“Yes. Ehlena and I are catching up on medical charts.”
“Jane, you gotta stay there. You can teleconference for Nate, okay? And I don’t want you to go to the Pit, either. Stay inside the compound.”
“Vishous. What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know, and that’s what scares the piss out of me. But as long as you’re safe, I can concentrate on everything else.”
There was the briefest of hesitations. “All right. Should I tell Ehlena and the others to stay in?”
“Yes, all of them. All the shellans, all the young.”
“Okay. I’ll make sure of it.”
He closed his eyes. “Thank you.”
“Be careful,” she said.
“Always.”
As they ended the call with ILYs, he started walking again. The dining room was on the left and its double doors were closed. Before he went inside, he leaned into the waiting area and hi-how’re-ya’d the receptionist. She gave him a little wave with her pen and didn’t break stride with her rescheduling.
Made sense. She had at least eight appointments to cancel. Maybe more depending on whether the rest of the night was in the shit show or the floor show category.
One was just drama that took care of itself. The other required intervention to get right.
Over at those floor-to-ceiling doors, he grabbed the matching brass knobs and gave a pull. Instantly, the conversation on the far side dried up—and then when the group saw it was just him, the volume boomeranged to prior decibels. He re-shut things not because the real discussion was going down, but to spare the staff the noise.
At least the Brotherhood, the Bastards, and the fighters could fit in the cavernous space. With the long mahogany table moved out, and the chair contingency cut to two padded ones in front of the fireplace and only a couple by Saxton’s desk over in the corner, there was plenty of room. Searching through the bodies, V spotted his roommate over by the sideboard and he shouldered his way through the congestion to Butch.
As he came up to the brother, the cop put both his palms in the air. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I take one night off and all this shit happens.”
“Add a couple trays of pigs-in-a-blanket and this is one helluva cocktail party, true?”
“What the hell happened at the clinic?” Butch asked.
“Did someone say Hormel?” Rhage piped up.
Butch frowned. “Wait, don’t they do chili?” Then he refocused on V. “I heard something about Nate being brought back to life by some kind of magic?”
V exhaled and snagged an ashtray off the mantel. “No, not Nate. It was Balz, by some human woman, after he had a neck wound—”
“No, it was Nate, who was shot in the stomach outside Dandelion—”
“Yeah, I was there when we took him to Havers’s. But he died—”
“Actually, they do so much more than chili. But their dogs are first-rate.”
Both V and Butch focused on Hollywood:
“What?”
“Huh?”
As they played echo chamber with the inquiries, Rhage stepped up and turned their little group into a circle. “They own Dinty Moore beef stew also. But yes, I like both Hormel’s chili and their hot dogs.”
Vishous closed his eyes and rubbed his temple with his gloved hand. “Do you ever lose the food filter?”
“You were the one who brought up pigs-in-a-blanket—”
“Do we have an angel in this room or are we just fangs?” Wrath’s voice cut through the talking. “Lassiter? Where the fuck are you.”
The King was over by the fireplace, sitting in the armchair to the left, all black leather against the red brocade. With an expression of barely restrained hate-the-world, he was sweeping the room with his blind eyes, those wraparound sunglasses scanning left to right. Meanwhile, there was no angel, and nobody was volunteering to make that report. Then again, Wrath already knew that there was a copious absence of a Lassiter in the crowd, and this growling interruption was more along the lines of voicing his dissatisfaction at being made to wait.
Tohr, ever the peacemaker, cleared his throat and took the heat. “Ah, no. He’s not here. I’ll text him again.”
“Well, where the fuck is he,” Wrath demanded. “I want to know how two females, one of whom is supposedly a civilian and the other of which is a goddamn human, managed to magically drag two males back from the Fade tonight.”
V glanced at his roommate, and as he met those hazel eyes, Butch’s brows gave him a see-I-told-you-so.
Guess Nate had been saved somehow. V had had to go back to that bookshop to clear the scene as soon as they’d dropped him off at—
All at once, everyone in the room froze.
No more shifting of weight back and forth. No movements of hands or heads. No talking, no blinking, no breathing—and he wouldn’t have been surprised if all the hearts stopped, too.
His had certainly turned solid in his chest.
Something was wrong. Something… terrible was wrong.