Page 25

TWENTY-FIVE

Sorsha

“I should have brought a pair of binoculars,” I grumbled, slouching against the leather seat with new-car smell prickling in my nose.

Ruse tsked teasingly at me from the driver’s seat. “Patience, Miss Blaze. Our job is to be ready to drive when the Incredible Hulk gives the word.”

He meant Thorn, who was stationed in the shadows somewhere down the road where he could make out what was going on at Meriden’s house. Those of us keeping our physical bodies were staked out in a driveway a couple of blocks away. Ruse had even made a show of getting out of the car and walking around to the back of the house in case anyone was watching all the way over here and would have thought our arrival odd otherwise.

He’d slipped back through the shadows after, and the sedan’s tinted windows ensured no one was going to be IDing me or my shadowkind friends through the glass. I appeared to have stumbled straight from a slasher flick into a spy caper.

It was a pretty posh car all around. I peered at Ruse from where I was still hunkered down in my seat. “Are you sure the salesman isn’t going to snap out of your little charm spell and realize he’s lost a major chunk of change, plus commission?”

“First off, I assure you there’s nothing ‘little’ about any part of my prowess,” Ruse said. “And yes, you can rest easy. He thinks he got the better end of the deal.”

“But he didn’t. Someone at the dealership is going to notice eventually.”

“Your mortal conscience is so adorable.” Ruse’s smirk softened around the edges with a hint of affection. “If all goes well, we won’t need to keep this lovely piece of machinery for more than a few days, and then I’ll drop it off in the lot. No harm done!”

Other than the potential harm of whatever wear and tear we put it through, which considering how the past few days had gone might be a lot, but since the alternative had been sitting around in the horror-movie motel with my thumb up my ass, I shut up.

I suspected the only reason Thorn had agreed to my coming along at all, yesterday’s apologies about misjudging my commitment aside, was because he’d be more worried leaving me on my own than having me where he could keep an eye on me. As annoying as his own commitment could be, he did take the whole protection racket very seriously.

Across from me, Snap turned his head, following the path of a gray minivan that was cruising by.

“Wrong direction for that to be Meriden,” I said. “And much more the kind of car the white-picket-fence families around here would be driving than a conspiracy of shadowkind hunters.”

He nodded as if taking my observations in stride. If last night’s awkwardness was still affecting him, he hadn’t let it show in any way I’d noticed so far. Maybe he’d decided pretending his momentary arousal had never happened and praying it never did again was the better course of action.

I was allowed to feel a tad disappointed about that, don’t you think?

“Perhaps I don’t understand because I haven’t spent enough time in this realm,” he said, “but I can’t see what those people would want with us. With higher shadowkind in general. What are they doing with Omen and whoever else they’ve taken, and why?”

“The collector who had us felt awfully proud of the power he had over us, keeping us locked up,” Ruse said. “Remember how often he’d come around to gloat? Mortals can be just as addicted to a sense of power as shadowkind can—maybe more so.”

Snap hummed. “It didn’t seem as if that building we searched before was for just holding and displaying the shadowkind they’d captured. They were going much farther than that.”

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” I said carelessly.

The godly shadowkind blinked at me. “Do they? I don’t.”

“No, it’s just— It’s words from a song. Never mind.” I gave a vague wave of my hand. “Whoever these people are, they’re probably power-hungry too, just for a different kind of power. The hunter M.O. has evolved before, right? From what I’ve heard, way back in the day, all they were interested in was tracking down and slaughtering any of you they could find. It took a while before they found out that they could actually make money from the hunt—mostly if they kept the beings they captured alive.”

“There were always collectors,” Ruse said. “Just like there were always sorcerers.” He glanced at Snap. “Those are the mortals who’ve developed a system for manipulating shadowkind into using their powers for the sorcerer’s benefit. But I remember hearing of collectors in my early days… There were only a few of them, and it was harder for them to arrange the purchases without the internet and all, I’d guess. And mortals in general were much more bloodthirsty about anything remotely supernatural back then.”

