Shadow Fall

white. He flexed his hands hard to burn away the memory of Annabella’s satiny skin. Her sexy, slender body.

Besides, he had plenty of business to take care of, old and new, before he could linger with her the way he wanted—the memory would have to last an eternity. Soon he would be caught, if not by a seriously pissed-off Shadowman, then by some holier-than-thou avenging angels, and dragged out of this world. He had a lot of work to do before that happened.

Custo forced his concentration onto the screen, tabbing to the contact addresses and telephone numbers associated with the credit card accounts.

He put in an earplug so he could talk as he worked. “Tommy?”

“Here,” Tommy’s gruff voice buzzed across the line. “Good to have you back, man.”

“Good to be back. I trust you’ve been brought up to speed?”

“Yeah, I got it. Adam gave a general security briefing this morning, told us that we were all at your disposal. Says there’s some scary shape-shifting Shadow monster after your girl.”

His girl? Not yet, but Custo didn’t correct him. “I want to get Segue operatives into as many seats as possible. Put together a team. You have whatever funds you need to buy back what you can. I’m sending the credit card list to you now. Be discreet.”

Custo ended the call and selected another file, the Segue personnel manifest highlighting staff members from before and after his death. One of these trusted people was a traitor, a wraith collaborator. Adam had gotten a head start on reviewing the profiles, tagging names with thoughts and background information.

The gala was the night’s priority, but the traitor was Cus-to’s past life’s unfinished business. Spencer, the asshole who’d killed him, had been so smug with his ridicule about the traitor, so confident in the success of the back-stabbing shithead who wanted to bring down Segue. It had to be somebody close to Adam to get Spencer off like that.

But who? These were all trusted men: Tommy, Jens, who’d apparently lost a lot of hair in the past two years, Gomez, Jackson…The list went on.

Setting up a team had never been this difficult.

Maybe Tommy could buy up the tickets, but someone else should head the security around the stage. Tommy’s smooth, affable style would have been perfect for the gala, but Jens could take point. Break up and overlap the duties for double coverage.

Custo himself would be with Annabella at all times.

And Gomez? Jackson? How much did he really know about them?

Damn it. Custo gripped his skull in frustration. He didn’t know whom to trust.

Chapter Eight

CUSTO smothered a smile as Annabella chanted “lashes, lashes, lashes” while she tore apart her cubby of a bathroom.

Lashes? Well, okay…but he restrained himself from commenting on his willingness to participate in any and all of her unusual sexual fetishes and surveyed her apartment with hungry interest instead. He wanted to know everything about her.

Her studio was a narrow space jumbled with colorful…stuff. The kitchen sink behind him was tidy, a short fridge snugged under the counter. A coffeemaker and hot plate cluttered the other side of the sink. A futon ran along one wall, reclined in sleep position, sheet in a twist, bold patchwork blanket still in the half-cocoon shape of her body. Pillows littered the area in deep reds, blues, greens, some with fussy tassels, and a small old TV-DVD combo unit took one corner. Clothes were everywhere, but mostly piled on one of her two chairs. The place smelled sweet and feminine, no one scent predominating.

Photographs sat on every surface, glass fronts glinting as the afternoon sun poured in her window. The one nearest was of her with a middle-aged woman and a young man wearing a graduation gown. The three shared Annabella’s coloring, and the way they squeezed one another’s shoulders, faces angling for space in the photo, told Custo they were her family.

For the first time in years he felt a pang of jealousy, the kind that used to precede a flood of bitterness when he’d been at school and heard the other boys going on about their family vacations. Not that he begrudged her a family where he had none, but he wanted to be in that photo, a day in the life of holding her tight, mugging for a camera.

Stop. But the want sliced through him anyway, cold and harsh. There would be no photos. Their relationship could not possibly end that way, and he’d learned a long time ago that fantasies only made reality worse.

“Yes!” Annabella shouted. He turned as she emerged, waving a small package in her hand, a set of spidery fake eyelashes. As if her natural ones needed any help. “Now just let me run the garbage down the hall, and we can go.”

“I’ll do it,” he said. No need for her to carry the trash when he was there.

“No, no, I take out my own. But can you…uh…watch me from the door?”

Of course he’d watch her; he wasn’t taking his eyes off her until she was out of danger. He’d have followed her, but his earplug beeped, and he let her drift down the hallway, plastic bag in hand, so she wouldn’t be bothered by the security details for the night’s performance.

It was a simple, but comprehensive plan: Annabella would dance, opening a way for the wolf to return to his Otherworld territory, per his wishes. Segue soldiers would be in the audience, backstage, and surrounding the building, exit strategy in place for Annabella, should anything go wrong. City Center personnel had been briefed about extra security posing as stage crew and were cooperative with Segue’s measures. Custo would be side stage, prepared to give the wolf extra incentive should Annabella attract his interest again.

“Custo here.”

“We’re in place,” Jens said. “We have the stage area covered and seventeen operatives with tickets for tonight’s performance.”

Custo stood in the apartment doorway while Annabella ducked down the hall. He leaned out when she rounded the corner. With an abrupt clatter of metal noise, she was headed back toward him. She held up a finger, mouthing “one minute” and knocked on a neighbor’s door.

He nodded to her, but spoke to Jens. “I want minimal disruption to the flow of things backstage.”

Jens’s com crackled again. “Where will you be?”

Custo thought that had been understood, but it bore restating so there was absolutely no mistake. “I’ll be with Annabella.”

Annabella stopped at her neighbor Peter’s door and signaled to Custo that she needed a minute. Yeah, right. She needed way more than a minute; the way Custo looked at her had the liquid heat in her blood short-circuiting her brain. She got no relief since he had to stay nearby to protect her, to keep the wolf in the shadows. Her dependence was as unsettling as her attraction to him.

She had to concentrate on Giselle. The rest of the world, Custo-the-angel included, she couldn’t entirely trust. All that was too different, too strange, too frightening to grasp. She had to focus on what she knew.

But, heaven help her, if not for the looming performance, she could easily do something very stupid. She almost had earlier that day. He’d just looked so good and smelled so good, and then he’d felt so good, better than anything she’d ever imagined with or without the aid of movies and steamy fiction.

Her sanity was hanging by a thread. Only dance could save her.

But first she had to deal with Peter.

She rapped on his door. Guilt had her gnawing on a fingernail, a habit she’d taken great pains to break. Talking to him was torture, but he’d worry if she didn’t show up at her place for a few days without letting him know. She always had in the past. And he’d been so good to her when she first moved into the building, so green to the city that she almost backed out of her lease to live with a bunch of other dancers when she really wanted to