CHAPTER 4
Blood ran off Custo’s arm into crimson splatters on the cold concrete floor of his holding cell. His forearm was a scream of pain from a deep diagonal slice through skin and muscle—a parting gift from one of Adam’s men, and a test: wraiths heal rapidly, humans do not.
Not that Custo had expected a welcome parade; Adam had to take all due precautions. Custo leaned against the cell wall—his butt was already going numb from his seat on the hard floor—and rested his lower arm on his knees in plain sight. His sleeve was bunched over his elbow. Easiest way to safely ID a wraith was to watch him regenerate, a bracing combination of nightmare and miracle.
Custo was more than a little curious himself. Did an AWOL angel heal rapidly, too?
A long two-inch sliver of thick Plexiglas broke up the monotonous gray of his prison. No way to get food in without unsealing the two-foot-thick steel-reinforced door. No place to piss. Aside from the metallic scent of blood, the air had a wet earth smell, as if he were underground, but laced by the peculiar funk of the walking dead. A wraith’s cell.
Custo knew the three Segue facilities in the northeastern U.S. by heart—he’d been involved in the construction of them all—but this place wasn’t familiar. Had to be new, and if it was new, then the wraith war continued and at least several months had passed since his death. Actually, since he’d picked up from Annabella’s thoughts a general awareness of wraiths, the threat had to be public as well. He did a little mental math. Probably over a year had passed. It made sense that Adam was so suspicious.
“I’m not a wraith, Adam,” Custo called. His voice bounced back at him.
As expected, no answer.
Custo stretched his consciousness to locate Adam. He was there, on the other side of the cell. Custo touched his mind: his friend was determined to wait out the test. Custo pushed harder, trying to unlock Adam’s deeper thinking, but as always, only immediate intent was discernible, and even that was unreliable. People changed their minds all the time.
He extended himself further and found Annabella, not far away. Her thoughts were a muddle. Probably scared, worried, angry. But safe. There was no better place for her than Segue, both for her protection and for the resolution of her problem. The sooner he settled the wraith question with Adam, the sooner he could put her at ease. He didn’t want her frightened any longer than necessary. She was feisty, which he liked, but too delicate to fight a creature of Shadow. He’d take care of everything.
An image flashed in his mind: Annabella wrapped around him while he was buried deep within her, the heat of their friction, hearts pounding against each other, his mouth on the apple of her shoulder, the sweet taste of her skin…
A sharp sizzle, white-hot, brought Custo’s attention back to his arm. Pain cleared his fantasy from his mind. He blinked hard and examined his wound.
The deepest layers of rent tissue were obscured by congealing blood, the gape in his skin cracking slightly like a wide, lipless mouth. The shallow edges of the cut, however, had gone from scarlet to pink as the skin came back together, sealing with the pucker of a scar. It was a miracle of millimeters, but Custo had no doubt he was healing—fast.
Shit. His heart tightened like a fist.
Adam would have only one conclusion—wraith. And on the subject of wraiths, Adam had always been blindly resolute. Kill them, kill them all. Custo couldn’t blame him. Adam’s own brother, Jacob, had made the choice to become a wraith, trading humanity for immortality, then murdered Adam’s mother and father, fed on them to make himself stronger, and mocked Adam for being too human, too weak to stop him. Jacob should have known better, should have known Adam wouldn’t break and would never forgive the destruction of his family. The Segue Institute was born with a single clearly defined purpose—find a way to end Jacob.
The heat in Custo’s arm was now bone-deep, aching with the weave and knit of his flesh. The healing wasn’t nearly as fast as a wraith’s, who could recover in minutes from what should’ve been mortal wounds, but it far exceeded a normal man’s. Therefore, damn it, wraith.
Custo lifted his uninjured arm, licked his thumb, and cleaned away the dried blood at one edge of the wound. It was obvious now that he was healing supernaturally. No point hiding the truth.
He turned the closing wound toward the slit in the wall, so there would be no mistake. “I’m not a wraith, Adam. I’m—” He broke off. Still couldn’t say the ridiculous word out loud. He groaned inwardly and took a deep breath. Tried again. “I’m an angel.”
