by Eva Chase
I raised my eyebrows at him. “That is sort of my thing, as you well know. Have you got a problem with it?”
He stared right back at me, unshaken by my implied challenge. “I don’t think such involvement will make it easier to protect her. If it affects your concentration, it may bring about the opposite result instead.”
“My concentration is just fine. We cubi deal in bodily intimacies, not emotional connection—we make no secret about that.”
“So, you have no interest in her beyond physical satisfaction.”
He didn’t say it like a question, but I felt the need to answer it anyway. “I like her well enough, but I’m hardly going to get attached in any way that would throw me off my game. Omen picked me for good reason too. Everything is under control.”
And besides, it wasn’t likely I’d have any more involvement with Sorsha at all after tonight, not that I wanted to mention that to Thorn. Not that, or the fact that Omen might not have picked me if he’d been aware of one particular past lapse.
No one needed to know about that. I knew better now.
“As long as it stays that way,” Thorn said, getting up. He left me on my own in the kitchen, grappling with a rekindled uneasiness I couldn’t quite shake.
19
Sorsha
I’d never felt nervous about heading into a Fund meeting before. Never had any reason to believe the act of walking into a low-rent movie theater might be seen as suspicious. But now, given recent events, I was waiting in a dim alleyway four blocks away, shuffling my feet against the rain-damp concrete and praying that the clouds still clotted overhead didn’t decide to open up again while I was out here. My umbrella: another casualty of last night’s apartment fire.
The afternoon’s rain had brought out a mildew-y scent that made my nose itch. Every time footsteps sounded on the sidewalk, I shrank back into the thicker darkness by the brick wall beside me. None of the people who passed through the evening looked like a possible threat to me, but then, I hadn’t been prepared for a band of organized attackers to crash into my apartment either.
I’d been working with the Fund in this city for eleven years, and none of the members had ever even been so much as harassed, except maybe now and then by the mortal-side shadowkind who didn’t appreciate our attempts to help. No one in this group had even known a member who’d been hurt in the line of duty. Only more proof that whoever had decided I needed to be eliminated from the equation, they obviously weren’t your typical hunters.
Finally, Thorn wavered out of a dark patch in front of me. “I picked up on no sign of enemy presence nearby,” he said. “I believe you can safely enter the building for your meeting. But I will be accompanying you through the shadows.”
He’d already emphasized that point before we’d left our temporary new home. I nodded, gazing up into his rugged face for a few seconds. Searching for a hint of humanity in those coal-dark eyes and hardened features—something to reassure me that this was at least a little more than a cold transaction of favors owed.
There’d been passion in his voice, if a solemn kind, when he’d talked about defending me and his companions and finding his boss. He’d thought to rescue my one token from my parents for me. There had to be something other than steely chill behind all the brawn.
I couldn’t pick it out right now, though. Well, at least steel was reliable. It’d turned out I couldn’t say that for much else.
“All right,” I said. “Off I go.”
As I moved to stalk past him, he vanished, but I knew he was staying with me unseen. The evening was full of shadows for ease of travel.
The smell of buttered popcorn laced with mint and—was that toffee?—met me at the door to the Fund’s private theater room. Only a few people had shown up so far, the Saturday meetings being less popular than the weekday ones, but Ellen and Huyen were over by the screen, and that was all I needed.
Unfortunately, Vivi had also turned up early. Before I could get one of our leaders’ ears, my best friend had moseyed down the aisle to join me.
“Hey!” she said, and gave me a once-over. “I love that blouse. It’s new, right? Where’d you get it?”
I tugged at the hem of the silky purple halter top self-consciously. It was new, but I hadn’t been the one to get it. The entire outfit had been sitting outside my bedroom door when I’d gotten up this morning. Any of the trio could have realized that I couldn’t wear my bar dress for days on end and swiped some clothes in the shadows of a shop, but from the hint of cacao smell that had lingered on them, I suspected they were an apology offering from Ruse.
