“Maybe,” Daphne cocked her head to one side, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Patrick told us that when Zotovic’s people renovated the Pinnacle Tower that they were really cagey about anything they changed beyond the front lobby, right? So we don’t know for sure what kind of surveillance or security camera system they’ve got set up in there. But something to obscure our facial features isn’t the worst idea, assuming we manage to get out of there in one piece.”
Izzie shook her head, impatiently.
“We’re wasting time that we don’t have. That Patrick doesn’t have.” She pocketed the two vials, and then took the cardboard box of shotgun shells from Daphne’s hands. She bent down, and proceeded to load the shells into one of the shotgun’s empty magazines.
“Okay, you’re right.” Daphne came to crouch beside her, and went to work loading another. “I’m just a little worried about what comes afterwards, is all.”
Izzie spared her a quick glance, giving her a sympathetic look.
“Let’s worry about what happens afterwards when we know that there’s going to be an afterwards,” Izzie said, a tight, mirthless smile tugging up the corners of her mouth. “For the moment, let’s just worry about what happens now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Patrick was surrounded by darkness, but he knew that he was not alone. There were things moving there, even though he couldn’t see or hear them. Then he realized that the darkness itself was moving, and that he was wreathed in living shadow. He remembered what his great uncle had told him as a boy, about the time that Pahne’i had gone down beneath the earth and wrestled for eight days with the living god of shadows, and was suddenly convinced that he was down there now. Patrick could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and his stomach roiled as if there was a fire burning deep inside of him. He tried to open his mouth to speak, but found that he couldn’t breathe. He reached out, hands grasping nothing, struggling to take a breath, until . . .
Patrick jolted awake, gasping for air.
He was in a dimly lit room, arms and legs strapped to a metal chair. He had been stripped to his t-shirt and boxers, and the metal of the chair was cold against his skin. He could feel cold tiles beneath the bare soles of his feet. As he struggled to catch his breath, he tried to remember where he was, and how he had gotten here. His last memory was of the dead man with the hole in his forehead talking to him, and then a sudden burst of pain.
They must have knocked him unconscious, and brought him . . . where?
Patrick craned his neck to look from side to side. There was a wall of windows on the far side of the room, through which he could see the night sky and the tops of skyscrapers. There were light fixtures set amidst acoustic tiles in the ceiling overhead, but they were dark, the only illumination in the room what little light was shining in through the windows, giving everything the room a faintly bluish-grey tint. And aside from the chair to which Patrick was strapped, there was little else in the room to see. There was an empty chair facing him a few feet away, a waist-high table off to one side, and set up high in a corner was a security camera, its lens trained on him. If he turned his head as far as he could in either direction, in the corner of his eye he could just make out the outline of a closed door behind him, a thin trickle of light leaking out from the gap underneath it. He tried to shift the chair, but found it was too heavy to budge with his wrists and ankles secured.
There was a dull ache at the side of Patrick’s head, no doubt from the blow that had knocked him unconscious. His mouth felt parched, his lips cracked and his throat burning with thirst. When he blinked, his eyelids scraped over dry eyes. He felt more dehydrated than he would have expected, assuming that he’d only been out of it for a matter of hours. The air in the room must be arid, he realized, leeching the moisture right out of him.
He felt a sharp spasm of queasy nausea in his gut, and his dry tongue was stung by a foul taste. One of the Ridden was nearby.
Patrick heard the click of a knob turning behind him, and then light spilled into the room as the door swung open. He turned his head to see, squinting in the glare, but only got a glimpse of movement before the door slammed shut and the room was once more plunged into darkness.
It took a moment for his eyes to readjust to the gloom, as he heard footsteps circle around him, and the sound of the metal chair across from him scraping across the floor.
“You’re finally awake.”
Patrick could make out the silhouette of a man sitting facing him, framed against the skyline in the windows beyond. The man gestured to the camera high up in the corner.
“I’ve been keeping my eyes on you. A few of them, anyway.”
The man reached into his pocket, and when he pulled it back out his hand was filled with light. It took a split second for Patrick to realize that the man was holding a smart phone with a lit screen, and another second to recognize that
