by Eva Chase
Thorn hadn’t looked behind them—Thorn didn’t know. If the machine gun bullets were the same silver the guards in the toy store had fired, they’d tear him to pieces.
My heart pounding, I threw myself forward to catch his attention. “Thorn, into the shadows!” The words tore from my throat, and my hand slashed through the air at the same moment in a gesture of pure desperation.
The gunmen had just pressed their triggers. The rat-a-tat of machine gun fire pealed out—and cut off just as abruptly as the van’s flames roared out at them. Fire lashed across the yard in a vast billow. The gunmen scrambled away with cries of pain, a hell of a lot more than their shirt hems on fire.
Thorn had vanished. I had to assume he was on his way to us and not fatally wounded by those first few shots. I leapt into the truck, slammed my palms against the dash without letting myself second-guess or really even think, and pictured another flare of heat setting off a spark deep beneath the hood.
The engine sputtered to life. My chest hitched with it. “We’re all in,” Ruse said from the cramped back bench, and I found just enough wherewithal to tug my door closed as Omen hit the gas.
The truck tore around with a groan and rattled toward the fairgrounds entrance. Snap formed on the seat behind me. “Thorn’s hurt,” he said in a stricken voice, and my pulse lurched all over again.
“I’m fine,” the warrior said gruffly a second later, emerging into being on the back bench so abruptly his massive form shoved Snap and Ruse toward the windows. Which was all well and good for him to claim, but smoke was trailing off his back as if someone had set him on fire. At a jostle of the truck’s rickety undercarriage, he winced.
Oh, hell, no. I grabbed my purse, which did have a few useful bits and bobs in it, set Pickle on the floor, and motioned Thorn back through the door that led to the truck’s cargo area. “You’re not bleeding out—or up, or whatever—on my watch. Get back there where we’ve got more space to work before you keel over.”
“I need directions, stat!” Omen added. As I got up from my seat, Ruse leapt through the shadows to take my place. He snatched up Omen’s phone, and I followed Thorn into the dim cargo area.
The boxy space was swaying so violently that I nearly tripped over my feet. Thorn sank down against one bare wall, and I dropped down next to him with as much grace as I could manage, which wasn’t a whole lot. More shots stuttered behind us, but they sounded farther away now. At least, I hoped I was judging that right.
“Let me have a look,” I said—briskly, to cover up the panicked thumping of my heart. A little light seeped through the small window on the cargo door at the back. The space around us was empty except for a few crumpled cardboard boxes and a couple of canvas sheets that I could cut up into bandages if need be.
“I will be fine,” Thorn insisted as he twisted at the waist to show me his back. “You warned me in time—they only clipped me. And I heal quickly.”
He wasn’t lying. I’d known about shadowkind resilience already, but it was still a little startling to see it in action. I knelt beside him, taking in the tatters of his tunic—and the already closing wounds that dappled the edges of his shoulders and back amid numerous scars of all sorts of shapes and sizes.
The streams of smoke had slowed to a trickle. By the time I made a single bandage, the gouges where the bullets had caught his flesh would probably be closed completely.
He was okay. Not dying, not even that badly injured. My breath whooshed from my lungs in a rush. Thorn shifted so his back rested against the wall again, and I tipped my head against the warrior’s broad shoulder.
The muscles there had tensed, even harder to the touch than usual. Thorn’s voice came out in a low, terse rumble. “You shouldn’t have needed to warn me. I should have been more aware of our enemies’ movements.”
“You can’t be looking everywhere at once. Anyway, none of us had any idea they’d up the ante that far.”
“I should have considered it—it was to be expected after we’d proven ourselves such daunting opponents.”
I tucked my hand around his massive bicep. “It doesn’t matter. We got through it. I’m just glad I could warn you.”
The frustration in Thorn’s tone didn’t fade. “It matters because you had to put your energy toward protecting me when my job is meant to be protecting you—and the others. Yet again, I have—”
He cut himself off, glowering at the opposite wall, but I thought I could fill in the blanks. He’d told me a little about the long-ago war he’d fought in and how ashamed he felt that he hadn’t been there to battle to the death alongside so many of his fellow wingéd when he might have made more of a difference.
