Page 115

TWENTY-ONE

Snap

“Look at it,” Ruse said, waggling his phone in the mortal man’s face. The glow of its screen showed a message the incubus had typed. “Doesn’t it make you want to follow my every command?”

The man who worked for Tempest jerked his head to the side, unable to move any farther than that thanks to Thorn’s strong hands holding him in place.

We’d gone inside the partly smashed cabin, taking spots around a rough wooden table now scattered with splinters from the wall the warrior had bashed through. Thorn had the man planted in a chair while he loomed from behind. Ruse sat across the table from him. Sorsha and I stood on either side of the incubus, watching the proceedings, while Omen paced the small space by the cabin’s kitchen. Without even looking at him, I could tell the hellhound shifter was just as unhappy with the situation as our captive looked.

“Would it work even if you could make him read it?” I asked.

Ruse grimaced. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried to charm through visuals before. Persuading with my voice is what comes naturally. It’d be easier to tell if we could force him to read in the first place. Even if our stalwart lunk here holds this asshole’s eyelids open, we can’t make him focus on the words.”

“Try this.” Omen tossed a piece of paper and a pen onto the table. “Your handwriting might contain more power than words typed on some mortal device.”

“If he’ll read that .” Sorsha leaned over the incubus’s shoulder. “Write the letters really big so he can’t help seeing them.”

Ruse chuckled to himself. “Like I’m trying to teach a child how to read.” But he scrawled across the sheet of paper in as broad strokes as it would fit. KEEP READING WHAT I WRITE. “Might as well cover that hurdle first.”

Thorn gripped the man’s head to turn it toward the table, and Ruse brandished his message like a flag. The man appeared to glance at it, but all he did was screw up his face into an expression so sour it made my tongue curl up. He whipped his hands through the air in more of those gestures that were his own way of speaking. I didn’t understand the physical language, but I got the distinct impression he’d told Ruse to shove his paper—and possibly other things—up his anus.

If the incubus’s charm was having any effect, it definitely wasn’t making the man any friendlier. I bent over the table, flicking out my tongue to capture more definite impressions. Perhaps we didn’t need this fellow’s help. I might be able to glean something useful about his investigations for Tempest without him offering any cooperation at all.

The man didn’t seem to have used the table for his work. I caught wisps of fingers closing around a hot mug with a whiff of coffee smell, laying out a knife and fork for a simple meal of grilled meat, and resting a book against it as he contemplated a story of men on horseback shooting at each other while wearing large hats.

Moving away from the table, I tested the cupboard beside it, the narrow bed with its scratchy blanket, and finally circled around Omen to check the kitchen. With each flicker of sensation that rose up, the fragments I’d gathered formed a patchy picture of the man’s life here—not vivid or comprehensive, but something.

“He’s been here for a while,” I reported, taking a taste of the walls between comments. “Long enough that he’s gotten bored with it. He imagines a woman who lives in some other place—she smiles a lot, and he thinks she is very pretty. He gets annoyed when he sees her with a man that puts his arm around her.”

I frowned, sorting through the emotions I’d picked up from our captive’s reminiscing. “I think maybe she is mates with someone else, but he wants her to be his. He keeps working because somehow he believes the sphinx will help that happen.”

Sorsha wrinkled her nose and aimed a glare at the man. “He’s helping Tempest so he can force some woman to hook up with him? What a catch. And the Company calls you all ‘monsters’.”

Those impressions left me uncomfortable too. They didn’t help us defeat Tempest, though. “I can’t get much sense of his work. He leaves early and comes back late, tired. Walking a lot, and digging. Maybe he’s been looking for something?”

I knelt by a wicker basket in the corner where a rumpled shirt slumped over the rim. My tongue darted through the air above it, and a tingle of past excitement raced through me, spurring my own. “He found it. I can’t tell what it was, but he was eager to tell Tempest about it so he could finally leave.”

Omen’s head jerked around. “Has he already told her?”

“I think he’s told her some things, but he still had to go back and uncover more of whatever it was.” I tipped my head to the side as if that would knock the jumbled impressions into a more coherent story. It didn’t work.

At the table, Ruse had flipped the paper over and pushed it and the pen toward the man. He gestured to them emphatically. The man’s lip curled. He snatched the paper up, crumpled it with a few twists of his fingers, and hurled it at the incubus’s face.

“All right,” Ruse said, standing up. “I think we’ve determined that my charm doesn’t extend to the written word or pantomiming. What now?”

Perhaps if I tried the clothes the man was wearing right now? I edged over beside Thorn and bent my head. A ripple of the deeper, chilling hunger nibbled at my gut. I closed my mind to it and inhaled more impressions.

