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He already was, but Adam’s instincts hadn’t caught on to that detail. Hadn’t caught on to the fact that the opposite of his words was doubly true. If Icarus didn’t succeed in seducing him, Icarus would be dead. For good this time. He teased the corner of Adam’s mouth with his thumb. “Risk I’d be willing to take.”
Faster than he should have been able, Adam clasped his wrist. To yank it down and push him away, Icarus expected—but Adam did the unexpected. He pulled Icarus closer and swiped his tongue over his own bottom lip, the tip brushing the pad of Icarus’s thumb. “Could I even afford you?”
Icarus bit back his gasp—surprise, victory, and lust all warring for a voice. Any of which, if spoken, would crater the mission.
The mission.
“If you can afford that whiskey”—he flicked his gaze to the glass—“you can afford me.”
A shaky breath coasted over Icarus’s palm, and Adam’s gaze finally drifted down, taking in all of Icarus. His pulse sped, a blush streaked across his high cheekbones, and when he lifted his eyes back to Icarus’s, a lake of fire stared back at him. The same fire that roared through Icarus, unlike anything he’d ever experienced. “Where—”
A phone rang, shattering the moment. A single blink and Adam disappeared, retreating into his shell, banking the heat as the storm clouds returned. The Devil tiptoed back under his skin, and he released Icarus’s wrist, shifted away, and pulled out his phone. “Devlin.”
The call lasted less than a minute, and when it was over, the Devil slid off his stool without another word. Without another look. Without the slightest clue that he’d just sentenced Icarus to death.
THREE
Icarus ordereda cheap shot of vodka, sulked the length of it, then got over himself. Yes, he was good at his job, but not every job was easy, and he hadn’t expected this one to be. In fact, he’d been doing better than expected before that phone call had interrupted them. Success—Adam—had been at his fingertips. It—he—could be again if Icarus was in the right place at the right time when Adam finished doing whatever that call had summoned him away to do. The night wasn’t over, and neither was the mission.
He paid the bartender and grabbed his trench and combat boots from the coat check. Swapping his heels for the boots, he shoved the former into his coat pockets and wrapped up tight before heading outside into the cold night. Neither the temperature nor the dark affected him, but his work attire might draw the kind of attention he didn’t need at the moment. He already had a mark; he wasn’t looking for another.
He sniffed the air and caught the lingering aroma of whiskey, and on its heels, the oily odor of gasoline, another thing only the rich and powerful could afford for their gas-powered automobiles. He followed the scents, keeping to the shadows as he moved at his preternatural pace, heels never touching the ground, leaping from toe to toe, block to block. The path took him down Sutro Hill and east across town toward the Canyon Lands.
Humans rarely ventured into this part of Yerba Buena, their reaction times too slow for the frequently shifting land and their eyesight too poor for an area that was shrouded in fog day and night. Magically so. It was a demented sort of fun house for paranormals—a place to hide, to trade in illicit goods, to do bad things, a playground for one’s darkest fantasies—but for humans, it was a sightless, dangerous nightmare. A deadly maze that could change shape in the blink of an eye.
Icarus wasn’t surprised to find a vintage Camaro parked at the end of a road in front of the barbed wire fence that ran the length of the Canyon Lands border. He was surprised, however, that Adam’s scent didn’t diverge left or right into one of the alleys, garages, or abandoned buildings where all sorts of shit went down. Instead, it continued straight ahead, beyond the fence and out toward the canyons of deep dark water that cut into the crumbling ruins of structures that used to stand tall and magnificent, glass and metal that had once shone in the sunlight.
Before the Rift.
Before that day thirty years ago when Nature and her allies had gone to war with Chaos and the darker forces of magic, with Yerba Buena as ground zero. When what had started as a balmy October day had turned into a dark and stormy nightmare, when the contours of the land had been irrevocably altered by earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis, and when battle lines had been etched in stone. Skirmishes were constant in the three decades since, the push and pull between Nature and Chaos waxing and waning with the seasons and the power grabs of beings—human and paranormal—in between. But where the Canyon Lands were concerned, Nature had conceded the territory, and she hadn’t left it a hospitable place.