Did he really think he’d failed just now, even with all of us alive and no longer bleeding smoke all through the atmosphere? I wasn’t sure whether to be more sad or offended about that.
“Hey,” I said, and waited until he shifted his gaze to me. “You need to loosen up on yourself. You did enough. If you hadn’t gone patrolling, they’d have caught us completely by surprise. And it shouldn’t be only your responsibility to keep me—or anyone else—safe. Aside from the fact that I can look after myself just fine lots of the time, we’re a team. That means we all look out for each other. We’ve got a much better chance of making it through this war that way. You watch my back, and I’ll watch yours too—as well as I can, anyway.”
Thorn blinked at me. His eyes slid away, his expression still so solemn I braced myself for further argument. But after a stretch of silence, he said, “I don’t believe you need to worry about your capabilities. That was quite the blast you sent at the mortals who were shooting at me. I’m honored to have such a valiant warrior on my side.”
I sputtered a laugh at both the idea of being valiant and being a warrior myself. “Don’t count on me ever pulling off something on that large a scale again, at least not when we actually need it.” The only way I seemed to be able to use my power was by not thinking about using it at all, just doing it… which was hardly a reliable strategy.
The truck jostled, and Thorn tucked his arm around my waist to hold me steady. It stayed there, his thumb tracing a gentle line up and down my side. “You did save my life, m’lady. Quite literally this time.”
“Please don’t tell me you now have another huge debt to repay.”
An unexpectedly light note entered his voice. “Oh, I do. But I swear I won’t mention it except under exceedingly urgent circumstances.” He paused, and his usual serious demeanor returned. “Thank you. I wouldn’t have expected—but I should know by now not to underestimate you.”
“You really should,” I agreed, and eased back to look at his face. “Just so we’re clear, I will be looking out for you, but I don’t think I’m ever going to live up to your standards as a warrior. Stealthily making sure I’m never even seen is much more my thing than direct combat.”
The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Maybe so. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m still here because of your quick eyes and action. I suppose I can admit there’s something to your point about teamwork, but there’s no need for you to be a warrior when that’s not your nature. It’s not the incubus’s or the devourer’s either, but they have their own strengths I can’t match.”
“Because you’re so strong at being strong.” I poked him in the pec. “I do wish that me being mortal—however much I am, which seems to be a fair bit—wasn’t such a liability in a battle. I guess there’s not really any getting away from that, though.” My fingers lingered on the muscles of his arm just below the sleeve of his tunic, trailing over the pale scars that marked his tan skin there too. “How far do these go back?”
“To my very first battle. Any time I’m wounded badly enough to draw out the smoke, the reminder is etched in my physical form. I haven’t added many to it in centuries, though.”
“Not since the wars way back when. Until now.” I grimaced and, to distract myself from morbid thoughts, teased my fingers up to his neck and along his jaw where even m
ore pale nicks and notches told the story of his valor. As hard as his features looked, his skin was warm and smooth, only lightly textured by the scars. I let my hand venture farther, into the thick fall of his hair.
Thorn made a rumbling sound from deep in his chest. His voice came out even lower than usual. “When you touch me like that, I’m glad for your body’s softness.”
My pulse kicked up a notch, but there was nothing fearful about its pounding now. My skin warmed where his arm still held me close. Gazing into his near-black eyes, I found I couldn’t come up with anything cleverer to say than, “You’d better be.” Then he was drawing me to him, his mouth claiming my lips before anything more inane could fall from them.
In that moment, the shudder of the truck’s walls and the battle we were fleeing fell away. I gave myself over to the firm heat of his mouth and the stroke of his hand along my abdomen. It rose until his thumb skimmed the curve of my breast. Need condensed, sharp and hungry, between my legs, even though this wasn’t the ideal place to indulge that desire.
