Shrugging, Spencer answered, “I had to get your location somehow. Got to hand it to Custo; he didn’t give. But there’s no fighting The Collective.”
“I’ve found a way,” Adam said. She’s just outside the door.
“It’s too late. The world has changed. The wraith population tops ten thousand, headed by an immortal demon. Cooperation is in our best interests. The wraith revolution is over. The Collective won.”
The hell it did. Adam’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“But I’ll, uh, throw you a bone if you let me out of here,” Spencer said with a flash of his teeth.
“You’re not leaving this room alive.” Hold on, Custo.
“Really?” Spencer asked. “I can show you how to end a wraith without a scream. It’s actually very simple. Your perspective at Segue has been so myopic that you couldn’t see it for yourself.”
Adam thought of Talia. Her small, fragile frame struggling for air. He couldn’t imagine her fighting a demon. Couldn’t imagine her slack body if she died trying.
“What is it?”
“Wraiths can’t tolerate death.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Can’t tolerate death.
Spencer glanced meaningfully at Custo, slumped in his chair. His rounded shoulders were too still.
No! It couldn’t be. Not Custo.
A life for a death. Philip’s druid rite, his theory of symmetry in which a person gives up their life to teach a monster to die. That wraith wasn’t worth Custo. His only friend. His brother in every way that mattered.
“Out,” Adam said. He had to get to Custo. Save Custo.
Spencer’s eyes glittered in satisfaction. Adam kept his gun trained on him as Spencer eased out the door.
“I’ll be just outside when you’re done,” Spencer said. Him, his SPCI team, and a couple wraiths. All that, and still Spencer would die when Adam was finished here. His banshee easily trumped Spencer’s backup.
Adam rushed to Custo and gently felt his blood-slick neck for a pulse as his own clamored wildly. He couldn’t find it.
No, wait. The vein at Custo’s neck trembled. The pulse was there, just thready. Weak.
Hang on. Hang on.
Adam knelt on the floor beside the chair, forced his trembling hands to gentleness to raise Custo’s chin. His face was a nightmare of brutality, even softened by Talia’s shadows. His eyes were red-ringed, his nose askew, his jaw oddly hanging. “Oh, God. Custo, I’m sorry.”
Not that Custo could hear him. He was well beyond that.
Adam swallowed bile as a rage of helplessness filled him, vision blurring with water. Custo couldn’t die like this, tied to a chair. Adam took the knife out of his belt and severed the cords that bound his friend, so very careful not to nick Custo’s skin.
Custo’s body sagged forward when Adam freed his arms.
“Easy now,” Adam said, shouldering the weight. Warm wetness seeped through his shirt, Custo’s blood flowing freely. Adam brought him to the bed. There was nowhere else to take him. No help he could get to save him.
He was too late, again.
Adam’s arms shook as he laid out his friend. He couldn’t hold Custo’s hand as he died, because his fingers were cruelly twisted, broken. He took Custo’s wrist instead to wait out the fading heartbeats.
One beat.
Custo as the poor kid with no family, new to Shelby Boys’ School, rumpled and rearing to fight.
A second beat.
Custo, showing no fear when first confronted by the horror of Jacob. Working side by side to contain the monster. Helping found Segue instead of living his own life. Custo should’ve had his own life. A woman. A family. Of all things, Custo should’ve had a family of his own.
The darkness of the room thickened.
No third beat touched Adam’s fingers. A smothered sob wracked him as a warm fleeting presence brushed by—Custo!—which Adam knew was only palpable in Talia’s half-light.
A depression formed, tendrils of curling darkness reaching out as if whipped by an unseen wind.
Adam slowly rose next to the bed and peered inside the layers of shadow for a trace of Custo’s passing. The loss hollowed him, scraped out his heart, stealing the breath and words he so desperately needed to say good-bye and thank you and I am so fucking sorry.
But there was only darkness. Darkness and Shadowman.
Shadowman stood trapped within a vortex of intense, swirling shadow. The wind slowed and died, coming to rest in a rippling cloak about his body. Shadowman twitched his cloak aside, and Adam perceived a gleaming light beckoning within the deep like a bright promise.
A glow moved within and across the darkness. Custo. Gone. Adam felt like a limb had been severed from his body. Something vital missing, yet the ghost-pain of it remained to haunt him.
The wind picked up, binding Shadowman again.
But the rod of Death’s scythe was long. He whipped out the curved blade, speared the wraith’s just-stirring body, and dragged her out of the world. The “fireflies” within the wraith floated free into forever, the consumed souls released at last to the hereafter.
As darkness swallowed Shadowman again, he brought up his bloodthirsty gaze and met Adam’s.
Adam understood. Spencer was right. The answer was so simple. No one else Adam loved need fear The Collective.
Yes, Talia could free Death with her scream. But anyone else could, too. They just had to die to do it.
Cold will hardened in Adam as he stepped away from Custo’s broken body. This wasn’t good-bye. No. Now he planned to follow Custo’s lead. If Custo could give his life to protect his friend, to screw Spencer, to kill a wraith, Adam could, too.
But there was no way Adam would spend his life for his selfish brother Jacob. No, if he were going to court Death, it would be for the demon himself.
SEVENTEEN
TALIA watched as the soldiers moved stealthily into the center of the room, fanning out to search the dark while that coward and traitor Spencer lounged on the wall next to the bedroom, giving orders from his headset.
Where was Adam? Why was he taking so long? One more minute and she’d go in after him herself.
One soldier’s trajectory headed perilously toward the open air of the window. With his senses muted, he wasn’t aware of his danger, even as his boots crushed glass underfoot.
Talia retracted her shadows slightly from the sharp drop of the loft’s broken window. If the man fell to his death, it would not be because of her.
The man stepped out of the shadows into sunlight. The sudden deluge of stimuli and imminent danger had him flailing for balance. But he recouped, shuffled forward, and peered cautiously over the edge. He took up position there, as if Talia and Adam planned to escape that way. Not likely.
The wraiths, one a bald, thickset male, and the other, a tall and lithe female with the graceful poise of a ballerina, slinked across the room.
“Been lucky all my life,” the male wraith muttered. “I deal with a demon, and my luck dries up. I pull the short straws every time now.”
Demon.
The female held out her hands to feel her way across the dark. Her fingers fluttered across the shoulders of a soldier twice her weight. She found his mask and used it to lift his body out of her way
The soldier thrashed and screamed, though his cries sounded smothered in the darkness.
“Oh, I’m not going to eat you,” the female wraith sneered and dropped the man to the floor. “Treaty won’t allow it.”
Treaty. Spencer. Custo.
The female’s hand found the long wall that led uninterrupted to the hallway. She was headed to the bedroom.