Shadow Thief (Flirting with Monsters Book 1)

by Eva Chase

  “No,” he said, a quiver running through his clear voice. “I won’t. Omen said— We agreed—”

  “Hey,” Ruse said in the same warm, gentle tone he’d used with me when I’d been reeling from the drugged air the other night. He reached over to grasp Snap’s hand. “We’re not asking anything like that of you. Don’t worry about it. She was just curious—she didn’t know.”

  I glanced between the two of them. “What don’t I know?”

  Snap’s shoulders had come down at the incubus’s reassurance, but he still looked haunted, as if a different sort of shadow had risen up through his usual brightness. He exhaled sharply and appeared to get a grip on whatever emotions my question had dredged up. “It’s different with living things. It isn’t something I would ever want to do.”

  I could hear an unspoken again in the resistance that wound through his voice and the way his gaze darted away from me. Something about his abilities… horrified him? Sweet harping Hades, how bad could it be for him to react like this?

  Under all that joyful innocence, this god of sunshine had scars of his own. Scars and secrets.

  I had the urge to touch him like Ruse had, to tell him that I knew what it was like to swallow down pain—that whatever haunted him, I wasn’t going to judge him for it. But now wasn’t the time for uncovering those secrets. We’d delayed here long enough.

  I let myself give his arm a quick squeeze. “I’m sorry I brought it up. I had no idea. I’m sure you can dig up all kinds of useful dirt your regular way. You’re the one who brought us here, after all.”

  Snap blinked at me, and a glimmer of his usual curious demeanor returned. He turned to Ruse. “Why would we want dirt?”

  The incubus cracked a smile. “Another one of those silly mortal expressions. Come on. If we don’t get moving soon, Thorn’s likely to explode with his impatience.”

  “I’m hardly that limited in self-control,” our warrior muttered, but he did vanish into the shadows around his seat awfully quickly after Ruse’s remark. The other two slipped away a second later.

  I refused to let myself slump. Although maybe it would have been a good tactic to avoid anyone wondering why I was sitting out here on my own. I settled for fiddling with my phone instead, as if I just had to finish this level of Whatever The Hot New Game Was before I could haul ass to wherever I was going.

  Every few seconds, I glanced toward Meriden’s house and all around, but no one emerged from either door, and of course I couldn’t see my shadowy friends. “Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world,” I muttered to myself.

  As if on cue, the phone in my hands vibrated. Vivi’s number came up on the display. My throat tightened as I answered it, even though I should have welcomed the distraction.

  “Hey!” I said with as much normal enthusiasm as I could feign. “What’s up?”

  “I was calling to ask you that, girl. You seem to be making all kinds of mysterious plans lately.”

  Her tone was teasing, but I winced inwardly all the same. “Not really. Honestly, all I’m doing right now is hanging out on my own.” Not a lie! Somehow I couldn’t feel all that victorious about it.

  “No exciting news, then?”

  “Still nothing. I promise, when I’ve got anything to tell, you’ll be the first to know.” I just wasn’t going to tell anyone at all until I knew men with gas and guns wouldn’t be coming for every person in the know.

  Vivi laughed, which didn’t really make sense—I hadn’t told a joke. Something about the sound was a little forced. Apprehension pricked at me.

  “We should get together for a proper hangout sometime,” she said before I could go on. “Come over to my place, pick another movie off our watchlist, order in Thai. We could both use some time to unwind, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You know I’m always up for a movie-and-Thai night.” I paused. “Is everything okay with you, Vivi?” The bastards hadn’t harassed her in some way simply because they’d found out about our friendship, had they?

  “What? Of course! Just missing that one-on-one time with my bestie. Hey, can you remind me how to get to that thrift shop on the east end you were telling me about? I was thinking of doing a little shopping after work tomorrow.”

  It wasn’t an odd request, and I didn’t see how it could have been prompted by nefarious villains, but her jump from one subject to the next still struck me as awkward. Was she grasping at straws to keep us talking? As I gave her the directions, I listened carefully for any hint of background noise that might reveal more than she was saying, but my ears didn’t catch a thing.

