“Nah, it’s a safe approach. Coming in from the south side. Probably someone from the inner corridor.” The heat of his body near mine was a welcome shift away from the cold shivers running over my skin. “In a couple of months, though, they’d have to go down the 8. Rocs’ hatching season makes them territorial near Helix. One of those will take down a chopper just because it got too close to Junior.”
The scattered clouds lingering on the horizon flickered with lightning, and my imagination worked dark shapes into their roiling forms—echoes of serpentine lines from somewhere in my buried memories. There were enormous cloud dragons who spent most of their lives slinking through the upper atmosphere, feeding on storms of white krill. Like Ryder and the helicopter, I’d never actually seen one, but I’d come across the shattered remains of what I thought was a cloud dragon’s skeleton, fallen from the skies following a battle or perhaps just dying of old age. The story was they were the size of mountain ranges, coming to rest in the high peaks of the Himalayas once a year or so. No one knew their exact numbers, but the elfin confirmed their existence, telling tales of Sidhe and Unsidhe warriors losing their lives to the hungry crystalline hatchling they stumbled upon while climbing the Underhill’s ice-swaddled mountain ranges.
“Here.” Ryder nudged my shoulder with his, holding out a waxed paper cup with a sipping lid. “I brought you coffee.”
I hadn’t even noticed he’d left.
It’d taken me nearly an hour to get Dempsey down to Medical and another ten minutes for the emergency room staff to hear me out. The only thing that saved the nursing staff from me shooting someone was my neighbor and onetime long-held crush Dalia Yamada, who spotted me down the corridor where she’d been handling an intake. In the years since we met, she’d gone from a nursing student to a full-fledged resident, stopping briefly at being a triage nurse. She’d stitched me up more times than I could remember and took care of my cat, Newt, when I was called out on a run.
Now she took care of my… mostly father, pulling Dempsey into a maze of surgical arenas and testing rooms, leaving me to drift alone and in the dark in the waiting room outside of a door where my past lay dying and my future stood beside me.
The coffee was hot, a rich shot of bitter chocolate and cream followed by a punch of whiskey, a hit to my empty gut, and I smiled despite the shitty circumstances and took another sip to taste the smoky charcoal whisper on my tongue again.
“This isn’t hospital coffee,” I said softly, meeting Ryder’s dark green eyes in our reflections on the wall of windows overlooking the city’s southern face. “Doesn’t taste like cat piss.”
“What’s the use of being a High Lord if I can’t get a decent cup of coffee.” Ryder saluted me back, his smile glimmering among the lights sparkling beyond the glass. Behind him, the people in Dempsey’s life sat in sparse numbers, pulled together by calls gone out from the Post. Ryder glanced over his shoulder as if taking attendance on the useless vigil. “Where’s Jonas?”
“On a run in El Centro. His husband, Angus, said he’s handed it over to someone else.” I sipped again, now wishing it was more whiskey than coffee, but I was glad for it anyway. “He and Razor are heading back now.”
Neither one of us mentioned we hoped they made it in time.
Sparky was sitting with Dalia’s boyfriend, Jason, a tattoo artist and master mechanic I’d known for a long time. They were an odd pair, her long-boned, desert-weathered, lanky frame next to his muscular, wide-shouldered, hunched-over body. Still, they were two peas in a pod, both engineers masquerading as grease monkeys, and in Jason’s case, a fantastic artist. He’d slid into my inner circle, hooking up with Dalia and getting in tight with Sparky. The old girl needed someone who’d take over her business, letting her retire and move closer to the city, but we all knew that would never happen. Jason would set up a satellite shop in downtown somewhere, and Sparky would burrow down into the desert nest she’d made, working on monstrous vehicles for Stalkers to use on dangerous runs while renting out storage bays for their shit.
Until the day one of us found her up there, dried up by the sun and staring at the sky.
I had to get my mind off my macabre thoughts. I’d been surrounded by death since the first moment I took up a gun, swearing to sculpt away the filth of the world for a few pennies and a shiny Stalker badge. Death was a constant in our world, yet I was being tackled by its touch this time, dragged down by the weight of cancers eating through Dempsey’s body. It was inevitable. We all died. We all gave up our last breaths to the hooded man with his sharp scythe. None of this was a surprise.
So then why the hell did it hurt so much?
“I might need more coffee to get through this,” I muttered under my breath. “Never thought I’d be such a coward.”
Ryder studied me for a moment. I knew this because not only could I feel his stare rake over my face, his glittering green eyes reflecting in the glass were pretty obvious about it. If there was one thing he was not made for, it was stealthy surveillance.
“Is that how you see yourself? As a coward? For feeling upset and unsettled because the man you think of as your father is dying?” He approximated as good of a derisive snort as he could, but I could hear him force it. His tone gentled when his shoulder pressed into mine, the push of his weight against my skin calming some of the gnawing in my stomach. “I’ve never had anyone close to me die like this, but looking at everyone else in here, I’d say you’re doing fine.”
We stood shoulder to shoulder in silence for a long time. Or at least long enough for the night to steal more of the sky away from the city as lights were doused and the understreets began to glow brighter than the upper levels. There were shimmering waves punching through the gaps between the upper levels’ roadways and concrete mesas, vibrant and insistent signs of the lives going on in the labyrinth of streets and alleys below.
It was hard to look at my mirrored self. I was still always shocked to find an elfin face staring back at me, and even worse, one that looked more like my true father every time I saw it. I was still gritty from the run, a bit of dust ghosting my black hair, but Ryder was, as usual, pristine in his long Sidhe Lord jacket, metallic emerald threads woven into the hunter green fabric to match his too-damned-cunning-for-his-own-good eyes. Every one of his golden hairs lay perfect against his skull, pulled back into a queue, probably to draw attention to his handsome face with its high elfin cheekbones and sweeping, pointed ears. Humans found him irresistibly attractive and charming, lulled by a melodic voice trained by centuries-old politicians and other lords.
To the elfin he was okay. Unfortunately for me, some perverse biological time bomb went off when we met, and I wanted to crawl over his whole body and leave my mark on every inch of his ivory-sheen skin. If I were honest, I’d admit it wasn’t just that we were drawn to each other on some primal level. He’d grown on me, worked under my skin like a spill of ink from a tattoo machine’s needle, but I wasn’t ready to confess to that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
I didn’t like being told what to do, how to feel, but damned if Ryder wasn’t making it hard for me to think.
“Have you talked to the doctors?” Ryder finally asked, breaking the stillness between us. “I sent healers in—”