Page 86

TWENTY-TWO

Sorsha

The one thing we did occasionally have to stop for was gas. Around noon, Ruse pulled into a station that had a pizza place next door. While he cajoled free gas out of the station staff, I grabbed my wallet to head over to the pizza place, figuring it wouldn’t be a horrible thing to actually pay for what we were going to consume now and then.

“Bleeding heart,” Omen said lightly as he stepped out into the midday sun behind me.

“Talk like that, and I’ll order pineapple across the whole thing,” I replied, anticipating his grimace. One definitive thing I had learned on our road trip so far: the hellhound shifter didn’t approve of fruitiness on his cheesy pies, the poor soul.

“Heavy on the pepperoni, and maybe I’ll forgive you anyway. Just?—”

“Make it snappy—I know, I know.”

The guy at the counter told me it’d be a fifteen-minute wait for the three pizzas I ordered—only one sprinkled with the pride of Hawaii, since I was feeling kindly—so I stepped out of the humid seating area to bask in the warm early fall breeze and the greasy scents wafting from the kitchen vent.

Apparently Gloam had felt the need to stretch his legs too, because he came trudging over in his typical daytime slouched stance.

“I doubt the pizza we get here will compare to what they offer in the city,” he said with equally typical gloom.

I gave him an encouraging smile even though I knew the effort was likely in vain. “I subscribe to the idea that all pizza is good pizza.”

He made a humming sound and drifted toward the alley between the pizza place and the gas station shop. A moment later, a clang of metal colliding carried through the restaurant’s windows. Antic popped into view in the alley with a distinctly guilty expression.

“The chefs looked so bored, I thought I could cheer them up a little,” she said. “I guess I didn’t set the prank up well enough. It all just slipped…”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “As long as you didn’t ruin our pizza.”

“Oh, no, it was all empty pans! I was going to roll them across the floor.” She made a sweeping motion with her scrawny arm to demonstrate.

Okay, so maybe I couldn’t blame Omen for being skeptical about how much these two would add to our master plan. I motioned to the RV. “Why don’t you go get the table set up with drinks and napkins and stuff? I’m sure you can find something fun to do with them.”

A glint danced in her eyes. “Oh, yes, I can do that! You’re going to love this.” She darted off, blinking invisible again after her first few steps.

Our pizzas were ready at fifteen minutes on the dot. As I carted them to the RV, the spicy scent of the pepperoni set my mouth watering. The hellhound shifter had better not mind if I grabbed a slice or two of his pie.

Antic had formed a leaning tower of pop cans on the table. I laughed, and she did a jig of delight on the sofa-bench. Snap came hustling over for the food but first gave me a peck on the side of my neck as if in thank you. We all dug in, the devourer’s eyes gleaming neon with pleasure, more slices vanishing as Ruse and Gloam rejoined us. The night elf didn’t even complain about the slice he slowly nibbled at.

Ruse tucked his arm around me in a casually affectionate gesture, letting his fingers trail across my shoulder to enticing effect. “Thorn decided he needed to patrol, naturally,” he told me. “Omen must have gone with him, probably to make sure he doesn’t take the whole day at it. I suppose we should save a slice or two for them.”

“That seems wise,” I agreed, and reached to pet Pickle, who’d hopped up on the sofa beside me.

The little dragon flinched at the motion of my hand. As he took me in, his wings came down, but his body stayed tensed as I scratched his shoulder. Despite the deliciousness filling my stomach, a pinch of sadness ran through my gut. Was he ever going to be completely comfortable with me again?

“You feel a bit tense, Miss Blaze,” the incubus said. “Let’s see if we can’t work that out of you.”

He shifted his pose to set his thumbs against the admittedly tight muscles along my spine. A massage while eating pizza—could there be anything more heavenly? I wasn’t sure what in blue blazes I’d done to deserve this doting, but I wasn’t going to say no.

Snap watched this development with a glimmer of consternation. He stroked my knee under the table and motioned to the tower of pop cans. “Would you like something to drink? If nothing here is quite right, there was a large selection in the store.”

“I’m good, thank you.” I nudged his knee with mine and leaned back into Ruse’s hands. “What’s with the spoiling me all of a sudden?”

“You’ve been working hard,” Ruse said in his sly voice. “Don’t you deserve to be spoiled? We could make a competition out of it. See if the devourer can keep up with an incubus.”

