by A. L. Tyler
“That’s what I just said.” He had apparently grown bored of the conversation, because he placed his hands firmly on the table and stood up. “Look, you want to know if he’s your father, go to The Cork Tree. There’s a picture on the wall circa the Grift era. I framed it because Sammie wasn’t fond of pictures, and it’s the only one in existence I’ve ever seen. It isn’t great. Judge for yourself, and ask around. But that’s all the information I have on Grift.”
The guard escorted him out. Feeling numb from the outside in, I went back to my car and clutched the steering wheel until my knuckles were white.
Samson Grift was alive.
And Nick was most definitely lying to me.
I SLAMMED THE CAR TRUNK shut and tried to quiet the buzz within me. It was almost midnight, and the parking garage was mostly empty.
Parking garages. They were dark, dismal places that often smelled of foul air, gasoline, and in the city, urine. Belfour was one such city.
And yes, the parking garage smelled.
It felt like a mass burial site for cars, and I felt like a maggot. Even the air was greasy and made the sweat cling to my brow.
Angel got out of the car and slammed the door shut, watching me with knowing eyes. “Alright?”
I had to give her credit. She couldn’t hear the insistent buzz that was building within me. It wasn’t something that could be seen, either, but she somehow knew.
She raised an eyebrow and continued to frown.
“I’ll be fine,” I nodded. “For now. Thank you again for coming.”
I started to walk toward the stairs, and she followed.
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here, now?” Her voice echoed off the oil-smudged concrete walls around us. “Cause I’m not killing a guy, if that’s what you came here to do. I obviously won’t tell Nick if you do, but that’s kind of above and beyond our arrangement.”
I stopped halfway down a flight and turned to face her. Standing two steps above me, she looked like a giant.
“We are here to look at a photograph and ask some questions. That’s all.” I heaved a sigh. “And you’re messed up. Not the most messed up person I’ve ever met, but there’s something wrong with you.”
“You need me here to look at a photograph?” She put one hand on her hip. “You said you might have a burn.”
I threw my hands out to the side and let them slap back to my sides, shaking my head. “It’s a picture of a guy who was trafficking kids to Mockers who probably did terrible things with them. And I have a bad feeling that this guy is going to look a lot like my dad, because he might be my dad. And if that’s the case, then yeah, there’s going to be shit on fire.”
I shoved my hands in my coat pockets.
Angel nodded, breathing a small laugh. “Good call, Driftwood. Carry on.”
I walked down the steps to the street. Even the smell of city and the touch of car exhaust brushing my skin as a light wind blew past was a relief after the stagnant air in the garage. Bathed in streetlights, we crossed the intersection and walked down the block to the entrance for The Cork Tree.
In a narrow door, down some narrow stairs, and into a room of smoke and raucous laughter.
I immediately turned to the wall on the left, covered in old, faded photographs. Each one had its own unique frame, and they covered the wall—floor to ceiling—from the door to the back. A quick study showed me that they had been placed chronologically, and I moved past a few tables to find the right place in the time line.
“Jette.”
I raised a hand to quiet Angel, lost in my obsession. “Just a minute. It’s got to be here. It’s the only picture I’m ever going to have of Grift.”
I ran my hand down the wall, searching the pictures and the dates and names, one by one, but it wasn’t the names that drew my eye.
It was Nick. Nick’s face, in that old photograph, standing between Jackson Coffing and another man. The other man was turned three-quarters away from the camera, his face obscured because he’d raised a hand to tip his hat...
“Jette.”
I knew that hat.
“Ladies. You have business here?”
“I’m sorry, we just came in to use the restroom,” Angel lied smoothly. “My friend was just taken in by the photos. We’ll go now.”
I reached for my phone. I had to take a picture, to take it with me—late at night, in a smoky room, my brain would always question if that was really the hat I thought it was.
“Hey.” The guy grabbed my shoulder, and my senses returned.
All six of them, because my synesthesia was whistling the merry tune of a well-spelled curse on the tip of someone’s tongue.
“You’re on private property,” the guy said, glowering down at me. “No pictures allowed.”
Chapter 27
I CAST HIM A SARCASTIC smile. He was a big guy, but I was already pulling loose the threads of his curse and sounding out the enchanted traps laid around the bar.
“I was just speaking to Jackson Coffing earlier today,” I said. “He sent me here to view this photo, and I’m sure you’re some bad-ass criminal organization, but my name’s Jette Driftwood. Don’t cross me. I’m taking a picture, and we’re gone.”
I turned back to the wall. He grabbed my shoulder, and it sounded like a xylophone tipping over as the ancient magic protested within me.
It wanted out.
“I don’t care if you’re on the Order,” the guy said. He put one hand on the wall next to my head, trapping me as he leaned in. “The rule is no cameras. And Mr. Coffing doesn’t take well to name dropping, whether he sent you or not.”
The bar had gone quiet behind him. Four other guys were getting up from their table, anger and ill-intent written all over their ugly faces.
“No pictures,” Angel said lightly. “That’s fine. We’re going.”
Big and pushy grabbed Angel’s wrist before she could even move.
