Bad life. Good death. He’d settle for that.
“Where’s Adam?” Spencer repeated. “You’ll tell me before we’re through.”
Custo gave him his best, bloody smile. If Spencer and his wraiths hadn’t found the emergency escape, he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him. Not even to save his own life.
Custo gathered the saliva and blood that coated his mouth and spat in Spencer’s face. Got the asshole’s chin and neck.
Spencer drew his sidearm. He touched the hard tip of the gun to Custo’s forehead while he wiped himself clean with his other sleeve, a sneer of disgust stretching his face.
The wraith woman sat up on the bed and whined. “If you’re giving up on your questions, let me finish him. I’m hungry.”
Spencer’s eye twitched. “No. He’s mine.”
He drew his arm back. Struck. Knocked the sight from Custo’s eyes.
Pain wedged through his cheekbone to split his skull. Custo blinked hard against a thick film obscuring his vision, and yet, strangely, he was able to see perfectly: The room changed, brightened. Long fluorescent lights glared overhead where the bedroom had been lit by recessed cans. A sense of constriction bound his chest in a different, suffocating kind of discomfort. Thick, earthy smells of blood and fluid and sweat filled his nose.
A man masked in soft blue-green stared down at him and commanded, “One more push!”
Oh, dear God. His birth.
Then a cry, the squall of an infant, offered up from his own throat.
A nudge under his chin brought Custo back to the bedroom in the loft.
Spencer leaned in, and Custo could feel his breath on his face. “You can die fast and easy or slow and miserable.”
Custo’s heart labored while he refused to inhale—no used Spencer air for him, thank you.
“It’s your choice,” Spencer said. He scratched his cheek with the barrel of the gun.
“Schl—” Custo’s jaw wouldn’t work right. He tried again for slow and miserable. Give Adam time.
“Let me have him,” the wraith complained. “Adam and the girl are probably long gone anyway.”
“No. And stay out of my business,” Spencer answered.
The wraith stood, hand on the doorknob. “What a waste…”
Spencer brought his gun-heavy hand down again.
A crush of blackness hit Custo and jarred his memory to sudden clarity a second time. A private library, wood shelves gleaming. A young man in a dark suit sat behind a wide desk, while Custo perched on a hard, striped sofa, feet swinging in the air above the floor, trying not to—what word had his mommy said?—fidget. One of his shoelaces had come undone again.
“I said I’d pay for his schooling, but that’s it.” The man’s voice was cold.
“He’s your son,” his mommy answered. She was wearing the shirt that showed her bra today. Custo hated that shirt—why didn’t she fix that top button?
“He’s my bastard—it’s a little different—and I want nothing to do with him.”
Reality tumbled back into Custo’s consciousness, Spencer slapping his cheek. Custo tried to lift his head, but his chin only bounced on his chest. His ears were full of the rush of ocean and wind, which made no sense in the middle of the city.
“Adam wouldn’t do the same for you,” Spencer said. “He has to know you’re here and what I’d do to you. Last chance.”
Not even if it were his first. “No.”
“You can’t save him, you know. Not even if he gets away today.” Spencer leaned in to Custo’s ear. “A little secret, just between you and me…there’s someone else at Segue who sides with the wraiths. Someone you both trust. The minute Adam turns his back…”
Spencer reared back for effect, swung, and the world split again. Custo was in a school yard surrounded by wide white buildings and the strong scent of honeysuckle. That first day at Shelby Boys’ School.
Some pansy blue blood planted a fist to his face.
Custo shook off the surprise of the blow and looked for the assailant. The kid was tall and skinny, face flushed, blue eyes bright with fear as a bunch of other boys egged him on.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” the rest of the boys chanted.
This should be easy. Custo ducked to the side when the pussy threw a wild punch, then clocked him on the jaw.
The boy fell in a sprawl on the ground.
Custo stepped forward, shifted to plant a kick in the boy’s gut—a reminder to everyone what would happen if they dared put their hands on the poor, stupid new kid again—and got hauled back by his collar. The fabric burned at his throat.
“He hit me first!” Custo yelled to whatever teacher had made it to the grounds in time to stop the fight. They couldn’t expel him on the first day, could they?
“And you got him back. Enough.”
Not a teacher. An older kid. Well, Custo could take him, too. He dropped his weight and spun. Buttons popped, but the other kid hung on.
“I’m Adam Thorne,” he said, seemingly unperturbed, “and we’re going to be friends.”
Custo wrestled against Adam’s hold. He stamped on the older boy’s prissy loafer—a baby trick, but Adam was keeping him too off balance to do more.
“Best friends,” Adam amended in grim, low tones. “The rest of you, move out. Not the time or place, men.”
The skinny kid scrambled up from the dirt and milled away with the rest of group. Custo lifted his chin to their backward looks. Just try me.
Adam saved his life that day. Another expulsion would have sent him back to the streets. Permanently.
Spencer’s earbud buzzed through the cloudy murk of Custo’s memories.
“Repeat,” Spencer said, “Adam’s here?”
Custo’s heart clenched. Goddamn stupid hero.
“Guess we don’t need you anymore,” Spencer hissed darkly in Custo’s face. “This was way too easy.”
No! Wait! He had to warn—
A white thunderclap of pain and Custo’s consciousness spread like water running from a dropped clay vessel, his life falling in so many pieces around him. The expanse of the loft was laid open to his understanding, a sixth sense that strengthened exponentially in the sudden absence of all others.
In the great room beyond, Adam and Talia held their ground near the elevator, darkness billowing out in silken waves from Talia’s position. She stood at the brink of Shadow, one foot in mortality, one beyond, compelling the Other darkness to obscure the room, to hide them from capture.
Custo’s mind clouded with Shadow as well. The darkness flickered with lightning strikes of memory. His first lay, Janet Summerton, with her peachy breasts and ginger hair. University, still on his father’s buck, dorming with a geek on scholarship. Adam’s frantic call for help when his brother Jacob had gone insane—turned wraith—and killed their parents. The flashes of memory advanced with each trembling heartbeat toward the decision to enter the loft’s building to meet Adam and Talia, when the place had so clearly been compromised.
And Custo would do it again. My life for his.
Spencer crossed the room and stood, his back to the bedroom door, gun ready at his chest, and utterly oblivious to the murky forest of dark trees that grew in place of the dissolving walls. Black trunks and skeletal limbs stretched into a violet sky through which brilliant stars blazed, each with a skittering comet’s tail streaming the passage of time.
A gray wind lashed through the room just as Adam kicked in the bedroom door and plugged two bullets in the wraith’s head. She went down with a wide-eyed thump, but she wouldn’t, couldn’t, die. That was her trade—a life of monstrous soul feeding in return for immortality.