by Eva Chase
As I re-emerged, Betsy roared away down the dirt driveway. I slung the straps over my shoulders, careful of the bandaged wound, and set off at a jog. No time for dillydallying, as my Luna would have said.
It was hard to imagine what she’d make of the woman I’d grown into. Would she have been proud of everything I’d done to rescue the mistreated shadowkind in this world so far or horrified by how much I’d stuck my neck out? True to Omen’s comments about shadowkind attitudes, during the time I’d been with her she’d never shown concern for anyone other than the two of us. I could easily imagine her racing past a hundred caged creatures to spare me from a splinter.
She definitely wouldn’t have approved of the all-black outfit I wore for my thievery—I knew that much. Stealth and sparkles really didn’t mix.
I headed down the New-Age retreat’s overgrown driveway to a quiet road bordered by fallow fields, stretches of woodland, and the occasional farm house. As I loped alongside the ditch, I scanned all of those for anything worth putting those thieving skills to use on.
The sun crept up across the sky, and the heat intensified with it. Sweat trickled down my back.
I must have covered at least a couple of miles before I spotted my salvation: a mud-splattered bicycle leaning against a fence post, ratty tassels drooping from the ends of its handlebars. Not my typical plunder—I was more a gems and rare coins kind of gal—but right now I’d take that bike over the Hope Diamond.
No, let’s be real: I’d take the Hope Diamond, but then I’d steal the bicycle too.
It was obviously a kid’s bike, but a big kid’s, at least. I couldn’t have pedaled it while perched on the seat without hitting my chin with my knees. So, I gripped the gritty plastic handlebars and took off with my ass up in the air like I was about to race in the Tour de France.
As methods of transportation go, you’d be better off not following my lead. I bounced along the potholed country roads for the better part of an hour, until my thighs and back ached almost as badly as my wounded shoulder, and my eyes were stinging with sweat. Thankfully, my vision wasn’t so blurry that I missed the delivery truck at the pumps of a gas station up ahead.
The delivery truck with its back door ajar.
There weren’t many places around here that a truck that size would be taking its cargo to. I dropped the bike at the edge of the station and slunk over. The driver had his elbow leaned out the window as he chatted with the attendant who was running his credit card.
“Not my favorite type of load, but you’ve got to take whatever you can get these days. At least it’s a short drive to the city.”
Jackpot. I eased the rear door farther up and squeezed under it.
I found myself in a dim, hot space that smelled like straw and shit. Rustles filled the air all around me, punctuated by an occasional… cluck?
I was surrounded by chickens. A hen in the cage closest to me attempted to peck me through the bars.
“Mind your beak,” I whispered at her, thinking various curses very intently in Omen’s general direction, and hugged my legs to my chest as I prepared for a long ride.
By the time I made out city buildings through the gap under the door, I probably smelled like a chicken coop myself, but I’d made it to my destination with a half an hour to spare. I rolled out when the truck stopped at a red light, summoned an Uber while picking bits of straw off my clothes, and told the driver who showed up to take me to the Finger.
The Finger wasn’t the official name of the gigantic statue that loomed in the middle of one of the largest downtown squares, but good luck finding anyone who could tell you what else it might be called. Erected a few decades ago by some avant-garde artiste, the tower of chunks of varnished wood held together by steel struts looked like nothing so much as a massive hand giving the buildings around it the middle finger. Naturally, it was the city’s most popular landmark.
When I hopped out at the edge of the cobblestone courtyard at ten minutes to noon, several tourists were clustered around the Finger taking selfies. There was no sign of any shadowkind, but I wouldn’t have expected to find them basking in the sunlight. As I strolled over to the structure, the four of them appeared as if they’d simply stepped from around its other side rather than straight out of the shadows.
“You see,” Snap said happily if carefully, to make sure no one around us noticed his forked tongue. “Of course she made it.”
