A nothing in the road.
“The sorcerer.”
“So I suspected.”
“He’s in his car. He’s hidden it, the way he hid the office from you. It’s a secondary bolt-hole—a way for him to escape, except he won’t run while Jack can lead your sister to him.”
“He couldn’t go far enough unless he left this world entirely. For some world other than mine, of course,” the Dragon Lord amended. “As that would certainly not solve his problem.”
His problem. Allie appreciated the understatement. “He’s grabbed Graham because Graham’s still his best bet to take out Jack…” Lifting her hand off the truck, she closed her fingers around the bullet in the breast pocket of Graham’s jacket. “… except we’re not likely to put Jack anywhere he can get to him unless he thinks we’ll just let Graham back in, which we would, because Gran’s wards would strip a geis, so…”
“Gale girl!” His tone snapped her out of reflection. “As fascinating as time spent in your company is, if you cannot tell me how to find this nothing, I will return to the sky.”
“I can’t. But if the aunties can,” she added hurriedly, “how do I contact you?”
“If you cannot contact me, Gale girl, I doubt you have anything to say I need to hear.” He stepped back, and Allie knew the fire was a heartbeat away.
“Adam!” When he didn’t begin to burn, she took a deep breath. “Just whose side are you on?”
Sulfur overwhelmed the alley’s scent of old garbage, cat piss, and car exhaust as he sighed, the heat dialed back to a level she thought she could endure. “If my sister comes to this world,” he said wearily, “we are bound to protect her. To serve her. I am fond of this place and there are many parts of it I do not wish to see destroyed.” He twitched a nonexistent wrinkle from his suit jacket. “But mostly, I am fond of it because it has been a refuge. Here, I am not in my sister’s service. I am on my side, Gale girl.” His smile held multiple points. “But I suspect you knew that.”
“You’re probably right about the car,” Auntie Jane said thoughtfully. “He’d want a way to run.”
“Except if he thought he was going to be running instead of hanging about the city, he may need to keep moving to stay undetectable,” Auntie Bea added.
Auntie Christie set a shallow bowl of water on one end of the dining room table. “He’ll have to stop for gas, and when he does, I’ll find him.”
“In that?” Auntie Meredith snorted, staring into the screen of her phone.
Allie thought Auntie Christie’s smile looked a bit like Adam’s. “At least I don’t have to scry through incoming calls.”
She moved closer to Auntie Jane as the other two continued bickering. “Graham didn’t go willingly.”
“Of course he didn’t. Stupid boy probably participated in blood magic at some point over the last thirteen years. That sort of nonsense creates ties that aren’t easy to break and Jonathon Samuel is powerful enough to use them.”
Allie held out the bullet. “His blood’s part of this.”
“So is Jonathon Samuel’s.” Auntie Jane snickered as she rolled it across her palm. “He’s not going to be pleased he didn’t get this back,” she said returning it. “But it proves my point. Young men are idiots.”
“He didn’t know any better.”
“Then you’ll have a lot to teach him, won’t you?”
“If…”
“When, Alysha Catherine.” Strong fingers pinched her chin. “When.”
“Allie, why do I have to be up?” Yawning and scratching, Jack slouched across the room and glared at her. “It’s still stupid o’clock in the morning.”
“If you can sleep through this…” she waved a hand at the baking and the scrying and whatever the hell Katie was doing to Charlie’s hair. “… go back to bed.”
“Thanks, Al. You totally don’t suck.”
“What?” she asked as Auntie Jane snorted disapprovingly. “It still is stupid o’clock in the morning.”
Kalynchuk took a long swallow of coffee and gunned the SUV through a yellow light. “I am living in my car,” he snarled, tossing the empty cup into the backseat. “Me. In my car. Like a transient. Like a mere mortal. Like I am not the only man of power to master the Dragon Queen!”
“Hiding from a group of old women who can destroy you with a word,” Graham reminded him. His shoulder ached from where he’d been slamming it against the door.
“Please, they’re the least of my concerns.”
“You never told me you were a Gale.”
“There’s a great many things I never told you.” He took his eyes off the road long enough to sneer in Graham’s direction. “We were not friends.”
“No shit.” Major fail on emotional pain if that had been the intent. “Did you kill my family?”
“Did I what?” That drew his attention off the road so completely the car wandered off with it.
“Simple question.” Graham reached over and jerked the wheel to the left to avoid impact with a parked car. Given the whole invisible thing, Kalynchuk had taken them onto quiet, empty, residential roads, but that didn’t mean there weren’t dangers. He realized too late impact could have given him a chance to get away.
From his smug expression as he regained control of the vehicle, Kalynchuk realized it, too. “Your family died years ago. Why do you care?”
“Why do I care?” Fingernails dug half moons into his palms as he stopped himself from taking another futile swing at the son-of-a-bitch. “For fucksake, they were my family!”
“It’s been thirteen years, and you never asked me. You don’t think that’s interesting? You made a living asking questions, and you never asked me that. It’s like you knew that if they’d lived you’d still be stuck in that backwoods pitiful excuse of a life. I saved you, and you know it.”
“I’d always thought it.” Although, here and now, he didn’t know how he could have. He’d worked for Kalynchuk for half his life, had started out overwhelmed and honored to think an orphaned boy from Blanc-Sablon would be trusted to guard so important a man, had ended up thinking his life had a greater meaning than some office drone with no idea of how much larger the world actually was. Start to finish, he’d been an idiot. “The whole sex with a dragon thing? That proves your mastery of fire pretty definitively. Your enthusiasm for killing your son proves you’re a heartless fuck.”
“My son,” the sorcerer snorted. “I was willing to have you kill him, which is, I admit, merely a difference of degree. You don’t seem to understand that the creature is more dangerous to me than those old women are.”
“And you’ve lost your chance.”
“I didn’t lose it!” The force of the words sprayed saliva over the windshield as he turned down another empty suburban street. “You took it from me.”
“Damned right.” Graham didn’t bother hiding his triumph. “They’ll never let you near him. And they won’t let me near him if there’s a chance I’m under your control.”
“Fortunately, I don’t care what they want or they intend. However, in case we can’t remove him, his mother will be at least as disoriented upon arrival as he was—perhaps more, given that she has no connection to this world except through him—that’s when the old women will do whatever it is they plan to do. They’ll fail—they have no idea of how strong she is—but that failure should further distract her. I controlled her once, I can do it again. If I can get her into skin, you can kill her with Blessed rounds. A lot of them, admittedly, but it can be done.”
“Should have thought of that before you grabbed me.” He spread his hands. “No weapon.”
“Not your favorite, perhaps, but I stopped by your condo and picked up your other M24.”
The thought of Kalynchuk knowing how to find his very well hidden weapons cache made his skin crawl. “I won’t use it.”
“Stop being so stupidly squeamish. She’s not Human.”
“Are you Human?”
“That doesn’t matter.” Maybe he said it to Allie. Maybe to Kalynchuk, he wasn’t sure.
“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?”