take a chance that I’ve been misled.”

He was right. There were rules to the covenant with the Djinn. Responsibilities a master had to accept. Violating those rules had some serious blowback, and if he understood enough, he could have set it up to be sure Sarah died with him.

No, I couldn’t take the chance. Not that I’d been willing to in the first place.

“Fine,” I said. “Give me the address.”

It was close to the beach, which wasn’t an advantage right now; I hung up and checked the progress of the storm. The streetlights were blowing nearly sideways, and signs were fluttering like stiff metal flags in the relentless wind. Hurricane-force winds, and it was just the leading edge of the storm.

As I took the exit from the freeway heading for the beach, I caught sight of the ocean, and it made my guts knot up in fear. Those smooth, greasy-looking swells out toward the ocean, exploding into gigantic sails of spray when they hit shallow water… blow on a small bowl of water and look at the way the waves form, heading toward the edge. Concentric rings, mounting higher as force increases.

The storm surge was going to be horribly high. Houses at or near the beach were already doomed. My apartment complex was probably toast, too—so much for the new furniture.

Life was so fragile, so easily blown apart.

“Look out!” Cherise yelled, and threw out a hand to the right.

I barely had time to register something big coming from that direction, hit the brakes, send the car into a spin across two lanes of traffic—thankfully, unoccupied—and manage to get us straightened around in a lane by the time we came to a lurching stop.

A boat bounced in from the right and landed keel-first on the road, oars flying off like birds into the wind. It splintered into fiberglass junk. I watched, open-mouthed, as it rolled off in a tangle.

“Holy shit,” Cherise whispered. “Um… shouldn’t we, like, get somewhere? Maybe the hell out of Florida?”

Yeah. Good idea.

Eamon’s building was a needle-thin avant-garde structure, the kind of place that, when they talk about building erection, they really mean the double entendre. I couldn’t read the sign, but I decided the best possible name for it was TestosteroneTowers, and it was someplace I intended never to live.

Even if Eamon wasn’t there.

Cherise looked pale and scared, and I didn’t blame her; the weather was getting worse, and this was exposed territory. Last place I wanted to be was in a high-rise… safe from the storm surge, sure, but way too much glass. I was thinking of something in a tasteful concrete bunker, up on a bluff. And as soon as I had Sarah back, we were going to find one.

“Should I stay here?” Cherise asked cautiously. I pulled the Mustang into the parking garage and went up to the next-to-highest level. It was the logical spot … not completely exposed, only one level could collapse on you, and it was higher than the likely storm surge. Bottom level would be safest from flying debris, but a collapse was possible, and drowning an added hazard.

“I think you’d better come with me,” I said. “Just stay close.”

We got out, and even in the shelter of the garage the scream of the wind was eerie. It ripped past me at gale speeds, pulling my hair and grabbing at my clothes. I braced myself and went around to take Cherise’s hand. I had a little more height and weight than she did; she was too small and light for this kind of thing.

We made it to the stairs and found a hamster tunnel of plastic and lights leading from the parking garage to the building. It looked like being in the middle of a dishwasher on full spray, and I could hear an ominous creaking and cracking from the plastic. I tugged Cherise along at a trot. The concrete under our feet—padded by carpet—trembled and yawed. Leaks ran down the walls, and half the carpet was already soaked.

When we were three-quarters through it, I heard a sharp crackbehind us, and turned to look back.

A huge metal road sign had impaled itself through the plastic and hung there, shuddering. It read SLIPPERY WHEN WET.

“Funny,” I told Mother Nature. “Real funny.”

The plastic shivered under the force of another brutal hit from the wind, and I saw stars forming around stress points. This little tunnel through the storm wasn’t going to last.

I tugged Cherise the rest of the way. The big double doors were key-locked, but I was well beyond caring. My little theoretical addition to the practical chaos already swirling around wouldn’t matter a damn, really; I focused and got hold of the running-on-empty power I had left, and found just about enough to fund a tiny lightning bolt to fry the electronic keypad.

The door clicked open.

Beyond that was a deserted, impersonal lobby, with a long black couch with kidney-roll pillows running down one wall. It was very quiet. There was a large computer screen displaying names and numbers—almost all of the spaces were vacant. In fact, it looked as if the building was just opening up for renters.

