Page 49

SIXTEEN

Sorsha

Occasionally, my dreams were pretty damn delicious. A three-foot-high stack of waffles layered with custard and blueberries and drizzled with enough syrup to give Snap a spontaneous orgasm? Who cared if it was obviously unreal?

I searched the table for a fork, and suddenly in that way dreams had, it wasn’t waffles but all three of my trio stretched out before me. Mouth-wateringly naked. Eyes come-hither. Still being drizzled with syrup.

Um, yes please, I’d take a bite out of all that. I leaned in to lick a trickle of sweetness off Thorn’s massively muscled chest—and fuck all that was just and juicy if some asshole didn’t yank me awake before I got even a taste.

A harsh voice was rasping by my ear. “Sorsha!” My pulse stuttered, and I thrashed aside the blanket I’d curled up under on one of the camper van’s padded benches.

Omen loomed over me in the thin dawn light, his brimstone scent sharp around us. He hauled at my arm again. “Get up, they’re on us—get out of here unless you want to be barbeque.”

A crash and a metallic crunching reverberated through the air from somewhere beyond the van walls. My blearily sleep—and syrup—deprived mind couldn’t quite process what was going on other than it was something very bad and apparently staying here would make it even worse. I lurched off the bench and dashed out the back of the van with the shadowkind boss.

He leapt up the funhouse’s steps, tugging me with him, and propelled me through the entrance into the darkness. “Go, go, go!”

Go where? I sprinted through the shadowy halls, his urgency spurring me on even though I had no idea why it made any sense to be running away in here. Was this another dream? If so, I really needed to have a chat with my subconscious about appropriate transition points.

A figure sprang out of the darkness, hurtling right toward me. I flung myself to the side—and slammed into the cool glass of a mirror. The figure in front of me heaved sideways and winced too.

Oh, that was my reflection. Not looking so hot on three hours of sleep.

I whirled around in the hall of mirrors, barely able to make out more than blurred impressions of movement in the darkness. Were those shapes all me?

No—that one darted at me with a slash of some glinting blade. I threw myself past it, smacked my hand against a nearby mirror to push myself around a corner, and nearly pinged off another reflective panel.

An explosive sounding boom echoed through the walls, rattling the glass. My heart thudded faster.

As my breath stung in my raw throat, I dashed on. Something thwacked my shoulder. A searing hiss wound through the air from somewhere overhead.

I veered around another corner and pelted at full speed into a room full of hanging punching bags painted with smirking clowns. Welcome to heart-attack land! I pummeled my way through the dangling obstacles, the bags battering me this way and that as they swung back into me.

A metallic screech from behind me made my nerves jump. I bashed my way past the last of the freakish clowns and bolted into the next room, only to find myself swaying back and forth as if I’d careened onto a raft on stormy water.

The floor—the floor itself was warped into weird undulations, bending this way and that under my feet. I teetered to my left and almost fell to my knees.

Omen’s voice rang out from somewhere in the distance. “Sorsha, hurry! Get to the roof!”

Then a distinctive squeal sounded almost directly above me. Panic raced through me with an icy jolt.

Pickle! What were these fuckers doing to my little dragon?

I scrambled onward across the topsy-turvy floor. By the time I reached the far end, I wasn’t just exhausted but woozy too, as if I’d had a couple of shots too many.

There was a stairwell. I pounded up the spiral steps to the second floor, ignored the rest of the wacky gauntlet for the door that must guard the route to the roof, and rammed my heel into the knob. To my momentary relief, the door burst right open.

Another squeal reached my ears, even more terrified than before. I hurtled up the steps to an open doorway where the faint dawn sunlight shone across the staircase. Before I’d even reached the top, the prickly scent of a fire flooded my nose.

I burst from the doorway into the wavering heat on the concrete plane of the roof. Pickle was perched on an overturned plastic bucket several feet away, flames crackling in a ring around him. His clipped wings fluttered in terror.

If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d probably have noticed that it made no sense at all for my shadowkind creature to be here or for a fire to have somehow flared up around him like that. But at that point I was running on pure adrenaline, and all I knew was I had to rescue him.

I raced toward the fire with a swipe of my hand, willing it away from him with all my might.

And just like that, the flames parted. They bowed to either side of a blackened patch they’d marked on the concrete in front of me, and Pickle sprang through the opening into my arms.

As I skidded to a halt, four forms shimmered out of the shadows along the edges of the roof. The nearest one, Omen with his cold blue eyes gleaming bright, slashed a pocket knife across my forearm where I’d wrapped it around the dragon.

