Breathe in, breathe out. Max repeated the mantra to himself as he sat hunched over on the curb across from the Thornton Building. Every fire truck and ambulance in the city swarmed the street, emergency personnel crisscrossing his vision as red and white blurs trying to manage the chaos. He coughed; dust from the explosion still polluted the air. He felt sick.
He’d known it would happen, but failed to correctly interpret the signs until it was too late. His ability wasn’t well tuned to danger. It cared about money. Money, money, money. How many people died because he’d done nothing? Medics still carted injured victims and cloth-draped bodies away—
“It could’ve been an accident, like a busted gas pipe or something,” Aaron said yet again from where he paced a few feet away.
Max closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Maybe,” he muttered. He had no idea.
“I mean, there’s no way someone did this on purpose. Why would they? What’s Carressa Industries ever done to anyone? Maybe some anticapitalism nutjob…”
Max swallowed hard, his throat dry again. Carressa Industries wasn’t malevolent, but its founder had been. An old enemy could have decided now was a good time to extract some long-overdue justice by hurting innocent bystanders. Why not? Dean Price, Max’s real father, had done it. Lester Carressa, the monster he’d thought was his father until Val exposed the truth, would’ve done the same. Of course, the forces of fate conspired to save him again—the person least deserving of such mercy. God, those poor people…
Breathe in, breathe out—
He jerked when he felt something on his shoulder. For an irrational second he thought it was the raven; it was only Aaron’s hand.
“You saved me,” the analyst said as he stared down at Max with wet eyes. “I don’t know how, but you knew what would happen and you saved me.”
A spike of panic quickened his heart. “No, no, I didn’t know.” The police already hated him. Hell, they’d tried to kill him twice. Aaron’s fawning over how Max “saved” him using mysterious prior knowledge of the explosion would surely rile up the cops again. “It was only a feeling. A bad shrimp dumpling.”
“I still owe you my life—”
“Max!”
Val’s voice reached him over the din of chaos. He jumped up and saw her push her way past a throng of reporters, then she burst through a police cordon and sprinted into his arms.
“Thank God, thank God,” she said, her head buried in his chest. “I heard over the radio. I thought it might’ve been you.”
It should have been me.
She looked up at him. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded robotic. Physically, I’m fine, his tone implied, but he couldn’t help it. It was an accurate expression of how he felt: numb.
Val understood. She took his hands in hers. “Can we go?”
He’d already given a short, unhelpful statement to the police. They’d asked Max and Aaron to stick around for further questioning, just in case, but he wasn’t obligated to obey. He didn’t linger at the cops’ behest.
“Michael hasn’t come out yet,” he said. The robot voice was gone, replaced with something desperate from deep in his chest. “No one will tell me if he’s one of the injured, or d—” The last word stuck in his throat, and it was only with every scrap of energy he had that he kept his composure. He glanced at the reporters straining against the cordon, their cameras swiveling between him and the carnage. Leeches.
Val nodded, a familiar steel in her eyes that matched their color. “Wait here.”
Her hands slipped out of his, and she marched over to a clutch of ambulances where EMTs gave first aid to people with minor injuries. She exchanged words with a couple medics, who frowned at her and shook their heads, then she moved on to a third, who finally nodded about something. Barely three minutes after she’d told him to wait, she trotted back to Max, her lips in a tight downturn. She put a hand on his arm.
Oh God, he shouldn’t have asked.
“Michael’s been injured,” she said. “They won’t tell me how badly.”
He felt the blood leave his face. Why couldn’t it have been him?
“I’m sorry,” Aaron said beside him with what sounded like genuine sorrow. “I know you guys are close.”
How would he know? That’s right, Aaron was a people person. The fact that he’d noticed Max and Michael’s relationship and seemed to care that it was in danger made Max like him even more.
“They took him to Harborview Hospital,” Val said. “We can go there if you want—”
“Yes. Let’s go now.”
* * *
With Val close behind, Max hustled past a wall of reporters and walked into a chaotic emergency room lobby packed with family members on the verge of panic. He scanned the room for a nurse or doctor or anyone who might have information on Michael until his eyes landed on Gracie, Michael’s wife. Seeing her face creased with weeping as she leaned against another woman—a good friend maybe—he approached slowly. Maybe she didn’t want to talk to him, the lucky survivor again.
When he was close enough to touch her, she finally noticed him. She embraced him in a hug.
“Oh, Max,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief over his shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
To hell with him. He wasn’t the one brought in on a stretcher. “How’s Michael?” he asked.
She pulled back and fresh tears filled her eyes. “He’s in surgery now, but still with us. They don’t know if they can save his arm, though.”
Save his arm? But he was alive. At least he was alive. There was that. Good news. He blinked as the room began to slew a little, voices muffling.
“I’ll stay until he’s out of surgery.”
Gracie gave his shoulder a tender squeeze. “No, please, don’t stay here just for that. The doctors say he’ll be under the knife for hours. You need to go home and rest. Be with your own family. I’ll give you a call as soon as I know more.”
