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“How much?” a third voice asked, solemn and dutiful, all business.
“Five million,” the growly one replied.
Someone whistled. Mr. Solemn, if Icarus had to guess.
“Probably more now,” Mr. Growly added. “You cost him another one.” Icarus couldn’t get a read on his accent. It was practiced and unnatural, like it had been pieced together from a million different dialects. Icarus crept closer, wanting to get eyes on them. Were they mostly human, like Adam? He didn’t think so, at least not the growly one.
“You didn’t pick the contract up?” Adam asked.
Mr. Growly laughed, and when he spoke again, some of the put-on accent was stripped away, his growl softened to an affectionate rumble. “She’d never forgive me.”
Shewho? Someone they worked for? The Devil didn’t seem the sort to work for anyone.
“She might haunt you for passing it up,” Adam replied.
A dead someone. A dead and gone someone. Icarus’s kind didn’t “haunt.” That was a term strictly reserved for ghosts. But the three men in the street didn’t seem to have the same dark connotations with the word as Icarus did. They laughed, quiet and low, tender almost. Whoevershewas, they all remembered her fondly.
Mr. Solemn’s voice was gentle, beseeching when he spoke again. “Come up to the mountain.”
Sneaking closer, Icarus inched into a crumbling cement corner, only rebar left on his side but still solid enough on the street-facing side to hide behind.
“I’m not running,” Adam said. “I haven’t run for ten years. And she—they—deserve vengeance.”
They, not onlyshe. And there was that ten years again.
Icarus peeked around the corner just as Mr. Growly got in Adam’s face. Golden eyes glowed beneath a headful of rusty-blond hair. Definitely not human. “What good is vengeance if you’re dead?” His words were full of anger and something deeper, something like brotherhood.
Icarus’s own chest clenched. He batted down memories before they rose higher and instead focused on the here and now.
The present in which Adam shifted his focus, calmly rotating his face to the other man standing in the street with them. His words and expression were resigned. “Then you’ll come get me and take me to them.”
“Fuck.” The man flinched and rotated, the tails of his long dark trench flying, and before he dipped his chin, before he raked a hand through his jet-black hair, Icarus caught the flash of violet eyes. Also not human. He spun back around the next instant, solemn long gone, anger and anxiety straining his voice. “I swear, you’ve had a ten-year death wish. You just ran into a burning building, for fuck’s sake. Do you have any idea how hard it’s been keeping you alive?”
“Can you blame me?” Adam swung his attention back to the golden-eyed man. Icarus risked a sniff, far enough away from the smoke to smell again—a canine of some sort. “If Vincent’s coming after me this hard, he knows I’m close, and he can’t afford that with whatever he’s banking power for.”
“The Rift anniversary,” the dog said. “Or Samhain.”
“Whatever he’s planning, we have to stop him. We have to finish their work.”
There was thattheiragain. Mr. Solemn started to argue something, maybe about them, but his words were dampened by a wave crashing into the canyons below so thunderous the silt beneath Icarus’s feet shifted, the earth giving way. Icarus bit out a low curse. “Fuck.”
“Who’s there?” the dog barked, and the crows above screeched an awful chorus.
Icarus debated bounding away, but he couldn’t without being seen, without exposing what he was. He scooted farther into the corner instead, fingers scrabbling at rusty rebar and crumbling cement.
Voices and footsteps drew closer. “Show yourself!” Adam shouted.
Gunshots were not the answer any of them expected.
FOUR
The gunfire camefrom behind Icarus, from the direction of the burning building they’d fled. From the only path out of the Canyon Lands. Cliffs and dark water—all that existed the other way.
“I’ll cut a path,” the dark-haired man said, and in the blink of an eye, he was in the air, transformed into a crow bigger than any of the ones overhead.
No, not a crow. A raven.
The crows, though, followed his lead, taking flight and barreling through the hole in the ceiling, out past Icarus and into the street, falling into formation behind the shifter and slicing through the fog.
