Shadow Thief (Flirting with Monsters Book 1)

by Eva Chase

  He sprang over me. Before I could so much as blink, he’d dropped from the second-floor platform to the ground with only a huff and a smack of his feet against the pavement.

  Flesh mashed. Bone crunched. I fled down the ladder as fast as my limbs would allow, Ruse following just as speedily. Thorn let out a strangled noise, and there was a thwack that I would bet was a smaller body slamming into the wall below.

  The second my feet touched down, the warrior grabbed my wrist and hauled me toward the street. He was limping—a jagged tear gaped open in his trousers just below his knee.

  Shadowkind didn’t bleed the way we did, as Thorn was demonstrating very vividly right now. Rather than liquid spurting, wisps of black smoke unfurled from the wound hidden by the fabric. The thicker darkness of the night swallowed them up.

  I caught a glimpse of two bodies, one slumped by the wall spilling a lumpy mess of brains from its head, another sprawled nearby with its back wrenched to an angle that made my stomach churn. The smoke alarms were wailing above, gray billows streaming out the open window.

  It wouldn’t be only our attackers descending on this place soon. I ran with the shadowkind toward the street, thanking the heavens that I’d worn flats with this dress.

  Get out of here—now, now, now. The urgent cry in my own head propelled me onward. Could I really outpace these hunters—or whatever they were—in my current state?

  We sprinted down the street, my stomach roiling as much from the drug still in my system as the gruesome scene Thorn had left behind. My backpack battered my side. Then up ahead I spotted a veritable gift from the gods: a bike leaning against the fence outside a house on the other side of the street, not even chained.

  I might not be licensed to drive, but I could sure as hell pedal with the best of them. I veered across the road, yanked it from the fence, and hopped on.

  A startled yelp reached my ears—the bike’s owner must have had it in view—but I was already flying along the sidewalk, the wheels whirring. My mind had narrowed down to one thing amid the lingering haze: get as far away from the attackers at my apartment as was humanly possible.

  The buildings and streets whipped past me in a blur. My thighs burned, but I kept pumping my legs as fast as they could go, even as my balance wobbled. This late, hardly anyone was out and about. When a stream of traffic lights showed up ahead, I swerved down one side street and another until a perfectly timed green light gave me a chance to bolt across the busy road.

  I’d lost all track of my supernatural companions, but at this hour, the city was more shadow than not. They might not be able to match a truck’s speed, but I hoped they were keeping up with my bike by the means only they could use. Better they traveled in ways no mortals could see them anyway.

  Every now and then, I shot down an alley or cut across a parking lot—taking routes no larger vehicle could use in case I’d picked up less welcome followers. After several of those and an ache that had expanded all through my legs, my panic eased off. I pedaled on for at least another ten minutes before I finally coasted to a stop at the corner of a block of low-rise apartment buildings.

  The back of my dress clung to my skin, damp with sweat. The night air stung as I sucked it down my raw throat. My breaths and my pulse gradually evened out. In my purse, Pickle squirmed and let out a mournful-sounding squeak.

  I still had him. I had my wallet and my phone and other purse essentials—I had my cat-burglar-esque equipment in my backpack. Everything else…

  Three forms emerged from the shadows around me. As the last of the adrenaline drained away, the full impact of what I’d left behind—left behind in flames—hit me too hard for me to acknowledge the trio.

  Luna’s CD collection. Her fairy dust shoes and her scrunchie. I didn’t give a shit about my own clothes—those I could replace—but the few fragments of her life I’d been able to hold onto…

  The pearly box with my parents’ letter. That realization came like a punch to the gut. I nearly doubled over as I clung to the handlebars.

  I’d stuck the box back on the shelf in the closet. I hadn’t even thought of it, I’d been in such a rush. The fire would have consumed everything in that room, if not the entire apartment. The one gift my parents had left for me was utterly gone, and I had no way of ever replacing it.

