Page 104

TEN

Sorsha

I peered up at the stucco apartment building, its thin face looming several stories above the street. Patches of orangey-brown and a paler cream color mottled the stucco, and rust speckled the hinges on the antique-looking front door.

“This is the place?”

“Unless our stalwart hacker connected the phone number he traced to the wrong address.” Ruse cocked his head and then motioned for me to stand back from the door. “Wait here. I’ll take the lay of the land from the shadows first. If we’re lucky, we won’t even need your thieving skills. The fellow up there is engaged to his Company lady, but they’re not living together yet. As far as we know, he’s not involved in the Company himself. There’s no reason for him to be particularly protected.”

Because the Company had no reason to believe the man up there knew anything that could help their enemies—a.k.a., us. But if his fiancée hadn’t let anything useful slip during their phone conversations, Ruse would simply charm the dude into forgetting we’d ever stopped by like he would anyway, and we’d see what other connections his new hacker ally could dig up from back in Paris. Thank all that was wired and wild for the internet.

Ruse stepped into the shadows of the narrow alley between that apartment building and the next—so narrow it’d have been a tight fit for me to walk down it—and vanished. While I waited for his report, I pulled out my phone to give the impression I was occupied with more than just loitering here. The three other members of my shadowkind quartet had come along, but they were staying in the darkness until we knew what we were looking for.

Too bad I couldn’t text with them while they were in their shadow forms. My lips quirked at the thought of what enthusiastic observations and dour cautions Snap and Thorn would pass on.

Omen? Who knew what the hellhound shifter would think it worth saying to me. But although he hadn’t exactly gotten less enigmatic, I’d felt more comfortable in whatever uncertainties he stirred up since our interlude in the cathedral.

He intended to ensure I made it through this alive, Tempest and the Highest be damned. That much I was convinced of now. And if we had the chance to steal another heated moment or two along the way… I didn’t think either of us would turn it down.

Ruse reformed out of the shadows looking pleased with himself. “Not a bit of iron or silver around, at least not enough to be of any concern.”

I tucked my phone back into my purse, feeling abruptly adrift. This had been my plan, but it working well meant I didn’t have any part to play in it. “I guess I should head back to the Everymobile then.”

“Not at all! Come on.” He nudged me toward the doorway. “I’ve already chatted with our host enough to ensure he’s open to visitors. You can’t come all the way to Rome without doing a little sightseeing. And I promise you, you’ll get quite the sight from up there.”

As usual, his playful cajoling was irresistible, even without him turning any of his supernaturally-powered charm on me. I tramped after him into a cramped corridor that led to a rickety lift so small I was practically snuggling with the incubus inside its car. Good thing the rest of our companions could shrink to a much smaller size when they traveled through the shadows.

The lift whirred upward with only an occasional wobble. Naturally, Ruse couldn’t resist the excuse of the tight space to give my ass a squeeze. I swatted his in return as he got off ahead of me, and he laughed.

I wasn’t sure he’d completely dropped the whole “I should have protected you better” idea he’d expressed to me on the drive here, but at least his usual carefree flirtiness was back in full force.

“The rest of you can come out too,” he announced to the landing at large as he knocked on a door that had clearly seen better days. Just as the worn surface with its flaking white paint swung open to admit us, Thorn and Snap materialized behind me.

“Omen wanted to survey this and the surrounding buildings more closely,” Thorn informed us in an undertone as we headed inside. His mouth was set at a displeased slant, his near-black eyes scanning the room we stepped into even more warily than usual.

Our charmed Italian host waved us on into a small living room with threadbare chairs, a scratched up coffee table, and a window so big the warrior could have stepped through it with arms outstretched without brushing the frame. It looked out across sprawling parkland toward the grandiose ruins of the Colosseum.

“Wow,” I said, needing to catch my breath. Ruse hadn’t been lying about the sights. I walked right up to the glass as if drawn by a magnetic pull, taking in the full view up close.

Snap joined me, looping his arms around my waist and pressing a kiss to a sensitive spot just behind my ear that sent a welcome tingle through me. Even the impressive view couldn’t distract him from offering the public display of affection, although afterward he leaned his head next to mine, his chin brushing my temple, and considered it with widened eyes.

“That building—it’s very old even by mortal standards. Thorn says he was young when he saw it newly built. I don’t believe I had come into existence yet.”

Shadowkind, not being the type to celebrate birthdays seeing as they weren’t quite born and, y’know, the whole lack of concept of time in their own realm thing, didn’t tend to keep very close track of their age. Snap might have been only a little older than me or decades more. But in the mortal world, he was still pretty much a newbie.

“Lots of battles fought in that place,” I told him, trailing my fingertips over his knuckles. Was his embrace even more insistent than usual? Maybe seeing Ruse grope me on the elevator had woken up his possessive instinct with a fiercer edge. “Mostly for fun, though—for the people watching, anyway. Like those soccer games you saw on my TV, back when I had a TV.”

