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TWENTY-ONE

Sorsha

When I came out in the morning to grab breakfast, Gloam was drooping over the table like a plant that had wilted with too much sun. The downcast nature that consumed him by day made it hard to believe he’d been gleefully discussing favorite mortal desserts with Snap yesterday night.

Antic perched on the counter across from him, holding the new map book Ruse had picked up for her. A vibrant pink sticky note poked from the top of the cover announcing This Way Up . I wasn’t sure trusting her to give directions even with that safeguard was the best idea.

She looked up from the book to stick out her tongue at the night elf. Her skinny legs swung against the cabinets. “I keep telling him he should take that sour face into the shadows where at least we won’t have to look at it.”

Gloam sighed. “I know it isn’t pleasant to observe my dejection. I can remove myself if that’s what you’d all prefer.”

I shot a warning look at Antic and sat down across from him with the muffin I’d picked up. “Don’t be silly. You are the way you are, and if you’d rather stay in physical form, that’s up to you. Anyone who doesn’t like looking at you can just point their eyes in another direction.”

The imp huffed and hopped down from the counter to stand closer to Ruse, who was back on driving duty. “In another, I’d say, ten miles we’re taking an exit south.” She turned the book sideways and then her head sideways to match, which didn’t exactly add to my confidence.

Even with shadowkind drivers who had no need for sleep, we weren’t going to make it to the Golden Gate City until tonight. At least we had our lovely home on wheels to enjoy for the journey. And we hadn’t even stolen it or conned it out of anyone—legitimate rides for the win!

As I bit into the doughy sweetness of my muffin, Gloam raised his head enough to peer at me from beneath his thin eyebrows. “There’s so much more Luna was hiding from me than I ever could have guessed. You came from a human and an ifrit…” He stopped there, just staring, as if the impossibility of it had rendered him mute.

“Hey, no one’s more surprised than me,” I said. “She raised me for thirteen years and never made a peep about me potentially having voodoo skills or anything like that.” Really, a warning would have been nice. What if I’d accidentally set one of my high school teachers up in flames for disparaging my essay-writing attempts or what have you? Not that I was thinking of anyone in particular who might have deserved it…

“I never thought such a thing could have happened. I suppose that just shows how little I truly understand this world.”

I had to restrain myself from rolling my eyes at his insistence in making the insanity of my existence all about his failings. “I’m sure it wasn’t easy. Omen has been around for, like, a thousand years or something and he’s never heard of anyone managing it.”

Somehow my reassurance only turned Gloam gloomier. He looked down at his hands. “They must have wanted you an incredible amount to try so hard to bring you into being. I can’t imagine anyone will ever care that much about my being.”

No wonder Luna had only hung out with this guy during the night. I was starting to rethink my rebuke to Antic. But his comment stirred up a trickle of warmth too, one that spread through my chest as I soaked it in. For the first time since Ellen had texted to say she and the rest of that part of the Fund were out, my nerves completely settled.

“They did,” I said. “Love me a lot. I remember…” My recollections of my parents were vague, but every impression I had of my mother’s face framed by her ruddy hair was beaming with affection. In the note they’d left for me, they’d called me their “treasure.” And Luna had believed in their commitment to each other and to having a child enough to not only help them with their search for a solution but to devote her life to me for more than a decade after their deaths.

So what if I was an impossibility? Yeah, I was a freak of nature who still had a lot of work to do when it came to controlling her hocus pocus. But I’d also been born out of the most immense love I could ever have imagined.

My parents and Luna had believed I deserved to be brought into this world—that I’d make things here better rather than worse. I had to believe in myself at least as much in their honor.

The Everymobile swayed as Ruse changed lanes, to no honks just this once. “We’re officially halfway there!” he called back to us.

“Woohoo!” I raised my arm in a fist-pump. A moment like that called for a song. “We’re as spry as a tiger; we’re as chill as a kite, rising up to the challenge on arrival!” I belted out.

Gloam blinked at me with a bewildered expression, but Antic giggled and did a little jig with the map book.

Omen materialized next to the table with his arms folded over his chest. “If you want to actually ‘rise’ to that ‘challenge’ without barbequing yourself any more than you already have, I’m thinking another training session might be in order. If you think you can manage not to burn down Darlene around us?”

I stuffed the last of my muffin into my mouth with a quick nod. How many challenges had I already tackled and lived to tell the tale? I’d get the hang of this. If my mom and dad had managed to get their differing natures to cooperate enough to produce an entirely new being, I could talk the opposing sides of myself into getting along.

