by Eva Chase
13
Snap
The place Sorsha had called a “bar” didn’t look anything like the long, straight pieces of metal I’d used that word for in the past. Even viewed from the shadows, the images slightly warbled and the sounds and scents faded, it was much more interesting. Interesting enough that I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask Thorn whether it really was a good idea for us to be slinking through these shadows.
Sorsha had insisted it wasn’t safe for us to come along. I’d have thought she should know, since she’d been here before and we hadn’t. But Ruse knew a lot about the mortal realm and Thorn knew a lot about danger, and neither of them seemed concerned that we’d run into any trouble here. I could follow their lead.
Especially when it meant getting to take in so many new aspects of mortal-side life.
I slipped through a patch of darkness under an empty table to tip my head close to a glass that one of the mortals had left there, a trace of amber liquid ringing its base. I couldn’t taste anything while remaining in the shadows, directly or with my deeper senses, but the sour smell tickled my nose.
“Why are they drinking these liquids?” I asked Ruse, a languid presence nearby. “They smell almost like plants gone to rot.”
The incubus’s chuckle came with a distant tone. “In some ways, that’s what they are. It’s called fermenting. It brings out some… interesting qualities that help mortals relax and find courage.”
I peered at the people socializing in the room around us. “Are they bolstering themselves to head into some kind of battle?” Sorsha’s world hadn’t appeared to be the sort of place where masses of warriors took up swords against each other on a regular basis, regardless of the hints Thorn liked to drop about his past adventures in this realm.
Ruse laughed again. “Only battles with their own self-esteem and other people’s opinions of them. Mortals come to establishments like this to enjoy themselves with friends and to pick up potential mates. Usually short-term ones, but for some reason many of them get much more anxious about that than looking for marriage material.”
Mates. Like that couple over there, two men with their arms twined as they rocked with the music a few paces from where Sorsha and her friend were dancing. You could tell they were mates and Sorsha and her friend weren’t because of the amount of closeness… and also a sort of energy around them that I could taste without even using my tongue.
Sometimes Ruse and Sorsha generated that kind of energy between them. But not always. I didn’t fully understand what it accomplished other than that they seemed to enjoy something about it, which maybe was reason enough to want it. Like eating food I didn’t need but that tasted so delicious.
Did they decide to create the energy or did it just happen? What did it feel like when you had it? I didn’t think I’d ever encountered it in myself.
I might have asked, but as I turned in Ruse’s direction, I spotted another shadowkind—not in the shadows like us but sitting at one of the stone tables with a drink of her own. A dappling of scales showed across her skin. From that along with her pose, I expected she was some sort of reptilian shifter.
“There are other kind here,” I said, nodding toward her. “Should we avoid her?” We’d already known the being distributing drinks from behind the shiny counter was one of us, but she stayed on the other side of that large, carved crystal slab.
Thorn shifted closer to me, his presence looming as large in the shadows as it did on the physical plane. “Sorsha said our kind often come here. Why would any of them think it’s strange that we’re here too? It was an excuse to keep us away.”
“She really should have known better than to assume we’d go along with that order,” Ruse agreed with a teasing cluck of his tongue.
Why wouldn’t she have wanted us to see the bar? Maybe I’d asked too many questions at the market earlier today. There were just so many things to experience that I didn’t understand but wanted to.
Like the young man who was tossing coins into the circle of water to our left. I peered at him and then the coins, the metal discs glinting as they caught the tiny underwater lights. “That’s money he’s throwing away, isn’t it? Why would they put it in the water? Is that how they pay for those relaxing courage drinks?”
“They pay for the drinks at the counter,” Ruse said. “And mostly with paper bills or plastic cards. The coins don’t buy much. They throw them into the water for fun and to pretend it’ll give them the power to get whatever they want.”
My gaze jerked back to the coins. “Does that work?” So far I hadn’t met mortals who could work magic of any kind, let alone on that scale.
“Of course not. They just enjoy the pretending.”
Mortals were rather strange about a lot of things. Before I could puzzle any longer about that, Thorn moved forward. I looked in the same direction.
Sorsha was stepping away from her friend with the swishy clothes and hair. She was smiling, but tension wound through her posture. A twinge shot through my gut. “Where’s she going? Is something wrong?”
“She seems to think it is.” I could feel more than see the flex of Thorn’s considerable strength. “Four men came in together a minute ago. Their movements appear very purposeful. She may have had past dealings with them or seen some other warning sign.”
“She’s heading for the back door,” Ruse pointed out. “We’d better keep up, don’t you think?”
Thorn glanced toward the front of the room again, but then he turned to stride after Sorsha, leaping between shadows as need be. Ruse and I traveled along behind him. If any of the newcomers tried to harm her, we were between her and them now. It must have been a good thing we’d come along.
The incubus had been right about the door. Sorsha twisted the handle, murmuring a faint tune to herself, and pushed outside. We leapt after her into the thicker darkness of an alley.
A totally different combination of sensations washed over me: the faint chill of the night, the contrast between the dark, narrow space we’d come out into and the yellow glow of streetlamps at the opening a few buildings away, and a dank, definitely rotten smell seeping from the trash bin Sorsha darted around. It took me a moment to adjust—and to notice the figure that had already been out here in the alley.
