Page 31

THIRTY-ONE

Sorsha

Patching me up turned into a group effort. Ruse picked up the necessary supplies while I lay grumbling and cursing on the motel bed, the one hand towel Pickle hadn’t appropriated pressed to the entry wound and the dragon himself curled up against my head in an effort to offer comfort. When the incubus returned, Thorn and Snap sat next to me. After I’d swallowed a couple of painkillers and a swig of the vodka Ruse had also deemed necessary, the warrior slowly talked the other shadowkind through the process of removing the bullet and stitching my flesh back together.

Snap shuddered when he peered at the lump of metal that was apparently visible in the wound. “It’s silver.”

“Good thing I’m not a werewolf,” I muttered. The guards had been at least a little prepared for supernatural intruders.

Thorn ignored my dry remark. “We wouldn’t need it out otherwise. I don’t want to leave anything in her that could make it harder for us to take care of her. It shouldn’t cause any further trouble—no major blood vessels right there.”

Snap sucked in a breath and brandished his tweezers.

His slender fingers did perform the job more gracefully than Thorn’s heavy hands could have managed, although I contributed quite a bit more cursing regardless. In between the throbs of pain, I couldn’t help thinking about where the warrior must have picked up his knowledge in field wounds. A long time ago and probably in countries far, far away.

Thorn didn’t look particularly fazed by the wound or the bleeding that had already slowed to a trickle by the time we’d made it to the car thanks to the pressure he’d applied. Snap, for all he kept his hands steady, was much more perturbed. At my every hiss and grimace, he winced in sympathy.

“You destroyed the ones who did this?” he asked Thorn with his new possessive fierceness.

The warrior offered a rare, if grim, smile that would have been answer enough. “Oh, yes.”

The lump of metal Snap plucked out didn’t look large enough to have caused half of the agony I’d been experiencing. The pain started to dull now that it was gone, other than the tiny jabs of the stitching needle. In a few minutes, I was sitting up with an ice pack over a gauze bandage, the muscle there turning nicely numb.

Piece of cake. Ha ha ha.

Ruse had been examining my loot. “So, our answers are in here?” he asked, nudging the computer.

“I hope so,” I said. “They’d better fucking be after all this. The trick is going to be getting them out.” I motioned to Snap. “Any chance you can get a sense of a password from that thing?”

Snap considered the metal structure with obvious skepticism. He leaned in, his tongue flitting past its surface here and there. When he straightened up, he shook his head. “It’s mostly you, from when you were running with it. The other impressions are much duller. Nothing that tells how to open it.”

Of course the owner wouldn’t have been petting the computer while logging in or working out nefarious plans. If I’d thought to grab the keyboard too… But then, I’d barely made it out of the store with what I had carried.

I rubbed my mouth. “All right. We’re going to need a monitor and a keyboard, and I guess I’ll have to see if someone from the hacker cabal can talk me through breaking the password encryption… And fast.” It was past eleven. At best, we had eight or nine hours before the sword-star bunch realized what we’d taken off with and started cleaning up shop.

Ruse cocked his head. “Wouldn’t it be easier to bring the computer to the hackers and let them do the work?”

“I don’t know where they are. I guess they probably know someone who could handle it in a city this big.” I frowned. “If they’d agree to meet up with us anyway. If that would even be safe.”

The incubus’s eyes gleamed. “Get them on the phone, and I can handle the rest.”

Every minute it took to wait for a response felt like years, but it’d actually only been half an hour before the Fund’s contacts had hooked me up with a local associate who reluctantly agreed to a phone conversation. When the call came in, I handed the phone to Ruse.

“Hello there,” he said in his smooth voice, and shot me an amused glance as he covered the mic area. “They’re using a voice distorter—as if that’ll help.”

He sauntered around the room, rolling his cajoling words off his tongue, until he’d gotten an address and a promise that our new friend wouldn’t mention the visit to anyone. “I’ll return with all possible speed,” he said, handing me back my phone and hefting the computer.

“Take the devourer with you,” Thorn said abruptly.

Ruse looked at Snap, who blinked at the warrior. “What would I do there? I don’t know how to get anything out of that box.”

