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EIGHTEEN

Sorsha

“Souvlaki and moussaka, here we come!” Ruse announced as we roared away from the border crossing between Albania and Greece. Just a few cajoling words with the border patrol, and they’d been waving us through with broad smiles.

The incubus glanced back from the wheel to shoot a grin Snap’s way. “Just wait until you see how many edible delicacies there are to discover here.”

The devourer’s forked tongue flicked across his lips. He leaned past the driver’s seat to check the dash. “Perhaps we should be stopping for more gas soon? And Sorsha will need more to eat before much longer.” He caught my eye with a playful glint in his.

“Yes, all for our mortal’s benefit, I’m sure,” Ruse teased, but I thought I could still hear a hint of tension in his voice that had been there ever since he’d informed the rest of us yesterday that his charmed hacker had found a promising lead that pointed us to Crete. Something about this venture bothered him.

The traces of phone calls and emails the hacker had dug up suggested there might be someone out on the ancient island who’d been working very closely with Tempest, though, so whatever the problem was, he’d obviously decided it wasn’t worth mentioning. The next time I got him alone, I’d have to prod him about it.

I was starting to see how the ability to simply peek inside people’s heads could be awfully tempting.

“Straight flush!” Antic declared, slapping her playing cards down on the table where I’d agreed to a few rounds of poker with her and the equines just to pass the time. Snap had briefly joined in until we’d switched to bidding with pennies rather than strawberries—which was really his own fault for eating them all.

Maybe that was for the best, though, because the imp was proving to be a menace. She chortled to herself as she scooped up more copper to add to her already considerable heap, and Bow let out a snort of frustration.

Omen emerged from the shadows in the hall and gave us a baleful look, but he managed not to remark again about how much faster we could have gotten to Crete if he’d stuck me on a plane and then hopped the RV through a couple of rifts. Gisele’s usually sparkly temperament had become more like the glint of a sharpened scalpel the last time he’d brought it up.

“Haven’t you already put her through enough?” she’d said with a jerk of her hand toward the sink, which at that point had been sputtering alternating dribbles of pineapple juice and sour milk, and the hellhound shifter had been wise enough to shut his mouth.

I had to say the pineapple juice was actually kind of enjoyable. Hey, don’t judge. The warm iced tea that had been spewing from the showerhead for a few hours this morning? Not so much.

“We will need to fill up the gas again before we reach our destination,” Omen said to Ruse. “Pick the stop at your discretion.”

“Letting me play the boss? That could be dangerous.” Ruse motioned Snap closer. “Grab my phone and let’s look up our options for delicious satisfaction.”

Omen must have made a gesture of his own, because Thorn materialized a moment later and dipped his head before making a report. “No sign of concerning activity in the area. I don’t believe we’re being followed.”

The warrior had decided to stay the course for this potentially crucial stage of our mission, but I knew he still felt uneasy about the debt his fellow wingéd had suggested he owed them. His gaze slid to the landscape passing by the window, his face set in a pensive expression.

I passed my cards over to Gisele so she could shuffle and looked up at Omen. “If this is some kind of trap Tempest set up, she wouldn’t need to have anyone following us—she’ll be waiting for us there.”

He grimaced. “I wouldn’t put it past her to employ multiple tactics so she can keep an eye on us. We’ve already surprised her once.”

“I know you and Thorn enjoy worrying,” Ruse called back, “but I wouldn’t have suggested we embark on this voyage if it looked anything like a trap. The bits and pieces connecting the Company to this guy are mostly from months or even years back. We didn’t uncover any communication between them and him since he was sent off to Crete last month. Tempest didn’t even know we’d be looking for her back then.”

“I wouldn’t have agreed to your suggestion if I thought it was likely to be a trap either,” Omen muttered. “I just know that when it comes to the sphinx, more care is a much better strategy than not enough.”

Antic bounced on the sofa. “Too much doom and gloom around here. Are we playing another hand or what?”

I happily indulged in another round of that distraction, even though it cost me the last of my pennies and several nickels to boot. The imp was just crowing over her winnings when the RV slowed.

Ruse pulled off at a faded gas station with only two antique-looking pumps and a similarly scruffy café next door. I couldn’t read the lettering on the grimy sign over the door. The mock columns that ran along the front of the building on either side of it, designed to look like a Greek temple if those temples had been painted with red and blue stripes over the whitewashing, had gone dingy with time, and not in a way that gave them historic grandeur.