The man looked so scruffy I might have taken him for a werewolf in mid-shift if everything else about him hadn’t screamed mortal. He’d been standing farther down the alley, but at Sorsha’s exit, he turned and headed toward her with steps that both lurched and swayed. A bottle of that sour-smelling liquid dangled from one of his hands. He didn’t seem relaxed or brave to me, though, only unsteady. And intent on catching up with our rescuer.
“What’s he do—” I started to ask, and sucked in the rest of the sentence and my breath at the gleam of a knife he’d pulled from his pocket.
He was going to hurt her. We had to stop him. Those thoughts blared through my mind clearer than anything—and my body went rigid. A sickly chill congealed in my stomach, so dense it erased even my memories of the treats I’d snacked on at the market and later at dinner.
I could stop him. I could—like that other time—but to do that again— Despite my urge to protect the woman who’d saved us, every particle in me flinched away from the thought with a smack of horror.
It was a good thing I wasn’t the warrior among us. As I froze, Thorn hurled himself forward.
14
Sorsha
I paused in the short hallway that led to the bar’s back door just long enough to glance over my shoulder. None of the guys who’d set off my warning bells appeared to have clocked me as a target. As far as I could tell, they were still circulating through the front half of the bar, not yet looking or coming my way. Good.
In my bar-wear, I felt unnervingly vulnerable. The badge pinned to my bra might protect me from shadowkind powers, but it’d do nothing at all against human means of combat. After the mixed martial arts classes Luna had insisted I take in my early teens—Be
cause you never know if you might encounter some enemy that prefers brute force over hocus pocus, she’d said—I could handle myself all right, but four against one wasn’t great odds.
“Oh, girls just wanna have guh-uns,” I sang under my breath as I slipped out into the back alley, not that I knew how to fire a gun anyway.
The alley was dark and dank, and a homeless dude was loitering outside the building next door, swigging from a bottle of vodka I could smell from seven feet away. Thankfully, it’d be just a short jog to the lights of the street. Once I was watching from outside where any searchers wouldn’t expect to find me, I’d be much more in control of the situation.
I hurried toward the sidewalk, that sense of control already settling comfortably in my chest, and uneven footsteps scraped the pavement behind me. The drunk guy was heading this way too. I picked up my pace so I could keep well ahead of both him and his stink—and he lunged at me with a speed I hadn’t expected.
The vodka bottle tumbled to the ground with a crackle of breaking glass. The second the guy’s hand closed around my wrist—firmer and steadier than made any sense given his supposed inebriation—my fighting instincts kicked into gear. My body twisted, and my leg shot up for that most basic of self-defence maneuvers: a knee to the balls.
I’d say one good thing about him: he did have his private parts exactly where I needed them to be. My knee connected with his most sensitive appendage, and the air shot out of him with a pained grunt. He stumbled backward, flailing to keep his balance. A knife flashed through the air in his other hand.
Holy mother of mincemeat, what exactly had he been planning on doing to me with that thing? Drunk homeless dude, my ass. This guy had just put on a front while he waited for a target.
Had he been waiting for me specifically, or had I just gotten extra lucky tonight?
I didn’t have the chance to ask him about it. I shifted my weight back, my fists coming up, ready to give him a lesson in why you don’t attempt to knife random women, and the air between us split with a sizzling sound that raised the hairs on my arms. A huge, brawny form wavered into view in mid punch.
Thorn’s fist slammed into my attacker’s face just as the “drunk” guy had lurched back toward me. His crystalline knuckles raked through the flesh of the guy’s cheek and nose down to a gleam of bone. A cry of pain had just started to break from the asshole’s mouth when the shadowkind warrior literally broke his throat with a slash of his other hand. He gouged straight through the guy’s neck, cutting off the cry into a gurgle and a spray of blood.
My attacker crumpled into a heap, blood puddling around him. Thorn stepped back with a satisfied swipe of his knuckles against his palm, and—holy mother of magnificence.
I stared, briefly distracted from the carnage. Specks of the guy’s blood had spattered across the warrior’s chest… His bare chest, with bulging muscles on full, glorious display. In fact, he was bare all the way down.
When shadowkind moved through their realm or through the shadows in ours, they dropped their physical forms, including any clothes they’d been wearing. It appeared Thorn had been too focused on leaping into the fray to remember to bring into being more than the essentials of his body, modesty be damned. And, wow, the equipment he was packing between his legs definitely lived up to the rest of his impressive form.
I jerked my gaze away after just a moment of gaping, but that was enough for Thorn to notice. He looked down at himself and let out a noise of consternation. At the edge of my gaze, I saw his typical tunic and trousers blink into being, covering all that deliciousness. It was almost a shame.
What was definitely a shame: the mangled body I was now staring at again, just a few feet away from me. My stomach flipped over. I sidestepped to avoid a rivulet of blood that trickled toward me. “What the hell was that?” I demanded, my heart thumping from the fight—and maybe a little from the eye candy I’d gotten right after, despite my revulsion at the rest of the scene.
