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“Somewhere that’s actually safe.” He lowered the gun and stepped back, giving Icarus the choice.
Icarus slid into the car, closing his eyes and palming the soft leather seats as Adam circled to the driver’s side door. A brief reprieve before Icarus steeled himself and brought his other senses back online, focusing on the scents of leather and whiskey to distract from the blood, opening his eyes to color and sharpening his gaze instead of his fangs. He glanced out each window, checking all directions and making sure they weren’t being followed.
Making sure they were safe. That was what he’d been turned for, after all. To protect. Now it seemed the Devil was his charge too.
FIVE
At the beginningof the night, if asked where he thought Adam lived, Icarus would have guessed one of the grand mansions in the Heights, or maybe a unit in one of the glitzy high-rises that rose on Sunset Hill above the Pacific cliffs. Those were the areas of Yerba Buena where most people who could afford whiskey and gas cars lived, if they lived in the city at all. He’d bet the single designer heel still in his pocket that that was where Vincent Cirillo and company lived. They probably had a whole floor or two in one of those high-rises.
After the events of the past hour, Icarus had reconsidered his guess about the Devil’s habitat and had changed it to the Lost Valley, a patch of relatively stable land bound on all sides by this or that area where illegal activities of this or that variety were the norm. Property was cheap in the Valley, the weather a mix of sun and fog. Not bad if one had the means of protecting themselves from the occasional spillover violence. Icarus had thought that was where they’d been headed as Adam had sped away from the Canyon Lands toward the interior of Yerba Buena.
But then Adam had driven right past the Valley and continued across the city—to the Terrace. In no event would Icarus have guessed that Adam lived a neighborhood over from him in the foggy corridor known as the Gap. Between the max-capacity, run-down apartment buildings of Icarus’s Lakeside neighborhood and the jammed-together, equally run-down rentals of the Manor, the Terrace was several blocks of single-family homes on decent-sized lots. Once affluent, the houses were now considered too modest for the wealthy and too expensive for everyone else. It was an upper-middle-class enclave for an upper-middle-class that no longer existed in YB, their numbers dwindling since the Rift, then falling precipitously since the turn of the century two decades ago. Nice middle-class folks like the ones who’d inhabited the Terrace had either been financially squeezed out or fled the epicenter of the centuries-old war between Nature and Chaos. Add to that the less stable ground—exacerbated by the Rift—and more fog than anywhere outside the Canyon Lands—naturally occurring, in this case—and the Terrace was a sort of residential graveyard where only a house every few lots was occupied.
“You live here?” Icarus asked as he stepped outside the garage where Adam had parked. From the driveway, he stared up at the two-story house, the exterior painted the same blue-gray shade as Adam’s eyes. It was in better shape than any of the surrounding homes—the pitched roof whole, the chimney in one piece, the white molding peeling only a little, the yard neatly kept—and the only one occupied on the street, as far as Icarus could tell by the lack of other cars, lights, or heartbeats. “Does anyone else live here?”
Adam didn’t answer either question, just slapped a button on the wall with the arm that wasn’t bleeding. The garage door began to lower, and Icarus skirted back under in the nick of time and followed Adam across the garage to an interior door. Using a key, Adam opened a control panel, entered a code on a keypad, and waited for a lock to disengage before pushing open the door and flipping on the lights inside.
No biting back the gasp this time. The armory Adam ushered him into shouldn’t have surprised Icarus. Especially not after the location of the house, the trip into the Canyon Lands, or the shifters Adam had met with, but it was still a shock. Guns, crossbows, throwing stars, and knives hung on three walls; beneath them on workbenches were tools and explosives in progress; in the drawers under the benches were ropes, cuffs, tape, and more; and in wooden crates all about the room were rocket launchers, grenades, tranq darts, and stakes.
“You’re at war,” Icarus said.
“I’m trying to stop a bigger war.” Adam withdrew the gun from the holster on his hip and emptied the bullets into a lined case. Silver, then, deadly to most magical creatures, including Icarus, versus lead bullets, which would have no effect on him but were deadly when fired at those on the more human end of the scale. Adam placed the weapon back in the open spot on the wall.