“You don’t want to do that,” she said testily.
Another thug had moved up. He pulled a gun and aimed it at me.
“Honey,” Angel said. “The last guy to point a gun at her didn’t leave enough behind to make a proper ID. You should put that away.”
“You talk a big game,” the first guy said. “But I know Bleak spies when I see them. You won’t be reporting back on this mission.”
The sound was like squealing brakes. The big guy was on his knees before I even realized it was happening.
Angel had drained him. He was shaking and seizing at my feet. I barely looked up in time to see her throw a ball of burning light at the guy holding the gun.
I ducked under her resonating cast and summoned the ice, sending bolting icicles at anyone who was running at us instead of away. They slammed into tables and walls, embedding themselves in the drywall and shattering the furniture like toothpicks in my hail storm. I tried not to hit anyone directly, but one guy did crawl out the front after taking a hit to the leg.
Angel was strolling past the bar, shattering bottle after bottle with a single pointed finger. In my ears it sounded like scales on a piano, and I almost laughed.
“Does anybody else want some?” she called through the fray. She lowered her hand and the shattering stopped. “Because you’ve got ten seconds. Get out or get in line.”
Everyone was scrambling, and most of them were trying to leave, but one idiot did find it in heart to come at me with the sharp broken piece of a chair.
Angel’s eyes went wide with terror as I raised a hand. With a crack of thunder I sent him flying back into the wall of photographs, and glass shards shattered on the floor as he collapsed.
A hand closed on my shoulder and I whipped around to burn someone’s face off, but Angel’s grip held true. The thunder died back to a buzz and my knees gave out beneath me. Angel caught me as I collapsed and pulled me away from the broken glass.
The sound was gone.
Angel sent a shock wave through the bar that rendered our last two p
otential assailants unconscious. With a disappointed glare, she walked over to the guy I had pitched into the wall, stepping lightly through the tinkling glass in her high heels, and checked his pulse.
She cast me a bitter frown. “He’s not dead, but he could have been. You’ve got a problem.”
I was panting in exhaustion. “I give what I get. He came at me.”
“So knock him back.” Angel’s brow furrowed. “I don’t perform surgery with a chainsaw and you shouldn’t, either. Practice more, kill less.”
She was right, and I nodded. I got to my feet and pulled my cell phone to snap the picture I needed. I wanted to stop the world and stare at it right then, analyzing everything from the hem on the jacket to the angle of the elbow, but I didn’t need to. I already knew what I was looking at.
It was my father’s hat.
“IS THAT TRUE? WHAT they say about you, and the last guy to pull a gun on you?”
The sound of Kane screaming as he burned alive flew fresh into my mind. That was the whole reason I’d invited Angel along on my excursion—so that wouldn’t happen again. I hated thinking about it.
Bringing Angel was a good call.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I said haltingly.
“Well, if he was going to shoot you—”
“He did.” My responses came out in a mechanical tone. “He emptied the clip.”
“—then I think it was necessary.” She leaned back in her seat, applying some scented lip gloss before tossing it into her purse and sighing. “You’ve got skills.”
I did a double take. It almost sounded like a compliment.
“If I had skills, I would have taken him alive,” I said darkly.
She looked slowly over at me. “Maybe. Or maybe you’d be dead now. What I know is that magic doesn’t like to kill. That takes intent, and practice, and discipline. And you haven’t got any of those. Death by magic goes against the natural order. That’s why the Mockers and the Typhons and every other twisted asshole out their like to channel human death in their spells. But as much as magic doesn’t like to kill, it doesn’t like to die, either.”
I gripped the steering wheel and caught a glimpse of her significant look as we turned onto the highway.
“You’re saying I didn’t kill them?” I asked bitterly. “It was the magic?”
“Maybe.” Angel’s voice turned softer. “Mostly I’m saying that if you’re going to beat yourself up about killing instead of dying, this probably isn’t the line of work for you.”
I stared at the long, empty road before us. It was dark, and I was tired, and I probably should have accepted Angel’s offer to drive.
“Did you find what you were looking for in that picture?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know anymore. My father had worn a dark fedora to work some days, but it wasn’t the only dark fedora in the world. Two former colleagues of Grift said we had similar eyes.
But my father wasn’t a criminal. He believed in equality between humans and witches, and he was profoundly devoted to the idea that we should work toward a day when magic was used to better the lives of everyone. He played by the rules, and he believed in peace.
He wasn’t a thug cop wandering the streets, taking bribes, threatening people, and trafficking children.
Was he?
That hat. The eyes.
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
“You can’t recognize your own father in a picture?”
I glanced over at her. Fear writhed in my stomach, slippery and knotted like an angry snake. “Yes. I think it’s him. But he was never like that. I can’t believe it was him, but it was him.”
Angel didn’t say anything. She turned her sad gaze out the windshield.
My eyelids gained ten pounds in the silence that followed. Three miles later, I pulled to the side of the road.
“Need me to drive?”
I stayed where I sat. “What was your dad like? When you were growing up?”
