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EIGHT

Thorn

If Talon’s fidgety comrade didn’t stop sneering at Sorsha, I was going to have to apply my fist to his skull and enjoy the billow of his essence escaping. Our lady wouldn’t like it, but I was starting to feel it’d be worth weathering her disappointment.

The syndicate boss himself wasn’t cultivating my good favor either. He’d grimaced and sighed through Omen’s explanation of our need, and now he was working his jaw in thought with his basilisk eyes still hidden behind those dark-paned glasses.

You couldn’t trust a being who wouldn’t look you in the eyes—even if it was a look that could kill. He’d have been thinking rather highly of himself if he believed he could fell any of us shadowkind in attendance.

But of course one of our number was not shadowkind and thus not of the same bodily durability. And Jinx—who, based on his frenetic movements and the quivers of energy that rippled off him with a faint lemony tang, I’d become increasingly sure was a poltergeist—absolutely delighted in reminding us of that.

“Not sure what you need allies like us for when you’ve got this one already,” he mocked, waving his hand toward Sorsha. “Interesting strategy, bringing a human along to fight enemies who can topple even higher shadowkind. Makes me wonder what other screws you’ve got loose up there.”

Now he’d managed to insult both my commander and my lady in one go. We could discover how amusing he’d find the situation when he was leaking smoke all over his clubhouse.

I took a step forward, my hand clenching, and Sorsha caught my arm. She gave me a little smile with a sharpness I suspected was intended for the other shadowkind. “Leave him be. He doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know.”

Jinx squirmed at the affront to his intelligence and shut his mouth, which satisfied me enough for the moment, even if it was mostly because of the stern glance Talon sent his way. Omen might not be terribly pleased if I thrashed one of our potential allies in the middle of negotiations either.

Or perhaps we were already at the end of those negotiations. The basilisk turned back to us, his mouth still twisted at a not-at-all-promising angle.

“I hear your concerns,” he said. “But I’ve already offered plenty of assistance within the city bounds. My base of power is here—I can’t say I have any resources on the other side of the ocean. I’m not about to leave my operations here untended, and I’m hardly going to ask even the employees I can spare to traipse off across the world on some potentially suicidal quest.”

“ Not tackling the Company of Light as soon as we’re able to could be even more suicidal,” Omen said, but I could tell from the weary edge to his tone that he was even less optimistic now than he’d been going into this place.

When he’d first brought us together, my old associate had said the four of us would be enough to see through his mission, that the shadowkind who refused to recognize the impending catastrophe would only slow us down. The urge gripped me to say we didn’t need any of these buffoons, that we should continue as we had been after all. Suggesting otherwise had made me uneasy to begin with, as much as Sorsha had proven her case before. I’d chosen to follow Omen on this path because I trusted he would lead us well.

And I knew far too well the consequences of questioning one’s superiors. It was because I’d gone to seek out another possible solution to the conflict—against the orders of the wingéd generals—that I hadn’t been there for the final slaughter in the wars that had demolished my wingéd brethren. I’d chased a hope of a better way rather than standing by my comrades, and they had died without me standing by them while I’d lived with fewer scars than I’d deserved. If I’d been dedicated enough to stay the course, would it have gone differently?

I’d thought that if this time I devoted myself completely to a figure smart and strong enough to be worthy of that faith, it would be my redemption. But this course had turned out to be much more complicated than I’d expected.

“You could at least tell your underlings about the problem and see if any of them would be willing to pitch in without being ordered to,” Sorsha said. “Or is your grip on your operations so shaky you couldn’t spare even a few shadowkind to make sure you don’t all end up in cages?”

“ No one is going to cage me,” Talon retorted, a threatening hint of a hiss creeping into his voice. “You can make your own invitations. I have better things to do than cater to your crusade.”

“Fine,” Omen said flatly. “Can you at least answer one question before we leave you to your oh-so-important business? I hear the Highest were making inquiries with the mortal-side shadowkind some twenty or thirty years ago, looking for a powerful and potentially dangerous being. Possibly by the name of Jasper or Garnet or similar? Did you catch wind of any of that?”

Talon frowned as he appeared to consider. “That does ring a bell of some sort. I remember the word going out… I seem to have gotten the impression the search was mostly to the south.”

“Do you remember if you heard that the being was apprehended?”

“No, nothing more after the initial questioning. What do you want with that one anyway?”

Omen’s lips curled with the subtlest of sneers. “I’m wondering if he’d have the balls to go up against a conglomerate of mortals, unlike some others I won’t mention.”

