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SIX

Sorsha

As we strolled up to the museum entrance all casual-like, Ruse offered me his elbow as if he were a Victorian gentleman. The effect might have worked better without that goofy baseball hat perched over his horns.

“M’lady?” he said in a near-perfect imitation of Thorn’s somber voice.

I poked him with my own elbow instead. Thankfully, with some aloe and the healing powers that seemed to come with my ability to barbeque myself, the burns on my arms from last night were already pretty much gone. “Let’s save the joking for after we’ve gotten Snap and all the little beasties out of here.”

“Ah, you wound my heart,” he teased, but his warm eyes took in the foyer with total alertness. For all his playful nature, he was taking this operation seriously.

There were actually a shocking number of patrons browsing the glass cases holding various styles of shoes. A tourist couple snapped photos while their two kids tugged on their shirts, looking like they’d rather be anywhere else. A young guy in sneakers so puffed up he could have pulled off an excellent Donald Duck imitation exclaimed about the history of sporting footwear to a girl with glazed eyes. Good luck hitting a home run on this date, dude.

We passed boots worn by soldiers—not anyone who’d seen much action, from their pristine condition—and slippers supposedly possessed by emperors, with an obscene amount of gold thread. The celebrity hall of fame boasted diamond-encrusted stilettos worn by some pop star on a recent tour. Did she still have working ankles after stomping around a stage with those things strapped to her feet? Or vision, for that matter? Their sparkle was blinding. Luna would have approved, anyway.

We came up on the inner sanctum, its doorway discreetly tucked down a little hall between Put Those Soles To Work and A Watery Good Time —boat shoes and diving fins for the win!

Ruse didn’t give any noticeable signal, but he must have primed the guards he’d charmed well. A muscular woman in a tan uniform approached us with a respectful tip of her head.

“Everything’s in order, sir,” she said. “Let me know when you’re ready to begin your final inspection.”

Ruse put on an expression of total professionalism, but a hint of his roguish smirk showed through. I bit back a smile.

“I’d like to meet the other guards on duty out here first,” he said. “Everyone except Mack, I already spoke with him. If you could escort them over to the vestibule one at a time, so we can keep this discreet…?”

“Absolutely, sir, absolutely.”

“The vestibule?” I repeated with another twitch of my lips as she hustled off.

Ruse let his grin slip out. “One of my favorite words. Can’t go wrong with a good vestibule. Now let’s get over there so I can have the rest of this contingent singing our praises.”

There were only two other guards patrolling the collection during the day—the Company must have thought it was unlikely anyone would risk an invasion while there were so many witnesses around. Of course, that fact worked in our favor now. And once we had what we needed, we could clear the innocent bystanders out of the place with a pull of the fire alarm before any real fires got started.

As long as we kept the situation totally under our control.

Ruse made great friends with the other two guards in a matter of minutes—easier when he only needed the influence to last for an hour or so now. As much as I hated these people who’d dedicated their lives to eradicating the shadowkind, watching the incubus work his charm was still a little unnerving. I couldn’t completely suppress the faint but chilly quiver as I remembered the other shadowkind who’d toyed with me as a child using his own brand of persuasive voodoo.

But Luna had chased the jackass off, and I emerged unscathed, and Ruse wasn’t anything like that prick. I couldn’t imagine him harassing a child, even if he did let his sense of humor come out when it came to the real villains.

He watched the second guard amble off with a mischievous glint in his eyes. “I could have them marching through the halls singing Christmas carols if I wanted to.”

I elbowed him again. “As much as I’d like to see that, it won’t get Snap out. You can start your carol group once the cages are open.”

“Oh, fine, you spoilsport.”

He gave me a fond peck on the temple with a tenderness I hadn’t been expecting. The incubus and I had gotten about as intimate as any two beings could be, but lately he’d had more standoffish days than not. Even after last night’s celebrations, he hadn’t made a single come-on to prompt an invitation into my bed.

I wasn’t totally sure what was going on with that or with this brief PDA, but puzzling over it could wait for later too.

It was just five minutes to noon now. We sauntered back toward the door to the inner sanctum, and at twelve on the dot, Ruse knocked with a one, one-two, one beat. A signal he’d arranged with his new friend he’d been calling the Tiger King, the ropey-limbed guy who opened the door with a rasp of its lock a moment later. He wasn’t wearing his own armor—Ruse had instructed him to shed it before he let us in.