With his baseball cap on to cover his horns in mortals’ view, Ruse sauntered over to pluck something out of my hair. He tapped my cheek with a chicken feather. “I won’t ask.”
Funnily enough, Omen didn’t look remotely pleased. “You cut it close,” he said, as if even making it at the last second wouldn’t have been an incredible feat, and immediately turned away. He jabbed a finger toward a police officer who’d paused to buy a hot dog from a stand at the other end of the square. “I hear you consider yourself some kind of master thief. Steal that cop’s cap for me.”
Oh, he wanted to up the ante now, did he?
Thorn tugged at the fingerless leather gloves that disguised his crystalline knuckles but always seemed to irritate him. “Omen,” he started.
I shook my head to hold off the warrior’s protest. “Not a problem. I’ll just need a moment to prepare.”
Omen crossed his arms, giving me a disbelieving scowl. I ignored him as I took the lay of the land. He was going to find out soon enough that I wouldn’t give up—not until the bastards we were both after met a fate at least as horrible as they’d given to their shadowkind victims.
I could use a strategy I’d seen Auntie Luna turn to more than once when her fae glamours and other spells wouldn’t do the trick. Collide and divert. I wasn’t quite as petite and bubbly as she’d been, but I could pull it off nearly as well.
While the cop chowed down on his street meat, I jogged around the nearby streets until I found a performer with an open case strumming her guitar at an intersection. I held out a twenty and patted my wallet when she grabbed it.
“I’ll give you four more of those if you scream as loud as you can, five minutes from now,” I said, pointing at her watch, and added at her quizzical look, “Set it to music if you want. No scream, no cash.”
There wasn’t going to be any cash anyway, but hey, just the twenty was a lot of money when I’d lost nearly all my earthly possessions last week.
I hoofed it back to the square, watching the minutes tick by on my phone. When there was only one left, I took off across the cobblestones at a breakneck run.
The cop had just finished his hot dog. He dabbed at his mouth rather daintily with a paper napkin—and I slammed right into him, looking back over my shoulder as if I were paying more attention to something behind me than to where I was going. Still, I managed to swing my heel against his ankle to knock him right off his feet.
We both tumbled over, my arm flying up and smacking his cap to ensure it detached from his head. Since I wasn’t a total fiend, I jerked my elbow to the side before it would have rammed him in the throat. We hit the ground with a shared grunt.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry, so so sorry,” I babbled, scrambling up. “It’s just—There was—” I gestured wildly toward the direction I’d come from, widening my eyes as far as they would go.
The cop had barely righted himself when the street musician let out the scream I wouldn’t be paying her for, high and shrill—and maybe with a riff on her guitar, but I didn’t think the cop noticed that. He bolted up faster than anything, too alarmed to bother with his cap, and dashed off to see what devious crime was being committed two blocks away.
I swiped the cap off the cobblestones and ambled back to where Omen and the others were waiting. With a bow, I presented the prick with his prize. “Ta da. Please, don’t hold your applause.”
Ruse chuckled and clapped. Omen glared at me. “If you think this will—”
“I think,” I said, already backing away, “that you’ve got nothing to complain about in my perform
ance, and I deserve a little break as my reward. I’ll meet you all back here at five—or I’ll hitchhike my way back to the cabin, if you’d prefer.”
I gave Bossypants a cheeky salute, and then I spun on my heel and hailed a passing cab.
Between his knife trick last night and this round of testing, Omen couldn’t have made it clearer how he felt about my presence. I’d just have to show him what humans were capable of when they had allies of their own kind at their back. I needed a shower and a moment to breathe, and then I was going to steal myself a little mortal support.
Only after I’d already picked the lock to the apartment and snuck inside did it occur to me just how bad my approach to a surprise visit might come across to someone who wasn’t in the habit of breaking and entering on a regular basis.