“Ignore appearances,” the incubus said as he led the way out. “This place is supposed to have the best dolmades in a hundred-mile radius.”

Rather than salivating, Snap was peering at the restaurant front with a faint frown. He’d jarred to a stop a few feet from the RV. When I touched his arm, he shook his head as if to clear it and aimed one of his brilliant smiles at me. “Should we discover what these dole mad Es are?”

Ruse took it upon himself to do all the ordering, but I trusted the incubus’s affinity for carnal pleasures. As he, Snap, and I schlepped the bulging bags to the RV, where the equines were basking in the sun, a man so skinny he could have passed for a signpost seemed to shimmer out of the shadow cast by an actual signpost and stalked over to Omen. I stopped in my tracks.

“What is the meaning of this excursion?” the unfamiliar shadowkind demanded in a haughty, nasal voice.

Omen reined in a bristle with visible effort. “Who the hell wants to know?”

The skinny guy, whatever sort of being he was, folded his arms over his chest. “The Highest expect you to be taking your commitment to them much more seriously. While Ruby is on the loose, this isn’t the time for taking vacations.”

Shit a slimy slug, they were following Omen to nag at him now? And to nag at him specifically about the being he was supposed to be reporting on… who was, er, standing right here carrying a load of dips and pitas. My pulse skipped a beat.

The hellhound shifter rolled his eyes with a long-suffering expression, but he managed to flick his glance my way with the swiftest of warning glances in the process. Trying not to look suspicious about it, I hustled onto the Everymobile.

Omen’s voice followed us. “It just so happens that I’m coming this way on a very promising lead. The Highest managed to maintain some patience over how many years already? But if they’d rather that you take over the search, by all means. I’ll just head back to?—”

“Certainly not!” the lackey said in a tone of both horror and deep offense, as if he couldn’t imagine taking on such a huge responsibility and simultaneously found it demeaning that Omen would try to pass it off on to him. Then the door clicked shut, muffling their conversation.

Thorn appeared for just long enough to reassure me, “It’s just the one skulking around here,” and then vanished, presumably to make sure that continued to be the case. My appetite had vanished too.

Ruse set his bag down on the table, his mouth slanted at an awkward angle. “If they knew,” he murmured, “they wouldn’t be showing up just to pester Omen about his promptness.”

“That doesn’t mean they couldn’t find out,” I said, keeping my voice similarly low. I resisted the urge to go up to the window and watch the rest of the conversation play out.

Snap stared out at Omen and the walking signpost with an anxious flick of his tongue. His shoulders came up. “If this being tries to come after you…”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said, with much more breeziness than I actually felt, and flopped down on the sofa.

Pickle scrambled onto my lap. I ran my fingers absently over his back between his wings. How closely were the Highest’s minions watching us? What if they happened to stop by right when I was fucking up my powers again?

Heat sizzled from my fingers, and the little dragon yelped.

“Pickle!” I cried, forcing my voice into a whisper. “Pickle, I’m sorry.”

He darted away to the bedroom with his wings pressed flat to his sides. My stomach knotted. Thinking about worst case scenarios had practically made me create one.

“I’ll go out and see if Omen needs a little help talking his way out of this,” Ruse volunteered, “seeing as making friends with strangers isn’t typically on his to-do list. You stay put, Miss Blaze.” He couldn’t quite hide the worry in his gaze before he slipped into the shadows.

Snap sat down next to me and examined my hands. My palms had only turned mildly pink. He hurried to get the aloe anyway, despite my protest that I’d probably heal in an hour or two anyway.

“I’m looking after you in every way I can,” he said, and shot another glance toward the window with an uneasy air that I didn’t think was just about our unexpected visitor. “No matter what I have to do.”

Something in that phrasing gave me a clue. I tugged him down beside me. “I don’t think you’ll be called on to devour that lackey. Can you even use that power on shadowkind? Anyway, if he needs offing, I’d imagine between Omen and Thorn, every vital part of his body will be ‘off’ in about five seconds flat.”

Snap only managed a glimmer of a smile at my joke. He sighed and tucked my head under his chin in his favorite pose. “I’ve never tried on a shadowkind. But I would, for you. If it’s to defend my beloved, there’s nothing monstrous about that.”

