Page 22

TWENTY-TWO

Sorsha

By the time we made it back to the apartment after picking up a drive-through dinner, night had fallen. The only light was the glow from the posts at the corners of the parking lot. The warm breeze carried a hint of smoke—from the flavor of it, it was a trash can fire. Great neighborhood we’d ended up in.

Since we had the pilfered keys now, I went in through the lobby as if I belonged in the building while the trio followed via the shadows. No point in drawing attention to ourselves with the guys’ striking good looks and Thorn’s nearly inhuman physique.

A middle-aged woman in turquoise scrubs was looking through a few envelopes by the mailboxes. She didn’t even glance my way as I breezed past her to the stairs. I didn’t think anything of her, or of the fact that she ended up ambling along several steps behind me. Only when she came out into the second floor after me did I realize I could have a problem. She might be familiar enough with her neighbors on the same floor to know I didn’t belong in the apartment I was heading to.

It only took a small trick. I stopped and muttered a curse to myself as if I’d remembered something that frustrated me. Then I stepped closer to the wall to rummage through my purse. The woman walked by… and kept going all the way to the stairwell at the far end of the hall.

That was odd. Maybe she’d taken a longer route to her own floor to get some exercise? My skin prickled as I hustled the last short distance to the apartment door and ducked inside.

The guys took a few more seconds to appear, and when they did, it was in mid argument.

“How could they already know we’re here?” Ruse was saying. “We only just got back from Meriden’s house, and she was already in the lobby.”

“They could have followed us from the office building,” Thorn said, and spun toward me. “We have to leave. That woman who followed you—she stopped and watched to see which apartment you went into, and then she immediately took out her communication device. She must have been waiting for us. And if our enemies know we’re in this building, the rest of them will be waiting nearby.”

My pulse stuttered with a jolt of adrenaline. Fucking hell. Thankfully I’d brought my backpack along for the drive, so I had almost all of my things. But I couldn’t take off without?—

“Pickle!” I called, pitching my voice low but urgent. “Pickle, come, we’ve got to go.”

The little dragon dashed out of the room I’d slept in, tufts of feathers clinging to his scales and floating into the air in his wake. He must have found a down pillow to nest in, damn it.

There wasn’t time to make amends for our unwitting hosts’ destroyed property. I bent down with my purse open and motioned for him to jump in. He balked for a second and then made the leap. My jerk of the zipper, closing it to hide him, was met with a snort of protest.

While I’d gathered him, Thorn had slipped away into the shadows again. He wavered back into the front hall with an expression even graver than before.

“They’re just coming out from the stairs at both ends of the hall,” he said. “More than a dozen of them—and this time they’re fully equipped like the ones who took Omen.”

I yanked the dangling strap of my backpack over my other shoulder and held my purse close. “There’s no fire escape this time. Do you think we have any chance of making it past them in the hall?”

“The three of us could take a shadow route, but you—” Thorn’s head jerked to the side as if he’d heard something from the hall. His expression set with resolve. He swiveled on his feet. “The vehicles are… that way.” Grabbing my wrist to tug me with him, he sprinted down the hall toward the bedrooms.

“What—?” I managed to get out as Ruse and Snap dashed with us. Before I could complete that question, Thorn had let go of me to charge straight through the bedroom door. It burst off its hinges with a crackle of splintering wood… and Thorn kept going, his fists rising in front of him, straight at the far wall.

He slammed into it arms first and drove straight through, plaster and plywood crumbling around him to rain down on the floor. As my feet jarred to a stop in the middle of the room, I gaped at the Thorn-sized passage he’d opened up between this apartment and the one next door. Oh my freaky stars, the guy didn’t do things by halves, did he? We had a whole lot more than a pillow to apologize for now.

If I’d had any doubts about racing after him, they were resolved in an instant by the boom of our apartment door exploding open behind me. Yeah, we had definitely overstayed our welcome here. I hurled myself through the smashed opening after Thorn.

He’d already barreled right through the neighbor’s apartment and out the other end, leaving another gaping hole in the kitchen wall. Shrieks spilled from the living room. As we ran by, I saw a young woman frantically hopping up and down where she’d jumped onto her couch, as if she thought she were dealing with a very large mouse that might come scurrying up her leg.

