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ELEVEN

Sorsha

Getting into the Colosseum wasn’t a cakewalk, but I’d slinked through tighter situations before. With an only mildly scraped elbow from one particularly rough bit of stone I’d had to scramble over, I slipped away from the towering walls of the former stands to where Omen was standing in the moonlight on the stretch of smooth flooring at one end of the massive arena.

He had his arms folded over his chest as if he’d been waiting there for a while, but not all of us could dart invisibly through shadows to avoid all security measures. I spread my arms to say, Here I am , and glanced around at the space he’d decided we should use for my next training session.

The span of even terrain ended several feet away at a pit full of deteriorating stone walls and arches that rose nearly to ground level. Strange to imagine that some two thousand years ago, gladiators and beasts had battled their way across this stage… and now here I was, about to enter a different sort of battle. Whether it’d be more with the hellhound shifter in front of me or my inner demons, I’d find out soon enough.

“All right,” I said. “What’s the big idea? Or did you just want a place with as much room as possible in case my powers explode?”

Omen gave me a narrow look. “If you’re going to play a significant role in taking Tempest out of commission, you’ll need to develop that focus of yours even more than I anticipated. Since you have a lot more practice with physical rather than mental gymnastics, I figured we’d start with that.” He tipped his head toward the broken ground ahead of us. “Let’s see you make a circuit of the arena. No falls.”

Yeah, I didn’t think falling that far would have been a good idea even if he hadn’t made it one of the rules. I dragged in a breath of the cool night air, a dry mossy scent filling my lungs, and made a running start of it.

I vaulted over the little metal fence meant to stop tourists who didn’t have a death wish from tumbling into the depths and landed on the top of the nearest arch with only a slight sway. This part was a piece of cake. I’d scrambled along ledges higher and narrower than this dozens of times.

Making my way around the arena was like a combination of a tightrope walk and an obstacle course, one that mostly involved leaps and bounds. Any part of it might not have been the most difficult feat I’d had to pull off, but I’d never had to play quite such an extended game of hopscotch. By the time I’d circled back around toward the platform, sweat was trickling down my neck beneath my ponytail and my calf muscles had a few things to say about my chosen nighttime activity, none of them pleasant.

I did make it back to Omen with nothing worse than a little fatigue and a tiny ache in my heel where I’d landed on an especially obnoxious lump on one of the crumbling walls. As per usual, the hellhound shifter kept any overt signs of approval to himself.

“Good,” he said in his terse voice. “We know you can survive the journey. Let’s make it challenging now.”

He vanished into the shadows and reappeared only as flickers here and there along the course I’d followed—where pale squares of what I quickly deduced was paper blinked into being on top of the aged stone protrusions. Omen had planted at least twenty of them before he returned to the platform, swiping his hands together with a hint of satisfaction with his work.

“You want me to light them all up?” I asked before he had to give the order.

The corner of his mouth curled upward just slightly, but that ghost of a smile was enough to bring back the memories of our interlude in the cathedral. I didn’t think the heat that washed through me at that thought was the sort he’d wanted to inspire, but it was a lot less likely to literally burn me.

Maybe we could enjoy an impassioned work break in here too? Make this a grand tour of fucking across the landmarks of Europe?

The flash of orange in his cool eyes suggested he might have guessed at my thoughts—or had similar thoughts of his own. But Omen was sadly very good at keeping it in his pants. He motioned to the path he’d laid. “You know how this works. Get to it. Extra points if you can light them all up on your first time around without having to stop.”

“And without lighting myself up in the process.”

“Yes, I assumed that went without saying.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes you like it when I bring out the fire up close and personal,” I teased, and sprang over the fence before he could grouse about me not taking the training seriously enough.

I couldn’t say I’d ever been an avid student, but I’d take this version of training over most of Omen’s past methods, which had included speeding toward me in a camper van and nearly torching Pickle in an attempt to terrify me. The majestic sprawl of the arena and the haze of the night sky overhead made it easy to leave any worries that’d been niggling at me behind and give myself over to the moment.

No matter what anyone said, the fire inside me was mine . I was going to figure out how to work with it or die trying… and we’d just ignore the fact that the latter possibility had sometimes seemed way too likely for comfort.

I narrowed my awareness down to the little white squares that caught the moonlight, the momentum of my body soaring from perch to perch, and the flames that rose in my chest at my beckoning. Out, out, out, just a little at a time, enough of a jolt of heat to set that slip of paper and the next one curling and blackening under a bright flare.

I didn’t quite manage a perfect run. My balance wobbled after one particularly long leap, and I had to stop and gather myself before I could incinerate the paper there and dash onward. But Omen was fully smiling by the time I reached him.

