The last time Madoc had seen such raw hunger in someone’s face, he’d had Took’s cock in his ass. It was only for a second, and then Took wedged it down out of sight and shrugged as he glanced out the small window.
“It’s not up to me.”
“If it were?”
Took looked away from the window. “It’s not,” he said harshly. “I can’t sleep during the day, ’cause I don’t want Him, whoever he is, to win. I can’t sleep at night because I’m scared the fucker knows where I am. You know why I had to take the Waring case? I’m broke. VINE health insurance covered my medical care, got me back on my feet, but most nights I go to a hotel. Sometimes I drive a couple of hours and just stop at a random motel on the road. That eats into your savings pretty damn quick, Madoc. I’mscared, and the only thing you call a scared Biter is retired. But you know what? I’d still take your hand off if it was up to me. Sick, scared, and suspicious as I am, I’d be back out there because it’s the only thing that feels like me anymore. And then I’d get someone killed or….”
He stopped and clenched his teeth, as if the words would squeeze out, given a chance.
“It’s not up to me,” he said. “I’ll do this, and then… whatever. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go back to Cali. It’s home. I could go and see my mother. She’s probably got another gift for me.”
There was a stack of letters in Madoc’s desk in Philly, half of them still crumpled from where he retrieved them from the trash and smoothed them back out, that used 90 percent of the same words, maybe even 95. They had just been tweaked and rearranged enough so that they said something very different from Took’s reluctant acceptance of someone else’s decision.
Madoc swallowed the harsh question, or maybe it was an accusation, in his throat. He needed to ask some other questions first, the ones that he would have already asked and demanded answers for—if he hadn’t been so desperate to respect Took’s decisions. Instead he just reached over the low table and grabbed Took’s hand in a cool clasp.
“I hate flying,” he said as Took gave him an odd look.
He knew the statistics. Most flights were safe as long as they stayed overland or skirted close to the coast. It didn’t matter. Immortality loaned the Anakim a sense of control. They could die, but they always had some influence over how and when. Not up here.
It was why there were still only a few flights per day, despite how convenient it made long-distance travel.
“No one asked you to come,” Took muttered, but he didn’t move his hand.
Madoc blinked and peered back into the gray through the window, as a hand constructed of twig bones and strung together with strips of bloody sinew stretched out from somewhere and snatched one of the hungry, darting shadows out of the air. When it squeezed, the shadow exploded, its essence bled out into the sky like ink, and its brethren shot in to pick it apart.
“You took the jet to come get me,” Took said. “In Appleberg. I appreciate it.”
Madoc looked at him and wondered if he was really that dense. Although he supposed that was a stupid question. For someone who unstitched emotion and motivation for his career, Took had always been blind when it came to how people saw him.
“I would do almost anything for you, Luke,” he said.
Took looked stunned for a second and then glanced away to scowl out the window. He scratched his jaw with his free hand and cleared his throat. Madoc was, he thought wryly, in love with someone who had the emotional range of a teenager.
“You could call me Took, to start with.”
“It’s not a name,” Madoc jabbed back.
He expected an argument, but Took just snorted and went back to the files Madoc had shared with him. His hand stayed curled around Madoc’s, and it was odd how cold fingers could still make Madoc feel warm.
It was some comfort on a flight that didn’t have much else going for it. On most flights Madoc could at least look forward to when they’d land and he would be back on solid ground. Not this time. When they landed, all he had to look forward to was The Salt, where the monsters knew his name.
IT MADEyou feel human again, the heat. It was only a few degrees, the temperature announced in red letters over a sign that encouraged staff, human and Anakim both, to hydrate, but it was hungrier. It felt like a punishment, like Madoc was a scrap of meat caught between the hammer blow of heat from the chalk-blue sky above and the hot, white skillet under his feet.
It made him rue the lost ability to sweat. Any trickle of moisture to cool him down would be welcome.
“I feel like a lobster,” Took muttered as he flapped the hem of his black, BTR T-shirt in an attempt to generate a breeze. It didn’t do much good, but Madoc appreciated the glimpse of lean, scarred stomach. “Couldn’t we find a salt mine in Montana to keep them in?”
“It’s not meant to be pleasant,” Madoc said as he watched an open-topped jeep bounce and judder across the stretch of salt-bleached sand toward them. “Besides, if they ever break out, where will they go?”
Took turned to look around. It was the sort of landscape you would call beautiful in a picture, with long stretches of ragged salt waves that smeared into the horizon and curves of colorful striated rock that curved up out of the sand like a snake’s back. A blast furnace in the day and cold enough to find chips of ice at night.
“Would it kill you?” Took asked. When Madoc raised an eyebrow at him, he amended the question. “Them. Anakim… us.”
He’d asked people to kill him in the hospital. Berated, the doctors said aggrievedly, which had been sohimthat Madoc hadn’t known whether to laugh or weep. If Took still wanted to die, he could have done it himself by now. Madoc still weighed the tone of the question. Hopeful or just curious? In the end, as he watched Took track the horizon, he came down on “uncomfortable.” That was appropriate. Madoc wouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t uncomfortable around here.
“Maybe,” he admitted quietly. “Not how I would choose to go.”
The jeep finally pulled up to the fence, and the day warden climbed out. Like everything else laid down in the Accord, The Salt was an unhappy compromise. The Senate liked the idea of an Anakim prison well enough, but not the idea of the Anakim being in sole control of it. On the flip side of the coin, the Anakim definitely didn’t trust the living with a prison full of their monsters and their near-gods.