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He didn’t reply, and there was little to be read in his expression. I bit into my sandwich and had to bite back a groan of sheer pleasure. Besides sex and a cold glass of Coke, the best thing in life had to be a fabulous lamb sandwich.
My phone rang just as I finished my meal. The tone told me it was Jak, and my heart began to beat a whole lot faster. Something was wrong. I was certain of it even before I answered the damn thing. I pushed up from the table and ran across to my handbag, fishing around for several seconds before I found my phone.
“Jak,” I said, my heart seeming to beat somewhere high in my throat. “What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you. Urgently.”
Despite his words, he neither looked nor sounded worried. In fact, he looked rather distracted.
I frowned. “What about?”
“Can’t say on the phone, but you’ll want to hear it, believe me.”
I bit my lip, frustrated with both his reticence to answer the damn question—although that was something I should have gotten used to, seeing as everyone was doing it of late—and that inner voice that kept insisting something was wrong. But was it clairvoyance, or the simple knowledge that every time the phone rang, the shit got deeper? “Where?”
“At Larry’s, in Brunswick.”
It wasn’t a place I knew, but then, that was what Google was for. “When?”
He paused. “Ten minutes.”
“Shit, Jak, you’re not giving me much time to get—”
I cut the rest of my sentence off as my damn phone beeped, then shut down. The stupid battery was dead.
I swore softly, threw it down, then stalked across to the computer and Googled Larry’s in Brunswick. It was situated on Hope Street, not far down from Sydney Road.
I grabbed my keys, then glanced at Azriel. “I’ll meet you there.”
“You do not wish me to take you?”
I hesitated. That niggly sense of wrongness was still present, but I wasn’t really sure whether it was related to Jak, or the still-missing Ilianna. I bit my bottom lip, weighing options, then said, “Can you go to Stane’s first and ask him to keep an eye on police reports, just in case something comes through about Ilianna?”
He frowned. “Why not ring him? He does not appreciate me suddenly appearing on his premises.”
No, he didn’t, but he wasn’t about to keel over in shock from it, either, according to Azriel, and he should know. Besides, I needed information on Ilianna, and Stane was probably our best method of getting it—and it was stupid of me not to have asked him when I was there earlier. “My phone is dead, and I don’t want to waste time going there myself. And I’m only meeting Jak. He’s not a threat.”
“Perhaps not, but given your own sense of unease—”
“Look,” I said, impatience edging my voice—which wasn’t really fair given he was only trying to keep me safe. But there was safe and there was mollycoddling, and this had the feeling of the latter. “It’ll take you all of three seconds to get to Stane’s and less than that to ask him to scan the police frequencies. I can hardly get myself into too much trouble in that short time.”
Surely even I wasn’t that clever.
He studied me, clearly unhappy, then nodded abruptly and disappeared. I headed out the front door, locked up, then called to the Aedh. A sliver of pain ran through my head, but I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was a warning that I was pushing my limits again—despite the energy Azriel had given me—or the mere fact that I was too close to the wards that prevented the Raziq from entering our home. But if pain and pushing my limits found Ilianna, then I really didn’t care—though I had no idea why I thought Ilianna might be the reason behind Jak’s sudden demand for a meet. Maybe it was nothing more than stupid hope.
I zoomed through the streets, the bright lights little more than a blur underneath me. Larry’s, it turned out, was an old, somewhat rambling warehouse structure that had obviously been no more successful as a bar than it had as a warehouse. I re-formed and pulled the somewhat holey remains of my sweater together, my gaze sweeping the grimy, blue-painted building dubiously. I couldn’t imagine any good reasons for Ilianna being in a place like this, and I sure as hell did not want to think about bad reasons. But maybe this wasn’t about her—after all, it was Jak who’d collected the information that had led us to the standing stone gateway under the run-down warehouse near Stane’s. Maybe he’d found another one.
I walked across the road, every sense I had attuned to the old building. Nothing stirred, and I couldn’t see or hear anyone near. The night air was cool and whispered through the holes in my clothes, chilling my skin and causing goose bumps. Or maybe they were simply the result of growing unease.
“Jak?” I kept my voice soft. If he was here, he’d hear.
“Inside.” His voice was as hushed as mine, but oddly lacking warmth.
Unease growing, I grasped the door handle and wrenched it open. Unfortunately, I used more force than necessary and it crashed back, trapping my hand between the door handle and the wall. I bit back my yelp and shook my fingers, my gaze searching the dark room as I eased inside. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything.
“Where are you?”
“Here.”
