Shadow Bound (20 page)

“Who?” But he already knew the answer.

Abigail’s eyes wrinkled with her smile. “Clap if you believe in faeries.”

Shadowman.
“Then Talia’s voice must heal so that she can call Death.”

“Let me be clear,” Abigail said. “My Sight does not permit me to see the fae. Not the one you call Shadowman—”

Adam’s breath caught at the depth of Abigail’s knowledge. Someone had had the answers to his riddles all along.

“—nor the woman downstairs. The lives of the fae are not their own, their destinies are bound, existence predetermined by the function they were born to fulfill, and so I cannot see the paths before them. My Sight can only see those of the mortal world. You and me and Zoe and the poor man whose body hosts the demon. I cannot see the demon himself.”

Adam’s heart stalled. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “What do you mean ‘the poor man whose body hosts the demon’?”

“A demon has only as much power as a mortal gives him. This poor soul gave the demon his free will in exchange for…”

“Power,” Adam finished.

Abigail’s mouth made a disappointed moue. “No. Power is your weakness. You like to be in control, the one making decisions. The man who hosts the demon was tormented by fear. He was afraid to live, afraid to die, afraid of people. He wanted to live without that fear. To have peace.”

Adam was disgusted. All this because of fear. Unbelievable.

Abigail lifted an eyebrow. “Do you know what it is to be afraid? Truly, deeply afraid?”

“Of course.”
Everyone is afraid. But trade yourself to a demon because of it? No.

She chuckled, mocking him.

“I’ve been afraid,” he said again. “Have you seen my brother? I’ve stared down his gullet as he prepared to suck the life out of me. It was fucking terrifying.” The memory alone had his heart accelerating, his stomach tightening. Yeah, he’d known fear.

Abigail seemed unimpressed. “There’s worse.”

Adam couldn’t possibly conceive of worse and pressing the issue was irrelevant anyway. He returned to his original question: “Can I kill the host, and therefore the demon?”

“Like a happy, convenient loophole in the sticky problem of the demon’s immortality?”

“Yes. Exactly,” he said, though he didn’t like the sarcastic tone she’d used to restate his question.

“You’d kill the man, but not the demon. Sooner or later—probably sooner—the demon would simply find another host.”

“So we’re back to the beginning: Talia must scream to call her father, and then Shadowman will finish this.” Adam rose. If there were no new answers to be found here, he had to get Talia moving before anyone caught up. He rose.

Abigail shrugged her shoulders. “That’s one way to do it,” she mumbled. She hunkered down into her chair and didn’t elaborate.

Adam wasn’t biting. He’d had enough of her games. “Can you tell me where to find the demon?”

“You thinking of joining The Collective?”

Irritation tightened the muscles across Adam’s scalp. He’d had just about enough of this. He bit back his desired response and said, “No. I need to know where to find him so that I can get Talia into position safely.”

“I think you underestimate her.”

“Can you tell me or not?”

She sighed a world of exhaustion. “I see water. I see the Styx.”

“Are you being needlessly cryptic again?” Spouting about ancient Greek mythology when he needed a modern address.

“I’m being literal,” she bit back. “The
Styx
is a ship, just an aptly named ship. Buy a ticket on the
Styx
and you buy a ticket to the underworld.”

“Can you see anything else? Anything that will help me or Talia?”

“No, that’s all—” Abigail broke off, her gaze shifting past Adam’s shoulder.

He turned and found Talia, framed by the field of stars on the curtain dividing the room.

“Welcome,” Abigail said behind him. “I’ve been waiting a long time for you.”

Talia gazed at the old woman in the chair. Light touched strands of gray hair, turning them to silver. Her skin was crumpled, sagging flesh. And there was something…odd about her that went beyond the dark glaze that covered the woman’s eyes.

Adam took Talia’s shoulders and searched her face. “You’re okay, then?”

“I’m—” Talia’s already thin voice broke. She delicately cleared her voice so the burn in her chest wouldn’t flare up. She tried again, keeping her words whisper soft, though the sound still came out stilting and rough. “I’m fine. Amalia, the doctor, says I was very lucky. I need to take it easy, rest, and after a while I will be back to normal.”

Normal. Not likely. The Earth-made component of the gas might’ve been slowly wearing off, but the Otherworldly part slicked her throat and lungs like malevolent oil. Neither water nor hacking coughs cleared it.

“This just confirms my suspicions,” Adam said. “If they wanted to kill you, they’ve had ample opportunity. They want you alive. The gas was meant to incapacitate us long enough for them to get to you. Did she say how long it would take for you to recover your voice?”

