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EIGHT

Snap

When I woke up, only a faint haze of dawn light showed through the window. Sorsha lay peaceful in my embrace, her red hair providing a bright frame to her pale face. Her fiery sweet scent lingered in my nose and on my lips.

I wanted to hold her like this forever. I wanted to slide back inside her and return to that wonderful, slick melding that had brought such pleasure to both of us. But the first option was impossible while we still had Omen’s jailors to bring to justice, and the second would have meant breaking her much-needed sleep.

Instead, I settled for slipping away into the shadows and reforming outside, meaning to check the car for any food she might have bought and left there that I could offer her as a breakfast when she woke. That’s what I would have done, except Omen was leaning against the car, his arms folded over his chest and his gaze piercing as it fixed on me. I might not have been an expert at reading emotions like Ruse was, but I could tell he wasn’t happy.

“What exactly is this mortal’s draw that all three of you are slavering over her?” he said in a cool, flat tone. “Even you . Are her nether regions laced with heroin?”

I blinked at him. I didn’t like how hard and cold he’d been since we’d freed him. The Omen who’d asked me to help with his quest, the one who’d guided me through our first few ventures into the mortal world, hadn’t exactly been cheerful, but he’d smiled with warmth. Made jokes now and then. Laughed at Ruse’s jokes at least as often as he’d glared. He was angry because of what the other mortals had put him through, this Company of Light, and that made sense, but still, I didn’t like it.

And also… “I don’t know what that means.”

He sighed and pushed himself off the car to straighten up. “Of course you don’t. Never mind. The point is, you’re awfully attached to this woman, aren’t you?”

Did he simply know what we’d been doing last night, or had he managed to overhear some of the things I’d said to her as well? I wouldn’t take any of them back.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” I asked. “You haven’t given her a chance—you weren’t there to see how much she did for us, how incredible she’s proven herself to be. Weren’t your tests enough? Or how she helped us in the ambush last night?”

“That’s not the point. She could deliver us the elixir of life and she’d still be a mortal. No good has ever come of a shadowkind getting hung up on one of them. We’re not the same sort of being—we don’t mix well. It’s a losing game.”

My hackles rose. “It isn’t a game. I care about her.”

He waved a finger at me. “That’s exactly the problem. Caring tangles your fate up with hers. You haven’t been on this side enough to know—mortals are fragile, Snap. Damned fragile. Why do you think they’re always coming up with new ways to try to screw us over?”

“Because they think we’re monsters?” I ventured.

“That’s just the name they invented to justify how they feel. And how they feel is fucking terrified of us.” He scoffed. “They’re afraid of so much, and they want to destroy whatever scares them.”

I paused, remembering a different sort of terror I’d sensed before we’d gotten Omen back. One he might have experienced as much as the creatures who’d left those impressions had. Was that what had changed him?

“I know what they did,” I said quietly. “The Company, in their experiments—not every aspect of it or any hint of why, but we investigated one of their labs. I tasted… over and over again, so much agony to so many shadowkind. It was horrible.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Omen growled.

“But I do need to tell you—Sorsha isn’t like that, not at all. She hates the people who did that as much as we do.”

“It doesn’t matter. Even the ones who aren’t outright hostile end up making more trouble than it’s ever worth. The only thing it’s worth doing with mortals is killing the ones out to harm us and giving all the others a wide berth. I guarantee you, she’ll make you regret doing anything else.”

“You don’t know her. She isn’t fragile.” I couldn’t imagine that word ever properly describing Sorsha. The power she wielded wasn’t anything like Thorn’s or Omen’s—or any other shadowkind—but it was still power. I could recognize the determination and resilience in her as surely as I could glean impressions of the past from any objects in my grasp.

Omen had tried to hurt her or to put her into situations where she’d be hurt, but she’d overcome his challenges. Why couldn’t he see?

“She is fragile,” he insisted. “You just don’t understand yet. It always comes out at the worst time. We’ve got too much at stake to risk it.”

“We’d risk a lot more if we stopped her from helping us. And I might not be very familiar with the mortal realm yet, but I know enough to recognize that.”

“Fine. She’s helping us. I haven’t sent her away, have I? Just have a little self-respect and stay out of her bed if you know what’s good for you.” He grimaced and stalked away.

A jittery sensation ran through my body in the wake of his words. The thought of Sorsha becoming fragile, of her breaking in some way, set all my nerves on edge.

I made myself investigate the car as I’d planned to. After a minute, I came up with a gas station store bag still holding some sort of chocolate cake-like confection that I expected would serve well enough, but I couldn’t rouse much sense of victory. I flitted back into the cabin and set the food down on the little table under the window.

Sorsha had dozed on. There was a sort of delicateness to her features when they were relaxed with sleep, a vulnerability in the softness of her skin. When we shadowkind took physical bodies in this realm, we could be gouged and shattered too, but unlike her, we could escape into the shadows to avoid a blow.

I’d already had to dig one bullet out of her. That had been painful—for me as well as her. Perhaps that was what Omen meant about her supposed fragility causing trouble.

The answer was simple, though. It rang through me clear as anything as I gazed at her lovely form.

I wouldn’t let the few who were vicious enough to wound this woman get close enough to do so. No mortal or shadowkind would uncover any frailty in her. She’d saved me from a cage that would have burned me and the searing of the lights in a collector’s home—and I would save her when she needed me to. Over and over, if it came to that. When a battle turned bloody, it wasn’t as if Omen needed my abilities in that moment to serve his purposes anyway.

Whatever other shadowkind he’d known who’d mingled with mortals, they must not have cared the same way I did. She was mine, and she’d called me hers, and nothing had felt more right in my entire existence. He didn’t need to worry about how much she mattered to me precisely because of how much she mattered to me.

Satisfied with that conviction, I eased down on the bed next to her to soak up a little more of her warmth. If I was particularly lucky, she’d share a morsel of that chocolate delicacy with me when she woke up.