Swiping my hands together, I got up. “All right. Let’s do this.” I paused, considering our limited options for training space. “Maybe not right here near the driver’s seat, since I can’t promise a flame or two won’t get a little out of hand. And I’d rather not make a bonfire out of my own bed, so… the master bedroom?”

“I could just stuff you into the bathroom, since no one else here needs that.”

“Yeah, but there’d be no room for you to join me in there to boss me around.”

I marched past him to the narrow doorway at the very back of the RV. I’d only gone in there once before, when Gisele had been curled up on the bed unconscious from her battle wounds. Apparently she’d wanted to shake that memory too by changing the surroundings—the bedspread was different, a dark blue that twinkled here and there like stars. She must have gotten Bow to scrounge up a new one for her.

“All right,” I said. “What’s on the menu today? Any sparkly things you’d like scorched out of existence?”

Omen cast a baleful look around at the bedroom, which had more surfaces that shimmered than not. Even the ceiling had been dabbed with patches of gold glitter like a shiny hurricane was about to descend on us.

The unicorn shifter’s taste in décor was unmistakable. It really was too bad she and Luna had never gotten the chance to meet.

“I thought we’d go back to the first trick that worked.” Omen brandished a handful of torn strips of paper he’d pulled from his pocket. “Simple and easy to work with in a confined space. But first—I thought back to when I originally decided I needed to temper my, ah, temper. We can try a few centering and calming techniques that might help you stay cool while you’re summoning your fire.”

Anything that reduced the chances of me ending up in cinders sounded good. “I’m ready. Teach away!”

Omen talked me through a couple of mental exercises involving measured breathing and visualization. I decided it was wisest not to mention that his instructions sounded an awful lot like the yoga guru meditations Vivi’s mom was addicted to.

Who was I to poke fun, anyway? Picturing a serene stretch of still ocean water, I could compel its imagined cooling sensation all the way across my skin. Of course, what really mattered was whether my mental imagery would continue to hold water once very real flames came out to play.

“Do you think you’ve got a good enough grip on yourself now?” Omen asked. After several minutes of pacing while he lectured, he’d finally allowed himself to sit on the edge of the bed—a foot away from me, but even when I closed my eyes, the heated power of his presence tickled over my skin.

“I’d better be,” I said. “Bring out the papers!”

He got up again to stand in front of me and held one pinched between his fingers about two feet from my face. The bedroom, for all its impressiveness, was still an RV bedroom, and we didn’t have a whole lot of room to work with. He waggled the paper slip so it swayed above his grasp. “You should feel honored. I’m trusting your aim enough to put my hand in harm’s way.”

“Of course, what that actually means is you still don’t believe I could actually incinerate you.”

He really smiled then, with a cocky slant to it that abruptly made me wish I was getting a grip on him . “Glass half full, glass half empty—it’s up to you how you see it.”

He shouldn’t be tempting me, or one of these days my uneasiness about the energy that sometimes rose up inside me would be outweighed by my desire to teach him a lesson about underestimating humans… or half-humans… whatever.

I focused my gaze on the paper. Imagined that serene ocean landscape spread out through my body—and a jolt of my inner heat leaping up through that, aimed only at my target. Burn!

The paper went up in flames. If they stung Omen’s fingers, he didn’t let on. Still smiling, he closed his hand around the fire to snuff it out and then brushed away the ashes that remained. “Excellent. Now we just need to do that a thousand or so more times.”

I restrained a groan. “Suddenly I feel like I’ve become your personal shredder. I’ll have lots of practice if I ever want to take a job in covering up paper trails when all this is over.”

“There you go. I’m setting you up for new and exciting career opportunities too.” He paused, and the wry tone left his voice. “Did it feel all right? You didn’t burn yourself at all?”

“All good. Perfectly cool and oceanic.” I made a beckoning gesture. “Let’s get on with the rest of that practice, or we’ll be in Uruguay by the time I’m done.”

By taking a moment to center myself and bring up the calming imagery before each blast of flame, I managed to barbeque four more small slips of paper and then a couple of larger ones without any ill effects. Were we going to work all the way up to a complete encyclopedia set?

Of course, when I needed to extend my voodoo in the middle of a fight, I wasn’t necessarily going to have time to perform a little meditation before I jumped into the action, or I might get barbequed by our attackers in the meantime. My visualizations weren’t going to deflect bullets or daggers or laser whips.

As Omen prepped his next target, I dragged in a breath and let the cooling sensation wash through me again, as thoroughly as I could summon it. I needed to see how long the effect would last if I didn’t keep bolstering it with every surge of power.

