Darkness Unmasked

“I cannot say.” He turned around, but didn’t immediately release my hand. “I suspect the only people who would know are the two people you’ve already noted.”

Stanford and Uncle Quinn. I rubbed my free hand across my eyes wearily. “What the hell are we going to do, Azriel? Stanford is right about one thing—whatever she is, she’s not sane.”

“Actually, I would suggest the opposite. However, she is a being without emotion, someone whose soul lost contact with all that is humanity a very long time ago. She is incapable now of seeing beyond her own needs, desires, and plans.”

I frowned. “You can’t say she’s without feeling given she had us chasing the Jorõgumo for revenge.”

“That did not come from either the heart or the soul, but rather a far darker place. Someone took something of hers, and she could not let the matter slip unchallenged.”

“So if I ever did?”

His smile was somewhat wry. “You challenge her every time you speak to her.”

I grimaced. “I meant seriously challenged. As in, agree to work with Stanford.”

“Then you’d better hope I am still around to defend you.”

Fear swirled through me. I knew I wasn’t any sort of match for Hunter, even with Amaya at my back, but still, hearing Azriel basically confirm it was as scary as hell.

“Well, it’s not actually something I’m planning, however much I’d like to see the bitch dead.”

“Which is the first sensible statement you’ve made for quite a while.”

“I am capable of sensible on occasion.” I rose up on my toes and quickly kissed him. “I’m going for a shower. If you want to be useful, you could make me something to eat.”

His eyebrows rose. “I am not adept at human domestic duties.”

“Now, that,” I said, voice wry, “is a comment echoed by men the world over. All you need to do is slap some of the lamb that’s in the fridge between a couple slices of bread, squeeze on some tomato sauce, and I’ll be one happy lady.”

“That I can manage.” He raised my hand, kissed my fingertips, then disappeared.

I checked my phone to see if Ilianna—or anyone else for that matter—had called, then headed into the shower. By the time I’d dried my hair, dressed in comfortable jeans and an old sweater, Azriel had set the dining room table with not only a sandwich, but a glass of Coke and a steaming mug of coffee.

“You know,” I said, as he pulled out a chair and seated me. “You might just become a keeper if you carry on like this.”

He didn’t immediately answer, but when he did, his voice was oddly formal. “And would you wish that, if the situation were different?”

I paused, the sandwich halfway to my mouth, and met his gaze. “If the situation were different, if we weren’t who we were, and the option was there, yes, I would like that very much.”

He nodded, and it oddly felt as if an agreement had been reached. I frowned, wondering what exactly that might have been, but his expression—or lack thereof—very much suggested he wasn’t about to elaborate.

“Because there is nothing to elaborate,” he said softly. “What happens next lies in the hand of the fates.”

I swallowed against a suddenly dry throat and tried to ignore the tiny slivers of both hope and fear that began coursing through me. “Meaning there could be some way we could explore this thing further?”

While that possibility scared the hell out of me, I couldn’t help the leap of excitement at the thought of being able to explore whether what was between us had the strength to blossom into something real and permanent.

But all he said was, “That is for the fates to decide.”

“Then the answer is probably no, because fate and I have not been on friendly terms of late.”

He didn’t reply, and there was little to be read in his expression. I bit into my sandwich and had to bite back a groan of sheer pleasure. Besides sex and a cold glass of Coke, the best thing in life had to be a fabulous lamb sandwich.

My phone rang just as I finished my meal. The tone told me it was Jak, and my heart began to beat a whole lot faster. Something was wrong. I was certain of it even before I answered the damn thing. I pushed up from the table and ran across to my handbag, fishing around for several seconds before I found my phone.

“Jak,” I said, my heart seeming to beat somewhere high in my throat. “What’s up?”

“I need to talk to you. Urgently.”

Despite his words, he neither looked nor sounded worried. In fact, he looked rather distracted.

I frowned. “What about?”

“Can’t say on the phone, but you’ll want to hear it, believe me.”

I bit my lip, frustrated with both his reticence to answer the damn question—although that was something I should have gotten used to, seeing as everyone was doing it of late—and that inner voice that kept insisting something was wrong. But was it clairvoyance, or the simple knowledge that every time the phone rang, the shit got deeper? “Where?”

