by Eva Chase
Ruse blinked, looking genuinely taken aback. “Totally out of the blue—no arguments beforehand? Not that up and leaving that way would be normal even under those circumstances, as far as I understand it.”
“Nope. As far as I knew, nothing had changed. He left a note…” I swallowed hard. “He said he felt like he was lying when he told me he loved me, that he couldn’t seem to fall in love with me because I wasn’t quite what he needed. That’s the last I ever heard from him. He ghosted me completely. I hadn’t even seen him again until tonight.”
“This may not be much comfort, but if that’s how he deals with his problems, I’d say you’re better off without him, Miss Blaze.”
“Obviously. I just…” I just had never quite been able to shake the question of what I’d been lacking that had made me unlovable. But maybe I knew now. Maybe there was something not quite right about me that he’d been able to sense even if he couldn’t have put it into words.
I didn’t want to linger in the chill of that possibility.
“It would have been hard to take when you were so fond of him,” Ruse filled in for me.
“Well, yeah.” I gave myself a little shake and forced my tone to turn wry. “It doesn’t matter. What’s so great about a normal life anyway? I’m having way more fun fleeing murderous psychos on a daily basis.”
Ruse chuckled. “Your involvement with the shadowkind has brought a certain sort of excitement into your life, hasn’t it?”
That was one way of putting it. But I did want him to know— “I don’t regret breaking you three out of those cages one bit. I let some of the things that should have mattered slide while I was with Malachi, not wanting to risk him getting caught up in any trouble I got into. It was only after he left that I really started going after the collectors, emancipating their zoos and all that. So I suppose you could say I’ve decided to be married to my work.”
“We’d certainly be in a much worse position if it wasn’t for that,” Ruse said with amusement, but the intentness of his gaze suggested he hadn’t totally bought my nonchalance about the break-up.
For a minute or two, we sat in silence. A plane flew by far overhead, its tiny light flashing. Then the incubus said, “It might make you feel better to know that from what I’ve seen, love doesn’t come all that easily to anyone.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “You haven’t exactly been pursuing that kind of relationship to speak from experience.”
He smiled crookedly. “Not generally, no. But—and I’ll thank you not to mention this to any of our companions—there was one woman, a little more than a century ago. She enjoyed our initial interlude so much that I found myself returning to her, and now and then we would talk before or after… or during… and I found I enjoyed much more about her than the physical satisfaction.”
It was my turn to blink at him. An incubus falling in love? I wouldn’t have thought the cubi kind were even capable of that—but maybe that was my own prejudice, as enlightened about the shadowkind as I liked to believe I was.
Ruse didn’t meet my gaze, still staring up at the sky. “It was ridiculous, of course. When I attempted to spark something beyond our encounters of the carnal kind, she made it very clear she only wanted me around for getting her off. Put me right in my place. An embarrassing blip in an otherwise illustrious career, but I guess we all have our lessons to learn.”
I studied his roguishly handsome face, trying to picture what kind of woman would turn any of Ruse’s attentions away. He’d gotten me off impressively well between the sheets, sure—I had no complaints there—but my fondest associations with him had nothing to do with the bedroom. There’d been the night he’d gotten us all dancing to one of Luna’s old CDs to lift my spirits. All the ways he goofed around to counter Thorn’s sternness. The delight he seemed to take in filling Snap in on all the weird and wonderful parts of the mortal realm.
The fact that he’d come after me tonight and made sure I was all right—and that he’d done it without turning it into a big to-do.
“She didn’t know what she was missing,” I said in all seriousness.
Ruse flashed another smile at me. “How kind of you to say.”
“I mean it.” And driven by an instinct I couldn’t deny, I leaned in to kiss him.
I half expected him to pull back from the kiss, to confirm the disinterest I thought I’d picked up on earlier. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The second my lips brushed his, Ruse pushed himself up to better meet me. His mouth seared hot against mine, and his fingers teased into my hair to urge me closer. I found myself gripping his shirt, lost in the wave of sensation he could provoke so easily.
