Otherworld Nights (39 page)

“Knowing Benicio Cortez, that sets the bar a little lower than I like. All right, though. Point taken. I’m a Cabal CEO now. A high-powered teleporting half-demon a year from official recruitment age is ripe pickings. I won’t deny it. So keep whatever details you can and I’ll see what my associates in Josef’s camp say.”

“Calling in the spy network, huh?”

“Just for you. Because I love you dearly and trust you ninety percent. Even if you are a pain in the ass.”

“That’s what little sisters are for.”

He promised to call back as soon as he had results. I pocketed my phone and looked over to see Keefer staring at me.

“That was your brother?” he said.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“He runs one of these Cabals?”

“Right, but … it’s complicated. I didn’t give him details on you because, yes, that’d be a little too tempting. Sean’s a good guy, but he’s also head of a Cabal. The one that’s after you, though, is the other Nast Cabal. And, yes, they need to come up with team names, because otherwise it’s really confusing.”

“Your
uncle
runs the other half? The one that’s trying to kidnap me? And Lucas, the guy in charge of this place, did I hear you say his dad runs a Cabal?”

“Lucas and Paige are
both
in charge of this place. Best to remember that if you want to stay on their good side. But otherwise? Right on all counts. It’s complicated, like I said. The point is that you’re perfectly safe here.”

“Uh-huh.”

I glanced toward the door. “Let me go grab Adam. He can talk more on the demon stuff while we wait for Paige and Lucas.”

I found Adam back on the couch. “Hey, did you forget something?”

He didn’t answer.

“Look, if you’re tired, we can put this off, but I keep telling the kid you’re coming to talk to him, and …”

As I walked over, I saw two sheets on the otherwise empty table. My gut twisted. I took another slow step, gaze fixed on them, telling myself I was mistaken, that they couldn’t be what I thought. But of course they were.

“If you want to keep something from me?” He spoke with his gaze still on the ceiling. “Don’t leave it lying on your desk. Not when the security panel I need to access is right above it.”

“I …”

His gaze swung my way. “When were you going to tell me, Savannah?”

“I was—”

“Were you going to actually break up with me before you left? Or just pull a vanishing act? Move across the country and hope I got the message?”

“No! I—”

He sat up. “I didn’t even know you’d applied to college out of state, and maybe that’s irrelevant right now, but that’s what I keep thinking. I never even knew you’d applied, and I can’t figure out why not, because I made it damned clear that if you wanted to go to college, I’d never hold you back, no matter where you went. Hell, I offered to go with you. Set up a satellite office for a few years. That was the problem, wasn’t it? Me making plans.
Hey, you want to go to school out of state? I’ll go with you.”
He looked up at me. “You could have just said no.”

“That’s not—”

“
No, Adam. You’re moving too fast, Adam. I need my space, Adam
. I tried …” His fists clenched, and I caught a whiff of smoke. “I tried so damned hard to play it cool, even if you’ve never given me any indication that you want that.”

“Because I—”

“I’m so damned careful, Savannah. A year of being so careful, because I know you’re …” He swallowed back the rest. “A year of taking every step with care, to be sure you’re okay with it. Do you really want to live in the same building as me? Okay. Are you really okay with sharing an apartment most of the time? Okay. Do you seem like you want me to back off? Like this is more togetherness than you expected? Like I’m moving too fast? No. You’ve never once even hinted at that. And now this.” He picked up the college admission offers. “I don’t get it. I just don’t.”

“It’s not like—”

His gaze lifted to mine and I saw the pain there, roiling tamped-down fire behind his eyes. “I would have let you go, Savannah. One word and I would have let you go. Friends first. That’s what we said. Friends don’t pull this shit.” That fire flared, his temper rising as he got to his feet. “Friends have a little more respect for each other than this. They don’t make the other person feel like a goddamn loser for missing some sign that I’m sure as hell you never gave.”

“Savannah?” It was Paige, out in the hall. “Adam?”

“It’s not like that,” I said quickly, before she reached us. “I can explain.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can. Just as I’m damned sure it comes down to the same thing. That this relationship isn’t what you wanted. That it’s not what you expected. That I’m not what you expected. And it’s not enough to dump me—you have to run across the country to get away from me.”