“I dunno—” Talia shrugged. The vibration of her vocal cords made her throat ache. Breathing through both her nose and her mouth seared. And that dark stuff coated, suffocated, and made her lungs scream for undiluted air. But
she wasn’t about to burden Adam with the last part. The man was burdened enough.

“You shouldn’t speak.” His hands tightened on her shoulders as his jaw flexed in frustration. He dropped his forehead to touch hers, to rest there, mind to mind. His concern filtered into her consciousness. “Okay. We need to find a safe place to wait out your recovery. Somewhere solitary and inconspicuous. In the meantime, we can plan.”

Talia nodded shallowly, not wanting to jar their moment of intimacy. She really wanted to walk into the circle of his arms and curl against his chest, but his words from the loft, “another world, another time,” kept her back. She knew that Adam cared about her, but his priorities were unchanged: war first. That truth burned more deeply than the chemical gases she’d inhaled, though he was right. She was born to end this war.

“You can stay here for a while,” Abigail said. “It’s safe. I don’t see a future where The Collective searches the building.”

Huh? Talia replayed the old woman’s words in her mind. It made no sense.

“What—”
does she mean?
Talia meant to ask, glancing up at Adam as her throat flared with pain and eroded her words.

Adam broke contact and turned. “This is Abigail, and she can see the future. Or lots of futures, depending on what people decide to do.”

“Can she—”
see mine?
Talia brought her hand to her chest.

Adam shook his head.
No.
“She can’t see faery futures.”

But…Talia made a cutting motion with her hand down the front of her body, symbolically halving herself.

“I know,” Adam answered. “You’re half human. Abigail says she still can’t see your future. Apparently, your father’s blood runs a little thicker than your mother’s.”

Can she see yours?
Talia gestured to Adam.

“Bits and pieces,” he answered, looking away.

Which “bits and pieces”? Talia wanted to shake him.

Talia’s gaze flew to Abigail, who merely raised an amused brow.

If the woman could see Adam’s future, she had to be able to glimpse something of Talia’s as well. Adam had to be there when she screamed, when Shadowman ended the war. And after? What happened after? Did Adam’s future include her?

“You can stay here for the time being. We’ve prepared a room for you down the hallway. You’ll get used to the noise from downstairs. When you’ve rested and”—Abigail twitched her nose—“cleaned up, it would be nice of you to come downstairs and make an appearance.”

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to show up in a public place,” he said. “I don’t want to tempt fate by allowing a club full of people to see us.”

Talia agreed with him.

“But they’re all here for you.” Abigail looked directly at Talia as she spoke. The force of her statement had Talia stepping back.

“What—”
do you mean?
Apprehension escalated wildly in Talia’s body, tension flexing the small and large muscles of her aching diaphragm.

“This is no club,” Abigail explained. “This is a celebration. A Death Fete. We gather to celebrate you, Banshee, and your father, Shadowman. We have long recognized that the demon who calls himself the Death Collector is chaos in the making, a disease that threatens the world. The deathless creatures that have roamed New York’s streets finally have the attention of a faery who can do something about them. We celebrate because an end is in sight. We’ve waited many years for this day.”

Talia brought her hands to her heating cheeks. “I—I—” Everyone was waiting for her? Face a roomful of people who knew what she was? Who her father was?

Adam’s arm circled Talia’s waist as he spoke. “If you know so much,
see
so much, why didn’t you seek out me or Talia before?” His voice was even, but Talia felt the anger he concealed. “You could have stamped out the threat before so much damage was done. So many lives lost.”

“We could have, but my Sight revealed that route held no victory. The only way we could defeat the demon was if
you
found Talia.” A smile played about Abigail’s mouth.

“Why?” Adam lashed.

Talia could guess. She caught the dart of Abigail’s eyes seeking hers. Abigail held her gaze a fraction of a second, but more than enough time to read Talia’s expression, then sit back with a sense of smug satisfaction. Abigail knew.

Old Talia could never have faced a single wraith, much less the leader of them. But she was different now. The months running from the wraiths, each moment in that burning alley in Arizona, her respite at Segue, the understanding she’d found in Adam—all of it had changed her. Allowed her to function through her fear. To seek answers in spite of her terror. To accept herself and her dark gift. And, remembering Patty’s sacrifice, learn to embrace her fear for something bigger, more important than herself.

Now, if need be, she could scream in the face of an immortal demon.

Apparently Abigail
could
read faery futures after all.