Angel shook her head, hissing through her teeth. “Absent. And when he wasn’t, I wished he was. I hated vampires—all vampires—for a long time because of him. Not all of them are as human as Warren.”
We got out of the car and traded places. I reclined my seat.
“You should try to sleep.” Angel buckled her seat belt. She rested her hands on the wheel. “If your dad was good to you, you should hold on to that. Don’t let the rest of this spoil it. Whoever he was outside the house, that was someone else. I wish I could have had someone worth everything you are doing. If there is any doubt in your mind, Jette, let them stay separate people. Leave it alone, and love the memory of the man you had.”
I nodded. She was right. If it had been all about wanting to believe my father was a good man, that’s all I would have needed. The will to believe.
But it wasn’t all about what I believed anymore. I had built my life around freeing him. I had dated a psychopath. Committed acts of treason. Risked my life. More than once.
I was getting close—so close—to being able to free him. Once I mastered this magic, there would be no stopping me. I had suffered long and worked hard and been lucky to get here.
And I’d done it all because he didn’t deserve to be imprisoned. But what if he did? What if I was just an apple fallen not far from the tree—a criminal, born and bred like Millie Corm, who couldn’t escape the tendencies that would lead me to my demise?
What if I was doing all of this for a man who was exactly where he deserved to be?
Chapter 28
WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, sunlight was streaming through the windows. We were parked on a familiar street.
A familiar street in the wrong town.
“Did Nick call?” I asked.
“Nope.”
I glanced over and saw Angel, awkwardly posed with one foot on the driver’s seat and an elbow resting on her knee as she slouched and read a book on her phone.
I looked around. Judging by the sun, it was still morning. “Why are we by Nick’s house?”
“Because you need an opportunity to tell him what you’ve been up to.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “No.”
She clicked off her phone. “Jette.”
“No.”
“You do realize he’s probably the only person alive who can actually look at the files for both Grift and your father, compare any pictures, and make a decision—as Grift’s partner—about whether or not they were the same person? And you’re refusing to ask him?”
“If I tell him, I’m putting him in the position of harboring a criminal.” I sat up and compulsively checked my face for drool as I tied back my hair. “My investigation into my father isn’t sanctioned. Same for my investigation into Grift. This is more than just pulling records in the system, Angel—I gave a crime lord carte blanche privileges to ask me favors in the future. I can’t do this to Nick after everything he’s done for me.”
“You already did, and he’s already harboring a criminal,” Angel said. “You’d just be doing him the favor of letting him know. That seems like exactly the thing you should be doing for him.”
I scowled.
Her eyes turned cold again. “You should know that he hasn’t had anyone good in his life since his wife died. I see what’s going on here. If you hurt him with this, you will wish you’d only put him in legal danger. And more than that, you need to tell him if you want to find your balance. The burns won’t stop, and neither will I. He may already know the truth, and you’re worried about protecting him when he might be lying to you. Rip the bandage off, Jette.”
I glared at her. She’d hit right on the crux of the issue, because I knew he was lying to me. I still trusted him. I was lying to him, and I was still letting him come a little closer than a professional colleague. This was a recipe for disaster.
And beneath it all, I was hovering right over a pit of doom that threatened to swallow me whole. If Nick was lying to me, it had to be because he was protecting me.
&
nbsp; He knew. And he knew I wouldn’t like what I was going to find out.
I choked out the words. “I can’t.”
Angel’s frown extended all the way up into her judgmental eyes. “You’ve got twelve hours to tell him, or I will. I know what I said about our deal, but Warren is too good to lose. So start writing your confession.”
I raised a hand, attempting to summon the fire. I was met with silence, empty fingers, and a smirk from Angel.
My only means of practiced intimidation gone, I lowered my hand.
She waved goodbye as I got out of the car. I slammed the door unnecessarily hard. Angel crept along the street next to me, watching me from the driver’s seat like the parent of a truant child.
I flipped her the bird before walking into the building.
Everything sounded different with the arcane magic inside me gone quiet. The hum of the elevator grated on my ears as I tried to decide what to say to Nick.
And now I was going in unarmed. Not that it should have bothered me. We were friends.
I’d been friends with Kane, though. And I had it on the word of Jason Wolff, Louis Irvine, and Jackson Coffing that Nick was, at best, standing in a legal and ethical no man’s land.
When I got to Nick’s door, I juggled my keys before shoving the right one into the door. The wards sounded like a car alarm, and unable to provide the right signatures by myself, I left the keys in the door and knocked, stepping away.
I crossed my arms in annoyance as he opened the door.
“Driftwood.”
The alarm was still pounding in my head. “Do you want to do something about the...?” I gestured around us.
Nick looked back and forth in the hallway and shrugged.
“The wards!” I realized I was trying to yell over something he couldn’t hear when he smirked at me. “The wards, Nick. I just got leeched.”
He reached for his ring and murmured something lost to me in all the hubbub.
“I thought you were going out of town,” I said in irritation.
“I did. I’m already back.” He held the door for me as I entered. “The trips go a lot faster when I don’t have to worry about eating or sleeping. Or you.”