Strangers of the Night Read online

  He used his new, encrypted phone to thumb a text to Willa but erased it before he could send it. She knew where to find him just as much as he knew where she was. If she’d wanted him, she should have reached out. Instead she was making friends and getting herself settled in here with a new job and all of that business.

  He made his way to the cafeteria, which featured a buffet line more suited to a Vegas casino than a business facility. He loaded his tray with small tastes of whatever he thought looked good, then took the plates to sit at one of the heavy wooden tables lined with comfortable chairs.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Phoenix looked up at the unfamiliar male voice. The guy in front of him wore a pair of faded blue jeans and a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His reddish hair had been cut in a vintage style, adding to the ’50s Happy Days look.

  “There are plenty of other places to sit. Why don’t you go find one of them?” Phoenix dug his fork into a slippery pile of chicken potpie.

  The guy didn’t leave. He set his tray down across from Phoenix. “Look, it’s time we met, anyway. I’ll move if you want me to, but I was hoping we’d have the chance to talk. Get to know each other a little bit. I’m Jed. Collins.”

  Phoenix paused with his mouth full of soft noodles slippery with chicken gravy. He chewed. Swallowed. He took another slow, careful bite, giving Jed no indication that the introduction meant anything to him at all.

  “I’m your brother,” Jed said.

  “We shared the same parents. That doesn’t make you my brother.”

  Jed nodded. “Fair enough. Does it have to be such a big deal, though? It’s not like I’m trying to get good old Mom and Dad to take my side over yours about who gets to pick which television show we watch. We share DNA, Phoenix. And experiences. There has to be something to that.”

  “Why?” Phoenix gestured around the cafeteria. “Betcha half a dozen people in here have had similar experiences, if not directly at Collins Creek, at least someplace like it.”

  “Not related to each other.” Jed smiled and tilted his head.

  Phoenix felt a small, tickling nudge he was quickly able to ignore, although he did sit back in his chair to stare at the younger man. “What’s your thing? Can you make yourself look like someone else, the way Persephone does? Or do you influence people to do things, the way I can?”

  “I might be able to do a little bit of both, but mostly I affect things. Not people.” Jed began peeling the paper off a blueberry muffin encrusted with sugar. “Persephone said you weren’t staying around.”

  “I don’t plan on it. No.” Phoenix eyed the other guy.

  Jed glanced up. “Yeah, I don’t stick around here for more than a week or two at a time, then I’m off in the field working. I spent the first twenty years of my life locked up in a tiny room. I get antsy if I have to stay here for very long.”

  “...Locked up?”

  “Wyrmwood,” Jed said. “You’ve heard of it.”

  “Hell, yeah, I’ve heard of it. Bastards have been after me for a long damned time. I don’t intend to let them get me, and I don’t intend to get stuck here just to avoid having them catch me, either.” Phoenix stabbed his fork into a pile of noodles again but didn’t bring a bite to his mouth. “You were in there?”

  “Yes. They took me from the farm and put me in there until Vadim and the Crew came to break me out.”

  Phoenix put the fork down without eating. His entire life for the past twenty years had been spent running from Wyrmwood. Every decision he’d ever made, it seemed, had been to keep himself out of there.

  “It was bad?” he asked.

  Jed didn’t answer at first. Then he nodded. He took a bite of salad, crunching it before speaking. “It was very bad.”

  “And you don’t feel like the Crew is just more of the same, maybe the cells are bigger, maybe your walls aren’t quite so high, so you can still see the sky, but don’t you feel like it’s still a prison?”

  “No, not at all.” Jed gave Phoenix another curious look. “There’s nobody here telling me when or where I’m allowed to go, unless I’m on a job, and even then it’s my choice to take it or not. I mostly take the jobs. If you don’t work in some way, you don’t get paid, but that’s how it works anywhere, isn’t it?”

  Phoenix had never had a normal job, not really. “You said you can’t stand to stay here longer than a week or so.”

  “True, but I get to travel all over. I spent years never getting out of a single room, except to be taken into another single room for testing. I want to see as much as I can. I want to stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and smell the air. I want to swim in every lake and ocean I can. I want to live my life.”

  “And you’re not afraid Wyrmwood will find you, grab you? Get you back?”

  “Nope.” Jed grinned. “Not anymore. Not with what I can do to keep myself out of their reach. The Crew’s helped me with that. Helped me train, learn. With the kinds of resources we can access here, anything is possible.”

  “But you have to answer to Vadim.”

  Jed looked surprised. “Huh? No. I mean, sure, he’s the boss, but again, you do a job, you get paid. He’s the boss—he’s in charge of that. But the rest of your life? No, man. He doesn’t get involved with that stuff.”

  “Somehow, I can’t believe that’s true.” Phoenix had lost his appetite, and he pushed away his tray.

  “You don’t have to, I guess.” Jed shrugged and forked another bite of food. He chewed slowly, looking Phoenix in the eyes. “Speaking for myself, though, I spent a long time wishing I had a family, and now I do. You’re a part of that, even if you don’t want to be. We don’t have to arm wrestle or anything. You don’t have to teach me how to ride a bike. I just thought it would be great to have someone else around who understands what it was like where we were born, and what it’s like to live with what they made us into.”

  “I want to forget all that,” Phoenix answered sharply. “I don’t want it following me around all over the place for the rest of my life.”

  Jed shrugged and took a long drink of water. “Seems to me that it is already following you around, and you can’t get rid of it.”

  Phoenix was not going to give Jed the satisfaction of knowing how deeply he’d dug with those words, so although he wanted to get up immediately, he made a show of finishing his food and tossing the trash before leaving the cafeteria with a casual, deliberately neutral wave in Jed’s direction. Once he left, there was no place to go but to follow the winding halls of the complex to find Willa’s room. He figured she wouldn’t be inside. She was probably off in the library somewhere.

  She answered. She wore her dark hair piled on top of her head. A pair of steel-rimmed glasses dangled from a chain around her neck. Her white blouse, formfitting but unbuttoned to the throat, and the black skirt that hit just above the knee were such a cliché that he laughed. It came out of him on a stuttering sigh, not sounding much like humor.

  “Come in.” Willa stood to the side to let him pass. “I was just finishing a shift in the catalog room.”

  “Looking like that?”

  She hesitated, glancing down at her clothes. “It’s a professional outfit, Phoenix. Do you have a problem with it?”

  “No. I love it. It makes me want to tear it off you.”

  He wanted more than that. He wanted to go to his knees in front of her while she began to work her magic on him the way she’d done every time they were together. He wanted her to thread her fingers through his hair, tip his head back and scour his throat with her teeth.

  He did not want to tell her that.

  “Really?” She smiled and gave him a considering look. “I suppose that could be arranged.”

  Chapter 10

  Willa hadn’t seen much of Phoenix over the past week or so. S