by Nora Ash
Well, when he phrased it like that… I nodded and swallowed the lump in my throat. “Okay. Okay, I can do that, but no more sidelining me. I know I’m not as strong as a superhuman, but clearly, my reporter instincts are an asset. I was right about Mirome, and you refused to even listen. If you want me to stay put, you need to not shut me down like that again.”
The Shade sighed, the way his lips pinched indicating that he wasn’t entirely thrilled about the compromise, but he nodded nonetheless. “All right. You got yourself a deal.”
Lightning grunted behind me, and I chose to take it as confirmation that he was on board, too.
“Okay, well… thank you. Speaking of my reporter instincts… if Mirome wanted me for Bright, and we assume that the mayor did visit him like the servant said, maybe the mayor should be our next stop? I know you say it’s complicated to kidnap a politician of his level, but I think he’s our best bet.”
“I agree,” Lightning sighed. “After today, it’s past time to be cautious of political infringements. Which also means that we should visit the other council members and find out if they, too, are in Bright’s pocket, or if we can rely on them to help us.”
“Let’s start with Whisper,” the Shade said. “After Bright, she has always commanded the most respect.” He stepped back a bit and grabbed my hand, spinning me halfway around so Lightning could grab the other. “On three.”
The place we teleported to was a dark, Victorian-style house set in an overgrown garden on the outskirts of town. Once my now familiar bout of motion sickness settled, I frowned up at the windows. “This doesn’t look very Secret Lair.”
“It’s not. It’s her Meetings House—most Council Members and a few other supes have one, to allow for visitors,” Lightning said. “But Whisper spends a lot of her time here. She’s usually the one we go to, if we have any issues we don’t particularly want to debate at a meeting. Like a sheriff, if you will.”
“We shouldn’t bring Kathryn in. For all we know, Whisper might be on Bright’s side too,” The Shade said. He flattened his lips in a frown.
“I’m not leaving her on her own,” Lightning continued, giving voice to the dismay on both supes’ faces.
I sighed. “Really? You can share me in bed and trust each other enough to fall asleep after, but you still think the other’s going to take off with me?”
Lightning grimaced, probably at the reminder of having been naked and vulnerable through an entire night in The Shade’s presence. “She’s got a point. Fine, I’ll go, but I’m sure I don’t need to say what will happen if you do take her?”
The Shade rolled his eyes. “You have my word that I won’t hide her from you until Bright’s been eliminated.”
Lightning shot him a dark glare. Then his eyes flicked to mine and the glare softened. Without another word, he turned around and walked at human pace up the driveway to the quiet house.
I took a shaky breath as I watched him disappear through the door after a quick knock to announce his presence. As much as I knew we needed to deal with the threat of Bright before having The Talk, I found it very hard to suppress the warmth bubbling up from deep within every time I looked into either supe’s eyes.
“So,” The Shade said once Lightning was no longer in view, his voice unusually quiet. “You know who I am.”
It took me a few seconds to realize what he meant, but when I did, the warmth in my body turned to icy fear. The phone call.
Being tortured had erased all my previous concern of what The Shade might do to me if my desperate plan to contact him worked. It obviously had, since they knew where to come looking for me, but I hadn’t thought to tell Lightning so he could keep me safe. In fact, I’d let him walk away and leave me alone with The Shade, like an idiot.
I did my best to calm my suddenly racing heart and hoped that, if it turned out to be necessary, I would be able to shout loud enough to get Lightning’s attention. Without looking away from the house, I said, “Yes.”
The Shade was silent so long that the pounding of my heart seemed to be the only sound between us for five solid minutes.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I turned around slowly, as one would when in the company of a dangerous animal, and looked up into his eyes.
They were dark with some sort of emotion, but I couldn’t make out what it was.
“Will you hurt me?” My voice was higher pitched than usual, and broke at the end.
Slowly, as if to not startle me, The Shade lifted a hand and let his thumb brush over my lower lip. The touch was gentle, but sent a shock of sensation through my entire body. “Never.”
