Page 14

FOURTEEN

Sorsha

I paused in the short hallway that led to the bar’s back door just long enough to glance over my shoulder. None of the guys who’d set off my warning bells appeared to have clocked me as a target. As far as I could tell, they were still circulating through the front half of the bar, not yet looking or coming my way. Good.

In my bar-wear, I felt unnervingly vulnerable. The badge pinned to my bra might protect me from shadowkind powers, but it’d do nothing at all against human means of combat. After the mixed martial arts classes Luna had insisted I take in my early teens— Because you never know if you might encounter some enemy that prefers brute force over hocus pocus , she’d said—I could handle myself all right, but four against one wasn’t great odds.

“Oh, girls just wanna have guh-uns,” I sang under my breath as I slipped out into the back alley, not that I knew how to fire a gun anyway.

The alley was dark and dank, and a homeless dude was loitering outside the building next door, swigging from a bottle of vodka I could smell from seven feet away. Thankfully, it’d be just a short jog to the lights of the street. Once I was watching from outside where any searchers wouldn’t expect to find me, I’d be much more in control of the situation.

I hurried toward the sidewalk, that sense of control already settling comfortably in my chest, and uneven footsteps scraped the pavement behind me. The drunk guy was heading this way too. I picked up my pace so I could keep well ahead of both him and his stink—and he lunged at me with a speed I hadn’t expected.

The vodka bottle tumbled to the ground with a crackle of breaking glass. The second the guy’s hand closed around my wrist—firmer and steadier than made any sense given his supposed inebriation—my fighting instincts kicked into gear. My body twisted, and my leg shot up for that most basic of self-defence maneuvers: a knee to the balls.

I’d say one good thing about him: he did have his private parts exactly where I needed them to be. My knee connected with his most sensitive appendage, and the air shot out of him with a pained grunt. He stumbled backward, flailing to keep his balance. A knife flashed through the air in his other hand.

Holy mother of mincemeat, what exactly had he been planning on doing to me with that thing? Drunk homeless dude, my ass. This guy had just put on a front while he waited for a target.

Had he been waiting for me specifically, or had I just gotten extra lucky tonight?

I didn’t have the chance to ask him about it. I shifted my weight back, my fists coming up, ready to give him a lesson in why you don’t attempt to knife random women, and the air between us split with a sizzling sound that raised the hairs on my arms. A huge, brawny form wavered into view in mid punch.

Thorn’s fist slammed into my attacker’s face just as the “drunk” guy had lurched back toward me. His crystalline knuckles raked through the flesh of the guy’s cheek and nose down to a gleam of bone. A cry of pain had just started to break from the asshole’s mouth when the shadowkind warrior literally broke his throat with a slash of his other hand. He gouged straight through the guy’s neck, cutting off the cry into a gurgle and a spray of blood.

My attacker crumpled into a heap, blood puddling around him. Thorn stepped back with a satisfied swipe of his knuckles against his palm, and—holy mother of magnificence.

I stared, briefly distracted from the carnage. Specks of the guy’s blood had spattered across the warrior’s chest… His bare chest, with bulging muscles on full, glorious display. In fact, he was bare all the way down.

When shadowkind moved through their realm or through the shadows in ours, they dropped their physical forms, including any clothes they’d been wearing. It appeared Thorn had been too focused on leaping into the fray to remember to bring into being more than the essentials of his body, modesty be damned. And, wow, the equipment he was packing between his legs definitely lived up to the rest of his impressive form.

I jerked my gaze away after just a moment of gaping, but that was enough for Thorn to notice. He looked down at himself and let out a noise of consternation. At the edge of my gaze, I saw his typical tunic and trousers blink into being, covering all that deliciousness. It was almost a shame.

What was definitely a shame: the mangled body I was now staring at again, just a few feet away from me. My stomach flipped over. I sidestepped to avoid a rivulet of blood that trickled toward me. “What the hell was that?” I demanded, my heart thumping from the fight—and maybe a little from the eye candy I’d gotten right after, despite my revulsion at the rest of the scene.

Two other figures I should have realized would be along for the ride shifted in the darkness. Ruse tilted his head to one side as he regarded the dead man. He brought his hands together in a light clap. “Excellent smiting. A+ for technique. Maybe a little overboard in the nakedness department, but I’m really not one to criticize that.”

Thorn glared at him with a twist of his mouth that might have been a little embarrassed. He turned to me. “My apologies that I didn’t intervene sooner, m’lady. And for the… unfortunate oversight when I first arrived.”

