13

Adam

They drove in silence. Adam didn’t feel like talking with Vran gone and guessed Bobby felt the same.

After a while Bobby picked up the jug of water, eyed it like he might drink some, then put it back on the floor.

“Why aren’t I thirsty?” he asked. “Is it like the gas tank?”

“I guess so,” Adam said. “It’s a good thing. In the stories, eating or drinking anything in the spirit realm can trap you there, make it a part of you. There are people who spend a few days there and find out it’s been years back on earth. I’d rather not find out what would happen if we had to drink the water here.”

The silence deepened.

“Do you want to try the radio again?” Bobby asked.

“No,” Adam said a little sharply. “Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Adam.”

Adam gripped the wheel.

“I didn’t want him to come. I didn’t want you to come.”

He tried not to choke up but did.

“It was his choice, just like it was my choice,” Bobby said.

“And if you get hurt?” Adam asked. “If you get lost?”

“Then you keep going,” Bobby said. “You find Vic and hopefully you’ll find me too.”

Bobby still didn’t know about John, and Adam had no intention of telling him now.

At least the line to Vic kept getting stronger. He wasn’t imagining it. It said to keep going, to not abandon the road, and it hinted that maybe together, Adam and Vic could get them home. Maybe Vran was somewhere safe. Maybe Silver or Argent could find him.

Those were all pretty big maybes.

Adam had leaped into this without guidance, without really planning. He wouldn’t even have had the water to open the gate if Bobby hadn’t brought it. The demons would have caught them.

But it couldn’t be hopeless, could it? Sara wouldn’t have sent them to rescue Mel if it had been hopeless.

Adam took several long breaths, forcing the ball of worry further into his gut. The car’s air was stale, a little moldy. He tried rolling down the window, but the outside had grown dry, scratchy in his throat. Adam rolled it up again. The ghosts kept passing through the car, following the highway west, but there were fewer of them now.

“We keep going,” he agreed. “We find Vic. That really is our best chance to getting out of here.”

Even if it wasn’t, Adam knew he’d make the same choice. He’d followed his heart, come here because of how he felt and how Vic made him feel. Sara had known it too.

He felt like such a damn teenager.

“You love him,” Bobby said. It wasn’t a question.

Adam didn’t want Bobby getting back to his old habits and thinking he could parent Adam, fill whatever gap he thought he’d created when he’d offed their dad. The need to do what was best for Adam, or what Bobby thought was best for Adam, was like a bruise Bobby wouldn’t stop poking.

At the same time, Adam hadn’t told anyone but Vic how he felt. Strange as it all was, the setting especially, Adam realized there was something nice about getting to talk to Bobby about this part of his life.

“I do,” Adam said. “And if you try to have any kind of a birds-and-bees talk with me I swear I will hex you.”

“Can you do that?”

“Probably,” Adam said. “I am a warlock now.”

“I’m happy for you.” Bobby met Adam’s eyes. “Really.”

“He’s a good guy,” Adam said, focusing on the road, keeping alert. He’d had enough surprises.

“He’d better be,” Bobby said. “I mean, you came here for him.”

Adam wanted to joke that it wasn’t so bad, but couldn’t.

Please be okay, Vran, he thought, he willed, sending it out into the universe and not surprised when no answer came.

Their break in Shamrock felt like it had happened years ago. Adam could feel his strength waning, like he’d driven for days, but he couldn’t stop.

“I hope it works out for you two,” Bobby said.

Adam was ready for Bobby to let the matter drop, but he didn’t sound angry or even jealous. He sounded a little sad.

He’d mentioned Adam being an uncle, but Adam didn’t know if it was anywhere close to appropriate to say that Bobby could fall in love again. He had no idea how long mourning someone you’d loved like that should take. His grief over Perak, Silver, had been softened by the anger of abandonment. Even now that he knew the truth, it still pissed Adam off to know that Silver hadn’t defied his father to be with him. Then again, Vic’s mother and brother were rooting for them. Adam wondered how it would have gone if Maria or Jesse were opposed to Vic dating Adam.

“Are you going to give me relationship advice?” Adam asked, trying to lighten the mood.

“Would you take it?” Bobby asked.