I probably shouldn’t have pushed my luck, but the flood of relief—and, frankly, surprise—made me blurt out, “Why not?” Then, when I realized what I’d said, I continued, “I know your secret. I know I must be a liability now and—”
The Shade’s thumb stopped my somewhat frantic stream of words.
“I cannot hurt you. You don’t seem to understand that part. Even if I wanted to, harming you would be like hurting myself.”
“Oh.” I stared up at him, feeling oddly empty as I drank in the depths of his gaze. “Is that… is that part of the whole soulmate-thing Mirome spoke about?”
A small smile pulled his mouth up at the corners. “It would seem so.”
“Oh,” I repeated dumbly.
“Out of curiosity—what gave it away? When did you know?”
I lifted a finger to his mouth, gently touching the faint scar on his bottom lip. “Your scar. I saw it after you danced with me at the Autumn Ball, and recognized it from… from when you saved me.”
“Hmm. I suppose you are the only one to ever see me that close in both disguises,” he said.
We stood in silence for a bit, and The Shade’s eyes drifted back to the house. Just when I thought he’d deemed the subject closed, he asked, “Have you told anyone?”
I frowned, a little taken aback that he would even think to ask, but then realized that he had to. In their world, betrayal was seemingly everywhere.
“No.”
Another pause.
“Are you going to tell anyone?”
“No, Elias. Your secret is safe with me.” Saying his name felt weird, but also oddly liberating. Up until now, my lovers had been masked, even while in bed with me, and when I’d cried out their names, it had been the alias they used to hide from the world. Calling The Shade by the name he used when he didn’t don the mask was as intimate as feeling him press inside of me.
A ghost of a smile touched his scarred lip. “Eliath. My birth name is Eliath.”
I would have said something more, asked him about his life as Elias, or Eliath, but before I could open my mouth, the front door we were booth looking at opened and Lightning stepped out. Alone.
By my side, the Shade tensed and muttered a foul curse, but it wasn’t until Lightning got closer that I realized why.
Lightning’s lips were pinched in a deep frown, and when he stopped in front of us, I realized that his suit had smears of blood covering his hands and arms.
“They’re all dead,” he said without preamble. “Bright killed the other Council members.”
Four
Kathryn
“Fuck!” The Shade flexed his massive hands and lifted his arms up behind his head, seemingly to avoid grabbing onto the nearest object and smashing it with frustration. “Crap!”
His outburst surprised me a little. “I’m sorry. Were you close?”
The Shade made a rude sound, but it was Lightning who explained.
“Hardly. But their death at Bright’s hands means that what he’s planning… it’s bigger than we thought. He killed our leaders, Kat. This is not just war on the humans—it’s a coup, a complete change in our society too. We’ve been governed by small councils in independent enclaves for centuries upon centuries. Bright killing St. Anthony’s council… it will have worldwide consequences.”
“And we have to stop him,” The Shade spat. “Al
one.”
Oh. “Can’t you contact some of the other supes? In other cities? If this will affect everyone, they might want to help.”
“We can’t,” Lightning said. “We have no direct line of contact, so we would need to spend a few days finding out who was in charge there and how to contact them. Then spend however many days it would take to convince them that we were telling the truth. If Bright’s killed our leaders, he’s at the final stage of his plan. We have maybe a day or two to act before he plays his final move. If we want any chance at stopping him, we have to get to him before then.”
“Okay,” I said, reaching a hand out for each supe. “Let’s go visit Mayor Wilkins.”
The mayor’s mansion was eerily quiet. Lightning and The Shade teleported us to a balcony opposite the side facing the street to avoid alerting guards or random passersby, but the silence from the big building seemed to be complete.
“Is it always so quiet?” I asked. My only real experience with the mansion came from when I’d attended the Autumn Ball, where there had been hundreds of people milling around both inside and out. Perhaps it was normally this abandoned, outside of major parties.