Thorn nodded toward Ruse. “He can pick up on whether this ‘hacker’ has had any contact with our enemies. If they have, we’ll want you to test their home and possessions for any useful impressions you can glean that way.”

The explanation sounded flimsy, and from the arch of Ruse’s eyebrow, he thought so too. He wasn’t inclined to fight with the larger shadowkind about it, though. “Come on then. My influence isn’t quite as potent without visuals. We want to make sure we get there before it wears off.”

Snap cast a concerned look my way, but the need for urgency cut off whatever arguments he might have made. “We’ll be back soon,” he assured me. “For now, get all the rest you can.”

“Believe me, I have zero interest in running any marathons for the next decade or so.”

They slipped out, leaving me with just Thorn, looming where he stood beside the bed. I raised my own eyebrows at him. “Couldn’t wait to get me alone, huh?”

There was that familiar glower. He appeared to be waiting for something—the rumble of the car engine as the other guys drove away. Then he folded his arms over his expansive chest, but I couldn’t feel all that intimidated just from his bulk when I’d seen what he really looked like.

“You won’t say anything to the others about what I am,” he said.

Interesting. “Why not?”

The glower deepened. “It’s simply easier not to get caught up in the questions that arise. Even my fellow shadowkind are generally… taken aback.”

So I wasn’t wrong in being startled that his specific kind existed at all anymore. I scooted away from the pillow to Pickle’s snort of dismay, gave the dragon a soothing pat, and gazed up at my avenging warrior. “All right, I’ll keep quiet—on one condition. I want you to show yourself again.”

Apparently it was Thorn’s turn to be startled. “What?”

“You heard me. I’d like to get a look at you when I’m not half out of my mind in pain. Since this seems to be a once-in-a-lifetime-if-that sort of experience and all.”

Thorn opened his mouth and shut it, appearing to think better of whatever protest he’d been going to make. He’d correctly labeled me as obstinate just an hour or so ago, after all. “Fine. But only if we’re agreed.”

“No blabbing your secrets—it’s a deal.”

I offered my hand to shake on it, and Thorn accepted the gesture with a twitch of his mouth that could have been amusement or irritation or maybe a little of both. His solid fingers engulfed mine in their firm grasp. Then he stepped back from the bed to give himself more room.

Unlike Ruse, he didn’t need even the concentration of closing his eyes. The edges of his body flickered, and all at once he loomed half a foot taller, his frame filling out with even more of that sculpted brawn. The smoldering red consumed his eyes. Where his hands had dropped to his sides, his knuckles glinted with their crystalline surface protruding farther and sharper, and the hardened lines of his scarred face caught the light with a diamond-like quality I hadn’t seen in the darkness of the parking lot.

And those wings. He kept them partly folded, and still the arc of their dark sweep grazed the ceiling. The feathered tips might have stretched all the way from one end of the room to the other if he’d extended them.

I hadn’t seen those wrong. My breath caught. I knew I was staring, but really, if there was ever an excuse to, this was it.

A wave of giddiness propelled my next words. “You’re an angel.”

Thorn’s mouth tensed. “That word belongs to mortals. None of the trappings they add to it have any basis in reality. We prefer ‘the wingéd.’”

He placed an archaic emphasis on the end of the word, saying it “wing- ed ” rather than “wing’d.” His voice resonated with the reverb quality I also hadn’t imagined. It sent a tingle over my skin.

I hadn’t had any reason to believe in a literal heaven even before he’d made his comment about trappings, but if anyone had ever sounded as if they came from on high, it was him.

“I didn’t know there were any of you left,” I said. “I heard… there was a war?”

The information the shadowkind passed on between each other and to the mortals they interacted with was limited, and where it did exist, the details were sketchy and probably skewed by myth and faulty perception. The little bit I’d gathered was that sometime several centuries ago, there’d been a brief but epic battle of some sort in which angels—okay, the wingéd—had fought in unison with the human factions… on both sides. The clash of uber-powerful beings had left most but clearly not quite all of them dead. No one who’d referenced it had any idea what they’d been fighting about.

If Thorn was a typical representation of his kind, I was going to guess the disagreement had been more serious than which way you hung a toilet paper roll.

He didn’t add to my understanding. “Most slaughtered each other. I survived. It’s not a time I care to talk about at any length, m’lady.”