I yelped as much from surprise as the shallow sting of pain. As I moved to leap backward, Omen caught my wrist, wrenching me into place and turning the cut to the light in the same motion. My eyes caught on the narrow, red line—and all I could do then was stare.

The line was red with the blood welling up across the wound, but that liquid wasn’t all that was seeping from my skin. A thin but unmistakable trickle of black smoke snaked up from my arm into the air.

Smoke, like shadowkind bled.

My heart had outright stopped for a few beats. It revved up again with a tremor through my veins, but the adrenaline rush was already fading. With fatigue closing in on me again, the smoke dwindled and disappeared, leaving only a streak of proper human blood across my pale skin.

“Well, fuck,” Ruse said from where he was standing by my other side with Snap and Thorn. Even the incubus didn’t seem to know what to say after that.

“We all saw it,” Omen said, his voice taut. “Both the fire and the smoke.”

“But I can’t— It isn’t possible ,” I said. My voice sounded hollow. As Pickle clambered onto my shoulder, I brought my arm close to my chest to inspect the cut. My entire abdomen felt hollowed out. “None of you would bleed actual blood like this if you were cut. Shadowkind never do.”

“No human would bleed like smoke, though,” Thorn said, his stern face frozen in an unusually stunned expression.

I guessed he should know from all the epic battles he’d fought long, long ago. I swallowed thickly. “I don’t understand.”

Omen flicked the pocket knife shut and tucked it into his pocket. “Neither do I, but you can’t deny the evidence any longer. There’s something about you that goes beyond normal mortal bounds. I don’t think it’s just a spell laid on you either, with it twined that deeply with your essence. It seems to only come out when you’re particularly worked up. At least, for now. We’ll see if we can work on that.”

My idea of who—and what—I was had just been unavoidably flipped upside down, and he was already making plans for how he’d put me to use? “I don’t—I’ve got to think about this.”

“What’s there to think about?” he demanded. “You have power. We need all the power we can get if we’re going to take down the people intent on ravaging the entire existence of shadowkind. You’ve already wasted enough time with your refusals to admit it.”

“Well, maybe I’d be a little more interested in exploring the possibilities if you had any idea what this means. But you don’t, do you?” I glanced from him to my trio. “None of you knows how the hell this could happen.”

The three pairs of uncertain eyes that gazed back at me held no more answers than Omen had offered.

I let out a ragged breath. “Right. I assume we’re not actually under attack, and this was all just a ploy to freak me out enough to run your little test?”

“For now,” Omen said. “The Company of Light could attack at any?—”

“I know . But they’re going to have to wait too. I need at least a few minutes to process this identity crisis. Just—just leave me alone.”

I spun on my heel and stalked to the stairwell. Hurrying back through the funhouse, I barely registered the punching bags brushing against my shoulders or the warped reflections showing me only my own wan face. As I stepped out of the building by the camper van, my legs wobbled. Once I’d climbed inside the back of the vehicle, I tugged the door shut and burrowed under my blanket, cuddling Pickle against me.

The tiny dragon squirmed around and nuzzled his scaly head against my chin. I gave his neck a comforting rub. “The boss man was awfully mean to you, sticking you in that fire, wasn’t he?” I paused, and a lump lodged in my throat. “Is that why you like me so much, Pickle? Because somewhere inside me I’ve got smoke for blood?”

Had Luna known and simply never told me—was that why she’d been willing to raise me? What did it mean about my parents? Were they even my parents? Did I have parents at all? I’d never heard of a shadowkind of any sort being born rather than simply coming into existence out of the ether of their native realm—never heard of a single mortal-shadowkind pregnancy despite the many liaisons between the cubi kind of both sexes and their lovers-slash-meals.

But of course, I obviously wasn’t a shadowkind, at least not much of one. It was only a fragment of my being that emerged in tense situations.

I’d never heard of anything like that before either.

Even under the blanket, I felt it the moment another presence wavered from the shadows into the van.

“Sorsha?” Snap said, his voice tentative.

I forced myself to uncover my head. The devourer sat on the bench opposite me, his golden curls glowing with the rising sun but his moss-green eyes dark with concern.

He probably didn’t even understand why any of this bothered me. Working supernatural voodoo and bleeding smoke was business as usual for every being he’d spent much time around before me.

“Can I do anything?” he asked, softly and simply, and somehow that was exactly what I’d needed to hear. He couldn’t really do anything, but—maybe I didn’t actually want to be left alone right now, not completely.

“Come here?” I said, scooting as close to the wall as I could to make room on my bench.