Pity about the hamster-trail tunnel out there, in that case.

These kinds of places usually had security on duty, but there was a noticeable lack; I figured that the cops had already been around and instructed evacuation, and the security guy had scurried along with them.

I walked over to the touch screen and paged through the floors. Blank… blank… an import/export company… blank… blank… Drake, Willoughby and Smythe. Seventh floor. I took a look around the lobby. It was built for impressing visitors, not views, so there weren’t many windows. That was good. I spotted a camouflaged door behind the empty security desk. When I tried the doorknob, it was locked; I braced myself and kicked half a dozen times before I got the lock to yield. It looks easier on TV, trust me.

The room behind was small, bare except for a cot, desk and chair. I sat Cherise down on the cot and took her hands. “Wait for me,” I said. “Don’t leave here unless you have to, okay? It’s a windowless interior room; you’re pretty safe here.”

She nodded, pale and looking young enough to braid her hair and sell Girl Scout cookies. I couldn’t help it; I hugged her. She hugged me back, fiercely.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” I said. I felt her gulp for breath. “It’s going to be fine, Cher. Who’s the tough girl?”

“Me,” she whispered.

“Damn right.” I pulled away, gave her a smile, and watched her try to return it.

She was scared to death. Had reason to be. I was trying not to indulge in a complete, total freakout myself.

I left her there, kicked off my shoes, and hit the stairs.

When I got to the seventh floor, I was wheezing and flushed and the place the cougar had slashed me was throbbing like a son of a bitch, but the bleeding was still minimal. Still, I was willing to bet that I was looking like a wrathful Amazon. Frizzy hair, bloody, ripped shirt, and I hadn’t had the time or energy to shave my legs in days.

The mostly intact jeans were all that was saving me from complete embarrassment.

I gasped until I was sufficiently oxygenated, then adjusted the weight of my purse, dropped my shoes to the ground and stepped back into them. And yeah, okay, I straightened my hair. Because when you’re going to confront someone like Eamon, every little bit helps.

The last thing I did was take the stopper from David’s blue glass bottle. I left it buried in the bottom of my purse. Now or never, I told myself. I had no way to hedge this bet. I had to take some things on faith.

The frosted glass doors at the front advertised, in small, discreet type, the investment offices of Drake, Willoughby and Smythe. Lights on inside. I pulled on the ice-cold metal handle and the glass swung open with a well-balanced hiss.

Beyond was a reception area, all blond wood and silver, with a giant picture window at the back. The contrast was eerie and terrifying… the cool indifference of the interior design, the roiling primal fury of the storm outside, smearing the glass in sheets of rain. The glass was trembling, bowing in and out. There wasn’t all that much time to waste.

There was a second set of glass doors, these clear instead of frosted. I shoved my way through them and into a hallway lined with a dozen offices.

Light spilled out the open door of the one at the end.

I walked down the expensively carpeted last mile, passing reproductions of old masters, framed documents, alcoves with statues. At the end of the hall I turned left and saw the name on the door.

EAMON DRAKE.

The office was a triangle of glass, and his desk sat at the pointy end, sleek and black and empty of anything but a blotter, a penholder, and a single sheet of white paper. Very minimalist.

Sarah was lying on the black leather couch close to the left-hand wall. She was awake, but clearly not fully conscious; she was still wearing the bathrobe, and he hadn’t bothered to fully close it. At least, I thought with a wave of sickness, he hadn’t fully openedit. That was a little comfort.

Eamon was sitting on the arm of the couch, watching me. There was a gun in his hand.

It was pointed straight at Sarah’s head.

“Let’s not waste time,” he said. “This storm could make our little, petty differences seem mild. Hand it over and we’re finished, thanks, ta, bye.”

I opened my purse and took out the lipstick case I’d taken from Shirl’s demon-infected Warden friend. I flipped it open to show him the bottle.

“Open it and make him appear,” Eamon said. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I say that I don’t want a free sample of Eternity for Men instead of what we agreed on.”

I took the small perfume sample bottle out, unstopped it, and told the Djinn to appear. He obliged, not that he had much choice; he came out as a youngish-looking guy, dark-haired, with eyes the color of violets. Blank expression. I felt a resonance of connection, but nothing deep and certainly nothing strong. Djinn were, of course, powerful, but on a scale of one to ten, he was maybe a three.