Ellen and Huyen, the married leaders of the Shadowkind Defense Fund, were film fanatics. They owned a second-run theater just down the street from the apartment, where they usually held the Fund’s meetings to discuss how we could protect the shadowkind creatures in our realm from the humans who preyed on them. So it wasn’t surprising to find their walls adorned with framed vintage movie posters and mounted memorabilia like a Godfather fedora and a license plate from North by Northwest. They even had a literal gun on their mantelpiece.
Based on the movies they’d chosen to display, it looked like suspense flicks and film noir were their favorite genres. Which meant they’d probably watched at least a dozen scenes where a character walked into their darkened home only to find an unexpected intruder waiting, sitting casually in an armchair, perhaps with a dramatic clicking on of a lamp.
I wanted to ask the Fund’s leaders for their help, not give them a heart attack. At least it wasn’t all that dark at three in the afternoon, when I knew they always popped back home for a late lunch break after the first round of matinees. Taking the sneaky route was the only way I could talk to them without any chance someone from the sword-star crew would see me with them and decide to make the two women their next targets.
I might have risked relocking the door and waiting for them in the hall, but before I’d quite decided, their key clicked in the lock. Oh well, I guessed I was stuck doing this the creepy way.
The couple walked in, Ellen in mid-sentence exclaiming about her ideas for new popcorn flavors to inflict on Fund members at upcoming meetings. Seeing me in the living room doorway, they both halted in their tracks. I raised my hand in an apologetic wave of greeting. “Hi?”
Ellen glanced between me and the door and back again, strands of her frizzy, graying hair flying around her face where they’d escaped from her loose bun. “Sorsha, what on earth—How did you—”
I held up both my hands before she could finish that question. “Let’s not worry about that right now. I’m really sorry to surprise you like this. I just didn’t think it’d be safe to talk anywhere else. There’s something big going on—something that’s hurting a whole lot of shadowkind.”
I’d known that fact would override every other aspect of the situation. Ellen and Huyen were as dedicated to their cause as they were to their love of movies; they just couldn’t show off the former anywhere near as openly. Ellen pursed her lips, but she didn’t dial 911 or even tell me to take a hike, like most sane people would have.
“What’s going on?” she asked in her throaty voice.
Might as well serve up the meat of it before they lost their patience. “I’ve found out that there’s a large, well-organized group that’s hunting not just lesser shadowkind but higher as well—capturing them and keeping them to run experiments. I’ve talked to a higher shadowkind who managed to escape”—no reason to mention that I’d orchestrated that escape; one case of breaking and entering would look bad enough—“and he’s said it’s basically torture. We don’t know what they want to accomplish, but this is too huge and horrible to ignore.”
Ellen’s mouth had tightened too, but with obvious distress. “Hunting higher shadowkind—running experiments on them? Who are these people?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “They’re very good at covering their tracks. That’s why I’m hoping the Fund can use our resources to uncover more information and push back. But they—they already know I’m trying to stop them, and they’ve attacked me because of that. I didn’t want to risk them tracing me to the theater. If we’re going to meet to discuss this, it needs to be someplace else, and everyone who comes needs to be careful about it.”
Huyen glanced at her wife, her tan skin graying. “I don’t know. This sounds like it might be too big for us to tackle.”
“Not if we’re smart about it,” I said quickly. “Not if we work fast.”
“What did we even start the Fund for if we’re not going to intervene when there’s a major problem?” Ellen asked.
Huyen didn’t look convinced. I sucked my lower lip under my teeth, my gaze skimming over the posters around us for inspiration.
“If anyone’s prepared to take them on, it’s you.” I motioned to the Hitchcock pictures, to the spy capers and crime dramas. “You can put all the strategies you’ve watched to good use. We’re the underdogs going up against the corrupt conspirators… Don’t turn into one of the complicit wimps who tells the heroes they’re on their own.”
Resolve sparked in Huyen’s dark eyes. “Okay, that’s quite the pitch. I’m not promising anything yet, but why don’t we all sit down, and you can tell us everything you already know.”