At the determined light that flared in Snap’s eyes, I gave Ruse a light kick. “I’m not sure I’d survive that competition, even if it’d be a spectacular way to die. You’ve been doing such a good job of sharing—it’d be a shame to ruin that.”

“Hmm. I suppose it would.” He leaned in to press a brief but tender kiss above my ear. Apparently satisfied that his devotion wasn’t being questioned, Snap returned to his meal, leaving an only slightly possessive hand on my thigh.

A matching tenderness tightened my throat. Omen might have seen more in me than anyone else, but my original shadowkind trio had been there for me in their diverse ways from the very beginning. How quickly one’s romantic fortunes could change. A few months ago, I hadn’t been sure I could manage to handle even a friends-with-benefits arrangement without it going sideways—and not in the way you’d hope to end up sideways as a benefit.

Now I had two gorgeously monstrous men vying for the chance to pamper me the most—and a third out there patrolling with an unshakeable determination to ensure my safety. I must have done something very, very right in a past life I couldn’t remember. I tipped my head to offer Ruse a kiss over my shoulder, which he accepted with delight, and hooked my ankle around Snap’s in an effort to show how much affection I held for them both in return.

As Ruse worked over my back, I offered Pickle a bit of bacon off one of the pizzas, but he wasn’t inclined to fully forgive me yet. The dragon nipped it from my fingers with a squeaky snort—and promptly scuttled to the other side of the table.

Before I could ply him with more meaty delicacies, my ringtone pealed out. I swiped sauce off my fingers and groped for my phone. Ruse released me but left his hand resting on the back of my neck.

The call was from Klaus. “Sorsha, I’m glad I could reach you,” he said, his normally deep but jovial voice more hesitant than usual. He didn’t sound particularly glad.

The pinch in my gut turned into a knot. “What’s up? Are you still planning on flying into San Francisco this afternoon?”

“Oh, yes, everything’s covered there. I’m good to go. The trouble is… the rest of my colleagues are backing out.”

The knots were now multiplying like bunnies. “What? I thought they were on board—most of them, anyway. They just had a change of heart?”

He sighed. “It seems they felt you were behaving a little oddly at the end of our last meeting… Monica reached out to your original branch of the Fund to check in about you. Apparently the things they told her left her rather disturbed.”

“Oh.” I swallowed thickly. Huyen—or maybe even Ellen—had given these people the idea that I was some kind of menace? Or just off my rocker? They didn’t know about my fire powers… but they could have shared plenty about the destruction that had followed me across the city. “Everything that happened back home—we didn’t have much choice if we wanted to take on the Company of Light. They’re way too vicious to just sit down and negotiate with or something.”

“I can imagine. And I’m not judging you. I’ve been around in this scene longer than any of the others—I’ve seen how horrible we mortals can be to each other and to the shadowkind.” He paused with a rustling sound as if he was rubbing his beard. “I don’t know what exactly you’ve gotten yourself into, Sorsha, but I know your father was a good man, and I think you deserve a chance. And I wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for the shadowkind who had the kindness to stop and help when my wife and I got lost on a trip through the desert ages ago, so I figure they deserve whatever I can offer too.”

“Thank you,” I said around the constricting of my throat. “I appreciate it.”

“I wish I could convince the others, but youth do like to dismiss their elders. You’ll at least have me, and I’ll do what I can. I think your Fund leaders might have reached out to the branch in San Francisco as well, so I’m not sure you can expect much help from that quarter either, but I may be able to weasel my way in there without them realizing I’m working with you. I told my people I’d cancelled my plans so they wouldn’t pass on any additional warnings.”

That was something. I summoned all the gratitude I could manage into my voice. “We’ll make the best of it. Thanks again—I mean it.”

“Of course. I’ll touch base once I’ve touched down on the west coast.”

My fingers clenched around the phone before I dropped it back into my purse. As I drew my hand back into my lap, a burst of sparks leapt from my palm, prickling across my thigh. I squeezed my hand into a fist to snuff any lingering ones out.

I was a menace, wasn’t I? The Fund folks back home might not have known exactly why people should be cautious of me, but they hadn’t exactly been wrong.

Omen was going to be just ecstatic when he heard this news. I could already hear the “I told you so” lilt that would creep into his voice. Damn it.

