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SEVEN

Sorsha

Thorn brandished the fruit like it was a sword. “ This is a banana.”

Snap took the yellow crescent from him and brought it to his nose. He breathed in, and a dreamy smile crossed his lips. “It smells delicious. Is it for eating?”

Ruse chuckled where he was standing next to Thorn by the RV’s kitchen, but the sound came out a bit strained. “Absolutely! You ate one of those when we made our first appearance in Sorsha’s apartment. Jog any memories?”

Snap raised the banana to his lips, taking a bite right through the peel like he had that first time what felt like ages ago. Watching him, my breath caught in my throat. At this point, I didn’t really expect a light of recognition to spark in his eyes—the way it hadn’t after all the previous memory-jogging we’d attempted—but it was hard not to hope for it anyway.

He chewed thoughtfully, every motion like the shadowkind man I’d come to know and to care about a lot more than was typically my policy. Then he shook his head, regretful as always that he was letting us down in some way he didn’t even understand. “I don’t believe I’ve had one of these before. It’s fantastic, though!”

My stomach clenched tighter into the ball it’d been forming since Snap had first shown that he had no recollection of who any of us were. He was the same person—monster—whatever. It was just as if months, possibly years, had been wiped from his mind.

As the devourer downed the rest of the banana with equal enthusiasm to the one he’d pilfered from my kitchen, Ruse and I exchanged a glance. His was as fraught as my inner state. Omen had been held prisoner by the Company for weeks longer than Snap had, and his memories hadn’t been addled as far as any of us had noticed. But who knew what additional tortures the scientists might have devised? It could have been some new tactic in their scheme to infect all shadowkind with a deadly plague or an unintended side effect from one of their experiments.

I stroked Pickle’s back where he’d hopped onto my lap and tried to ignore the growing gnawing of the question I least wanted to face: What if Snap had lost those memories for good? All the work he’d done toward taking down the Company… All the intimacies and affection we’d shared…

When I’d first met him, he hadn’t even realized what physical pleasures his body was capable of. I wasn’t sure he’d felt anything for me other than gratitude that I’d helped free him—and he didn’t remember that now either. I was a total stranger who meant nothing to him, and there was no way to replicate the scenarios that had brought us to our unexpectedly passionate union.

“If our equine friends had left us behind some dish soap, I’d make you a bubble stew,” Ruse joked. “You liked those last time too.”

Snap’s forked tongue flicked over his lips. “Is this ‘bubble stew’ as tasty as the banana?”

“Ah, no, it’s not for eating—that one’s just fun to look at. Little shiny globes floating through the air.”

The devourer laughed. “For a place without magic, the mortal realm has a lot of marvelous things! So many different flavors and colors… So much vivid sound. This contraption that carries us great distances without us having to move our bodies at all.” He patted the RV’s table with an awed expression.

The Everymobile wasn’t carrying us anywhere right now. We’d parked it in the lot by the derelict strip mall while we sorted out what to do next. Omen stepped up to the table, his arms folded over his chest.

“It’s unfortunate that you don’t remember anything about our cause or the rest, but we do have to get on with that mission. Our enemies know we’re in Chicago now. When I first sought you out in the shadow realm, you agreed to help me investigate the disappearances of our people. Now we know who’s behind it—the same people who locked you up. Are you going to stick with us and make them pay?”

A flicker of uneasiness passed through Snap’s expression and vanished just as quickly. I hadn’t been able to tell whether he remembered all the way back to his first devouring, the one that had made him so horrified with himself that he’d sworn never to use that power again. Hints like that suggested he might, but he hadn’t mentioned it.

“Of course,” he said now in his brightly eager voice. “The way those mortals treated the shadowkind in that place—it was awful. So much pain…” A shudder rippled through his slim frame.

I had to resist the urge to take his hand. Would the gesture comfort him from a woman he probably associated more with the mortal villains who’d captured him than his shadowkind comrades? A quiver of anger shot through the ball of my stomach.