“I haven’t said a word to anyone,” he murmured as he ushered us into a brightly lit, white-washed room packed with glass desks and computer equipment. Ruse gave a restrained shudder, now surrounded by the silver and iron embedded in the walls. “A couple of the guys might give you some trouble—I don’t think they’re in on the bigger picture. I’ll bring them over like you asked, and you can decide?—”

What he thought we were going to decide was lost with the click of the door at the other end of the room. I caught a faint whiff of chemicals with the breeze that emerged, my body tensing with the understanding that the lab—the experiments, the captives, Snap —lay that way, and then the two figures who’d appeared in the doorway gave a shout of startled concern.

“What are you doing—who are these people?” one demanded, striding forward. Both of them were drawing their guns. Okay, then. Plan: Peaceful Intrusion had just gone down the drain.

“A hand with your colleagues?” Ruse said to his charmed guard, his voice thrumming with renewed energy.

The guy leapt at the guard who’d barreled toward us with some kind of karate chop that sent the other man’s gun flying from his hand. The third guard’s gun hand jerked up—and Thorn leapt from the shadows in full brawny glory, smashing his fist down on the man’s arm so forcefully I heard the crunch as the bone shattered.

The charmed guard had wrestled his other colleague to the ground and was now shoving off the guy’s protective helmet. “It’s for your own good!” he was declaring. “There’s so much they haven’t told us—so much we haven’t seen…”

Thankfully, he seemed to be too busy wrenching at the ties on the guy’s vest to see the next swing of Thorn’s fist, which drove the warrior’s crystalline knuckles deep into the underside of the third guard’s jaw. The man slumped with a bloody gurgle, no de-armoring necessary.

I leapt in to help remove the last of the second guard’s protective gear. The second he was free of silver and iron, Ruse’s cajoling voice rolled out again.

“There’s so much at stake—we have to hurry. These monsters are toxic, but they’ll burn away if we drive them out into the sunlight. Quickly, quickly, before the people who wish to keep them here and protect them can stop us from doing what is right.”

The appeal to the man’s hatred of the shadowkind worked so well it made my stomach turn. He sprang to his feet and dashed for the door to the lab area without another word from Ruse. The sight of the mangled flesh on the body Thorn had dragged out of the way didn’t exactly inspire my appetite either, but in that moment it wasn’t hard to remember why my qualms about taking the bashing-their-skulls approach had worn thin.

We pushed into a larger room full of steel tables, shelves of lab equipment—and a full wall of silver-and-iron cages. There had to be at least thirty smaller ones and then several larger enclosures at the end. They all blazed with artificial light, thin shapes of shadow jittering in its glare.

Snap had to be in one of those big ones. “Open them up!” I said to the guards. “Come on, let’s go!”

“You heard her,” Ruse added with more voodoo in his tone. “All of the beasties out, and then we’ll drive them into the daylight to vanquish them for good.”

“We don’t have the keys or the codes,” the guard said with an anxious stammer, waving to the cages. The large ones had keycode panels—the small ones only little locks with holes.

Ruse spun on his original ally. “You said you had access.”

“To the rooms! You didn’t ask about the cages before.”

He hadn’t wanted too much detail in case one of the guards let our plans slip ahead of time. Shit.

Omen rippled out of the shadow. “Who has them, then?” he demanded, but a surge of fury and frustration seared up through me, burning all need for that question away.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said tightly, ignoring the prickle of pain that came with my power. “I can open them.”

I grasped one of the little cages, fire flaring from my palm. The metal warped like the pop can melting the other night. With a yank, I opened a gaping hole in the interlocking bars.

With enough space now to pass by the toxic metals, the shadow within flitted past me without so much as a thank you. That was fine. I didn’t need one. Gritting my teeth, I grabbed the next cage and poured more of my searing power into my grasp.

“I don’t know if this is going to work on the big ones,” I gritted out. Those had solid walls, no bars. I had no idea how thick the metal was there.

“The computers,” Ruse said with a brisk gesture toward the other room. “Both of you, get on those devices and see what you can find. And if there’s nothing useful there, then?—”

The door to the largest cage in the row swung open with a mechanical whir. None of us had been standing anywhere near it. I wrenched the cage I’d been holding open and jerked around, my hands rising to face some new threat, but the figure that emerged was completely the opposite.

A tall, slim blur of shadow solidified into Snap’s golden-haired, green-eyed form. He stared around him in a daze. My heart leapt, the impulse to engulf him in a hug ringing through me—but he was out now and there were still dozens more creatures to save. I settled for shooting him a smile of pure gratitude and reached for another cage.

Omen swiveled around, his body tensed, his lips curled as being surrounded by so much of the aversive metals was wearing on even his vast stores of strength. “Someone did that on purpose—someone knows we’re here. They’re watching us.” His head snapped around toward the guards. “Is there another room?”