Silence. Not even a flicker of a question from Adam’s mind.
Custo sighed. “I know. I know. Sounds absurd. I don’t expect you to believe me when I don’t believe it myself, but there it is. The only way you’re going to know either way is to trust me. I’m asking you to trust me.”
Silence.
Jacob had loved to play games with Adam’s memories, to trick him into painful recollections of times when life was full and whole. Custo refused to do the same—to pull out their shared past to manipulate his friend. Not that Adam would be moved. He had learned to turn a deaf ear to the insidious ramblings of a wraith in a cell, the clever pleas for release, though the wraith had the voice of his brother or long-lost friend.
Dropping his arm back on his knees, Custo sighed. He could feel Adam’s presence on the other side of the concrete, a bright condensation of identity. Adam couldn’t afford mistakes. If the world were anything like it had been before, there was no way Adam could take a chance on him.
Adam’s mind came to a decision.
Custo brought himself to standing as the lock released on the cell door.
***
“I want a lawyer. You’ve got no right to hold me against my will!” Annabella yelled at the slit in the wall of her weird holding cell. It was worse than the prison cells she’d seen on TV—cold, nondescript gray, like an awful basement, with only a shitty folding table and a shitty pair of folding chairs. At least the room was somewhat lit. If she stayed near the door, she should be fine. The dim corner on the other side was out of the question. It seemed like the kind of place the wolf would hide. She wanted her flashlight to burn him out.
She slapped the palm of her hand on the table to make some noise. In the concrete room, the slap was like the report of a gun.
“Hello, damn it! I’m frickin’ exhausted in here!” Her voice was rough and shrill. She was terrified out of her mind, cringing at the least little thing. If she was getting sick from all this Custo crap, she was going to kill him. Kill that Adam bastard, too. She should have never agreed to share that cab. “I want a lawyer!”
Annabella dragged a chair around to the bright side of the table. The damn thing started to collapse into itself and she had to fight with the seat to get it properly unfolded again. She banged it on the floor when she got the seat open, and lowered herself carefully onto it.
“I. Must. Chill,” she said aloud. Obviously no one was listening to her. “I must chill. I must stay calm. I perform in”—she calculated the number of hours before she’d be onstage—“twenty hours-ish. I must keep it together. Deep breaths.” She inhaled until her lungs were bursting, then let out the air slowly. And again. Much better.
She glanced over her shoulder at the slit in the concrete. Screw it. “Get me out of here!” Her screech broke on here, the type of sound that shattered glass, but it didn’t do much to the concrete. She’d have to try harder.
This was so not happening. She looked around herself again.
“Maybe I’ve gone completely insane.” Sure seemed more plausible than any other explanation. “That’s it. I’m insane. This is not a prison cell; this is a padded room in some very low-budget hospital. I am not being hunted by a wolf—that’s only a manifestation of all my fears and stress. And that man Custo is…” …my hottest fantasy come to life. See? Crazy.
Concrete scraped loudly against concrete. Annabella stood, knocking her chair onto the floor. The huge, thick door retracted. She felt her ang
er rising again. Whoever was responsible for her unlawful imprisonment was going to get an earful from her. And charges filed with the police. And a civil lawsuit for attempting to ruin her performance.
“I want some ans—” Annabella began. She broke off when the door finally retracted enough to reveal her jailer.
A short, very pregnant woman. If Annabella was exhausted, the woman looked ready to pass out. She was deathly pale, dark circles under her eyes, both aspects accentuated by white-blonde hair pulled back in a day-old ponytail.
Annabella fought to hold on to the outrage and obscenities she planned to hurl at whoever came through that door for kidnapping her and locking her in a creepy basement. Not to mention she was starving to death. She’d just danced for four hours.
The woman gave her a little smile.
“Oh, damn it,” Annabella said, surly. “Let me get the chair for you.” She turned to offer it, but, of course, the damn thing had fallen in on itself again.