Add another person to the list of apology letters I was never going to send.

Shouts rang out behind us. I pushed myself faster, through the kitchen’s hole and past an elderly couple sitting frozen in shock with their dinner forks halfway to their mouths. “Really sorry!” I managed to toss out to them as I raced by.

“Send the bill to the bunch coming after us,” Ruse suggested with a breathless laugh.

A waft of outside air swept in from the hole in the couple’s bedroom. Jagged edges of cinder block and brick protruded around it, framing the night and the parking lot lights. As I reached it, I gulped. I’d known Thorn was strong, but—fuck, he was a demolition machine. Was there anything he couldn’t bash through?

I already knew the answer to that: silver or iron or both. Which the villains chasing after us would no doubt be carrying plenty of.

Thorn stood on the ground two stories down. He held out his arms. “Leap! I’ll catch you.”

He meant me, obviously. Snap disappeared into the shadows and emerged next to him a moment later. Ruse gave me an encouraging nudge.

“I’ve never seen him do this before, but I think you can count on him being very invested in making sure you don’t go splat,” he said with a wink, and then glanced behind us. “Unlike our tenacious fan club.”

My sense of self-preservation was torn between fear of the twelve-foot drop and fear of the weapons the enemies charging after us might be carrying. At least, like Ruse had said, the guy below wanted me to survive. I sucked in a breath, clutched my purse to my chest, and sprang into the open air.

My stomach flew to my throat and my hair whipped up from my head. I had only a second for terror to burst through me before my body smacked into two incredibly strong arms.

Thorn caught me with just enough give that the impact left only a fleeting ache in my back. He didn’t put me down, though, but sprinted with me toward the SUV. My head jostled against his expansive chest. The smell of him filled my nose, musky with a smoky edge like coals that had just stopped glowing: warmth and a warning wrapped together.

Ruse had whipped past us through the shadows and was starting the engine. Snap peered at us through the rear window from the back seat. Thorn wrenched open the door on the other side, tossed me in beside Snap with a slam behind me, and dove into the front passenger spot.

I landed in the middle of the seat, my hip jarring against one of the buckles, but I couldn’t really complain about the warrior’s haste. Yells and thumping footsteps carried from far too close behind us.

The second Thorn materialized inside the vehicle, Ruse hit the gas. The SUV tore backward and around. I tumbled farther to the side, bumping into Snap’s slender frame. He grasped my arm to steady me as Ruse burned rubber, roaring down the drive and out into the streets.

“Sorry,” I said to Snap, fumbling with my bags. I tucked my purse in the far corner on the floor’s shag rug where I figured Pickle was least likely to get crushed.

“It’s all right,” Snap said softly. The light of the streetlamps passing by glinted off his eyes. As the roar of several other engines reached us, they opened wider. “Will they be able to catch us, do you think?”

Ruse let out a rough chuckle. “I swear on my libido, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure they don’t.”

“We can’t stay in this vehicle,” Thorn said. “They’ll be familiar with it now. As soon as we can, we must abandon it and continue by other means.”

“No kidding. I think I’d better lose the homicidal maniacs behind us first, though—don’t you?”

Thorn gave a wordless mutter of assent, and Ruse jerked the wheel, spinning us in an abrupt ninety-degree turn—and then, an instant later, another. I still hadn’t gotten the chance to fasten any of the seatbelts around me. The momentum threw me into Snap again, the second lurch landing me right on his lap.

I guessed I’d just have to resign myself to being a ping-pong ball for this ride. It beat whatever the sword-star bunch wanted to turn me into. “Sorry,” I said to Snap again as his buffering arm came up to support me. He shook his head with a smile as if to say he didn’t need any apology.

As the SUV jostled back and forth with more of Ruse’s quick maneuvers, I swayed and gripped Snap’s knee. The moment we stopped rocking around, I attempted to squirm off him to give him at least a little personal space. My shoulder knocked his chest, and all at once Snap’s body went rigid against mine.

I held myself still, my gaze darting to him to check if I’d inadvertently hurt him. I’d never been quite this close to his divinely handsome face before, just inches between us. His chest hitched against my arm with a stuttered breath, and his moss-green eyes stared at me, as bewildered as if I’d suddenly transformed into a polka-dotted caribou.