Damn Huyen and Ellen and the rest of them who hadn’t even wanted to try. That was what the Company relied on, wasn’t it? The fact that everyone who might have supported the shadowkind they were set on eradicating was too scared to tackle enemies as big and brutal as they’d built themselves up to be.

Snap was watching me, a half-eaten pizza slice dangling, shockingly forgotten, from his hand. “What happened?”

I opened my mouth, and Thorn materialized by the door. I braced myself for the hellhound shifter to join him, pulling together the words to reveal yet another failing of mortal kind. But Thorn strode over alone.

“Where’s Omen?” I asked.

The warrior frowned. “Is he not here? He was when I left.”

Ruse’s forehead furrowed. “We assumed he went with you. I haven’t seen him since just after we pulled in here.”

“Same.” I glanced at Snap and the others.

The devourer shook his head, his mouth slanting at a worried angle that looked all wrong on his beautiful face. Antic scrambled up with a sharp salute. “I can go looking for him!”

Thorn considered her with unveiled skepticism. “I think you’d better stay here and let me do the searching, little one.” He glanced around at the rest of us. “I’m sure he can’t have gone far. Perhaps he discovered something nearby that caught his interest.”

As Thorn vanished into the shadows, an uneasy tremor ran over my skin. If my stomach had been knotted before, now it might as well have been one solid lump of limestone.

It wasn’t like Omen to get distracted, and he’d been determined to make it to San Francisco as quickly as possible. Even if he’d wandered off for some bizarre reason, I’d have expected him to be back by now, if only to let the rest of us know something needed our attention.

Had the Company managed to capture him again? But it wasn’t their style to stealthily scoop up just one of us if they could easily see where the whole squad was. I couldn’t imagine the hellhound shifter being caught without a major fight that one of us would surely have noticed.

Snap set his pizza down, the first time I’d ever seen him lose his appetite. He tucked his hand around mine instead, but I was too on edge to take much comfort from the gesture or Ruse’s squeeze of my shoulder.

It felt like ages before Thorn returned the second time, but the slice I was forcing myself to nibble at hadn’t even gotten cold when he appeared with no ice-cold bastard beside him. He looked even graver than when he’d talked about failing to protect his boss the first time, before we’d rescued Omen.

“I can find no sign of him,” he said. “I can’t imagine where he would have gone.”

My heart ached for the warrior even as a twisting sensation ran through my chest. The only thing I could think of that had happened recently and might have affected Omen’s mood was our scorching interlude in the bedroom this morning. He’d seemed like he accepted what had happened, even if he wasn’t crowing from the roof about hitting a home run with me. He’d hassled me when we’d gotten here like I’d have expected him to.

But who really knew what was going on behind those icy eyes and his carefully constructed self-control? Had he gotten angry at me for provoking him—had he gotten angry with himself for giving in to his lust? Would he really have compromised our mission just to go cool himself off?

Maybe, if he felt he was fraying enough to warrant it.

Ruse had been tapping at his phone. “I’m not getting any response the mortal way. He might be in the shadows. Phones don’t work there.”

“He wouldn’t have left us,” Snap said, but he looked at his companions for them to confirm that was a fact.

The incubus chuckled. “And miss out on the chance to call the shots for the grand finale of our trip? I can’t imagine it.” But the worried crease hadn’t left his brow.

We picked at the rest of the pizza until the incubus declared a ceasefire and packed the rest of it into the RV’s tiny fridge. With each passing minute, Omen’s absence weighed heavier. Finally, Thorn cleared his throat.

“We know what Omen wanted us to do—to continue to San Francisco as swiftly as this vehicle can convey us. He knows if we’re not here, that’s where we should be heading. And he may be able to arrive there even faster than us making use of the rifts through the shadow realm. I say we move out. The longer we linger here, the more likely we’ll draw the attention of the wrong people.”

That was true. I nodded despite the lump in my throat, which seemed to have spawned from my stomach.

Ruse swiped his hand across his mouth. “Just watch. We’ll pull up to the city limits, and he’ll be standing there ready to chide us for taking so damn long.”

His jaunty tone fell flat. My original trio had gone on without their leader before, but then they’d known what had happened to him and had some idea of how to get him back. Now, we didn’t have a clue how to help Omen or whether he even needed help.

And after the way I’d been losing us allies left and right, I had to admit that whatever had happened to him, chances were I wasn’t totally blameless.