you like to discuss it in my office? How many should I expect?” I read aloud.
I typed back, “Only two of us can attend, I’m afraid. If you chose, I would appreciate it, but something different from the standard affair would be lovely.”
“Okay, I’ve sent the request, telling him we require a place for two, and that we lack an entrance plan,” I murmured.
Axton’s breath warmed my cheek as he peered over my shoulder to read the correspondence. “If we’re sending them to the office, why didn’t you write that you’d discuss it?”
“Oh, that wasn’t asking where,” I explained. “That asked me if I could make it to him or if he had to devise a strategy for me. The next line tells him we can’t get to him by conventional means. I’ve already told him we needed to come to him by using the meal ruse.”
Axton nodded, his head brushing against mine. “Maybe we need to sit down and plot out our own codes.”
“We do, but I haven’t had time to sort out that part,” I muttered as the ferrule lit up again. After scanning it, something inside of me eased. “We have a plan.”
Grace breathed a sigh of relief, but when I tried to pass the ferrule back to her, she waved me off. “We’ll have access to Master Akai’s if we need to contact you, so keep it. Just in case.”
I nodded and slipped it into my pocket. It was a good idea, and I was glad she’d thought of it. If nothing else, it gave us a last line of communication if we needed them to run. Assemblian Corlia wasn’t some minor Street King or low-level Grim. He had power, and he obviously had followers. That alone could make him difficult to dispose of easily, but I had a suspicion that this didn’t stop with him. Others were involved, and his rank could mean that this operation was more deeply entrenched than I guessed.
“Well,” I said, looking around at the ones I’d grown to care for. “It’s the beginning of the end. Are you ready?”
Trace grunted and pulled the sleeping Kian against him tighter, but Axton grinned at me. His toothy grin and the wild gleam in his eyes seeded a growing hunger within me. My monster simply peered upwards, alert and waiting.
Not yet, I thought at it. But I will need you, so keep watching.
It nodded, solemn and mostly still, but then a sinister smile grew and split its face. Instead of chilling me like it had every time I’d seen that creepy expression before, the desire to hunt permeated me. I liked the feeling a little too much.
Chapter Seventy-Two
We’d dropped Grace and Kian off, taking them through a route cleared for us by Master Akai. He’d greeted us at a small, hidden door that Trace couldn’t fit through and hustled Axton, Kian, and Grace inside. Shadow opted to chase after them, sending me a vision of her in the box. An apology was attached, but I told her I understood. She couldn’t bear to return to that place, and I didn’t blame her. What she’d endured would frighten the strongest of us, and I praised her for knowing when she’d met her limits.
When Axton returned without the others, he relayed that they were safely inside Master Akai’s office. Shadow would curl up somewhere, keeping an eye on the others. Grace would tend to Kian when he woke, and Master Akai would prevent everyone from entering the room. Though my adoptive father was old, I had no doubt that he could hold his own against anyone that tried to attack them.
Of course, Trace, Axton, and I planned to have the rogue Reapers too busy to chase down their location. To that end, we switched forms, pulling our souls forward so we could travel faster. They followed me as I retraced the path I’d seen in Shadow’s memory. It wasn’t a direct route to the building where she’d escaped because we had to begin where she’d spotted me.
Still, it didn’t take long before we found ourselves crouched in some bushes across the street from a dilapidated, abandoned-looking house. It didn’t look like the units seen in the city. Now, we used tall, multi-unit buildings that clustered together within the busier parts of the city. At the same time, quieter sections on the outskirts had uniform, boxy single units in rows with tiny dots of lawn separating them.
The broken building before us had once been a grand,