When Villains Rise (Market of Monsters #3) - Rebecca Schaeffer Page 0,22

Nita had heard Kovit torture.

Nita shoved her mind away from that thought.

“Go away, Nita. Adair doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Have you asked him?” Nita countered.

She sighed. “I don’t need to. He’s furious, injured, and not in a great mood. If you go in there, he’s going to kill you.”

Nita crossed her arms and smiled with a confidence she didn’t feel. “Well, he can try. But we know who won the last fight, don’t we?”

Diana’s eyes narrowed. “Because you ambushed him. He won’t be tricked like that again.”

Nita blew out a breath. “Look, I just want to talk. Let me in, I’ll say my piece and leave.”

Diana gave her a long, assessing look, and then finally opened the door a little wider.

Nita took a step in, and Diana grabbed her arm. “Nita, if you ever hurt Adair again . . .”

“You’ll what? Get vengeance? You, who tried to talk me out of violence? Who couldn’t kill her own family’s murderer?”

Diana flinched, and Nita ripped her arm away.

Diana was quiet. “No. I was going to say I wouldn’t save you from Adair’s wrath again.”

Nita blinked. Diana had saved her and Kovit from being thrown out of the shop and onto the streets when the hunt for Nita had been heating up. She’d stood as a wall between two angry monsters and calmed Adair down. And later, she’d stood as a wall between Nita and Adair and calmed Nita.

“That’s fine.” Nita’s lips curled into a warped smile. “I don’t need anyone to save me. I’m perfectly capable of that myself.”

She took a few steps into the cluttered pawnshop. Old cabinets and tables were jammed together so tightly there was barely any room to make a path to the back counter. Glass chicken butter dishes stared at her with painted-on eyes, and a bronze statue of a general on a horse tried to stab her with its sword as she passed.

She made for the back stairwell. Two sets of stairs awaited, one leading up, one leading down. Nita and Kovit had stayed up at the top of the stairwell in a small guest room. That was where she’d left Adair last night, cooling in the bath, trying to recover from the effects of Nita’s boiling water attack, which had sloughed his glamour off and revealed the monster beneath.

Nita took a step up, and Diana called out, “Not that way.”

She turned around. “Where is he, then?”

Diana hesitated, then nodded to the stairs down.

Nita stared at the dark stairwell to the basement and laughed. “I didn’t think you’d start in on Adair’s stupid murder jokes.”

“It’s not a joke.” Diana came over. “He had me help carry him down there last night. There’s more water. He needs full submersion to recover properly.”

Nita hesitated. Everything at her screamed that this was a trap, that she was being led down the stairs into an underground murder chamber. Of all the people in the world to lead her into a murder chamber, Diana was on the bottom of her list.

But Nita had been wrong before.

Diana rolled her eyes and leaned against the counter wall. “He’s in the basement. You want to talk to him, that’s where you go.”

“Can’t he come up?”

“No.” Diana’s eyes were hard. “He needs the water to recover from what you did to him.”

Nita remained silent a moment. “Isn’t he the one who told me never to go down there, or he’d murder me and eat my rotting corpse?”

Diana’s mouth quirked a little at that. “Sounds like something he’d say.”

Nita held her ground. “You can go down and get him. I’ll wait here.”

She shrugged. “He won’t come up.”

“He will.” Nita took a deep breath. “Tell him I might have a plan for getting rid of the Dangerous Unnaturals List.”

Diana’s eyes widened. “What?”

“You heard me.”

Diana was quiet for a time before finally nodding. “I’ll go tell him.”

She descended the stairs, and Nita leaned against the stairwell, waiting. Part of her was intensely curious what was down there in the depths of the pawnshop.

And part of her was very certain she wouldn’t live very long if she found out.

She looked away, her eyes running over a curio cabinet full of ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of various animals, then moving on to a cribbage board made from an elk antler perched precariously on top of a moldy record player from the sixties. Where the hell did Adair even find some of this crap?

After a few minutes, there was a heavy thunk on the stairs, and