Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
Adam wanted to know who picked this location. Portola University’s main quad was wide open, very public, and very crowded, especially at four in the afternoon. Knowing who picked the when and where would tell them a lot about how this meet would go.
Vincent was a showy motherfucker, but doing his business in this broad of daylight seemed too showy, even for him.
He got away with what he did because he did it in foggy, no-rules YB.
Portola was a cesspool, but it was a temperate one with a high-gloss veneer, its seedy underbelly more carefully hidden.
It was maybe what Vincent aimed to be, but he wasn’t there yet.
Unless he’d amassed—stolen—more power than they realized.
Unless he thought himself invincible already, which was a truly frightening proposition.
If that horror had not yet come to pass, and Vincent hadn’t picked this location, then was it Mary?
Did she think it would be safer? If Vincent had contacted her about a job, if he wanted her skills badly enough, then it would make sense for her to set the terms of a meet.
But if she was being blackmailed into working for him, which was Vincent’s usual MO, then Adam doubted she had the leverage to dictate the when and where.
Which left Atlas. They were so far from knowing anything about the warlock’s motives that it was .
. . suspect. Who was he trying to protect with this location?
Vincent or himself? Or Mary? Did he know Mary was connected to Icarus?
Had he told Vincent? Had Vincent then made the connection to the people who wanted to kill him?
Was Atlas shoving Vincent or Mary into the open for a possible hit?
While taking a shot at Vincent was sorely tempting, Adam couldn’t make revenge his top priority today.
He’d promised to rescue Mary. And despite how desperately he wanted to end Vincent and his operation, Adam couldn’t do it here.
This was not the Canyon Lands. This was a location full of people, of humans, of potential victims. Which Atlas was counting on too, if he was the one who’d picked this location.
If he was going to show at all. It was ten past four, and there was no sign of any of them.
“Anyone with eyes on?” Adam radioed the teams.
“Negative,” Abigail replied from where she and Robin, both recognizable to Atlas, were posted in a parked car near the quad’s south entrance.
“Negative,” reported another pack pair lounging on a bench at the north end of the artificial lawn.
“Negative,” Jenn radioed from where she and another pack member were pretending to be tourists, taking pictures near the west end.
“Negative,” Cormac radioed from beside Adam, the two of them crouched on a rooftop at the east entrance.
They returned to silent waiting, except Cormac, whose silence didn’t last a minute.
His thoughts, unsurprisingly, veered in the same direction as Adam’s.
“If Atlas sent that picture, why? There’s no demand for a ransom, no demand for a meet with Icarus or us.
We don’t even know if she’s still alive. ”
“I think we’d know if she wasn’t.”
“If Icarus is telling the truth about what she is.”
Adam side-eyed his former partner. “You’re the one who kept harping about what you saw him do at the Canyon Lands that day. Now he’s told you. How else do you square that?”
“I don’t know exactly what I saw, but I do know something isn’t squaring. And you’re a good enough detective to know that too.”
He wasn’t wrong; their mental gymnastics just weren’t focused on the same person.
Adam’s gut told him to trust Icarus, but Cormac’s observations couldn’t be discredited either.
He’d been right about that day in the Canyon Lands, even if they still didn’t have all the details.
“You think Icarus isn’t telling us the whole truth? ”
“Have you told him the whole truth?” Again, Cormac wasn’t wrong, nor was he done examining all the angles. “I’m not sure Icarus knows the whole truth about his sister either.”
Maybe not the direction Adam thought his suspicions were headed. He kept his eyes on the quad while continuing to hear the detective out. “What makes you say that?”
“I did some more digging. No record before she showed up at that shelter.”
“Sealed?”
“Not that I could find.” He drummed his fingers against the roof’s ledge like he would his talons in raven form. “Couldn’t find anything on Canton either.”
“She erased all of them.” That would be the safest thing to do.
“Including Atlas?”
He glanced again at the raven. “Why would you look into him? We already knew he was erased.”
“Something else I saw at the Canyon Lands that day. Atlas cast an orb at me and Icarus and missed.”
“It was foggy and chaotic. The earth was falling out from under us.”
Cormac wasn’t buying it, his lips pressed into a thin line. “He’s better than that.”
Jenn cut off further debate, her voice whispered over the comms. “We’ve got eyes on.”
Adam whipped his gaze back to the quad, adrenaline spiking then heart sinking as he spotted the couple who emerged through the west entrance.
Cormac narrated the thoughts Adam didn’t want but couldn’t avoid. “Does that green-haired pixie look like a hostage to you?”
“We don’t know what we’re seeing,” Adam countered to Cormac and himself.
Sure, her arm was around Atlas’s waist and his was casually draped over her shoulder, neither of them looking the worse for wear, but why would they want to stand out in a crowded location full of people?
They looked like any other couple out for an afternoon stroll.
But what did they sound like? What words were escaping their moving lips? “B team, move to second position.”
“Copy that.” The pack pair on the quad stood, frisbee in hand, ready to extend their reach as needed.
Jenn’s team also wandered closer, picking a spot just inside the lawn’s edge well within their hearing distance, but far enough back from where Atlas and Mary had stopped near the center of the oval, arms around each other.
“If she’s betrayed him . . .” Adam mumbled, fear and anger slipping out, even as his training coached him otherwise. Coached him to look deeper, beneath what Mary and Atlas wanted everyone to see.
“She’s playing along to protect herself,” Jenn said. “I can hear her heart racing from here.”