Adam opened his mouth to ask again, but was cut short when Abigail gasped. Her eyelids flickered as her head fell against the back of the rocking chair. She moaned loud and low.

Adam looked to Zoe. “What’s the matter with her?”

“Another vision,” Zoe answered.

If possible, Abigail seemed to grow even older before Talia’s eyes.

Curious, Talia reached for shadow. The layered veils slipped around her shoulders as her senses sharpened. She didn’t fight the darkness, but let the boundary to the Otherworld flow freely around her. This was, after all, what she was born to do.

“I see a man,” Abigail wailed.

Talia observed Adam as he crouched at Abigail’s chair to catch the clues her vision divulged. Shadows circled him, gathering and rolling off his broad shoulders like a thunderstorm.

“A man searching…” Abigail repeated.

But Abigail was different. Wisps of smoky blackness filtered
through
her body, collecting in her eyes, sharing space with her spirit.

The woman should be stark raving mad. Perhaps she was, a little.

In the penumbra of Abigail’s shadows, Talia caught a glimpse of her vision.

Yes, the face and body of a man appeared, and he was searching, entering the bottom floor of the building that Adam had once thought safe, but had turned out to be a trap.

A trap.

“Who is it?” Adam asked.

“Custo,” Talia answered. And he was walking right into it.

“
I
T’S
Custo,” Talia repeated as she peered into the dense haze of shadow seething around Abigail. Then the image slid away.

“He was supposed to meet me at the loft.” Adam’s voice was thick with controlled emotion.

Talia looked wildly around at the overlapping waves of darkness, trying to recapture the slippery vision of Custo. She let her eyes relax, inhaled the seductive dark wisps that she’d kept at bay all her life, and let them fill her.

Potential futures sparked into existence in her vision, proliferating until there were as many glimmers of “might be” as there were stars in a clear night sky. She noticed how each discrete decision affected another, and another, until choices formed constellations of possibility that had no reference to probability. It was difficult to isolate one person. One event. To index one segment of time. At last she caught a sliver of Custo, a flash of his fair eyes.

Her heartbeat accelerated as she strained to make out his location and what he was doing, but she could only see shimmers of motion and the occasional delayed reflection of his environment. The glint of steel. A wash of vertical concrete. The glitter of the rising sun beyond a tall, wide window, now punctured with fist-size holes.

Talia let the shadows slide on her skin, caressing her face
and stroking her body. If she didn’t fight them, if she allowed the strands to insinuate themselves around her limbs, hug her curves and wrap her in darkness, then her sight grew clearer.

Her vision doubled, then tripled. Another Custo approached the loft’s building and surveyed the coded pad at the door. Yet another Custo followed at his heels, taking the sidewalk at a jog. One cut across the street on a diagonal. Another walked to the crosswalk at the corner, just as a car circled the building, Custo in the driver’s seat.

“I don’t get it. Which one is him? Which one is real?” Talia looked to Abigail for clarification.

“None of them is real until he acts,” Abigail answered. “These are just possibilities. And you are only seeing the versions of him that go to this building. There are probably many others who elected not to come. To opt out of this fight.”

“No,” Adam said with conviction. “There are no other versions of Custo. He is a man of his word. Custo will meet me at the loft.”

Adam was right. Each and every one of the Custos she saw, in spite of their small differences in approach, concentrated on the coded panel at the building.

“But he won’t go in,” Adam continued, as if he could direct Custo by will alone. “Our escape will have rotated the entry codes. He’ll know something is wrong. If he’s smart, he’ll walk away.”

Talia saw the many Custos’ expressions change as, indeed, his initial code was rejected. One Custo swore. Another raked his hands through his hair. Another stepped back onto the sidewalk to peer up the height of the building, then approached the keypad again.

All of the Custos entered the building.

Talia’s eyes teared, her breath coming faster. She had always liked Custo. He’d always seemed solid, direct, and real.

Adam groaned in frustration. “Damn it. No.”

“He’s a good friend,” Abigail said.

“He’s an idiot,” Adam roared back. The pain in his voice reverberated through Talia.

Every Custo drew his gun. All but one took the stairs; the other went with the elevator. Firearm raised, Custo entered the loft apartment.

A blur of movement obscured what happened next, but Talia caught the moment when Custo’s head jerked back, as if struck. She witnessed the sudden curl of his body around a belly-planted kick. She shuddered as he fell, spitting blood.

“What?” Adam asked. “What? What’s happening?”

