Good thing, too, as it was difficult to see Q-tips glued to a Tupperware bowl mounted on a toilet seat as anything other than trash.
Heading deeper into the building, she slipped through a staff-only door and found herself in a concrete-floored, concrete-walled warehouse space that smelled like chalk dust and crayons. Up above, caged fluorescent lights were set into the high, unhung ceiling, and exposed ductwork and electricals burrowed through joists like moles in a lawn. Desks were set back, and file cabinets were out to the sides, the center of the space remaining clear, as if large installations were regularly rolled in from the rear alleyway.
The double doors straight ahead were made of steel and had security alarm contacts on them -
"May I help you. "
Not an inquiry.
She turned around.
One of the bouncers had followed her inside, and he was standing with his feet spread and his blazer open like he had a gun in there.
Rolling her eyes, she waved a hand and put him in a temporary trance. Then, placing a thought in his mind that there was nothing unusual going on, she sent him back to his post - where he would relate to his big-ass buddy that, in fact, there was nothing unusual going on.
Not exactly rocket science with these Homo sapiens. But just to be on the safe side, she fritzed out the security cameras as she went toward the back doors. Shit. One look at the way the steel panels were wired and she decided not to push on through and risk an incident involving the police.
If she wanted to be in the alley, she was going to have to work for it.
With a curse, she headed back for the party. It took her a good ten minutes to weed her way through all the denizens of questionable taste and undeniable ego, and as soon as she was out in the night air, she dematerialized up to the roof and walked to the far side.
Assail's car was parked down in the alley below, facing out.
And she wasn't the only one looking at it. . . .
Holy. . . crap. . .
Xcor was in the shadows, waiting for the male as well.
Had to be him - whoever it was had a lockdown on his inner core to such a degree, there was little superstructure to be read: By habit or by trauma, or likely some of both, the three dimensions had shrunken in on each other until they formed such a gnarled, tight mass, it was impossible for her to get a bead on any emotion whatsoever.
Man, she'd seen imprints like this from time to time. They usually meant real trouble, as the individual was capable of anything.
For example, you'd need precisely this kind of knotted center to have the balls to make a run at the king.
This was her target. She knew it.
And now that she had locked into that mangled grid, she backed off, dematerializing to the roof of a tall building a block away. She didn't want to spook the son of a bitch by getting too close, and from here, she still had an adequate sight line t
o the Jag.
Shit, if only her radar had greater reach: She could go maybe a mile with her symphath side, but that was pushing it, her instincts strong, just short-range. So if he dematerialized a great distance away? She was going to lose him. . . .
As she waited, she wondered once again about Xcor's connection to Assail. Unfortunately for that aristocrat, if he was funding the insurrection, even indirectly, he was going to find himself in the crosshairs.
Not a good place to be.
About a half hour later, Assail emerged from the gallery's ass and looked around.
He knew the other male was there. . . and he addressed some sort of comment to precisely where Xcor stood.
The cold breeze and ambient noise of the city killed the sound track of whatever exchange occurred between the pair, but she didn't need dubbing to get the gist: Assail's emotions shifted around until she had to approve of the dislike and mistrust he felt toward whoever he was talking to. The closed-up male, naturally, gave nothing away.
And then Assail took off. And so did the other grid.
She trailed the latter.
Like so many things in life, in retrospect, what happened to Autumn around eleven o'clock that evening made sense. The clues had been there for months, but as was rather often the case, when you were going about your life, you misinterpreted the guideposts, misread the compass needle's position, mistook one thing for another.