“Look at her posture,” Cormac added. “She’s playing casual, but her back and shoulders are stiff as a board and her fist is clenched behind Atlas’s back.”
“Vincent entering from the south,” Abigail radioed.
If Adam hadn’t been so focused on that fist, if he’d shifted his gaze a split second sooner, he would have missed it. Atlas clasped her shoulder, and a shimmer of green sluiced over her, the outward signs of her distress disappearing.
Masked.
Whose side was the fucking warlock on?
“Three plainclothes trailing Vincent,” Robin relayed. “The one in a jacket is human and wearing a shoulder harness. The other two are shifters. I can see an outline of a weapon beneath the one’s black shirt. I’m guessing the other is armed too.”
A strike was definitely out. Too much firepower and too many people. “Extraction only,” Adam confirmed to the teams. They would have to wait and rely on Nate to help deliver Vincent.
If Mary didn’t kill him first. Scowling, she snatched back the hand Vincent had made a show of kissing the back of.
“C team, can you hear?” Adam asked.
“Pleasantries with a side of snark,” Jenn replied. “She’s feistier than her brother.”
Adam smiled, brief and fleeting because Jenn soon relayed Vincent’s true purpose.
It was enough to turn Adam’s stomach. Vincent had heard from associates about Mary’s hacking prowess, and he wanted to hire her to hack the location of one of the most powerful local covens.
Ever since the Rift, covens stayed on the move, no one covenstead for this very reason.
Beside Adam, Cormac stiffened, his eyes flashing violet. Over the comm, Abigail growled. “More power he can suck.”
“And yet,” Jenn said, “he doesn’t realize the ultimate power is right in front of him.”
But Atlas hadn’t told him either. Because Atlas didn’t know? Or because Atlas was a double agent?
But that wasn’t all Vincent wanted. He wanted her to dig further into Adam, into Deborah and David, because word had gotten back about last night’s attack, about the power he’d flexed. Vincent was finally starting to put the pieces together, which meant their timeline had been accelerated, again.
Mary protested, Vincent threatened, Atlas cajoled, and eventually an agreement—if it could be called that—was reached.
Adam suspected it was similar to how they’d muscled Icarus into their employ.
Regardless, with the deal made, Vincent departed the way he came, and Atlas, arm back over Mary’s shoulder, turned her not west but east, toward the entrance where Adam and Cormac hid.
The warlock’s eyes flicked up as if he knew exactly where they were perched.
“What the fuck is that asshole up to?” Adam muttered.
“It could be a trap,” Robin warned. “Lure us out for his own purpose.”
“He could call Vincent back,” Cormac said. “Turn you over himself.”
“He would have done that already,” Adam said.
“And she won’t let that happen.” He was confident of that much.
But if Atlas didn’t know what she was, other than someone who was important to Icarus, Adam didn’t want to expose her more.
“Let’s spring our trap first,” he said. “We’ve got him outnumbered. Converge behind our location.”
Cormac shifted between one breath and took flight the next, and the flock of ravens that had congregated around them the past hour flitted off the roof, falling into formation behind him.
Eyes in the sky while the rest of the pack on human feet drew closer.
Adam sensed them on either side of the building as he descended the stairs, then stepped out the back door into the small bricked-over courtyard between buildings.
They fanned out on either side of him, and the handful of humans in the courtyard scattered, instincts keyed in enough to know better.
By the time Atlas and Mary stepped through the opening between the buildings, they were surrounded.
And yet neither of them veered off course or missed a step, Atlas leading her to stand directly in front of Adam.
“I believe this”—he nudged Mary forward—“belongs to a mutual acquaintance of ours.”
“Why?” Adam asked.
“Because,” Mary said, as she sauntered to Adam’s side, all her previous nerves gone, her swagger so reminiscent of Icarus’s that Adam almost laughed. “I threatened to flood the internet with pictures of him on a leash.”
Robin snickered. “I’d like to see those.”
And then a seemingly peaceful exchange went up in smoke.
Atlas summoned an orb, and Robin shifted and collided with his chest, making the orb fly off course and barely miss the dive-bombing ravens.
Cormac screeched as he sailed low enough to ruffle Adam’s hair, forcing him to spin.
He spied Mary in a crouch, her glowing green hand an inch from the ground.
Adam shot out his own hand—power channeled into it, no idea if it would be enough—and wrapped his fingers around her wrist. “No! We can’t. Not yet.”
She stared up at him, eyes wide, and then a slow, satisfied smile stretched across her face. “He said you were different, but he has no idea you’re one of mine, does he?”
One of hers?
“Adam!” Abigail shouted behind him, and he whipped back around. She was the only shifter still in human form, the rest of the pack having shifted to defend Robin and help him pin Atlas to the ground. Robin stood over his chest, snarling in his face.
“You promised Icarus a punch,” Adam reminded his brother-in-law. “And you do not get to kill him until I kill Vincent.”
Robin gnashed his teeth, and Atlas snarled right back at him. “Now who’s on a leash, dog?”
Golden eyes flashed, murder glowing bright, and Adam was sure Icarus wouldn’t get his punch, but all Robin’s teeth sank into was green mist, Atlas disappearing with a single snap of his fingers.
“Huh,” Mary said, hands on her hips. “And I thought I had Atlas’s number.”
Speaking of numbers. Adam dug his phone out of his pocket and opened the encrypted chat app Icarus had installed. He handed the device to Mary. “Worry about them later. Text your brother now or there won’t be a base camp for us to get back to.”