by Eva Chase
I glanced around to make sure no one was hanging out nearby to see me, pulled on my gloves, and tried the handle. It didn’t budge.
Huh. I’d expected the trio to make it there before me. An uneasy quiver ran down through my gut. I looked around again, bracing myself to run—and the handle jerked over with a metallic crunching sound from the other side.
Before I could bolt, the door swung open to reveal Thorn’s own imposing visage. The handle from the other side of the door, broken and twisted, dangled from his brawny hand.
“The place has some fancy-pants locks we couldn’t manage to open without a certain amount of destruction,” Ruse said with a baleful look toward the taller guy. “I tried to suggest to this lunk that we make sure you thought it was wise to literally break our way in before going ahead.”
Thorn was already motioning me in with an urgent sweep of his arm. “We’d have drawn much more attention standing around outside discussing the matter—or leaving her out there wondering what had befallen us. She’s in now.”
Snap peered around the storage room I’d joined them in. “It doesn’t look as if anyone’s come by here in a long time.”
The shelving units that filled the space were mostly empty, the few bedraggled cardboard boxes that remained holding nothing that revealed more than what type of printer paper the business had used. The date on a shipping label informed me that particular package had been delivered five years ago.
Had this place been empty that long? My hopes sank even further.
The storage room opened up to a hallway lined with interior windows. The rooms on the other side appeared to be labs with gleaming metal tables and fridges next to open spaces that held nothing more than scuffs on the floor suggesting there’d once been other equipment there. Only muted light filtered through the tiny, high outer windows set with frosted glass. A bitter chemical odor hung in the air.
Thorn got us into one of those rooms with a similar trick with the lock—if you could call brute strength a “trick.” Inside, Snap crouched down by the scuff marks. The first flick of his tongue provoked a wince that echoed through his entire slim body.
“Silver and iron,” he said, his voice gone tight. “There were cages here.”
The kinds of cages that would only be used to hold shadowkind. The sword-star bunch had removed the obvious evidence, but they hadn’t counted on a being with Snap’s skills checking out the place.
“Can you pick up anything else about them—what sort of shadowkind they were keeping?” Ruse asked.
Snap took another tentative taste and shook his head with a shudder. He moved on, sampling the air over and around the table and then the fridge. His beautiful face tensed with a frown it was painful to see.
“I can’t taste much about the people who used this room,” he said quietly. “But they were doing something with—something to—shadowkind creatures. Something that hurt.”
Thorn’s hands clenched at his sides. My own fingers had curled into my palms. It wasn’t as if we couldn’t have guessed that whoever had taken their boss—and probably come for my Auntie Luna as well—had nefarious purposes, but if they’d operated out of this building, there was no doubting their intentions now.
We checked each of the lab rooms in turn, even though my stomach knotted at the growing strain that showed in Snap’s demeanor. The impressions of whatever awful experiments he was having to glean became worth it when he straightened up from a cabinet in the last room with a brilliant grin.
“I saw it! Someone who opened this recently—however recently they were last working here—had that star symbol with the swords on the folder he was holding.”
“We’re definitely in the right place, then.” I glanced at the pale walls around us with another shiver of uneasiness. “Meriden must be our guy.” But so far we hadn’t seen anything here that could lead us closer to him.
“The front of the building had more… debris,” Thorn said. “Something there might give us a sense of where to continue our investigation.”
I wasn’t at all sorry to leave the vacant labs behind. We passed another steel door to reach the front half of the building, which opened up into a pretty typical office layout.
A maze of dividers wove across the floor, separating out a couple dozen cubicles other than where a few had toppled over. The plain steel desks remained, but weirdly none of the chairs. A water cooler without its jug stood next to a dust-coated coffee maker just outside a small kitchen area. Doors along the opposite wall led into private offices, but the name plaques had been removed from their brass holders.
Snap immediately set off to sample all the impressions he could find. I veered in another direction, picking through the crumpled papers, long-dried pens, and other garbage the employees had left behind in case any of it held an identifying clue that didn’t require supernatural voodoo to discern.
Ruse followed the same course I did, inspecting the cubicles on the other side of the aisle. As Snap and Thorn drifted farther away, he glanced at me. I was bent over a desk, struggling to reach a paper that had fallen between it and the divider wall it appeared to be bolted to.
I half expected him to make a cheeky comment about my waving ass, but instead he blinked out of sight. The paper vanished into the shadows, and a second later the incubus was standing next to me, holding it out.
“Oh. Thank you.” I couldn’t stop my posture from stiffening a little at the warmth of his body right next to mine.
I took the paper, which turned out to have nothing but a couple of obscene dick doodles on it. Such amazing productivity.
Ruse stepped back, his mouth twisting into a grimace. His lips parted, and then he hesitated. “Sorsha,” he said finally when I started to turn.
“What?” The word came out terser than I’d intended, but I hadn’t been going for friendly either.
“I—” He let out a huff of breath, but from his expression, I got the sense he was frustrated with himself, not with me. “You can be angry with me forever if you want. I’m not telling you I didn’t fuck up. But I do want you to know I didn’t break your trust for kicks or to manipulate you in any way.”
