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TWENTY-SIX

Sorsha

It started with a distant crashing. My ears perked up, and I raised my head from where it’d been resting against my tucked arms.

A thud reached me next, still muffled but not as faint as before—then a shout and a grunt like someone taking a punch to the gut.

I pushed myself as upright as I could get in my cage, eyeing the door to my room. Was this another trick to get a reaction out of me? But it wasn’t as if I could do much with the cage properly locked this time. I’d checked the latches before I’d laid my head down, and I rattled them now just in case. They didn’t budge so much as a fraction of an inch.

More thumps and booms filtered through the walls. A cry, thin and fraught with pain, pierced my eardrums. My body tensed.

This racket could mean good things for me—it could be my allies breaking in—but it could also mean a whole lot of bad. Maybe some other shadowkind had found out about Tempest’s plans and meant to inflict their vengeance on everyone in the building. Maybe her own allies had figured out she was double-crossing them and were wreaking havoc out there. Who knew what other enemies she might have accumulated over the centuries who wouldn’t have any reason to spare me?

Instinctively, I ran my tongue along the seam of my gums, restraining a wince at the scalded flesh there. I might not have much in this ridiculous horror show of a lab room, but I’d kept the tools I’d come in here with. Sweet chomping chimps, let me get the chance to use them.

A clang reverberated down the hall, followed by a snarl I wanted to think sounded familiar. Before that could amount to anything, the last familiar face I’d have wanted to see wavered out of the shadows into the dim light.

Tempest’s gleaming locks were writhing about her head in an agitated state. As she unfastened the door to my cage, her leonine face remained in a rigid mask of resolve. I braced myself—but I couldn’t make my move here. I needed my fire to finish things off, and I had no guarantee anyone had disabled the sprinklers.

“What’s going on?” I asked as she gripped the door. “Not having such a good day after all?”

She grinned at me fiercely, showing catlike fangs. “There’s still been plenty good about it, and I don’t intend to lose that now.” She yanked open the door and flicked a pair of handcuffs around my wrists so quickly I didn’t have time to dodge them.

My ankles were already chained again. I put up the best fight I could, attempted to knee her in the shoulder or elbow her in the face, but physical combat with all my limbs restrained and aching stiffly wasn’t exactly a piece of cake.

Tempest hauled me out of the cage to tumble to the floor. As I squirmed around so I had some chance of defending myself, she loomed over me, her shadowkind form taking over.

Her face still looked almost the same, just even more feline with a broadening of her cheeks. Her body expanded into that of a massive lion. Tawny wings burst from her back with a hiss of their long feathers. She clamped her muscular forelegs around my chest and stomped on the floor just beside the lab table.

With a whirring sound, a panel in the tiles pulled back. Letting out a breathy chuckle, the sphinx dragged me into the darkness beneath.

I only caught a glimpse of the passage we dropped into: just a few feet wide and high with packed dirt walls, the length of it falling into total darkness ahead of us. Then the panel snapped shut again, blotting out all light. The earth smell that filled my nose wasn’t remotely pleasant: pungent clay with a rotting note that turned my stomach.

Tempest managed to bound through the darkness while still holding me pressed to her thickly furred chest with one foreleg. When I tried to thrash free, her claws dug into my side deeply enough for the jolt of pain to shatter my breath.

“I’m not sure what use you think I’m going to be when you’re abandoning everything else you’ve been working on,” I said, fighting to keep an agonized rasp from my voice.

“If you’d rather I tore out your throat and was done with you, that can be arranged.”

“Somehow I don’t think you’d be getting this cuddly if you were willing to throw me away that easily.”

“Perhaps, but I’m willing to be convinced.” Her eyes flashed in the darkness. A more cloying rotten-meat scent spilled with her breath over my face. “You must know by now that I don’t put all my stock in any one person—or place. I might be a sphinx, but I can play hydra too. No matter how many facilities the fools destroy, there’ll be more popping up in their place. I’m everywhere .”

The vehemence in her voice turned my blood to ice. She really believed there was no way she and the horrors she’d set in motion could be stopped. Had she already unleashed her sickness on the world, and all she was doing now was protecting the source of her cure in case she needed more?

If she’d already hurt my lovers?—

I clamped down on the flare of heat that thought provoked before it could sizzle from my skin. This wasn’t the place to play my last gambit either—I had no idea what protections she might have built into this tunnel. But as soon as I got my opening, she was going to regret every bit of the pain she’d inflicted and urged others to inflict, no matter how eagerly those mortals had leapt to the task.

Heat seared across my tongue. I swallowed hard, gritting my teeth, and aimed it along my gum. I’d better be ready.

All at once, Tempest heaved upward. A large circle of metal swung up and over to bang against asphalt. Still clutching me tightly, the sphinx clambered out into the cool night air that drifted through a vacant parking lot. A ratty shopping bag coasted by us.

It wasn’t the most glamorous escape route. I guessed I was cramping poor Tempest’s style.

Not for long, it seemed. With a sweep of her wings, we lifted off the ground. Yells and a metallic crunching sound careened from somewhere down the street. I’d better figure out exactly what mess we were leaving behind before I took my shot at destroying the woman who’d set it all in motion.

