“Anything about the Arons personally?” he asked as they stepped outside.
The sun’s glare scraped at Madoc’s eyes and bleached the world down to flare white and hints of color. He winced and pulled his shades out of his pocket to slide them on. The purple glass cooled the world back down, although his eyes still stung.
In thin sneakers, Quick hotfooted it along a step behind Madoc as he juggled his laptop from one forearm to the other and flicked through windows.
“Not much. They tithed, they led missions, they kept to themselves,” Quick said. “There was a complaint from a girl a few years back. Jesus, she was sixteen, but apparently she already had a husband.”
“It’s legal,” Madoc said as he stopped at the stairs up onto the plane. He cocked his foot back to brace the heel against the step as he waited for Quick to get to the point.
“It’s gross. Anyhow, she claimed that her husband had managed to get in touch with her and told her he’d found something out—he didn’t get a chance to say what—about the Arons and they’d deliberately left him behind. There was a bit of an outcry in the Church, but by the time the canon found him, the boy had been turned, so….”
“So.”
Quick bared his teeth in a humorless smile as he shrugged that away like it hadn’t caught him on the raw. His parents hadn’t been Proverbials, or even particularly religious, but they’d still iced him out the first time he went back to see them. Quick had claimed, with brittle humor, that the whole story was just too sordid for them.
“Anyhow, it went nowhere. I did get the feeling that the canon and the localsessionwould have preferred it had. When you read between the lines, they didn’t seem to actually like the Arons that much. A few little comments about how they were still ‘so kindly disposed to their old church’ and a disciplinary that told them that, unlike their old parish, the Charleston Proverbial church abided by the reformBook of the Confessionals,whatever that is. If Took is still talking to you, you should ask him.”
“And their old church?”
Quick grinned like the next words out of his mouth would be“I was hoping you’d ask that!”Instead it was simply the answer that Madoc expected. “Appleberg.”
Of course it was.
“Anything else?” Madoc asked as he glanced back over his shoulder to gesture “a minute more” at the pilot who hovered at the door.
Quick jabbed a finger down against his keyboard. “If there is, it’s all in your cloud. So can I…?” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the airport and raised his eyebrows hopefully.
“Go,” Madoc told him. “I’ll call you from Nevada if I need anything.”
Relief flashed raw over Quick’s face as he backed away, but after a few steps, he hesitated.
“If you see… him,” he said and then choked on whatever words came next. Even without putting a name to him, the unstable presence of his sire hung over Quick. The agent’s expression was a miserable tangle of fear, love, and hatred.
“I won’t,” Madoc said. “No one does anymore.”
Quick nodded. “I guess,” he muttered and turned away. He waved a hand blindly behind him as he jogged away over the tarmac. Madoc watched him go for a second and then climbed up into the plane. “Let’s go,” he told the pilot as he reached the top.
“Sir,” the woman nodded.
As she whistled for the ground crew to pull the stairs away, Madoc walked down the narrow aisle. He braced against the seat for balance as the plane started to move. In the back row, Took looked up from his tablet and blinked in surprise as Madoc dropped into the seat opposite him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked suspiciously.
“Itismy jet,” Madoc pointed out. He swallowed hard as the engines grumbled to life, and it took him a second before he could finish. “And my prison.”
There was no arguing with that.
A STORMhad rolled in. It buffeted the plane unsteadily and turned the air under them lumpen and dark. Madoc breathed in the taste of smoke and looked past the mundane into the gray world. On the other side of reality, a bird made of electricity and smokeless flame hung in the air beside the plane, wings canted as though it could soar forever. The eye it turned on the inhabitants of the metal tube, with the same lazy interest a man considered a can of ham, was the size of a small car. Behind it, through it, shadows with sharp teeth and tiny, screaming eyes dipped and spun as they tore apart blind gulls of white, drifting material that Madoc worried might be souls.
“I don’t need my hand held,” Took said sharply. “If that’s why you’re here.”
“That’s not what you told me,” Madoc said as he blinked smoke out of his eyes to focus on the solid world, where they merely roared through empty air in a heavy, metal dart piloted by a mortal woman who could keel over suddenly for any reason. Flight, except by wing if you were lucky enough to have your blood run that way, was clearly unnatural. It also put Madoc on edge enough that he welcomed the opportunity to bicker. “Not ready to come back. That was your stance the other day.”
Took pulled a face. “I don’t want to get anyone killed,” he said. There was a glass of water on the table in front of him. He fiddled absently with it as he talked. “I can still interview a suspect. Just because the shrinks think I’m not ready to have your back doesn’t mean my brain’s broken. Just my nerve.”
The bitterness in his voice was sharp as lime. Madoc paused long enough to shelve the petty desire to jab at him for distraction and studied Took for a moment.
“So what do you think?” he asked. “Are you ready to come back? I can make this permanent if you want.”