Two other figures I should have realized would be along for the ride shifted in the darkness. Ruse tilted his head to one side as he regarded the dead man. He brought his hands together in a light clap. “Excellent smiting. A+ for technique. Maybe a little overboard in the nakedness department, but I’m really not one to criticize that.”
Thorn glared at him with a twist of his mouth that might have been a little embarrassed. He turned to me. “My apologies that I didn’t intervene sooner, m’lady. And for the… unfortunate oversight when I first arrived.”
“I’m not complaining about that part,” I said, and shot my own glare at Ruse when he smirked. “None of you should be here at all—you were supposed to stay at my apartment! And you—you massacred this guy.” There really wasn’t any better word for it.
“He was attempting to harm you,” Thorn said, completely ignoring my first point. “He had a weapon. I was simply preventing him from using it.” He frowned at me as if upset that I hadn’t thanked him yet.
I supposed I did sort of owe him some gratitude. All the same… “Thanks, but I was handling it just fine by myself. You can’t go around killing people left and right, even if they seem like real jerks. Unless someone’s actually on the verge of killing me, you can stick to beating their ass and sending them running. Or rather, let me beat their ass and send them running.”
Thorn’s forehead furrowed. “I can hardly wait to see if an attacker will get to the point of a mortal blow. He was a miscreant of some sort. What does his death matter?”
I stared at him for several seconds while I tried to construct an answer his shadowkind worldview would understand. He clearly didn’t subscribe to the idea that life was sacred regardless of what the living thing was doing with that life. Truthfully, I wasn’t exactly sad that the asshole was dead, even if the sight of his battered body horrified me.
I’d never seen anyone die except Auntie Luna, and her departure had been more sparkly than bloody.
“On this side of the divide, we don’t go around killing anyone who pisses us off,” I said finally. “There are laws, and a certain mortal sense of morality… You might not agree with it, but it’ll be easier for all of us if you try to respect it at least a little.”
“I respect what keeps you and us alive,” Thorn said. “That matters more than mortal laws or your qualms about our presence.”
I resisted the urge to reiterate the fact that I probably would have been just fine even if he hadn’t jumped to my rescue. One guy with a knife vs. my martial arts skills shouldn’t have been a problem. Of course, who knew if my attacker had more than a knife? Bloody mess and all, I might find it in me to be a bit touched that Thorn was so dedicated to my safety.
They all were. Snap eased up beside Ruse and looked me over with a worried air. “You are all right, aren’t you? He came at you very quickly.”
“I’m totally fine.” I brushed off my arms as if to demonstrate.
“If it makes you feel any better, this was no great loss.” Ruse motioned to the bashed body. “I got a read on him before our fist-happy friend here took care of the matter. You aren’t the first woman he’s attacked—and if he’d had his way, you’d have been pinned up against the wall while he forced himself on you.” He grimaced as he spoke those words as if it disgusted him to even voice that possibility out loud.
My skin crawled at that revelation. But the way the guy had gone after me, the pretense of being drunk and all, hadn’t felt like some random rape attempt. “Is that all you picked up on?” I asked.
“I didn’t have a whole lot of time to rummage around in his emotions and motivations before he and they ceased to be.”
“Why did you come out through the back to begin with?” Thorn said. “Did you see a reason to be wary when you were inside?”
Oh, shit. I’d totally forgotten my original goal. “There were four men who came in—not part of Jade’s usual crowd. I got the impression they were searching for someone. Considering what you three have gotten me mixed up in and your idea t
hat we were followed this afternoon, I thought that someone might be me. I was going to double around and keep an eye on them from outside at the window.”
I hesitated with a glance at the body and then hustled the rest of the way to the street. When I reached the front of the bar, I held myself to the side of the window and peeked inside.
I couldn’t make out every corner of the place from here, but it only took a quick skim over the patrons to determine that none of the preppy guys I’d slipped out on were in view. Which meant they probably weren’t in there at all anymore—it wasn’t likely all four of them had squeezed into one of the nooks I couldn’t see. My jaw clenched.
My shadowkind trio had gathered behind me. “It looks like they left while we were busy dealing with the jerk in the alley,” I said. “Now there’s no way of telling what they were up to.” I might have been glad that my uninvited protectors had joined me if Ruse could have taken a read on those dudes. “I’m not sure they were looking for me—it just seemed better to be careful.”
Snap peered past me into the bar. “Yes, that’s why we came. To be careful with your safety.”
It was hard to be mad at him when he put it like that with his sweetly melodic voice.
I headed back toward the alley with a sigh. “All right. We’ll just all be extra careful until we find out how much attention we’ve already drawn. And if we want to make sure we don’t stir up even more trouble, you’d better clean up the mess you left here.” I shot a look at Thorn. “I hope you’re as good at getting rid of dead bodies as you are at creating them.”
15
Sorsha
By the time we made it back to my apartment, it was just shy of midnight. Normally after a night out with Vivi, I’d have returned pleasantly exhausted and ready to crash into bed. After this evening’s events, uneasiness was still jittering through my veins. I couldn’t imagine drifting off into dreamland anytime soon.