  “Okay, perfect,” she said when I finished, and let out another giggle. “So, you’re at home right now?”

  I couldn’t easily explain where I actually was, so… “Yep. Just finishing up dinner, actually, so I should get going.” Save me from having to lie to my best friend even more. “Let’s say Friday for movie night?” If my life was still precarious by then, I could always cancel.

  “Sounds good to me. Is there anything else I can pitch in with in the meantime? You really shouldn’t have to go it alone with, well, anything.”

  Her voice had taken on that concerned tone. I winced—but I wasn’t actually alone in this mission, was I? “I know, Vivi. Thank you.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll see you at the next meeting!”

  She hung up without her usual “Ditto!” Of course, she didn’t always say that when we were signing off, maybe not even half the time, so it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Nothing about the conversation had been overtly weird. The tension of the past few days might simply be bleeding into all of my perceptions.

  Still, a deeper restlessness gripped me as I returned my attention to Meriden’s house. Had the guys found anything? Had we walked into a trap somehow? Why the hell was I sitting uselessly out here with no clue what was going on with anyone who mattered?

  My hand came to rest on the door. I knew that walking over there was a bad idea, but—if they had gotten into some kind of trouble—

  I was still wavering between common sense and impatience when the trio shimmered into being around me as if they’d never left. None of them looked exactly happy, but they appeared to have returned in one piece.

  “Well?” I demanded before they’d had a chance to speak of their own accord.

  “He’s definitely living there,” Ruse announced.

  Thorn’s mouth was set in its usual solemn line. “The back apartment. We have plenty of evidence of that, but nothing that points to where he might be spending his time otherwise—and he wasn’t currently there.”

  Snap made a face as if that was his fault. “We do know what he looks like now. The impressions I picked up were mostly mornings and late at night. He might be wherever Omen is the rest of the time.” He glanced toward the others as if to confirm.

  Thorn nodded. “We’ll come back tomorrow and see where he goes after he completes his morning routine. Then we’ll discover where this Meriden is carrying out his wretched work now.”

  22

  Sorsha

  By the time we made it back to the apartment after picking up a drive-through dinner, night had fallen. The only light was the glow from the posts at the corners of the parking lot. The warm breeze carried a hint of smoke—from the flavor of it, it was a trash can fire. Great neighborhood we’d ended up in.

  Since we had the pilfered keys now, I went in through the lobby as if I belonged in the building while the trio followed via the shadows. No point in drawing attention to ourselves with the guys’ striking good looks and Thorn’s nearly inhuman physique.

  A middle-aged woman in turquoise scrubs was looking through a few envelopes by the mailboxes. She didn’t even glance my way as I breezed past her to the stairs. I didn’t think anything of her, or of the fact that she ended up ambling along several steps behind me. Only when she came out into the second floor after me did I realize I could have a problem. She might be familiar enough with her neighbors on t
he same floor to know I didn’t belong in the apartment I was heading to.

  It only took a small trick. I stopped and muttered a curse to myself as if I’d remembered something that frustrated me. Then I stepped closer to the wall to rummage through my purse. The woman walked by… and kept going all the way to the stairwell at the far end of the hall.

  That was odd. Maybe she’d taken a longer route to her own floor to get some exercise? My skin prickled as I hustled the last short distance to the apartment door and ducked inside.

  The guys took a few more seconds to appear, and when they did, it was in mid argument.

  “How could they already know we’re here?” Ruse was saying. “We only just got back from Meriden’s house, and she was already in the lobby.”

  “They could have followed us from the office building,” Thorn said, and spun toward me. “We have to leave. That woman who followed you—she stopped and watched to see which apartment you went into, and then she immediately took out her communication device. She must have been waiting for us. And if our enemies know we’re in this building, the rest of them will be waiting nearby.”

