by Eva Chase
“Nice to meet you,” he said in his cajoling tone. “Tell me, won’t you, how many more guards are inside the building?”
The man’s pupils had dilated. Thorn loosened his grip to allow him room to speak. “I— You—” he stammered.
Ruse knelt in front of him. The power rang through his voice so distinctly it tickled my ears even though it wasn’t directed at me. “We’re going to be very good friends. It couldn’t hurt anything for you to tell me.”
The guard’s posture started to relax. “There are two people monitoring the security cams. Another patrolling the halls. Not that we’ve ever needed all this manpower on the site… before…”
Ruse made a swift gesture to recapture the man’s attention and peered at him even more intently. “Before now. Indeed. Quite the catastrophe that’s happening out here. Imagine how upset your employers will be if they find out you all let these intruders get away. They’re trying to break down the walls so anyone might wander in and see your secret base.”
“No. We can’t let that happen.”
“Exactly. You know what you need to do? Put in a call on that radio of yours, get everyone you can out here. You can hear the invaders—they’re all along the wall—you’ll need to keep moving to catch up with them. Don’t back down and keep everyone on their trail until you’ve nabbed them.”
The guard nodded with a slow bob of his head. Then his gaze whipped away, his body stiffening all over again. He scrambled to his feet. “You’re right—I hear them bashing at the wall right over there. Shit.”
He raised his radio as he dashed off toward the outskirts of the site, hollering for every guard at the facility to join him immediately between pants for breath that only played up the urgency.
Ruse flashed me a grin. “And now…”
The last guard at the door hesitated and then hurried over. One, two, and then a third burst through the doorway to join the defense. Bingo!
Thorn hurtled across the stretch of packed dirt to slam the camera poised over the door into the concrete wall it was mounted on. I sprinted after him. Snap darted from the shadows to meet me by the entrance. With a flick of his tongue through the air over the electronic lock, he smiled and tapped in the code he’d gleaned. The bolt slid over, and I yanked the door open.
As the warrior sprinted back to the shadows to continue diverting the guards outside, Snap, Ruse, and I ducked into the building. We found ourselves in an entry room with lime-green walls and an antiseptic prickle in the air.
Ruse pointed to another doorway at the opposite end. “The stairs are down that hall.”
We were hustling along it when a woman in a lab coat emerged, blinking, from one of the workrooms. She didn’t have a chance to do more than gasp before I’d spotted the silver and iron badge pinned to her blouse, like a larger version of my own. I snatched at it and wrenched it off her with a rasp of tearing fabric.
“Everything’s okay,” Ruse said to her in a ridiculously soothing voice. “You have so much work to do. You should get back to it. Nothing’s more important than that.”
She drew in a shaky voice, her eyes glued to him. “But—”
“Trust me. Nothing going on out here interests you at all. Think of how much you want to accomplish before it’s time to leave.”
He nudged her toward her office, and she meandered inside looking intent if slightly puzzled. As the three of us jogged the rest of the way down the hall, I tapped Ruse’s side with my elbow. “Very impressive. I haven’t really seen you in action before.”
He chuckled. “I don’t normally have to skip so much of the foreplay. Turning the dial up this high is giving me an ulcer. Let’s hope I don’t have to charm too many more.”
We didn’t run into anyone else in the hall or the stairwell, but as we reached the second-floor landing, both Ruse and Snap slowed. Ruse’s jaw tightened.
Snap gave a little shudder as I pushed open the door to the hall that held the shadowkind prisoners. “A lot of unkind metals in this place.”
My gut twisted. “Can you keep going?” We’d known there’d be silver and iron in the cell walls to contain the prisoners, but we’d hoped the effect wouldn’t seep into the space outside them. How could we get Omen and the other shadowkind prisoners out of their cells if Snap couldn’t reach the locks? Hell, if I got the opportunity, I’d wanted to not just free every being in this place but grab whatever files we could get our hands on quickly to find out what the sword-star bunch had been doing here.
