by Eva Chase
I’d learned my lesson. I damn well better have.
I pulled back, leaving Sorsha flushed and breathless against the wall. A faint glint caught in her eyes in the darkness—a shimmer of tears that had formed before I’d taken her mind off her injury.
“No one’s coming,” I said. “I think it was just an accident, not an attack. We should do something for that wrist. I mean, something more permanent than my immediate efforts.”
I winked, and she managed to grin at me, her mouth twisting as the pain must have caught up with her again.
“I can still do my part in the ambush,” she insisted in a strained voice as we crept out of the stall. “I’m not letting any of you tell me otherwise.”
How was my heart supposed to be still when she talked like that, all ardent defiance? But I hadn’t spent centuries dealing in desire to fail at curtailing my own, even if it wasn’t quite the desire I was used to. I made a flourish with my hand for her to leave the barn ahead of me, as if this had all been a bit of fun.
When Omen returned, he didn’t even try to argue with Sorsha. He knew battle wounds well enough to fashion a rough splint for her wrist, glaring at the limb the whole time even though I’d made it clear she hadn’t been remotely careless. But it turned out none of us had any parts to play. The hour of the supposed hand-off arrived and passed, and another hour after that, until each passing minute left my stomach balled tighter.
“They’re not coming, are they?” Snap said finally.
Omen scanned the farmyard, his expression grim. “No, it appears they aren’t. Let’s hope that means they got scared off by our last ambush and not that they have something worse planned. Time to move out—and make sure that as far as they can tell, no shadowkind were ever here.”
11
Sorsha
My nerves stayed jittery the whole way back to the cabin. I didn’t like that the Company had apparently changed their plans, not at all. They’d never been the fickle type before.
Omen took the windingest of winding routes, and every honk or laugh that carried from the street around us had me jerking around with a hitch of my pulse. Which wasn’t great, because every sudden movement took my probably-broken wrist from the deep but dull ache it’d settled into back to sharp, stabbing throbs for the next few minutes. I couldn’t even bring myself to ponder the mystery of the car’s smoky-savory-minerally car smell.
But even though the eerie stillness of the farm had been supremely suspicious, we made it back to the New-Age retreat unobstructed. I wouldn’t have minded popping into a hospital on the way, but Omen seemed determined not to make any more stops tonight, and I wasn’t going to tell him I couldn’t take the pain.
“First thing in the morning, we’ll find a quiet little clinic where I can ‘encourage’ a doctor into giving you a proper cast,” Ruse assured me when we got out by the cabin.
“I might have a better solution than that,” Omen said curtly, and didn’t follow up that proclamation with any further detail. Just Bossypants being super helpful as always.
I yawned and considered both the makeshift splint and my exhaustion. “Well, I think I’m tired enough to sleep as long as I don’t put any pressure on it.” I paused, eyeing both the incubus and Snap. “So, I’ll need the whole bed to myself, no company. Just FYI.”
Ruse let out a chuckle that sounded oddly emphatic. “Have no worries on that score, Miss Blaze.”
“Do you need anything else?” Snap asked, as if he could have produced whatever I asked for out of the woodlands around us.
“No, rest and a doctor in the morning sounds perfect. But thank you.” I gave him a quick peck for good measure. When I glanced at Ruse, meaning to offer him the same gesture, he averted his gaze and turned as if to inspect the trees. All righty then. I could recognize a brush-off when I saw one, even if I had no idea what bee had gotten into the incubus’s bonnet.
Picturing Ruse swapping his baseball cap disguise for an actual bonnet and taking way too much amusement from the image, I headed into the cabin. By the bunk bed I’d been using, I stopped to fumble with my cat burglar outfit’s belt. Maybe I should have asked one of my lovers to join me for just a little platonic action. Undressing one-handed was pretty tricky.
I settled for only removing the belt with its dangling tools and stuffed all that into my backpack with a sharp tug of the zipper. At the sound, Pickle came scampering out of the bathroom. I’d barely had time to give him a scratch under his chin when the world went to hell around me.