“You’re perfect,” he muttered against my lips. “Don’t let any mortal prick convince you otherwise.”
There were other pricks I was much more interested in paying attention to right now—one in particular, behind those fitted slacks. As he claimed my mouth even more scorchingly than before, I let my hand trail down his chest to his fly, just to be completely clear that I was up for more than a quick make-out.
My fingers grazed the erection already hardening behind the smooth fabric, and Ruse groaned low in his throat. The sound of his desire—his desire for me—sent a tingling rush through my chest. His grip on my hair tightened, the pressure drawing sparks through my scalp.
He rolled us so he was nearly on top of me, and right then I’d have happily welcomed him on top of that plaster mountain or up against it, or any other way he wanted this to go down. My worries about him using his abilities on me, messing with my mind, seemed absurd now.
No wonder he’d been nervous enough to break his promise and take that one peek inside my head that he had, if the only other time he’d believed a woman might want more than his sexual talents, he’d had his heart broken.
Ruse delved his tongue between my lips and eased his thigh between my legs to pay back some of the friction I’d offered him. I gasped, arching into him automatically.
My hand came up to find one of the curved points of his horns where it protruded from his hair just above his ears. He’d seemed to enjoy it when I touched those. I curled my fingers around it, his tongue twined with mine, and for a few seconds, nothing else in the world existed.
Only a few seconds, though. Without warning, Ruse’s shoulders tensed. He drew back, his breath momentarily ragged while he gathered himself.
“Not the best place for this,” he said, a twinkle dancing in his eyes. “And I really shouldn’t be keeping you from your sleep anymore. Darkness knows Omen will be whipping us off on some new quest first thing in the morning.”
I sat up, my giddiness fading. As we climbed down from the fake mountain and headed back toward the camper van, I couldn’t shake the impression that those excuses hadn’t been the whole truth, or maybe even most of it.
Ruse had told me more than he’d admitted to any of the shadowkind tonight, but there was something else going on with our incubus—something he didn’t want to say to anyone at all.
16
Sorsha
Occasionally, my dreams were pretty damn delicious. A three-foot-high stack of waffles layered with custard and blueberries and drizzled with enough syrup to give Snap a spontaneous orgasm? Who cared if it was obviously unreal?
I searched the table for a fork, and suddenly in that way dreams had, it wasn’t waffles but all three of my trio stretched out before me. Mouth-wateringly naked. Eyes come-hither. Still being drizzled with syrup.
Um, yes please, I’d take a bite out of all that. I leaned in to lick a trickle of sweetness off Thorn’s massively muscled chest—and fuck all that was just and juicy if some asshole didn’t yank me awake before I got even a taste.
A harsh voice was rasping by my ear. “Sorsha!” My pulse stuttered, and I thrashed aside the blanket I’d curled up under on one of the camper van’s padded benches.
Omen loomed over me in the thin dawn light, his brimstone scent sharp around us. He hauled at my arm aga
in. “Get up, they’re on us—get out of here unless you want to be barbeque.”
A crash and a metallic crunching reverberated through the air from somewhere beyond the van walls. My blearily sleep—and syrup—deprived mind couldn’t quite process what was going on other than it was something very bad and apparently staying here would make it even worse. I lurched off the bench and dashed out the back of the van with the shadowkind boss.
He leapt up the funhouse’s steps, tugging me with him, and propelled me through the entrance into the darkness. “Go, go, go!”
Go where? I sprinted through the shadowy halls, his urgency spurring me on even though I had no idea why it made any sense to be running away in here. Was this another dream? If so, I really needed to have a chat with my subconscious about appropriate transition points.
A figure sprang out of the darkness, hurtling right toward me. I flung myself to the side—and slammed into the cool glass of a mirror. The figure in front of me heaved sideways and winced too.