But Michael’s my family, too, he didn’t say. Instead, he muttered, “Okay,” and after a kiss on the cheek from Gracie, he walked away, stiff as a corpse.
* * *
When they got home, Jamal had already put the kids to bed. From the doorway of the children’s bedroom, Max watched Lydia and Simon sleep. Val laid her head on his shoulder and wrapped her arms around his chest like a warm, full-body brace holding him up. The kids slept safe in their beds, unaware of the pain others suffered at that moment, children just like them who’d lost a mother or father that day—
“Son of a bitch, that letter!” Val said out of nowhere before letting go of him and disappearing down the stairs.
He closed the door to shield the twins from any more random outbursts, then shuffled to the master bathroom and splashed water on his face. He felt sick again. His left hand twitched against the porcelain, wanting to open the medicine cabinet and fish out his long-gone bottle of OxyContin. The craving came rarely; stress seemed to trigger it. Like a phantom limb, it would itch ferociously for an agonizing few seconds until he reminded himself it wasn’t there anymore and it faded away, but never quite gone for good. Only waiting. Something about a permanent rewiring of the brain, he’d read somewhere.
Val appeared in the bathroom doorway holding a wrinkled letter in her hand, food stains smeared down the back as if it’d spent some time in the trash. “This letter came in the mail today. There’s a line in it that says, ‘When glass and steel rain down from above, know it was meant to be, and is only the beginning.’ Glass and steel raining down—like the explosion!”
Max let out a long sigh. Shit, this again? Again? No. Absolutely not. It wasn’t another conspiracy. It wasn’t another Delilah Barrister, or Lucien Christophe, or Sten Ander, or Northwalk, or whoever the hell. They’d left Max and Val alone for five years. They got what they wanted the last time around—Val’s eggs, his sperm—and they weren’t coming back. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
She gawked at him. “Of course it means something—”
“Any crazy person can string vague phrases together and claim it’s a prophecy. That’s how psychic scams and cults work. It means nothing.” He walked past her and into their bedroom, ignoring her incredulous stare.
“Max, you know what we can do—”
“Yes, I know.” He yanked at his tie until the knot around his throat loosened. This bullshit wouldn’t swallow their lives again. They had too much to lose.
“You know what we’ve been through—”
“I know!” He ripped off the silk noose and threw it on the ground. “I know! Why would they come back now? Why blow up a building? What was that supposed to accomplish? I thought they wanted us alive—”
“To reproduce. But we already did that. Now maybe—maybe they want us out of the way, so they can take our children.”
“They don’t need ours. They can make their own with what Lucien gave them. And why bomb a whole building full of random people? Why not just storm into our condo and take Lydia and Simon?”
“Because we’d see it.”
He scoffed. “There are a million different ways—”
“Their Alpha sees everything, but our kids can, too. They tried to kill you, Max.”
“It wasn’t them. It makes no sense. Everything is not a fucking conspiracy! Why can’t you be happy with what we have and let it go?”
Her lips became a tight line, her eyes icy. “I am happy with what we have. But we can’t ignore this. What if this person strikes again? What if this is the person who kills my mother? He wrote the explosion was just the beginning. He tried to kill you.”
“Then give the letter to the police. Let them handle it.”
“The criminal justice system can’t be trusted to do shit. You know that. If I don’t find out who did this, no one will.”
“No. No.” Enunciatng every word, he growled, “Let someone else handle it. We need you here.”
“Really?” She scoffed. “I thought that was what Jamal was for now.”
“Don’t even start with the goddamn nanny. What are you going to investigate anyway? You’re not a bomb expert. And it could have been an accident. A random gas leak. Sometimes bad things happen for no reason.”
“That’s what you said when you were trying to convince me you didn’t kill you father.”
Max’s breath caught and he stared her down. She would bring that up now? She might as well have spit in his face. Val met his glare with an unspoken challenge of her own, and he felt his face heating up, his teeth grinding. He was getting angry. Very angry. He needed to leave.
He turned away from her and stomped out the door, flew down the stairs and out of the condo, slamming the door to the carport as he left. Let her wonder what he was thinking. Let her obsess over a fucking letter. Let her check all the locks and the goddamn guns she kept hidden around the condo, muttering to herself about how they were coming for the children at any moment, like a modern-day Miss Havisham haunting the bowels of their home. Let her do it without him.
Lost in the labyrinth of his own thoughts, he drove aimlessly for at least an hour, streetlamps and Christmas lights streaking by like stains against the surrounding darkness. Old habits must have taken over—how else to explain why he found himself in front of his old sex club, the Red Raven in Moonlight? Of course, it wasn’t his anymore; he’d sold it shortly after he met Val, leaving behind a part of his life he didn’t care to return to. Yet there he was. Though it wasn’t the Red Raven anymore.
It was Jones’s. Aaron’s bar.