A crash split the air, then a thump and a volley of shouts, most of them voices I didn’t recognize. My heart stopped. No time for that rest right now after all, unless I wanted to be doing it six feet under.
I snatched up my backpack and my purse—and, shit, Pickle. Scooping up the little dragon one-handed, I tossed him into the purse with so little grace he squealed in protest. As I wheeled around, pawing at the backpack for the tools I’d just put away, a figure in silver-and-iron armor crashed through the cabin window.
Shards of glass pelted the arm I raised to protect my face. Thankfully, my fighting instincts kicked in, honed by the self defense classes Luna had made me take—I sent up a silent apology to her spirit for ever complaining about those. The guy lunged at me, and I knocked his feet out from under him with a swipe of my leg. As he caught himself on the post of one of the bunk beds, I groped with my good hand for any hard object I could turn into a weapon.
My fingers collided with a big, jagged hunk of rose quartz on the tiny dresser. Time for it to do something other than look pretty and emanate loving vibes.
The guy swung at me again, but his weapon—one of those blazing whips—wasn’t much use in the tight space. Before he could fling it at me, I walloped him in the head with the pointy end of the crystal. He swayed but managed to throw a punch that clocked me in the jaw.
I reeled backward, my head spinning, and he smacked the crystal out of my hand. I grasped hold of the next nearest object, which turned out to be my lovely lawnmower candle. Thank goodness for thick glass jars. I mashed that right into his nose, hard enough that blood spurted from his nostrils.
As he swore at me, I fled out the cabin door. Pickle squeaked in distress at the bumping of my purse against my ribs, but I didn’t have a chance to steady him, especially when my one functional hand held my only means of defense.
Outside was even more of a shit-show. The moonlight glinted off protective helmets and vests all across the clearing. Thorn let out a bellow as he thwacked a few of our attackers off him, but their weapons had slashed across his bulging arms deeply enough that even in the darkness I could make out hazy mist trickling out of the wounds.
Shadowkind didn’t bleed like we did, not that red liquid mess. Sever what should have been a vein or an artery, and their essence wisped out as black smoke.
Another form careened through the night, chomping and gouging unshielded calves and bellies left and right. I’d barely seen more of Omen than a blur when he’d first barged out of his jail cell, and then he’d been flickering somewhere between his shifted form and his more human appearance, but I knew this had to be him—and now he was all beast.
The enormous, hound-like demon-dog could have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me, and I was no shorty. In place of the icy blue eyes I was used to, its gaze blazed a fiery orange. The same searing glow coursed amid its dark gray fur like rivulets of molten magma across a volcanic plane. Fangs as long as my index finger gleamed with each snap of its jaws. The devilishly pointed tail I remembered lashed through the air, wrenching a knife from one attacker’s hand.
I’d never seen a shadowkind like that before, but Luna had told me stories of some of the more frightening creatures you could encounter, mostly to dissuade me from begging her to find a way to take me into the shadow realm so I could experience it for myself. I was looking at what most mortals would have called a hellhound.
In the midst of the chaos, I was struck by a fleeting eureka moment. So that was
the source of Betsy’s smell. Instead of your typical doggy odor, Omen’s presence had marked it with sulfur and hellfire.
The Company’s people clearly hadn’t caught him by as much surprise as during their first ambush, but despite his ferocity and strength alongside Thorn’s, our attackers were closing in on us. They hadn’t skimped on manpower.
One guy sprang at me, and I beat him off with the candle jar, just as another came charging toward me from the other direction with one of the Company’s nets. Did he figure I was a shadowkind, or did they just want to take all of us alive for questioning? My breath hitching in my throat, I lobbed the jar at his face.
He must have been holding a lighter or something that I hadn’t seen. The candle’s entire wick flared to life as the jar’s mouth smacked into him, and hot wax splashed into his eyes. He dropped the net with a howl.
