pretty clear. I was the enemy. Adam’s intervention was likely the only thing preventing his elite squads from taking me out. I didn’t want trouble. I needed to get into the base of operations with my hands free and my demon intact. That wasn’t going to happen if I pissed them off. Time to play the good little half-demon consultant.
“Muse.” Adam acknowledged me with a nod then strode on by and sat at a table with a handful of enforcers. They spoke too quietly for me to listen in. As much as I wanted to overhear their conversation, looming behind Adam wasn’t going to win my any favors. I roamed the bar, checking out the incident wall. After twenty minutes, Adam finally joined me.
Adam towered over my itty-bitty five-foot nothing, intimidating me just by standing right next to me. Adam had the kind of natural strength you can’t hone at the gym. Good genes. Like his son.
A headache throbbed up my neck and around my temples. I took a sip of my whiskey and welcomed the burn. “How’s it going with Akil?”
He folded his arms over his chest and regarded the countless photos and documents pinned to the wall. It took a while for him to reply. So long in fact, I wondered if I was getting the silent treatment. “There was an incident.” The grave timber of his words made it clear things weren’t going well. “Conflicting reports say he wasn’t restrained properly or that he convinced one of the team to loosen the tethers. Either way, he killed one of the lab assistants and broke the arm of another before he could be…restrained again.”
“He did all that while still tied up?” What did Adam think was going to happen? You don’t capture a wild animal and expect it to roll over and let you tickle its belly.
Adam brushed a hand over his chin, bristling the day’s worth of whiskers. “The lab technicians will be more careful in future.”
A member of his staff had been killed, and he thought it would teach his staff a lesson. Those reactions were why Adam ruffled my demon bristles the wrong way. “Have you got anything of worth out of him?”
“It’s early days.”
“Yeah, lots of time to lose more valued staff members.”
Adam pointed at a photo on the wall. By the shoddy focus, I figured it had been taken with a cell phone, but it was clear enough to show the hideous lesser demon with its beast-like maw about to devour what looked like a human arm. “This demon took out a family walking in the park and tore them to shreds in broad daylight in a crowd of thirty people. It turned on others. Killed eight people in total.”
I tore my gaze away from the forensic scene photograph only to find Adam pointing at another.
“A fight broke out at the Aquarium,” he continued. “In the confined space, this demon killed seven and wounded fifteen people before staff trapped it in a side room.” His throat moved as he swallowed. The lines around his eyes pinched as he removed his glasses and wiped them clean on his shirt. “They’re coming through faster then we can send them back or kill them. It’s chaos.”
I bit back the urge to tell him to release Akil. He wouldn’t, even though he should. In Adam’s world, all demons were evil. The lesser demons, the ones without conscious thoughts, no more aware of what they were doing than wild animals, the no-name demons, just trying to get by, and the princes, they were all evil and needed to be destroyed. None more so than the Princes of Hell. “I can get information from Akil. Your people won’t get anything of value out of him, not in this century, and you don’t have a lifetime to question him.”
He slid his glasses back on and regarded me with a heavy sigh. “If I let you in there, he’ll kill you. Of that, he’s been quite vocal.”
I moistened my lips and scanned the pictures without really seeing them. Adam didn’t know how deeply my relationship with Akil flowed. Nobody really did. I often wondered about it myself. Stefan had suggested I give his father something Adam couldn’t refuse investigating. If I played this right, I could get into the Institute’s base and hopefully within spitting distance of the Operation Typhon Subjects. The other half bloods had to be near where they kept Akil. How many secret lairs could one organization have?