“No? Why did you, then?”
Despite my still-terse tone, he looked relieved that I’d even asked. “I know what value I generally bring to the table where mortals are concerned—or rather, to the bed. When the act is over, I haven’t been in the habit of sticking around. No one’s ever complained about my leaving. When it seemed as if you meant for me to stay with you, I wasn’t sure whether I was only making assumptions or— I didn’t like the idea of overstaying my welcome inadvertently. So I looked before I could catch the impulse, just to make sure that really was what you wanted.”
The only thing I don’t want is for you to feel obligated, he’d told me the other night when I’d invited him into my bed in the first place. Remembering that and seeing the remorse that sat so awkwardly on his roguishly handsome face, some of the betrayal I’d been feeling crumbled away.
What must it feel like, being treated as if you had no worth other than your sexual prowess for centuries on end? Maybe it didn’t matter to him as much as it might to a human being, but shadowkind could still experience loss and loneliness. To have all the pleasure but none of the closeness and connection of falling asleep in each other’s arms afterward… Even the months when I’d been hooking up with Leland, the lack of actual intimacy had started to dull the fun parts of our agreement.
Ruse’s skills might have knocked my socks off, almost literally, but I’d take the full experience of human intimacy over supernaturally powerful passion alone any day. If I ever got a chance to have that for real, that was.
“Okay,” I said. “I can see why you might have slipped up. I still don’t want you slipping ever again.”
I looked down at my hands braced against the desk and decided that if he’d opened up, I could give him a little honesty in return. “Having my mind messed with is a particularly sore spot for me. There
was this time—when I was seven, heading home one evening with Luna, another higher shadowkind spotted us together and started mocking her for taking care of a mortal. When we tried to simply walk away from him, he used his powers on me.”
“He was an incubus?” Ruse asked softly, but his eyes flashed with a golden blaze of anger.
“I don’t think so, but he had some kind of charm ability. He called out to me, told me to jump around and crawl on my hands and knees and would have ordered me to walk into traffic if Luna hadn’t launched herself at him then.”
A lump filled my throat with the memory. “It was awful, wanting to resist, terrified of what he was making me do, but being trapped in my body that was following his commands no matter how much I tried to stop it. I know that tormenting people isn’t your thing, but the thought of anyone using their influence on my mind brings back that terror.”
If I hadn’t been completely sure of Ruse’s remorse before, there would have been no mistaking it etched in his expression now. “I hate that I reminded you of that time—that you’d need to associate me at all with that dumpster fire of a being. If I can’t manage to keep the promise of never slipping up again, you’re welcome to light me on fire and cheer while I burn.”
My lips couldn’t help twitching upward at the vehemence with which he made that offer. “I think I can manage without burning anyone alive. Let’s just see how it goes. And don’t push your luck.”
“Duly noted,” the incubus said with a playful salute, though his eyes were still serious. I was just venturing onward to resume my search when a joyful voice rang out from the office kitchen. Of course Snap would have ended up in there sooner rather than later.
“I have something!” He loped out with his face beaming as bright as his curly hair. With one hand, he held up a mug that had a jagged shard missing from its side. “This cup belonged to Meriden. He brought it in from his house, and I can see the house in the impressions that’ve stuck to it.”
Excitement raced through me. I hurried over. “Are you sure it’s his?”
He tipped the mug to show us the base, looking so breathtakingly pleased with himself I had to restrain the urge to kiss him. “I can hear someone saying the name while he was holding it—and look. This is for John Meriden, isn’t it?”
Marked on the mug’s base in black sharpie were the initials J.M.
I laughed and settled for squeezing Snap’s shoulder in a fragment of an embrace. “You did it. He’d better watch out now—we’re coming for him where he lives.”
21
Sorsha
Helpfully, the residents of the apartment we’d borrowed had left the keys to their vehicle in a bowl near the door. When Ruse pressed the unlock button in the parking lot at the back of the building, a shiny silver SUV beeped.
We’d treat it well, I told myself as we walked over. We’d even leave them with a full tank of gas as a thank you present.
Then I opened the passenger side door, and my eyebrows shot up. “Oh, for the love of sweet potato fries.”
It’d looked like a perfectly normal SUV from the outside. The inside stunk of the ‘60s. Literally. A waft of musky, earthy patchouli washed over me. As I wrinkled my nose, I took in the bright pink mini shag rugs on the floor in front of each seat and the bejeweled peace sign glittering where it hung from the rear-view mirror.
Maybe walking would be better.
But no, given the house Snap had described from the impressions on Meriden’s mug, we were heading out to the posh suburbs at the north end of town, and that was a hell of a hike even for me. So I clambered into the back of the car with Snap while Ruse took the driver’s seat and Thorn stretched out his expansive legs next to the incubus.
I wasn’t going to let this assault of decades past go unchallenged, though. Tapping at my phone’s screen, I connected it to the SUV’s sound system and started Tina Turner’s Private Dancer album playing. Take that, flower children.