Snap recovered himself with a set of his shoulders. “They should be stopped. I’ll do my best to help with that. I don’t know what I can tell you right now. With all the energy of the metals in that place, I couldn’t bring out any of my powers to test their equipment.”

“That’s all right,” Omen said, so brusquely I’d have liked to punch him. Too bad I was on the other side of the table with a tiny dragon on my lap. “I’ll let you know when you can pitch in.” He turned to take in the rest of us. “So. We have an even larger challenge than we anticipated ahead of us. It appears the Company of Light has been doing their wretched work not only all across this country but on the other side of the ocean as well.”

“So bloody many of them,” Thorn muttered.

“Exactly.” Omen paused. “I think our mortal disaster here might have had the right idea in our past operations, recruiting whatever help we could get. I never expected us to be confronting an organization this widespread, and I don’t think the five of us will be enough to shut them down once and for all. More skills, more insight, and simply more beings in play will allow us to put together a more complex strategy. We need to seek out more allies. We managed it before—I’ll be optimistic and assume we can find others willing to lend a hand at least briefly.”

I should have been gratified that he was admitting out loud that I’d been right about something. He’d groused enough about my ideas while I was putting them forward before. But any pleasure I might have gotten from his acknowledgement was swallowed up by the overwhelming sense of all those pockets of shadowkind-torturing psychos spread out across the planet. So many fucking mortals so determined to ruin everything in their path—maiming and killing and whatever they’d done to Snap?—

There was so much they needed to pay for. And sweet shredded seashores, did I want to be there delivering that payback.

The fire inside me roared from a quiver to a blaze in an instant. A burning sensation flared through my limbs—and Pickle squeaked, flinching so violently he tumbled off my lap onto the sofa cushions.

My heart lurched. My palms were prickling with the heat that must have burst from them. Pickle nuzzled his side—oh, God, were his shiny green scales faintly singed?

“Hey,” I said softly, reaching out to the little creature in the hopes of offering some sort of apology. He leapt back with a widening of his beady eyes. My throat constricted. “Pickle?”

He stared at me, his head weaving from side to side on his slender neck, and then he sprang off the sofa-bench completely and scurried down the hall toward the bedrooms.

Tightly as my stomach was balled, the bottom still managed to drop out of it. He’d been scared of me.

My hands clenched at my sides. Ruse and Thorn had been talking, sharing their ideas about who we might turn to for assistance first, but when I glanced up, Omen’s gaze was trained on me, his ice-blue eyes as piercing as ever.

“They might at least contribute a few of their underlings,” Ruse finished. “That Talon gent didn’t seem like the type to want to leave his home base unsupervised for long.”

Omen nodded. “Yes, we’ll speak to him again and see if he’s willing to offer anything.” He made a beckoning gesture toward me. “Disaster, a word outside? You two, have another go at stirring loose a memory or two in our devourer’s head.”

Oh, this was obviously going to be a laugh riot of a conversation. Did the RV have an escape chute?

Even if it did, I wasn’t going to give our leader the satisfaction of thinking he’d intimidated me into pulling a runner. I’d managed to coax the big bad hellhound onto the dance floor last night. I’d kissed him and survived to tell the tale.

And there wasn’t anything he could say to me that would feel any worse than what was already going through my head.

Thorn shot me a look of mild concern, but I gave his arm a light squeeze in reassurance as I passed him. “Is this a super-secret meeting for discussing mortal strategies?” I said to Omen, following him out in the cooling evening air.

The hellhound shifter made a point of not only shutting the door but also stalking across the lot to give us distance as well. With more than a little trepidation, I walked after him to where he came to a stop outside a hair salon. Its broad front window was plastered with posters of individuals who, based on their ‘dos, needed to re-evaluate their personal style. A long-squashed shampoo bottle lying on the concrete walk outside gave off a soured honeysuckle scent. Way to set the mood.