“No,” Lightning mumbled, effectively killing off my hopeful theory in its infancy. “Something’s definitely up. Stay alert.”
The last bit was undoubtedly directed at The Shade, but I took it in nonetheless as we snuck in through the French doors and through the darkened room.
Lightning took the lead, I assumed because he had plenty of experience making his way through the mayor’s mansion from previous visits. Even though we walked quietly and carefully along the many hallways, we never heard a single person, and the eerie feeling of wrongness increased for every minute.
Finally, Lightning stopped in front of the double doors I vaguely recognized from my visit to Wilkins’ office.
Lightning looked over his shoulder at The Shade, nodding at some sort of signal from the other man, before he reached out and grabbed the handle, yanking open one of the doors.
It swung open, revealing the mayor behind his desk.
I blinked in surprise, even as The Shade shoved me inside and closed the door behind us. Somehow, the quietude of the mansion made me expect to find the office as empty as the rest of the house.
Mayor Wilkins looked up from the documents he was signing, a small smile gracing his lips at the sight of us. “Shade, Lightning. I see the rumors are true, then. You are working together these days. How… peculiar.” He put the pen down and opened a drawer in his desk.
I don’t know if it was the cool calculation in his voice, or the way he seemed so completely calm at our unexpected entrance, but finally, all the pieces clicked together in my brain. The threads that all led back to the mayor, without ever leaving a clear trail to exactly how he was connected to Bright. It was because we had never even thought to look at the only explanation that made sense.
“He is Bright.” My startled whisper broke through the tension in the room as clearly as if I’d shouted it. “It’s him.”
Both Lightning and The Shade cast me a sharp glance, and I could see the realization breaking on their faces in the same split-second. They snapped their attention back on the mayor, The Shade sliding his twin swords out of the scabbards mounted on his back as they both moved into a defensive position in front of me.
Wilkins’ smile broadened. “Oh, so that’s what you see in the little cunt! She’s the brain in your weird little triad. I mean, I’m sure Mirome’s right about all his mate-babbling, too, the way you both act like she’s Vasharyn incarnate, but I was so hoping it was more than just the magic. I’d just like to think that two of our greatest were brought to their knees by more than their cocks, you know?”
“I think you’re mistaken, Bright,” The Shade growled. “It seems you’re the one who’s about to be brought to his knees.”
“We’re going to end you, here and now,” Lightning said, the lethal threat as chill-inducing as The Shade’s roughened voice. “Whatever sick plan you have for overthrowing everything our race has fought for since our fall, it ends tonight.”
Bright’s laughter rang through the office, piercing and cold. “Oh, you pitiful fools. That’s exactly what I’m going to correct. We will rise again!”
Faster than my human eyes could follow, he reached into the drawer under his desk and pulled out a big and unnervingly familiar gun. The one he’d used to commit a robbery with last year—the one Shaw Industries had unwittingly funded.
“Get down!” Lightning roared, and suddenly he flattened me against the floor with his body. A blue plasma burst exploded behind us, ripping the door to shreds with a boom that made my ears ring and my vision blur. The stench of burnt wood and varnish permeated the air.
“Stay down,” Lightning hissed above me. Then he jumped up and launched himself at Bright. A dark shadow rushed toward them as The Shade joined the fight.
My heart pounded in my throat as the battle raged around me, but at least Wilkins didn’t fire the gun again. I dared to roll over from my prone position against the expensive rug to search for an escape route now that the door was no longer blocking the exit—and froze cold.
Behind the wreckage of the door stood row after row of masked people. From my low vantage point I couldn’t make out how far back they went, but they were many. Far too many.
I croaked in an attempt at warning Lightning and The Shade, but I only got a hoarse gulp out before strong fingers closed around my throat, ending my outburst with a strangled wheeze.
Someone picked me up by my neck, cutting off my oxygen supply completely. My eyes bulged and my head pounded as I scratched and kicked and clawed at whoever had a hold of me, but I never so much as dented the suit they were wearing.
