Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
I’m going to kill someone you love someday.
Something dark enters Kyle’s heart.
He opens his eyes. Drake is gone. He’s alone.
Kyle sits up with a start. “Hello?”
30.
No Such Thing as Virtue.
—∙—
Kyle looks up. People upstairs are talking, moving around. He rises from the floor, listens more closely. He hurries up the creaky steps to the door, stops. After a glance back at the empty basement, he decides if Drake left, it must be dark enough for him to leave, too.
He cracks open the door.
The church is lit only by candles—and they are everywhere in sight. On the pews. Windowsills. Scattered all over the floor. Tall candles, short ones, wide, all of them black or white with no exceptions. Cade is at the pulpit, also covered with candles, the book spread before her. Layna is at her side, whispering. Ahead, the chief and his son are at the front window, which still glows with the last light of day. At the pew behind them, Mikey is sitting with one leg bouncing in place, all kinds of nervous.
“Where’s Elias?” asks Kyle to no one in particular.
The chief turns from the window. “Not sundown yet.”
“Where’s Drake?” he asks instead, coming toward the front of the church. The shred of deep blue light from the windows is annoying at worst, like a shower turned slightly too far to the hot side. Kyle walks right past them, brings himself to the east front window, peering outside. He sees someone standing in an oversized hoodie in front of the church, the hood drawn over their head. Elias is next to him. “Drake?” he mutters to himself.
“Since the sun started going down, he went out there,” says the chief, coming up to Kyle’s side. “His choice. My son had a jacket, the guy put it on, covered his hands and most of his face, went on out there like he was braving a winter storm.” He looks at Kyle. “Elias didn’t want you playing it risky to join them.”
Kyle goes to the door, peels it open. “What the hell, guys?” he calls out to them. Elias and Drake both turn. “You were just gonna let me sleep through everything?”
Drake, whose mouth and nose is covered by fabric and his eyes with a pair of shades, lifts a hand and wiggles his fingers. Elias, hands in his pockets, looking like he’s been through hell, says, “It’s not dark yet, Kyle. Don’t—”
Kyle steps right out of the church into the dark blue dusk. “I go to work at the bar in this light all the time.”
“Just … stay in the church,” Elias presses again, coming to him. Then he lowers his voice. “Please.”
That’s when Kyle senses the ice-cold brick of dread.
He meets Elias’s eyes. “What’s going on?” he hisses under his breath. “What is it?”
Elias can’t quite look at him. His foot is tapping in place. Though his hands are stuffed away in his pockets, Kyle senses they’re sweating.
Kyle looks into the distance down the road. Turns, looks at the nearby buildings, at the park behind which the dark blue of the sky is quickly giving away to night. His eyes search every corner, every shadow.
It isn’t that his Reach finds anything. It’s that he feels space between what his Reach sees. Pockets of nothing—vacuums.
“They’re here,” says Kyle, realizing it. “They got here last night somehow. They’ve been hiding all day.”
Elias nearly covers Kyle with his body, the way he gently pushes him back toward the church doors. “I’m serious, go back inside, back downstairs.”
Kyle stands his ground. “What’s going on?”
It’s Drake who answers: “He doesn’t want you to be part of the negotiation, hot stuff.”
“Drake,” snaps Elias, nearly growling.
Kyle stares at Drake, confused, then at Elias. “What in the hell are we negotiating?”
Drake, who unlike Elias has no reservations about telling everything to Kyle, comes right up to him and pulls out a small slip of parchment paper from a pocket, extending it to Kyle pinched between two fingers. Kyle gently takes it. The paper is fragile, like it could fall apart from a breeze. Handwritten by a fountain pen from the looks of it, tiny blotches of ink here and there, dotting the fancy letters. It reads:
Return my golden boy to me posthaste. If one further night falls without his sweet shape, I will be so inspired to impart a grim gift upon yours in parting with tenderer mortal coils.
Kyle lowers the note. “Golden boy?”
“It’s my dear Uncle Salazo’s writing,” explains Drake, “and he means his pet. I swear, he can’t just say things plainly. It gets so tiresome, listening to his twisty old vocabulary navigate itself around the simple message of: send Mikey back, I’m in heat.”
Kyle rereads the note again. “This sounds like a threat.”
“It is.” Drake sighs flippantly, rubs his eyes. “I guess we’ve got no choice but to deliver Mikey back.”