“At least when the creatures are in cages, I can let them out again.” I kicked the back of Thorn’s vacant seat and scowled at the street outside. “These sword-star people are definitely something else, though. So many of them and so organized, plus they’re trying to get shadowkind from the collectors instead of for them. And from what you said about the impressions you picked up in that lab, Snap—I don’t like it; that’s for sure.”

The incubus opened his mouth as if he were going to add something else—and the gray minivan that had passed us just a few minutes ago drove back into view, turning toward Meriden’s house at the intersection between him and us. I sat up straighter, studying it. Why would they have come back around?

The minivan slowed to a stop toward the end of the next block, and a figure hustled over to it from one of the driveways I could barely distinguish at this distance. I tensed even more. “Start the engine,” I told Ruse on instinct, a second before Thorn flickered in and out of view in his signal to us to pick him up.

“Thorn’s calling us!” Snap said.

Ruse peeled out of the driveway but rumbled on down the street at just a smidge over the speed limit, despite the urgency he must be feeling as much as I was. If we looked like we were chasing the minivan, we’d blow all the care we’d put into this cover.

I gripped the door, my heart thumping. A baby blue compact had pulled away from the curb behind us. Great, now we had two sets of spectators to worry about, not counting anyone who glanced out their house’s windows.

The incubus didn’t even slow down as we passed Thorn’s post. The warrior must have sprung into the sedan from one shadow to another. With a blink, he was sitting in the passenger seat as if he’d never left.

He jabbed his hand toward the windshield. “Meriden got into that van. Don’t lose it. But make sure they don’t know we’re tracking them.”

“I remember the plan,” Ruse said mildly. At a stop sign, he drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, the only outward sign of his own impatience. The minivan turned out of view up ahead, and I stifled a growl.

Now that the people in the van couldn’t see us either, Ruse gunned the engine a little faster. When he took the same turn, the vehicle was still in view, the gunmetal-gray paint shining in the mid-morning sunlight a little more than a block ahead of us.

I let out my breath, and it snagged in my throat on my next inhale at a flash of color in the side mirror. Craning my neck, I spotted that baby blue compact taking the turn after us. Uneasiness itched at me. “I think someone might be tracking us .”

Thorn glanced back, his lips slanting into a deeper frown. “It appears to be just a driver, no passengers. I could deal with them if need be.”

I squinted at the figure, but between the light reflecting off the windshield and the pale hood pulled low over the driver’s forehead, I couldn’t even tell whether it was a man or a woman. “It only took one person to bring a whole squad down on us last night,” I reminded him.

“Let’s not jump to any conclusions yet,” Ruse suggested. The minivan veered right, and several seconds later he copied the maneuver. I exhaled slowly—and here came that blue car, following us again.

The incubus’s mouth twisted. “Okay, maybe we should start jumping now.”

“We can’t keep following the van with someone else following us,” I said. “No one’s seen who we are yet, but the more obvious it becomes what we’re doing, the more likely they’ll sound the alarm.”

Ruse gave the wheel another beat of his fingers and made a pleased sound at the sight of the van’s turn signal going on. We were coming up on a major throughway, four lanes with plenty of traffic as commuters headed to work. The incubus ignored the left turn lane the minivan had pulled into and drove straight ahead.

Thorn grunted in dismay. “What are you doing?”

“Just watch. Ah, here he comes.”

The blue car stayed on our tail. Ruse sailed through the intersection and halfway down the next block, and then swerved with a jerk of the wheel into a gas station.

“Ooof.” My chest jarred against the seatbelt I thankfully had on this time. Not that my ribs were thanking it.

I clutched the edge of the seat as Ruse tore through the gas station between the rows of pumps and out onto a different street. The engine roaring now, he careened into the next right, cut across the parking lot outside a print shop, and flung us around through a couple more hasty turns. Then, with one final squeak of the tires, we flew out onto the large street the minivan had turned onto.

And wouldn’t you know it, there was the damned thing still only a block ahead.