Thorn barreled toward me just as another attacker swerved my way. The warrior pummeled him three feet in the air with one of his mighty fists and spun to shield me. “Take cover—the car!”
Abandoning him to keep fighting on my behalf sent a jab of guilt through my gut, but he wouldn’t leave until I had a safe route out of here. And the station wagon was my only hope of a quick escape.
A figure already sat in the driver’s seat—a blond surfer-looking dude. Confusion washed over me for a second before I realized it was the disguising spell on the windows. The guy inside had to be Ruse, having slipped inside through the shadows now ready to make a getaway.
I was just a few steps from the door when the Company people must have noticed my mad dash. A louder shout rang out, and something shrieked through the air over my head. I had just enough sense left in my spinning head to duck, my good arm coming up over my head.
Whatever explosive our attackers had hurled, it hit the hood of the station wagon—and blasted a burst of flame all across poor Betsy. I hit the ground, my skin stinging from the heat. A lance of pain shot through my injured wrist, a duller throbbing waking up in my bandaged shoulder. I hissed, nicking my lip with my teeth.
Someone grabbed my good arm—Ruse, his cacao smell turned smoky from the wafts of heat streaming off the station wagon. “This way!” He hauled me onto my feet and toward the drive.
I glanced back toward Thorn and Omen. “But—”
“We’re not leaving them behind. I’m a firm believer in back-up plans.”
Snap wavered out of the night up ahead and beckoned us onward. “I found it! There’s only one man there—I think he has the keys—” He gazed past us to the crackling mess that had been our previous method of transportation. “And we need them, don’t we?”
“Lead the way,” Ruse said. “And make it snappy, Snap.”
The devourer had enough sense of humor left to give a flicker of a smile as he whipped back toward the road. “Down the road this way,” he said, pointing.
The gray shape of a large van came into view beyond the trees. Ruse smiled. “Perfect. We’ll go through the shadows and only emerge when we’re as close as we can get. Between the two of us, we should be able to knock him over. Sorsha, you can get his gear off?”
I gripped the strap of my purse, crisscrossed with the backpack I’d never gotten the chance to take off, thank Merlin’s magic. My jaw was aching from clenching against the pain in my wrist. “I’ll do my best.”
Ruse nodded and turned to Snap again. “Then I can convince him we’re all just having a friendly party. As soon as he’s subdued, you bring Omen and Thorn.”
Without another word, they both vanished into the darkness again. I pelted onward, sweat beading on my brow. “Just another manic run-day,” I sang to myself under my breath, but even The Bangles’ bouncy tune couldn’t lift my spirits right now.
The guy guarding the van looked up at my footsteps when I was still a short sprint away, but my shadowy companions had gotten there first. His hand jerked up, a pistol clasped in his grip, and Ruse and Snap appeared right behind him, slamming his legs so he toppled over.
I dropped to my knees to wrench off his helmet. Ruse grasped the man’s head and Snap sat on his legs while I fumbled with the snaps on the vest.
“A lot easier with two hands,” I muttered, but after what felt like a million years, I was yanking that off too.
The incubus immediately started speaking in his smooth, cajoling tone. A magical thrum resonated through his voice. “We’re all just having a little fun: a night-time game of tag. You and your partners had the wrong idea coming in here. No one wants to hurt anyone else. Happy times all around.”
I raised my eyebrows at him, but the guard was already falling into a subdued daze. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry. No one passed on the message.”
Snap flitted off into the darkness. As Ruse kept charming the guard, I checked the guy’s pockets for the keys to the van. “Don’t mind me. Just a little friendly groping.”
He didn’t look offended. I fished the keys out and opened up the driver’s side door. I obviously wasn’t driving in my current state, but I’d shit silver dollars before I let myself be crammed in the windowless cargo area.
I settled my purse and the deeply disturbed Pickle on the floor by the front passenger seat, tucked my backpack beside them—and ducked as a gunshot rang out from someplace much closer than I’d ever have preferred.
