That was cold comfort, but I wasn’t in a position to be choosy. “He’ll be all right,” I said, more for myself than my dad. “He’ll call me when he wakes up. Meanwhile, I’m going to make sure I’ve got some good news to tell him.”
“What more can you accomplish tonight?” Yong asked, floating after me as I strode across the huge, empty ticketing area back toward the stairs. “It’s two in the morning. Even the criminals are closing shop and going home to sleep. You should be asleep.”
“I’m too angry to sleep. And two a.m. is actually the best time to find what I’m after.”
My father looked skeptical. “And that is?”
I flashed him a grin in the dark. “I’m going to get someone to break Nik’s curse.”
Chapter 9
My address book had a lot of curse-breakers thanks to my crusade to remove my father’s bad luck curse. Most of the places I’d found were scams, but I’d saved the legit ones just in case. Some were even open twenty-four hours. Any of the non-scammers could have answered my questions well enough, but there was only one I trusted with Nik’s life, and in a rare stroke of good fortune, two a.m. was smack in the middle of his business hours.
“Come on,” I said, tapping my foot impatiently as my phone rang. We were back up on the main bridge that spanned the chasm of Rentfree, which was still bustling with traffic even at this late hour thanks to the Night Lot. We probably should have moved somewhere less public, but I didn’t actually know where I was going yet, and I was in a hurry.
“Oh thank god,” I said when the call finally picked up, but the elderly female voice on the other end wasn’t the one I’d been expecting.
“Office of the Forgotten Dead, Carol speaking.”
I froze, too thrown off-balance to reply. In hindsight, my shock was completely ridiculous. It was an office. Of course there’d be other people working there.
“Is Peter available?” I asked after an embarrassingly long pause.
“Sorry, hon, it’s his night off,” Carol said in a warm, kind voice that was so like Peter’s, I wondered if the Empty Wind coached his people to speak that way. “Would you like to leave a message?”
“Sure,” I said, because why not? “Can you please tell him that Opal Yong-ae called? He should already have my number.”
“All right,” Carol said, then she paused. “Wait, did you say your name was Opal? Like the gemstone?”
“That’s the one,” I said. Then, because this was the part people always had trouble with, I added, “My last name is spelled Y-O-”
“Oh, I know you!” she cried, dropping the calm, wise priestess voice. “You’re the one Peter’s been looking for!”
My chest clenched. “He looked for me?”
“He’s been worried sick! He told all of us to contact him immediately if you turned up. Let me give you his home address.”
“No, no,” I said reflexively, waving my hands. I mean, I did want to see Peter, and it was kind of an emergency, but Nik wouldn’t actually be in mortal danger again for another seven days, and it felt horribly rude to bust into Peter’s private home on his night off. “It can wait until tomorrow.”
“Nonsense,” the woman scolded. “I don’t know what your situation is, but Peter wouldn’t have been this insistent if it wasn’t important. He’ll bite my head off if he finds out I had you on the phone and didn’t send you over.”
I couldn’t imagine Peter biting anyone’s head off. I’d never even heard him raise his voice, but she was clearly serious because an address appeared in my texts a second later.
“There,” she said. “I’ve already sent him a message letting him know you’re on your way. I have to get back to work, but I wish you the best of luck with whatever you’re going through, Opal.”
“Same to you,” I said awkwardly, but she’d already hung up, leaving me staring at Peter’s home address.
“What do you want to do?” Sibyl asked. “Should I try cross-referencing the address for a home phone?”
“Don’t bother,” I said with a sigh, pushing my goggles up on my face. “He’s already expecting us. It’ll be rude if we don’t show up now.”
Sibyl’s icon flickered in the AI equivalent of a shrug. “Up to you. I’ve put the address on your map. Shouldn’t be hard to get to. It’s not far away.”
It was quite close, actually. If I’d had a car, Peter’s house would only have been a ten-minute drive from our current location. My auto-car contract was still good till the end of the year, and I was tempted to order one up just to give him a few minutes to prepare. That said, I didn’t think my car service provider sent vehicles to Rentfree, and politeness notwithstanding, I didn’t actually want to waste the time. I’d already inconvenienced him. Might as well go all the way.
Pulling my goggles back down, I pushed my way through the obstacle course of vendor carts that covered the Rentfree bridge at all hours of the day and night to the line of actual in-a-building stores on the other side. My father floated silently behind me, his smoky face scowling.
“I hope you’re going back to your apartment,” he said when I grabbed the door to a twenty-four-hour vending machine restaurant, which was just a fancy name for a temperature-controlled room with a table and a bunch of machines that dispensed pre-packaged food-like substances. “You look tired.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Don’t lie to me. We’re magically connected. I can feel your exhaustion as if it were my own, and while I’m proud of you for soldiering through,