Just as I thought I was going to black out, they let go. I fell to the floor with a thud, but I was too busy sucking in air through my bruised throat to mind the pain when my knees impacted with the rug. Then someone grabbed my hair and pulled my head back, pressing a cold blade against my throat.
It was as if someone had hit the “pause” button on the scene in front of me. Both The Shade and Lightning stopped mid-fight, freezing in place as they took in the supe army behind me. I could practically see the frantic calculations behind their blue eyes as they tried to work out if they could somehow beat the odds.
“Oops! I forgot to mention we’d get company, didn’t I?” Bright casually strolled around my two lovers so he could stand next to me and whoever had a knife to my throat. “Well, boys… I suppose this is checkmate, huh? Now, what was it we talked about before…? Oh yes, that’s right—kneel! Kneel for me, or your human dies.”
Both men dropped to their knees as if an invisible blade had cut the strings holding them up. Where I’d expected rage to flame from their eyes, I only saw desperation and mind numbing fear when our gazes met.
“Don’t hurt her. Please—don’t hurt her,” The Shade rasped. All his normal power and grit seemed to have drained from his voice.
“I’ll do anything,” Lightning whispered next to him. “You win.”
The sight of the powerful men throwing away their pride without another thought made the moisture in my eyes from the painful pull on my hair overflow and roll down my cheeks. It finally clicked that, however confusing and scary I found my feelings for both men, it was nothing compared to what they had gone through since marking me. If two of the most powerful superhumans in the city would kneel for their shared enemy and beg for him to spare me in front of so many others of their kind, whatever magic was in our bond had altered them both on a deep and fundamental level.
I didn’t know much about their kind, but I’d learned that their pride was not something they took lightly. And yet here they were, on their knees begging for my life.
“Well, whether or not she gets hurt is entirely dependent on you. Let’s play a little game, shall we?” Bright took a few steps forward and pointed his gun at them.
“Which one of you will give y
our life for hers? I will release the girl to the other and let them leave the city.”
Before I’d fully grasped the significance of his words, both men had gotten to their feet, but Lightning placed a hand on The Shade’s chest and shook his head. “No.” Without another look at his old enemy, he stepped forward and stared Bright straight in the eyes. “I will give my life for hers, if I have your word—with all our Brothers and Sisters as witnesses—that you will let her leave with The Shade, unharmed.”
Bright moved the gun to aim at Lightning. “You have my word, hero.”
“No, Lightning!” It finally, fully set in what he was doing. Everything in my body screamed in protest at the thought of losing him, and I knew without a doubt that I wouldn’t live through seeing him killed. “No, no! Don’t do this!” I fought against the supe who held me with all my strength, but all it earned me was more pain from my scalp and throat, until I was completely and efficiently immobilized by someone else grabbing my arm and twisting it up high on my back.
“It’s okay, Kittykat,” Lightning said, his voice much calmer now than when he had pleaded for my life. “It’s for the best.”
“How can you dying be for the best? No, I won’t let you!” I cried as the panic raged in my body and made it hard to breathe. I couldn’t lose him, I couldn’t lose any of them. I’d rather die myself. “I won’t!”
“You don’t have a choice,” Bright sneered. “The mighty hero has finally achieved his life goal and gotten the chance to give up his very existence for the humans he loves so dearly. We can’t take that from him. Seize him!”
A few supes broke out from the cluster behind me and grabbed Lightning by the arms, pulling him the final few steps in front of Bright and forcing him to his knees again. But he didn’t look at the villain with the gun aimed at his chest—he looked at me, and the love in his eyes took my breath away.
“I love you, Kathryn, with everything that I am. I am so sorry I let the fear of our bond come between getting to know you for who you truly are—my soulmate. That’s why it has to be me. The Shade never had any reservations, and as much as I hate him, I know he will do everything in his power to keep you happy and safe. That’s all that matters.”