“I… don’t think so,” the first guy said uncertainly.

Thorn frowned. “This space doesn’t seem large enough to account for the dimensions I charted from the outside. There should be more… there.” He pointed to the wall beyond the lab tables where a fridge and a couple of large cabinets stood. Clenching his jaw, he flexed his muscles—and charged straight at the wall.

I’d seen the warrior smash through concrete and brick before, but never anything quite like this. As his massive form crashed through not just plaster and beams but plates of silver and iron too, his flesh hissed. Smoke puffed up from the wounds. A groan escaped him, but he’d managed to bash a big enough hole for us to stare through into one more white room with desks, computers, charts and maps on the walls, and two figures in lab coats staring at us wide-eyed.

“You should leave here now,” one of them spat out, her hands clenched at her sides. “We’ve notified the rest of the Company. There’ll be dozens of people here ready to fight you off in a minute.”

She only cared about saving herself, then, not capturing us? Was that why they’d freed Snap—in the hopes we’d take just him and leave before we found them? I could respect that sense of self-preservation, but that didn’t mean I was going to cater to it.

“They’ll have the keys,” I said, with a wild motion to the guards. “Grab them, help me get these open.”

The two charmed men charged through the smashed opening to comply. As the scientists yelped in protest, I heaved another cage open by my own power. A few moments later, I had two helpers scrambling to shove keys into as many locks as they could. Which was a good thing, because the heat blazing from my hands was starting to rush through the rest of me with unsettling intensity.

“What’s this about?” I heard Omen ask. I glanced over my shoulder just long enough to see that he’d stepped into the hidden room and was peering at a map that showed the whole world. “What do these markings indicate?”

One of the scientists sucked in a shaky breath. “We can’t—we’re not supposed to?—”

“To hell with that. Ruse, make them want to tell me.”

The incubus clapped his hands. “My good friend Justin, I need your services for a moment.”

The Tiger King guard shoved his key ring toward me—I reined in my power as quickly as I could so I wouldn’t melt the thing—and hurried to help his new favorite person. The ripping of fabric told me someone’s protective badge had been removed from their clothing in a violent fashion. I checked the numbers on the keys, jammed another into a lock, and hurled the cage open as quickly as I could.

Snap had lingered in the room, watching us, his expression still hazy. I glanced at him and offered as much reassurance as I could manage. “We’ll get out of here with you as soon as we have all the other shadowkind free. Just hang tight.”

“Hang tight,” he echoed in a faint but curious voice.

Figurative language wasn’t the devourer’s strong point. “Stay there,” I said. “You’ll be safer leaving the building with the rest of us.”

Ruse had been speaking in cajoling tones to the scientist his guard had disarmed. Omen spoke up again, his voice on the verge of a snarl. “Explain the map to me. What do these blue marks mean?”

“Oh, those are the locations of Company facilities,” the woman replied in a much chirpier voice than before. “And the red dots indicate areas where we’ve detected recent shadowkind activity. It helps us quickly identify patterns and decide who should investigate.”

“They’re not just here in the US. You’ve got polka dots all over Europe as well.”

“Yes. That’s where the Company started, as I understand it. The president of operations runs everything from over there.”

Wait, the Company of Light was run from someplace overseas? We’d thought we’d have to go all the way to San Francisco to deal with the ultimate head honcho… I hadn’t bargained for a trip across the ocean.

Neither had Omen, clearly. His voice came out with a sharp edge of sarcasm. “Wonderful. Where ‘over there’?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never talked to him directly. I got the impression he travels around a lot. With a mission this crucial, how could he stick to just one place?”

Omen swore under his breath. I wrenched open the last of the smaller cages. “Are you done with her yet?” I called. “We need these bigger ones opened.”

The scientist sprang into action before Ruse even needed to prod her. He must have done quite a job on her with his hocus pocus.

“I can control the locks from the computers,” she said, bending over a keyboard. Her colleague made an incoherent sound where he was sprawled on the floor—under the charmed guard, who’d taken a seat on the guy’s back.

One cage door whined open, and then another. Thorn cleared his throat. He swung his hand toward a row of monitors mounted higher on the wall. “These TVs, they show what’s real—what’s happening now?”

This time Omen swore louder. Whatever he’d seen there, he didn’t like it. “Unfortunately, yes. You, open those last two. Everyone else, let’s go. We’ve got a lot more jackasses incoming from the Company than I’d like.”

It was hard to tell whether all of the creatures had left or only retreated into the nearest shadows. “Out, out, all of you!” I called to them. More fire stirred in my chest at the thought of our enemies closing in on us.