Ruse chuckled. “Thank the dark for rush-hour traffic. Any sign of our hanger-on?”

I studied the view beyond the back window for several seconds as we cruised after the minivan. The baby blue sheen should have stood out in the sea of black and silver, but I didn’t spot it. A weird choice for a stealth mission, really. Knitting my brow, I swiveled toward the front again.

“You lost them—but maybe they just happened to be taking the same route and weren’t after us anyway. They didn’t seem all that on the ball.”

“Doesn’t really matter as long as they’re not behind us now. Let’s see where Meriden is off to.”

We skirted the edge of downtown, coming within ten blocks of the apartment building we’d crashed in—and then crashed through—not long ago. The minivan took a few more turns before ending up in the docklands, where aging factories loomed on either side of the streets and the smell of algae seeped into the air conditioning. The river that wove through the east end of town used to be a major shipping route before the manufacturing industries had started moving overseas.

With much less traffic on these streets, Ruse had dropped back to a couple of blocks behind the minivan. I stirred restlessly in my seat. How long a road trip were we on, exactly? And why hadn’t I brought more snacks to?—

The minivan jerked to a halt by the curb. A skinny figure topped with gleaming black hair scrambled out and darted out of sight between two of the buildings.

Thorn cursed. “Go! We have to see where he went.”

The second the minivan had pulled away, Ruse hit the gas. We jolted back in our seats as he sped over. When he passed the last side-street before the drop-off spot, Thorn vanished, presumably rushing off through the shadows to track the man where the car couldn’t follow.

“He might need me to test the area,” Snap said, and wavered away an instant later.

As Ruse drove by the alley I thought Meriden had taken, I peered down it, but he’d disappeared as effectively as the shadowkind had. The incubus eased to a stop at the end of the block and idled there.

The minivan was long gone. As far as I could tell, there was no one around to make note of us. But I’d thought that before and been wrong.

I twisted to scan the street. “Do we just wait for Thorn and Snap? Should we be searching for Meriden too?”

Ruse appeared to make a quick deliberation. “Let’s keep driving—it’ll look less suspicious if anyone is monitoring the area, and maybe we’ll spot our target somewhere around the block.”

He circled around, and I leaned closer to the window, studying every doorway, window, and alley. The gloomy structures showed no sign of life at all, like giant, rotting carcasses of beasts slain long ago. An engine thrummed in the distance, but whatever vehicle the sound came from, we never saw it.

Ruse continued on a block farther, to where a rusty crane creaked in the wind over the river. He looped back around with a rough sigh. “Hopefully the Hulk had better luck.”

We were just coming up on the street where we’d left Thorn and Snap when both of them slipped out of the shadows into their seats with a shudder through the air. Ruse eased over to the curb and cut the engine.

Thorn didn’t wait to be asked. His voice came out taut with frustration. “We lost him. No trail to pick up. Snap couldn’t tell where he passed by.”

“If he didn’t touch anything closely enough with his body, it wouldn’t have left an impression I could connect to him,” Snap said in a mournful tone. “Many shoes walked over that ground; I couldn’t taste any that were definitely his.”

“Quite the system this group has worked out,” Ruse said. “I’d be impressed if it wasn’t so irritating of them.”

Thorn’s shoulders tensed. “It’s more than irritating. It’s unacceptable. At every turn, they get the better of us, foil every measure we’ve taken. We fumble along while Omen faces who knows what torment—” He stiffened even more at the sound of footsteps outside.

An older man came into view, heading into our street from down by the river behind us. Not Meriden—his hair a mix of mouse-brown and silver, his shorter frame slightly slumped. But without a word, Thorn whipped open the door, sprang out of the car, and charged past my window.

A sound of protest burst from my throat. I jerked around to see the massive shadowkind barreling toward the man as if he meant to knock him right off his feet. For the love of little baby elephants, what was he thinking?

I hesitated for just a second, and then I leapt out after him.

