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still smelled faintly of soot from Elijah. Thinking of him made my stomach contract, and I
pushed him from my mind. It wasn’t going to do me any good to worry about him. All I could do
was trust that he would come back unharmed.
I put the car in drive and headed out toward the office. There was nothing else to do so I
figured I might as well go check it out. Traffic was surprisingly light as I wove my way around
the one-way streets through the city. When I got to the scene, I found it was still barricaded.
A bored looking police officer leaned against the traffic barrier chewing on a toothpick.
He looked at me with mild interest when I pulled up next to him.
“Excuse me, is there any way I could get down there and have a look?”
“You a reporter?” He eyed me suspiciously.
“No, my office was in that building. I’m just curious…” I trailed off, not sure what I was
curious about really. I just wanted to see it. Not that I was about to say that to the cop. It sounded
stupid.
“Yeah, all right,” he said with a shrug. “Leave your car though. There’s still debris
everywhere, and you wouldn’t want anything to happen to this beauty.”
“Thanks,” I said as I cut the engine and got out.
“If you get hurt over there, I’m going to say you knocked me out,” the cop said dryly.
I looked at him for a minute but couldn’t decide if he was kidding or not.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said as I walked around him and headed down the street.
A lone fire truck was parked across the street from the building. I assumed they had to
stay in case any smoldering was going on in the wreckage. I nodded to one of the firemen who
leaned against the truck smoking a cigarette. The irony of it almost made me laugh.
Looking up at the demolished shell that used to house my office made my chest constrict.
It was gone. Everything. Not just the sword, which was a pity in itself for sure, but years and
years of hard work had vanished in the blink of an eye. At that precise moment the day before, I
had been sitting at my desk across from Tomas and talking about the apocalypse. Twenty-four
hours later, there was nothing but blue sky visible where my office had stood. The building had
collapsed in on itself and only the bottom few levels remained, charred and ruined.
My fists clenched at the thought that Tomas had had anything to do with this. There was
no one else, I had decided. He was working with Gareth, and I wanted to know why. Fuck this
sitting around for Elijah to get back bullshit. The smartest thing to do was to call my ex and
weasel whatever information I could out of him.
I turned my back on the destroyed building and jogged back to my car. The cop was
looking through the windows and jumped when I tapped him on the shoulder.
“Thanks for watching her for me,” I said with a smile.
“That is a sharp fucking car, mister,” he said, nodding appreciatively. “You’re not a drug
dealer are you?”
“No sir,” I said, my tone thick with laughter. “I promise you I am—was—just a business
man. Now that my office is gone, I suppose I’m unemployed at the moment though.”
“Damn shame,” he said grimly. “Can’t imagine what kind of person would do that. Damn
firebugs.”
“Yeah, you’d have to be a real son of a bitch to torch someone’s property like that.” I
gave him a quick salute. “Thanks again for letting me have a look.”
“No problem, son. You have a nice day.”
“Thanks, you too.” I got behind the wheel and did my best not to peel away from the
scene. It was hard not to gun the engine on her, but I thought that speeding off in front of a cop
who’d just done me a favor was probably not the best idea in the world.
By time I got back to the apartment, I had calmed down a little. I knew Elijah would be
pissed if I went off half-cocked after Gareth. He was risking himself to go into Hell for me, the
least I could do was sit on my hands until he got back. We’d talk about me going to Gareth later.
Maybe he could even help me come up with a way to trick my moron ex-boyfriend into spilling
his guts.
I threw myself down on the sofa and turned on the television. There was nothing on. The
building offered satellite TV with over a thousand channels, and there was never anything on.
Finally, I left it on a music channel and got up to clean the apartment.
Since I was hardly ever home and Gareth had never really been either even when he lived
there full time, the place wasn’t that dirty. It was dusty though, and I spent about three hours
wiping down all of the surfaces. It should have only taken about twenty minutes, but I had to
stop and check my watch and every clock in every room of the apartment every twelve seconds.
Finally, I decided I had become the butt of some cosmic joke and someone had stopped all of my
clocks from advancing. There was no way he had only been gone for seven hours. Surely, days
had passed by now.
I ordered a pizza, more for something to do than because I was actually hungry. Forty
minutes later, I had paid the driver and set the box untouched on the kitchen table. The television
was still playing music, though the genre had switched at nine o’clock.
Settling back on to the couch, I turned on an infomercial channel and watched women go
from three hundred pounds to one hundred pounds in six weeks of eating this food, working out
on that machine or dancing to hot, Latin music. The irony of the situation was not lost on me.
This was exactly what I would do when I was waiting for Gareth to stumble home. And when he
had, he’d always smelled like booze and other men, sometimes even women’s perfume. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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