He turned on his heel and stalked out without another word. Sorsha and I followed, my lady shooting a derisive glare Talon’s way for good measure. As we headed back to the vehicle where Ruse had stayed with our befuddled Snap, she gave herself a little shake as if to release the tension of the encounter, the sunlight flashing in her lovely hair.

The stresses of our mission had appeared to weigh on our lady more than usual these last few days, even before we’d discovered the devourer’s unexpected predicament. I hadn’t wanted to impinge on her honor by revealing that I’d noticed when she clearly was attempting to master those concerns on her own. Still, I was glad that she’d seemed more settled since her talk with Omen earlier today.

“Who—or what—is the Highest?” she asked him now.

“The oldest of the shadowkind,” he replied. “Some say they were the first ones, the only ones that have existed from the beginning. There aren’t many of them, and they don’t have much to do with the rest of us, generally speaking. They only intervene from time to time when they get the idea someone’s making quite a bit more trouble than they’d prefer.”

“I’ve never even encountered one of the Highest,” I said. We all knew, perhaps by some instinct, that it was best not to venture too far into the deepest depths of our natural realm. The ancient beings there preferred not to be disturbed.

“And you should be glad for it,” the hellhound shifter said darkly.

Sorsha hummed to herself. “So why are you really interested in this shadowkind they were looking for?”

“Essentially the same reason I gave that trumped up lizard. If the Highest take issue with this being’s behavior, he’s got to be something of a rebel. Maybe that means he won’t care about our cause either, but at the very least, I doubt he’d beg off out of fear of disrupting the status quo.” Omen let out a huff of breath. “As we’ve witnessed yet again, most of our kind are useless when it comes to paying attention to anything other than their own self-interest.”

“We found allies before,” Sorsha insisted. “There’ll have to be others who’ll care enough.”

She always challenged him so easily, without the slightest fear. And she had been right. I didn’t know if we’d have managed to destroy the main facility in that last city without the assistance she’d worked to obtain, often against Omen’s direct command.

I hadn’t tended to question my own capacity for bravery, but this mortal lady sometimes put me to shame. Watching her was making me start to wonder if the problem all those centuries ago hadn’t been that I’d ventured to question what we were doing but that more of my comrades hadn’t questioned it. Which I supposed was why when I opened my mouth, the remark that fell most easily from my lips was, “I believe there are potential allies out there, as difficult as it may be to find them.”

Omen gave me a sideways glance as if in askance, but he’d clearly come around to agreeing with our lady’s perspective on this matter, even if he still muttered about it now and then. He didn’t bother to argue. “Then it’s a good thing we’ll have plenty of time to ask around while we’re dealing with our diversion. We need to work out exactly where we’re going next to unravel your mysterious history, Disaster. Let’s hope it won’t be too catastrophic.”

Sorsha made a face at him as she climbed onto the RV. “You obviously wouldn’t have any frame of reference for this, but a three-year-old human’s memories are pretty vague. We can go over the bits and pieces I do remember, and?—”

She stopped in her tracks in the space between the driver’s seat and the living area. Ruse had just emerged from the shadows farther down the hall, Snap popping into view behind him, but Sorsha wasn’t looking at them.

I peered over her shoulder to observe three pairs of shoes lined up on the floor beside the cupboards. From their size and their neon hues, I guessed they were possessions the unicorn shifter had left behind.

I was about to ask Sorsha what had disturbed her about them when two of those shoes leapt up in the air and switched places. Then three of them started hopping around in a little dance. They flipped over each other, smacked the floor in a rhythmic beat, and suddenly all six of them flew up two at a time to stack into a wobbly tower. It held, swaying, for a few seconds before the shoes tumbled back to the ground.

A figure about the size of a partly-grown human child blinked into view beside them, spiky orange hair sticking up from her rounded head and skinny arms flung out to grab at the shoes. Her voice came out thin and squeaky. “Darn it, darn it. Never get the balance right.” She glanced up at us—at Sorsha, mostly—and gave a grin that stretched far into her cheeks. “I hope you were a little entertained by the trick anyway.”

“Um,” Sorsha said, apparently at a loss for words.

I wasn’t going to brandish my fists at a figure this pathetic, but security was my job. Stepping up beside my lady, I cleared my throat. “Who are you, and what are you doing on our vehicle?”

“Oh, I—” The figure fumbled with the shoes and then shoved them all into one of the cupboards with an exaggerated sigh of resignation. She sprang up to her full height, which only brought her about level with Sorsha’s waist. Still grinning, she gave us both a brisk salute. “Antic, at your service. Here to help in whatever ways I can.”