Ruse hollered at his charmed allies. “Head out there in front of us—divert the attackers as well as you can!” He grabbed Snap’s wrist, and they vanished into the shadows a moment later. They’d herd any creatures who’d lingered out, I had to assume.

The guards and the charmed scientist dashed for the entrance to the outer museum. I ran after them, Thorn and Omen alongside me. A fresh jab of guilt that I was the only one who couldn’t slip away into the patches of darkness hit me.

“You can go,” I said. “I might be able to dodge them.”

“You didn’t see the security footage,” Omen muttered. “We’re not leaving you behind, Disaster.”

We burst out into the hall between the galleries. Shouts echoed off the walls as the onslaught of enemies shooed the visitors out of the museum. Footsteps pounded on the floors. Two squads of guards hurtled toward us from either side.

My pulse stuttered with a flare of adrenaline. I wasn’t dying here, not after all this—not when I hadn’t even gotten to welcome Snap back. Fuck these assholes and the shit-show they rode in on.

Without my even consciously willing it, flames whooshed up over three of the figures racing our way. I tuned out their shrieks with a wince. Thorn threw himself toward the other attackers at our right, and my gaze stopped on a broad window that looked out onto the street just behind them.

“Thorn!” I said. “We can crash right through.”

There’d been a time not that long ago when Thorn would have been too caught up in his own combat focus to pay attention to any suggestions I made. We’d established more of a mutual having-of-each-other’s-backs since then. He followed my motion, made a quick nod of agreement, and swung both fists to gash open two of the guards’ throats. Then he snatched up a couple of steel-toed shoes and hurled them at more distant opponents with a kick hard enough to break their noses.

Omen was slashing through the wave of guards coming from the other direction, but there were a lot of them. They all wore their protective armor, and a few carried the laser-like whips that raked through the shadowkind’s bodies in ways most other weapons couldn’t.

I gritted my teeth, and another two of our attackers vanished into an explosion of flame, along with a couple of displays that let off a whiff of charred leather. My skin tingled, but I didn’t seem to have caught fire myself this time. Having clearer, more deserving targets seemed to help keep that scalding energy focused away from my own body, thank tasseled toe shoes.

The smell of burning flesh wafted through the smoke. Bile rose in my throat, but I ignored my queasiness. I just had to get to the window, and we could be done with this.

Let them all burn. Why the hell shouldn’t they, when that was what they wanted to do to every shadowkind in existence?

Thorn battered a couple more guards and hurled himself past them to the window I’d pointed out. The slam of his fist brought down a hail of broken glass. I sprinted toward it.

A movement by one of the display cabinets next to the window brought my fury back to the surface. I whipped my hand out, and a pair of ancient miner’s boots turned into a fireball that careened toward?—

A little boy. It was one of the tourists’ kids: a scrap of a thing all round eyes and flyaway hair, who couldn’t have been more than seven years old. My boot-iful fireball flashed toward him where he’d crouched trembling beside the case. A look of pure terror took him over, and a cry broke from my lips. No, no. I hadn’t meant to?—

Something in me heaved with that shock of panic, and the flaming boots veered just enough that they skimmed the boy’s legs rather than roaring right into his face. He squealed, slapping at his jeans.

I’d still hurt him. What if he?—

I didn’t get to find out whether I had enough conscience left to make sure I hadn’t flambéed a child. Thorn caught me around the waist and hauled me through the broken window. The fresh outside air slapped me in the face, waking me out of my conflicted anguish.

Get to the RV. Get to Snap. Then it would all be over.

I dashed alongside the warrior around the corner. Omen flickered in and out of view, loping along in his hellhound form, just long enough to show he was with us. As we came into view of the Everymobile, Ruse flung the door open for me and then dove back into the driver’s seat. Thorn vaulted into the shadows around the steps, I threw myself up them and jerked the door shut behind me, and the RV lurched forward with a screech of its tires.

My heart was still thudding. I swayed over to the sofa and collapsed onto it. “Where’s—where’s Snap?” I managed to ask.

The devourer blinked into sight at the other end of the sofa in response to my question. Relief choked me. I found enough energy to shove myself over to him and dragged him into an embrace. His delicately dark scent, like a sunny meadow hiding mossy depths, filled my nose, fantastically familiar. It sent a pang through my heart.

“I’m so glad we got you out,” I said, pulling back so I could look him in the face.

Snap regarded me, cocking his gorgeous head. “So am I,” he said brightly. “It was very kind of you.” His gaze slid from me to Ruse and then Thorn and Omen, who’d stepped out of the shadows on the other side of the table. “You all went to so much trouble to help me… Who are you?”