The hellhound shifter started mixing things up by crumpling one paper into a ball, letting another wave as he dangled it, and whatever else he could think of to vary the practice. I blasted each of them one-by-one, not letting myself hesitate to gather my emotions this time. Pretend we were in the midst of the fray, and each of those scraps was a Company asshole about to slaughter me or my shadowkind allies. Burn. Burn. Burn it all…

A sharper flare of heat shot through my chest, and a flame licked up across my forearm at the same instant as Omen’s paper caught fire. I slapped my arm against the bedspread, an ache already spreading through my flesh. When I checked it, the skin gleamed dark pink.

“Fuck finicky flapjacks,” I muttered.

Omen grabbed a bottle of aloe he’d had on hand, proving he hadn’t really trusted my control all that much. “Were you concentrating?” he demanded.

“Yes, yes. But I had to pick up the pace. My powers aren’t going to do us much good if I’m stopping to praise the seas while some prick is stabbing a knife into me.”

“I’m sure you’ll get there. You’re rushing it.”

I made a face at him. “Right, I have no idea why I feel any time pressure at all. It’s not as if dozens, maybe even hundreds of shadowkind are being tortured as we speak, all to develop some sickness that’ll kill the lot of you.”

“You won’t accomplish much to stop the Company if you’re too busy scalding yourself.”

Rather than handing the bottle to me, he squeezed a dollop onto his own fingers and sat next to me to smooth the gel over my burnt skin. At least the shadowkind part of me seemed to heal the wounds it dealt me faster than any human would have recovered.

The real cool of the aloe spread over my arm. As the pain drew back, other sensations came into more vivid awareness. Like the brush of Omen’s fingers, unexpectedly gentle, as he finished his administrations. Like the not-at-all unpleasant heat emanating from him where he was now poised just inches away.

As he let my arm go, I gave in to the urge to poke one of his substantial pecs. “Who would have thought the hellhound could be so sweet?”

Omen snorted. “Yes, my preference that you remain uncharred so you can actually participate in those upcoming battles is clearly a sign of boundless devotion.”

“There you go,” I said, cheerfully ignoring the sarcasm dripping from his voice, and leaned back on my hands. “I knew underneath all the rancor you adored me.”

The shifter’s gaze skimmed over my breasts and down the rest of my body, the flicker of orange light in it kindling a very different flame all through me. Then he pushed away from the bed with a jerk, that familiar ice forming in his eyes. Any good humor flattened from his tone. “You should get back to practice. With a minimum of burnt flesh this time, if you can manage that?”

I glowered at him. “Why do you have to revert back to being Bossypants the Asshole? Is it that hard to admit that you care at least a tiny bit what happens to me beyond my usefulness to your cause? And, y’know, to act like it for more than a few seconds at a time?”

“We’ve talked about this. I’m not interested in being another one of your fuckbuddies. I can’t see any way that won’t just lead to more disaster.”

“I’m going to have to point out that you’re the one who brought up fucking. I’m not even asking you to kiss me. All I’m talking about is a little more consistency in the respect and compassion department. Or do you figure since I’m only half shadowkind, I’m only half worth caring about?”

He bared his teeth. “I certainly didn’t come here to make friends with mortals.”

“I’m not ‘mortals’—I’m me . And I think I’ve proven that I’m nothing like the ones you hate.”

“I never said you were like them.”

I threw my hands in the air. “Then what’s the problem? You know I’m in this to the end. I’ve given up pretty much everything I had before you all crashed into my life to see this mission through. Why are you still so convinced that being a little friendly will ruin your life somehow?”

“Who says it’s my life I’m worried about ruining?” Omen said, with an edge of a snarl. “Do you really think getting more wrapped up in my business is going to turn out so hot for you?”

How could I resist an opening that good? I peered at him through my eyelashes. “Yes, actually I expect it’d be incredibly hot.”

The hellhound shifter let out a strangled sound. “And of course you have to turn things around like that. I don’t for one second think you’ll be the one hitting the brakes if I stopped doing it.”

“So what you’re saying is you don’t trust your own self-control, and you’re blaming me for it.”

“That’s not— I know what you’re like. I’ve seen how you’ve drawn the others in, even if there was nothing malicious about it. Don’t try to pretend this is all about making friends, because I see you .”

He said the words like an accusation, but the deeper truth of them rippled through me, dispelling most of my frustration. My fingers relaxed where they’d clenched the bedspread as we’d argued. One corner of my mouth lifted in a crooked smile.