“An imp,” Omen said from behind me with a note of distaste.

Ugh. Imps were mischief-makers, always seeking human attention in the most obnoxious ways. Since they liked to scamper around mortal-side and I’d rarely crossed the divide in centuries, I’d thankfully had few dealings with them.

“You didn’t entirely answer the second question,” I said. “Why are you here? Our human doesn’t need your version of ‘entertaining’.”

The imp raised her pointed chin. “I did answer. I’m here to help. You’re looking for help, aren’t you? I heard you talking about it. And you obviously know what you’re doing, the way you marched into that awful room where they had me shut up behind bars. If you’re going to stick it to more of those kinds of humans, count me totally on board.”

“I don’t think your sort of helping is exactly—” Omen started.

Sorsha held up her hand. “Wait a second. Weren’t you just complaining about how few shadowkind want to get their hands dirty? She just proved she can move things around invisibly, even if her shoe towers need a little work in the steadiness department. There’s got to be some way she could contribute.”

Ruse had ambled closer. He peered down at the little being with a smirk. “I don’t get any sense that she has motives beyond what she’s offering.”

“The question is whether she’ll contribute more than she’ll make us long for a quick sword to the chest,” Omen said, echoing my own reservations.

“Hush, you,” the imp said, as if she wasn’t speaking to a hellhound shifter more than twice her size and approximately a thousand times more powerful than she was. She bounded up onto the sofa and sat there with her scrawny legs dangling. “The human wants me to stay, and that’s good enough for me.”

“No one asked your opinion,” Omen muttered. “Really, Disaster?”

Sorsha gave him a firm look. “Really. You can’t moan about not getting enough help and then moan that the help we get isn’t in the perfect package.” She turned back to the imp. “Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

The imp beamed at her. “How are we sticking it to ‘em first?”

Sorsha sank down on the sofa across from her. “Well, we need to figure out where we’re going next—for a sort of side mission. Maybe you can even help with that. I’ll mention all the things I can remember about the place, and if it sounds like anywhere any of you have been mortal-side, speak up.”

As I propped myself against the counter by the sink, keeping one eye on the imp in case she turned out to have more malicious intentions—you could never be too sure—Sorsha rubbed her mouth.

“All right. There was someplace we got ice cream at least a couple of times—there was always a line-up and I’d get impatient, and it had a bright red sign. I remember things about the inside of our house, but that won’t help anything. Um… there was a park near the house, with a slide my mom said was too tall for me to go on yet. Some kind of festival we went to with lots of music, in the summer I think—my hair got all sweaty. And there was a big bridge I loved… something about it at night, like smoke rising across the sky?” She knit her brow. “I know that’s all incredibly vague. I do have the box with the note my parents left me, too.”

She reached for her purse, but Omen brushed past me to touch her shoulder. “Hold on. Say what you did about the bridge again. As much as you can remember.”

Sorsha frowned in concentration. “It was definitely big—although hard to say how much of that impression is relative to when I was a preschooler. I only remember it when it was dark. Maybe not full night but evening. And that smokiness moving toward the sky?—”

“That.” His fingers tightened where he was gripping her. “There’s a glamour on your memory. I can feel it coming through when you try to verbalize the scene. Your fae must have put it there.”

“Why would Luna have messed with that memory?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Maybe to make sure you didn’t go back. All the more reason I should break it. A nearly twenty-five-year-old bit of fae flim-flam shouldn’t be too difficult to dispel. Keep focusing on that image.”

Sorsha tensed. “What are you going to do? Is this some kind of mind-reading trick you never mentioned?”

Omen shook his head. “Don’t worry, Disaster. I’ve got no interest in unraveling the entire contents of your head. I can simply sense the magic there when you’re concentrating on the information it’s clouding. And I can break it, if you’ll let me.”

She exhaled slowly. “All right then.”

Her eyes closed as she must have brought the memory back up, and Omen’s did too. The rest of us watched silently—even the damned imp, though she was squirming in excited anticipation.

Our commander’s hand gave a little tug on Sorsha’s shoulder, and her eyes widened. Then she laughed. “It wasn’t smoke. It was bats . A whole cloud of them, soaring up past the bridge.”

Ruse snapped his fingers. “I know where that is. It figures you’d have come from a city with plenty of shadowkind.” He nudged the devourer. “Sounds like we’re heading down to Austin.”

“Austin,” Sorsha repeated as if trying out the word. She smiled, but hesitantly. Maybe wondering the same thing I was.

If her fae guardian had taken steps to meddle with that memory, what else might she have hidden in our lady’s mind?