“Death hasn’t improved your sense of humor,” he grumbled. “You’re still not funny.”
Smoothing my thumb over the beat of his frantic heart, I begged him with my gaze for patience.
“I’ll explain later,” I promised him in a low voice. “It’s not exactly what you think.”
Expression tight, he exhaled. “Then it’s probably worse.”
“You are a little ray of sunshine.” I frowned at him. “I’ve always considered you a Grumpy Bear on the Care Bear scale, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’re a Funshine.”
“Hadley.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I—”
“—love you too,” I finished for him. “Now let’s go adventuring.”
“You are—”
“—wonderful and amazing and have great taste in side dishes?”
“You’re doing it again.” He clamped his hands on my shoulders to hold me still. “You’re deflecting.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“I will get frustrated, I will get angry, I will get worried, but I will never hurt you.”
The impact of what he’d caught me doing staggered my wobbly legs, and I hated how deep the hooks of insecurity had sunk into me until I couldn’t let the man finish a sentence out of fear what he might say next.
Mostly, that he would say goodbye.
That I wasn’t worth the headache.
That I wasn’t worth the hassle.
That I wasn’t worth…anything.
“I don’t always realize I’m doing it,” I confessed. “I hear people start to criticize, and I just want to slap my hand over their mouth before they say something they can’t take back.” I tugged on his arm. “I’m sorry. I trust you with my life. That ought to prove I can trust you with my heart too.”
“We’ve got time for you to get there.” He kissed my forehead. “All the time in the world.”
Poor guy had no idea how literal his words were, if Ambrose was to be believed.
That was definitely a conversation for later.
“We’re presenting a tempting target out here, folks.” Ford glanced around us. “We need to move.”
“I’ll go in first.” I checked with the shadow beside me, who nodded. “There could be more wards.”
Muscles worked in Midas’s jaw as he chewed over all the things he wanted to tell me, but he swallowed them down with visible effort and trusted me to lead them.
Turning my back on my friends, I stalked toward the front door, shadow in tow.
“They spent a lot of time on these wards.” I checked the knob, and it turned in my hand. “Too easy?”
Then again, if no one could reach the door, did it really matter if you bothered locking it behind you?
Once inside the cavernous building, I slumped with disappointment. A wide-open space with nowhere to hide that I could see, I doubted this was where Liz had gone to ground. There were no supplies, food or otherwise. Nothing about the space explained what warranted the heavy security measures set outside.
As that doubt surfaced, an ounce of certainty trickled in that there must be something here worth protecting if they had it locked up so tight.
With a flick of my wrist, I sent Ambrose to scout the interior while I stood there, careful not to trip any traps I might not sense. We had to wipe this place clean before the others joined us. They didn’t have a handy-dandy shadow to taste the magic and report back like me.
Moments later, Ambrose returned and waved me deeper into the building.
Normally, he would have stabbed me in the brain to share his findings. “What is it?”
Again, I doubted myself. I had almost—no, I had killed myself, temporarily, to gain entrance. For what?
Placing his palm on the wall, he glanced back to make sure I took the hint.
“You want me to touch it.” I did as he instructed. “Okay, now what?”
A frisson of power sped through my hand where it touched the wall, and it rippled, wavered, as if I had dipped my fingers into a still pond and disturbed its surface. “What is it?”
An elegant shrug rolled through Ambrose’s shoulders.
That was helpful. “Any idea why I can’t see through it?”
He spread his hands wide.
“They know I have the sight,” I realized. “This is like the glamour Liz used at the clinic.”
For them to switch it up, I must have proven myself too adept at locating their safe houses and allies.
Frak.
Maybe I should have been a smidgen less competent.
“For what it cost me, I’d hoped to get more use out of it.”
Ambrose made an encompassing gesture, a question, and waited to see what I would decide.
“We don’t have much choice,” I told him. “We can’t go in blind.” I stood back. “Strip it down.”
Rubbing his hands together, Ambrose did that. He punched his hand through the illusion and yanked it out in curling ribbons he slurped like spaghetti noodles. The bond between us hummed as he filled his stomach, and the excess spilled over into me, better than a shot of espresso.
The illusion shattered into a million points of light that blinded, and the insidious whisper that I was in the wrong place, that I had come to the wrong conclusion, evaporated along with it.
“That was one heck of a compulsion.” I rubbed my forehead as my thoughts finished clearing. “It didn’t hook me, exactly, but not for lack of trying.”
Given more exposure, I would have bent to its will, decided I was wrong, and left without looking back.
The space hidden behind the false wall gobsmacked me, and my jaw scraped the poured concrete floor. Except, it wasn’t concrete, or a floor at all. It was a yawning maw that stretched from corner to corner, a good twenty feet across, and this was the cusp.
“Goddess,” I breathed, then wished I hadn’t sucked in the sulfurous mist lapping across my ankles.
A staircase made of oxidized metal spiraled down, down, down until it vanished from sight. It touched on multiple floors, allowing residents stairwell access. Hundreds of individual doorways nestled in tidy rows like apartments. Their chiseled
