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“Can I see her?”
“Yeah. No doubt she’d like that. It’s been… a helluva day.”
As his eyes searched her face, she knew whathe was looking for, and shook her head. “He’s not going to help us. I saw him up there, and thatassholeis not going to help us.”
Daniel’s jaw locked for a moment. “We’ll find another way. Somehow—”
“How can he be so cruel?” Releasing his shoulders, she tangled her fingers in her hair. “I don’t understand how anybody can be like that. He’s a monster, an absolute—”
Daniel urged her arms down. “Hey, hey, let’s move on from him. Just breathe with me, okay?”
Lydia nodded. Nodded some more. Then she replayed the exchange up on the mountain—and got stuck in a memory loop with thesymphath’s sadistic detachment.
“You’re right,” she muttered. “We don’t ever need to see that man—male, whatever he is—again. But, God, I can’t get over how ruthless he is.”
Daniel’s eyes narrowed. “What did he say to you?”
“Nothing that bears repeating,” she shot back with strength. “I just hope he rots in hell—and you’re right, we’re going to have to help Gus on our own. We can find that Kurtis Joel guy ourselves.”
“Yeah, well, that might be a problem.” Daniel ran his hand over his skull a couple of times, like he was trying to rub his brain so it worked better. “I have no idea who the guy is, where he is—why he’s in the file system. The name appeared twice in the old FBG database, and it stood out to me becauseit was the only entry in the whole goddamn thing with no larger context. No detailed biography. No company ties. No notes. There were just two words, each time—‘apparatus occisio.’?”
Lydia frowned. “Is that Latin?”
“Yup. ‘Killing machine.’?”
She thought back to when she had first met Blade—and that enemy soldier had come out of nowhere. The thing hadn’t been human at all. And then she went back further, to the spring… when she and Daniel had been tracked through the woods by what she thought was a man, but hadn’t been. At all.
“The scene at Gus’s was totally clean,” Daniel said. “No hair, no fibers—and the blood was Gus’s only. That’s what made me think of the entries. A killing machine. It has to be what broke into the condo, and that database was maintained by Blade. He made the notations and he knows something—I can feel it.”
“I agree, but working with him isnotgoing to be an option.”
Daniel’s eyes flared with a nasty gleam. “What did he want in return.”
“Nothing I was willing to give him.”
“Fuckingbastard—” Daniel walked off, relying on his cane, moving around in a circle. “I shouldn’t have sent you up there—”
“We had to try and we did. Now we move on to the next thing.”
She focused on that cane, and didn’t want to ask him why he was suddenly using it again. But maybe he’d helped with their hostess’s medical emergency.
Switching gears, she said, “I do have an idea. Are you strong enough to—”
“Yes.” He squared off at her. “Whatever it is, the answer is yes.”
No more than five minutes later, Daniel was back in the SUV, but considering he was sitting properly in the front passenger seat, instead of slumped like a drunk in the back, negotiating with his ability to stay conscious?
It proved the whole night wasn’t going to shit—even if that was the overwhelming trend.
He should have known what the outcome would be of telling Lydia to go see his old boss—but he’d been desperate, and desperate people did stupid things as they argued with reality.
And he could well guess what the sonofabitch had wanted in return.
As Lydia drove them off from the Phalen estate, night had come solidly, the darkness consuming the rural landscape. Courtesy of Walters being nothing but a little mill town, there were no other cars onthe road, and the few houses that dotted the shoulder were set so far back that their lights seemed as distant as the stars overhead.
Glancing over at Lydia, he studied her face in the glow of the instrument panel. Her brows were down low and her lips were a tight line of intention—and goddamn, she was beautiful. Then again, she was always that way to him, no matter her mood, no matter the circumstance—which was a consequence of loving someone deeply, wasn’t it.
As his eyes drifted across her upper body, he thought of his dream.