Talia shoved away the shadows and retched, trying to get them out from inside her body, her mind. The coating of Otherworldly ick grasped at her throat as she heaved for air. The effort knocked her off balance and burned her from her core out, but Adam steadied her, drawing her against him.

A tremor of relief washed through her body—she’d wanted, needed, to be in Adam’s arms for a while. She just had no idea how to get there.

“Are you all right?” Adam spoke low, words short with tension.

Talia’s lungs were screaming, but she nodded a mute
yes
against his ribs. A faint tinge of sewer still clung to him, but underneath the smell was all Adam.

“Will you be okay here for a while?” He backed them both to the door of the room.

She shook her head.
No.
She knew what he was thinking. No way on earth was he going without her.

“Talia, these people seem fine. If they meant us any harm, they would have done something by now. And I’ll be back as soon as I can. I can’t stay. You have to understand, I can’t just stay and let Custo die.”

Talia did understand. He was being condescending again. Taking over. She wasn’t asking him to babysit her. If he could
just get over his macho I-have-to-save-the-world routine, then he would know she understood. Her “no” had nothing to do with staying with these people.

He was going after Custo. She was going with him. She cocked her head to tell him so.

“Don’t look at me that way, Talia. You just said that the doctor wants you to take it easy,” he argued. “You need to heal. Besides, I’ll probably be walking into an ambush. I won’t be able to protect you.”

She pointed to herself, and then pointed to him.
I’ll protect you. Duh.

His eyes narrowed. “You can’t scream. How can you protect me?”

Talia laid a hand on his chest, just under the U between his collarbones where she could feel the soft echo of his heartbeat, and pulled the shadows around them.

Adam knocked her hand away and the shadows snapped back. “No. The risk is too great.”

He may as well have slapped her. She gritted her teeth and glared at him from her darkness. Idiot man. She was going, whether he liked it or not.

Abigail laughed. “Poor Adam. Probably thought he’d found a woman who would follow his lead, do everything he said. Got a banshee instead. I need one of them big windows for you two to work it out against. Zoe, do we have a big window somewhere? Adam’s particularly good with windows. Maybe he could convince her that way.”

Talia’s face heated, but she ignored Abigail, stubbornly crossing her arms and blocking the door.

Adam looked back at Abigail. “Can you quit mocking me for a minute and help me convince her to stay?”

Abigail shrugged. “Why would I waste my time doing that when I know very well that she goes with you?”

Talia controlled a smug smile.

“She—? What—?” Adam stammered. Then he turned to Talia. “Oh, hell. Come on.”

Zoe followed them down the stairs, shouting over the rising whine of a mournful melody as they neared the main floor of the building. “You can take my car if you want.”

“Good,” Adam said as he looked over his shoulder, beyond Talia. He didn’t want to attempt a reverse trek through the sewer, nor did he feel comfortable with an open stroll up the five blocks from his current location to the loft’s building, especially with Talia’s distinctive looks.

Zoe passed off the keys and directed them up the alley. Adam regarded Talia as they sprinted toward it. “You’ll do what I say, when I say it, or I’m not going anywhere. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” she croaked.

This was a bad idea, taking her back to a building infested with either wraiths or SPCI operatives, or both. She was supposed to heal so that she could call her father and end the war. It was beyond irresponsible of him to allow her to come on a fool’s errand.

As a realist, he knew he might lose Custo, his surrogate brother. He couldn’t lose Talia as well. Yet, he couldn’t very well risk her following after he’d left.

Zoe’s car was a beat-up blue hatchback Accord circa the midnineties. Adam ran around to the driver’s side and crouched to get into the car, his knees hitting the steering wheel. Talia was seated and belted before he managed to fold himself into a position in which he could drive.

The car smelled like burned plastic in spite of the scented cartoon character dangly thing hanging from the rearview mirror. Random papers and debris littered the backseat. At least the car had a manual transmission.

Fiercely missing his Diablo, Adam slammed the Accord into first gear and accelerated down the alley at a crap seven mph.
The car brayed when he floored the gas, but got him up to twenty by the mouth of the alley. He’d buy Zoe another car if he killed this one. Hell, he’d buy her another car if he survived the day.

Traffic was thickening with the start of the morning rush. A fleet of taxis jockeyed for position, blocking the intersection. Adam took the car onto the sidewalk with an ear-bracing scrape of the undercarriage, maneuvered around the cars to the angry shouts of their drivers, and ran the light to turn onto his building’s street.

“There,” Talia said, startling him. He hit the brakes.

“What?” The street had no pedestrians, only a line of parked cars.