Otherwise, he’d given me plenty of distance, which worked just fine for me. I couldn’t remember any of the spectacular parts of our encounter last night without a flash of panic at the thought of him rummaging through my thoughts and feelings. How could I be sure he’d even admitted his full transgression, that he hadn’t been using his powers on me the whole time?
It was going to take more than some pretty clothes to smooth things over, even if I did look pretty fantastic in them.
If I told Vivi it’d been a gift, she’d want to know who from, and I’d just tangle myself in a whole lot of bigger lies. So I stuck to a smaller one. “You know, I don’t even remember. Somewhere at the mall.”
“Well, it was a good choice.” She bumped her shoulder against mine. “Good to see you got home all right after the bar. I was a little worried, the way you took off.”
Ha. Yes, I’d gotten home all right. Getting out of the apartment had been much less okay. “It was no big deal,” I said, feeling as if each new lie was adding to a heavy lump in my stomach. “I wish I could have stayed longer.”
“No news on the tip Jade gave you?”
“Nope, I haven’t had much chance to see what I can make of it yet.”
Ellen left the conversation she and Huyen had been in with one of the older members and headed our way. I made an apologetic gesture to Vivi. “I’ve got to talk to the lady in charge. Grab me some of tonight’s popcorn?”
Vivi hesitated for a second as if balking at the idea of missing what I’d say to Ellen, but then she shot me a smile and a thumbs-up. As she walked away, I hustled to meet Ellen.
Despite her love of flavors, our co-leader was thin as a rail, with frizzy, graying hair that was perpetually escaping from her loose buns. On meeting nights, stains on her fingertips often gave away her latest popcorn ingredients—today’s greenish tint confirmed the mint.
I didn’t have much time before my best friend would return and hear something that would make her even more curious what was going on with me. “Hey, Ellen,” I said, cutting right to the chase. “Do you have a spare badge around? I seem to have misplaced mine.” I wasn’t giving Ruse any more chances to exercise his self-control—or not.
“Sure,” the petite woman said, with a note of surprise. I’d managed not to misplace the first badge she’d given me in the past eleven years, but it could happen to any of us. She dug into her purse—of course Ellen the ever-prepared would have a little stash of those always on hand.
“Is everything else all right?” she asked as she handed it to me.
Maybe my general agitation was showing more than I’d meant it to. I pushed my mouth into a sheepish grin and pocketed the protective badge. “Yeah, I just seem to be having kind of a scattered week. I was also hoping—I wanted to get in touch with the group that monitors talk about the shadowkind for us online, but my computer’s hard drive died.” The whole thing had died a sad, fiery death. “Could I grab his contact info from you again? I knew better than to write it down somewhere not totally secure, but that means I’m out of luck.”
I spread my hands in an attempt to look cluelessly innocent rather than like a lying liar who lied. From the weight in my gut, I might as well have swallowed a boulder. Ellen didn’t appear fazed by the request, thank shimmering seal pups. She gave me a motherly pat on the shoulder.
“I’ll send it to you by a secure link. You�
��re still at the same email as before?”
“Yeah,” I said with a rush of relief.
“FYI, they’re looking for payment in organic kombucha these days—they take it by the crate.”
Crates of kombucha it was, then.
As Ellen moved on, Vivi came up beside me. She handed me a bag of popcorn and cocked her head with a swish of her hair. “What’d I miss?”
I gave her a smile in thanks. “Nothing.” One more lie to add to the pile.
My best friend’s gaze turned unusually serious. She paused for a second and then said, “No matter what you find out, I’ll be here if you need me. You’ll remember that, right?”
The emphatic plea made my gut twist all over again. “Yeah,” I said. “Of course I’ll remember.” I just wouldn’t be taking her up on the offer, not after I’d seen just how brutal my newfound enemies could be.
