Twilight Crook

by Eva Chase

  We didn’t know how often the Company’s hunters made the rounds here, but the past reports had all been from Thursdays—and all well before we’d staged our own ambush, so I didn’t think the Company had planted that information like they must have for the hand-off at the farm the other night. We’d just have to hope we got lucky. I wanted to hear from someone who could tell us about more of their operations instead of just spouting anti-“monster” bullshit.

  My shadowkind associates were surveying the area through the shadows, ready to dart back to me if they spotted suspicious movement. I’d opted to stay in my physical—human-ish—form, staked out on a low rooftop over one of the derelict factory garages, so that I could put the screws to my mortal ally a little more.

  Said ally was crouched next to me by the low brick wall that ran along the edge of the rooftop. Sorsha flexed her slender wrist as if she still couldn’t quite believe that Birch had mended it.

  She knew magic, had been raised by a woman with shadowkind powers, and yet seeing them in practice was still somewhat otherworldly to her. So otherworldly that she seemed determined to deny that she could wield any powers herself.

  I knew what I’d seen—not just during the attack by the cabin, but when we’d been escaping the Company’s experimental facility and the day afterward, when I’d tested her with that falling fire. The effect had been small enough that I could see how she might have explained it away. I’d nearly explained it away after my slicing of her arm had revealed human blood rather than the smoke of a well-disguised shadowkind. None of my other tests had provoked her to using deliberate magic—or relieved me of the problem of deciding what to do with her.

  But then the candle. And I’d seen in her reaction when I’d confronted her that she knew there was something more than human about her, as much as she wanted to deny it. I’d just have to prove it to her beyond her ability to deny it.

  First I had to figure out what brought out those powers in the first place, since she didn’t appear to activate them consciously.

  “Shut up,” she said before I’d so much as opened my mouth. “I know why you decided to stick with me, so you should know I’d rather tongue-bathe a tiger than talk about that anymore.”

  “Funny that you seem to think you have any choice in what I decide to talk about,” I replied. If the universe had seen fit to send me a secret weapon with unpredictable powers, couldn’t it have offered up one slightly less mouthy? “We could be facing off against Company people again tonight—people prepared to capture shadowkind. Are you really going to hold up your hands and play the powerless mortal if they get one of their nets or whips around us?”

  She shot me with a look as fiery as that red hair of hers. “I’ve never acted powerless. I just don’t have any super-special hocus pocus, no matter how much you want to believe it.”

  “Have you ever really tried to work some ‘hocus pocus’? Why don’t you see if you can set that stick up in flames?” I nodded to a bit of the debris that was scattered across the asphalt surface around us.

  “Why don’t I throw it and you go fetch it, dog-breath?”

  The worst part about the insult was it did bring out my inner hellhound. My hackles rose, and my lips started to curl with a growl before I caught the searing surge of my temper.

  She sparked all sorts of fires. I’d spent ages reining in the wildness that ran through my nature. I was not going to let one upstart human blast all that effort to smithereens in the course of a week. It was bad enough that both she and my shadowkind associates had seen me in a bout of unhinged fury when they’d first broken me out of my prison cell. I wasn’t going to live that down until I’d shown just how in control of myself and them I could be.

  I hadn’t enjoyed browbeating them back into line, but sometimes harshness was a necessary component of leadership. If they didn’t see me as fully in command, they might hesitate to follow an order when far too much depended on it. I hadn’t devoted my current existence to this cause to see my efforts fall apart because I placed kindness over authority.

  Besides, if I let my temper loose and incinerated the mortal, she wouldn’t be any kind of secret weapon at all.

  Before I could compose a perfectly calm and controlled yet scathing response, Snap flickered out of the darkness. “Men,” he said breathlessly. “With the protections the Company has used before. They’re moving toward the dock just east of the rift.”

  I peered in the direction he’d indicated. Beyond the glow of the nearest streetlamps, a few figures slunk through the darkness and vanished onto the abandoned boats still roped to the docks. Planning to hide out in that shelter while they watched for any beings that emerged, presumably. I frowned.

  They’d come in enough numbers to overwhelm me during that first ambush. We had the advantage of surprise this time, but that wasn’t a guarantee of victory. They’d shown how formidable a threat they could present at the cabin the other night too. As much as I’d hated it, especially after what they’d done to Betsy, turning tail and running had been our only hope of surviving with our freedom.

  We did have the river to work with here, though. Those vests and helmets were pretty heavy—the men wouldn’t be eager to swim in them. I cocked my head, considering the possibilities.

  “Get Thorn and Ruse, and go through the shadows around the dock to the boats. Cut them loose—push the two far ones toward the middle of the river so they can’t reach the dock and the one nearer this way, toward the shore. We’ll give them a fine welcome.” I jerked my hand toward Sorsha. “Come on.”

  As Snap vanished, we hurried to the stairs. “Getting a few flames going on that boat would keep our enemies even more distracted from shooting or slashing us,” I pointed out. “Is it really so important to convince yourself you don’t have the power that you won’t even try to pitch in?”

