“I’ll come along too,” Dante says.
I glance at Seb. “So you’ll—”
“Tell everyone else the news once they surface? Yep, I’ll be here, like always.” He salutes me only semi-sarcastically.
“Let me know what happens,” Hanna tells him, gesturing to the cartoon dinosaur prancing across the TV screen.
It doesn’t take long for Hanna to rouse Rook next door and for us all to grab our jackets and head out. We’re unwashed, bleary-eyed, and we don’t know where we’re going. A real A-team.
Just who you want coming to your aid.
“How the hell are we going to find him if he’s not answering you?” Hanna asks.
I have a few ideas and I’m already on my phone, checking to see if Ember has his cell phone switched on and his location shared.
No dice. Because that would be too damn easy.
“I guess we can try going to Arcanum Heights, to the mansion where the vamps are holed up, and then go from there.”
“Could you track him down like you did with Silver?” Hanna asks Dante.
“While it’s always enjoyable to be treated like a talking bloodhound,” Dante replies drily. “I don’t think so. I doubt I have the same ability to focus on his scent like I can with Silver. Hers is a powerful scent that calls to me.”
“Ew, gross.”
He shakes his head at her and snorts.
“Might be a trap,” Rook says. “Lure you to the mansion.”
“And what are they gonna do when we get there? Drop a massive net from the sky?” I snort.
Rook shrugs. “Must be luring you in for a reason.”
“I’m about seventy percent sure this is some kind of trap,” I reply. “Doesn’t mean Ember isn’t in trouble, though. He needs us.”
“He betrayed us. Lied to our faces for months. Teamed up with a bunch of nut jobs and then gets spooked when they turn out to be psychos who have started killing kittens.” Hanna snorts. “Nah. Excuse me if I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the bed he’s lying in right now.”
“He thought he was helping us climb out of the gutter,” I reply. The more time that passes and the longer I’ve let what happened at the Solstice sit and marinate in my brain, the more convinced I am.
Unless I don’t know Ember at all, which is a distinct possibility, but one I don’t want to consider right now.
“He’s always been a dreamer. More interested in ideals than practical stuff, you know that. I reckon he saw an opportunity and didn’t realize how dumb and naïve he was being. And by then it was too late, anyway.”
“He made a deal with the devil,” Hanna replies.
“He and the vamps also underestimated the city’s ability to sweep things under the rug and ignore them.”
We’re heading to Arcanum Heights on foot, considering traffic is so dicey at the moment and you never know whenyou’re going to get stuck in an hour-long tailback thanks to another roadblock courtesy of angry Nexus inhabitants. While they’ve mostly stopped setting stuff on fire by this point, that doesn’t mean they aren’t letting their dissatisfaction be known in other ways.
The snow melted weeks ago and has been replaced by a sky that’s gray and miserable. It’s cold and there’s a thick mist of rain in the air that makes me tug my jacket tighter around me. Despite the early hour, the streets are busy with people bustling about, their heads down and their focus entirely on themselves.
As we walk, I’m wracking my brain for ideas of how we might track Ember down. I just hope that reaching the mansion will trigger something and there will be a trail of breadcrumbs that leads us directly to him.
Turns out we don’t even need that.
We’re about halfway to Arcanum Heights when a ghost pops up on the sidewalk in front of us. I’m about to skirt around him when he calls out.
“Hey, aren’t you the witch who said she’ll grant favors for information?”