  My guts felt as if they’d knotted into a solid mass of mourning. I hadn’t been ready, not for any of this. More than a decade in the same city, three years in the same apartment—I’d gotten complacent. So fucking stupid. Luna had taught me better than that.

  “Sorsha?” Snap said tentatively. He brushed a gentle hand over my shoulder.

  I inhaled sharply and forced myself to straighten up. The ache in my weary legs was nothing compared to the stab of loss in my chest, but these three wouldn’t understand why I cared so much about those things. I’d just have to swallow the grief down like I had Luna’s death and the other losses since…

  As I dismounted the bike, Thorn stepped closer. The tear remained in his trousers, but his calf had stopped leaking the smoke of his essence. That seemed like a good sign. Shadowkind did usually heal quickly.

  “You should probably hold onto this,” he said, holding out one of his brawny hands. “It seems rather… delicate. It didn’t entirely survive the fighting I’ve already had to do—I apologize.”

  He was offering me the box I’d just been mourning. A crack ran through the pearly lid, and one of the corners was chipped, but it was here. Whole and unburned.

  I snatched it from him much more hastily than was really polite and popped it open. The letter was still nestled inside, my mother’s spiky handwriting scrawled across the notepaper. I snapped the box shut again with the irrational terror that a sudden wind might steal that treasure from me after all.

  A lump filled my throat. I stared up at Thorn’s face. “When did you take this?” And the bigger question: Why?

  His rugged features revealed no more than his usual grimness. “I noticed it in your closet as I was coming into the bedroom. It appeared, before, that it was important to you. I thought you would want it saved from the flames.”

  I hadn’t realized he’d been paying any attention when I’d talked to Snap about it, let alone that he’d recognized the depth of my connection to what must have looked to him like a fairly mundane object. He’d risked a few seconds in the battle to rescue it for me. That was worth a heck of a lot more than any heads he’d bashed in on my behalf.

  “Thank you,” I said, swallowing hard. “I would have hated to lose it. Honestly, I don’t know how to thank you enough.”

  As I searched his face for the compassion he must have acted on, his expression tensed under my scrutiny.

  “It was nothing,” he said brusquely. “Certainly not compared to the debt I’m still repaying. We shouldn’t linger out here in the open for much longer, should we?”

  I winced inwardly at the curt dismissal. Maybe that was all he’d been thinking of—how he owed me for getting him and the others out of those cages. However he felt about me, he obviously didn’t want to waste any time accepting my gratitude.

  I slipped the box into a safe compartment of my backpack. “You’re right. We’ve got to hole up somewhere for the night. I’m totally wiped—we can take stock and make bigger plans in the morning.”

  Ruse cocked his head toward the apartment buildings beside us. “It looks like we have an extensive spread of possible hideouts. Let’s see which ones we can use.”

  17

  Sorsha

  As we reached the apartment building, I started rummaging through my backpack for my lockpicking tools. Before I’d even set my hands on them, Ruse had slipped through the shadows into that of a potted plant on the other side of the lobby door. He opened it for us with a flourish. “Gentlemen, madam.”

  Right. Breaking and entering was a hell of a lot easier when you had supernatural powers on your side. For a second, my skills seemed to pale in comparison.

  On the other
hand, I couldn’t be defeated by a spotlight and a few pieces of iron and silver, so maybe it was fairest to say we simply had different strengths.

  Getting inside the building didn’t solve all our problems. “We can’t waltz into any old apartment,” I whispered. “The current tenants aren’t going to be as welcoming to uninvited guests as I was to you three.”

  “I can check to see which are unoccupied,” Ruse said, and tipped his head to Snap. “If you take a taste of the doors for those, you might be able to tell how soon the residents were planning on coming back.”

  Snap nodded, eager as always to contribute to our plans.

  As we checked out the hall of apartments that branched off from the dingy lobby, Thorn kept scanning ahead and behind, his stance tensed, as if expecting another attack. Based on the threadbare carpet and its faintly musty smell, this clearly wasn’t a five-star residence—but that was better for us as far as security went. All the same, the atmosphere combined with the scene I’d just fled set my skin crawling.