Something was obviously not okay. I shifted my weight to get off him, and another swerve of the car sent me sliding back into his lap. My ass pressed into Snap’s groin—into a solid form that was even more rigid than the rest of him.

Oh. Oh . My eyes caught his again, just as they flashed with a glimmer of brighter green, like that glimpse of neon I’d gotten in the collector’s room. His hand braced against my thigh and then pulled back as if he wasn’t sure where to put it. Heat seeped between us everywhere our bodies touched, which at this point was quite a lot of territory.

So he did have it in him to get turned on. From the uncertainty in his expression, he hadn’t been any more aware of that fact than I’d been. But now that I’d noticed it, there was no mistaking the bulge of his erection.

His pupils had dilated slightly, his breath coming shallower and faster than usual. A tingle quivered through my lungs and down to the apex of my thighs in response. He’d gotten this turned on, probably for the first time in his existence, because of me. And every part of me was totally on board with that. I just couldn’t tell how on board he was.

It wasn’t as if we were in any position to explore the possibilities further. The awkward intensity of the moment broke with a screech of the tires. Ruse hauled the SUV in the other direction, and I flew off Snap onto my back, just barely catching myself before my head banged into the opposite door.

After one more burst of speed, the incubus slammed on the brake and cut the engine. “They’re not going to find us here for at least a little while. Now we just have to figure out where we’re taking off to next.”

We’d stopped in a laneway so tight I could barely squeeze out of the SUV. Good thing the shadowkind, especially Thorn, didn’t have to bother with the doors. The backs of brick buildings loomed on either side of us; the glint of streetlamps shone only faintly in the far distance. I had no idea where we’d ended up, but it definitely didn’t look like an easy spot to stumble on.

“We’ll want another vehicle.” Thorn motioned to Ruse. “Why don’t you slink around and see what you can turn up that couldn’t be easily linked to us? I’ll patrol the area to ensure our enemies haven’t followed us too closely.” He glanced at me and Snap. “You two get ready to flee if we need to, but stay here for now in case we don’t find another vehicle in time. I won’t be long. Ruse had better not be either.”

“I can take a hint,” the incubus said. They both slipped away into the darkness, leaving Snap and I in silence.

In the tight space that was as much as I could open the door, I picked my purse off the floor and gave Pickle a comforting pat through the fabric. He murmured his displeasure.

Snap flitted into the shadows and out again by the back of the SUV. I leaned against the trunk at the opposite end from him, giving him the space I hadn’t been able to offer in the car. Snap gazed down the lane toward that distant haze of artificial light. In the dimness, I thought I could tell his cheeks had flushed, but a glance at his nether regions showed that he was no longer, er, standing at attention.

We stood there in silence for a few minutes. Then words spilled out of me before I could second-guess the impulse. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal, you know. It’s a totally natural reaction that anyone could have in close contact like that. Just a little friction, stirring things up.”

His head swiveled with its serpentine grace to consider me. “Just a little friction,” he repeated, in a tone I couldn’t read. “Is that all it means to you?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again, abruptly unsure how to respond. “Not always,” I said finally. “But I can look at it that way if that’s what you’d prefer.”

He looked away from me with a flick of his tongue over his lips. “I don’t know. I—” He paused, apparently grappling with his words as much as I had. “It’s not a sensation I’m used to. It was… unexpected. As it was happening, I wanted very much for it to be over with, but I also wanted more. I’m not sure which preference was stronger.”

I found myself wetting my lips too. I sure as hell wasn’t going to push him, but— “Well, if you end up deciding on more, just let me know.”

He shifted against the trunk with an audible inhalation, but before either of us could say anything else, Ruse appeared in front of us. He jabbed his thumb toward the end of the lane. “I’ve got a cab waiting that-a-way, with a very agreeable driver who won’t mark down the pick-up. Where’s the lunk?”

“Right here.” Thorn stepped out of the shadows just as the incubus finished speaking. “Our pursuers haven’t made it this far yet, but we should move on with all haste. We can’t shelter for the night in one of those taxis.”

An idea clicked in my head, so fitting I could have laughed if tension hadn’t still been knotted through my chest. “I know the perfect place for us to go.”