Snap squared his shoulders and marched forward, but I could see the effort it took in the clenching of his hands. Ruse followed, showing similar signs of strain.
The blank walls and solid metal doors offered no glimpse of the creatures inside the cells. I scanned the numbers on the doors as quickly as I could. “Cell 11 was Omen’s, right?” He was our first priority. I didn’t want to think through the implications of Subject 27 being in only the eleventh cell—or what might have happened to at least sixteen of the subjects before him.
The incubus gave a curt nod. “Let’s find it fast. I’m definitely not digging the vibe of this place.”
There. I rushed over, Snap close behind me. Fighting a cringe, he bent close to the keypad by the lock. On his first attempt, his tongue flinched back into his mouth before he appeared to catch anything. An even more determined expression came over his face, and he tested the air again.
“4-9-7-2,” he spat out, hauling himself back from the noxious surface.
I tapped in the numbers, willing my hand not to shake. How long could Ruse’s ploy and Thorn’s shenanigans keep all the guards from noticing what we were up to in here?
How were we going to make it out of here if they came back too soon?
The lock whirred open. Hallelujah. As soon as we made sure this was Omen—and that he knew we were his people, coming to rescue him—I’d get Snap to move on to the next cell. If he could even tolerate testing the rest of the locks with all the toxic materials in this place, that was.
I tugged the door wide. The entire ceiling of the cell was one huge panel of light, which glared off the reflective walls and floor and nearly drowned out the twitching form like a streak of shadowy smoke in the middle of it.
“Omen?” I said. “Do you need help getting—”
Before I could finish the question, the blur of darkness flung itself at me with a guttural roar. Yellow-orange eyes blazed at me like twin flames; a clawed hand—or was that a paw?—smacked me aside with a scrape of pain through my arm that echoed into my injured shoulder. I stumbled into Snap, who caught me in a tight embrace.
“Omen!” he protested. “She’s with—"
The blare of an alarm drowned out anything else he might have said. My stomach flipped over. Sweet stinking cheese. There must have been some other device we’d needed to disable to remove a prisoner safely.
The overhead lights flared twice as bright—and down the hall by the stairwell, a barrier of silver-and-iron-twined bars dropped into place with a clang, cutting off our escape.
“Shit,” Ruse muttered. We bolted toward the stairwell anyway. The shadowy figure we’d released was still whipping around us, too swift and hazy to make him out clearly. One moment it looked like a hunched human form, the next some sort of muscular beast, its dark flesh streaked through with a fiery glow. A tail lashed in its wake, taut and sinuous with a triangular protrusion I glimpsed at its tip.
A devil’s tail.
I couldn’t think about that now. It didn’t matter what Omen was if we all ended up dead or jailed tonight.
There was no time to try to free anyone else. Ignoring the guilt that jabbed through my panic, I yanked the scorch-knife from my belt, switched it on, and rammed it into the bars the second I reached them.
The people who’d designed this place had meant the barrier to hold off shadowkind with the power of its metals, not the width of its bars. I cut through one in a matter of seconds, drove the blade against it farther down, and kicked the l
arge chunk out to clatter onto the floor. My heart seemed to be beating right in my throat, my pulse thudding behind my ears almost as loud as the alarm.
As I moved to the next bar, Ruse’s voice carried from behind me. “Omen, pull yourself together. We’ve got you—we’re taking you out of this hellhole—but it’ll be a lot easier if you get a hold of yourself.”
“They did horrible things here,” Snap said, with a quiver of anger in his voice. “Horrible things to him. I don’t even have to try to taste it.”
I’d only cut out three bars when a door banged open below. Almost biting my tongue at the jolt of panic that hit me, I rammed the knife even harder into the fourth. One more and the space should be just big enough for the shadowkind to follow me through…
A guard barreled into the landing just as I severed the bottom of that bar. I punched it right into her face. As she stumbled backward with a grunt of pain, a form that now looked completely like a man sprang through the opening at her.
