Page 84 of Light

As Emma already comprehends.

We race across the room, dropping between the sprawled men on the floor. Since Emma’s already checking on Foley, Archer, and Shay Bommer, I drop down beside Shay’s brother, Tait—and steel myself for the chest blooming with blood, the stare focused on nothing.

And the guy’s staring, all right—fixing two irises full of incredulous gold light up at me. Then blinking in wide confusion. “The hell-forsaken fuckity fuck?” And then swearing like he’s training to go pro at it.

His brother spews a rough laugh. “And you didn’t want to bring your Kevlar.”

The guy hitches out a foot, clipping his little sib’s calf. “Butthead. Never said I didn’t want to bring it, only that I wondered if it’d be necessary.”

Shay kicks him with equal ruthlessness. “Because you said this was going to be a basic babysitting job?”

Tait raises his hands, palms lifted, offering a blatant mea culpa. “Guilty as charged. And holy half-pipe of fuckery, was I wrong.” Or maybe he’s already gone pro and hasn’t had the chance to share it over beer and pretzel bites.

Not that he’s going to get the chance now. With my bloodstream already pumping with fresh jolts of fire, I pivot around to face Foley, Emma, and the others, spreading my glowing fingers across my tensed haunches. “Now that we’re squared up on who came to the party prepared, I wish I could tell you all it’s over. But if her highness of evil depravity is up to half her usual game, there’s a good chance she Elphaba’ed herself out of here and straight to the ground floor of this building.”

“Which means what?”

But before Tait’s done with the query, my wife is on her feet and halfway to the door. “Holy shit. The kids!”

I’m already on her six. By the time she clears the kitchen, I’m shoulder-to-shoulder with her. Damn good thing because once we reach the private elevator landing and I pulse the doors open, I’ve got my other arm locked around her waist. Thank fuck for the woman’s honed instincts, which prompt her to do the same to my waist with her leg. By the time I sear away the floor of the elevator car and then leap into the shaft below, she’s my perfect electric spider monkey, hanging on across my back as I pulse-bounce us seventy stories down. Though she’s filled with urgent silence, I’m still hyperaware of how thankful she is for my action. Seventy floors goes by a lot faster when one isn’t waiting on an elevator’s machinations.

When we reach the bottom floor, we have the option of veering right toward the executive offices or hooking left for the hotel’s back-of-house, which includes the catering loading dock and the private parking space in which I keep a new Range Rover parked at all times. It’s my version of a Team Bolt disaster preparedness kit. The bullet-proof, heat-proof, extra horsepower car is also stocked with enough MRE meals and water to keep six adults alive for a week.

In short, it’s been ready for a situation exactly like this one.

And as Emma swings off my back and leads the sprint to the dock, I pray like hell that it’s gone.

She gets to the strip of raised concrete first. Skids to a stop along the polished steel lip of the dock.

And then erupts with a tear-infused whoosh of air.

Which tells me absolutely nothing.

But once I pound to my own halt, I commiserate completely with her outburst. I slam my hands to my knees as a mix of a bellow and a sob erupts from my own throat, weighted with a world of relief and a whole cosmos’s worth of gratitude.

The Rover’s gone.

After basking in my three seconds’ worth of elation, I yank my phone out of its insulated pocket in my left thigh—and pray that Lydia and Angie have remembered to tune the car’s radio channel for receiving my private frequency code.

Before my finger hits the first button, there’s an incoming call to my device. The Brocade’s front desk. Shit.

The tension in my gut surges into a terse repetition of the word as I stab at the screen to answer. “Neeta. Talk to me.” For the last three days, the woman has been filling in as main manager for the night crews at my request. Wade’s been pulling the same duty for the day shift, but we’re still an hour away from the eight o’clock shift change. During the E-ticket ride that’s been life since we discovered the Source and rescued its victims, I’ve felt safer about the Brocade as an extended home front with the two of them on guard in the exec offices. What might seem like “nothing” to a normal supervisor might be a smoking grenade in our expanded dimension of the world.

Though at the moment, Neeta doesn’t sound like she’s reporting a mere grenade. “You should probably come to the lobby.” There’s none of her usual musical lilt or fragment of lightness in the suggestion. “You should probably come now.”

“What is it?” I charge. My stomach has balled up so bad, it’s the gastrointestinal Death Star. “Neeta?”

After a pause that’s too damn long for the planet destroyer in my gut, she finally replies, “It is not a what. It is a who.”

“Fuck.” Though this might actually be a good thing. If Faline’s staring down my front desk staff, that means she’s not out looking for Lydia, Angie, and the kids. The assurance lends the mettle I need to finally dictate, “All right. Okay. So don’t talk to the bitch at all. You tell her that whatever she’s fucking here for—”

“Mr. Richards.”

“—she’ll talk to me for that demand and nobody else. Just say I’m on my way—”

“Mr. Richards.”

“—and then tell her she can stand or sit while—what?” Her exigency finally sinks in, forcing me to interrupt myself. The full stop means a physical one as well. I endure Emma’s baffled stare while refocusing my attention on Neeta instead of my diatribe.