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SEVENTEEN

Sorsha

Saying my first official training session didn’t go well would be like saying the Pacific Ocean was a teensy bit damp.

Omen marched me out into the deserted yard next to the funhouse, where a stray Ferris wheel car had been pummeled almost out of recognition. I guessed that was how Thorn had produced the crashing noises I’d taken as part of a Company attack earlier this morning. A rusty old delivery truck parked nearby seemed to hold a look of relief that it’d been spared in the slant of the dust smears on its windshield.

Omen clapped his hands together. “All right. We know you can work this power. Let’s see if we can get you working it on purpose.”

I thought of last night’s failed experiment with the popcorn bag. “I’m not sure I can, at least not out of the blue with no real reason to. Didn’t you say it’s activated when I get ‘worked up’? I can’t make myself panic over nothing.”

The hellhound shifter’s expression suggested he thought I’d been pointlessly overwrought plenty of times already, but he managed to keep at least a little of his disdain to himself. “You’ll need to get familiar with the specific feeling of manipulating—or producing—fire until you can summon it up without a bunch of panic around it. But for now, we’ll start by triggering it first.”

He gave me a thin smile, and then he started pelting me with beanbags he must have found at an abandoned game stall.

Having the bags smack into my chest and legs—oh, and that was the side of my head—definitely pissed me off. I snatched one out of the air and flung it right back at Omen. It clocked him in the nose.

“That’s not what we’re looking for,” Bossypants snapped. “Focus on the projectiles, not on me. They’re what’s hitting you. If you light one up, I’ll stop.”

“Promises, promises,” I muttered, not really believing him, but it didn’t matter anyway. I squinted at the beanbags as they whipped toward me until I thought I was going to go cross-eyed, but my irritation didn’t come with the rush of energy that’d coursed through me a few times in the past. If that even was the feeling I was looking to stir up. I hadn’t exactly been meditating on my inner state while I was dashing to save Pickle’s life.

After a while, Omen gave up on that tactic and ushered me back to the funhouse rooftop. He shoved a slip of paper into my hand and motioned for me to get up on the low railing that circled the roof’s edge. “Walk along there and see if you can get the paper burning.”

I took a brief glance at the ground a couple dozen feet below. No biggie. With nimble steps, I crossed from one end of the building to the other in less than a minute. I looked back at Omen, my heartbeat barely elevated. “This is supposed to work how?”

He was glaring at me, a few tufts of his tawny hair poking up from the smooth surface he’d slicked it into. He swiped his hand back over them, failing to tame them, and stalked over. “Most people would be a little unnerved walking along up there.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “You watched me pilfer that flower pot for you, and you still thought I might be afraid of heights?”

“Come on then, Disaster,” he said in a growl. Apparently that was my new nickname—oh, joy.

After several more exercises that all seemed to involve battering or tripping me in some way, Omen resorted to getting into the camper van and roaring toward me at full speed. I watched him come with a slight hiccup of my pulse, but even as my body tensed, nothing supernatural woke up inside me.

He hit the brake just in time to screech to a halt a foot from where I stood. I waved my hand with the slip of paper that was now grayed and creased, and it proceeded to remain as unburnt as it’d been when he’d handed it to me.

The shifter threw open the van’s door and loomed on me. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I stared right back at him, my jaw clenching. It wasn’t as if I’d been having a ball with what he’d put me through over the past several hours. “I thought we’d already determined that none of us has any idea.”

“That’s not what I— For fuck’s sake, can’t you get a little nervous even with that thing barreling toward you?” He waved toward the van.

I shrugged. “I knew you weren’t going to actually run me over. That would kind of go against the whole ‘use Sorsha to turn the tables on the baddies’ plan, wouldn’t it?”

An inarticulate noise of frustration spilled from his mouth. “How are you so fucking aggravating?”

The retort shot from my tongue automatically. “Because you’re fucking infuriating and it’s contagious?”