The shadowkind man who must have been Omen slammed the guard’s head into the ground with a cracking of her skull. He launched his sinewy frame down the stairs, and the three of us bolted after him.
Another guard had just reached the lower landing. With a snarl, Omen crashed into him, slamming him into the door frame and snapping his neck a second later. He flung the body to the side and raced on.
Then, at the far end of the hall where we’d come in, half a dozen guards rushed into the space. Weapons of metals and light flashed in their hands. We all stalled in our tracks.
They stepped forward, wary but ready, a few more of their colleagues coming in behind them to join the blockade. My pulse lurched.
They were prepared for us now, and there were too many of them. I couldn’t imagine tearing our way through the whole lot, no matter what Omen was.
My hands shot up instinctively, as if I could ward them off—and one of the guards at the front of the pack flinched as if I’d actually flung something at him. More chickenshit than I’d expected. Omen glanced back at me with eyes now icy blue, as if he’d only just noticed I was still with him and his companions.
But flinging my arms around wasn’t going to help us more than that tiny distraction. The guards advanced on us with increasing speed.
“Sorsha!” Thorn’s bellow carried through the walls, followed by the crackle of smashed glass. Omen jerked toward the sound. He sprang back to a door between us and him and shoved it open.
We dashed after him to find shards glinting around one of the small windows I’d observed from outside. Thorn stood beyond it, his harsh cheeks splattered with mortal blood.
“Omen,” he said hoarsely at the sight of his boss. “Come on, all of you, into the shadows. Sorsha, I’ve got you.”
It wasn’t anywhere near the leap it’d been from the apartment building. He swept his arm across the window frame, clearing the splinters of glass. Omen hurled himself through, his form thinning as he soared out into the flood of light. The incubus boosted me after him. As Thorn caught me and swung me onto his back, Ruse and Snap dove after us. Their forms raced through the glow and vanished into the shadows of the construction site.
The alarm was still blaring, frantic shouts breaking through its rhythm. A shot like a sizzling bolt of light smacked the wall less than an inch from us.
Thorn didn’t risk tangling with all these attackers. With me clinging to his shoulders for dear life, too grateful to have him to complain about the indignity, he charged off in the same direction our companions had gone. He dodged beams and boards, smashed through one of the gates at the edge of the site, and hurtled on down the street toward the car.
Ruse had already started the engine, the lights flashing on in the darkness. Thorn and I tumbled into the back seat, and he took off with a screech of the tires.
The bleat of the alarm pealed through my ears from deep within that giant steel skeleton. I couldn’t catch my breath until the cacophony of our escape finally faded away in the depths of the night.
33
Sorsha
The fire crackled within the ring of stones in the derelict campsite we’d stumbled on, miles outside the city. Its heat, sharper than the warmth that lingered at the tail end of the summer night, grazed my face where I was leaning against the side of the car. Its light washed over all of us arranged around the firepit, including the man we’d risked life and limb to save.
Omen stood poised almost directly across from me, his arms folded over his chest as he watched Snap poke at the fire with a long stick. I couldn’t have said he was quite as stunning as the team he’d gathered, though he wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes. I suspected if I’d been a regular mortal passing him on the street, I wouldn’t have given him a second glance other than maybe to check if his ass looked as fit as the rest of his body. But I wasn’t, and something about his presence drew my attention like a moth fluttering to those flames.
Flames that brought to mind the flash of his eyes I’d seen when he first sprang from his cell. He was some kind of shifter, clearly, though not from what I’d glimpsed any standard werewolf or kitsune. And he had more to him than that. I remembered the eyes, yeah, and I also remembered that tail.
Those now icy blue eyes gleamed starkly beneath his sharp brow. His Cupid’s bow lips would have looked dainty, his rounded chin soft, if it wasn’t for the firm set of his jaw. A sense of power and authority emanated off him so intensely I could almost taste it, like a spike of adrenaline and a tang of blood. He’d been around several centuries ago during the war of the angels, and I’d be willing to bet ages before that as well.