“Yeah,” I said. “You do. Not just like that. You’re the only one who saw that I was more than human when even I was turning a blind eye. You see what I’m capable of, and you see when I’m struggling—and you like me at least enough to push me or bandage me up as I need it. That’s why I like you, or at least why I’m trying to through all the hot-and-cold routines you pull.”

At my change in tone, Omen’s stance had gone rigid. “What are you trying to pull now?”

Huh, it looked like kindness pissed off the hellhound shifter even more than snark did. Because it got under his emotional armor more than he liked?

I shrugged, keeping the same calm attitude. “I’m simmering things down—which doesn’t mean I’m backing down. I just don’t see the need to keep throwing insults at each other. Call me a disaster all you want, but no one’s ever believed in me as much as you do.”

Another flicker of flame passed through Omen’s eyes. His hands balled at his sides, and his voice came out terse. “I believe you’re a fucking headache.”

“Nope. I’m not doing this. The bickering has been fun, but aren’t you getting tired of it? If we’re going back to practicing, then it’s with the understanding that I know you’re doing this to help me, because it matters to you that I come out of this mess okay.”

“You don’t get to announce how I feel.”

I gave him a wry smile. “I’ll agree to that rule if we also make one that you don’t get to pretend you’ve got no feelings at all.”

“Don’t go all Dr. Phil on me,” Omen snapped. When I didn’t respond, he took a swipe at my shoulder, knocking it just enough to make my body sway. “Where’s your fight, Disaster? Aren’t you always going on about all the incredible strength you’re holding back?”

“I don’t want to fight you. And frankly, I think it shows a lot more strength to own up to what you really want than to walk around with some tough-guy front.”

“It’s a hell of a lot more than a front.” Omen took a jab at my other shoulder. “If you think I’m some kind of puppy dog, you’re sorely mistaken. Do I need to show you just how hellish I can be?”

“Better that than the Ice-Cold Bastard,” I said. “Who said I wanted a puppy dog anyway?”

“Then show you can take on the hound.”

He shoved me more roughly, his eyes flaring, his hair rumpling like it always did when his temper emerged. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of pushing back.

I raised my arms in a gesture of surrender instead, and that enraged him to the point of blazing. His fangs came out, the magma glow and lava darkness coursing over his skin.

With a full snarl, he slammed me back on the bed. His hands pinned my wrists to the mattress with a prick where one of his claws nicked my skin. He clamped his jaws around my throat. His fangs nicked my flesh with a sliver of pain. And all that dangerous, delicious heat flooded over me.

If he thought he could push me into giving him the fight he wanted instead of the fondness I’d been offering, he hadn’t seen quite enough.

“I trust you ,” I said quietly. “Whether you want me to or not. You can’t scare me enough to make me run away.”

A growl reverberated up from Omen’s chest, transforming into a groan as it spilled across my throat. His body hovered over mine, his muscles tensed. Then his tongue swiped across the sensitive skin he’d been threatening, drawing a rush of pleasure with it.

My breath caught with a gasp taut with desire. I dared to raise my hand to that wild tawny hair?—

And he wrenched his mouth from my neck to my mouth, claiming me with a kiss of scorching breath and searing tongue.

My fingernails scratched across his scalp. His fangs were still out, his hellhound heat radiating all across his otherwise mostly human form, but damn if that didn’t make the embrace that much more intoxicating.

I arched up toward him, the need to meld with that heat clanging through me like a fire alarm. Without breaking the kiss, Omen dragged me farther up the bed, his hips pushing between my thighs. The hottest part of him, long and hard, pressed between my legs, setting off a shock of bliss. I let out a very undignified whine.

There wasn’t anything dignified at all about the collision of our bodies. It was all savage fury. Our mouths crashed together again and again, a metallic tang creeping across my tongue where his fangs had scraped my lip. I tore at his shirt, and he flung it the rest of the way off so violently it smacked a china figurine off the dresser to smash on the floor.

More veins of orange glow blazed across his chest. When he lowered himself again, my shirt crackled with the raging heat. As the fabric charred and fell away like soot, he might have blistered the skin beneath it, but I instinctively called up my own fire to meet him. The flames of our beings danced together between us, searing away the rest of our clothes but licking against my flesh with only the most ecstatic of burns.

Apparently I could also avoid incinerating myself in painful ways if I was in the process of being thoroughly fucked. Good to know.