“And that kid you rescued tonight?”
“A weapon we couldn’t let the other side have.” Sadness in Adam’s eyes belied the simple statement. That wasn’t all the kid was, at least not to him. Before Icarus could read deeper, Adam turned to the one wall in the room that was the antithesis of violence. A utility sink stood beside a washer and dryer, fluffy gray towels piled atop the latter, and above the sink and appliances was a built-in cabinet from which Adam withdrew a green box with a white cross on it. “I need to clean up, then I could use your help with the cut.”
Icarus slammed shut his olfactory senses and blinked the color from his vision. The entire drive across the city he’d been able to ignore the blood—mostly. But now, what Adam was asking... damn near impossible. Not without shutting off his triggered senses and dampening his instincts, activating the defense mechanism he’d been “gifted.”
Maybe it was all for naught. Vincent clearly intended to kill Adam. Icarus could kill him tonight—probably, especially, once they left the armory—but that wasn’t his mission. And Icarus was too damn curious for his own good. Med kit in hand, he followed Adam up the stairs to the main level of the house. “I don’t think a gunshot wound is exactly a cut.”
At the door at the top of the stairs, Adam went through the keypad routine again. “Relatively, this is a minor cut.”
Icarus believed it, given the weapons stockpiled downstairs. The Devil was ready to do battle. For someone armed like that, tonight was merely a skirmish.
Adam pushed open the door and held it for Icarus to enter first. He closed the door behind them, rearmed it, and flicked on the lights. The same empty feeling that had first socked Icarus in the club returned, not as sharp but more encompassing. The air in the house was heavy with it. Just as the former mudroom downstairs had been turned into an armory, the main level of what had once been a cute family home—Icarus could sense the lingering warmth of it—had been transformed into a sort of basecamp. A kitchen that looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade other than as a storage area for water bottles and a receptacle for take-out containers. A dining table covered in photos and files. A living room with card tables and desk chairs for furniture, the former laden with computers and monitoring equipment, wires crisscrossing the dull wood floors.
Icarus’s tiny apartment wasn’t much, but it was lived in and cozy, a home. This was not. It was a lonely, tactical, sterile place.
Except for the mantel above the fireplace.
Icarus set the med kit on the kitchen island and drifted into the living room toward the mantel, while Adam drifted in the opposite direction down the hallway, turning on lights as he went. Icarus blinked color back into his vision, just for a moment, and regretted it immediately. The framed pictures on the mantel made his chest ache worse than it had in the club. A younger Adam in police blues. A dark-haired man and blond woman in military camo, holding up a sign that read We Miss You. The same man and woman in numerous other pictures with Adam. One with the man dressed in a tux, the woman in a white gown, and Adam in his dress uniform between them, the two strangers kissing either side of Adam’s face. Adam’s smile was sublime, bright enough to power a solar grid. Another picture of the grinning three, holding up their hands with matching wedding bands. Obviously happy, obviously in love. The family of three in front of this house, arms over each other’s shoulders, standing next to a SOLD sign in the yard. Then, on either end of the mantel, triangular cases of polished wood and gleaming glass, each holding a flag and medals. Deborah Levin, a shined brass plaque read at the bottom of one. David Levin, read the plaque on the other.
Something about their names... Icarus squinted, concentrating, then a moment later, it clicked—anagrams were a favorite family game—and his eyes widened with another surprise. The D from their first names, plus an anagram of their last names—Devlin.
And beneath the name on each plaque was a date exactly ten years ago.
Icarus lifted a hand to touch, drawn to the contradiction of joy and misery radiating from this one spot in the otherwise emotionless environment, as if it were a giant black hole, melancholy’s gravitational pull sucking him in. He caught himself at the last second, clutching the beveled edge of the mantel, then removing his hand as the wood cracked under his tense grip. He stepped back, blinked away the pain-laced color, and folded his arms over his chest.
“Who were they?” he asked when he heard Adam return from the bathroom.
“I belonged to them, and they belonged to me.”
SIX
Icarus dughis fingers into his biceps, trying and failing to displace the agony from the gaping hole in his chest torn open again by Adam’s words.
“What’s your name?” Adam asked from behind him.