As the opening notes of “I Might Have Been Queen” spilled from the speakers, Ruse gave a knowing laugh. He backed the SUV out of its parking spot more smoothly than I’d have expected from a guy who’d probably only needed to use his driving skills about once a decade, and we were off.
We were looking for a big colonial style place: white walls, gable windows, and columns on either side of the double front door. A wide lawn with a tree that shaded the driveway. And, most importantly—because there were probably a thousand houses in the suburbs that fit the rest of the description—Snap had also caught a glimpse of a bronze statue of a rearing horse poised next to the front steps. We just had to hope it was still there after however many years it’d been since Meriden had last worked in the office building.
I opened up my map app. “Keep going north on this street until I tell you otherwise,” I ordered Ruse. “We’ve got a ways to go.”
“Navigate away, Miss Blaze!”
Receiving only a couple of honks—Ruse wasn’t so smooth at the whole changing lanes thing—we made it around the edges of downtown and up into the wealthier district where I’d set more than one collector’s home on fire. I got the incubus weaving up and down the streets while the rest of us scanned the houses beyond our windows.
After a couple of hours, my vision was starting to blur from staring so long. Snap made a soft hissing sound against his teeth. “I’m not seeing the same one—not the way I tasted it from the mug. I don’t know for sure it was in this city.”
“He might live farther out of town,” I admitted with a grimace. It would take days to scour the entire greater metropolitan area—if even that got us what we wanted. Maybe I’d have to put our fates in the hands of a black-market hacker cabal after all.
“We’re here now—might as well give it our best shot,” Ruse said with good cheer. I guessed he enjoyed driving.
We continued on until my stomach started to grumble that it needed something more substantial than the bag of barbeque chips and mug of coffee I’d already downed as a sort of lunch. At a particularly loud gurgle, Thorn turned in his seat with a questioning look. With the final notes of The Joshua Tree fading from the speakers, I admitted defeat. We definitely still hadn’t found what we were looking for.
“Let’s head back and grab some dinner, and I’ll try to figure out how to reach out to my internet associates in a way that won’t get us killed.”
“I approve of that plan,” Ruse said. Even he was starting to sound a bit weary.
We cruised down one last residential street, heading south. Just as the houses started shrinking and the lawns were getting scruffier, Snap jerked toward his window.
“Stop! There, on that street we just passed. Turn around!”
We got five honks for Ruse’s next maneuver, pulling a U-ey and then a left on the heels of his companion’s urgent plea. Snap gestured to a house three from the corner: white walls gone a bit dingy, paint flaking from the columns on either side of the door, a rather bedraggled oak tree by the driveway. The late afternoon sunlight glinted off a tarnished statue of a rearing horse next to the front steps.
Ruse let out a low whistle. “Nice job.”
He had enough sense of stealth to drive a little farther before parking outside a house on the other side of the street. I squinted at the building Snap had indicated, noting a key feature he hadn’t picked up on from his vision.
“Meriden doesn’t live in the whole place. It’s divided into apartments. There are three different mailboxes beside the door.”
Ruse motioned toward the driveway that ran alongside the house to a garage farther back. “And another around the side there.” Another door stood atop a couple of concrete steps with its own mailbox, maybe a separate entrance to the basement or a back apartment.
“It seems we can be reasonably confident that the object of our interest resides somewhere in that place,” Thorn said. He glanced at me. “We should investigate while you stay here, m’lady. We don’t know how closely Meriden’s home might be monitored. You can kee
p watch in case he leaves while we’re conducting our search.”
“I don’t even know what he looks like,” I protested. Like hell did I want to hang back in the car like a kid waiting for her parents to run an errand. Sure, the shadowkind could slink around unseen and I couldn’t, but this guy had been working with—or on?—shadowkind for years. He might be able to detect them anyway. They shouldn’t have to take all the risk, especially when investigating on our own had been my idea.
“Make note of any male who leaves the premises, then.”
“But—”
Thorn’s dark eyes turned hard as obsidian. “You’re staying here. There’s nothing you can do inside to help our investigation that we can’t do ourselves.”
That statement stung. I stiffened, groping for an argument in response that I thought he’d accept. “He’s not likely to have left any obvious evidence of where he works just lying around, considering how careful the sword-star bunch are obviously being. I know the city—I know mortals. I might realize something is significant that you wouldn’t.”
“If we turn nothing up, then we’ll consider it.”
“He may be home,” Ruse pointed out with an apologetic note in his voice. “You couldn’t go waltzing into his apartment while he’s there anyway.”
I sighed. “Fine.” As I sank back against the patchouli-scented seat, the reminder prompted a question I hadn’t thought to ask before. I turned to Snap. “If Meriden is in there… can you test him and pick up impressions of other places he’s gone, or—”
At the flinch that tightened the shadowkind’s heavenly face, I cut myself off. His whole body had tensed, his green eyes going momentarily dark and distant, as if he was seeing something a long ways away that he wished he’d never had to see at all. Then he was looking to his companions, still rigid in his seat.