  Sorsha’s eyes flashed at me in the darkness, but I thought I heard a hint of hesitation in her voice with her next protest. “I think it’s better I focus on the ways I can actually help rather than imaginary super powers.”

  “Funny, of all the things I could criticize you for, I hadn’t taken you for a coward.”

  Her shoulders tensed. That blow had landed. Now if only it’d push her enough.

  Falling into silence out of caution, we slipped out the factory doorway and edged along the side of the crumbling brick building toward the water. As we reached the sprawl of the shipyard that lay between us and the river, shouts rang out from the dock. My boys were getting down to work.

  I set off across the yard at a lope, assuming Sorsha would follow, determined as she was to help in one way or another. In the dim light, I made out the motorboat careening across the water toward us. Three figures were scrambling across it, one of them yanking at the chain on the motor, which coughed its last wheeze of gas and died again.

  Another brandished a gun. I’d take care of him first.

  “You know the plan,” I said to Sorsha. “See if you can add to it.”

  She stared at the boat, but if she was attempting to stir up a fire, I didn’t see so much as a glimmer. Fine. We could do this without any magical help from her. That was our area of expertise, after all.

  I reached the edge of the concrete yard just as the boat came within leaping distance. One of the men gave a yell at the sight of me, but I was already springing across the gap.

  I tackled the prick with the gun, knocking the weapon out of his hand and into the water. Thorn appeared next to me an instant later. He heaved another of the men by his bare arms onto solid ground, a few feet from where Sorsha had come to a halt.

  The man landed on his side with a grunt, but he was sprier than we’d given him credit for. Ruse appeared with one of our lead blankets on one side, Sorsha dove to snatch off his helmet from the other—and he swung his leg around so fast he managed to kick the back of her knee. She stumbled, yanking herself out of the way of his next blow, and skidded right over the slick metal lip that jutted over the water.
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br />   She fell with a yelp and a splash, the water swallowing her up. Thorn rammed his fist into one of the other men’s faces, crushing his skull, and spun to dive for her, but Sorsha had already heaved herself back to the surface. With an angry hiss, she grasped a post to haul her dripping body out of the water.

  Ruse had managed to trap the first man under the blanket. The one I’d disarmed threw himself at the shore. He snatched at Sorsha as she swung her legs out of the water, she smacked out at him with her hand—and just then, a tiny flare glinted along the collar of his shirt.

  It was there and then gone. I wasn’t sure Sorsha had even noticed it, but I grinned—both at the momentary flame and at the crunch of Thorn’s fists pummeling the prick into the pavement a second later.

  Sorsha picked herself up. Her drenched shirt clung to her chest and hips, emphasizing every curve of her athletic but undeniably feminine body, and a different sort of heat stirred in me.

  Oh, she was something to look at. I wouldn’t try to deny that. She could light all sorts of sparks, indeed. But those ones, I had no interest in pursuing. She already had enough shadowkind under the spell of desire.

  I motioned to the man we’d trapped. “Their friends will be on us any minute now. Get the iron and silver off him and let’s go!”

  14

  Sorsha

  We held our second interrogation in the back room of a funhouse. The summer fairgrounds had shut down for the season a few days ago, but they left enough supply trailers and other structures on site year round for the camper van to blend right in.

  Omen stalked back and forth in front of the chair where we’d plunked our now perfectly willing captive down. “The docklands, the bridge in the park, and the strawberry-picking place south of the city. Are those really the only rifts your people check regularly? You never go farther afield?”

  The Company of Light guy let his head list to one side as he considered with a frown of concentration. Once Ruse had chatted with him long enough, he hadn’t even minded having his arms and legs tied to that chair. Bossypants was insisting on extra caution.

  “I went out to a town just north of Pittsburgh with the guys once,” our captive said, “but I wouldn’t call that regularly. Covering those three every week takes up plenty of time as it is. We don’t catch many of the monsters, but the Company is happy with what we bring in.”

  An edge of frustration was creeping into the hellhound shifter’s voice. “All right. Let’s run through all the Company higher-ups you’ve dealt with. Names, descriptions.”

  “It’ll make helping them so much easier,” Ruse put in with a twinkling of charm, shooting Omen a look of warning not to get too brusque in his questioning.

  Pickle, who’d been watching the proceedings with me where I was standing beyond the glow of the single overhead bulb, scrambled from one shoulder to the other with a prickle of his claws and a nervous twitch of his tail. Tension hummed through the small, barren space, most of it wafting off of our leader. After everything we’d risked, this captive wasn’t proving much more useful than the first one.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. I stepped out into the evening air with a little relief at the excuse to leave. It wasn’t much fun listening to the Company jerks spout off about eradicating “monsters”—and even though they appeared to all be prejudiced and potentially murderous assholes, seeing them in that charmed daze for hours on end unnerved me.

  I had my protective badge pinned to my undershirt to ward off supernatural powers, and I trusted Ruse not to use his on me anyway, but still… under certain circumstances, he could. He had on at least a few innocent people who had no opinions about the shadowkind whatsoever in the past couple of weeks in the service of our cause.