Oh, that was my reflection. Not looking so hot on three hours of sleep.
I whirled around in the hall of mirrors, barely able to make out more than blurred impressions of movement in the darkness. Were those shapes all me?
No—that one darted at me with a slash of some glinting blade. I threw myself past it, smacked my hand against a nearby mirror to push myself around a corner, and nearly pinged off another reflective panel.
An explosive sounding boom echoed through the walls, rattling the glass. My heart thudded faster.
As my breath stung in my raw throat, I dashed on. Something thwacked my shoulder. A searing hiss wound through the air from somewhere overhead.
I veered around another corner and pelted at full speed into a room full of hanging punching bags painted with smirking clowns. Welcome to heart-attack land! I pummeled my way through the dangling obstacles, the bags battering me this way and that as they swung back into me.
A metallic screech from behind me made my nerves jump. I bashed my way past the last of the freakish clowns and bolted into the next room, only to find myself swaying back and forth as if I’d careened onto a raft on stormy water.
The floor—the floor itself was warped into weird undulations, bending this way and that under my feet. I teetered to my left and almost fell to my knees.
Omen’s voice rang out from somewhere in the distance. “Sorsha, hurry! Get to the roof!”
Then a distinctive squeal sounded almost directly above me. Panic raced through me with an icy jolt.
Pickle! What were these fuckers doing to my little dragon?
I scrambled onward across the topsy-turvy floor. By the time I reached the far end, I wasn’t just exhausted but woozy too, as if I’d had a couple of shots too many.
There was a stairwell. I pounded up the spiral steps to the second floor, ignored the rest of the wacky gauntlet for the door that must guard the route to the roof, and rammed my heel into the knob. To my momentary relief, the door burst right open.
Another squeal reached my ears, even more terrified than before. I hurtled up the steps to an open doorway where the faint dawn sunlight shone across the staircase. Before I’d even reached the top, the prickly scent of a fire flooded my nose.
I burst from the doorway into the wavering heat on the concrete plane of the roof. Pickle was perched on an overturned plastic bucket several feet away, flames crackling in a ring around him. His clipped wings fluttered in terror.
If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d probably have noticed that it made no sense at all for my shadowkind creature to be here or for a fire to have somehow flared up around him like that. But at that point I was running on pure adrenaline, and all I knew was I had to rescue him.
I raced toward the fire with a swipe of my hand, willing it away from him with all my might.
And just like that, the flames parted. They bowed to either side of a blackened patch they’d marked on the concrete in front of me, and Pickle sprang through the opening into my arms.
As I skidded to a halt, four forms shimmered out of the shadows along the edges of the roof. The nearest one, Omen with his cold blue eyes gleaming bright, slashed a pocket knife across my forearm where I’d wrapped it around the dragon.
I yelped as much from surprise as the shallow sting of pain. As I moved to leap backward, Omen caught my wrist, wrenching me into place and turning the cut to the light in the same motion. My eyes caught on the narrow, red line—and all I could do then was stare.
The line was red with the blood welling up across the wound, but that liquid wasn’t all that was seeping from my skin. A thin but unmistakable trickle of black smoke snaked up from my arm into the air.
Smoke, like shadowkind bled.
My heart had outright stopped for a few beats. It revved up again with a tremor through my veins, but the adrenaline rush was already fading. With fatigue closing in on me again, the smoke dwindled and disappeared, leaving only a streak of proper human blood across my pale skin.
“Well, fuck,” Ruse said from where he was standing by my other side with Snap and Thorn. Even the incubus didn’t seem to know what to say after that.
“We all saw it,” Omen said, his voice taut. “Both the fire and the smoke.”
“But I can’t— It isn’t possible,” I said. My voice sounded hollow. As Pickle clambered onto my shoulder, I brought my arm close to my chest to inspect the cut. My entire abdomen felt hollowed out. “None of you would bleed actual blood like this if you were cut. Shadowkind never do.”
