I suspected we weren’t going to get much out of Davos now that he was locked up, but if I played my cards right, maybe I could manipulate him into oversharing.
He wanted to open a gate to Hell, and he certainly wouldn’t be able to do that from inside a cell. If he believed the rest of his cronies were going to fuck everything up, then I might be able to get him to spill the beans on what they’d done with Sig and Ingrid.
It was a long shot, but it was all I had.
Harold would be a big help. Having an actual demon on hand to goad Davos and tell him how badly he was screwing everything up would go a long way.
I hoped.
Otherwise I’d just asked for a live demon to be shipped across the country to me, and there was a solid chance this might go terribly wrong for me, as most of my worst ideas tended to.
After I answered a few more of the detective’s questions, he handed me his business card in case I thought of anything new after the fact and let Shane and me leave.
Once we were outside, Shane begged off, giving the classic, “I need to go home and relieve Siobhan so she can sleep” line. A likely story.
So I was alone again, with several hours to kill before Harold and Emilio would arrive, and it was daytime meaning there was no point in going to see Davos yet. Which, of course, left me wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do with myself.
I decided to head back to the bar from the previous night, hoping Davos and his crew might have been stupid enough to leave behind some clues, or maybe the cops had overlooked a clue that would tell me what Davos’s people had done with Sig or Ingrid.
Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to find anything useful, but I couldn’t stand around twiddling my thumbs. There’d been a point in my life where I had sort of wandered around looking for trouble, and stumbling my way into a good fight was all that mattered to me.
I wouldn’t say I’d gotten wiser in my old age, but I’d learned to love the investigative aspect of what I did. I wasn’t a detective, but I did solve crimes for a living these days, and seeing the fruits of my mental labor was often as rewarding as punching someone really, really hard.
Almost.
I wasn’t too far from the club, just a short walk. Since it was a beautiful sunny day, I might as well walk through Central Park, rather than around it.
The Plaza was right near the corner of West 59th and 5th Avenue, and from the front of the hotel I could easily spot tourists snapping photos of the iconic glass cube that served as the entrance to the Apple store. Behind the cube was what had once been the flagship FAO Schwartz toy store with its famous floor piano from the movie Big. I was grateful to have lived in the city when the store had been around.
It was strange to realize how quickly the city could change around me. It seemed like sometimes I would leave for a few weeks on a trip and return to find a dozen new restaurants opened, and a beloved old institution had shuttered its doors.
A sense of loss and sadness filled me.
Would there come a day when I no longer recognized the city I’d lived in my entire adult life?
FAO Schwartz had found a new home, but it wasn’t quite the same as it having its place on 5th Avenue.
I thought ab
out the Rain Hotel and how it had been such a dominant part of SoHo before it came down, and about all the pieces of the New York skyline that were no longer there. The fall of the Towers, the rise of their replacement.
New Yorkers were a resilient people—they had learned long ago to roll with the punches thrown at them, even if it meant they had to accept some pretty bizarre shit along the way.
New York had handled the reveal of supernatural creatures better than a lot of other cities. Probably because it wasn’t a shock to the system so much as it was, Well, that explains a lot.
They were one of the first cities to develop a symbol for showing which businesses were friendly to those of the otherworldly persuasion: a sticker shaped like a drop of blood with a howling wolf silhouetted inside. Not exactly all-inclusive—the fae were especially pissed at being left off—but it was a nice gesture and went to show how many places in the city were welcoming of the supernatural.
I jogged across 59th and entered the park near the General Jose de San Martin monument, a green-hued statue of a general astride his horse.
The park was in its glory. It was late April, and the buds had burst into small green leaves, so even though the air had the faint chill of winter to it, if the breeze kicked up, the sun beating down and the green overhead held the promise of spring’s arrival.
The cherry blossom trees were exploding with soft pink flowers, and though they weren’t as prevalent here as in Washington, they were plentiful enough to make the whole park magical.
Five years later and I was still amazed by how much I had missed in the daytime.
Living my life in the nighttime had its perks. I knew all the best late-night dining spots—though I’d unfortunately needed blood to survive—and I had learned to navigate in the dark, without fear of the nasty things that could make life miserable for others.
Walking in Central Park in the daylight was a trip. The colors were so damned vibrant, they made my heart sing. What made a green that green, or a sky so blue? It dazzled me, even after all this time, and I couldn’t believe I’d spent most of my life without this.