Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(65)

She gave him that tweaked grin of hers. “The risk makes it all the more exciting!”

He wanted to scream at her, shake her until she could see how wrong all this was, but he knew it would only make her suspicious of him. Above all else, she could not be suspicious. Her trust meant everything to him. Even if that trust was entirely misplaced.

“Listen to me,” he said as calmly as he could. “It’s obvious that whoever wants those scythes ended is putting us at risk instead of themselves. At the very least, I have a right to know who we’re doing it for.”

Purity threw her hands up, and turned on him. “What difference does it make? If you don’t want to do it, then don’t. I don’t need you, anyway.”

That hurt him more than he was willing to let on.

“It’s not that I don’t want to do it,” he told her. “But if I don’t know who I’m doing it for, then I’m being used. On the other hand, if I know, and do it anyway, then I’m the one using the user.”

Purity considered that. The logic was shaky, Greyson knew that, but he was banking on the fact that Purity did not work from an entirely logical base. Impulsiveness and chaos ruled her. It was what made her so enticing.

Finally, she said, “I do jobs for an unsavory called Mange.”

“Mange? You mean the bouncer at Mault?”

“That’s the one.”

“Are you kidding me? He’s a nobody.”

“True. But he gets the assignments from some other unsavory, who probably gets the assignments from someone else. Don’t you see, Slayd? The whole thing’s a mirror maze. No one knows who’s at the far end casting that first reflection—so either you enjoy the funhouse, or get out.” ?Then she got serious. “Which is it, Slayd? In or out?”

He took a deep breath. This was all he was going to get from her—which meant that she didn’t know any more than he did, and she didn’t care. She was in it for the thrill. She was in it for the defiance. To Purity, it didn’t matter whose agenda she served, as long as it served her agenda, as well.

“In,” he finally said. “I’m in. One hundred percent.”

She punched him playfully in the arm. “I can tell you this much,” she said. “Whoever’s casting that first reflection is on your side.”

“On my side? What do you mean?”

“Who do you think got rid of your annoying Nimbus agent?” she asked.

Greyson’s first instinct was that this was a joke, but when he looked at her, he could tell it wasn’t. “What are you saying, Purity?”

She shrugged as if it were nothing. “I passed word up the line that you needed a favor.” Then she leaned close and whispered, “Favor granted.”

Before he could respond, she wrapped her arms around him in that way that seemed to dissolve his bones and turn him to jelly.

Later, he would look back on that feeling and see it as some sort of strange premonition.

? ? ?

If Purity had been involved in the first attempt on Scythes Curie’s and Anastasia’s lives, she wasn’t saying—and Greyson knew better than to ask. Revealing that he even knew about that first attempt would blow his cover.

For this mission, only Mange and Purity knew the details. Mange because he led the mission, and Purity because the plan had been hers.

“I actually got the idea from our first date,” she told Greyson, but did not explain what she meant. ?Were they going to imprison the scythes before ending them? Was that what she was implying? Until he knew the plan and the location, it limited his ability to sabotage it. And on top of that, he had to sabotage it in such a way that he and Purity could escape the botched mission without her knowing that he was the one who botched it.

The day before the mysterious event, Greyson made an anonymous call to the offices of the scythedom.

“There will be an attack on Scythe Curie and Scythe Anastasia tomorrow,” he whispered into the phone, using a filter to distort his voice. “Take all necessary precautions.” ?Then he hung up and threw out the phone he had stolen to make the call. While the Thunderhead could trace any call to its origin the instant it was made, the scythedom was not so well equipped. Until recently scythes had been like a species with no natural predators; they were still grappling with how to deal with organized aggression against them.

On the morning of the event, Greyson was told that the operation would take place at a theater in Wichita. It turned out that he and Purity were members of a larger team. It only made sense that an operation of this nature would not be left in the hands of two questionable unsavories. Instead it was left in the hands of ten questionable unsavories. Greyson never learned anyone else’s names, as that information was on a need-to-know basis, and apparently, he didn’t need to know.

But there were things he did know.

Even though Purity had no clue whom they were working for, she had, without even knowing it, told him something incredibly valuable. Something critical. It was the kind of thing that would have made Agent Traxler very happy indeed.

What irony that Traxler’s gleaning was the key to that crucial information . . . because if Purity could arrange to have a Nimbus agent gleaned, it could only mean one thing: These attacks on Curie and Anastasia were not some sort of civilian action. A scythe was running the show.