Chapter 3
THREE
Icarus ordered a cheap shot of vodka, sulked the length of it, then got over himself.
Yes, he was good at his job, but not every job was easy, and he hadn’t expected this one to be.
In fact, he’d been doing better than expected before that phone call had interrupted them.
Success—Adam—had been at his fingertips.
It—he—could be again if Icarus was in the right place at the right time when Adam finished doing whatever that call had summoned him away to do.
The night wasn’t over, and neither was the mission.
He paid the bartender and grabbed his trench and combat boots from the coat check.
Swapping his heels for the boots, he shoved the former into his coat pockets and wrapped up tight before heading outside into the cold night.
Neither the temperature nor the dark affected him, but his work attire might draw the kind of attention he didn’t need at the moment.
He already had a mark; he wasn’t looking for another.
He sniffed the air and caught the lingering aroma of whiskey, and on its heels, the oily odor of gasoline, another thing only the rich and powerful could afford for their gas-powered automobiles.
He followed the scents, keeping to the shadows as he moved at his preternatural pace, heels never touching the ground, leaping from toe to toe, block to block.
The path took him down Sutro Hill and east across town toward the Canyon Lands.
Humans rarely ventured into this part of Yerba Buena, their reaction times too slow for the frequently shifting land and their eyesight too poor for an area that was shrouded in fog day and night.
Magically so. It was a demented sort of fun house for paranormals—a place to hide, to trade in illicit goods, to do bad things, a playground for one’s darkest fantasies—but for humans, it was a sightless, dangerous nightmare.
A deadly maze that could change shape in the blink of an eye.
Icarus wasn’t surprised to find a vintage Camaro parked at the end of a road in front of the barbed wire fence that ran the length of the Canyon Lands border.
He was surprised, however, that Adam’s scent didn’t diverge left or right into one of the alleys, garages, or abandoned buildings where all sorts of shit went down.
Instead, it continued straight ahead, beyond the fence and out toward the canyons of deep dark water that cut into the crumbling ruins of structures that used to stand tall and magnificent, glass and metal that had once shone in the sunlight.
Before the Rift.
Before that day thirty years ago when Nature and her allies had gone to war with Chaos and the darker forces of magic, with Yerba Buena as ground zero.
When what had started as a balmy October day had turned into a dark and stormy nightmare, when the contours of the land had been irrevocably altered by earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis, and when battle lines had been etched in stone.
Skirmishes were constant in the three decades since, the push and pull between Nature and Chaos waxing and waning with the seasons and the power grabs of beings—human and paranormal—in between.
But where the Canyon Lands were concerned, Nature had conceded the territory, and she hadn’t left it a hospitable place.
Icarus ducked through the wire fence, cursing low when a barb snagged the lace band of his stocking.
He could try to save it, but the wafting whiskey scent was growing fainter, dissipating in the heavy fog as Adam moved farther into the canyons.
Cutting his losses, Icarus unclipped the garter—that he wasn’t losing—and clawed through the thinner nylon beneath the lace top of the stocking.
Freed, he climbed the rest of the way through the fence and hustled to catch up to Adam, worrying more with each step.
The ground beneath his boots was a debris-filled mess of buckled roads and sidewalks, sand and silt, and all around, in buildings and makeshift hovels, in the swirling fog that filled alleys and crevices, bright eyes glowed, their owners snarling a warning.
What the fuck was Adam doing out here? Meeting someone—or doing something—he shouldn’t? In either case, was it worth risking his life?
Icarus got his answer twenty or so yards later when an explosion overhead sent him scrambling behind a rusted-out dumpster.
Smoke and flames billowed from the shattered windows of a corner building, the metal fire escape rattling as another explosion wracked what was left of the crumbling structure.
“Go, go, go!” someone shouted from inside the building, and in the wake of another plume of smoke and shattering glass, a slim figure in jeans and a dark hoodie emerged from the broken window onto the fire escape.
They turned back toward the building, arms outstretched, and Adam appeared at the window, leaning his torso out, a blanket-wrapped something in his arms. As Adam handed off the bundle, an arm slipped loose of the blanket, and a head fell back onto the rescuer’s shoulder, exposed.
Human, maybe? Dark hair, skin that was too pale and too thin, translucent almost, stretched across jutting bones.
Emaciated, barely hanging on to life, a fluttering heartbeat compared to the stronger two—no, four—in its vicinity.
And glowing too, a red-orange sheen the likes of which Icarus had never seen, rippling over the being’s skin.
A shifter, then, of some sort? Icarus sniffed, but the smoke drowned out any other scents.
“Go!” Adam shouted. “Get him to Jenn and the coven before he flames out.”
Flames out?
The hooded figure wrapped their arm tight around the young man, turned, and jumped off the metal platform.
Icarus muffled his shout in the crook of his arm.
The jumper landed on their feet, dark hair escaping the hood, delicate features visible in profile.
A woman. Definitely a shifter for how gracefully she’d landed and how fast she took off, disappearing into the fog.
The building gave another terrible shake and a groan as wood and metal scraped together, as smoke and flames gushed out of every hole, as hunks of concrete crashed to the already-splintered asphalt.