Icarus ducked through the wire fence, cursing low when a barb snagged the lace band of his stocking. He could try to save it, but the wafting whiskey scent was growing fainter, dissipating in the heavy fog as Adam moved farther into the canyons. Cutting his losses, Icarus unclipped the garter—thathe wasn’t losing—and clawed through the thinner nylon beneath the lace top of the stocking.
Freed, he climbed the rest of the way through the fence and hustled to catch up to Adam, worrying more with each step. The ground beneath his boots was a debris-filled mess of buckled roads and sidewalks, sand and silt, and all around, in buildings and makeshift hovels, in the swirling fog that filled alleys and crevices, bright eyes glowed, their owners snarling a warning.
What the fuck was Adam doing out here? Meeting someone—or doing something—he shouldn’t? In either case, was it worth risking his life?
Icarus got his answer twenty or so yards later when an explosion overhead sent him scrambling behind a rusted-out dumpster. Smoke and flames billowed from the shattered windows of a corner building, the metal fire escape rattling as another explosion wracked what was left of the crumbling structure.
“Go, go, go!” someone shouted from inside the building, and in the wake of another plume of smoke and shattering glass, a slim figure in jeans and a dark hoodie emerged from the broken window onto the fire escape. They turned back toward the building, arms outstretched, and Adam appeared at the window, leaning his torso out, a blanket-wrapped something in his arms. As Adam handed off the bundle, an arm slipped loose of the blanket, and a head fell back onto the rescuer’s shoulder, exposed. Human, maybe? Dark hair, skin that was too pale and too thin, translucent almost, stretched across jutting bones. Emaciated, barely hanging on to life, a fluttering heartbeat compared to the stronger two—no, four—in its vicinity. And glowing too, a red-orange sheen the likes of which Icarus had never seen, rippling over the being’s skin. A shifter, then, of some sort? Icarus sniffed, but the smoke drowned out any other scents.
“Go!” Adam shouted. “Get him to Jenn and the coven before he flames out.”
Flames out?
The hooded figure wrapped their arm tight around the young man, turned, and jumped off the metal platform. Icarus muffled his shout in the crook of his arm. The jumper landed on their feet, dark hair escaping the hood, delicate features visible in profile. A woman. Definitely a shifter for how gracefully she’d landed and how fast she took off, disappearing into the fog.
The building gave another terrible shake and a groan as wood and metal scraped together, as smoke and flames gushed out of every hole, as hunks of concrete crashed to the already-splintered asphalt. Icarus whipped his gaze back to the fire escape. No sign of Adam. But three heartbeats still inside. Adam plus two other friends... or two other foes?Fuck. A tinny voice of self-preservation rang in Icarus’s head. Let the building come down; let it end Adam; let Vincent blackmail Icarus to do something—anything—else. The louder voice inside Icarus’s chest rebelled at the notion of leaving Adam to such a fiery fate, especially after he’d just saved a paranormal of some sort from the same.
Icarus moved to step out from behind the dumpster, to zip into the building and rescue the man he was supposed to deliver to Vincent, only to freeze midstep when a coughing Adam staggered out of a glassless window on the ground floor. The two other heartbeats emerged and rushed to Adam’s side, helping to hold him up as he gulped in breaths of air. Icarus silently sank behind the dumpster and waited for Adam to recover, which happened far too quickly for Adam to be only human. Icarus didn’t have long to ponder what he was, though, because the trio moved again, Adam leading them away from the burning building and deeper into the fog, stopping only when they reached the outer edge where the ground had fallen away in massive chunks, only ruins and unstable jetties left between the deep dark crevices of rushing water.
Icarus ducked inside the nearest hollowed-out ruin, inching closer to where Adam and his associates gathered on the buckled road outside. He hopped from one rusty steel pile to the next, ignoring the murder of crows perched on the broken beams overhead, the gaping holes in the slab floor around him, and the muted crash of waves somewhere far below.
“What did you find out?” Adam asked.
A growl belied the voice that answered. “He pulled the trigger on the contract. Even before that stunt tonight.”
He? As in Vincent? It had to be.
