Chapter 4
FOUR
“What is this place?” Kai asked as he waited for Mac to unlock the alley door of what looked like an out-of-business tasting room from the front.
The street-facing windows were boarded up, the stoop was littered, and a pair of crows had perched on the peeling over-door sign.
Not an unusual sight here in the Lost Valley.
Most retail establishments had closed shop, and the handful that remained had been boarded up, no doubt in anticipation of the Rift anniversary and Samhain.
If the howling wind and slanting rain that had picked up tonight on their way into the city were any indication, the next couple of weeks were going to be a nightmare.
“Base of operations,” Mac answered. The complicated lock finally disengaged, and he pushed open the door.
Kai followed him inside and down a hallway, Mac flicking on lights as they dripped their way into a larger area.
The speakeasy vestiges remained—a bar and stools, some glasses and half-empty bottles on the backbar, a chaise pushed against one long wall, and a heavy curtain on a metal arch around the front door—but the tables in the open middle space had been pushed together to make workstations for computers, keyboards, and monitors, their wires snaking across the wood floors.
The booths along the other long wall were ladened with weaponry—knives, crossbows, stakes, guns, and ammunition, lead bullets in marked boxes, silver ones in the stacks of lined and locked cases. A command center and armory in one.
He swiveled back to the bar where Mac was pouring a shot of vodka from a frosty bottle he must’ve pulled from an under-cabinet cooler. “I’ll take one too.” Mac shot him a violet glare but filled a second shot glass nonetheless. “I thought you were based in Talahalusi, at Monte Corvo.”
“Exactly how much did Paris tell you?”
He tossed his soaked hoodie on top of Mac’s trench and stood between two stools. “I knew that much from my own research. I had to know the lay of the land when I got here. The fact that you and Paris crossed paths . . .”
Mac pushed the shot glass across the bar. “Lucky coincidence?”
“I don’t think so.” He sipped the chilled liquor, surprised at its quality. But really, given the stockpile of weapons and other gear, he shouldn’t have been. A good sign in more ways than one. “I’m glad he has you.”
“Who?”
“Paris. He—” Approaching heartbeats, of both humans and shifters, stole Kai’s words. Electronic beeps from the back door echoed down the hallway, then the scrape of the heavy metal door opening. A second of the storm raging outside, and then it was blocked out again by the door closing once more.
Despite the tension rippling through Kai, he took his cues from Mac, who didn’t seem the least bit surprised.
He didn’t startle nor go on alert like he had at the cabin at Kai’s arrival.
Friendlies, then. As approaching footsteps grew louder, Mac tossed back the rest of his shot. “For the record, I don’t have Paris.”
Before Kai could press for an explanation, a ragtag group of people joined them in the tasting room, two of whom were familiar . . . yet not.
“Kai!” Icarus said as he led the rest of the group closer. “Mac didn’t say it was you we were meeting.”
Kai knew the courtesan from Club Sutro, where Kai officially worked the bar slinging drinks and Icarus unofficially worked the room slinging his own brand of escape.
But this wasn’t the same pink-haired, lace-wearing vampire from the last time Kai had seen him at the club.
There was more actual red among the strands of pink, his favored lace, garters, and heels had been traded for an electric blue maxi skirt, a black leather coat, and combat boots, and his heart beat at a distinctly different rhythm.
“You’re not a vampire anymore?” he asked suddenly.
Icarus stopped short, his skirt swishing at the abrupt halt. “How’d you know that?”
“Because he’s a shifter,” Mac said from behind the bar before tossing back his shot of vodka.
A petite woman stepped past Icarus and right up to Kai.
She had tan skin like his and Mac’s and green hair styled in barrel curls that seemed impervious to the rain that had soaked everyone else.
She lifted her hand to his cheek, and her mouth formed an O.
Dazzling hazel eyes stared up at him. “Well, aren’t you a pleasant surprise? ”
Icarus tapped her shoulder. “Share with the class, babe.”
“Not my secret to share,” she said without looking away.