Icarus whipped his gaze back to the fire escape.
No sign of Adam. But three heartbeats still inside.
Adam plus two other friends . . . or two other foes?
Fuck. A tinny voice of self-preservation rang in Icarus’s head.
Let the building come down; let it end Adam; let Vincent blackmail Icarus to do something—anything—else.
The louder voice inside Icarus’s chest rebelled at the notion of leaving Adam to such a fiery fate, especially after he’d just saved a paranormal of some sort from the same.
Icarus moved to step out from behind the dumpster, to zip into the building and rescue the man he was supposed to deliver to Vincent, only to freeze midstep when a coughing Adam staggered out of a glassless window on the ground floor.
The two other heartbeats emerged and rushed to Adam’s side, helping to hold him up as he gulped in breaths of air.
Icarus silently sank behind the dumpster and waited for Adam to recover, which happened far too quickly for Adam to be only human.
Icarus didn’t have long to ponder what he was, though, because the trio moved again, Adam leading them away from the burning building and deeper into the fog, stopping only when they reached the outer edge where the ground had fallen away in massive chunks, only ruins and unstable jetties left between the deep dark crevices of rushing water.
Icarus ducked inside the nearest hollowed-out ruin, inching closer to where Adam and his associates gathered on the buckled road outside.
He hopped from one rusty steel pile to the next, ignoring the murder of crows perched on the broken beams overhead, the gaping holes in the slab floor around him, and the muted crash of waves somewhere far below.
“What did you find out?” Adam asked.
A growl belied the voice that answered. “He pulled the trigger on the contract. Even before that stunt tonight.”
He? As in Vincent? It had to be.
“How much?” a third voice asked, solemn and dutiful, all business.
“Five million,” the growly one replied.
Someone whistled. Mr. Solemn, if Icarus had to guess.
“Probably more now,” Mr. Growly added. “You cost him another one.” Icarus couldn’t get a read on his accent.
It was practiced and unnatural, like it had been pieced together from a million different dialects.
Icarus crept closer, wanting to get eyes on them.
Were they mostly human, like Adam? He didn’t think so, at least not the growly one.
“You didn’t pick the contract up?” Adam asked.
Mr. Growly laughed, and when he spoke again, some of the put-on accent was stripped away, his growl softened to an affectionate rumble. “She’d never forgive me.”
She who? Someone they worked for? The Devil didn’t seem the sort to work for anyone.
“She might haunt you for passing it up,” Adam replied.
A dead someone. A dead and gone someone.
Icarus’s kind didn’t “haunt.” That was a term strictly reserved for ghosts.
But the three men in the street didn’t seem to have the same dark connotations with the word as Icarus did.
They laughed, quiet and low, tender almost. Whoever she was, they all remembered her fondly.
Mr. Solemn’s voice was gentle, beseeching when he spoke again. “Come up to the mountain.”
Sneaking closer, Icarus inched into a crumbling cement corner, only rebar left on his side but still solid enough on the street-facing side to hide behind.
“I’m not running,” Adam said. “I haven’t run for ten years. And she—they—deserve vengeance.”
They, not only she. And there was that ten years again.
Icarus peeked around the corner just as Mr. Growly got in Adam’s face. Golden eyes glowed beneath a headful of rusty-blond hair. Definitely not human. “What good is vengeance if you’re dead?” His words were full of anger and something deeper, something like brotherhood.
Icarus’s own chest clenched. He batted down memories before they rose higher and instead focused on the here and now.
The present in which Adam shifted his focus, calmly rotating his face to the other man standing in the street with them. His words and expression were resigned. “Then you’ll come get me and take me to them.”
“Fuck.” The man flinched and rotated, the tails of his long dark trench flying, and before he dipped his chin, before he raked a hand through his jet-black hair, Icarus caught the flash of violet eyes.
Also not human. He spun back around the next instant, solemn long gone, anger and anxiety straining his voice.
“I swear, you’ve had a ten-year death wish.
You just ran into a burning building, for fuck’s sake.
Do you have any idea how hard it’s been keeping you alive? ”
“Can you blame me?” Adam swung his attention back to the golden-eyed man. Icarus risked a sniff, far enough away from the smoke to smell again—a canine of some sort. “If Vincent’s coming after me this hard, he knows I’m close, and he can’t afford that with whatever he’s banking power for.”
“The Rift anniversary,” the dog said. “Or Samhain.”
“Whatever he’s planning, we have to stop him. We have to finish their work.”
There was that their again. Mr. Solemn started to argue something, maybe about them, but his words were dampened by a wave crashing into the canyons below so thunderous the silt beneath Icarus’s feet shifted, the earth giving way. Icarus bit out a low curse. “Fuck.”
“Who’s there?” the dog barked, and the crows above screeched an awful chorus.
Icarus debated bounding away, but he couldn’t without being seen, without exposing what he was. He scooted farther into the corner instead, fingers scrabbling at rusty rebar and crumbling cement.
Voices and footsteps drew closer. “Show yourself!” Adam shouted.
Gunshots were not the answer any of them expected.