“Probably,” Adam repeated. “I mean I’ve dated two guys, if you can call what Silver and I did dating.”

“You never told me what happened.”

The memory of those days, those nights in Liberty House, were spiked with black and blue. It really had been his personal hell, with only the dreams, the spirit walking and his nights with Silver as a reprieve.

“You know the important parts,” he said. “Death manipulated you into sticking me there. Silver’s dad sent him to teach me how to use my magic. When we got close, the king made him end it, forbade him from seeing me.”

“So Death and the king were in on it together,” Bobby said. “Why else would he send Silver to train you?”

“It makes sense,” Adam said.

Now the king was dead. Silver had killed him, and free of his father, Silver had offered Adam a place in his court.

Death herself had gone to reap the king. Sure, he was important, a powerful immortal, the likes of which should never die. That could be all there was to it, but she’d always worked the levers behind the scenes, hiding her identity so well that even Argent hadn’t known who she was.

Why had she shown up personally, and what did it have to do with Mel, the woman they were supposed to rescue?

There were puzzle pieces missing, and Adam didn’t have the picture on the box as a guide.

He wished he could question Vran, find out what he’d known about the Sea Elves’ alliance with Silver’s father. He also wished he could stop, sleep for hours, but that wouldn’t do anyone any good. He wouldn’t even trust Bobby to drive, not that he couldn’t handle the car, but Adam’s connection to Vic was their only guide, and sleeping when something might sneak up on them felt like a really bad idea.

“What about Jodi?” Bobby asked.

“We’ll find her,” Adam said. “The living don’t belong here. Death was clear about that. We’ll bring her back and drop her in a hole.”

“Adam . . .”

“You really want to go there, after what she tried to do to you?”

“She’s just a kid.”

“She’s my age. Old enough to vote, to drink. She’s old enough to join the army.”

“Can you imagine Jodi in the army?”

“Sue would say it might do her some good,” Adam said. “She never liked Jodi or even Noreen really.”

“Why?”

“Too many drugs and petty crimes. She wouldn’t say it, but she didn’t approve of their choices.”

“Car’s going to be crowded,” Bobby said. “Hopefully you can zap us home.”

“Zap us?”

“I don’t know what to call it. Teleport?”

Adam chuckled. “Yeah, let’s say teleport.”

“What about this?” Bobby asked. He gestured at the highway, the stream of ghosts coming in and out of view. “What would Sue say about it?”

“I don’t know. She could spirit walk, taught me a few things and introduced me to Sara, to Death, but I can’t imagine she ever dreamed we’d be here in the flesh.”

“I wish I’d known her better,” Bobby said. “I . . .”

“You left us,” Adam said. “You left us behind, because you had to.”

“Yeah.”

They drove on.

“I miss her,” Adam said.

“I’m glad she was there for you,” Bobby said. “You know, after.”

“I thought you hated her. She thought you hated her.”

“I was wrong about her. There are so few of us left, so few Binders.”

Adam had seen and heard a lot of strange things these last few months, but he’d never thought he’d hear his brother admit that he’d been wrong about anything.

He could hear the sadness, the loss in Bobby’s voice.

“You know,” Adam said. “I really hate it when you try to act like you’re my dad.”

“I know,” Bobby said. “I’m sorry for that too.”

“I wasn’t looking for an apology. I was just trying to say that—well, it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be a good one.”

Bobby didn’t say anything, and Adam rode the silence into the desert, listening to the car, to the roll of the wheels across the highway.

“We’re not anywhere near Roswell are we?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t think so, why?”

Bobby craned his neck, leaning forward on the dash to better see the pale desert topped by the red-black sky.

“I mean, are those aliens?”

Adam squinted at the distant, pale shapes. Walking single file, they moved along the horizon. They stood taller than houses, than some office buildings, silvery, vaguely people-shaped figures. Adam couldn’t quite make them out. They were no clearer than mist, slightly grayer against the bloody sky.

“No,” Adam said. “They’re spirits, but I don’t know what sort. We’ll leave them be and hope they do the same for us.”

We’re only passing through, he thought, willing it out to whatever powers ruled this place. We mean no harm.

It was something he always did on long drives, usually when the watchtowers changed. It was only polite to tell the Guardians and other races he was in their territory, to announce his intentions. It usually came to nothing. He had so little magic, too little for them to bother with.