But this wasn’t just some annoying jerk at the office. This was the highest order of shadowkind with multiple centuries of honing his might. He really did growl then—the sort of dark, grating sound I’d have expected his houndish form to emit, with a flare of his eyes from blue to scorching orange and a baring of his teeth to reveal fangs that hadn’t been there a moment before.

I’d almost forgotten just how much coiled power that compact human frame contained before it hit me. A slap of otherworldly heat lashed my skin, and my pulse really lurched for the first time since I’d leapt to save Pickle.

So naturally, I did the thing any sensible person would have done: I set Omen’s shirt on fire.

It was only a little fire—a flicker of flame that shot up from the hem and disappeared the second he’d whacked it with his open hand, leaving only a tiny scorch mark on the maroon fabric. It happened so quickly, like always, that I couldn’t have said what exactly I’d been feeling when I’d done it, other than both incredibly frustrated and abruptly sure the guy was about to rip my head off, grand plans thrown to the wind.

When Omen raised his head from examining his shirt, his shoulders had come down, though they were still rigid, and his eyes had returned to their usual piercing blue. His voice came out tightly controlled. “I don’t suppose you have any idea how to do that again, preferably to something other than me.”

I splayed my hands in a helpless gesture. “It just… happened.”

Running his fingers over his hair, which was now utterly ruffled, he let out a brusque huff of air and turned away. “Take a breather. I suppose you need to eat something by this point anyway.”

I had wolfed down a few snacks here and there in between his various torture sessions, but I wasn’t going to argue with the chance to indulge in a proper meal, even if I didn’t totally understand his decision to retreat. Maybe he’d decided I was hopeless after all.

I clambered into the back of the van in its new location, murmuring a few soothing words to Pickle, who scuttled back and forth with his wings trembling. What did I have left in the stash I’d grabbed during our last gas station stop?

As I dug into the bags, Ruse appeared by the open door, a box balanced on one upturned hand. A pizza box. The second the combined smells of melted cheese, rich tomato sauce, and spicy pepperoni hit my nose, I was salivating. I could have jumped him in gratitude, except I was hungry enough that I’d rather jump the pizza.

I hopped back out, Pickle at my heels. To no one’s surprise, Snap materialized out of the shadows a second later, his eyes eagerly intent on the pizza box. “What is that ?” he asked.

Ruse chuckled. “And this is why I got a large. The mortal realm has plenty of fantastic food beyond fruits and sweets.” He caught my gaze. “I’d have gotten you a spread of Thai, but that would have been much more unwieldy.”

“No complaints here! Pizza is my second favorite.” And definitely much more suited to digging into when you didn’t have much in the way of furniture… or utensils.. or, well, anything.

Ruse stacked a couple of crates into a makeshift table and opened the pizza box there. Soaking up the fading rays of the late-afternoon sun while chowing down on a crisp slice gooey with mozzarella was the perfect combination. From the speed with which Snap downed his first slice and his euphoric expression as he reached for his second, he agreed.

“While you and the boss were busy playing, we heard back from our hacker,” Ruse said. “She traced that address your friend got to a shell company—and some of those photos are buildings that company or some connected shell owns. We’ll have to scope those out.”

“Great, I’ll pass the info on to the Fund too so they can make their own inquiries.” I swallowed another tasty mouthful and glanced around, not wanting to exclude the third member of my trio from the meal. “Where’s Thorn?”

The incubus waved his hand dismissively. “He got one of his ‘feelings’ and went off patrolling, as if he doesn’t feel the need to patrol every second hour regardless. They’ve never attacked us by daylight before, but try telling the lunk that.”

I glanced toward the funhouse, where the final member of our larger quartet was looking at something on the cellphone he’d picked up during our recent travels. I didn’t feel particularly inclined to invite Omen over to our impromptu dinner, and anyway, if he’d wanted a piece of it, he’d have marched over and demanded it. Still, as I took in his frown at whatever he was looking at, some of my lingering irritation faded.