The woman chuckled and waddled forward. “I appreciate it.”
“Well, you look ready to pop,” Annabella grumbled, getting the metal chair unfolded again. “Here.”
“Not for another two months. Twins.” The woman used the table to lower herself down. The metal door slid closed and locked with another loud scrape.
“Uh…” Annabella looked at the door, her body flushing with anger again.
The woman squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry. I’m Adam’s wife, Talia. We won’t be in here long. He’s spying on Custo now, but he checks on me all the time.” She sighed heavily. “All the time,” she emphasized with a roll of her eyes.
Annabella wrestled with the second chair. “Where is here? And why the hell am I being held hostage?”
“You’re not a hostage. And you are just north of New York City, at one of Segue’s holding facilities.”
“This is criminal.”
Talia shrugged. “The president himself has granted us the authority to apprehend and hold wraiths.”
“I’m not a wraith,” Annabella shot back. The president? …of the United States?
“But you believe it anyway.” Talia flashed that tired smile again, pulling her hand back with a satisfied sigh. “Want to tell me why?”
Why? Like she’d have any clue why the world suddenly became crazy-scary. First the wolf, then the surreal encounter with Custo, and then the soldiers dragging them both away from that hideout in the city.
Talia lifted her eyebrows in friendly interest. “How about starting with how you met Custo?”
“How about letting me out of here?”
“Custo first,” Talia said. “Besides, I promised Adam that I wouldn’t release you from the cell.”
In spite of her anger, Annabella felt herself crack a smile. “But left out the fact you planned to join me?”
Talia shrugged again. “He’s a little distracted with Custo’s return, and I took advantage.”
“Will you catch hell?” The woman seemed so whipped already. It would be just like that SOB Adam to stress her out some more.
“Adam will want to yell at me so bad the little vein on the side of his head will bulge, but he won’t. Poor man has it tough these days.”
“Poor man? He frisked me! As in…everywhere!” Annabella lifted her brows to make sure that Talia got her meaning.
“Lucky. I wish he’d frisk me.” That tired smile again.
Annabella gave Talia a once-over. “Looks like he frisked you just fine seven months ago.”
Talia’s smile lifted further and lit her eyes. “He did at that. Our belated honeymoon to Paris was very good to us. Tell me about Custo before Adam gets back or someone tattles on me.”
Custo? What about a little freedom first? A little due process?
Annabella met Talia’s steady, weary gaze, and felt the last of her anger crumbling. “Oh, fine.”
She thought back to the moment she first saw him. It was only a flash really: The dress rehearsal had been typically good and bad. She’d barely started the final solo when the wolf appeared. She’d ignored the animal, figuring that if he were real, it was already too late to run, and if he weren’t, she didn’t have anything to worry about. She’d spotted Custo on the other side of her, hidden behind a bit of scenery.
“He came out of nowhere,” Annabella said. “One minute I was dancing alone onstage, the next Custo was with me, tackling my hallucination of a wolf.”
“I beg your pardon?” Talia’s brow furrowed. “A wolf?”
“Yeah. You’re not going to believe me, but I swear it’s the truth.” Custo believed her; maybe this woman would, too. “There is a huge wolf …in the city…that is made out of shadows and he has been stalking me for two days.”
Annabella sat back in her chair and waited for Talia’s response. If the woman’s face showed one iota of disbelief, contempt, or amusement, then pregnant or not, she was going to get a piece of Annabella’s mind.
Talia’s face tightened, her mouth thinning. “Is the wolf made out of shadow, or does it exist in the shadows?”
Her serious expression had a chill sweeping over Annabella, prickling at her scalp as all the blood dropped out of her face. “He’s real?”
“It’s definitely possible.”
Two people believed her. Which meant the wolf was real and was stalking her. Annabella put her head on the table as the room spun.
“You’re safe here,” Talia said. Annabella felt a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
***
The hunter crouched in a corner of darkness, panting with fear. Foul scents of industry, sharp and acrid, filled the air. Foreign sounds jarred him, echoing in a world of harsh, cold gray. His claws scrabbled and scratched on a firmament of flat, unnatural stone. No trees, no magic. Just large, wide caverns upon caverns going deep into the earth.