I crossed my arms in imitation of Omen’s typical authoritarian stance. “What’s up? Was I not joyful enough that you finally recognized my genius?”

Omen rolled his eyes. “I’m just glad not to have you crowing about how you told me so.”

“Oh, don’t worry, that might come later. I’m waiting for my moment.”

“Sorsha.”

Something about the way he said my name, crisp and solemn, put a cap on my snark. When did he ever address me by my name and not “mortal” or “Disaster” or when he was having a particularly uncreative day, “you”? A chill tickled over my skin, but honestly, that was better than the flames I couldn’t seem to stop from leaking out.

“What?” I said, serious now. “I’m listening.”

He studied me for a little longer with a cool gaze incisive enough to cut into my skull. “You really are losing your handle on your powers, aren’t you? More than you’ve let on. It’s not just when you’re trying to use them. Something happened that startled your dragon just now, didn’t it?”

I couldn’t stop the cross of my arms from turning into hugging myself as I dredged up the answer. “I didn’t just startle him. I burned him—I hurt him. And no, I didn’t mean to do anything at all. I’ve tried to tell you a bajillion times already. There’s more fire in me than I know what to do with or how to contain, and sometimes it just bursts out. Even when I am fighting, it’s getting ahead of me.”

I hesitated, and Omen’s gaze sharpened. “What?”

“I almost fried a little kid in the museum,” I said, the words scraping my throat raw on the way up.

“That was a reaction in the middle of a battle. You can’t expect to be able to take the same care there.”

Oh, now he thought it was time to go easy on me? I raised my eyebrows at him. “Would you let yourself off the hook for messing up your control like that?”

But the shifter stayed impervious. “I wouldn’t be worrying about which mortals I took down, whatever their age, to begin with.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.” I let out a rough sigh. “I realize you find it hard to believe that I could have enough power to be a danger to anyone when I don’t mean to be. You probably still find it hard to believe that any mortal has powers at all. But I do have them, and—I don’t like the way it feels now. It isn’t a wonderous talent I can bend to my will. Sometimes the flames come out of nowhere, and I can’t shake the impression that they could totally explode. That I could flatten the whole city if I didn’t catch the fire in time.”

Omen didn’t retract his previous skepticism, but at least he didn’t argue with me. “It’s been hurting you when you’re using it—how often?”

“Most of the time, lately. And when I’m not, when it has those surges, too. But at least I heal from the burns quickly.” I rubbed my forearms where the skin had been blistered last night but was now only faintly pink. “That kid wouldn’t have recovered. Pickle wouldn’t if I burned him badly enough.”

The hellhound shifter sucked in a breath. He started to pace the width of the walkway, his expression intent. “I don’t like it,” he said finally. “We have too much at stake to bring a destructive wild card into the mix.”

My back stiffened. “If you’re going to try to tell me to take a hike after all this?—”

He held up his hand. “Cool your jets, Disaster. I pushed you into bringing this power out; I can take responsibility for that. And you still contribute more to the cause than I can dismiss. But before these unusual reactions take hold any further, I think we should see if you can get a handle on them so that you can use them to destroy our enemies and not yourself. For that, we need to understand them. Understand you and what you are. Do you know where you were supposedly born?”

That wasn’t the direction I’d expected this conversation to go. “I’m not sure. I was three when Luna escaped with me, and she refused to tell me very much—she didn’t want me going back there. I think she figured the hunters who murdered my parents might still be looking for me. But I remember a few things. We might be able to figure it out.”

“Good. Then we can add that to our list of goals alongside building our base of allies. There must be someone in that place who’d know more about this fae woman and your supposed parents, and therefore how you came to be. If we’re going to get answers, I have to imagine they start there.”

“Okay.” A tingle shot through me, both exhilarated and uneasy at the thought of digging into my history. Even if I got answers, that didn’t mean I was going to like them.

