“Wu was in here?” I swung my scowl around the room. “How did he get in?”
“I’m not sure.” Thom hesitated with his palm above the phone, asking silent permission I was quick to grant him. “He touched this.” A long inhale puffed out his chest. “No, not touched. He carried this with him for some time. Days.” The edge of his lips curled. “The phone is brand new. I smell that too, the metallic burn of fresh circuitry. Wu marked this on purpose.” His gaze traveled to the dent on my pillow. “He left this in your me space as a message.”
A ball of dread formed in my gut. “What’s the message?”
“That you’re his.” Thom hissed at the screen. “He’s staking his claim.”
“Is this a demon thing?” In my gut, that ball started bouncing. “He told me I was his new partner.”
And that was about the time I started feeling ten kinds of stupid for not calling Kapoor to verify Wu’s credentials.
“Perhaps,” Thom allowed. “Without knowing his breed, it’s impossible to say for sure.”
“Give me a second.” I held up a finger and dialed Kapoor on my cell while Thom returned the other to its spot on my pillow. He answered on the fourth ring. “Hey, I got a visit from an Adam Wu yesterday and —”
“What?”
Thom, who had no trouble hearing both sides of the conversation, winced at the near-shout.
“Adam Wu,” I repeated. “He swung by my house.”
A door clicked shut in the background on Kapoor’s end, and a lock engaged. “What did he want?”
“Mostly? To remind me I have three weeks left before the NSB expects me to pay up on my end of our deal. He also wanted to introduce himself, seeing as how we’re going to be partners.”
“Partners,” he echoed. “He told you that?”
“Yes, he did.” I eyeballed the present he’d left me and wondered if Kapoor would apoplexy if I told him about that too. “Why do I get the feeling you had no clue about any of this? Aren’t you my liaison with the taskforce?”
“This move is above my pay grade,” he said, apology clear in his voice. “I’ll have to make some calls to management and get back to you.”
“What, exactly, is your pay grade?” This was the second time he’d palmed off big decisions on some nebulous higher authority. “Is there someone else I should be talking to about this? I have people depending on me, and all these half-ass answers aren’t going to cut it.”
“I’m not a small fish, Ms. Boudreau, but you seem to have landed a whale.” Kapoor gusted out a sigh. “Wu is not under my jurisdiction. He works independently, and his position is fluid. Give me a day or so to track him down, and I’ll get your answers.”
Forget a day or so. I was dialing him up when this call ended. “What is he?”
Kapoor hesitated for so long, I wasn’t sure he was going to answer. “I am not at liberty to discuss that.”
“Of course not.” I snorted. “What was I thinking? The right hand of any organization never knows what the left is doing. Why would this taskforce of yours be any different?”
I ended the call before Kapoor fed me another line.
“He came in through this window,” Thom said from behind me. “His scent lingers in the wood.” I turned as he tongued the dark stain. “This is an old scent.” He glanced at me. “He’s touched this wood many times over several visits.” He shoved the window open and leaned outside, breathing deep. “The sash is the only exterior part of the window or house he touched, but its scent is multi-layered as well.”
There was only one way a person got through a window without climbing. “You’re saying he can fly.”
Not a revelation considering at least two of the five members of my own coterie had wings.
“Yes.” Thom rubbed his nose as though it tickled. “I can’t identify his breed, but I have catalogued the scent. I will know it if we come across it again in another charun.” Had he shifted, his stub of a tail would have been twitching. “Wu is something new, something we have never encountered.”
“How is that possible?” By their own admission, the worlds below had all been conquered.
“I’m not sure.” He stared out the window, up at the sky, and removed a phone from his pocket. “I must tell Cole.”
“I have calls I can’t put off any longer too.” I checked the time and grimaced. “Would you mind giving me some privacy?”
Thom stepped out, dialing as he went, and I heard his footsteps on the stairs as I started down the list. I texted Rixton and then Sherry, and then I pinged Uncle Harold before calling the Trudeau landline and speaking to Aunt Nancy about Dad, whose condition hadn’t changed overnight. She was quick to assure me he hadn’t noticed my absence, but that didn’t exactly give me a case of the warm fuzzies.
After we finished chatting, I took a quick shower to fix the hot mess my hair had become overnight and dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved tee that wouldn’t suffocate me before padding downstairs barefoot.
Thom was nowhere in sight, and I needed to get a move-on, so I walked out onto the porch to search for him. “Thom?”
No answer.
“Thomas?”
Still no response.
I slid on flip-flops and hit the yard. I didn’t have to go far. He was sitting in the same patch of frilly white flowers where he’d been chasing bees earlier. I circled around to get in front of him, jerking to a stop at his glazed expression. His phone rested across his palm, his fingers open, and a deep voice boomed from the speaker. I knelt and scooped up the cell, pressing it against my ear.
“Hey, it’s Luce.” I winced as Cole geared up for another bellow. “I’m here with Thom. Do you have any idea what happened to him?”
“He was updating me on the situation with Wu, but he started slurring his words then stopped talking altogether.”
“He looks dazed.” I pressed the back of my hand against his forehead and his cheek, and he pushed into the touch. “He’s running a low-grade fever.” Contact must have broken through to him on some level. He lay back in the grass and rolled from side to side a few times, a purr rumbling in his throat. Eyes fixed on me, he curled around me, rubbing his chin over my hip like he was marking me with the scent glands cats have below their jaws. Not the most comfortable sensation in the world, but I could manage. For him. Words in that foreign language they all spoke poured from his lips, and then he laughed. Once he started, he couldn’t control the manic burst of amusement. “Um, correction. He’s not dazed. He’s high as a kite.”
“Wait there,” Cole ordered. “I’ll be there in ten.”
Ten minutes turned out to be more along the lines of five. I was unable to stand as the bone-white dragon landed in the front yard, due to the man curled around my hips, milking my thigh with the claws tipping his fingers, but my entire being snapped to attention at his arrival. The beast swiveled his rounded ears, and his crimson eyes narrowed on Thom. His whiplike tail thrashed at his side, its barbed end striking far too close for my comfort. His white mane stood on end, framing his lion’s face, and he angled his branching antlers toward Thom.
“Cole.” I scooted forward to shield Thom as best I could from the ornery dragon. “He needs your help.”
The great creature shook his head once as if to clear it, and then he surrendered to the change that left me sitting before an equally irritated man, one that caused heat to pool low in my gut. “Get his hands off you.”
I made no move to comply. It wasn’t like Thom was doing anything wrong. He was clearly not in his right mind.
I was starting to think he wasn’t the only one.
“Now,” Cole roared with a ferocity that kicked my pulse up about a million notches. “Or I will do it myself.”
I jumped to unwind from Thom, who had tuckered himself out and started snoring, and marched over to Cole. “What is your problem?” I shoved him, the contact a dropped match in a puddle of gasoline, and my palms itched from wanting to do it again, to savor his heart pounding wild beneath my hands. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”