The man had halted in mid-step at the sight of the colossus closing in on him, but Thorn didn’t so much as slow down. He slammed his hand into the man’s chest and yanked the front of his polo shirt up to his chin. The man swayed backward, scrambling on tippy-toe to keep his feet on the ground.

“What do you know about the man who got out here?” Thorn demanded.

“What?” his victim said in a reedy voice. “What man? When? I—I don’t know what you mean.”

“You must know some thing.”

“I swear, I was only walking by—there’s a shop down the street where they sell the only coffee my wife will drink.” He jerked his hand, and the plastic bag dangling from it rustled. “Please. I’d help you if I could.”

“Thorn!” I stopped on the sidewalk next to him, my throat constricting. “He’s just some random guy walking by. He wasn’t even near the drop-off spot.”

“That’s what they’d want us to think.” Thorn shook the man. “Whatever you’ve seen, whatever you know, you’ll tell me, now .” His voice had gone hard and cold as a winter freeze.

The guy was trembling, his toes barely scraping the ground. He couldn’t make anything more than a choked squeak now. I didn’t think Thorn was trying to kill him—but he might with that incredible strength, if he was too distracted by his need for answers to notice the full effect he was having on that mortal body.

I wasn’t completely sure the warrior wouldn’t turn that strength on me if I crossed him in this moment, despite debts owed. The breath left my lungs, but I forced myself to grasp his arm.

“Thorn,” I said, vaguely aware of the other two shadowkind reaching us. “He doesn’t have any answers. I know you’ve been beating yourself up for not protecting Omen, for not finding him sooner, but this isn’t going to make it right. It wasn’t your fault anyway.”

Finally, Thorn’s gaze shifted to me. In that moment, the anguish in his eyes was so stark that my throat clenched up again for a different reason. It resonated through me, stirring up echoes of the guilt that had wrenched me so often in the first years after Luna’s death—the unpredictable flashes back to the attack, the incessant attempts to piece together some way I could have saved her, as if it could have made a difference by then.

“How can you know that?” Thorn asked in a raw voice.

I made myself hold his gaze, even though the tension radiating off him set all my nerves jittering with alarm. I knew where that agonizing frustration came from. It wasn’t aimed at me or even the man he was holding, not really. And I could tell him this with more certainty than I’d ever been able to absolve myself.

“Because I’ve seen just how far you’ll go to keep the people under your watch safe, and it’s really fucking far. I’d probably be dead at least twice over if it wasn’t for you. We’re going to figure this out. I know that much. Just… not this way. Please.”

Gradually, the warrior’s arm relaxed. The man’s feet touched down. He sagged with a rasp for breath that brought Thorn’s gaze jerking back to his victim. He took in the man’s quivering form before glancing back at me, and a flicker of an expression that might have been distraught crossed the warrior’s face.

Oh, there were feelings buried under that hardened exterior—plenty of them. The thought of the overwhelming loyalty that drove his guilt sent a shiver through me, one not entirely unpleasant.

“I only wanted to find out what he knew,” he said.

I squeezed his arm where my hand still rested on it. “And now that’s done.”

Ruse sauntered over to the man and helped him gather himself with a grip of his elbow and a friendly pat to the back. “He’s confused and terrified, and the confusion is real,” the incubus said to us. “He really doesn’t have any idea what this is about. And I think I’d better make sure he doesn’t give it any more thought, hmm?”

He eased the man off to the side to talk to him in soothing, persuasive tones. I let my hand fall from Thorn’s forearm. He watched it drop to my side as if he wasn’t sure how it’d ended up on him in the first place.

“What do we do now?” Snap asked.

“Well…” I looked around. “We know where Meriden gets dropped off. They probably stick to a similar schedule every day—it’d get complicated constantly switching locations with no reason to.”

Thorn picked up the thread of my thoughts. “We’ll come straight here tomorrow morning. Be ready to follow him as soon as he gets out. Pick up the next part of the trail.” He raised his head, his usual cool determination returning.

I found myself smiling at him—this brutally devoted monster. “Exactly. I’d call that a plan.”