He had to get free of the city. Get out of this warren of closely packed shops and restaurants teeming with people. He had to find the Dolan. It was Imperative.
The brick buildings to each side pointed upward to the sky, a symbol of where his mind should be. His purpose. The laughter of people inside burst into the alley as a boy popped out of a kitchen to throw away a bag of trash.
The boy spotted him and went rigid with alarm.
Hold! commanded a figure at the end of the alley. A female angel.
Xavier took the bag of trash from the boy’s grasp and with a hand to the kid’s chest, pushed him back inside the restaurant. Xavier threw the trash into the bin. “I have work to do,” he told the angel ahead. It was a young one, earnest and resolute in her stance.
Such sadness had the fae queen wrought, and she was not yet even born to this world. More death, more grief. Darkness everywhere.
Xavier approached, palms open. “Peace, sister.”
“Come home,” the angel said.
Xavier filtered through her memory so that something would be remembered . . . after. Diana was her name. Her human life had been a good one, and she’d dedicated her angelic one to giving back. But she had to die. Would she have chosen to give this much, had she known? His quest was more important.
“Xav!” Laurence shouted from behind him. Too far to help her.
Xavier broke Diana’s neck, fast, clean, so that he could get by. One more soul destroyed by Mab.
Cari walked up the pier. The roof of a house ahead cut angles out of the tops of trees. There was a hollow knocking, wood on wood, blustered by an incoming storm. Mist whipped off the water of the bay. The leaves shushed the wind, but it gusted on to rattle something metal, like chains. A beaten path fixed with uneven stones dug into the ground led the way around to the house. High grasses bristled near the water.
She cast her eye as far as she could see along the shore—water did have magical properties. Mason’s “wards.” The man had done the best he could with what was available.
Mason caught up behind her, supplies in hand. “Adam called. Wraiths are a half hour out.”
There’d been a furor at Segue when Mason had requested the use of a bunch of wraiths to combat the angel. At first there’d been outright refusal. Adam wouldn’t stand for any soul to be devoured by one of those monsters. But Kaye was barely hanging on to life. And the angel Xavier was practicing genocide against magekind. Adam had finally conceded, saying his soul was damned anyway, and even Shadowman had agreed, saying that Xavier had forfeited his soul long ago. Custo had been silent. Five portable wraith cells were being flown in from the satellite New York site.
The most recent sighting of the angel placed him in Boston, where he had killed another of his own. That was two angels dead because of him, and a couple of police officers outside Vauclain House.
But now that Cari was here, at Mason’s home, she partly regretted the impending destruction. Her nod to Mason became another look around, a little wistful. “This is a lovely spot.”
The little island wasn’t grandiose, like the manses of the mage Houses. But a place this idyllic didn’t come cheap—millions, Cari thought. He had to have some means.
“My first couple of jobs—bloody work—paid for it.” He shrugged. “I also scared the shit out of the owner when a better offer came in.”
Cari could imagine. “Good for you.”
“I had a toddler keeping me up nights. I was in a bad mood. All my patience—and back then I didn’t have very much—went to the kid.”
The trees stepped out of the way as she turned a bend in the path. An overgrown lawn ran up to the back porch, which held some kind of awkward metal and netting apparatus. Trapped underneath was a soccer ball. The house itself was a white cottage. Very sweet. Well cared for. The hedges under the windows were a little wild, but Mason had been away.
Mason had to wrestle the soccer goal out of the way to get the back door open. He tried to hold it open, but the bags in his arms made his effort clumsy, so she held the door for him. It gave her the chance to look around without being observed.
Kitchen to the left. Out of date and cluttered with counter appliances. Silly flowery curtains with ruffles on the window above the sink. To the right what had to be the dining table, but it was scarred from use and held some kind of project. Screws. Bolts. Tools. Mason had been making something. Curious, she wandered over while Mason made banging noises off somewhere. A large piece of paper was folded open, a drawing—plans—sketched in detail, but just lopsided enough that she knew it’d been created by the son, and not the father. A little bit of their arrested life together. She was greedy to absorb all the details she could.
Movement turned her head. Mason, in the living room. “They’ll land on the front lawns, and we’ll pull the cages into the trees to conceal them.”
She walked forward into the living room. The threshold of the pass-through was marked up. Upon closer examination she realized the pencil marks had dates that grew progressively more recent as they inched up the doorway. The last was a couple months ago. Her heart ached as she realized she could guess how tall Fletcher was.
A beat up leather sofa set faced a smoke-scarred stone fireplace.
Cari let her gaze travel, taking in the minutiae of their life. His home made her feel strange, sad and angry, as if in another world at another time, she’d been the one to defy family and run away with Mason Stray. This was where she’d have ended up.
She couldn’t understand how Liv—stupid, proud Liv—had abandoned this home. Cari looked at the curtains again—those flowery ruffles. Maybe Liv had tried.
“Not your style.” She pointed to the window and hoped she wasn’t being obvious.
Mason leaned a shotgun, smoking with Shadow, by the front door. “Maria. She gets fussy sometimes when I’m away. Said the place needed a woman’s touch.”
“Maria.” Another woman, caring for him and his son. Adding touches. How nice.
Mine, Cari’s heart rasped.
His eyes narrowed as he smiled. “The nanny. She just celebrated her sixtieth. Fletcher and I made her a pasta gizmo.” He shrugged. “Granted it was so she’d make us more ravioli, but she seemed to like it.”
Nanny. Maria was practical, not personal. Well, not personal in the way that Cari had feared.
“Does she know about Shadow?” If Maria took care of Fletcher, she must.
“She said she raised seven of her own and that she could handle anything.” He chuckled low, as if remembering something. “Fletcher put her to the test. I was so exhausted by then, there were a couple nights I wept for sleep. Maria took pity on me.”
Cari walked through the room, her heels knocking on the wood floors. She came to stand by Mason to look out the front door. The wide and deep lawn needed to be cut, but the state of overgrowth made the spot storybook-magical, though big gray clouds rolled overhead. “I’ve been in a lot of Houses,” she said. “Great Houses. And this one is among the best.”
It was an effortless, feel-good place, exactly how everything about Mason seemed to go easy on her—always had. She could imagine curling up on his sofa, wrapped in a blanket, or wrapped in him, and feeling more herself than she ever had in her life.
He put an arm around her waist, and she let her head fall to his shoulder.
And in what—a day?—this perfect place would be decimated by Shadow and Order.
A dark swell of anger made her heart beat harder.
Mine.
If she survived this, and she intended to, she already knew what she was going to do first thing. She smiled, thinking to herself of the bomb it might set off among the Houses. She was going to enjoy every moment.