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Tanner chuckled. “They’re going to get slapped with a ticket in two minutes if they don’t watch it,” he said, monitoring the speed traps. Darien had barely slowed down in time to not get dinged himself a few minutes ago.
He drove across a stone bridge that arched above a canal. The canals here were even greater in number than the waterfalls, both adding to the city’s constant wet feel.
Congested traffic in the downtown core pushed them behind schedule by about an hour. By the time Darien found a casual neighborhood to pull over in, and Jack and Ivy vanished inside the doors of a pizza joint to grab everyone lunch, it was past noon.
Darien shut off the truck and took out a resealable bag of Stygian salts. He shook some onto the lid of the center console and slid them into a line with the edge of an empty cigarette packet. He snorted the salts through a rolled-up banknote and sat back in his seat, waiting for them to take affect.
The drug burned his nose and made his skin tingle as if he’d been stung by bees. He closed his eyes and focused, Joyce and Tanner keeping quiet as Darien searched for his cousin, using the memory of Roman’s face as a target. Several years had passed since he’d last seen him, but not long enough to make a difference.
Minutes passed and he found nothing, not one trace of him. He wasn’t surprised—if anything, he was frustrated. He would need to find Roman another way now.
Darien blinked the Sight out of his eyes, the drug preventing the black from leaving them for several blinks. “Nothing,” he declared.
Tanner was focused on his screen, a hand pressed to his chin while the other scrolled on the navigation pad. “Doesn’t surprise me,” he murmured.
The back door swung open on Joyce’s side. Jack and Ivy were back with a stack of pizza boxes and bottles of water.
“Any luck?” Ivy asked, passing out the waters.
Darien took one and twisted the lid open. “He’s invisible.”
Jack helped himself to a slice of pepperoni and bit into it, eating half in one go. “What do we do now?” he asked, mouth covered in tomato sauce.
Darien thought about it. “We track Pax instead.” The kid had likely changed enough in appearance that he’d have to get Tanner to find a photograph online, but that should be easy enough with the amount of social networking sites the kids were using nowadays.
Joyce shuffled through the pizza boxes, Ivy balancing the stack carefully, and selected a different flavor. “Who’s Pax?” she asked.
Darien took a swig of water. “Roman’s half-brother.” Pax shared a dad with Roman and Travis, but he had a different mom.
Ivy checked her watch. “What’s the day today?”
“Wednesday,” Tanner said.
“He’ll still be in school.”
“Which gives us enough time to find a place for the rest of you to lie low,” Darien said. “I’ll be going by myself to find Pax.” It was a precaution, in case Paxton’s dad had any plans to pick his kid up after school. Darien highly doubted it, but he wouldn’t chance being seen by the wrong people. And Donovan Slade was the wrong fucking person.
“What kind of pizza did you get?” Darien asked his sister.
“Pepperoni, ham-and-pineapple, and triple-meat.”
Darien beckoned for Ivy to pass him the pizza boxes. “Give me the pepperoni before Jack eats it all.”
Years had passed since Darien had last seen his cousin Paxton Slade. Back then, the kid must have been… Shit, he couldn’t remember how old. Young. Darien wasn’t sure Pax would even recognize him now.
With a photo of Paxton fresh in his memory, Darien tracked him to a part of town not far from his school. This area, being on neutral ground, had a safer and more laid-back feel. As he drove, the people he observed on the sidewalks didn’t feel the constant need to look over their shoulders or keep their hands in reach of the weapons they carried—concealed, of course. Unless you were a Darkslayer, you didn’t open carry here, same as in Angelthene.
Darien slowed at a stop sign out front of a bakery with a violinist playing out front. The tiny business made this whole block smell divine. Using his Sight, he looked through the relatively weak spells on an antique shop to his left, where five boys stood in an alley beside it.
Paxton.
Darien pulled a sharp U-turn and parked a few stalls down from the entrance to Oswald’s Antiques.
He got out and made his way to the alley, pulling his hood up as he moved. A light rain fell from the sky, and there was a chill in the air that made everything smell like the first bite of winter—something Darien hadn’t experienced since the last time he’d gone snowboarding.
As he neared the mouth of the alley, he made the decision to take Pax for one of those cinnamon buns he could smell baking in the ovens. Based on the auras crowding around his cousin in that alley, the kid would deserve it.
He passed the antique shop, tinny old music floating through the open doors. Rain dribbled off the plastic awning, the drops drumming on Darien’s hood as he stepped out front under it and rounded the corner into the alley.