“Back in the bottle,” I told him, and he misted and vanished. I put the stopper back in and raised my eyebrows at Eamon. “Satisfied?”

He cocked his head, staring at me with those deceptively soft, innocent eyes.

Oh, he was a clever one. He knew there was something wrong.

“I’m not a bad judge of people,” he said. “And this is too easy, love. You’re taking this too meekly.”

“What do you want me to do? Scream? Cry? Get my sister killed?” I clenched my teeth and felt jaw muscles flutter as I tried to breathe through the surge of helpless fury. “ Take the fucking bottle, Eamon.Otherwise we’re all going to die in here.”

He caressed Sarah’s hair with the barrel of the gun. “Threats don’t serve you.”

“It’s not a threat, you idiot! Look out there! We’re in a goddamn Cuisinart if these windows go!”

He spared a glance for the storm, nodded, and held out his hand. Long, graceful fingers, well-manicured. He looked like a surgeon, a concert pianist, something brilliant and precise.

“Throw it,” he said.

I pitched the bottle to him, underhanded. He plucked it effortlessly out of the air, and for a second I saw the awe in his eyes. He had what he wanted.

Now was the moment of risk, the moment when everything could go to hell. All he had to do was pull the trigger.

He looked at me, smiled, and thumbed the stopper out of the bottle. It rolled away, onto the carpet, and the Djinn misted out again. Subtly different, this time. Paler skin, eyes still violet but hair turning reddish, and cut in a longer style that made him look younger and prettier.

“Pity he isn’t female,” Eamon said critically. “What’s your name?”

“Valentine.”

“Valentine, can you keep these windows from breaking?”

The Djinn nodded. I opened my mouth to warn Eamon he was making a mistake phrasing it as a question, but he didn’t need me to tell him that.

“Keep the windows from breaking,” Eamon said, and the order clicked in. The glass stopped rattling. Outside, the storm continued to howl, but we were about as safe as it was possible to be. From broken glass, at least.

Eamon let out his breath in a trembling sigh, and I saw the hot spark in his eyes.

“You’re only human,” I told him. “You don’t have the reserves of power to fund him for anything more powerful than that. Don’t be stupid.”

“Oh, I’m not interested in the world, I assure you. One person at a time is my motto.” He gave me another fevered, glittering smile. “You kept your bargain.”

“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

“You know, I’m sorry I’m going to have to do this. Valentine, kill—”

“David,” I said, “come out.”

That was all it took.

A black blur that Eamon couldn’t see, and suddenly Valentine was falling, screaming, ripping at the black shadow that formed over and around him. It was a nightmare to watch. David had changed into something more horrible than I could stand to see, and something that even my eyes wouldn’t properly focus… I caught hints of sharp edges and teeth and claws, of insectile thrashing limbs. I stumbled off to the side, well away from them, until my hip banged painfully into Eamon’s desk.

Eamon was thrown. “Valentine! Kill her!”

Valentine wasn’t in any shape to obey commands. He was down flat on his face, screaming, and the Ifrit’s claws were ripping him apart into mist.

Killing him.

Devouring him.

Eamon hadn’t expected this, and for a long moment he was frozen, staring at his Djinn dying on the floor, bottle still held useless in his hand.

I called lightning and zapped him. Not fatally, because I didn’t have it in me, but he screamed and jerked and slid bonelessly off the arm of the couch into a twisted pile on the carpet.

The bottle rolled free. The gun bounced under the couch.

The Ifrit finished its meal and began its transformation, taking on weight and shape and human form.

A trembling, naked human form.

David fell to his hands and knees, gagging, gasping, and collapsed on his side, his back to me. I stared at the beautiful long slide of his back and wanted so badly to run to him and stroke his hair, cover him in kisses, and hold him close and swear that I’d never let this happen again, never…

He turned his head and looked at me, and what was in his eyes burned me to ash.

Nobody, human or Djinn, should live with that kind of guilt and horror. That much longing.

“Let me go,” he whispered. “I love you, but please, you have to let me go.”

I knew he was right. And it was the only time possible I had left to do it.

I hardly felt the bottle shatter as I slammed it against the desktop. Even the slashes in my hand hardly registered. That kind of pain was nothing, it was insignificant against the bonfire burning in my soul.