He was a hard-ass and a beast—literally—but it was mostly in the service of saving all shadowkind, something most of the rest of his kind weren’t willing to put in any effort to accomplish at all. And… as much as my trio had glommed onto me and become fond of me, none of them had picked up on the hints of powers even I hadn’t been ready to acknowledge. Probably because they couldn’t conceive of a mortal having that kind of power.

Omen had noticed when he’d barely even known who I was. For all his disdain of humankind, he’d been open-minded enough to keep me around and push me—however obnoxiously—toward uncovering those powers further. He’d spent all day doing whatever he could think of to help me control them. It might not have been fun, but I doubted he’d considered it a laugh riot either.

With a little less generosity, he could have written me off as a hopeless mostly-human being. It wasn’t as if the four shadowkind didn’t have plenty of supernatural voodoo between them without me contributing.

Omen raised his head as if sensing me watching him, and I jerked my gaze away—just in time to see Thorn leaping out of the stretching shadow of the camper van.

The warrior strode toward us, his voice ringing out with a force that thrummed through my nerves. “We’ve got to go! There’s a squad coming this way—it looked like they were?—”

Before he could finish that thought, something shrieked through the air behind him to crash into a side window of the camper van.

Ka-boom!

An explosion shattered the van’s other windows with a burst of fire that rocked the tires. Another one biting the dust. Sweet scorching salamanders, these people really meant business now.

For a second, I stood frozen, stuck in the uncertainty of where to run when our expected means of escape had just gone up in flames. One frantic thought hit me— Pickle! —but at the same moment, the little dragon brushed against my ankle with a quavering squeak, having followed the pizza brigade over here. Then a volley of shouts and the rattle of gunfire from the direction the missile had flown from spurred me into action.

I scooped Pickle into my purse—which I’d picked up out of habit, thank God—and whirled toward the only other vehicle I’d noticed anywhere nearby: the rusty old truck by the funhouse. My backpack with my cat-burglar equipment was still in the van, but it’d be ashes in another few heartbeats if it wasn’t already. Losing the scorch-blade I’d spent three robberies’ worth of ill-gotten income on hurt, but not as much agony as if one of those missiles hit me going back for it.

My feet pounded across the pavement. Snap vanished into the shadows, as Omen appeared to have too, but Ruse dashed alongside me in physical form so he could speak. “I already checked it—there are no keys. So unless you’re as good at hotwiring as you are at breaking and entering…”

“Nope.” But I did have some idea. My thoughts had slipped back to the winter years ago when Malachi’s car battery had kept dying and we’d gone to a guy down the hall to jump-start it four or five times. I’d watched them hook things up; I had a basic idea of where the power needed to flow. A little jolt was all it needed.

A little jolt like a flash of fire.

I had no idea whether it would work, but jumping on a carousel horse wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I sprinted faster, hoping Snap and Omen would head to the same destination too in their shadowy way.

Just as I reached the truck, Omen appeared in the driver’s seat. He groped along the dash in search of a key, clearly not prepared to rewire the thing either. I turned as I yanked the passenger side door open—and my stomach flipped over with a surge of horror.

Thorn was charging after us across the lot. He’d stayed in his physical form too, no doubt expecting he could fend off any attacks that came his way and shield the rest of us from them at the same time. But the mercenaries who’d just come into view back by the burning van weren’t looking to capture any shadowkind they got their hands on this time. No, from the size of the machine guns they raised, we’d made enough trouble that they were perfectly happy to wipe us all off the face of the earth now, even if it was a waste of experimental subjects.

Thorn hadn’t looked behind them—Thorn didn’t know. If the machine gun bullets were the same silver the guards in the toy store had fired, they’d tear him to pieces.

My heart pounding, I threw myself forward to catch his attention. “Thorn, into the shadows!” The words tore from my throat, and my hand slashed through the air at the same moment in a gesture of pure desperation.

The gunmen had just pressed their triggers. The rat-a-tat of machine gun fire pealed out—and cut off just as abruptly as the van’s flames roared out at them. Fire lashed across the yard in a vast billow. The gunmen scrambled away with cries of pain, a hell of a lot more than their shirt hems on fire.