  With my next breath, I quietly sang a lyric I’d mangled into pure nonsense. “Til now, I always got pie on my own—I never really dared until I met brew.” Ruse raised an eyebrow at me, and I grimaced back at him. “It makes me feel better. And I could use a whole lot of better right now.”

  “Whatever makes you happy, Miss Blaze,” he said with a grin, and slipped through the shadows around the first door. He emerged seconds later shaking his head, and we moved on to the next.

  “How many people know of your involvement with this ‘Fund’ and where you live?” Thorn asked, managing to keep his own voice quiet to fit our current stealth mode.

  “No one outside of the Fund knows about the Fund,” I said. “Well, other than some of the higher shadowkind who live mortal-side, like Jade—and the hunters and collectors are at least vaguely aware that we’re around. I haven’t had anyone over at my place since I adopted Pickle.” I reached into my purse to scratch the dragon’s back between his wings, and he let out a hum that was almost a purr. “Even the Fund people wouldn’t really approve of me keeping him, despite the circumstances.”

  “But someone who’d visited you there before might have remembered.”

  “Possibly. That’s still a very limited number of people—and no one I can think of would have given my address to a stranger.” I sucked my lower lip under my teeth to worry at it as Ruse returned from the fifth apartment. He motioned to Snap, and we stopped while the godly shadowkind worked his powers.

  “Whoever’s decided they need to bring me in—or shut me up—wouldn’t need to drag the information out of my friends anyway,” I said. “If someone saw us at the bridge or the market, or realized I was at the bar asking questions, it wouldn’t be hard for them to find out my name. Which is unfortunately a pretty distinctive name. Anyone who can orchestrate some kind of conspiracy against the higher shadowkind should be able to dig up my address from that no problem.” My black market contacts did the same with collectors using less definitive information.

  Snap drew back after several flicks of his tongue around the doorknob. “They expected to return in the morning,” he said. We needed longer than that.

  “The real question,” Ruse said as we moved on, “is what made our enemies so sure you were going to cause trouble for them.”

  “They could be monitoring Fund activities—could know I’ve been involved with that. And then seeing me poking around at all made them nervous.” Which made me even more glad that I’d kept Vivi out of this mess. If she’d come along on our earlier investigations, would they have stormed her apartment too? She wouldn’t have had three shadowkind guards ready to jump in and protect her.

  No, I couldn’t let my best friend hear a peep about this, not while the assholes who’d come for me tonight were still on the loose.

  “The sword-star people are very powerful,” Thorn said darkly. “We can’t know everything they’re capable of finding out—or doing.” He glanced over his shoulder again.

  “There’s no way they could predict we’d come here,” I reminded him. “I don’t even know where here is.”

  “We weren’t truly prepared for them to launch an attack at your apartment. It could have gone much worse. I won’t be caught off-guard again.”

  I wasn’t going to argue with him there. As irritated as I’d been with my unexpected—and stubborn—houseguests, I was awfully grateful that they’d been around tonight.

  “Next time,” the warrior added, “if there’s a chance that doesn’t risk our escaping unscathed, I’ll take one of the attackers for questioning. Ruse can persuade them to talk.”

  “You bring me the guy, and I’ll work my magic,” the incubus agreed as he wisped from the last first-floor apartment. “Looks like we’re heading upstairs.”

  Uneasiness itched at my skin as we tramped up the steps, but after a few more unworkable apartments, Ruse found another that was currently empty. “There was a calendar on the fridge with the next week marked off as a vacation,” he said. “We may have our jackpot! Snap, do the honors?”

  Snap leaned in to sample the impressions that floated around the door. He straightened up with a brilliant smile. “They were imagining a plane ride and beaches on the other side. One of them asked the other if they’d remembered to have the mail held until they got back.”