Twisting my head, I made out a big brick building with lights flashing in some of the windows. Immense, monstrous silhouettes charged in and out of view. One wall was crumpled in across most of the left side. A few human figures scrambled through the rubble. As I watched, a shadowkind of some sort sprang at one and slashed through his neck. Several more creatures tore from the darkness in pursuit of the others.

I hadn’t seen any being I recognized yet. Maybe this really didn’t have anything to do with my crew. Where in Pete’s name would Omen and the others have found themselves this many new allies so fast—if the hellhound shifter would even have considered sticking out his neck to ask without me badgering him about it?

Tempest wrapped her other foreleg around me again now that her wings were doing most of the work. As she soared higher into the air, the pressure squeezed my ribs against my lungs. My voice came out more strained than I liked. “Pissed off a whole lot of beings this time, did you?”

“They don’t even know what they’re intruding on,” Tempest muttered. “Nitwits, the whole horde of them. Bashing their way in, yammering about some ruby they were looking for. If I’d had the time, I’d have directed them to a fucking jewelry store and introduced a diamond cutter to their vital organs.”

I just barely bit back a startled laugh. Ruby—that horde of shadowkind was looking for me.

And who knew of me as Ruby other than my closest companions… and the minions of the Highest, who wanted me dead to the point that they’d spent twenty-five years scouring the mortal realm for me?

Omen had stuck his neck out, all right. I never would have expected him to go this far. Technically, he’d stuck my neck out too, but it wasn’t as if my life hadn’t been under plenty of threat as it was. He’d used the Highest’s forces as his own tool to crash Tempest’s party.

I had kept telling him that getting his fellow shadowkind in on the cause was our best bet of coming out on top. Nice that he’d finally embraced my approach whole-heartedly.

Of course, all his efforts would amount to jack shit if I let this psychotic sphinx carry me off to conduct her nefarious schemes elsewhere.

Tempest must have sensed the readying of my muscles. She glared down at me. “Throw one whiff of flame at me and we’ll find out whether you can survive a trip into the shadows, phoenix.”

What would happen if I didn’t? Would I die as she wrenched me into the darkness, or would she find herself losing her grip on me?

We were swaying with the beating of her wings at least thirty feet above the ground now. The odds of surviving a fall weren’t in my favor. But at this point, all that mattered to me was that my captor didn’t survive.

Even with all the rage scorching my insides, I might not be able to completely destroy her on my own. If Omen could use the Highest’s minions, there was nothing stopping me from borrowing his strategy in turn.

“You think you know everything, but you have no idea,” I told Tempest, and sang another mangled lyric at her. “Not very smart, and you’re insane, you can shove your mad game.”

“Big talk from a little birdie in the clutches of a cat.”

“We’ll see how long that lasts.” I tipped back my head and bellowed at the top of my lungs, propelling a jet of fiery power alongside the words. “Hey, you beastly bastards! The Ruby you want is right here!”

My voice rang through the air, and the spurt of flames blazed across the night sky to mark our spot like a signal flare. As I blinked the after-glare away, a mass of shadowy figures surged from the ruined brick building toward us.

Tempest spat out several words that sounded deeply profane in a language I didn’t know and dug her claws into my sides again. A warble of her frigid energy penetrated my skin as she made good on her promise to try to yank me into the shadows with her.

Even if I survived the trip, in the shadows I couldn’t hurt her. I had to keep her here. I had to pin her to the fabric of this physical world. And luckily I’d shaped myself just the means to do that.

“Hey, Tempest, there’s something else you should know,” I shouted, and dug my tongue along my gums, where trickles of my supernatural fire had masked any noxious vibes the tiny instrument might have given off.

She swung her head down, her eyes glittering viciously. “What?”

“Your lackey in Crete had a very nice ring.”

A ring I’d melted into a tiny silver-and-iron spear. I flicked the miniature weapon between my lips, clamped my teeth on it to hold it steady, and slammed my mouth into the sphinx’s forehead with all the force I could muster.

As my jaw jarred against the bridge of her nose, the dull end of the needle scraped my tongue, but the sharpened point drove home.

A screech tore from Tempest’s throat. She flailed her head from side to side as if trying to shake the sliver of toxic metals free, but it held in place, smack in the middle of her treasured third eye. Blood welled around the puncture point.

My makeshift weapon prevented her from shedding her physical form, but it didn’t make that form any less deadly. With an ear-splitting howl, she raked her claws down my side and raised a paw as if she meant to slash my face right off.

A glimmer of hellish orange was streaking toward us through the darkness below. I sent up a silent prayer to the universe that the owner of that glimmer would reach us in time and yanked back the barriers that’d been tamping down my inner fire.

The flames erupted from my body like I’d been drenched in gasoline and torched. They flooded every inch of me, stinging and scalding—and they roared across Tempest too. Ignoring the pain as well as I could, I focused every bit of energy I had on hurling more and more heat across and into her leonine body.

