Page 88

TWENTY-FOUR

Sorsha

When we came up on the San Francisco city limits, I found myself drifting to the front of the Everymobile to watch the buildings whip past us through the windshield. Their lights and the glow of the streetlamps streaked in the growing darkness. My gaze snagged on every figure we passed.

None of them were Omen. I hadn’t really expected him to be standing waiting for us to turn up with his impatient glare and his authoritarian stance. Still, I couldn’t help being a little disappointed that he wasn’t. I’d have taken a heaping of criticism about our discipline and arrival time just to know where the hell he’d gone.

“I suppose we should find some cozy nook where we can settle in for the night,” Ruse said in his usual flippant tone, but his expression looked a tad weary. I’d bet the incubus could last for days between the sheets without losing energy—a wager I wouldn’t mind taking to the bed one of these days, just to confirm—but he wasn’t made for driving mortal roads for hours on end.

“Where would Omen think to look for us?” Snap asked, coming up behind me. “We should pick a spot where it’d be easy for him to find us.”

“But not likely that the Company will notice our arrival,” Thorn put in.

“Yeah.” I sucked my lower lip under my teeth. “We’ve usually had the best luck finding areas without much mortal activity around the fringes of the cities. Let’s ramble through the suburbs and see what we turn up.”

If that didn’t work… Post an ad in the Missed Connections section of a newspaper? Put out an emergency bulletin over the public TV? Hire a plane to skywrite a message? He’d be most likely to see that last one, but then, so would every other person in the city, Company assholes included.

In the end, Ruse found a vacant lot between a couple of faded warehouses and parked the RV there in cargo van guise. Thorn stayed up to continue discussing the situation with his new wingéd friend, whose name—Flint—matched his appearance better than any shadowkind I’d met yet, and I tugged the incubus and the devourer into the bedroom with me.

They came without complaint and settled in on either side of me. I was too tangled up to want to conduct any experiments in stamina right now, but with Ruse brushing his fingers down my back in a fond caress and Snap tucking his chin over my forehead to encompass me with his fresh scent, I was able to sink into sleep faster than I’d thought.

My two lovers were still there when I woke up. As I stirred, Snap pressed a kiss to the top of my head and Ruse let his fingers skim over my waist. “Anything we can do to make this a happy morning for you, Miss Blaze?” the incubus murmured.

I tipped my head up to kiss Snap on the lips and then rolled over to offer the same to Ruse. His claiming of my mouth was so fervently tender that my pulse fluttered. I might have given in to the temptation to rediscover all the other sensations he could rouse with his touch if the absence of my most recent paramour hadn’t been hanging over us.

“What would make me happy is to see the entire Company going up in flames,” I said. “Then maybe we can spark a few metaphorical fires around here.”

“I will happily take that rain check.”

I had the urge to pass some of that loving on to Thorn too, but when we emerged into the RV, there was no sign of him. Flint sat at one end of the sofa-bench looking at a mug in front of him as if he wasn’t quite sure whether to drink from it or crush it with his rock-like fist. Gloam was meandering through the hall in full droop-mode. Antic flashed into visibility at the sight of me, balancing on one hand on the edge of the counter with her spindly legs wheeling in the air.

I cracked a smile mostly so that she’d be satisfied that she’d gotten a reaction from me and quit goofing around.

“The first big dude went off to check for bad guys,” she said as she flipped onto her feet, anticipating my question.

“Thorn said he would return shortly,” Flint added. I’d always thought Thorn’s voice was low and rumbling, but compared to Flint’s thunderous tones, our original wingéd was a soprano.

I plopped down onto the sofa across from him and nodded to the coffee cooling in his mug. “Typically that stuff is better enjoyed hot.”

He gave it a skeptical glance. “I have not consumed mortal provisions in many centuries. I hesitate to begin now.”

Antic bobbed beside us as if debating snatching the mug for herself but seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the possibility of pissing off a shadowkind of Flint’s stature. She settled for pouring some out of the pot into two new mugs, splashing the brown liquid liberally on the floor and counter alike, and plunking one of those down in front of me.

“What’s the plan?” she asked in an intrepid tone, taking a noisy swig from her mug.

What was the plan? We’d been going to figure that out once we got here, assuming Omen would have plenty to contribute. Now…

I might have suggested we wait and see if Thorn’s patrol turned up the hellhound shifter, but before I could speak, the warrior emerged from the shadows, his mouth set at a pained angle. My heart sank. No luck in that respect, clearly.

We had to go forward without Omen then. If he didn’t like the plans we made in his absence, then he shouldn’t have fucking absented himself.

I dragged in a breath and looked around the table. All of my shadowkind companions were watching me. Somehow I’d become the substitute boss when the regular one was away. No pressure there.