  “Then they’re not expecting anyone else to be dropping by either. Perfect.” Ruse clapped his hands and vanished through the shadows again. A second later, he was opening the apartment door for us from the inside.

  Crashing in some stranger’s apartment had sounded like a sensible enough option when it’d only been in theory. Going to anyone I knew was way too risky, and I hadn’t seen any hotels around here we could check in to. Stepping over the threshold into someone else’s home, though, sent an uncomfortable prickle down my spine.

  Everywhere I looked, my gaze caught on remnants of the people who lived here. A bright pink jacket with rabbit fur trim on the hood hung on one of the hooks in the front hall next to a scuffed-up leather duster. They must have eaten bacon for breakfast the morning before they’d left, because a hint of that salty, greasy scent lingered by the kitchen. The living room held an old record player and a stack of cardboard sleeves way more ancient than my CDs.

  Standing in the living room doorway, the sense of mourning crept over me again. Those CDs were gone—melted in the fire, most likely. So were all my clothes except what I wore on my back. The pieces of furniture that might not have matched but that I’d picked out based on comfiness. My laptop, which had been lying on my unmade bed where I’d last been using it. The goofy hand-painted mug Vivi had given me several Christmases ago.

  Everything I’d owned that I wasn’t carrying, from the practical to the sentimental, had been burned away. Even if the fire hadn’t reached every corner of the apartment, it’d be too dangerous to go back to scavenge. The thoroughness with which I’d thrown the life I’d built there away hit me at full force for the first time. I gripped the doorframe, riding out the wave of loss.

  I’d picked up the pieces of my life before with nothing but a single duffel bag’s worth of possessions and strength of will. I could do it again. And I couldn’t say I regretted the actions that must have brought on tonight’s attack. I’d rather get to the bottom of Luna’s death than have all that stuff.

  But still. It’d been my stuff. It’d been my home, the first one that had really felt totally mine after bouncing from one Fund member’s house to another and then shacking up with the one serious boyfriend of my early twenties. I inhaled and exhaled, groping for my self-control, willing back the tears that had started to burn at the corners of my eyes.

  Before my shadowkind trio could notice my momentary fragility—or at least, before they could ask any questions about it that might break open the floodgates—I pushed myself onward down the hall.

  Mercifully, there were two bedrooms. The first one I peeked into, a small, windowless space that was probably mea
nt to be a den, had just enough room for a double bed and a tiny birch table beside it, both of which might have come straight from Ikea.

  I guessed that one served as a guest bedroom, because the master bedroom next door blared personality. A pink shag rug, flower decals all over the walls, lava lamp on the dresser, orange-and-pink patterned bedspread framed by velvet cushions—it was a ‘60s-style dream.

  “Well, I can’t possibly sleep in there,” I said, grateful for the excuse. Slipping into a bed someone else had clearly made their own gave me even more creeps than simply entering their apartment. “My sensibilities are fully offended.”

  “It does have plenty of character,” Ruse said, his tone amused.

  Thorn shifted his weight on his feet. “I’m going to take a circuit of the neighborhood,” he announced. “Ensure there are no additional dangers lurking that we should be aware of.”

  He strode off without waiting for a response. Snap had already bounded off into the kitchen, the cabinet doors squeaking as he opened each to ogle the contents. I should probably have felt guilty about the food that wasn’t ours he was going to be chowing down on, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to care in that moment. I’d just lost the majority of my worldly possessions. Mr. and Mrs. ‘60s fanatics could spare a little grub.

  I crossed the hall to the other bedroom and set down my purse. Pickle sprang out, shook himself with a huff, and trotted down the hall to join Snap, maybe pursuing a late dinner of his own.

  Ruse had lingered at my side. When I turned to face him, his warm hazel eyes searched mine. “I expect you could use some rest. If you need anything, you know where to find us.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and my throat tightened for a different reason. The incubus had worked awfully hard to lighten my spirits tonight—and then had his efforts ruined by that unexpected assault on the apartment. He hadn’t needed to try to cheer me up.