Fair enough. “And the others really don’t know?”

He shook his head. “Not the incubus or the devourer. Omen knows. He was there.”

My eyes widened. “Is he an ang—er, wingéd—too?”

Thorn chuckled—a sound I’d never heard from him before, thrumming from his throat with heavenly resonance. “No. He’s— You’ll see, if he wants to show you.”

Someone had mentioned the man having claws at one point, hadn’t they? I might have prodded the warrior further, but his good humor faded with the last few words. There was more he could have said but didn’t need to.

If we ever do find him.

I didn’t want Thorn dwelling on that right now. With a twinge from my shoulder, I pushed myself to my feet so I could step closer.

Thorn’s stance tensed at my approach, but he didn’t disguise his true form. As I reached with my good arm to trace my fingers over the slope of one wing where it left his back, he held himself perfectly still.

The surface of the black feathers was unexpectedly silky, only coarse along the edges, and the ridge of flesh beneath them emanated warmth. I couldn’t resist the urge to stroke them more firmly. Was that a slight hitch in his chest, as if that spot might be particularly sensitive to the touch?

When was the last time he’d been close enough to anyone to let them offer this kind of caress, if ever?

“They’re magnificent.” I glanced up, my pulse stuttering at finding myself so close to that impenetrable face. “ You’re magnificent.”

He peered down at me with those smoldering eyes. “Mortals usually flee in terror at this sight.”

I grinned. My heart was still thumping double-time, but it definitely wasn’t in fear. His musky, smoky smell had coiled around me, and every word that fell from his lips in that tone like low thunder was stirring heat in my core. The jolt of desire that’d rushed through me in the parking lot definitely couldn’t be blamed on just adrenaline.

My hand drifted from his wing to rest on his bulging bicep. “Haven’t you figured out yet that I’m not your average mortal?”

“It would be exceedingly difficult not to have noticed.”

I walked my fingers down to his elbow teasingly. “And you like me, irreverence and obstinance and all, as hard as it might be for you to admit it.”

He let out a sound that wasn’t much more than a wordless grumble, and then he proved what I’d just said by clasping the hair at the back of my head and tugging me to him. His mouth collided with mine, hot and steady and unrelenting. I held onto his tunic for dear life and kissed him back, my senses overwhelmed.

Maybe it wasn’t the sanest move I’d ever made. I’d already been canoodling with both of his companions, and just one monstrous lover was more than a handful. But—heaven help me even if it didn’t exist—I wanted them all, and after tonight, I deserved a little indulgence. It wasn’t as if any dalliance between a human and a shadowkind could turn into a real relationship in the long run. Once our battle with the sword-star bunch was over, who knew if I’d even see any of them again?

Thorn kissed me once more, with determined gentleness, before he drew back a few inches. His hand slid from my hair to stroke along my jaw.

“I almost didn’t get to you quickly enough tonight,” he said, with a rawness I could hear even through the reverb. “We still have farther to go to see this through. I won’t insult you by asking you again to back down, but I hate the thought that next time I might fail to protect you.”

“You’ve now saved my life at least a couple times over,” I said. “I’m pretty sure any debt you owed me is fully paid.”

He made a noise of consternation. “You’re worth more than any debt. I didn’t kiss you as repayment either.”

A flutter passed through my chest with a softer sort of giddiness. “I’m glad we’re on the same page, then. Maybe you take the whole protection gig to unnecessary extremes? All Omen could have asked was that you do your best, and I’ve never asked for anything at all.”

“I…” His thumb that had been gliding along my chin halted. “I had friends in the war. Brothers and sisters at arms. I would have died for them—I should have—but I wasn’t there when the need was greatest, and now they are gone and I am still here. I don’t wish to repeat that mistake.”

He’d spoken in his usual formal diction, but the weight of that loss rang through the words. A lump rose in my throat. How long had he spent roaming the shadow realm alone, tangled up in guilt and mourning? He’d been carrying that wound for centuries, and Omen’s mission had brought the pain right back to the surface.

I touched his jaw like he had mine, finding the hardened planes of his face still had the warmth and suppleness of skin against my fingers. “I understand, but I swear to you that if something happens to me, I won’t blame you for it. All right?”