  The phone’s screen glowed in the deepening darkness outside. It was Vivi calling. My heart leapt. Kicking at crinkly concession-stand bags, I wandered farther across the desolate concrete yard that had held a Ferris wheel a few days earlier and brought the phone to my ear.

  “Hey, Vivi. Did everything go okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. They ate up my posh persona like I was caviar with a cherry on top. I told you I could work a crowd.”

  “You did,” I agreed, and I’d known it was true. Vivi’s brand of poise seemed to endear her to people almost as well as Ruse’s charm. She’d been out this afternoon at a fundraising event. Between the connections the Fund had started tracing and the information we’d gotten from our local hacker, we’d been pretty sure it was a front for the Company of Light. “No one asked any awkward questions?”

  “Nah. I’ve been around this kind of crowd before—just like the folks my uncle would schmooze with when he was running for state office. As long as you look the part, they assume you’re some rich professional like them. And they do like to talk. I think I might have picked up a couple of tidbits your little team will find useful.”

  I perked up, ignoring Pickle nibbling at my ear. “Oh, yeah? What did you get?”

  “Well, I made friendly with some of the catering staff and was able to sneak a look at some of their paperwork to check the billing name and address. Not sure how far that’ll get you, but it should be worth tracing. And there were some pictures in this slide-show they did—they were claiming they’re raising money for a special treatment center for kids with cancer. Maybe Ellen and Huyen should reconsider the whole ‘no outright lying’ policy for our appeals, because man did it work—”

  “The pictures?”

  “Right, yeah.” Vivi laughed at herself. “I wondered if they might have used any from their actual buildings, since they wouldn’t want anyone to recognize a place they know isn’t really a cancer treatment facility. So I snapped as many pics as I could of their pics with my phone. I’ll email all that and the billing info stuff to you. I know it’s not a ton, but I didn’t want to get too pushy my first time out.”

  “You shouldn’t get pushy, period,” I reminded her, but a smile had touched my lips despite the desolate atmosphere around me. We were building a real team here. With enough people—mortal and shadowkind—on our side, eventually the Company wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “I know, I know. Safety first. I did find out they’re holding another event like this next month, so I can try to dig up more leads—in non-pushy fashion!—then.”

  “Perfect.” Next month—that felt like forever away. Of course, it felt like it’d been at least one forever since my shadowkind trio had barged into my life in the first place. I was already down an apartment, most of my belongings, and my sense of certainty about who I was.

  That thought led me right back to the insinuations Omen had been making—the last thing I wanted to dwell on. As I shook my uneasiness off, Vivi kept talking.

  “I stopped by our favorite bar too—a certain someone there wanted me to pass on a message. I guess whatever she wants to tell you, she didn’t feel comfortable talking about it except in person? She wants you to meet her in the FoodMart five blocks east of her place at eleven thirty tonight.”

  Jade wanted to meet at a grocery store? Well, I’d had dealings in weirder places recently… like right now, looking up at the giant clown face on the front of the funhouse. The shadowkind woman might have come through with something for us. I checked the time on my phone—I wouldn’t have to rush to make it there. “I can do that. Thanks for letting me know.”

  “If there’s anything else I can help out with in the meantime…”

  “I know, I know. You’re eager to get in on the action.” But I still wasn’t in any hurry to pull my best friend that far into the fray, as hungry as she might be to get a taste of adventure. “I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  I ambled back around the funhouse and slipped through the back door just in time to see Thorn plunging his fist into our captive’s smiling face.

  Plunge was absolutely the right word. His crystalline knuckles caved in the guy’s forehead and nose with a sickeningly wet crunch and squelched at least a few inches farther into his skull. The man�
�s body slumped—a body that was still tied tightly to the chair. It wasn’t as if he could have been any threat.

  My stomach lurched. “What the hell!? Since when were we going to kill him?”

  Thorn stepped back, blood and gore dripping from his hand to patter on the floor, his mouth tightening as he looked at me. Beside him, Omen—who must have given the order—offered only a casual shrug.

  “Since he was a genocidal bastard out to destroy all shadowkind?” he said. “He coughed up everything useful he knew, and some of his colleagues saw us take him—they’d never believe he escaped before we’d raked him over the coals. From the sounds of your past exploits, they’d have killed him for being a loose end. This way he ends up in the same place without spilling anything about us.”

  He was still spilling—spilling brains all over the concrete floor. I averted my eyes, swallowing down the bile that was rising in my throat.

  Omen had a point. The Company had murdered their own people before for compromising the organization through no fault of their own. I’d seen Thorn himself murder several Company employees in the past couple of weeks. They’d just always been actively trying to murder us at the same time, so it’d been easier to keep down my dinner at the thought.

  “Well, I’m going to need a ride downtown in about an hour,” I said. “I think I’m going to tour the sights outside until then.” I turned on my heel and marched back out before any more of the fleshy stink could reach my nose.

  Meandering around the vacant fairgrounds didn’t do much to lift my mood, even with the good news I’d gotten from Vivi. I lobbed discarded pop cans at a target game that had been left in place while Pickle rummaged for treats by a snack stall with empty racks. Exerting my muscles distracted me a little, but that gnawing uneasiness lingered in the back of my mind.