“You always do rise to the challenge, don’t you, Disaster?” he said in a tone warm enough that I had to restrain the urge to grab him by the shirt and see what else I could make rise.

“Maybe one of these days you’ll have to stop calling me a disaster,” I retorted instead.

He chuckled. “Don’t take it as commentary on your present skill-set. It reminds me of where we started.”

“And how far we’ve come?”

“That too.” He tapped my chin. “Tempest isn’t going to know what hit her when we unleash your powers for real.” Then he stepped back and sprang into the shadows again to reset his course, laying out more papers this time—because no matter how much he might like me now, I knew better than to expect he’d ever cut me any slack.

As I readied myself to race through the course again, a trickle of heat, maybe at the thought of Tempest and her sneer, prickled across my back. I smacked at it as well as I could over my shoulder. The little flames that had emerged nipped my fingers before they settled down.

Shit on a soda cracker. How was I supposed to stop the self-scorching side of my powers from emerging when half the time it seemed to come out of nowhere? If the trick was never feeling annoyed about anyone anywhere, I was screwed.

My frustration must have shown on my face when Omen reappeared. He looked me over with a particularly searching expression. “Are you good to go again?”

Asking rather than ordering—that was an improvement. I rolled my shoulders and dragged in a breath. I hadn’t really hurt myself, now or any time before. My shadowkind powers healed me up faster than a regular human would have, almost as easily as they burned me in the first place. If a few blisters here and there came with the territory, I could handle that, as long as it meant I was taking down the baddies at the same time.

“No problemo,” I said. “You can’t start a fire without a spark.”

“As you would know better than most. Get on with it, then.”

Even with the extra targets, I made it through that round and the next without faltering and with all the papers at least singed if not turned to ashes. I’d also scalded a couple more spots down my spine and the backs of my arms, but ignoring the stinging was working out okay. If I could hide it well enough that Omen wasn’t noticing, then that was some kind of improvement.

When I’d finished the last lap, I paused to lean against the railing. A yawn stretched my jaw before I could catch it. At least part of the reason I hadn’t outright burst into flames was the sweat now sticking my damp shirt to my skin.

“All right,” Omen said. “That’s enough obstacle-course running for one night. You’ve come a long way. There’s one more thing I think we should work on.”

“Sure. What’s that?” I shook the fatigue out of my limbs as well as I could, doing my best to tune out the tender spots my shirt rubbed against.

They’d heal. No big deal. I wasn’t letting nerves stop me from stopping that psychotic sphinx.

“We can’t forget what makes you such a formidable foe—what you bring to the table that none of the rest of us can.” Omen stepped into the darker recesses of the building and pulled a sack from a shadowy nook. I thought I saw him suppress a wince, though from the heft of it, the bag couldn’t be that heavy.

Then he upended the bag in the middle of the platform, and I understood. He’d brought several metal items, some silver and some iron.

I studied his face. “You hauled all this in here? You could have asked?—”

He waved me off. “I can survive being in close proximity for a little time here and there. I just can’t manipulate it well enough to effectively use it. But if you can bind Tempest with silver and iron, she won’t be able to escape into the shadows like she did the last time. You can force her to hold her physical form, and then we’ll have a real chance of taking her down.”

“Right. So what exactly am I doing with this right now?”

“I’m having a chain manufactured that’ll combine both metals and be long enough to wrap around her, but it won’t be ready until tomorrow. For the moment, I’d imagine it’d be most useful for you to practice melting this stuff. Get used to how much fire you need to summon to heat the metal to that point. You’ll want to meld the chain right around Tempest to be sure she can’t simply shake it off.”

I’d melted the silver-and-iron bars of Company cages before. This wasn’t so different. I sifted through the collection of items, raising an eyebrow at a few of them. The ornate silver sugar bowl looked like it’d been stolen from Versailles itself, and the cast iron frying pan would have been very satisfying whacking into the sphinx’s head all on its own. A little tricky to keep hidden until the right moment, though.

I focused on the smaller pieces first, letting the floodgates inside me ease open until the searing sensation rose to my throat. A burst of flames reduced a silver necklace to a shimmering puddle. A sharper spurt of fire liquified an iron bar the size of my thumb. The burns I’d given myself earlier prickled, but no fresh ones broke out on my skin. Two victories in one.

The frying pan proved the most difficult. I glared at it for a full minute before the flames I’d called up brought the edges and handle sagging down.

My frustration sparked an answering flare across my hip. I swiped at it, hoping Omen was too distracted by the metal spectacle to notice.