Thorn had vanished. I had to assume he was on his way to us and not fatally wounded by those first few shots. I leapt into the truck, slammed my palms against the dash without letting myself second-guess or really even think, and pictured another flare of heat setting off a spark deep beneath the hood.

The engine sputtered to life. My chest hitched with it. “We’re all in,” Ruse said from the cramped back bench, and I found just enough wherewithal to tug my door closed as Omen hit the gas.

The truck tore around with a groan and rattled toward the fairgrounds entrance. Snap formed on the seat behind me. “Thorn’s hurt,” he said in a stricken voice, and my pulse lurched all over again.

“I’m fine ,” the warrior said gruffly a second later, emerging into being on the back bench so abruptly his massive form shoved Snap and Ruse toward the windows. Which was all well and good for him to claim, but smoke was trailing off his back as if someone had set him on fire. At a jostle of the truck’s rickety undercarriage, he winced.

Oh, hell, no. I grabbed my purse, which did have a few useful bits and bobs in it, set Pickle on the floor, and motioned Thorn back through the door that led to the truck’s cargo area. “You’re not bleeding out—or up, or whatever—on my watch. Get back there where we’ve got more space to work before you keel over.”

“I need directions, stat!” Omen added. As I got up from my seat, Ruse leapt through the shadows to take my place. He snatched up Omen’s phone, and I followed Thorn into the dim cargo area.

The boxy space was swaying so violently that I nearly tripped over my feet. Thorn sank down against one bare wall, and I dropped down next to him with as much grace as I could manage, which wasn’t a whole lot. More shots stuttered behind us, but they sounded farther away now. At least, I hoped I was judging that right.

“Let me have a look,” I said—briskly, to cover up the panicked thumping of my heart. A little light seeped through the small window on the cargo door at the back. The space around us was empty except for a few crumpled cardboard boxes and a couple of canvas sheets that I could cut up into bandages if need be.

“I will be fine,” Thorn insisted as he twisted at the waist to show me his back. “You warned me in time—they only clipped me. And I heal quickly.”

He wasn’t lying. I’d known about shadowkind resilience already, but it was still a little startling to see it in action. I knelt beside him, taking in the tatters of his tunic—and the already closing wounds that dappled the edges of his shoulders and back amid numerous scars of all sorts of shapes and sizes.

The streams of smoke had slowed to a trickle. By the time I made a single bandage, the gouges where the bullets had caught his flesh would probably be closed completely.

He was okay. Not dying, not even that badly injured. My breath whooshed from my lungs in a rush. Thorn shifted so his back rested against the wall again, and I tipped my head against the warrior’s broad shoulder.

The muscles there had tensed, even harder to the touch than usual. Thorn’s voice came out in a low, terse rumble. “You shouldn’t have needed to warn me. I should have been more aware of our enemies’ movements.”

“You can’t be looking everywhere at once. Anyway, none of us had any idea they’d up the ante that far.”

“I should have considered it—it was to be expected after we’d proven ourselves such daunting opponents.”

I tucked my hand around his massive bicep. “It doesn’t matter. We got through it. I’m just glad I could warn you.”

The frustration in Thorn’s tone didn’t fade. “It matters because you had to put your energy toward protecting me when my job is meant to be protecting you—and the others. Yet again, I have?—”

He cut himself off, glowering at the opposite wall, but I thought I could fill in the blanks. He’d told me a little about the long-ago war he’d fought in and how ashamed he felt that he hadn’t been there to battle to the death alongside so many of his fellow wingéd when he might have made more of a difference.

Did he really think he’d failed just now, even with all of us alive and no longer bleeding smoke all through the atmosphere? I wasn’t sure whether to be more sad or offended about that.

“Hey,” I said, and waited until he shifted his gaze to me. “You need to loosen up on yourself. You did enough. If you hadn’t gone patrolling, they’d have caught us completely by surprise. And it shouldn’t be only your responsibility to keep me—or anyone else—safe. Aside from the fact that I can look after myself just fine lots of the time, we’re a team. That means we all look out for each other. We’ve got a much better chance of making it through this war that way. You watch my back, and I’ll watch yours too—as well as I can, anyway.”