Maybe the love the apartment’s true owners had for the ‘60s explained why they hadn’t demanded the landlord replace their kitchen appliances, because the stove certainly behaved like it was several decades old. After an hour of slowly turning up the heat under the frozen stir fry I’d liberated from the freezer and watching the ice crystals barely melt, all at once half of the bits had burned to the pan.
I growled at the meal as if I could intimidate it into uncharring itself. Before I could decide whether to make the best of it or toss it and start over, the shiny new laptop my shadowkind friends had obtained for me chimed with an inbox alert.
Screw dinner. I plopped myself down at the kitchen island and let out a cry of victory. “We’ve got it!”
Thorn, who’d been skulking by the kitchen doorway in his usual glum way, stepped only a little closer, as if it would pain him to show any more enthusiasm than that. Snap, who last I’d seen had been sprawled on the master bedroom floor tipping the lava lamp this way and that with pure joy, came gliding over a second later.
“You have the information that’ll tell us where to find Omen?” he asked, his eyes bright.
“Maybe,” I cautioned. Pickle hopped onto my lap from where he’d been sitting on the other chair and peeked over the top of the island. I gave his chin a scratch as I considered the screen. “Jade said that someone’s put a call out for ‘potent’ shadowkind, and that sounds like the M.O. of the bunch that ambushed him. Our contacts on the dark web are pretty good at digging up useful communications that were meant to be private.”
Hunters and collectors had their own areas of the internet’s black market where they operated, of course. As secure as they tried to keep those channels, the cabal of hackers who worked for the Fund for pay managed to crack their codes on a regular basis. Usually they could trace the usernames to the actual people behind the sales, purchases, and other posts.
As I opened the file my contact had sent me, Ruse slunk into the room too. He leaned against the counter at the farthest point in the kitchen from me, his stance casual but careful.
He was giving me distance for my sake, not his, I knew. Now and then he’d tossed out a joke or teasing comment, watching my reaction intently as if a laugh would tell him he was forgiven. If he thought he was going to win me over a second time that easily, he was kidding himself.
My hand rose to my chest of its own accord, taking a momentary comfort from brushing my fingertips over the edges of the new silver-and-iron badge pinned under my blouse. I leaned closer to the screen. My other forefinger skimmed over the touchpad as I scanned the list of names and summaries of what the hacker had found.
I almost scrolled right past it. My eyes slid over the letters, continued another half a screen down, and then recognition pinged in my head. Wait a second. I leapt back to that previous entry.
Looking at it, a chuckle slipped from my mouth. Son of a biscuit eater. We’d been barking up the altogether wrong tree, but I could see how the mistake had happened.
I pointed at the name that had caught my eye. “It’s not Merry Den we’re looking for, and it’s not a place. It’s a person. John Meriden. He’s behind one of the aliases that’s posted at least a couple of messages over the last few months, looking to confer with collectors about their shadowkind.”
Snap’s spirits visibly deflated. “I told you the wrong information.”
I patted his arm reassuringly. Oh, the guy did pack plenty of compact muscle onto those slender limbs.
Focus, Sorsha.
“It was an easy mistake to make,” I said. “You picked up on the sounds in a way that formed words you know. It could have happened to any of us. And hey, it still helped us find our man in the end.”
Thorn loomed over me, scowling at the computer as if preparing to reach into the screen and grab our target by the throat through cyberspace. “Where is this ‘John Meriden’?”
“Let’s see what my contact found…” As I read through the entry, my own spirits sank a little. “He only made a small slip that allowed the hackers to find his real name, they don’t say what exactly—probably logging in somewhere he shouldn’t have with the same IP address. But the address itself was some kind of front. They couldn’t trace it back to an actual location that connects to the guy.”
“With his name, it shouldn’t be difficult to track down more details, should it?” Ruse put in. Pickle let out a chirp as if agreeing with the incubus.
“Yeah, I can ask them to investigate more about him specifically. They wouldn’t have gone on a full-blown search for any of the names yet—this is more a summary…” I paused. “Except if he’s connected to the same people who barged into my apartment last night, who knows how closely they’re keeping an eye on anyone poking around in his business.”