I pulled back to peer up at him. “Are you worrying about that again? You haven’t done anything wrong. You are what you are, and you’ve used your nature when you’ve needed to.”

“Not only then.” He let out a breath like a shudder and hugged me tighter. “That place—the colors and those columns all in a row—it looks a little like the place where I took my first devouring.”

Ah, that explained a few things. I rested my arm over his and stroked the back of his hand from knuckles to wrist. “That time was an accident, wasn’t it?”

“Does that make it less horrible or more? It was the first time I’d ventured through a rift into the mortal realm—I didn’t know what to expect. There was a man in an alley yelling and smashing bottles. It bothered and confused me. Unsettled me. I didn’t know why he would do that, and I wanted him to stop, and before I even realized what I was doing, I was already swallowing his soul. Feeling all the agony that I was putting him through. Wanting more.”

“And then you punished yourself for that mistake by hiding away in the shadow realm for ages to make sure you never did it again. It’s not like you just brushed it off.”

“I know. But…” He tipped his head close to mine again. “The sphinx may do evil things, but she’s wise about a lot too. She said we were only pretending not to be monsters, that we can’t just ignore what we are forever. I wish I could. I wish I hadn’t liked it. I wish I didn’t still feel pinches of the hunger now and then. I’d like to just be your beloved and one who can taste impressions to help with our mission, and that’s all. Even if you can accept how I am, I don’t know if I can.”

Was that why he’d been even cuddlier than usual the last few days? I turned in his arms to offer him a kiss. He kissed me back with such sweet tenderness that it was impossible to picture this man as some kind of savage beast.

“I just burned my one-hundred-percent innocent dragon because I still haven’t gotten a handle on my powers,” I said. “If you can forgive me for that, then I hope you can forgive yourself for not having full control over every impulse. You’re doing a much better job keeping your urges in check than I am.”

Snap let out a huff. “You’ve had much less time to get used to them.”

“But much more practice using them. And I’m still fucking up. We just… We do our best, right? No one goes through life never wanting anything that could hurt someone else. You decide what’s most important, and act on that as well as you can, and that shows who you really are.” I kissed him again. “And I think you’re pretty damned fantastic.”

He hummed and nestled me against him, his gaze returning to the windows warily. The voices had fallen silent. I hoped that meant Omen had sent the skinny lackey off—with or without assistance from our companions—and not that the prick was investigating to make sure the hellhound shifter had been true to his word.

Fuck the Highest for hassling Omen when they wouldn’t help him with the actual catastrophe we were facing. Fuck Tempest for messing with all of my shadowkind lovers’ minds.

The anger nibbled at my nerves, but Snap’s adoring warmth around me stopped it from flaring into a real fire.

The equines tramped on board first with a defiant air, followed by a skipping Antic, then Thorn and Ruse, and finally a scowling but no longer impeded Omen.

“He’s gone,” the hellhound shifter said before I had to ask. “But I can tell they’ll be sending more. Bloated self-important jackasses. I don’t know how much warning we’ll have.”

I forced a smile. “I’ll work extra hard at keeping my flambéing tendencies tamped down.”

As Omen took over at the wheel, the atmosphere stayed subdued. Gisele and Bow retreated to the master bedroom with a joint of their “other kind of” grass. Antic tried to coax Pickle out of my room and sulked when he didn’t respond. The rest of us eyed the bulging bags that held our lunch, but none of us moved to open them.

Ruse had pulled out his phone. He tapped at it, swiped through some pages, and tapped some more, his expression getting noticeably stiffer with each passing minute.

“Have you realized that place actually only had the second -best dolmades in this half of the country?” I said after a while, just to prod a response out of him.

The incubus chuckled without much humor and shoved his phone in his pocket. His gaze shifted to the window, but the haziness in his eyes suggested he was thinking about something far beyond the view outside.

“I told you once about a particular mortal woman I occupied myself with back in the mists of time,” he said, painfully droll. “It happens that she lived not far from Athens. As do rather a lot of her descendants now.”

A prickle ran down my spine. He meant the first mortal woman he’d thought he’d fallen in love with—the one who’d rejected him. “Are you planning on doing anything about that?” I couldn’t help asking.

A bittersweet smile played with his lips. “I was thinking if the timing works out, I might make a brief detour to pay a call on her granddaughter.”