“I don’t understand,” Adam said, but the lyrics still sent chills across his hot back and reminded him somehow of Jacob.
Dreadlocks cocked his head. “You musta inherited that money then, ’cause I’m saying it as plain as I can, and you just don’t get it. I’m saying the sun is setting, and if your sister has any brains at all she is going inside somewhere or she will be the demons’ feed.”
“Where inside?” Adam pulled out a hundred, held it up.
Dreadlocks waved the bill away with a grimace of disdain. “End of the world, man. What the fuck is that paper going to do for me? For any of us?”
“It’ll get you off the street.” Just tell me where.
“I can get me off the street. I’m here by choice. I’m here because here is real. It’s you and your fancy shirt that are shit, man. You live in the dark; you just don’t know it.”
Adam kept his voice calm, his expression controlled even though he wanted to grab the punk by the throat. “I want to see, too. Help me see so I can find her.”
“If she’s here, she’s inside. Or she should be. Tally likes to live dangerously. Doesn’t trust anybody. I offered her a place in my family, but she refused. Where she’s got to now, I don’t know.”
Adam’s chest burned, an emotion he couldn’t name breaching containment. He glanced down at the photograph in his hand. “I never said her name.”
“Well, I told you I’d seen her. You didn’t believe me?” Dreadlocks grinned, spreading his arms wide to invite a laugh at Adam’s expense from his crew. The group tittered on cue.
Adam didn’t care as long as he got information.
“Well then, maybe now you’ll believe me about the demon night,” Dreadlocks said.
Adam already believed. “Where inside?” Please.
Dreadlocks sighed. “Try Priest, man. North of Santa Maria. Mountainside.”
“Priest?” Adam controlled himself through a long inhalation, though his heart pumped to act. He kept a choke hold on his hope.
“They’re roads, man. You know what a road is?”
Only Jacob ever talked down to him, but Adam was too grateful to be irritated.
“I get that you don’t want my money.” Adam stopped and corrected himself. “Don’t choose my money. But it’s all I have to give. That and my thanks.” He pulled out his wallet, took every bill in the leather sheath, thumbed a couple of business cards—the personal ones with his direct mobile number—and held them out. When Dreadlocks didn’t lift a hand, Adam dropped the lot on the ground.
“Call me if you ever need anything. If you want to tell me more. If you are in trouble.” He lifted his gaze to the crowd of kids. “Goes for all of you. If your demons are what I call wraiths, you’re going to need my help. Now get inside.”
Adam jogged back to the car, his body humming with anticipation. He glanced over his shoulder toward the bonfire glow of the setting sun, and then faced Custo.
Custo must have read the excitement on his face. “She’s alive,” he concluded.
“Calls herself Tally.” Adam could barely speak over the buzzing in his ears.
“Where?”
“Priest and Santa Maria.”
“A church?” Custo typed rapidly into the rental car’s GPS.
“Roads, man.”
Black spots swam in Talia’s vision. If she twitched her eyes left, the spots skated left. If she twitched them right, the spots skated right. No matter how hard she tried, she could never examine one of the spots dead-on. Bothersome game. Like keep-away from childhood, but more frustrating because the pastime—and that’s all it was good for, passing time—made the intense pounding behind her eyes worse. Nauseatingly so.
She gave up for the moment and focused down the alley on the soul-sucking monster at its entrance. Talia was trapped at the other end in a belly made of concrete wall and pavement. The hulking brute blocked the exit of the garbage lane to her apartment complex to stand sentry, to watch for her as he’d done when he caught up with her in Denver, then Las Vegas.
This time she had spotted him first and turned down an unfamiliar alley rather than ducking through the gate to the complex’s square of scraggly lawn where a couple of teenage girls had set out chairs to sun themselves. Stupid to ruin their skin and cost her an escape route. But she couldn’t very well lead the monster to vibrant young lives. Not after Melanie. Therefore, the alley.
She’d been here a day and a half and smelled just as bad as the garbage. Good thing her shadowy shield obscured more than light or the monster would have discovered her that first day. The dark cloak dampened most sensory perception of her; sight, smell, and sound all concealed under its folds. With the exception of her pulse, she was a shrouded ghost.
Talia worked her thick and uncooperative tongue on the roof of her mouth to swallow. Frustrating reflex—nothing but glue to work with, and the motion made her lungs burn.