“I owe you the thanks right back. The score with Traynor is mine to settle.” Alex was running a hand over the side of the F-150. “I haven’t seen this thing in two years. I can’t believe Evan kept it.”
Cora looked back at Alex’s SUV, where Traynor was still unconscious in the back. “What should we do with Traynor?”
“I’m still deciding. Just like we’re still deciding what we should do with our Polaris escapee Victor Nichols, when we find him.” Alex looked at Reece. “Nichols has been sending you ominous emails, you know.Stress-testing, he called it in his notes. Who knows the extent of what he’s been willing to do to empaths—or their siblings. And speaking of my brother.”
He looked back at Reece and Cora. “We may run into him at some point, but I think we’d all rather it wasn’t today.”
“This will be fast,” Reece promised. “I just want Vivian Marist’s flash drive with everything they’ve tried to figure out about how Evan became the Dead Man.”
“I can’t wait to read about myself,” Alex said wryly.
“I hope there are more files on there,” Reece said. “Maybe they’ve got the names and locations of more empaths.”
Three more screams rent the air, echoing off the high-rises.
“They sent a bunch of people from Stone Solutions Canada home today after the fight,” Reece said. “The flash drive might still be in Marist’s office.”
Cora cracked her knuckles. “We’ll buy you time to look.”
Grayson parked at a pier not far from the convention center, certainly stealing someone else’s slip, then took the gun from the under-seat storage before he left the boat behind and sprinted up the street lined with hotels and high-rises. Even if he hadn’t known where Stone Solutions Canada was, he could have followed the screams.
He turned a corner downtown, running at top speed past the parking garage he’d parked in with Reece that morning, bickering over who got to be behind the truck wheel. Now, several of the cars along the curb were on fire, and people were screaming and tearing down the sidewalk.
He didn’t see Alex or Cora Falcon, but coming out the front doors of the Stone Solutions high-rise was a familiar silhouette.
“Reece.”
Grayson’s voice cracked, but then, the street was full of smoke from the cars.
Reece whirled around. For a moment, the shock was evident on his face; unlike everyone else on the planet, with their emotions picked up by Reece’s corrupted empathy like ships on a radar, he wouldn’t have been able to feel Grayson approaching.
Grayson gestured around them. “What are you doing?”
Reece looked from the cars on fire to the broken glass on the street to a pair of thralls locked in a fistfight farther down the sidewalk. Then he smiled in a way Grayson didn’t recognize at all.
“Oops,” he said dryly, without an ounce of regret.
That was it then. Another pacifist empath was gone.
Reece was lost.
“You’re fully corrupted,” Grayson said, stating the obvious.
“Oh, come on, it was inevitable.” Reece spread his hands. “To be honest, I don’t know why I fought this side of me so long. Give me power over anxiety any day.”
Out of the corners of his eyes, Grayson could see at least half a dozen other people on the street, all of them big men in camouflage, turning slowly in his direction with malice in their eyes.
“How?”Grayson said, before he could stop himself.
“You know what’s funny?” Reece said, which wasn’t an answer. “Before I turned, I said to myself,the Dead Man can stop me if I become corrupted. And it wasn’t a lie: I believed it, I believed you’d come, and you wouldn’t let me hurt people, and so I could pay the price for corruption and no one would lose but me.”
He waved at the chaos around him. “Now, though, I can see that I underestimated myself, just like you kept telling me. My empathy is strong. And my empathy got used toyou.”
Around the street, the thralls were moving in. Grayson counted seven of them, all close to his own size, and all of them would have strength and speed jacked up from the corrupted empathy in their systems.
“I’m not like other empaths with the Dead Man now,” Reece said. “Your voice doesn’t bother me. The sight of you doesn’t bother me. I don’t want you to stop me—and I don’t think you can.”
Grayson took a step forward. “Come here and touch me then.”