The claws on her extended paw drooped and melted with the intensity of the heat as her foreleg fell. The shriek that rattled from the sphinx’s throat then was nothing but agony, no room left for rage. Her other foreleg moved as if to wrench away from me, but I flung my arms around her charred, furry body and squeezed as tight as I could.

The sickly smell of burnt flesh—not all of it hers—filled my nose. Her wings flapped weakly, trailing flames taller than she was, and then we plummeted.

As we dropped, the fire streamed over us like the tail of a meteor. Then the heat glazed my vision so thickly I couldn’t see anything but the flickering light. I choked back a sob at the throbbing digging down to my bones and propelled even more of the raging inferno at my captor.

This was for egging on the mortals’ hate. This was for Luna’s death. This was for the torments Tempest had encouraged her lackeys to inflict on so many shadowkind, including my devourer and my hellhound. This was for the new horrors she’d meant to enact on them and so many mortals too.

Let her burn. Let her burn until there was nothing left of that sadistically cavalier fiend than the barest scraps of ashes—and let them blow down into the foulest sewer in existence for good measure.

Her body started to disintegrate in my hands. Cinders sloughed off into the sizzling wind. She tumbled from my arms just as I collided with someone else’s.

I smacked into a broad chest, a familiar smoky scent with a hint of sulfur washing through the blaze. Arms glowing with a magma-bright light embraced me and eased me the rest of the way to the ground, but their fiery heat didn’t scorch me further. Instead, they absorbed the flames that had been ravaging my body.

The pain snuffed out along with the fire. As I looked up into my protector’s face, only a dull prickling sensation continued to ripple over my skin.

Omen smiled at me, the charcoal gray and glowing orange fading from his skin. “You defeated her. That was spectacular. And here I thought I’d get to come charging to your rescue for once.”

I beamed back at him, feeling slightly delirious. The sharpest flames might have dwindled, but the fire inside me was raging on, its heat crackling through me. “Don’t sell yourself short. Your brigade gave me the opening I needed.”

I turned on shaky legs to stare at the blackened corpse that had fallen beside me. Tempest’s wings had smashed into crisp chunks when she’d hit the ground; one of her hips had fractured, blackened all the way through. The silver needle had melted into a gleaming blob in the blackened mass that had once been her head.

She’d defied death before. I wasn’t taking any chances, thank you very much. I nudged the sphinx’s side with the toe of my sneakers—and her entire charred rib cage crumpled in.

Triumph flared inside me next to my still-smoldering anger. I aimed a kick at her head and watched it burst into burnt dust.

Omen stepped up behind me and took one of my hands, raising it over my head. When I lifted my gaze, my pulse stuttered. A swarm of shadowkind had surrounded us—the horde Tempest had ranted about. The Highest’s minions.

Omen pitched his voice to carry. “The phoenix Ruby has destroyed our true enemy! You saw what the sphinx was preparing in that building. You witnessed how the mortals she conspired with attacked every shadowkind they met. This being has ended all of that. Ruby is our hero !”

Holy glittering guacamole, was that gambit actually going to work?

Plenty of the gazes that had fixed on me shone with hostility. But they hesitated, many of them turning to look at the largest beings among them, who started murmuring amongst themselves in harsh voices.

Omen tugged me back toward him. He twined his fingers with mine, his other hand rising to my cheek. The pale blue eyes that met mine were anything but cold.

“So, you took my advice for once,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying.

The corner of his mouth crooked upward. His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone. “There’s a first time for everything. You’re not always wrong.”

I made a face at him. “If they’re not convinced, they’ll kill you.”

“It’ll be worth it.”

He said it without a hint of hesitation, and a strange flutter passed through my chest. Naturally, rather than figure out what to make of that, I kept shooting off my mouth. “Oh, yeah? Because I seem to remember plenty of times not at all long ago when you were doing your darndest to get me out of your?—”

“Shut up just this once in your life, Disaster,” Omen murmured, tipping his head closer, and I didn’t think anyone had ever said those words more sweetly. “They’ll have to rip me to shreds before they get one piece of you. I’d put my entire existence on the line for you all over again in a heartbeat. I told you that you’ve made an impression—in more ways than one.” He did hesitate then, his fingers going still against my skin. “I love you.”

I’d never anticipated hearing those three words fall from the hellhound shifter’s mouth. A giddy warmth spread from around my heart, swallowing up the fiery rage as it came. Still, one last question tumbled out. “Even though I’m partly human?”

Omen chuckled. “ Because you’re partly human, it seems. Don’t let it go to your head.”

“I know better than that.” My fingers curled into his shirt just below his collar. “I love you too.”

He answered me with a kiss, so fierce and demanding it made my knees wobble. What our spectators made of that, I had no idea, but I couldn’t say I cared. This indomitable, passionate man was mine , the missing piece in the quartet I hadn’t known I needed, and I’d never felt more at home than in his arms in that dismal parking lot.

When he drew back, I grinned up at him for a moment longer. Then I glanced toward the crowd to search for the rest of my shadowkind lovers. It wasn’t a matter of whether they’d be here but only where. My gaze skimmed over the mass of figures?—

And with a whine that rang through my ears, a gleaming bolt of metal pierced the darkness and rammed into Omen’s back.