“You won’t have to work with anything that dense when we face Tempest,” he said. “Good to know you could if we needed you to.”

I let out a hoarse guffaw, twice as weary as before even though I’d barely moved in the past half hour. “As long as whoever I’m trying to melt that pan at doesn’t mind waiting around while I work up to it.”

“Hey.” Omen touched my shoulder, thankfully not on any spot where I’d barbequed myself. His tone turned unusually gentle. “You’ve got this. She thinks she knows all, and that’s her biggest downfall. She’s got no idea what she’s in for when you really step up to the plate.”

“She doesn’t really know you anymore either,” I reminded him, and couldn’t resist the opportunity to lean in and claim a kiss. If it was as much to reassure myself that he was still invested in this—and in me—as to satisfy a pang of desire, I didn’t see how anyone could blame me.

Omen kissed me back, his hand sliding up to tease over my hair, but it seemed a world tour of landmark sex spots wasn’t in the cards tonight. When he drew back, despite the hellish heat glinting in his eyes, he looked intent in his typical all-business way.

Maybe even more serious than usual. He didn’t speak as we crossed the platform to the Colosseum’s looming walls, or after our separate trips through the shadows, when I caught up with him on the street a block away. A pensive furrow had formed in his brow.

We’d left the Everymobile—and the rest of our crew—parked in a lot nearby that had cleared out for the night. The city bus guise still functioned decently well. It had even adapted to the city. I just hoped no one wondered why this particular city bus featured a whirling satellite dish on its roof.

The second I stepped inside, Snap hustled to my side to escort me to the table and tuck his arm around me there. Ruse had picked up pizza to indulge in, and they’d left a few slices for the one member of the party who actually needed that kind of food.

After I’d downed one of those, I didn’t feel half as exhausted. I leaned back in Snap’s arms, letting my other hand come to rest on Thorn’s thigh where he’d sat down beside me, bolstered by the presence of all four of my lovers and the other allies who’d followed us this far as well.

“From what Tempest said when we met up with her and what Ruse got from the guy here, we should make our move soon,” I said, looking at Omen. “She survived an onslaught of wingéd in the past. How are we even going to get close enough to attack her?”

“With extreme difficulty. But it’s occurred to me that we may have already hit on the perfect strategy. One that doesn’t involve our own wingéd, at least not right away.” He glanced from Thorn to Flint with a slightly apologetic tip of his head. “No criticism meant to present company, but the wingéd aren’t exactly known for subtlety or slyness. I’m not sure we’ll ever get her in a position where we could attempt that kind of onslaught again, let alone succeed in it.”

“Unfortunately, I suspect I can’t charm her into going along with our requests,” Ruse said.

“No. But another aspect of our mortal’s recent plans may point us in the right direction.” Omen let out a sharp breath. “There isn’t much Tempest cares about other than her own satisfaction—but she did value the association she and I had enough to reach out to me rather than simply rebuffing us. She offered us the chance to join her based on that association. I think we may be able to work with that.”

The thought of cozying up to Tempest in any way made my skin crawl, but I nodded. “In what way?”

“I can put out word that I’ve reconsidered and I’d like to join forces with her. She’ll be wary, but she’ll believe it enough to meet up again. Her ego is too big for her to dismiss the possibility entirely. You and I will go alone. I’ll present you as a weapon we can use for her cause, as if you’re under my control. When her guard is down, you’ll strike—hard enough to at least give me an opening to finish this.”

“And by ‘finish’, you mean…?”

Antic did a little dance between the table while dramatically dragging her finger across her neck. Omen grimaced at her, but he didn’t object to the gist of her suggestion.

“She should have left this world centuries ago. It’s time that reprieve came to an end. As long as she remains living, she’s proven herself an immense threat to mortals and shadowkind alike.” He paused, his gaze settling on me. “And the Highest will be much more likely to grant you a reprieve if we have irrefutable proof that you dispatched her.”

He was willing to kill one of his former friends—but after what I’d seen of her, I couldn’t summon much discomfort at the thought. I’d burned up dozens of mortal Company lackeys so far. If they’d deserved it, then Tempest did a thousandfold more for urging them on.

Thorn stirred next to me. “I believe I should speak to the other wingéd nearby in case we require more manpower after all, concerns about our capacity for subterfuge aside.”

“It never hurts to have a backup plan. Tell them what they need to hear.” For the first time ever, Omen sank onto the sofa-bench across from me. He rested his forearms against the edge of the table. “Sorsha and I will need some time to go over our opponent’s weaknesses. One thing I can say without a doubt—we’re only going to get one chance at this trick. And if we miss the mark, Tempest will make us pay.”