“I’m glad we’re agreed,” Omen said in a slightly wry tone. He’d actually been pretty… considerate about the whole thing. And that wasn’t a word I’d ever thought I’d associate with the hellhound shifter, at least not when it came to his attitude toward me. But we had been through a lot, hadn’t we? We’d found a pretty good rhythm for working together until my powers had started turning me into even more of a pyromaniac.

My gaze had drifted to his mouth: those perfect Cupid’s bow lips. The lips that had branded mine with a heat that still made my knees weak remembering it.

He was turning away to head back to the Everymobile. “Omen,” I said quickly. “About last night outside the club?—”

His gaze shot back to me with a flash of orange fire that didn’t look at all welcoming. Maybe that’d been designed to cut me off, but he should know by now that keeping my mouth shut wasn’t a particular skill of mine.

“I take it you want to pretend it never happened,” I went on.

He spun the rest of the way to face me again. His eyes had settled back into their usual cool hue, but a heat wafted over me that I was pretty sure had come from his well-built body. If he wanted me to believe he had no emotions at all about our split-second encounter, he was being about as convincing as a dog drooling over a forbidden bone.

Except I wasn’t forbidden, definitely not where boning was concerned. So what exactly was the issue?

“Do you have any alternate suggestions?” he asked. “Because if you think you’re going to reel me in like you somehow did my associates, you can incinerate that idea. Even if anything did happen between us—which it won’t—it isn’t going to buy you any special favors.”

I blinked. “Hold on. Why would you figure I was looking for favors, special or otherwise?”

He shrugged. “You do seem to be making a habit of seducing some rather powerful shadowkind. Do you really need one more just for the hell of it?”

He was lucky I didn’t incinerate him for what he was implying. I glowered at him. “I didn’t kiss you—or do all the many things I’ve done with the others—for some kind of personal gain, unless you count the gaining of fine times between the sheets. It isn’t part of any plan. It just… happened. And I liked that it happened, so I didn’t see any reason to stop more happening when the occasion arose. This situation is already crazy enough. Is there really something wrong with taking part of that craziness in an enjoyable direction now and then?”

“I suppose not. What was last night about, then?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes you’re appealing in a very annoying way. Sorry if that bothers you. I kissed you because I wanted to, plain and simple. If you’re looking for a huge conspiracy, you’re not going to find it there. But if it was so distasteful to you, I’m sure I can restrain myself in the future. As you’ve pointed out, I have plenty of other supernatural beings to kiss if the urge strikes.”

Omen’s mouth twitched. There I went, staring at those damn lips again. When I met his eyes instead, a hint of their orange glow had come back.

“I didn’t say it was distasteful,” he said, in a carefully restrained voice that spoke of so many emotions he might be tamping down. “But if you’re concerned about how many blazes you set off, perhaps you should pick your dance partners more carefully. Let’s have it end where we left it last night.”

“Fine,” I said. I definitely wasn’t disappointed about that. All right, all right, maybe a teensy weensy bit. “I just thought we should clear the air. Look! Clear as crystal. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.”

That twitch of his mouth was in the direction of a smile. And maybe it would have gotten all the way there if Ruse hadn’t hurried over to us from the RV right then. The fire in Omen’s eyes went out as swiftly as a doused campfire.

“No luck with Snap?” he said, taking in the incubus’s expression.

“Not exactly.” Ruse ran a hand through his already rumpled hair. “I didn’t want to say this in front of him in case it made things worse.”

My pulse hiccupped. Was there more wrong with Snap beyond just his memory?

Ruse looked at me and then back at Omen. “I took as good a read as I could on his inner state. It’s not easy picking up emotions and the rest from shadowkind—most of us keep our minds too guarded. But you know our devourer is pretty much an open book. I think… I think he’s in there. All of him. The Company jackasses didn’t burn those memories out of him. He’s just buried them so deep even he can’t dredge them up again, for whatever reason.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to pull his consciousness away from the torment and he overshot by a couple of miles?” Ruse let out a short laugh that had no real humor in it. “In essence, you could say he devoured himself.”