Page 66

TWO

Sorsha

Walking up to the clubhouse of Chicago’s premier shadowkind criminal syndicate, I had trouble telling whether the gang had been going for unsettling or brutal with their décor. Either way, it was safe to say they’d shot well past the mark on both.

With the narrow two-story building tucked in between a tattoo parlor and a motorcycle dealership, they definitely had their clichés in order. But the front of the place was painted entirely black—including the first-floor window, because apparently curtains weren’t enough for these dudes—other than stark white skull symbols on either side of the door and threads of pale gray that crept across the darkness like a massive spider web. They hadn’t bothered with a sign or any other pretense of this being a regular place of business.

I stepped inside half-expecting a collection of Halloween store paraphernalia, but what I got wasn’t much better. The walls of the small front room were painted the same black as the outside. No spider webbing here, but the single lightbulb overhead cast a red glow over the room’s limited furniture, which included a metal desk that had rust creeping along the corners, a matching bench sporting spikes on its supposed arm rests, and a display rack of ornate swords and daggers that looked much more authentic than anything our superhero hacker associate back home had owned.

A sour, slightly metallic scent lingered in the air, as if the room had recently hosted a blood bath. Not exactly a place of friendly welcomes.

Omen didn’t look concerned, though. He stalked into the middle of the room and stood there, his eyes narrowing. He’d told us the shadowkind who operated this syndicate would be expecting us, and I could tell he wouldn’t be happy if they kept us waiting long.

Before it got to the point of his hellhound fangs coming out, three figures wavered out of the shadows to meet us.

The one in the middle was obviously the leader, nearly as tall and broad-shouldered as Thorn, though packed with leaner muscles. The speckling of pale stubble on his scalp gleamed in the crimson light, and a patch of scales glinted on the backs of his hands just below the cuffs of his suit jacket. Reptilian in nature, presumably.

He was flanked by two other men. The slender, sallow one on the left I immediately pegged as a vampire—which wasn’t hard when his lips had curled back to bare his fangs in implicit threat. That explained the painted-over window and the weird lighting. The guy on the right was trickier to pin down—literally. His eyes darted this way and that, his wiry body never quite settling from its twitching and fidgeting even while he stood in place next to his boss.

When his gaze did come to rest in one spot for a couple of seconds here and there, it was on me. The vampire was ogling me too. Possibly Boss Man was as well, but it was impossible to tell thanks to the thick sunglasses that hid all hint of his eyes. I was pretty sure Omen would have given this bunch a heads up about the mortal he was working with, but I was used to the extra scrutiny my presence provoked. You didn’t see shadowkind and humans getting chummy all that often—if you could call my relationship with Omen anything as warm as “chummy.”

Omen was sizing up the syndicate guys in turn. “You’d be Talon?” he said with a nod to the boss and a razor-edged tone that suggested the dude had better be or there’d be hell to pay.

“As you requested,” Boss Man replied in a liquid voice so dark it seemed to blot out the dim glow of the bulb overhead. “What brings us to the attention of a hellhound and his cohorts? We don’t have much time for entertaining unexpected visitors.”

Despite myself, a shiver shot down my spine. Unlike the other gang leader we’d dealt with, this one didn’t speak with any noticeable deference to Omen. For him to have agreed to his impromptu meeting in the first place, Talon must have recognized the hellhound shifter as a larger power, but he wasn’t offering much in the way of respect besides that.

As happened sometimes, being intimidated annoyed me, and when pissed off, I didn’t always make the choices most likely to keep my innards intact. I’m sure you have your flaws too.

I waved to the closed door behind the syndicate dudes. “What, have you got a full schedule of polishing torture devices and laying down a few more coats of black paint? You know, putting so much effort into showing how badass you are only makes it look like you’re trying to distract anyone from actually measuring your dicks. Maybe if you cared a little more about what’s happening out there and not how cool you look wearing sunglasses in a room that’s barely lit, we wouldn’t have needed to interrupt your busy day in the first place.”

The boss’s head turned in a smooth, serpentine motion. He was definitely looking at me now, whether I could see his eyeballs or not.

“The sunglasses,” he said, equally smoothly, “are to ensure I don’t extinguish your life with a glance—unless I absolutely want to. But I can remove them if you’d prefer to play that game of Russian Roulette. With an attitude like that, I don’t think your odds are great.”