“Adam?” Paige appeared in the doorway. “What’s going on?”

“Personal,” he grunted.

“I can tell that, but where—?”

“Can we have a few minutes?” I said. “We’ll take this outside. Keefer’s in the next room.”

“Which room?”

“The meeting room.”

“No,” Lucas said, walking up behind her. “He isn’t.”

Keefer was gone. He wasn’t in the bathroom or poking around the office. And the security system hadn’t caught him leaving because he’d teleported through the wall.

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I was talking to Sean, and he got a little freaked by the fact that my uncle is in charge of the Cabal chasing him. And that my brother is in charge of another Cabal. And that Lucas’s father …” I exhaled. “Shit. I’m sorry. I thought I’d explained it well enough, and he didn’t
seem
too worried, but what makes perfect sense to me is going to seem scary as hell to some kid who didn’t even know what a Cabal
was
.” I looked at Paige and Lucas. “I screwed up. I didn’t think it through. I’m sorry.”

“It’s my fault, too,” Adam said. “Savannah was trying to get me to help her out with the kid, and I was
AWOL
on personal stuff. Which is unacceptable.”

I glanced over, interpreting his jumping to my defense as a sign that he wasn’t as hurt and angry as he’d seemed, but he didn’t look my way, and I knew he was just being fair, because that’s who he is. Always. That stung all the more because
I
hadn’t been fair. I’d been a coward. Just not for the reason he thought.

“Well, Keefer’s not here,” Paige said. “And taking the blame doesn’t help to find him. The farther he gets, the harder it’ll be to track him. Can you two still work together?”

“I’ll go with Lucas,” Adam said. “We’ll take my Jeep. You and Savannah stick close to the office and search with your spells.”

He pulled out his keys and headed for the door without another word.

Paige and I started by scouring the building, separating as we cast our sensing spells. There was no sign of Keefer within a block radius, and beyond that, it was impossible to track him—too many directions to go and too many other people setting off our spells. Paige called Lucas, and they divided driving territory while we headed for the Prius.

When we drove from the parking lot, I said, “I screwed up.”

“We aren’t talking about Keefer, are we.”

“No, sorry. Later, right?”

“You can look while you talk. Go on.”

“You know I applied to Portland State for criminology and Pacific Northwest for art.”

“Yes …”

“I didn’t get in.”

She looked over sharply. “When—?”

“A few weeks ago. I didn’t say anything because, well, no big shock, right? All I cared about in high school was getting out, and my grades reflected that. As for my art, I’ve barely drawn in years. I applied just to see, but I knew you and Lucas were right—I’d need extra work to get into either. I got two other acceptances, though. On the opposite side of the country.”

“Oh? I didn’t know you’d applied anywhere else.”

“No one did. You suggested I cast a broader net, so I did. Anyway, I got the acceptance letters this week, and Adam found them on my desk. I hadn’t told him.”

“About getting accepted?”

I went quiet, staring out the open window.

After a moment, she said, “When you say
no one
knew you’d applied, that doesn’t include …”

I stayed quiet.

“Oh,” she said. Then she sighed.

She turned the corner before speaking, carefully. “If you thought Adam would have a problem with you going out of state, Savannah …”

“He wouldn’t. We’d discussed it. If I wanted to go on my own, that was fine. Or we could both go and maybe open a temporary satellite office for the agency. Now he thinks I got spooked when he suggested coming with me, because I wanted to get some distance, and that’s why I didn’t tell him.”

“Which isn’t the reason at all, is it?”

I glanced over. Paige slowed to peer down a side street at a kid walking the other way.

“Keefer doesn’t have a jacket,” I said. “And he’s shorter.”

Paige nodded and sped up. “Back to Adam. I know you don’t want distance. I know you’re happy. Crazy-in-love happy. Both of you. If he thinks for one second that you’re making plans to bolt? He’s overreacting, I have a good idea why, but first, you. Why didn’t you tell him?”

I stared out the window for another quarter mile. “Because I don’t want to go. And, yes, I know how stupid that sounds. Why did I apply if I don’t want to go?”

Another block of forcing myself to check out every side road and person under the age of thirty. Then I turned to Paige.