Maybe it didn’t matter what I thought if he’d blame himself anyway, but he inclined his head in acknowledgment. His wings vanished, his body contracting to his normal though still imposing height. The red faded from his dark eyes.

“The others might be back at any moment,” he said, with more his usual brusqueness. “Snap was right—you should be resting while you can.”

“Fine,” I muttered, but my shoulder was starting to ache more insistently again. I could be satisfied with a couple of kisses for now. Getting more involved with the third member of my monstrous trio—I’d decide later how sane that idea was. If we got a later after wherever else our schemes led us tonight.

I sank down on the edge of the bed. As Pickle scrambled up onto my lap to curl up there, my thoughts veered toward my own friends. My best friend, who’d wanted so badly to fight for me too, even if those efforts had ended in disaster.

I grasped my phone. “I should call Vivi. Make sure she found someplace safe to hide out.” Get in a few last words with her just in case they turned out to really be my last. It was late, but Vivi tended to be a night owl even when she didn’t have a recently-witnessed murder to ruin her sleep.

“I’ll give you the room,” Thorn said, and wavered away into the shadows to his own room without bothering with the door.

I hesitated over my Frequent Contacts, where Vivi’s welcoming face grinned up at me from the top spot. My stomach knotted.

Ten years ago, when I’d been barely more than a kid and she hadn’t been much older, we’d been glued at the hip. I wasn’t sure how I’d have survived this long without her friendship keeping me sane and human. The thought of someone putting a bullet in her still made my innards clench up with an icy panic.

But maybe she’d felt the same way about me potentially walking into danger. She’d screwed up and crossed boundaries, and I was still kind of pissed off about that, but at least she’d done it out of love rather than the intent to do harm.

I tapped the screen and lifted the phone. A few seconds later, my bestie’s voice pealed into my ear.

“Sorsha! Are you still okay?”

I ignored the ache in my shoulder. “I’ve had better days, but yeah. Are you ? Did you get out of town like I said?”

“Yeah, I grabbed Gran, and we took off for a cottage a couple of hours away that belongs to friends of the family. I—I keep looking out the windows just in case someone’s coming.” Her voice dipped lower. “I’ve been worried sick about you. I wanted to call, but I didn’t want to interrupt you at a bad time. Obviously I’m not the greatest judge of when or how to interfere.”

“You shouldn’t have been interfering at all,” I couldn’t help saying, even though I hadn’t meant to restart that argument.

Vivi sighed. “Okay, that might be true. And I’m really sorry I went all stalker on you. But you shouldn’t have been lying to me. I thought you knew you could count on me… I wish you’d trusted me more.”

The dejection in her voice made me wince. I swallowed hard. “It’s not that I don’t trust or count on you, Vivi. I do, for all kinds of things. But you saw how dangerous the situation is, what kind of people I’m up against… With the things Luna taught me”—and the trio of allies who’d turned up on my doorstep—“I’m better equipped to take them on. I was trying to keep you safe .”

My best friend was silent for a moment. “I get that. I can even appreciate the thought. But Sorsh, what if I don’t want to be safe if that means I can’t help you when you’re in trouble? How do you think I’d feel if you got hurt and I hadn’t done anything to stop it? If we’re working together, at least we can split the danger two ways instead of it all being on you.”

“I don’t think it works exactly like that,” I said, but her words sent a twinge through me anyway. Had it really been right for me to take away her choice in the matter? I’d told myself she wouldn’t fully understand the danger to know what she was getting into—but part of the reason she didn’t was because of all the things I’d avoided telling her.

I hadn’t liked Thorn trying to send me off to keep me safe, and he’d at least informed me of that decision rather than going behind my back.

“I’m sorry too,” I added. “At this point, I think we’re both safest if you lay low, but once the immediate crisis is over, we’ll talk more. Okay?”

“That sounds like a compromise I can get behind. Are you… Are you looking after yourself?”

“As well as I can. And as you noticed, I’ve got some friends of another sort who’ve made that their business too.” I smiled wryly. “You don’t have to worry about them either. We’ve reached an understanding.”