He ran his hand over the short, tawny hair slicked close to his skull and raised his gaze to meet mine. My heart lurched under his penetrating inspection, but I held myself still as if it hadn’t affected me. He hadn’t bothered to apologize for or even acknowledge the way he’d lashed out at me when I’d first freed him, though at least the scrape of his claws had barely broken my skin through the sleeve of my shirt. Pickle, perched on my shoulder, squirmed closer to my face with a nervous chirping sound.
Omen’s mouth curled into a smile as chilly as his eyes. “Would the three of you care to explain the mortal in our midst?” He gave the word “mortal” a disdainful taint.
“They needed a leg up navigating the city and figuring out where you’d ended up in it,” I said before the others had to admit to how we’d met. A twinge of protectiveness filled my chest. He didn’t need to know they’d gotten themselves captured too—and by ordinary hunters no less. “I was happy to help. I was raised by a shadowkind woman. I pitch in where I can.”
I’m not afraid of you. Well, maybe a teensy weensy bit, but he didn’t need to know that either.
“She’s part of that group of humans that advocate for mortal-side shadowkind,” Ruse put in with a wave of his hand. “The something-or-other Fund.”
Omen grimaced. “The do-gooders who haven’t the guts to do half enough good to make a real difference. I know of them.”
I bristled at his bland dismissal, but Snap leapt to my defense before I had to. “I don’t know anything about the people Sorsha works with, but she doesn’t have any shortage of courage. Or any other useful quality. We wouldn’t have managed to find you, let alone break you out, if it wasn’t for her.”
Thorn, looming by the hood of the car, inclined his head. “She’s lost a great deal serving our cause and yet refused to back down. I wouldn’t hesitate to fight at her side again.”
Omen considered his three compatriots with the same piercing focus he’d aimed at me. I wasn’t sure what they might have given away about the other directions our relationships had veered in. Maybe the fact that they respected me on any level irked him.
“I thank you, then,” he said finally, turning his attention back to me for a brief moment—and not sounding particularly grateful. “Forgive me my skepticism. I’ve just spent the last innumerable weeks being tortured by your kind; I’m not feeling the friendliest toward any
one mortal at the moment.”
His gaze lingered on me a little longer, as if searching for some reaction to that statement beyond my tight smile of acceptance. A creeping sensation ran over my skin.
“Is that all they wanted?” Ruse said. “To torture higher shadowkind? It seems like an awful lot of trouble just for that.”
“Oh, no, I’m sure they had a much more complex agenda.” Omen rubbed his jaw. “They were attempting to accomplish something with their torment, to discover something, but they were careful not to say very much about it in my presence, so I can’t say what. I do know, given their techniques, it can’t bode well for us. As I suspected, there are humans making some sort of bid to sway the balance of power between mortal and shadowkind.”
My stomach knotted. And we’d left that place standing and full of other captive beings who’d be subjected to even more of that torment. The words tumbled out. “We have to stop them.”
Omen raised his eyebrows at me. “You sound as though you’re including yourself in that ‘we.’”
I lifted my chin. “Of course I am. The same bastards killed the woman who raised me. Even if it wasn’t for that, they deserve to go down. I’m already all in. The rest of the Shadowkind Defense Fund will help as much as they can too, whatever you think of them.”
“So you plan to go running back to them. Or did you think you’d join our little company? Keep in mind that the way we’re going won’t be easy even for us.”
The truth was, I hadn’t had much of a chance to think my options over. I hesitated for a second, but the answer came with a swell of certainty.
Maybe it was the connection I’d started to feel with all three of my trio. Maybe it was the fact that I suspected sticking around would really piss off the man who’d asked the question, and the more he talked, the more the idea of annoying him appealed to me.