And an apartment to house that TV in. I couldn’t even blame my shadowkind companions for that loss when I was the one who’d set the place on fire. Of course, they’d been the ones who’d brought the Company to my doorstep attempting to kidnap and possibly kill me. But who was keeping score?

Thorn came up at my other side. “Mortals do have strange priorities at times.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Says the wingéd who fought in some immense war for reasons he can’t even remember?”

He let out a grunt as if accepting my point, but his frown made me wonder if I’d gone too far with my teasing. Or maybe something else was bothering him. He’d looked a little more serious than usual since he’d appeared, which for the warrior was pretty dire.

I shifted in Snap’s embrace, and the devourer let me go with only a faint noise of discontent. I stepped closer to the wingéd and tucked my arm around his muscular one. Sometimes it was easy to forget how passionate a heart lay under all this bulk and brawn, but in some ways, my warrior lover was the most deeply affected out of all of them.

I twined my fingers with his. “Is everything okay? Did Omen notice something that made him think we could be in trouble here?”

Thorn shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of. I believe he simply meant to confirm there were no signs of Tempest’s presence, as he’s best equipped to identify that.” He let his hand come to rest on my hip with an affectionate stroke of his thumb, but his gaze shifted to the horizon beyond the Colosseum. “There is at least one other nearby who might remember what we fought for.”

Another wingéd? Thorn could sense when any of the few remaining members of his kind were nearby—that was how we’d found Flint. It made sense that he’d be encountering more of them as we jetted all across the world. He didn’t seem all that happy about it, even though he’d already revealed his nature to the rest of us.

I squeezed his hand. “Maybe they’d join in, like Flint did. You persuaded him easily enough.”

“Perhaps. But to have lingered mortal-side in much closer vicinity to the terrain of our shame… I’m not certain what their mindset might be.”

“It can’t hurt to ask, can it?” Snap said brightly, turning from the view. “Bringing more shadowkind on board has only helped us, as Sorsha expected it would.” He leaned in to give me another peck, this time on the temple.

“But those that do not come on board have the potential to cause trouble,” Thorn muttered.

Did he think this wingéd might outright work against us? It was hard to imagine a being with a similar solemn nature to his and Flint’s taking a stance like Tempest’s, but then, there were a lot of ways a powerful warrior could be destructive if he—or she—got the idea to be.

Behind us, Ruse’s dupe let out a loud burst of laughter. I swiveled to watch the incubus’s “interrogation.” The wingéd left off his brooding enough to turn with me at my tug.

Our host chattered away in eager Italian, so fast I didn’t catch a single word I even partly recognized, although my local vocabulary was admittedly mostly limited to “spaghetti” and “fettuccine.” The man’s hands swept through the air with each exclamation. Ruse nodded and retorted something in the same language with a perfectly authentic accent. Apparently languages came to the incubus naturally too.

Watching the mortal guy’s gesticulations, I tried to guess what they might be talking about. The apartment building was growing yet another floor? Pineapple was the best ever pizza topping? We should all hop on a Ferris wheel for a ride?

Ruse’s voice dropped, his demeanor turning more serious. He made several statements with some dramatic gestures of his own. I was pretty sure the jerk of his hand was the shutting—or opening?—of a door. A flap of his hands like wings—indicating some sort of shadowkind creature? From his tone, he was getting down to business.

His dupe’s smile faded too, but he responded with as much emotion as before, just sounding upset instead of excited now. He mimed something that I was going to assume was not icing flowers on a cake, however much it might look that way, and then what might have been an explosion. That didn’t give me the impression of good news. If it’d been an explosion of joy, surely he’d have looked happier about it.

As the incubus and our charmed host continued their urgent discussion, Omen slipped out of the shadows by the bathroom doorway and ambled over to us. He caught Ruse’s eye but didn’t say anything. The incubus acknowledged him with a quick tip of his head.

“Do you understand what they’re saying?” Snap asked him, nuzzling my hair.

“I can pick up a little, but I haven’t spent much time in this country in centuries, and the language has, you might say, evolved.”

“Indeed,” Thorn rumbled. “And not for the better.”

I nudged him gently with my elbow. “Kids these days and their crazy slang, huh?”

The warrior shot me a wounded glance, but the effect was diminished by the hint of amusement that glinted in his eyes. “I seem to manage to keep up with you, m’lady.”

“So you do. In so many wonderful ways.”

Omen cleared his throat in what I took as a shockingly polite way to say, Shut up , but I’d have shut my mouth anyway at the tense expression on Ruse’s face as he rejoined us. His new friend was sitting on one of the chairs, head bowed and shaking in some sort of denial.

“His fiancée hadn’t told him very much,” the incubus said, his voice uncharacteristically grim. “But I was able to draw out a decent amount of information from piecing together what he has heard and seen and unconscious impressions from his mind. The Company definitely has major operations happening here. They’re particularly focused on this disease they hope to spread to the shadowkind. And his woman on the inside has been talking as if they’re just days away from releasing it.”