“If you say so.” She gave a short laugh. “Ack, Gran’s calling for me. I’d better see what’s up. Call me again to touch base tomorrow so I don’t go crazy wondering what’s happened to you?”

“I’ll do that.” I’d be worrying about her too.

“Talk soon then. Ditto.”

My smile turned painfully bittersweet. “Ditto,” I replied.

I lay back against the pillow, Pickle snuggling into the crook of my neck, and closed my eyes. Despite the intermittent twinges of pain, I must have dozed at least a little. One second my mind was drifting through a highlights reel of the past week, and the next all three of my shadowkind companions had burst into my room, talking at the same time.

I sat up, blinking and swiping at my eyes. A glance at the bedside clock told me it was now nearly two in the morning.

We were running out of time.

I held up my hands. “Hold on, hold on. What’s going on? What did you find out? Start from the beginning—just one of you.”

Ruse came to a stop beside the bed and caught one of my hands in his. His smirk radiated victory.

“The hacker you found cracked all the codes, and we hit pay dirt. We know exactly where Omen is down to the cell number—we’ve even seen the blueprints to know how to get to it once we’re there.”

Snap was practically bouncing on his feet with eager energy. “At least, we think it’s him. They’re all called ‘subjects’ in the files. But ‘Subject 26’ was the only one brought in around the time he was captured, and some of the other details sounded like him.”

“He’s alive,” Thorn said with undisguised relief.

“We found the building,” Snap went on. “It was one of the other impressions I got from Meriden. Two of them together, actually. There’s a big construction site”—he glanced at Ruse as if to confirm he’d gotten the term right—“and in the middle where you can’t see unless you go right through, there’s the building I saw with the concrete walls and shiny doors.”

A secret facility hidden within a construction site? With all the building projects that went up around the city and then took forever to complete, I had to give the conspirators kudos. That was pretty brilliant.

“You saw the place?” I said as everything he’d said sunk in. A quiver of nerves raced through me even though the two of them had clearly returned unharmed. “You went in?”

“Not all the way in,” Ruse said. “On the way back here, we swung by the address we got to scope things out so we could make more definite plans. We couldn’t easily get into the actual building, though. They’ve got flood lamps all around the place so we can’t get close enough to jump to any entry point through the shadows, and obviously we weren’t going to stroll over and knock.”

“Lots of guards too.” Snap made a face. “Some of them standing around, some of them patrolling, with silver and iron protections and those weapons they used before.”

“I can smash through their puny equipment,” Thorn rumbled.

“Not with this many, even with these guns.” Ruse punched him lightly in the arm. “We’re going to need a better strategy than ‘Charge straight in and hope for the best.’”

I thought of the construction of the toy shop office. “What about the building itself? Is there any silver or iron worked into it?”

Ruse hesitated. “We didn’t pick up on anything from outside. The blueprints indicate there were special materials used in the cells, which makes sense. The rest of the building looked clear.”

But of course we couldn’t know for sure if they’d added more since then.

If the shadowkind couldn’t simply slip inside unseen, then getting in would require my expertise. My first impulse was to tell them to lay out the route for me, and I’d get to Omen and release him myself. No need for any of them to risk the same assholes catching and caging them , especially when we didn’t know how going into the building might affect them.

But as I looked around at the three men—and perhaps monsters—who’d crashed into my life uninvited days ago, the bizarre fondness that swelled in my chest was tainted with a pinch of shame.

I’d nearly gotten myself killed earlier tonight by insisting I go into the store alone. Shutting Vivi out had made more problems for us than it could solve. The idea of seeing anyone that I, yeah, cared about under threat still made every particle in my body balk. It made me think of my parents’ cries and of Luna shattering into mere particles of the woman who’d raised me.

My lungs constricted with the memories. People around me, people who were trying to look after me—they died.

But these three knew the risk they were taking. How could I tell them it wasn’t their choice to make—or try to take the choice away from them completely?

If we were going to outmaneuver the sword-star bunch and rescue their boss, it’d take all the wits and skills we had between us. Going in alone could be both a suicide mission and a guarantee of failure.

“We’ve gotten this far,” I said. “No way are they stopping us now. Tell me exactly how the building is laid out and where we need to go, and let’s work from there. We need to pull this jailbreak off before the sun comes up.”