“It’s too present,” I said with a jab of regret. The blare of emotions the man was experiencing right now drowned out any subtler information. “He’s angry and frustrated—and a little scared. But that’s when he thinks of the sphinx discovering we’ve found him, not so much of what we’ll do.”

Omen growled under his breath. “We haven’t got any leverage. There’s clearly nothing he cares about in this place other than his own life, and you can be sure he knows Tempest would slaughter him in epically painful fashion if he betrayed her, so us threatening to kill him won’t do much.”

Sorsha’s mouth twisted. “He’s got to know something useful if he’s been working so much for Tempest. Whatever he uncovered here might be what’s allowing her to finally unleash the sickness the Company created.”

Omen’s gaze veered to me and then away again. He hesitated, which was so unlike our leader that I turned to study him.

“There is one way,” he started, measuring out his words.

All at once, our captive jerked forward. With our attention on the hellhound shifter, Thorn’s grasp on our captive must have loosened just slightly. The man’s knees banged the underside of the table, and he swung up a small gun that must have been fixed there.

The warrior slammed him toward the ground. The gun went off with a boom that shattered the quiet of the night and clipped the ragged edge of the wall behind Sorsha.

He’d almost killed her. That bullet would have hit her in the forehead if it’d flown a few inches to the right. Without thinking, without feeling other than the swell of vengeful horror, I threw myself between my beloved and her attacker.

As I loomed over the slumped man, my rage simmered down to a duller anger within moments. He couldn’t stage any further attack while he was pinned firmly under Thorn’s bulk.

Omen kicked the gun off into the night, none too gently. He glared down at the man. “No, you don’t value your life all that much, do you?”

Even with the initial jolt of my protective instincts fading, a ball of hunger remained at the base of my throat, gnawing rather than merely nibbling now. My jaw itched to let loose the needle-like teeth that could pierce this man’s skull and siphon away his soul shred by shred.

I sucked in a ragged breath, and Omen glanced at me. Something in his expression sent a shock of comprehension through me.

He didn’t want me to subdue my hunger. When he’d said there was a way, he’d been going to suggest that I use my power. That I flay our captive’s being down to the barest essence, for all the torment it would put him through, to see everything he’d been and done.

If the man refused to communicate with us and Ruse couldn’t wheedle him into doing so, devouring him was the obvious answer. It would tell us more in a matter of minutes than we might get out of him or his home… ever. And what this lackey knew might make the difference between saving hundreds of millions of other beings, mortal and otherwise, untold amounts of pain.

Still, my body balked. My tongue quivered over my lips, and the hunger rose up my gullet. How could I know whether I was making this decision out of justice or monstrousness?

My voice came out in a croak. “Tell him. Make him understand that he’ll die if he doesn’t agree to share what he knows. He should have a choice.” Even if we were already sure of which one he’d make.

“Snap?” Sorsha said softly. Her hand slipped around my forearm, a gentle warmth. So much gentleness my beloved could offer despite all the fire and strength in her as well.

She wasn’t concerned about herself. She’d shown she loved me regardless of whether I turned to this power. It was only my own well-being she was worried about—how I felt about going through with this act.

“I’m not going to order you,” Omen said. “It’s your choice too. I’ll just point out that there’s a lot on the line. Sometimes there isn’t any answer that isn’t at least a little monstrous.”

The truth of those words settled in my chest. Sorsha squeezed my arm, and the resistance inside me started to melt.

Yes. Avoiding devouring this man would likely sentence all those other beings to their own horrifying deaths. Would letting that devastation happen be somehow more humane of me simply because I hadn’t carried out the destruction through my own jaws?

This was what my beloved and my friends saw in me: not a monster giving in to viciousness, but a shadowkind with an ability that could reverse an immense catastrophe. I could do this. I was meant to do this. And I found I could think that without cringing for the first time since that night long ago when I’d sunk my teeth into my first meal’s skull unknowingly.

Why had I joined Omen’s cause at all if I wasn’t going to give this mission everything I had?

While I’d grappled with myself, Ruse and Thorn had conveyed the situation to our captive as well as they could with motions and scribbled words. He shook his head against the floor with a defiant scowl. Inhaling slowly, I crouched beside him.

“You are helping to hurt many people who’ve done nothing wrong,” I told him, in case some of my meaning might travel into him even if he couldn’t hear my voice. “I must hurt you to make sure those horrors end. It’s what I was made for—I won’t deny it. Sometimes it takes a monster to fight monsters.”

I knew in that moment through my entire body that as long as I cared about this realm and mine and all the beings in them, I wouldn’t ever let my monstrousness overwhelm me.