My legs splayed farther apart with a need too overwhelming to deny, and Omen didn’t require any further invitation. His cock rammed into me, sending pleasure sizzling through my nerves.

As he plunged deeper, he grasped my thigh as if to haul us even closer together than we were already joined. My body bucked with his of its own volition, urging him faster, harder. With each forceful thrust, ecstasy roared through me in a growing inferno.

Omen tore his mouth from mine to ravage the side of my neck and the curve of my shoulder. “ You ,” he growled, but if he was pissed off about what we were doing, it wasn’t enough to stop. Stopping was a concept that had burned away with our clothes and any common sense I’d still possessed. Why the fuck had we waited so long to start ?

It might not have been the wisest act I’d ever taken part in. Leaving aside the whole fiery destruction element, there was our new discovery about shadowkind fertility—but if my parents had needed some unknown magic to perform the impossible feat of my conception, the possibility of it happening by accident felt far too distant to wrench me from this bliss.

An unexpected sensation slid across my calf, like the teasing of a finger—except Omen’s fingers were currently tangled in my hair and clutching my jaw to yank my lips back to his.

An inkling crept through my pleasure-hazed mind. I groped across the sculpted planes of his blazing back to the even more tempting ass I’d admired through his slacks on more than one occasion, and found out just how much those slacks had been hiding.

He did have a tail even in his unshifted form—the one shadowkind feature he couldn’t lose when otherwise in his full mortal guise. A tail that shivered as my hand closed around its warm, sinuous length.

My touch must have sparked something enjoyable for Omen, because one of those groaned growls pealed out of him. It reverberated into me with a fresh rush of delight. The tail’s devil-pointed tip traced another giddy line up my leg and then along my side in its own caress.

Just how much control did he have over that part of his body—and when would I get to test that out?

I wasn’t going to ask him now, both because I wasn’t sure any request wouldn’t knock him out of the furor of the moment and back into his frigid restraint and because I was skyrocketing toward my orgasm too swiftly now to let out more than a moan.

Omen pounded into me with all that fiery intensity, his tail flicking along my ass. With another moan bursting from my lips, I crackled apart like a firework, ecstasy singing through every part of my heat-flooded body.

I dug my fingers into Omen’s back, and a ragged breath stuttered out of him. Even more heat pulsed into me as he reached his own climax.

And then it was done. I was lying there on the bed with the hellhound shifter poised over me, coming down from the high of what he’d just minutes ago sworn he never wanted to happen. Uncertainty dampened the afterglow.

Did I want to look into his eyes and see what reaction was waiting for me there?

I might have been bold to a fault, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t procrastinate. My gaze slid first to the bedspread beside us, and a giggle tickled up my throat.

The fabric was scorched black. When Omen eased back, withdrawing from me, the charred area disintegrated into flaky cinders.

“Well,” I said, “I guess we’re going to have to find the equines a new bedspread. Maybe if it’s twice as twinkly, they won’t mind.”

I dared to glance up at Omen then. He was staring down at me, his skin returned to its normal pinkish human shade and his eyes their mortal blue. Any bits of his short-cropped hair that weren’t sticking up were plastered to his forehead with sweat from that rather intensive workout with bonus flames.

His expression wasn’t exactly warm, but it wasn’t hostile or horrified either. He ran a finger across my collarbone and rubbed the soot he’d wiped off my skin against his thumb. “It’s a mess all around. Still a disaster.”

His tone was even enough that I felt comfortable trailing my hand across his pecs to smear the effects of our merging there too. “I’m pretty sure the burning was at least as much your fault as mine, demon dog. Not that I’m complaining. I don’t think I’d consider what we just did a catastrophe. The world hasn’t ended yet, has it?”

Omen’s shoulders relaxed incrementally. “No, not yet,” he said, and there was definitely a droll note in his voice now.

“I didn’t intend for us to end up like this, you know.”

“I know. If you had, it wouldn’t have happened.” He exhaled with a rough sound that pinched at my gut.

“Then I hope we can move forward without any regrets,” I said.

“We’ll see how I feel about it when you’re attempting to yank my chain again.” He gave me a sharp look. “Even if you kept up with my fire after all, that doesn’t mean you’re getting out of the rest of your training.”

My heart swelled with relief and perhaps even affection. I bobbed up to steal a quick kiss before he decided to set himself off limits again. “Well, I think the one who can recreate his outfit in the shadows and move between rooms unseen should grab me some new clothes from the other bedroom. Then you can train away.”

“I’m going to hold you to that, Disaster,” he said with what might have been a smirk before he vanished into the darkness.