Son of a shih tzu. As Thorn stepped closer to me with a threatening flex of his muscles, the details added up in my head, and I almost bit right through my tongue. Luna had told me plenty of stories about her shadowkind brethren over the years. I hadn’t forgotten the tales she’d spun of basilisks, giant lizards that could kill you with a look, although I’d never met one in the flesh before.

Probably best to avoid getting into a pissing contest with one. I gave him a little smile. “My apologies. I wouldn’t want to let any games distract from our very important mission.”

Omen cleared his throat, shooting me a glare he might have wished could kill me. “Maybe you can manage to keep your mouth shut for the next five minutes?” He turned back to Talon. “If you have as much sway over both shadowkind and mortals in this neck of the woods as I hear, I assume you’ll have caught on if there were humans gathering our kind in a far more organized way than the typical hunters.”

The twitchy guy finally gave in to his restlessness and drifted over to the display of weapons. He plucked up a dagger and spun its blade on the tip of his finger. “There’s the type with the nets and the whips. Obsessive bastards.”

Thorn frowned, his muscles appearing to bulge even more. “Those would be the ones we’re after.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve done anything to rid the city of them,” Omen remarked.

Talon shrugged. “They catch little pests that are no concern of mine. The occasional higher being they might sweep up should have been watching its step better. I protect those who seek our protection—what happens between mortals and the rest is their business.”

That was the standard line of mortal-side shadowkind. Why should they think of the greater good—or the good of anyone at all who wasn’t licking their boots?

To be fair, there were an awful lot of humans who approached life that way too.

The tightening of Omen’s jaw was the only sign of his disgust with that kind of self-interest. “Understandable. We need to tangle with them, though. They’ve come into possession of one of our associates, and we intend to get him back.”

“Well, I certainly won’t stop you from tearing a few heads off if that’s what gets you off,” the basilisk said.

No offers to pitch in, not that I’d really expected one. Ruse gave my ponytail a teasing tug and leaned over my shoulder. “I don’t suppose you gents with all your connections could direct us to this group’s center of operations? That would speed along the tearing of heads quite a bit.”

“I suppose that wouldn’t be too much trouble.” Talon turned to his frenetic companion, who was now flipping the dagger from hand to hand. “Jinx, a moment?”

The wiry guy tossed the weapon back at the display—in a perfect arc that sent it dropping right back onto the metal pegs that had cradled it. “What’re you after, boss?”

“See if you can fetch Grit—he’s the one we had keeping an eye on the museum. Maybe he can cough up a few more details for these ‘gents’.”

As Jinx darted into the shadows to follow that order, my ability to keep my mouth shut ran out. “Museum?” I asked. “We’re looking for living shadowkind, not stuffed ones.”

The vampire let out a chuckle almost as dark as his boss’s voice, but he didn’t bother to enlighten me. I got the distinct impression that Talon had rolled his eyes behind those shades.

“Humans work in bizarre ways, as you should know, mortal,” he said. “The museum gives them a front—a large building to work from and presumably a reason for money to change hands. I doubt many of the beasts that go in come out alive, though.”

And I’d bet I’d freed more of the lower beings of his kind than he’d ever lifted a finger for. But with another warning glare from Omen, I managed to keep that thought to myself.

A jitter through the air that made the blades rattle in their holders, and Jinx reappeared. “Grit is stationed down by the lake today. I can take you to him if you make it snappy.”

Through the shadows, he meant. I opened my mouth to protest, but Omen held up his hand. “You don’t need to be involved in every piece of this operation. Wait for us back on Darlene.”

Oh, he was doubling down on the name, was he? I might have had a few choice words about that, but before I could voice any of them, Talon approached me. He peered down at me through his sunglasses, cocking his head. My shoulders stiffened, but you’d better believe I held my ground.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked, raising my chin.

I might not have been able to see his eyes, but I thought I could feel his attention pass over me like a cool draft grazing my skin. His mouth tightened into the kind of smile that ate children’s laughter for breakfast.

“There’s a burning inside you,” he said. “But it might not stay in for long. If you’re not careful, you’re going to sear away with it when you decide to let it loose.”