Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [125]
“But it isn’t,” he sulked. “We’re still here, in town. And it’s too late for any of us to leave tonight.”
“You could leave,” I noted. “Adrian could leave.”
“I won’t leave Ian, and Adrian won’t leave until he’s burned down the whole world, or at least the part of it that killed his sister. I don’t know what you think is going to happen with that lunatic, but you can’t give him what he wants.”
“You may be right,” I muttered.
“What?” I heard his honest disbelief, and nearly smiled but didn’t.
“You heard me. I said, you might be right. I can’t give him his sister back, and he’s just going to run around breaking things until he figures out that she isn’t coming home, and nothing he can do is going to change that.”
“So you’re using him.”
A little too astute for his own good. See? Ghouls. Bad news, the lot of them. “Sure, I’m using him. But he’s using me, too. He spent years sitting on the evidence that covered up his sister’s death, not having a clue what to do with it until I came along.”
“How very gallant of you.”
“He needs me more than I need him, and at least he’s not a useless Seeing Eye ghoul.”
“Then why didn’t he come on this errand with you?”
I growled, “We’ve been over this. You were the only warm body we could trust, and Ian agreed that I could use some backup—if only to spread the word that I’d made a wreck of things, brought down the parkour school in a blaze of glory, and gone home to Jesus.”
“It’s a shame I won’t be bringing that message back,” he said, which was needlessly mean, in my opinion.
“Is that so?”
“Sure it’s so. If you’d crashed and burned, at least the rest of us would be headed home.”
“Tough shit. You’re not headed home, you’re headed back to the hotel with me, and if you don’t like it you can stuff it up your ass and let it melt.” I leaned back in the car’s cheap fabric seats and crossed my arms, tired of fighting with him. All it did was make me angry, and all I did was make him accusatory.
The fact was, I didn’t give a damn what he thought. I liked Ian—hell, maybe I liked him more than was strictly smart, given the circumstances—but when all was said and done he was a client, and I’d come through on the assignment, and all that remained was for him to pay me. Then we could move on with our lives, never seeing one another again.
Literally, and figuratively.
That’d be best for everyone. We’d sort it out when Adrian and I returned from doing our own little reconnaissance on Major Bruner’s office. We’d make our arrangements, write our checks, see one another off, and that’d be the end of it.
When we reached the curb, Cal dropped me off on the sidewalk and went to park the Malibu under the building. I left him to it, and went upstairs to the rooms—adjoining suites—wherein I’d find two guys whose company I could actually stand.
Adrian answered the door when I knocked, and his hand was behind his back. “Oh. It’s you.”
“You were expecting …?” I fed him the straight line, but he didn’t bite. He only withdrew that hand and revealed the big carbon steel blade that looked obnoxiously familiar. “Hey, that’s mine!”
“I know,” he said with a shrug. “But you can’t be too careful.”
“Hardy har har.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“Who’s More Careful,” I muttered, pushing past him into the room. “Stupid Cal.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Ian was sitting on the couch, facing the television, which was broadcasting a PBS special about submarine disasters of the thirties. Listening, I assumed, since he obviously couldn’t watch it. But he asked, “Where’s Cal?”
“He’s parking the car. I had him drop me off.”
“Ah. Should I assume that things went reasonably well, since you seem to be in one piece?”
“You should absolutely assume that,” I said. “Though you should be aware that I might have sort of, hypothetically, killed Lieutenant Bolton.”
“Hypothetically?” Adrian asked.
“Okay, so I totally killed him. And I figured I’d bring that up before Cal came upstairs being all morally superior and trying to call me out about it.”
Ian’s mouth turned up in a faint smile, but stopped in a pose of bemusement.