“I’m not complaining about that part,” I said, and shot my own glare at Ruse when he smirked. “None of you should be here at all—you were supposed to stay at my apartment! And you—you massacred this guy.” There really wasn’t any better word for it.

“He was attempting to harm you,” Thorn said, completely ignoring my first point. “He had a weapon. I was simply preventing him from using it.” He frowned at me as if upset that I hadn’t thanked him yet.

I supposed I did sort of owe him some gratitude. All the same… “Thanks, but I was handling it just fine by myself. You can’t go around killing people left and right, even if they seem like real jerks. Unless someone’s actually on the verge of killing me, you can stick to beating their ass and sending them running. Or rather, let me beat their ass and send them running.”

Thorn’s forehead furrowed. “I can hardly wait to see if an attacker will get to the point of a mortal blow. He was a miscreant of some sort. What does his death matter?”

I stared at him for several seconds while I tried to construct an answer his shadowkind worldview would understand. He clearly didn’t subscribe to the idea that life was sacred regardless of what the living thing was doing with that life. Truthfully, I wasn’t exactly sad that the asshole was dead, even if the sight of his battered body horrified me.

I’d never seen anyone die except Auntie Luna, and her departure had been more sparkly than bloody.

“On this side of the divide, we don’t go around killing anyone who pisses us off,” I said finally. “There are laws, and a certain mortal sense of morality… You might not agree with it, but it’ll be easier for all of us if you try to respect it at least a little.”

“I respect what keeps you and us alive,” Thorn said. “That matters more than mortal laws or your qualms about our presence.”

I resisted the urge to reiterate the fact that I probably would have been just fine even if he hadn’t jumped to my rescue. One guy with a knife vs. my martial arts skills shouldn’t have been a problem. Of course, who knew if my attacker had more than a knife? Bloody mess and all, I might find it in me to be a bit touched that Thorn was so dedicated to my safety.

They all were. Snap eased up beside Ruse and looked me over with a worried air. “You are all right, aren’t you? He came at you very quickly.”

“I’m totally fine.” I brushed off my arms as if to demonstrate.

“If it makes you feel any better, this was no great loss.” Ruse motioned to the bashed body. “I got a read on him before our fist-happy friend here took care of the matter. You aren’t the first woman he’s attacked—and if he’d had his way, you’d have been pinned up against the wall while he forced himself on you.” He grimaced as he spoke those words as if it disgusted him to even voice that possibility out loud.

My skin crawled at that revelation. But the way the guy had gone after me, the pretense of being drunk and all, hadn’t felt like some random rape attempt. “Is that all you picked up on?” I asked.

“I didn’t have a whole lot of time to rummage around in his emotions and motivations before he and they ceased to be.”

“Why did you come out through the back to begin with?” Thorn said. “Did you see a reason to be wary when you were inside?”

Oh, shit. I’d totally forgotten my original goal. “There were four men who came in—not part of Jade’s usual crowd. I got the impression they were searching for someone. Considering what you three have gotten me mixed up in and your idea that we were followed this afternoon, I thought that someone might be me. I was going to double around and keep an eye on them from outside at the window.”

I hesitated with a glance at the body and then hustled the rest of the way to the street. When I reached the front of the bar, I held myself to the side of the window and peeked inside.

I couldn’t make out every corner of the place from here, but it only took a quick skim over the patrons to determine that none of the preppy guys I’d slipped out on were in view. Which meant they probably weren’t in there at all anymore—it wasn’t likely all four of them had squeezed into one of the nooks I couldn’t see. My jaw clenched.

My shadowkind trio had gathered behind me. “It looks like they left while we were busy dealing with the jerk in the alley,” I said. “Now there’s no way of telling what they were up to.” I might have been glad that my uninvited protectors had joined me if Ruse could have taken a read on those dudes. “I’m not sure they were looking for me—it just seemed better to be careful.”

Snap peered past me into the bar. “Yes, that’s why we came. To be careful with your safety.”

It was hard to be mad at him when he put it like that with his sweetly melodic voice.

I headed back toward the alley with a sigh. “All right. We’ll just all be extra careful until we find out how much attention we’ve already drawn. And if we want to make sure we don’t stir up even more trouble, you’d better clean up the mess you left here.” I shot a look at Thorn. “I hope you’re as good at getting rid of dead bodies as you are at creating them.”