Goddammit. The flight alone from LA to San Francisco took an hour and a half. Even with his authority to expedite his flight and commandeer a police cruiser to cut through city traffic in San Francisco, meeting her deadline was going to be close, very close.
He knew she kept the deadline tight in order to keep him from making some kind of countermove against her. And of course the whole thing was some kind of trap, but that was the least important part of their exchange.
In a clench, he forced himself to tap out the next words. I need proof of life or there’s no deal.
Justine must have been waiting for that one, because almost immediately, her next text came, and it was a photo.
In the image, Melly stood in front of a man, looking both furious and terrified at once, her hands bound in front of her. The man’s hands were sunk deep in her long, disheveled hair. Was he holding her hair back for the camera? Melly’s face was tilted up at an uncomfortable angle, as if he had yanked her head back.
As Julian stared at the image, his emotions bled out — all the bitterness, resentment, regret, fear and rage — until he felt empty of everything, except the need to commit violence.
You, he thought at the unknown man restraining Melly. You are a dead man. You and Justine have just become my life’s mission.
Soren said, “Julian?”
At the same moment, he received another text: That photo is from early this morning. Do we have a deal?
He replied, I’ll be there in three hours.
Ticktock. Remember, not a word to anyone. I’ll find out if you do.
He knew she could too. Justine was a talented liar. She also had a keenly developed truthsense. All she had to do was ask him a direct question and listen carefully to his reply.
A hand touched him on the bicep. Startling, he whirled to look into Tatiana’s gaze. The Queen still looked frightened, but she was beginning to show signs of other emotions as well — worry and confusion, along with the beginnings of anger and distrust.
Distrust for him.
“Julian, are you paying attention at all?”
Not a word to anyone, Justine had said.
Staring at Tatiana’s distrustful expression when he had done not a goddamned thing in the world to earn it, he decided to take Justine’s admonishment literally.
Pivoting on one heel, he snatched his cloak off the back of a chair and strode for the hallway, ignoring the calls and questions that flew after him. With one slicing gesture, he pointed at his two guards then at the floor at their feet, ordering them wordlessly to stay where they were. They remained in place, immobile.
As he strode toward the front door, he slung the cloak over his shoulders and pulled the hood over his head, holding it in place with one fist. The two Light Fae guards stepped aside at his approach.
The last thing he heard before he left the house was Bailey, as she said bitterly, “I knew you should never have asked him to come.”
Then he stepped out into the sunlight. Searing pain stabbed the skin on the back of his hand, and he broke into a lope that brought him to the car.
The keys were in the ignition. Lunging into the driver’s seat, he slammed the door, started the car and gunned down the driveway. A glance in the rearview mirror showed Tatiana, Bailey, Soren and the Light Fae guards, all standing on the front doorstep and staring in his direction.
He was fleetingly pleased to see that his two guards were nowhere in sight. They were following orders, at least for now.
The others had to have realized something was seriously off, but he couldn’t count on them piecing things together in the right way. Even if they did, and they attempted to do something to help, they might just make matters worse.
If they didn’t… well, fuck them.
He dismissed them from his mind. He had a plane to catch, and a deadline to keep.
Like Justine said, he better get a move on.
Four
Lying so far north of Los Angeles, San Francisco had a much cooler climate and entirely different weather patterns. As the Nightkind plane taxied into SFO, beads of moisture gathered on the outside of the windows from the dense, heavy fog that had rolled in some time earlier that day.
Julian welcomed the fog. It provided an effective cover from the deadly sunshine. From long years of experience with living in the Bay Area, he could tell that he would be able to walk outside freely without needing the cloak, at least for the next couple of hours, and the fog might actually linger until nightfall.
During his trip to LAX, and the subsequent flight, he had received several calls and texts. None of them were from Yolanthe or Xavier, the two people he would have actually chosen to talk to, in case they had discovered any leads on Justine’s whereabouts, so he ignored all the messages and let the phone calls roll over to voicemail. Maybe if enough people took note of his prolonged silence, they would start talking to each other and figure out that something had gone wrong.
Once the airstair had been put into place, he exited the plane, strode through the massive, overcrowded airport to the area allotted for pickups, and approached the first parked police car he saw.
Putting a hand on the edge of the roof, he leaned close to the window to look inside. No key in the ignition.
“I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the car, sir,” a male said severely from behind him.
Straightening, Julian turned to face a young human, one eyebrow raised.
The cop’s expression changed drastically. “S-sir,” he stammered. “I mean, your majesty. No wait, that’s English royalty. You’re a—a—‘your grace,’ right? Or are you a ‘my lord’?”
There was no way Julian could maintain silence after that. On the plus side, the cop would definitely remember every detail of their meeting. He said dryly, “ ‘Sir’ or ‘sire’ will do just fine. I need your keys.”
“Certainly, sir. Sire.”
He was too preoccupied to be amused. “One or the other. I don’t need both at once.” He held out his hand peremptorily, and the cop dropped his keys into the palm of his hand.
“Where shall I go to pick up the vehicle, sire?” the cop asked.
Without replying, Julian climbed into the police car and, switching on the vehicle’s siren, he drove off. He had very little time now to get to the Golden Gate Park, and the museum.
Cutting sharply across the highway, he settled into the fast lane and shot the car’s speed to over a hundred miles an hour. In the heavy fog, it was a suicidal pace. What saved him were his preternatural reflexes.
The other vehicles on the road moved out of his way as drivers responded to the siren, but still there were times he had to slow as he waited for the traffic to shift to the right.
When he turned onto John F. Kennedy Drive, he had five minutes left.
Then four minutes, three.
Two.
He could tell by the line of red lights glowing up ahead that traffic was heavy at the intersection. He wasn’t going to make it if he continued to the intersection to turn onto Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, the road upon which the museum was located.
He had no doubt Justine would kill Melly without a moment’s hesitation if he were late. None at all.
Yanking hard on the steering wheel, he drove the car over the shoulder and onto the grounds of the park. He could feel the wheels of the car digging into the dirt, and he gunned the engine to compensate.
When the distinctive shape of the museum building loomed out of the fog, he opened the car door and leaped out while it was still running, leaving it to slow to a stop on its own. Blurring into his fastest sprint, he raced around the corner of the building just as the stopwatch on his phone started to chime.