“What was that?” Bobby asked. “What did you do?”

“You felt that?” Adam asked.

“Yeah. You did it before, a little while ago.”

“I was trying to reach Vran,” Adam said.

“Did he answer?”

“No. But remember when we taught you to hide yourself? That was the opposite. I wanted to let them know we weren’t a threat.”

“Ah, cool,” Bobby said.

“I’m surprised you’re talking more about it,” Adam said. “Magic, I mean.”

“It was Annie, the way she saved me,” Bobby said. “She gave me her life, left so I could stay. It doesn’t feel right to ignore a gift like that.”

“I understand,” Adam said. “It’s how I saved Vic when he was shot.”

“That’s how he knew those things about you?” Bobby asked. “Like that you didn’t like guns?”

“Yeah,” Adam said.

The silence fell again.

“Say something,” Bobby said.

“How much do you know about Annie, about her family?” Adam asked.

“They’re from Chicago. They’re not like us. They have money.”

“Everyone Mercy possessed had some Sight, some magic,” Adam said. “Annie had to have had some too.”

That had been Death’s long game, to create the Binders so that Mercy could possess Bobby and Adam would hate him enough to kill him. She’d manipulated them for generations to make that happen. Annie had been random, a variable, and changed the outcome.

Free will, Death had complained about it wrecking her plans.

Adam couldn’t say that he minded being a bit of a pain in her side after all she’d put them through.

John had been part of it too. Death had used him as a tool, employed him to break the seal binding Mercy. She’d set so much in motion to reap one ancient spirit.

Adam had taken Sara at her word, that she wanted Mercy off the board because it lay outside the rules that bound her, but she’d let it lie for centuries. He couldn’t shake the sense that there was more to it than exact bloodlines and magical combinations. No, something was wrong in Sara’s house. Something that had driven her to reap Mercy and the king. Then there was Mel. Why now? Why the sudden rescue? Adam didn’t know how long Mel had been down here, but he could guess that it had been a while. All of it was going somewhere. Sara always had her reasons.

“Everyone thinks Annie walked out on me, that she disappeared,” Bobby said, interrupting Adam’s musings.

“Including her parents?”

“I—I didn’t know what to say, what to tell them.”

“Oh, Bobby,” Adam said. “I’m sorry.”

He meant it, but he also worried what trouble it could bring.

“This, what she gave me,” Bobby started. Apparently confession time wasn’t over. “I never wanted—”

“To be like me,” Adam said.

“Yeah.”

“I hear voices sometimes, since I woke up. I don’t know if it’s the grief or something else. I see things out of the corner of my eye.”

“I don’t have an easy answer,” Adam said. “It could be either. You could be getting glimpses of the spirit realm. You do have magic, maybe not a lot of it, but some. You always did.”

He didn’t say specifically. They both knew Adam meant that day in the trailer. And Bobby had seen the spirit realm clearly, back in Denver, when they’d taken Annie to the Watchtower of the East to try and save her.

“It could be the grief,” Adam said, but he didn’t think so.

He knew grief. He’d been digesting it slowly since Sue had died. Running off to chase down John, and now coming here were great distractions, but Adam knew the feelings would come for him. At some point he’d break down. He’d sit and cry until he had let it all out.

Adam squirmed in his seat. His back hurt. His eyes were tired. Driving had always been his favorite way to escape, to feel free, but this trip might cost him that too. He was ready to find Vic, ready for it to be over.

They were nearly to Albuquerque, or where Albuquerque would be in the real world. Maybe they’d find something there, someone who could help or another rest stop.

He didn’t mention it to Bobby. Adam didn’t want to give his brother false hope. He kept his eyes forward, kept his foot on the gas.

Vic needed him. Vran needed him. Adam had to get this done and get out of here.

“I really am glad you’re here,” Adam said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Bobby said. Squinting, he leaned forward again. “There are lights up ahead.”

“Yeah,” Adam said.

Of every place they’d yet been, Albuquerque was the brightest. The glow of the streetlamps pushed against the gloom, making it look closer to something from the real world, like when a long drive brought you toward a city.

Adam wondered what sort of trap waited for them this time.