said, "Believe me, Steve, I know we screwed up."
"Meet us tonight. You can bring two guards, but if I sense that they're casting spells then I will shoot your lover in the head. He's human; he won't heal."
"I know he's human," I said.
"With all the talent in your bed, why take a human?" he asked.
I thought that wasn't an idle question for Steve. "He's my friend."
"Do you love him?"
I hesitated because I wasn't sure which answer would keep Julian safest.
Doyle nodded.
"Yes," I said.
"Then come with just two guards and it can't be the Darkness or the Killing Frost. If I see either of them I'll just shoot him."
"Okay, I won't have them with me as my guards. Now where do I meet you?"
He gave me an address. I wrote it down on the paper that Frost brought from the bedside, and repeated it to him so there wouldn't be a mistake. Lives have been lost over a transposed number more than once.
"Be here at eight. By eight-thirty we'll assume you're not coming and I'll let Bitter do what she wants to him." He lowered his voice and whispered, "You saw the last bodies. She's getting better at killing. She enjoys it now. She's picked her illustration and it's not from a child's book."
"What are you talking about?"
"It's a textbook, a medical textbook image. Don't be late." The phone went dead in my hand.
"Did you hear that last part?" I asked.
They had.
"Fuck, I didn't think Julian was in danger. Why him?"
"That day you snuggled up to him on the street they must have been watching," Rhys said.
"There were police wizards at the scene. Rhys, he might have been working his own crime scene."
"Makes sense."
"And if they were watching the house they know he stayed over and didn't leave until morning," Doyle said.
"He's been living with another man for more than five years. Why wouldn't they assume he was sleeping with one of you?"
"Because Steve Patterson is heterosexual and he'll think girl before he thinks boy because of it," Rhys said.
"A medical textbook. She's going to butcher him."
Rhys leaned in the doorway as Frost and Doyle looked at each other. "The question is, are they already at this address or will they move Julian to the meeting spot?" Rhys said.
"Do we tell Lucy? Do we tell the police?" I asked.
The men exchanged a look. Doyle said, "If we don't bring the police in we can simply kill them. They don't want me at your side, that's fine. I am the Darkness. They won't see me until it's too late."
"If we just plan to kill them, it's easier," Rhys said, "simpler."
"What gives Julian the best chance to get out of this alive and whole?" I asked.
They exchanged a look among them again. "No police," Doyle said.
Rhys nodded. "No police."
Frost hugged me, and whispered it into my hair. "No police."
And just like that the plan changed again. We wouldn't call the police. We'd just kill them. I should have been human enough to be bothered by that, but I kept hearing Julian's voice over the phone and her voice asking him to scream for her. I kept seeing their victims. I remembered my dream with Royal dead in it. I thought about what they planned on doing to Julian and might be doing to him right this minute. I didn't feel bad as we planned how to find the address, scout it undetected, and decide how best to save Julian. If we could take them alive, we would, but we only had one priority: Julian as unhurt as possible, and the only dead: Steve and Bittersweet. Beyond that it was all fair game.
Rhys was right. It was much simpler.
Chapter Fourty-five
The address was a house in the hills. It was a nice house, or had been before the bank got it and the housing market crashed. Apparently our serial killers were squatting in the house. I wondered what they'd do if the estate agent brought prospective buyers around unexpectedly. Probably best that that didn't happen.
Sholto came back to L.A. He was the Lord of That Which Passes Between. The tree line and the yard of the house was a between place, just like where the beach met the ocean, or where a cultivated field abutted a wild place. He could bring more than a dozen soldiers to the edge of the yard itself. But that was as close as he could get. Doyle had been in charge of scouting the area and had found the