Thorn blinked at me. His eyes slid away, his expression still so solemn I braced myself for further argument. But after a stretch of silence, he said, “I don’t believe you need to worry about your capabilities. That was quite the blast you sent at the mortals who were shooting at me. I’m honored to have such a valiant warrior on my side.”

I sputtered a laugh at both the idea of being valiant and being a warrior myself. “Don’t count on me ever pulling off something on that large a scale again, at least not when we actually need it.” The only way I seemed to be able to use my power was by not thinking about using it at all, just doing it… which was hardly a reliable strategy.

The truck jostled, and Thorn tucked his arm around my waist to hold me steady. It stayed there, his thumb tracing a gentle line up and down my side. “You did save my life, m’lady. Quite literally this time.”

“Please don’t tell me you now have another huge debt to repay.”

An unexpectedly light note entered his voice. “Oh, I do. But I swear I won’t mention it except under exceedingly urgent circumstances.” He paused, and his usual serious demeanor returned. “Thank you. I wouldn’t have expected—but I should know by now not to underestimate you.”

“You really should,” I agreed, and eased back to look at his face. “Just so we’re clear, I will be looking out for you, but I don’t think I’m ever going to live up to your standards as a warrior. Stealthily making sure I’m never even seen is much more my thing than direct combat.”

The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Maybe so. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m still here because of your quick eyes and action. I suppose I can admit there’s something to your point about teamwork, but there’s no need for you to be a warrior when that’s not your nature. It’s not the incubus’s or the devourer’s either, but they have their own strengths I can’t match.”

“Because you’re so strong at being strong.” I poked him in the pec. “I do wish that me being mortal—however much I am, which seems to be a fair bit—wasn’t such a liability in a battle. I guess there’s not really any getting away from that, though.” My fingers lingered on the muscles of his arm just below the sleeve of his tunic, trailing over the pale scars that marked his tan skin there too. “How far do these go back?”

“To my very first battle. Any time I’m wounded badly enough to draw out the smoke, the reminder is etched in my physical form. I haven’t added many to it in centuries, though.”

“Not since the wars way back when. Until now.” I grimaced and, to distract myself from morbid thoughts, teased my fingers up to his neck and along his jaw where even more pale nicks and notches told the story of his valor. As hard as his features looked, his skin was warm and smooth, only lightly textured by the scars. I let my hand venture farther, into the thick fall of his hair.

Thorn made a rumbling sound from deep in his chest. His voice came out even lower than usual. “When you touch me like that, I’m glad for your body’s softness.”

My pulse kicked up a notch, but there was nothing fearful about its pounding now. My skin warmed where his arm still held me close. Gazing into his near-black eyes, I found I couldn’t come up with anything cleverer to say than, “You’d better be.” Then he was drawing me to him, his mouth claiming my lips before anything more inane could fall from them.

In that moment, the shudder of the truck’s walls and the battle we were fleeing fell away. I gave myself over to the firm heat of his mouth and the stroke of his hand along my abdomen. It rose until his thumb skimmed the curve of my breast. Need condensed, sharp and hungry, between my legs, even though this wasn’t the ideal place to indulge that desire.

“For the record,” I said, my lips grazing his, “I think you’re good at a few things other than fighting. And I’m very glad about that.”

“Is that so?” Thorn said, and tugged me back to him with a kiss so demanding that glad wasn’t the half of it.

At the screech of the tires and the jolt of the truck stopping, we pulled apart from each other. Thorn glanced toward the door that led to the front of the truck with a regretful air. “I suppose we’d best see where we’ve found ourselves—and where we’re going from here.”

“Yep.” I heaved myself to my feet, but as he stood up beside me, I couldn’t resist giving his cheek one last caress and saying, “To be continued. So please do your best not to get shot any more before I can make good on that promise.”