“For the record,” I said, my lips grazing his, “I think you’re good at a few things other than fighting. And I’m very glad about that.”
“Is that so?” Thorn said, and tugged me back to him with a kiss so demanding that glad wasn’t the half of it.
At the screech of the tires and the jolt of the truck stopping, we pulled apart from each other. Thorn glanced toward the door that led to the front of the truck with a regretful air. “I suppose we’d best see where we’ve found ourselves—and where we’re going from here.”
“Yep.” I heaved myself to my feet, but as he stood up beside me, I couldn’t resist giving his cheek one last caress and saying, “To be continued. So please do your best not to get shot any more before I can make good on that promise.”
18
Ruse
I might not have shared Omen’s contempt for most things mortal, but the community center where Sorsha’s Fund had gathered for their current meeting definitely wasn’t the highlight of this realm. The stale sweat smell reached my senses even in the shadows, and the pounding of the basketballs in the gym next door filtered through the conversation so loudly I couldn’t make out some of the words.
It did beat the smell of burning camper-van upholstery and the blare of machine-gun fire we’d left behind at the fairgrounds yesterday—I’d give it that.
One thing was clear without hearing any of the words: most of the members weren’t happy. The leader with the black hair and sharp eyes had her hands on her hips as she spoke to Sorsha. “That was your apartment, wasn’t it—that building that caught fire, where they found those dead bodies? And the victims found by that mini golf—they were smashed up the same way…”
Her wife and co-leader with the frizzy hair grimaced. “I saw the photos. Those injuries look like they were caused by shadowkind strength. What are these beings you’ve gotten yourself involved with?”
Sorsha was standing on the other side of the room’s long table, only her friend Vivi next to her while they faced off against not just the group’s leaders but the several other members who’d shown up and appeared equally disturbed. Clearly those people had no appreciation for Thorn’s skill with his fists. What was he supposed to have done—tied up our attackers with a silk ribbon and asked the police to pretty please toss them in the clinker?
Our mortal—or whatever exactly she was, unexpected powers taken into consideration—looked as stubbornly stunning as ever, even though she’d had to rush off here with barely any notice. Her hands had clenched where she’d rested them against the table.
“We’ve been attacked,” she said, dodging the question. “Repeatedly and violently. The people the Company of Light has sent after us have practically killed me at least half a dozen times at this point. Anything you’ve seen in those reports was self defense.”
The ones that hadn’t been strictly necessary, like the dope Omen had asked Thorn to off after we’d questioned him, we’d been able to dispose of more carefully since we hadn’t been fleeing for our lives at the same moment. I could tell from the tension in Sorsha’s jaw that she hadn’t forgotten those deaths, even if she wasn’t going to mention them to her fellow Fund members.
The Company assholes would have seen all shadowkind tarred, feathered, boiled in oil, and hung for good measure if they’d gotten the chance. Why should any of us be wracked with guilt over their loss of life? Mortals and their tender hearts.
Not that I minded Sorsha’s. She had plenty of steel in there too… and if that heart hadn’t been at least a little tender, she’d never have forgiven me for my broken promise.
“We’ve only got your word on that,” one of the other members said. “None of us has seen any evidence that this ‘Company’ is doing anything at all to shadowkind.”
“I saw what they did to one of their own guys,” Vivi piped up. She might have screwed us over a little with her initial nosiness, but the flash in her dark eyes as she defended Sorsha earned her plenty of points. “They killed him and mutilated the body—these aren’t anyone you’d want to make friends with.”
“Do you even know for sure it was mortals who killed that guy?” asked the stout young man with the soft, gloomy face. “Or did you need Sorsha to tell you that too?”
He was the one Sorsha had once had some brief dalliance with. Not the massive asshole who’d vanished on her with a brief note about her vague inadequacies, whom I’d have liked to tar and feather myself, but the almost-as-massive asshole whose emotions churned with resentment and indignation—but not a hint of regret about his own behavior, funnily enough—whenever he’d looked at her. Leland something-or-other.
