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Golden eyes flashed, murder glowing bright, and Adam was sure Icarus wouldn’t get his punch, but all Robin’s teeth sank into was green mist, Atlas disappearing with a single snap of his fingers.
“Huh,” Mary said, hands on her hips. “And I thought I had Atlas’s number.”
Speaking of numbers. Adam dug his phone out of his pocket and opened the encrypted chat app Icarus had installed. He handed the device to Mary. “Worry about them later. Text your brother now or there won’t be a base camp for us to get back to.”
THIRTY-TWO
He should have known better.One touch and she’d immediately sensed what he was. Why hadn’t David or Deborah ever told him the creature sharing David’s soul and now Adam’s was a force of nature? Did they know? Deb had always been a shifter, and Adam had assumed the same of David, but thinking back, there were pictures and fleeting moments from before their deployment when David had seemed lighter, when all of his soul shined from his eyes. Before it had been dimmed by the fire inside him.
Inside Adam now.
Magic.
The same magic—the source of it—bound inside the green-haired woman beside him in the passenger seat. She’d been silently working her phone the entire drive from Portola to Talahalusi, fingers flying, switching between chat boxes and transferring files between cloud-based drives. Anyone passing them on the freeway, if they could catch a glimpse of the Camaro through the caravan of other cars surrounding them, would probably assume she was just another person who spent too much time on their phone. Maybe some would wonder if she was a hacker. But how many would guess she was the life force holding their world together? It wouldn’t cross Adam’s mind if she were a stranger, but she wasn’t, and the questions filling his head were too many to count.
“What do you want to know?” she asked, as if reading this mind. Could she?
He chuffed. “I don’t even know where to start.”
A small smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“You’ve lost others?
“Too many.”
“How did it happen?” Adam asked. “How did the magic inside David come to be inside me?” He’d been in the safe house when David had come stumbling in, his skin rippling orange and red, Deborah in coyote form in his arms. She had been too still, not breathing, a sizzling, gaping wound on her side. He’d told Adam to run, but there’d been nowhere to run, the battle raging outside, the loves of his life dying in the room with him. He wasn’t leaving them; he’d promised until death do they part, and he’d planned on keeping that promise. He’d wrapped his arms around David, holding them both, and withstood the searing heat that burst from their husband and brought the walls down around them. That was the last thing he remembered before waking in a hospital bed with no burns on him. But in him... “Why am I still here?”
“He loved you. He made a choice to save you. And in doing so, he also saved the magic.”
But how? No one had ever been able to answer him that. “It doesn’t normally happen this way?”
“Too many can’t control the magic. They flame out and die alone.”
“They can’t use it to bring themselves back again?” He’d sensed that himself; that the magic inside him was a one-shot deal, at least where he was concerned. It was another reason he’d flexed it so rarely—that and the fear a flame out would sear those around him. Contrary to what he’d told Icarus, it was the primary reason why he hadn’t flexed his power when facing Vincent at the Canyon Lands. Icarus, Cormac, Jenn, and Abigail had all been in the blast radius.
“The magic can only bring a being back once.” She finished on her phone and set it on the seat between them. “It’s why Chaos is winning. Every one of you that’s extinguished, whose energy isn’t properly channeled, is a black hole that feeds the darkness. Without the power of rebirth, of second chances, there’s not enough energy to drive the living.”
Again, how the hell did Adam unpack all that? But as he turned onto the narrow road that led to Monte Corvo, his thoughts likewise narrowed, catching on something she’d said and considering it more personally, considering it in terms of the man they had in common.
“Is that what I am to Icarus?” Had Icarus figured out what he was? Or even if he hadn’t, had the vampire? Was the thing inside Adam a life force—rebirth—the vampire couldn’t resist?
“It’s what he is to you, isn’t it?” she shot back, then cast her gaze out the window at the rising vineyards. “Irony, fate, call it what you will, it twists like a vine around all of us.”
Adam frowned. “So it’s not really us?” His awareness of Icarus before he’d even laid eyes on him, the attraction that had ridden him hard since he had, the affection that had grown steadily alongside it. Was it merely rebirth reaching for an outlet? For death? Was Icarus the death wish Cormac so often warned of? Adam the man recoiled at the idea, but Adam the detective couldn’t discount the possibility. “It’s just fate or the monsters inside us?”
“Not monsters,” she said, those two words filled with such sorrow, such exhaustion, it stole Adam’s breath. But then her voice, her whole being, brightened as they pulled into the villa’s circular drive and the front door was flung open, Icarus barely holding himself back from running into the setting sun to reach her. She glanced back over her shoulder at him. “Don’t sell yourselves short. I know monsters. They don’t have half the love in their hearts as you and Icarus do.”
She smiled, then shoved the car door open, leaving a sparkle of green in her wake as she sprinted across the drive, up the steps, and into her brother’s arms. Icarus held her tight, lifting her off the ground and twirling her around, radiating relief that Adam felt in every part of his soul, the parts that belonged to him and the parts he shared with the Devil. Felt it settle deeper as he stepped out of the car and met Icarus’s gaze over the roof. Read the silent thank-you on his lips.
Was she right? Was it love filling up Adam’s heart and carrying him step by step closer to the person he’d been unable to shake from his life since he’d first sauntered into it? Not because of any mission or any blackmail or any forces other than attraction and affection, other than appreciation for what Icarus had brought to his life for the first time in a decade. He’d known love before, real and true, and fuck if the fullness of his heart, the peace in his soul, all of it, didn’t feel the same now as it had then.
Adam climbed the steps, never taking his eyes off Icarus, sliding his hand into Icarus’s outstretched one while Icarus kept his other arm wrapped around his sister. “I thought I’d lost you,” he whispered into her green curls.
“I told you I’d find my way here when I was ready.”
Icarus gasped and jerked back. Adam, however, found his words first. “Repeat that.”
“I found a way to you,” she said to Icarus, then to Adam, “And a way for you to take down Vincent Cirillo, once and for all.”