“No human would bleed like smoke, though,” Thorn said, his stern face frozen in an unusually stunned expression.
I guessed he should know from all the epic battles he’d fought long, long ago. I swallowed thickly. “I don’t understand.”
Omen flicked the pocket knife shut and tucked it into his pocket. “Neither do I, but you can’t deny the evidence any longer. There’s something about you that goes beyond normal mortal bounds. I don’t think it’s just a spell laid on you either, with it twined that deeply with your essence. It seems to only come out when you’re particularly worked up. At least, for now. We’ll see if we can work on that.”
My idea of who—and what—I was had just been unavoidably flipped upside down, and he was already making plans for how he’d put me to use? “I don’t—I’ve got to think about this.”
“What’s there to think about?” he demanded. “You have power. We need all the power we can get if we’re going to take down the people intent on ravaging the entire existence of shadowkind. You’ve already wasted enough time with your refusals to admit it.”
“Well, maybe I’d be a little more interested in exploring the possibilities if you had any idea what this means. But you don’t, do you?” I glanced from him to my trio. “None of you knows how the hell this could happen.”
The three pairs of uncertain eyes that gazed back at me held no more answers than Omen had offered.
I let out a ragged breath. “Right. I assume we’re not actually under attack, and this was all just a ploy to freak me out enough to run your little test?”
“For now,” Omen said. “The Company of Light could attack at any—”
“I know. But they’re going to have to wait too. I need at least a few minutes to process this identity crisis. Just—just leave me alone.”
I spun on my heel and stalked to the stairwell. Hurrying back through the funhouse, I barely registered the punching bags brushing against my shoulders or the warped reflections showing me only my own wan face. As I stepped out of the building by the camper van, my legs wobbled. Once I’d climbed inside the back of the vehicle, I tugged the door shut and burrowed under my blanket, cuddling Pickle against me.
The tiny dragon squirmed around and nuzzled his scaly head against my chin. I gave his neck a comforting rub. “The boss man was awfully mean to you, sticking you in that fire, wasn’t he?” I paused, and a lump lodged in my throat. “Is that why you like me so much, Pickle? Because somewhere
inside me I’ve got smoke for blood?”
Had Luna known and simply never told me—was that why she’d been willing to raise me? What did it mean about my parents? Were they even my parents? Did I have parents at all? I’d never heard of a shadowkind of any sort being born rather than simply coming into existence out of the ether of their native realm—never heard of a single mortal-shadowkind pregnancy despite the many liaisons between the cubi kind of both sexes and their lovers-slash-meals.
But of course, I obviously wasn’t a shadowkind, at least not much of one. It was only a fragment of my being that emerged in tense situations.
I’d never heard of anything like that before either.
Even under the blanket, I felt it the moment another presence wavered from the shadows into the van.
“Sorsha?” Snap said, his voice tentative.
I forced myself to uncover my head. The devourer sat on the bench opposite me, his golden curls glowing with the rising sun but his moss-green eyes dark with concern.
He probably didn’t even understand why any of this bothered me. Working supernatural voodoo and bleeding smoke was business as usual for every being he’d spent much time around before me.
“Can I do anything?” he asked, softly and simply, and somehow that was exactly what I’d needed to hear. He couldn’t really do anything, but—maybe I didn’t actually want to be left alone right now, not completely.
“Come here?” I said, scooting as close to the wall as I could to make room on my bench.
Snap smiled and moved to join me. Pickle scuttled away with a little snort, presumably deciding he wasn’t interested in being the filling of our cuddle sandwich.
There was even less room on the bench than we’d had on the bunk back in the cabin, but Snap managed to lie himself down beside me without toppling over the edge. He slipped one arm around my waist and tucked his chin against my forehead, cocooning me in his bright warmth.
“Omen wanted us all to make it seem like there was some kind of attack, to scare you,” he said. “I told him I wasn’t going to help, but he went ahead anyway. He gets very… determined sometimes.”