Ruse tsked. “You don’t think your hackers can avoid getting noticed?”
“No, it’s more that we can’t be sure none of them are paid off by other parties too. They work for whoever fronts the moola—they don’t have any specific loyalty to the Fund.” I leaned back in my chair, rubbing the top of Pickle’s head and frowning.
I’d given the cabal a general enough brief that it shouldn’t have set off any major alarm bells. If the sword-star bunch sicced the same hackers on me, they could probably figure out where I was working from in five seconds flat. The black-market-savvy skills I’d picked up over the years were nothing compared to theirs.
“Let’s see how much we can find out on our own without getting anyone else involved,” I said. “It’s safer that way. And if we can’t find out anything ourselves, then we can take a gamble. We’re definitely not finding Omen if the assholes who took him find us first, and they’re better prepared than last time.”
I opened up a regular search window and started my online game of hide and seek with Mr. John Meriden. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a few dudes with that name. Fortunately, only one of them turned up when I included the city name in my search.
The pickings were pretty sparse. Whoever the man was, he kept a very low internet profile. But I did manage to turn up a mention of a J. Meriden in connection to an address on the outskirts of the city. Checking the street view from the map, it looked like an office building—but with no sign and no other features that would tell me what went on in there. How very suspicious.
“Should have known better than those deets to send,” I sang in triumph. “Jackpot!”
“We’ve got him?” Thorn said with gruff enthusiasm.
“We’re one step closer, anyway.” I waved toward the online map. “Update your calendars—we’ve got plans for tomorrow.”
20
Sorsha
If I’d hoped I might saunter into Meriden’s office building and have a receptionist point me right to him, one up-close look at the current state of the place killed that dream. Obviously it would have been ridiculous to march right in demanding to speak to him anyway, but the dreary dimness that showed in gaps through the papered-over windows didn’t inspire much confidence that we’d find anything at all.
Thorn had already patrolled several blocks around the pla
ce, watching for any hint of our previous attackers. Now, as the other two shadowkind and I waited in a coffee shop down the street after a brisk walk past, he’d gone to prowl through the building itself.
Ruse sipped the espresso he’d charmed the barista into giving him, not looking as though he was enjoying it very much. Even Snap was too restless to make more than a few half-hearted exclamations over the whipped-cream-topped hot chocolate the incubus had gotten for him.
I’d decided to forgo caffeine altogether, since I didn’t need my nerves on any higher alert than they already were, but I was starting to regret leaving my hands empty. As I fidgeted with the napkin I’d pulled out of the dispenser, slowly tearing one corner, our hardened warrior stepped out of the shadows across the room as if he’d emerged from the bathroom rather than the darkness. I was pretty sure Ruse had coached him on that move.
“The way is clear,” he said when he reached us, his voice low but formal as always. “There is an entrance at the back I believe it would be wisest for us to make use of. M’lady, my companions and I will travel unseen and meet you there.”
I guessed that made sense. Still, I couldn’t help feeling I had a target on my back as I ambled outside like I was just enjoying this lovely summer day. I’d committed plenty of crimes, snuck into plenty of buildings I wasn’t meant to be in, but always with the cover of night. Under the blazing sun without my cat burglar get-up, I might as well have had a spotlight pointed at me.
If the place was empty anyway, there was no reason to poke around during the day. No employees to listen in on or even question if we’d dared. But we were here now. Thorn was even tenser about the situation than I was—if he thought we could go ahead, I was probably safer here than lounging on a beach in the Bahamas.
I just wouldn’t think about the fact that he’d missed the hunters who’d shipped him off to that cage I’d rescued him from.
I strolled around the block and down the driveway beside the used furniture store next door. Cutting across the parking lot took me straight to a rather imposing steel door at the back of Meriden’s apparently former workplace. Thank galloping gremlins that something about the process of melding iron into steel seemed to diffuse its repulsive effect on most shadowkind.