  My pulse stuttered with a jolt of adrenaline. Fucking hell. Thankfully I’d brought my backpack along for the drive, so I had almost all of my things. But I couldn’t take off without—

  “Pickle!” I called, pitching my voice low but urgent. “Pickle, come, we’ve got to go.”

  The little dragon dashed out of the room I’d slept in, tufts of feathers clinging to his scales and floating into the air in his wake. He must have found a down pillow to nest in, damn it.

  There wasn’t time to make amends for our unwitting hosts’ destroyed property. I bent down with my purse open and motioned for him to jump in. He balked for a second and then made the leap. My jerk of the zipper, closing it to hide him, was met with a snort of protest.

  While I’d gathered him, Thorn had slipped away into the shadows again. He wavered back into the front hall with an expression even graver than before.

  “They’re just coming out from the stairs at both ends of the hall,” he said. “More than a dozen of them—and this time they’re fully equipped like the ones who took Omen.”

  I yanked the dangling strap of my backpack over my other shoulder and held my purse close. “There’s no fire escape this time. Do you think we have any chance of making it past them in the hall?”

  “The three of us could take a shadow route, but you—” Thorn’s head jerked to the side as if he’d heard something from the hall. His expression set with resolve. He swiveled on his feet. “The vehicles are… that way.” Grabbing my wrist to tug me with him, he sprinted down the hall toward the bedrooms.

  “What—?” I managed to get out as Ruse and Snap dashed with us. Before I could complete that question, Thorn had let go of me to charge straight through the bedroom door. It burst off its hinges with a crackle of splintering wood… and Thorn kept going, his fists rising in front of him, straight at the far wall.

  He slammed into it arms first and drove straight through, plaster and plywood crumbling around him to rain down on the floor. As my feet jarred to a stop in the middle of the room, I gaped at the Thorn-sized passage he’d opened up between this apartment and the one next door. Oh my freaky stars, the guy didn’t do things by halves, did he? We had a whole lot more than a pillow to apologize for now.

  If I’d had any doubts about racing after him, they were resolved in an instant by the boom of our apartment door exploding open behind me. Yeah, we had definitely overstayed our welcome here. I hurled myself through the smashed opening after Thorn.

  He’d already barreled right through the neighbor’s apartment and out the other end, leaving another gaping hole in the kitchen wall. Shrieks spilled from the living room. As we ran by, I saw a young woman frantically hopping up and down where she’d jumped onto her couch, as if she thought she were dealing with a very large mouse that might come scurrying up her leg.

  Add another person to the list of apology letters I was never going to send.

  Shouts rang out behind us. I pushed myself faster, through the kitchen’s hole and past an elderly couple sitting frozen in shock with their dinner forks halfway to their mouths. “Really sorry!” I managed to toss out to them as I raced by.

  “Send the bill to the bunch coming after us,” Ruse suggested with a breathless laugh.

  A waft of outside air swept in from the hole in the couple’s bedroom. Jagged edges of cinder block and brick protruded around it, framing the night and the parking lot lights. As I reached it, I gulped. I’d known Thorn was strong, but—fuck, he was a demolition machine. Was there anything he couldn’t bash through?

  I already knew the answer to that: silver or iron or both. Which the villains chasing after us would no doubt be carrying plenty of.

  Thorn stood on the ground two stories down. He held out his arms. “Leap! I’ll catch you.”

  He meant me, obviously. Snap disappeared into the shadows and emerged next to him a moment later. Ruse gave me an encouraging nudge.

  “I’ve never seen him do this before, but I think you can count on him being very invested in making sure you don’t go splat,” he said with a wink, and then glanced behind us. “Unlike our tenacious fan club.”

  My sense of self-preservation was torn between fear of the twelve-foot drop and fear of the weapons the enemies charging after us might be carrying. At least, like Ruse had said, the guy below wanted me to survive. I sucked in a breath, clutched my purse to my chest, and sprang into the open air.

  My stomach flew to my throat and my hair whipped up from my head. I had only a second for terror to burst through me before my body smacked into two incredibly strong arms.

