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Blonde hair bobbed as she nodded. “What happened?”
“Cole set a trap to capture souls. Then they used the bodies to incubate something from the Between, like the boggins that came through and wrecked the hotel. We’re calling them banshees.”
She looked to Argent, who loomed behind Adam. “That’s horrible, but I don’t know anything about it, I promise.”
“What about Wilcox? Did he mention other plans, contingencies?”
“No. All he cared about was healing his daughter and letting the Wolf out.”
“What about you? What did you care about?”
She looked to the garden plot. “Cole and I talked a lot about the earth and extinction. Did you know all the bugs are dying? They’re just gone. We’re killing them off. Most of us haven’t even noticed, and when they’re gone, it won’t be long until we’re next.”
“And Cole convinced you Wilcox cared about that?”
“I know, I was an idiot, but I thought, hey, billionaires got us into this extinction, maybe I could use one of them to get us out.”
Knowing what he did about Wilcox’s business ventures, Adam was tempted to agree with her self-assessment.
“What about the Wolf?” Adam had to tread carefully here. “Did you ever speak to him?”
“Only Wilcox ever saw him, but he said we’d meet him when he was free, and he’d grant each of us a boon, like a wish.”
“What were you going to wish for?”
She smiled, like a kid who’d given her list to a mall Santa.
“No more oil. No more coal. All of it, just gone. Then they’d have no choice but to stop poisoning everything. Can you imagine a world without plastic?”
Adam had almost felt sorry for her living like this, without running water or power, but this was probably her heaven. He could even see the nobility of the world she wanted to create, but it wasn’t hard to see the impact of such an event. Planes would fall out of the sky if their fuel vanished. He doubted every moving car would come to a gentle stop. Hospitals would lose power. Food or medicine in transit to people who needed it would never arrive.
He’d thought her gentler than the rest, but she was an extremist too, in her own green way.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have anything else to tell you. Did I help?”
“Your cooperation has been noted,” Argent said coldly.
Adam didn’t know if she was playing bad cop or if she was affronted by the idea of her precious cars not running.
They climbed the hill again.
Another door, another cabin, this one smaller than Lauren’s. The air was a shade cooler, just on the side of chilly. There were fewer trees, and the light felt a little less pleasant.
“Which one is this?” he asked.
“Amber.”
She’d been one of Emily’s roommates and had joined up with Wilcox in exchange for money to wipe away her parents’ debt after her mother’s fight with cancer. She’d saved their house.
She answered the door when he knocked.
“What is it?” she asked.
He expected her to take the news about Cole badly, and hoped the shock would loosen her up, that she’d drop something useful.
“I knew it,” she said in response.
“Knew what?”