Not his territory. Not his realm. He was the trespasser here.
The hunter braced in meager earth-shadow. A high whine scraped up his throat. Back. He had to get back.
Mortals clumped with heavy, telling footfalls. Controlled violence hummed in the air around them. Fighters, all. The bright man, the one who’d faced him in Twilight, was worse, but they’d caged him.
The woman was here somewhere, too, her scent faint, yet threaded through the passageways she’d traversed.
She could get him back to Twilight. She could open the way to the never-ending forest. His running grounds.
A fighter stomped near, coming closer. A man, steamy and ripe with life.
The hunter bared his teeth, ears pinned, ready to strike.
The man walked the passage as if he belonged, his presence permitted everywhere in these caverns. Closer and closer. Fat with mortal juices.
This fighter could approach the woman. Perhaps he could compel her magic to open the way back.
The hunter sprang to take him.
***
The door retracted, and Custo stepped into the center of the cell—not too close to the opening as if to attack or escape, but not remaining on the far side, as if to draw Adam away from the door and the safety beyond.
Adam strode in anyway, the door grinding closed behind him. Custo could tell from the loose, but ready set of his shoulders that he was prepared to tangle, if necessary. Though they’d often handled wraiths together, Adam had taken on a couple of wraiths solo before.
“I’m not a wraith.” Custo sat on the floor to prove it. If he were a wraith, he’d be moving in for an Adam treat.
“An angel?” Adam’s tone was flat, concealing his true attitude.
Custo scratched his chin like a movie mob boss—an old private joke—and shrugged.
“From God?”
Custo winced slightly and dropped the act.
“Then from whom?” A touch of sarcasm there.
Custo cleared his voice. “I’m…uh…absent without leave.”
Adam frowned slightly, then sat on the floor and crossed his legs, mirror
ing Custo’s position, his gaze coolly assessing. “Let’s have it then. The story.”
There was too much and too little to tell, but at least he had an obvious place to begin. “Well, Spencer killed me.” Custo left off the torture part.
“I remember,” Adam said. His jaw tensed. Angry. But his mind betrayed nothing.
“What happened to him by the way?” Custo mimicked Adam’s surface composure, but he was angry, too. He had a score to settle.
“You mean you weren’t looking down from your cloud in the sky?” Full, bitter sarcasm now. Very angry.
“Doesn’t work that way.” Custo kept his tone deliberately light. “Did you kill him?” As far as Custo knew, Adam had never killed anybody. Custo didn’t think he could take it.
“Wraith beat me to it.”
Ah. “Fitting. He was colluding with them.” Spencer had been the SPCI liaison to the Segue Institute. SPCI, the Strategic Preternatural Coalition Initiative, was a covert government agency attempting to police the wraiths while Segue studied them, trying to discover the catalyst that changed them from human to monster. SPCI mostly mucked things up.
Custo drew a deep breath. “By the way, Spencer told me that you had another traitor at Segue. Another wraith collaborator. Someone you trust.”
Just like that, his message was delivered. A grasping knot of acute worry released. Adam had been warned.
How could you know that? Adam’s mind asked, but he said, “When did he tell you that?”
So Adam already knew. That was good news.
“Before…you know…he offed me.” It was utterly galling that that Spencer piece of shit had killed him. No pride in that. “Have you had any suspicions about another traitor?” Custo asked, though he knew the answer from Adam’s mind.
Adam shrugged. “We’ve had some intel leaks over the past six months or so and lives lost because of it. Talia killed the demon who created the wraiths soon after you died. The remaining wraiths number in the thousands and are nested all over the world. For a while we were able to aggressively track and…dispatch them, but they’ve become better at hiding and coordinating their attacks. Their target is Segue—me and Talia, specifically.”
Bad Boys of the Night: Eight Sizzling Paranormal Romances: Paranormal Romance Boxed Set Page 22