It’d been a pleasure to trip him in the movie theater where the group had met a couple of weeks ago. I slunk closer in case I got another chance to poke a foot from the shadows and knock him face-first onto the floor.
Vivi gave him a look as if she were contemplating doing the same thing. “Are you suggesting that Sorsha—the Sorsha who’s worked with the Fund for more than a decade without getting into trouble—is suddenly orchestrating some kind of huge conspiracy that includes murdering random men, all to take down a bunch of people who’ve actually done nothing wrong?”
Leland shrugged, his expression turning even more sour. “She might not know either. The shadowkind can be manipulative.”
Oh, I’d show him manipulative. I’d like to see him licking his own ass after I’d had a little charmed chat with him. From the emotions clouding his mind now, I didn’t think he was even considering that Sorsha’s story about the Company might be true. As far as he was concerned, she’d snubbed him and that meant she must be misguided in all things—just a dupe of vicious shadowkind.
He’d gotten to share all those bodily intimacies with her, but he didn’t know her at all.
“Yes, some can look to mess with ours heads. That’s why I wear this.” Sorsha tugged down the neckline of her blouse to show the silver-and-iron trinket pinned to her undershirt. Probably for the best that she didn’t mention the few times she’d taken it off—and what she’d gotten up to with me and sometimes Snap during those times. “Believe me, I’d like this fight to have a lot less blood in it, but that’s not on us. The shadowkind just want to survive.”
The first of the leaders had raised her pointed chin. “I’m afraid that given the evidence we’ve encountered, none of us feel comfortable pursuing this issue any further. And I think it’d be best if you got yourself out of whatever you’ve become mixed up in too.”
Sorsha’s mouth tightened. You don’t need these putzes, I thought at her, but some part of her seemed to believe she did.
“I’m not willing to walk away from the shadowkind when they’re facing this kind of threat. Did you find out anything else with all the digging you obviously did?”
“Yeah,” Vivi said. “What about the addresses Sorsha passed on—did you get anywhere with those?”
The addresses our hacker had uncovered from
us thanks to Vivi’s efforts. The twitch of the older woman’s eyes told me she knew something, all right, but she locked it away with a purse of her lips. “The matter is closed. We’ll resume our regular meets at the usual time and place this weekend. You’re both welcome to join us for our regular business there—it’s up to you.”
“Huyen,” Sorsha protested. “Ellen. Please. I swear—”
The frizzy-haired woman was shaking her head. Sorsha took in their expressions and must have come to the same conclusion I had about ten minutes earlier: this bunch was useless. With a curt sigh, she stalked out of the room.
“Really?” Vivi said, glowering at her colleagues, but the other Fund members held steady. She flounced out after her best friend.
Which was why it was a good thing Sorsha had agreed to let us stake out this place—me inside the rec center and my three companions patrolling the neighborhood around it. You couldn’t get a more perfect spy than a shadowkind lurking in dark corners.
Ellen rubbed her mouth, the only one who looked at all conflicted about what had just gone down. She turned to Leland. “We should keep an eye on the activity around that building in the docklands, as much as we can, just in case. I wouldn’t have thought Sorsha would get involved with anything disturbing. If there is an organization hunting the shadowkind on this scale…”
Leland snorted. “All I found was a record of some trucks arriving at the place ten days ago. No way of knowing what was in them—and it’s not like trucks are a strange sight on Wharf Street.”
Ten days ago—that’d be right after we’d stormed the facility to break Omen out. Exactly when the Company would have needed to move its other captives. And one of the addresses our charmed hacker had matched to the Company’s shell organization was on Wharf Street. Thank you so much for the tip, my glum friend.
A little more muttering followed between the various Fund members, but nothing of much interest. I slipped along through the shadows after them as they left. They wandered off in different directions, Leland heading across the street in the same general direction as the spot where I was supposed to meet up with Sorsha and the others. I followed right beside him, watching for a good moment to send him stumbling.