Greenish light glittered across my vision. I gave myself over to the change into my full devourer form. The stretch of my limbs and sprouting of sharper teeth came over me as though I were breaking free of a blanket that had been wrapped around me suffocatingly tight. A burn that was almost pleasant spread through my muscles.

Part of me would enjoy this act, as horrifying as it was. That was all right too. The enjoyment could belong to the good I knew I was doing even as I mourned the agony that came with it.

My jaw gaped open. Pulled by a mix of determination, justness, and the swelling hunger, I clamped my teeth shut around the man’s head.

I’d forgotten how intense the rush of images could be. Sights and sounds and, oh, the tastes surged through me, so vivid they might have swept away my sense of purpose if I hadn’t held on tight.

Yes, the rush of a young boy racing across a field to an ice cream truck—and the creamy sweetness flooding his mouth afterward—was meant to be savored. Yes, I could allow a moment’s satisfaction from his internal scream as I scoured through the memory of his teenage self smashing someone else’s prized violin into the smallest pieces his heels could produce. But farther, deeper, there would be the answers we needed.

There would be a sphinx and awful promises and mysteries unraveled. And I could devour until I found them.

The moments I’d been searching for hit me unexpectedly: a flash of amber eyes, graceful movements of bejeweled hands that I couldn’t follow, a caustic sense of agreement racing through the man in response. Tall towers, deep caverns, dry heat and damp darkness, chambers lit by an artificial glow. Glints of the metals he could pass but his master couldn’t tolerate. Writing, carved or painted, that he snapped photos of or copied with painstaking precision.

Spurts of triumph. Maybe this time would be enough. Maybe this time.

I lingered over every morsel as long as I could, inhaling every detail and marking in my own memory. The man’s silent wail of agony wound through the images brittler and harsher, until— snap!

My hunger severed the last thread. Nothing remained inside his husk of a body.

I heaved myself backward, falling into my regular mortal body as I did. Emotions still churned through me, some of them mine and some of them my victim’s, but the strongest sensation that expanded in my chest was relief.

The words spilled out of me. “He found writings—stories about shadowkind weaknesses. Rumors of poisons and other toxins. It wasn’t enough. She wanted more. There were claims of mortals sickening shadowkind and sickening themselves in turn. Ways to protect against that too. He saw just a day or two ago— To shield against the weaknesses one or the other possesses, you must contain both their strengths. I don’t know what that means, but Tempest was pleased when he told her. And… something about a place with many large rocks. He found a painting of it. Energies could resonate from it. I think she decided to unleash her disease from there.”

“Large rocks?” Sorsha repeated. “A mountain?”

I reached back into my mind’s eye. “No. One rock here and one there, many of them, standing in a circle. A large circle, with a smaller ring inside it. Some of them were stacked on each other like… tables.”

Ruse’s eyebrows leapt up. He tapped at his phone and held it toward me with a photograph on the screen. “Like this?”

My breath caught. “Yes. That’s the pattern.”

“Stonehenge,” Omen murmured. “If that’s where she plans to launch her catastrophe from, she must be working out the final details close to there. We’ll just have to?—”

With a boom that rang through my ears, the roof over our heads exploded in a shower of shingles.

Thorn bellowed and leapt up from the limp corpse. Orange light flared across Omen’s body. Shouts volleyed all around us—a glittering net heaved through the air—laser-like whips streaked across the darkness.

The wingéd warrior ducked, dodged, and bashed his fists into the faces of two of the attackers who appeared to be careening down the hillside in a wave. I spun around, grasping for some sort of weapon?—

But we hadn’t been their main target after all—not the four of us shadowkind. Two figures were lunging at Sorsha from behind. One of them jabbed something into the base of her neck with a crackle of electricity that made her body spasm before she could land her first punch.

I leapt at them, not caring that all I had to defend her were my bare hands, which weren’t half as suited to the job as Thorn’s. The brutes were already propelling her sagging body out onto the rocky terrain. I shoved one of them aside, but it was too late. As I reached for my beloved, a feline creature swooped down on vast wings to snatch Sorsha up in her paws.

A whip lashed across my shoulder. Ruse knocked the helmet off my attacker with the clang of a cooking pot. Omen tore past us all, his hellhound claws gouging the man’s stomach open as he sprang.

She was already gone. Bodies lay broken and bleeding around us. A few figures who’d seen the turn of the tide fled into the night. And the sphinx had soared off into the blackness of the sky, not a hint of her or her precious cargo in sight.

She’d taken Sorsha. My fingers curled into my palms as every particle of my body cried out in horror. What did Tempest mean to do with her?

I’d devour every member of the Company if that was what it took to save her.