“Good for you,” she said. “Sit here and wait for all I care. I’m out.” She started toward the door.
“Sunny,” Terric said. “Don’t go after him.”
“See you around.” She stormed across the room and slammed the door behind her.
“Tell me you have someone tailing her,” I said to Dash.
“Several someones. Want me to put in a call so they keep her in the city?”
“She’ll slip them,” Allie said. “She’s been a Hound for too long now not to expect someone to be shadowing her.”
“Suggestions?” Dash said.
“Tell the Hounds to—” Allie stopped, took a deep breath, and held it.
Zay shifted and looked down at her, his arm up off her as if she suddenly couldn’t bear the weight of it. He wasn’t breathing either.
I scanned the room, expecting magic or some kind of attack. Nothing.
“Hello?” I said. “Are you two okay?”
They exhaled in unison. Allie nodded. “Fine. False alarm.”
“False alarm for what?” I asked.
“Contractions,” Zay said. He gave me a level look that did nothing to hide the fact that he’d gone a little wide-eyed for a minute there.
“The baby?” Dash asked. “Allie, do we need to get you to the hospital?”
“No.” She brushed her fingers back through her hair and tucked it behind her ears. “It’s false labor. Just giving us a preview for the big day.”
I shifted my gaze back to Zay. He settled his arm around her again and was working the supercalm and supercollected. Nice cover-up, but I could see the panic in the twitch of his lips.
“Isn’t it a little early for the baby?” I asked, just to watch Zay sweat.
“A little, but I’m not having the baby yet,” Allie said. “This is fine. Normal,” she stressed, taking Zay’s hand and giving it a squeeze.
I delighted in the faint sheen of sweat that broke out on his forehead.
“You sure it’s not the real deal?” I asked while Zay’s heart rate kicked up a bit. “Baby could be here any second, mate. You sure you’re ready for that?”
“I’m not in labor,” Allie said, giving me a dirty look because she knew exactly what I was doing. “I’d know.”
“Of course, darlin’, ’cause you’ve done this so many times yourself.”
“Shut up, Shame,” Terric said.
“Just tell the Hounds to keep an eye on Sunny,” Allie told Dash. “Contact and pay a few of them between here and Spokane to look out for her. If Sunny goes after Davy, we’ll want to know where she is at all times.”
“Sure,” Dash said.
“And what are we going to do about finding Davy?” Terric asked. “If Krogher and Eli are on the move, they might be vulnerable. This could be our chance to pinpoint him.”
We were all quiet. We’d tried looking for him all the standard ways, and plenty of nonstandard ways, for months. But wherever Eli Collins had him hidden, it was buttoned up so tight we had gotten nowhere.
That was the problem when your enemy buddied up with government insiders like Krogher. They suddenly had resources for a lot of things, including experimental magic tech.
We were at a dead loss for anything else we could do to find him. Well, anything nonmagical.
“If the baby’s doing okay—” Allie started.
“No,” Zay said.
“But you could find him, couldn’t you, Zay?” she asked.
“We don’t know that,” he said.
Actually we did kind of know that. One of the tricks that Zayvion had picked up from being Guardian of the gates was he could go into a sort of Zen state and locate people in the city. He was especially good at locating people he knew, and he knew Davy very well.
Of course that was when magic was broken and strong.
“We could break magic,” Allie said. “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt the baby. I’m far enough along—”
“No,” Zay said. He closed his eyes for a moment, and Allie stared off into the middistance, then closed her eyes, listening to whatever he was saying to her in her mind.
The thing about Soul Complements is they became closer and closer until they could read each other’s minds. Then they were in each other’s minds more than they were in their own, and in a very short amount of time, they were no longer separate at all. They were joined so tightly they were something else, a combination of two people, two souls.
Allie and Zay had that kind of closeness. They didn’t seem to mind it, so bully for them. But it was more than a little strange to see the two of them so easily slip into being just one of them.
I looked over at Terric. He had a kind of wistful expression on his face until he glanced over at me. Then all that emotion locked down tight.
Yeah. I didn’t want that for us either. Shoving Life and Death in the same little cage would only end up with one or both of us bloody and broken.
“Well,” Dash said. “I’ll contact the Hounds, make sure they have eyes out for Sunny. I’ll let Clyde know about it too, since I’m sure we’d like the current head of the Authority to know what we’re doing, right?”
Terric nodded. “He should know.”
“Good,” Dash said. “If there’s anything else I can do, please give me a call.”
Allie and Zayvion opened their eyes at the same time. They had that sort of not-quite-them look on their faces.
Gave me the creeps.
Zayvion pushed up to his feet. “Thanks for coming by, Dash. Keep us in the loop. If one of the trails pans out in Spokane, I want to be a part of it.”
Dash filed the photo and report away into his messenger bag. “I’ll let you know if we get anything on Davy’s location. But I understand you have other more pressing priorities.”
“Thank you,” Allie said softly.
This suddenly seemed like a good time to bail and go find me something to kill before Allie decided she was going to bring up the whole Brandy Scott thing with Zayvion.
“I’m off, then,” I said. “Terric, you going to catch a ride with Dash?”
Terric frowned. “No. We came in my car.”
“Then let’s go, mate.” I said my good-byes with a wave and a “later,” then tromped out of the house, wanting distance between me and the living, pronto.
Terric lingered to talk to Zayvion, which left me out by the car smoking for a minute or two.
Dash strolled up to me. “You okay, Shame?”
“I’ve been worse. Including dead.”
He leaned against the car, hands in his back pockets, and faced the house the way I was facing the house. “Do you have any idea what Terric’s been doing?” he asked.
“Specifically?”
“Research of some kind,” he said.
“He hasn’t mentioned it. Why?”
“It’s just . . . he asked me for access into some pretty old texts. He’s been spending a lot of time looking for them. The word obsessive comes to mind.”
“Magic, I assume? Old Authority stuff?”
“Not exactly. He wanted into some of Allie’s father’s records.”
Allie was a sweet woman. Loved her dearly. But her father was a complete dick. He was a cold, hard bastard, who was also Eli’s mentor. He had an obsession with mixing magic and technology. An obsession that had made him a very rich man and had given Eli the kinds of ideas that landed us where we were at—kidnapped Davy, and kidnapped people spelled up with enough magic and tech they were human bombs. Beckstrom had been a big player in the Authority, and yeah, he’d killed my father.
So in general, I hated the son of a bitch.
But his magic tech? The disks that could store magic, and the networked conduits underground that could channel magic? Damn. He changed the world with his technology.
I had no idea why Terric would be digging into that man’s past.
“Which of his records?” I asked.