Snap smiled and moved to join me. Pickle scuttled away with a little snort, presumably deciding he wasn’t interested in being the filling of our cuddle sandwich.

There was even less room on the bench than we’d had on the bunk back in the cabin, but Snap managed to lie himself down beside me without toppling over the edge. He slipped one arm around my waist and tucked his chin against my forehead, cocooning me in his bright warmth.

“Omen wanted us all to make it seem like there was some kind of attack, to scare you,” he said. “I told him I wasn’t going to help, but he went ahead anyway. He gets very… determined sometimes.”

I leaned into his embrace. “I guess he wouldn’t have gone to those lengths if I hadn’t been so stubborn about insisting I couldn’t do anything magical.”

The devourer was silent for a moment. “ That scares you. That you could influence fire in some magical way?”

Okay, so he could understand more than I’d given him credit for. It was fair to say I was scared. Possibly even terrified, not that I wanted to admit that out loud.

“And that there might be other powers I don’t know about. Just… not knowing what I might be capable of, what I even am , and what else from my past must be either a lie or a total mystery.”

“I think it’s amazing that you have a force like that in you. You’re even more special than I already realized.” He pressed a light but possessive kiss to the top of my head. “But not knowing if you can control a power, one that could also hurt people… It feels pretty horrible, doesn’t it? I believe Omen only wants to help you learn how to find that control. Or I could help, if you’d rather that. I’m not sure how to, but I’d try.”

The lump in my throat returned with a pang of affection. I hugged him even tighter. “I appreciate that. I’ve never been scared of you , you know. No matter what power you have that you’ve decided you shouldn’t use, it’s obvious you can control it. I’ve never worried that you’ll hurt me.”

“I’m glad,” Snap said, “but I hurt people before, and I can’t forget that. That’s how I make sure it doesn’t happen again. I don’t think you would in the first place, though.”

His faith in me made my heart ache even if I couldn’t say he was right. There’d been plenty of people I’d wanted to hurt over the years. In the heat of the moment, if I knew I could with barely any effort at all… but then, that was all the more reason to learn what the hell I was doing from beings who were experienced in the supernatural arts, wasn’t it?

Maybe dealing with this puzzle wouldn’t be so bad with Snap by my side. And Ruse… and Thorn…

My thoughts slipped back to the delicious dream Omen had woken me from, and then to last night when I’d been ready to give myself over to Ruse yet again. Was my greediness fair to the guy holding me right now and all his passionate devotion?

“Snap,” I said. “Does it bother you that I might hook up with Ruse again, or even Thorn? It’s not that I don’t want you—I do, a hell of a lot. I just…”

I wasn’t sure how to explain it. But Snap seemed to already understand that too. He shifted against me, fitting me even more perfectly against his body.

“I’ve seen you with them,” he said. “And I can tell—the energy you have with them is a little different than with me. There’s something you get that’s different.” He paused, his embrace tightening. “I wish very much that I could give you every conceivable thing, but I’m not sure that’s possible. And if it’s not, I don’t want to take anything away from you. That would be incredibly selfish, wouldn’t it?”

“For a lot of people, wanting to keep a lover to yourself would be a pretty normal feeling.”

His hum reverberated from his lean chest into me. “I’m not a person, and I don’t want to be like those sorts of humans. What I like the most when I’m around you is seeing you happy, and if they bring extra happiness that I can’t, then that’s a good thing.” He ducked his head, his lips grazing my forehead. “As long as you’re still mine.”

I wouldn’t have thought I’d ever agree to that kind of claiming, but who was I kidding? The possessiveness in his tone only set off a warm glow around my heart. The devourer had made an indelible mark there, one I suspected no supernatural voodoo could ever erase now.

“You’ve got me, all right,” I said.

I felt his smile against my skin. “At least I know the two of them—I know they’re worthy of having you too.”

A better question would be whether I was worthy of any of them. Snuggled up against Snap, I wanted to be. I wanted to be a woman who could not just stage jailbreaks and sway fire to my will but also handle the hearts of those who cared about me with the care they deserved in return.

That kind of cherishing might be hard, like Ruse had suggested last night. It might even be impossible. But an hour ago I’d thought it was impossible that a human being like me could manipulate fire with my mind, so maybe I shouldn’t draw any conclusions just yet.

If I was going to be that woman, I knew where I’d need to start. Hiding under a blanket wasn’t going to cut it. I couldn’t stand by my lovers properly if I was denying who I even was.

“Let’s hope you’re right about that,” I said, tugging Snap upright with me. “I’d better see what Omen thinks he can teach me.”