BY THE TIME Hadley wakes up, David is gone.
He's been thorough. Nothing left behind. Hadley props himself up on the bed and looks dismally at the spot on the floor he'd begun to think of as belonging to David. Just up and gone. He might as well have never been here in the first place.
Hadley reminds himself that he would have left anyway. A week. No more, no less. David was supposed to leave, and Hadley has no right to feel this childish hurt, even as he thinks of last night and David's bloodshot eyes. And the graveyard. And the snow fight. And the woman. And Hadley watching the orange glow of a street light glide over David's sleeping face and damn nearly crashing the car because of it.
Odd, how it all felt discrete and disconnected from each other. None of it could have possibly occurred in the same night.
Hadley gets up from his bed and sits on the floor. If he deludes himself hard enough, he can still smell that catch-all scent that hung around David. Cheap deodorant, sweat, that faint cloying perfume of another world.
It's unfair, Hadley thinks, that David gets to coax him into companionship, into a camaraderie borne out of a week's worth of idle conversation and alcohol, and then leave without so much as a goodbye. Hadley would have expected a note, at the very least.
Stupid.
He's been feeling pretty stupid for the past couple of days. Instead of doing all the things he should have been doing—asking questions, asking how curses worked, asking why David wanted to break his curse in the first place—he's been doing, what? Nothing. Going to the gym and dragging along David. Talking to David about normal, banal, ordinary things, and David had been more than happy to go along. Conversations where Hadley told more than he intended to and David listened and laughed and snuck in a snide remark where he could. Hadley had been, much to his own surprise, completely taken by David. Interested and intrigued and not just because of the magic that always seemed to be radiating off of him. No, not just because of magic.
Hadley knows desire. He's felt it enough to recognize it. There is nothing new about this. The only thing difference here, one that actually matters, is that this particular flavor of want is insidious and slow, a knife that he didn't even feel until it struck bone. And now it was in so deep it would be impossible to get rid of it without losing some part of himself in the process.
It doesn't help that David could be his potential death.
And then his phone rings. He lets it ring for a solid minute, doesn't answer it. He watches it shake on his nightstand, and he considers if he has it in him, this early in the morning, to answer a call.
It stops ringing. Hadley lets out a relieved sigh. It starts ringing again.
Okay. He reaches out, grabs his phone. Looks at the name. Frowns. Answers the phone.
"Hey," he says. "What's up?"
"Do you know where David is?"
Hadley hadn't thought someone like Vic could've ever sounded so panicked.
"No?" Hadley says, and pushes himself to his feet. His stomach churns with unease. "I thought you'd know. What's wrong?"
"We're fucked," Vic says, and she isn't saying this to him, but someone on her end. "No, he's not with him." Someone answers back, and it sounds a lot like Hassan. "Okay. Shit. No, send Benji, not Francis. He's good with the Coterie. Yeah, fuck Charlie. We need to be covert about this."