“At Larry’s, in Brunswick.”

It wasn’t a place I knew, but then, that was what Google was for. “When?”

He paused. “Ten minutes.”

“Shit, Jak, you’re not giving me much time to get—”

I cut the rest of my sentence off as my damn phone beeped, then shut down. The stupid battery was dead.

I swore softly, threw it down, then stalked across to the computer and Googled Larry’s in Brunswick. It was situated on Hope Street, not far down from Sydney Road.

I grabbed my keys, then glanced at Azriel. “I’ll meet you there.”

“You do not wish me to take you?”

I hesitated. That niggly sense of wrongness was still present, but I wasn’t really sure whether it was related to Jak, or the still-missing Ilianna. I bit my bottom lip, weighing options, then said, “Can you go to Stane’s first and ask him to keep an eye on police reports, just in case something comes through about Ilianna?”

He frowned. “Why not ring him? He does not appreciate me suddenly appearing on his premises.”

No, he didn’t, but he wasn’t about to keel over in shock from it, either, according to Azriel, and he should know. Besides, I needed information on Ilianna, and Stane was probably our best method of getting it—and it was stupid of me not to have asked him when I was there earlier. “My phone is dead, and I don’t want to waste time going there myself. And I’m only meeting Jak. He’s not a threat.”

“Perhaps not, but given your own sense of unease—”

“Look,” I said, impatience edging my voice—which wasn’t really fair given he was only trying to keep me safe. But there was safe and there was mollycoddling, and this had the feeling of the latter. “It’ll take you all of three seconds to get to Stane’s and less than that to ask him to scan the police frequencies. I can hardly get myself into too much trouble in that short time.”

Surely even I wasn’t that clever.

He studied me, clearly unhappy, then nodded abruptly and disappeared. I headed out the front door, locked up, then called to the Aedh. A sliver of pain ran through my head, but I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was a warning that I was pushing my limits again—despite the energy Azriel had given me—or the mere fact that I was too close to the wards that prevented the Raziq from entering our home. But if pain and pushing my limits found Ilianna, then I really didn’t care—though I had no idea why I thought Ilianna might be the reason behind Jak’s sudden demand for a meet. Maybe it was nothing more than stupid hope.

I zoomed through the streets, the bright lights little more than a blur underneath me. Larry’s, it turned out, was an old, somewhat rambling warehouse structure that had obviously been no more successful as a bar than it had as a warehouse. I re-formed and pulled the somewhat holey remains of my sweater together, my gaze sweeping the grimy, blue-painted building dubiously. I couldn’t imagine any good reasons for Ilianna being in a place like this, and I sure as hell did not want to think about bad reasons. But maybe this wasn’t about her—after all, it was Jak who’d collected the information that had led us to the standing stone gateway under the run-down warehouse near Stane’s. Maybe he’d found another one.

I walked across the road, every sense I had attuned to the old building. Nothing stirred, and I couldn’t see or hear anyone near. The night air was cool and whispered through the holes in my clothes, chilling my skin and causing goose bumps. Or maybe they were simply the result of growing unease.

“Jak?” I kept my voice soft. If he was here, he’d hear.

“Inside.” His voice was as hushed as mine, but oddly lacking warmth.

Unease growing, I grasped the door handle and wrenched it open. Unfortunately, I used more force than necessary and it crashed back, trapping my hand between the door handle and the wall. I bit back my yelp and shook my fingers, my gaze searching the dark room as I eased inside. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything.

“Where are you?”

“Here.”

He sounded closer, but no warmer. Trepidation prickled across my skin, and my footsteps slowed even further. “Where the hell are the lights?”

“Can’t risk them.”

“Why?”

“Get in here, and you’ll see.”

Impatience threaded his distant tones, and just for an instant, he sounded like his old self. Maybe I was just being paranoid.

Maybe I should just wait for Azriel . . .

Damn it, no. I couldn’t keep relying on him to keep me safe. Sooner or later, he would leave, but I was stuck with Hunter long term. If I wanted to survive her post-Azriel, then I had better not start jumping at shadows the minute he wasn’t at my back.

Still, it was with a whole lot of trepidation that I continued to move into the darkness. “Jak, I can’t see a goddamn thing in here. Can’t you at least use the flashlight app on your phone?”