My gaze caught Flint’s metallic brown eyes—and a hail of impressions burst in my head.

I wasn’t in the RV anymore but in the middle of a battlefield scattered with bloody bodies, more figures charging over them with blades gleaming. The stink of gore flooded my nose, and clangs and groans filled my ears. Someone hurtled right past me, knocking me to the side hard enough to make my arm throb?—

And I was back on the sofa, gasping and shaking as my mind reeled.

“Sorsha!” Thorn grasped my shoulder and stared at his comrade. The other wingéd grimaced, lowering his gaze.

“My apologies, mortal,” he said in that deepest of deep voices. “My particular talent is to spark visions of horror—I would generally only apply it to my enemies. I’ve used it so little in so long, I’m no longer as used to moderating it. I didn’t intend to aim that memory toward you.”

A memory. So that was one glimpse of the brutality he and Thorn had managed to survive, to their apparent disappointment. I set my hand over my warrior’s, letting his touch steady me. My heart was still racing, but a sharper sense of determination rose through the dwindling panic.

That kind of brutality wasn’t so different from how we’d approached our conflicts with the Company so far. Rush in, burn them to cinders or rip their heads from their necks—y’know, whatever suited our particular skill set best. But we’d found another way back in Chicago. Sure, the plan I’d suggested there had ended with a fiery skirmish anyway, but there’d been at least a little less death and destruction than before. Give me a little credit for a partial win, won’t you?

I might have been part shadowkind, and I might have accepted the fact that I enjoyed laying down with monsters, but that didn’t mean we had to prove the stereotypes right. We could use the same tactics as in Chicago, only on a bigger and better scale. Show all the jerks who were too scared to help us that the Company could be decimated without a single drop of blood spilled.

Okay, maybe that was a little too optimistic. We could probably manage it without more than a bucket of blood, though. That’d still be a step up from the torrents the shadowkind had unleashed when we’d stormed Victor Bane’s mansion back home.

I didn’t think Omen would like my continued resistance to carnage at all, but he was welcome to show up any time and tell me about that.

I leaned my elbows onto the table. “We need to figure out who here is running the North American operations of the Company, right? But destroying them isn’t going to fix anything. The real leader is off in Europe somewhere. What if instead of trying to burn everything down, we figure out a way to get to that guy and use him to get to the man in charge overseas.”

Ruse cocked his head. “Interesting. Go on.”

I motioned to him. “You can work your charm over the phone. All we’ve got to do is convince the head guy here to put us in touch with his boss, and then you can bend the ear of the guy who controls everything the Company does. Imagine all the things you could convince him to do.”

A smirk curved the incubus’s lips. “Oh, there are many, many acts I’d like to talk him into committing. But starting with having him destroy the Company from the inside out sounds ideal.”

Thorn frowned where he was still standing over me. “Would that work? Could you maintain enough control over him to compel him to cause that level of destruction?”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “The head honcho wouldn’t need to destroy anything in a physical way. He must have access to all the Company data—we can get him to wipe it off the networks. We can have him call up the regional leaders and disband the branches. Maybe we’d need to force him to act in some crazy way to convince his followers that he’s been wrong all along so they don’t start things up again. I’m sure we can figure out the details once we have a hold on him.”

Antic swung her little fists in the air. “Or we could just go across the sea and give him what-for the traditional way.”

“But that might not work,” Snap said, understanding lighting in his face. “We keep destroying parts of the Company, and more of these people rise up in their place. The fact that we’re destroying them convinces them that they need to keep fighting us.”

I snapped my fingers. “Exactly. Knock off one leader and someone else will step up to take his place. I think it’s over-ambitious to assume we can eradicate the people who hate shadowkind and all the work they’ve done by picking them off bit by bit, and we can’t tackle them all at once. But whoever’s running the show—he can. And if we play this right, he can tie all the loose ends in a bow for us too.”

One by one, the heads around the table nodded. Gloam was the last, caught in despondent hesitation. “It sounds very grand—I don’t see how I could contribute.”

An inkling about that had already started to form in my head. I made a reassuring gesture toward the night elf. “Oh, I’m nothing if not resourceful. I’ll find a way for even you to pitch in; don’t worry.”

Flint stirred in his seat. “This plan sounds worth the attempt. How do we begin?”

I patted my purse. “The one guy who’s on our side in the Fund was able to talk to some of the local members last night. Klaus couldn’t find out a lot, but one of the things he did put together was a probable hunting location where the Company has been collecting shadowkind near one of the rifts. We grab one of those Company hunters, and then we can follow the trail that one gives us to another and another until we get our hands on someone who can point us to the big gun.”

“Of course, we don’t know how often they stake out that spot,” Thorn pointed out.

I smiled at him. “So we’ll just have to make a little mischief there to draw them out.”