4
Thorn
“You went where?” Omen said. His voice had become even flatter and colder than it’d been for most of the past two days, but I’d known him long enough to recognize the crackling undercurrent of heat that ran through it. To say that he and our mortal lady were not getting along would be putting it very mildly.
Sorsha set her hands on her hips. She was always rather striking to behold, now that I’d allowed myself to acknowledge it, but I enjoyed watching her most when circumstances brought out the ferocity in her temperament. Unfortunately, recently those “circumstances” had mostly been our commander.
“They’re the leaders of the local branch of the Shadowkind Defense Fund,” she said. “If anyone can give us a hand with our investigations, it’s them. We are dealing with mortal enemies, after all. Who better than mortals to figure out what they’re up to?”
Omen rolled his eyes skyward. It wasn’t the most awe-inspiring view, standing where we’d gathered in a laneway between a glossy office building and the slightly taller residential tower beside it. A rich but bitter scent wafted from the coffee shop on the office building’s ground floor. The clientele exited through the front, though, and the tower had no balconies below the tenth floor, leaving the laneway quiet.
Which meant Omen didn’t need to raise his voice even slightly for it to cut crisply through the silence. “It’s bad enough having any mortals entangled in our affairs. I’m not interested in shepherding a whole flock of them.”
“You don’t have to see them or talk to them,” Sorsha said. “I’m the go-between; I’ll handle everything. You never asked me not to try to bring them on board.”
His eyes narrowed. “I assumed you were sharp enough to realize that without my saying it. Apparently not.”
“We got some useful tips from Sorsha’s Fund friends before,” Ruse put in. “They led us to the hacker. Why not see what they come up with?”
“Yes,” Omen said with a sarcastic edge, “why not find out how quickly they can turn our efforts into a total clusterfuck?” He turned back to Sorsha. “You want to do things your way? I’m still not convinced even you can keep up with us. Do you think you’re up to another challenge, or will you run away again?”
“I didn’t run away.” Sorsha sighed. “Lay it on me, Luce. What death-defying stunt have you got for me now?”
Omen’s eyes narrowed at the nickname, and I restrained a wince. Of course the incubus with all his teasing would have brought that up—but our lady couldn’t know just how charged th
at reference to our commander’s long-ago exploits was for him. Omen had been quite a trickster himself when I’d first known him, but everything about his demeanor since he’d recruited me to his current cause showed how utterly he’d erased that past from his being. If he could have erased it from all memory as well, I expected he would have.
As he cast his gaze upward again, I braced myself. It seemed he had gotten something out of the view after all, because a moment later, he pointed toward the top of the residential tower. “There’s a flower pot with an orange blossom on the highest balcony, by the far corner. Do you see it?”
Sorsha peered upward. “Yep. What about it?”
“I’d like to see you steal that… without taking advantage of the building’s elevator or stairs. Without going into the building at all.”
My defensive instincts sprang to the forefront with an inner clang of alarm. Sorsha might be able to scale the outside of the building—once she reached the lower balconies, it wouldn’t require too much of a jump between them—but with each floor she climbed, she’d be tempting a fall. And by the time she made it to the twentieth or so floor, that fall would almost certainly be fatal.
Omen was smiling. It didn’t matter to him whether she lived or died. I was starting to think he’d prefer her dead.
It’d become clear that arguing with him about Sorsha’s worthiness wouldn’t convince him. From the determined clenching of Sorsha’s jaw, I knew she wouldn’t refuse the trial. I was hardly going to stand here and watch her throw caution—and perhaps herself—to the wind without a care, though.
The thought of what I was about to offer sent a constricting sensation through my chest, but I could handle it discreetly. I stepped forward. “I’d like to confer with the mortal one for a minute.”
Omen frowned at me, but I caught a flicker of curiosity in his eyes too. He knew I didn’t bestow my loyalty liberally.