“Getting tired of that,” grumbled the other man who had entered with them.
Kai recognized him from Club Sutro too. How could he forget one of the few people who had, over the past few years, ordered barrel-aged whiskey, a rare and pricey commodity?
And in Adam Devlin’s case, on the same day each year, until this past year when he’d shown up again two days later looking for Icarus.
Adam was different too. The sadness that had hung over him was lessened, and the heat that had mysteriously warmed the air around him was gone.
He hadn’t exactly been a shifter before, but whatever had traveled with his soul, maybe what he sensed was traveling with Jason’s now, was gone.
He was human again. But no less gruff in the delivery of his words, even as he sidled to Icarus’s side and slung an arm around his waist. “We’re a day from the Rift anniversary.
Time’s ticking.” His gaze bounced from Kai to Mac. “What’s going on?”
Mac moved out from behind the bar, two more shot glasses in hand. One for Adam, the other for the mountain lion shifter who had been the last of the party. She’d hung back, surveying the scene. “I’d like to know that too,” she said.
Mac jutted his chin in Kai’s direction. “Tell them.”
Kai swept his gaze over the group again.
No, he didn’t think Paris crossing these people’s paths was a coincidence at all.
“My—” He paused, unsure what to call Jason, how much to give away.
While Paris seemed to know these people well, Kai was only really acquainted with one.
He hedged. “My friend, Jason, he’s human. And a smuggler.”
“In legal terms, he’s a thief and a fence.” Mac handed Adam his phone. “I didn’t have time to pull together a physical file.”
“Why are we wasting our time, then?” Adam said, handing it back. “We’ve got a mile-long to-do list before tomorrow night, and petty criminals aren’t on it.”
The pixie, still closest to Kai, placed a hand on his chest. “Because this raven thinks his friend’s a phoenix now. Jason was human before?”
Kai nodded as Adam, suddenly interested, untangled from Icarus and stepped closer. He recalled one night Club Sutro when Adam had told Icarus he used to be a cop. His sharp gaze and sharper “Explain” now were one hundred percent interrogator.
“He got a lead from a source on a ‘stash’ of Vincent Cirillo’s somewhere in the Canyon Lands. ‘Gold and jewels,’ he was told. Enough money to get us out of—” Kai paused, then hedged again. “The situation we’re in now. It didn’t make sense to me.”
“We know what kind of stash Vincent hid out there,” the mountain lion said.
“Who was the source?” Adam asked him.
“A vampire he knew.”
“Shit, another one.”
“Word’s getting around,” Icarus said.
Adam raked a hand through his short brown and gray hair. “Without the entire story.”
“Now I need an explanation,” Kai said. He was losing the thread here while the one that tied him to Jason was stretching thin. He was running out of time.
“Adam was a phoenix,” Icarus said. “I was a vamp.” Lips pulled back, he clanked his teeth together in a simulated bite sans fangs.
“But you’re both human now.”
“Because their souls had a connection,” the green-haired woman said. “And because I channeled the phoenix where it needed to go.”
“Are you a witch?” Kai asked her.
“Not exactly,” she said with an enigmatic grin. “I had help.”
“Who’s still gone,” Adam said. “Any word from Robin?” he asked the woman shifter.
She shook her head.
“We may not need them,” the green-haired woman said. “Not with you. Your souls have a connection?”
“Yes.” He laid his hand over hers where it still rested on his chest. “It burns.”
“I know.” She gave him a pat, then slid her hand out from under his and glanced around at the others in the room. “We need to find him before someone else does. Before tomorrow night.”
Mac withdrew his phone again, thumbed at the screen, then set it on a nearby table and waved everyone over. “These are the locations in the Canyon Lands that Paris remembered hearing his father mention.”
The mountain lion tapped at three of the different X marks. “We’ve cleared those out already.”
Adam gestured at the other two remaining. “Which leaves these, then.”
Kai pointed at the more southern of the two. “That one,” he said, a flare of heat in his chest confirming his gut’s instinct. “The raven knows it.”