“I won’t say I wanted you guys to be proud of me, because that makes me sound like I’m still a kid, but …” A deep breath. “Oh, hell. I wanted you to be proud of me. You and Lucas and Adam.”

“We—”

I lifted my hand. “You are proud of me. I know. I also know that you’re pretty much obligated to say that because you love me.”

“No, we—”

“Let me finish, okay? That’s why I didn’t want to say it. Not only does it sound lame, but then you have to defend yourself and that’s really not what I’m looking for here. I just want to talk. To explain.”

“All right.”

“I know I’m not living up to my potential. As a witch, yes. As a person, no.” I had to raise my hand again against her protest. “Last year, after everything that happened, I realized I needed to smarten up. Shape up. Move out. Start my own life. Part of that was going to college, because it’s what you wanted for me, and please don’t say you didn’t. It wasn’t so much a dream as an expectation. In your world and in Lucas’s, college is a given, just like going to high school after elementary. Even Adam feels that way. He dropped out, but as soon as he got his shit together, what was the first thing he did? Went back for his degree. That’s what I wanted to do. Show you—all three of you—that I’d gotten
my
shit together. I applied to other places because that was the mature and responsible thing to do. Why didn’t I tell Adam? Because I don’t
want
to go anyplace else. Except once I got the acceptances, I started feeling … I started feeling like I
should
go. That if I didn’t, I was …”

I trailed off and looked back out the window.

“That you were what?” she asked softly.

“Back up,” I said.

“To … what I said before?”

“No, the car.” I gestured. “Back up.”

She did, and I directed her to pull up beside a parked SUV.

“Now start parallel parking behind it,” I said.

“There’s another spot—”

“Parallel park, Paige. I know you can. Stop when I tell you to.”

She grumbled but did it. When she was about halfway backed in, I had her stop. From that angle, still mostly hidden by the monster SUV, I could see my target and, hopefully, he couldn’t see us.

It was a tall man in his fifties. Thinning blond hair. Dark shades that I knew hid bright blue eyes. People said Josef looked like my dad, only with a thinner build. Beyond the coloring, I don’t see it.

In life, Kristof Nast was a son of a bitch. He still is in death. But, like my mom, there’s more there. A fierce and loyal heart. Josef
Nast is a stone-cold bastard. If he’d had a heart, it calcified when his son died eight years ago. I could cut him some slack for that, but I won’t. My family had suffered too much at Josef’s hands, and the only excuse he had was jealousy—he was jealous of my father and later of my brother, both beloved by my grandfather, who was the biggest son of a bitch of them all.

When Thomas Nast died, any remaining hope for Josef died with him, and our uncle had spent the last year showing Sean just how heartless he could be. So, no, I don’t see the family resemblance. I can joke about “Uncle Joe,” but I’d be no more moved by his death than I’d been by Thomas’s, and if that makes me a stone-cold bitch myself, I’ll call it hereditary.

“Josef’s here,” I said. “Can you park farther up?”

“Josef?”

“Yep, the boss himself, meaning Keefer’s a bigger prize than we thought.”

As Paige parked, I texted a message.

“Lucas?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Adam? Good.” She looked at me. “Fix this as soon as you can, Savannah. Don’t tell yourself you’re giving him time to cool down. Don’t slap a Band-Aid on it, either.”

“I don’t think a Band-Aid will cover this.”

“Of course it will. You can tell him you were only testing your admission chances and you didn’t want to admit it, in case you didn’t get accepted at all, and he’ll buy that. But it doesn’t fix the core of the problem.”

“I know.”

She looked over, as if surprised. When I reached for the door handle, she squeezed my shoulder before getting out.

I waited for her on the sidewalk.

“I know we’re running out of time for talking,” she said. “But I’m going to leave you with one thing you need to know, because as well
as you understand Adam, this is something neither of you wants to see. It’s the reason he’s overreacting right now, because, yes, he is definitely overreacting. He should know you’d never dump him and run across the country. But there’s a problem with your relationship. One neither of you likes to admit. The age difference.”

I stiffened and she said, “I rest my case.”

“We—”

“He’s ten years older than you. In twenty years, that won’t be a big deal. Right now, it is. To
him
, it’s a huge deal.”