“The red sedan. It’s what Custo was driving.” The red sedan was illegally parked directly across the street from Adam’s building. Adam pulled up alongside, stopping the Accord in the middle of the street, and hopped out.

“Get out,” Adam barked. He met her at the tail end of the car, grabbed her hand, and pulled her across the street. With his right hand, he drew his gun.

“We have to assume that whoever attacked the loft knows we’re here. They’d be watching the street. They’ll be waiting.”

Talia nodded. Her face was ash white. Scared, but not shaking. Not retreating into her shadows. She’d come a long way from that alley in Arizona.

“This is your last chance, Talia. You could make it back to that club. They’ll hide you. You could be safe there.” Why had he trusted Abigail’s word anyway? Just because she seemed to know everything didn’t mean she actually did.

Talia shook her head once, sharply.
No.

He raised his hand to the keypad, but a suffocating pressure built in his chest. He turned to her, grabbing her shoulders and abandoning all dignity to plead, “Please, go back. I
can’t let you in there. Not even for Custo. I just can’t. I won’t deliver you into their hands. Will you go back to the club? Will you go back
for me?
”

“I’m going inside that building for you,” she said in a jagged whisper, but whether it was because of emotion or her injury, he couldn’t tell.

“Damn it, Talia. I should never have had sex with you. I told you that we couldn’t have a ‘you and me’ right now.” He released her abruptly, shoving her away from the door. “Don’t lose the war because of some sentimental attachment you have formed in a stressful situation.”

Talia stepped forward again. Her black eyes glinted dangerously. “I choose my own battles, not you. Don’t make me try to find a way inside on my own. It will only cost Custo time.”

She waved him back to the keypad.

Damn it. Abigail was right: Talia was determined to follow. He should’ve tied her down somewhere. Too late now. Too late for everything now.

He coded inside. The small lobby was empty. “Stairs or elevator?”

“Elevator’s faster,” Talia answered.

Fine.
He sheltered her body as he punched the pad at the elevator. The metal door slid open.

Empty.

Talia stepped around him and entered. “I think we should do this Dark.” She lifted an eyebrow waiting for his response.

He stepped inside beside her, lacing his fingers through hers, and pulled her against the side wall. “Dark sounds good.”

Shadows caressed him, feathering lightly across his body like an extension of Talia. His perspective altered, senses sharpening as the physical world deepened and became more distinct, hyperaware of the environment. Of Talia’s slender, warm hand in his.

The steel box had them to the top of the building in five seconds.

Adam gripped her hand. “Here we go.”

The elevator door slid open, and Talia sent a churning wave of darkness tumbling into the room. The flood of shadow poured out from her and filled the great room of the loft, skating across the floors and climbing the walls until the space was thick with the watery veils that separated the mundane world from the Otherworld in a wash of obscurity.

Armored men knelt in assault position, aiming toward the elevator as shadow-blindness overcame them. They were clothed in bulky black, as if
that
color could hide anything from her, and they wore gas masks. Behind the men were two wraiths moving around the perimeter of the room with the slow, predatory fluidity of a mudslide.

Talia sniffed the air. A faint trace of the sickly chemical tang still lingered. There was too much at stake for her to succumb to that again.

The loft needed air.

Talia reached for the window with the fingers of her shadows, tracing the splintered cracks in the glass from the earlier impacts. She insinuated darkness into the thick panes with a gentle, but building, insistent pressure. With a hiss, a crack darted, gashing through the window. The heavy glass buckled and slid to crash partly on the loft’s floors and partly on the sidewalk many stories below. But Talia let no sunlight penetrate the loft as fresh air replaced poisoned.

“Whoa,” Adam murmured, gaze slanting down at her. Was that respect in his eyes?

He tugged her hand, pulled her toward the kitchen, and brought them both to their knees behind the kitchen counter. He silently slid open a drawer and selected a knife, which
he tucked into his belt. He pulled out a second, a short utility knife, and held it out to her.

No.
She shook her head. She could protect him, but she wouldn’t kill anyone.

He pressed the blade into her hand. “You asked to come,” he reminded her. “Now take the damn knife and use it, if necessary.”

Her fingers closed around the wooden grip. She had no handy place to stow it—the elastic waistband of Adam’s sweatpants was too loose on her waist.

Adam ducked his head to hers and murmured, “Can you see Custo?”

She shook her head.
No.
But she could see a spray of blood on the wall in keeping with Adam’s stark, abstract paintings. An aggressive red splatter on white evoking Jackson Pollock.