Ruse’s voice rose. “If you could do me a quick favor, pal? Run on over there and tell your colleagues that there are more shadowkind coming from the north. If they hurry, they can tag ‘em all.”
“Yes, right, of course,” the guard said, and trundled off toward the figures I could see just emerging from the driveway.
“Buckle your seatbelt,” Ruse said breathlessly, diving in behind the steering wheel. He obviously didn’t trust that his gambit would delay our pursuers long enough for us to laze around.
I shoved the keys into his hand, he gunned the engine, and to my vast relief, three figures popped into the space behind us with a whiff of Snap’s mossy scent, the sulphuric odor I now knew belonged to our hellhound shifter, and far too much of Thorn’s smoky blood.
Ruse hit the gas and hauled at the steering wheel. The van screeched around in as tight a U-turn as he could manage, engine sputtering, and roared off down the country road with bits of gravel rattling like machine-gun fire against the undercarriage.
Two more shots rang out behind us. One clipped the side mirror beside my door, and I flinched. But then we skidded around a bend and left our enemies far behind.
“Well,” I said, with as much optimism as I could summon, “we all got out alive. And in one piece… I hope?”
Omen’s cold voice carried darkly from behind me. “All of us except Betsy. Any thoughts on how you’re going to repay that debt, mortal?”
12
Sorsha
“Just keep quiet and let me handle everything,” Omen said as we walked down the street, the others trailing through the shadows around us.
I grimaced at him. “I know, I know. You’ve been telling me how much I should shut up ever since you brought up these friends of yours.”
“They’re not my friends. They owe me a favor. A few favors, really. Which is a good thing for you, considering I’m down one heavily enchanted car.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who must have led them to our hide-out.”
He stopped in his tracks to glare at me. The late morning sun searing off his blue eyes turned them almost as fiery as when they’d been the color of flames last night. My skin itched with the suspicion that if I pushed that line of thought harder, he might transform into his hellhound self so he could literally bite off my head.
“It was your human hacker contact who pointed us in the wrong direction,” he said. “And we wouldn’t have needed a hideout in the first place if your mortal body didn’t require sleep. I don’t think it’s in your best interests if we start tallying up the full score.”
I didn’t see how it was my fault his car had gotten blown up. How the hell had I been supposed to g
et to it without running toward it? But to be honest, while the shadowkind boss had grumbled plenty about the loss since we’d ditched the Company’s van in the wee hours of the morning, he hadn’t been quite as caustic with me as I’d have expected.
Another suspicion itched at me: something was up. Maybe he was being slightly less awful to me for the time being because he was about to offer me up to his past associates as dinner?
He set off again, walking fast enough that I had to hustle to keep pace. Then I saw the building he was leading us toward, and all other questions fell to the wayside.
“That’s where they run their business?”
The parking lot he’d moved to cut across sprawled outside of a sleek, dusky block of a building with a sign that would have been lit up in neon if it’d been opening hours yet. A sign with a buxom lady in a bikini holding a martini glass, next to the words, Paradise Bar & Dancers. If you looked up “strip club” in an encyclopedia, it’d probably have a picture of this place.
“Quiet,” Omen said in a harsh undertone, and added, equally low. “It’s not for the male members of the gang. They’ve got a succubus in the mix—this allows her easy feeding.”
Right, and I was sure the shadowkind men who ran their criminal syndicate operations out of the place didn’t get so much as a smidgeon of enjoyment out of the boobs and butts on display.
Maybe Ruse would perk up in the presence of another cubi type. He’d seemed a little down this morning, his smirks pale around the edges. Unnerved by the fact that the Company had tracked us down yet again despite all our precautions? Or was whatever had turned him standoffish last night still eating at him?
I did manage to keep my mouth shut as Omen rapped on the glass door. A woman in a dress designed to draw your eyes to exactly the few body parts it covered opened it and waved us in with a bored expression. Omen had called ahead so his friends—excuse me, owers of favors—would be expecting us.