I felt him leave me, a sudden cutting of the cord, an irrevocable loss that left me empty inside.

He stood up, clothing himself as he moved. Faded, loose khaki pants. A well-worn blue shirt. The olive drab coat swirling around him, brushing the tops of his boots.

He was warmth and fire and everything I had ever wanted in my life.

He fitted his large, square hands around my shoulders, slid them silently up to my face, and pulled me into a kiss. His breath shuddered into my mouth, and I felt his whole body trembling.

“I knew it had to be this way,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry, Jo. I’m so—I can’t stay in this form for long. I have to go.”

“Go,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

One last kiss, this one fierce and devouring, and in the middle of it he turned to mist and faded away.

I cried out and lurched forward, reaching with a bloody hand for nothing.

At the other end of the room, a window blew out in a silver spray of glass, and buried shrapnel in the wall above the couch.

I gasped and lunged forward, nearly tripping over Eamon, who was moving weakly, and grabbed Sarah to pull her upright. She couldn’t walk, but she mumbled, something about Eamon; I slung her arm across my shoulder and half walked, half dragged her to the door.

As we reached the safety of the hall, another window let loose with the sound of a bomb exploding. Oh God.The whole building was shaking.

I dragged Sarah to the stairwell and leaned her against the wall, then ran back to get Eamon. I just couldn’t leave him there, helpless, to get shredded, no matter what he’d done. He might deserve to die, but this would be a kind of death I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

I pelted in and was blinded for a second by a blaze of lightning that hit close enough to make the hair on my arms tremble. Eamon was still slumped on the floor, bleeding already from a dozen deep cuts; I grabbed him under the arms and pulled, groaning with the strain in my back, across wet carpet and wedges of glittering glass. He twisted around, trying to help or fight; I screamed at him to stop and kept hauling.

Somehow, I wasn’t really sure how, I got him into the stairwell and rolled him onto his bleeding back on the concrete. Sarah was on the steps, clinging to the railing, looking pale and vague-eyed and in danger of tumbling; I left Eamon there and jumped over him to catch her when she stumbled. “You’re on your own!”

I yelled back at him as he reached slowly for the handrail to pull himself up to a sitting position.

I put my arm around Sarah’s waist to guide her down the steps.

It was a long, long, longway to the bottom. One torturous step at a time.

Sarah’s bare feet were scratched and bleeding by the time we made it, and she was more or less coherent.

Coherent enough to turn in my arms and look back up the stairs and mumble, “But Eamon…”

“Eamon can go to hell,” I said grimly. “Come on. We need to get out of here.”

She didn’t want to, but I wasn’t going to take any crap from Sarah, not now. And not over her abusive psycho boyfriend.

We banged through the door to the stairs into the lobby…

… and into a group of men standing there looking at the touch screen, just the way I’d done earlier. Rescue! I thought in relief, just for a second, and then I realized that these guys weren’t exactly dressed like they were public servants on patrol. Three of them looked tough as hell—tattooed, greasy, muscled up past any sensible point of no return.

The fourth one had on a Burberry trench coat that had gone from taupe to chocolate from the force of the rain, and under that a half-soaked hand-tailored suit with a silk tie. I felt sorry for the shoes, which surely looked Italian and not hurricane-safe. He had an expensive haircut even the rain couldn’t dampen, a dark mustache, and a cruel twist to his mouth.

He took one look at me, nodded to his Muscle Squad, and they rushed me. Sarah went flying. One of them knotted a big, tattooed hand in her hair and dragged her upright; she wasn’t medicated enough not to scream. I didn’t fight. I knew I didn’t have much of a chance, especially when the Suit pulled out a gun that looked remarkably similar to the one Eamon had been using upstairs. Apparently it was a model much favored by sleazebags.

I wasn’t really scared anymore. The kind of day I’d had, adrenaline starts running low after a while. I just stared at him, dumbfounded, and he stared back with lightless dark eyes.

“You’re the one,” he said. “You’re the one who killed Quinn. Drake said you’d be coming. Nice to know I don’t have to cut his tongue out for lying to me.”

Eamon had sold me out. I don’t know why that didn’t surprise me.

He walked up to me and shoved the gun under my chin. “I am Eladio Delgado, and you have something I want.”

I shut my eyes and thought, Here we go again.