  Thorn caught me with just enough give that the impact left only a fleeting ache in my back. He didn’t put me down, though, but sprinted with me toward the SUV. My head jostled against his expansive chest. The smell of him filled my nose, musky with a smoky edge like coals that had just stopped glowing: warmth and a warning wrapped together.

  Ruse had whipped past us through the shadows and was starting the engine. Snap peered at us through the rear window from the back seat. Thorn wrenched open the door on the other side, tossed me in beside Snap with a slam behind me, and dove into the front passenger spot.

  I landed in the middle of the seat, my hip jarring against one of the buckles, but I couldn’t really complain about the warrior’s haste. Yells and thumping footsteps carried from far too close behind us.

  The second Thorn materialized inside the vehicle, Ruse hit the gas. The SUV tore backward and around. I tumbled farther to the side, bumping into Snap’s slender frame. He grasped my arm to steady me as Ruse burned rubber, roaring down the drive and out into the streets.

  “Sorry,” I said to Snap, fumbling with my bags. I tucked my purse in the far corner on the floor’s shag rug where I figured Pickle was least likely to get crushed.

  “It’s all right,” Snap said softly. The light of the streetlamps passing by glinted off his eyes. As the roar of several other engines reached us, they opened wider. “Will they be able to catch us, do you think?”

  Ruse let out a rough chuckle. “I swear on my libido, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure they don’t.”

  “We can’t stay in this vehicle,” Thorn said. “They’ll be familiar with it now. As soon as we can, we must abandon it and continue by other means.”

  “No kidding. I think I’d better lose the homicidal maniacs behind us first, though—don’t you?”

  Thorn gave a wordless mutter of assent, and Ruse jerked the wheel, spinning us in an abrupt ninety-degree turn—and then, an instant later, another. I still hadn’t gotten the chance to fasten any of the seatbelts around me. The momentum threw me into Snap again, the second lurch landing me right on his lap.

  I guessed I’d just have to resign myself to being a ping-pong ball for this ride. It beat whatever the sword-star bunch wanted to turn me into. “Sorry,” I said to Snap ag
ain as his buffering arm came up to support me. He shook his head with a smile as if to say he didn’t need any apology.

  As the SUV jostled back and forth with more of Ruse’s quick maneuvers, I swayed and gripped Snap’s knee. The moment we stopped rocking around, I attempted to squirm off him to give him at least a little personal space. My shoulder knocked his chest, and all at once Snap’s body went rigid against mine.

  I held myself still, my gaze darting to him to check if I’d inadvertently hurt him. I’d never been quite this close to his divinely handsome face before, just inches between us. His chest hitched against my arm with a stuttered breath, and his moss-green eyes stared at me, as bewildered as if I’d suddenly transformed into a polka-dotted caribou.

  Something was obviously not okay. I shifted my weight to get off him, and another swerve of the car sent me sliding back into his lap. My ass pressed into Snap’s groin—into a solid form that was even more rigid than the rest of him.

  Oh. Oh. My eyes caught his again, just as they flashed with a glimmer of brighter green, like that glimpse of neon I’d gotten in the collector’s room. His hand braced against my thigh and then pulled back as if he wasn’t sure where to put it. Heat seeped between us everywhere our bodies touched, which at this point was quite a lot of territory.

  So he did have it in him to get turned on. From the uncertainty in his expression, he hadn’t been any more aware of that fact than I’d been. But now that I’d noticed it, there was no mistaking the bulge of his erection.

  His pupils had dilated slightly, his breath coming shallower and faster than usual. A tingle quivered through my lungs and down to the apex of my thighs in response. He’d gotten this turned on, probably for the first time in his existence, because of me. And every part of me was totally on board with that. I just couldn’t tell how on board he was.

  It wasn’t as if we were in any position to explore the possibilities further. The awkward intensity of the moment broke with a screech of the tires. Ruse hauled the SUV in the other direction, and I flew off Snap onto my back, just barely catching myself before my head banged into the opposite door.