by Eva Chase
My phone chimed. Vivi? I tugged it out as quickly as I could.
It wasn’t my bestie’s number but one I didn’t recognize. I hit the answer button, a new thread of uneasiness already winding through my gut. “Hello?”
“Sorsha? Oh, good, I got you.”
It took me a second to place the voice with its odd wavering distance. She must still be woozy from the medications the hospital would have doped her up on. “Ellen! How are you? You have to know I’m so—”
“Don’t worry about that. That isn’t—” She coughed. “You’re right. These people—we can’t let it continue. But I overheard—Leland was talking near the doorway—he said something about making sure you don’t get anyone else hurt. It sounded as if… he meant to do something… something he probably shouldn’t.”
Something that had troubled the Fund’s leader enough that she’d reached out to me despite her injuries. My throat constricted. “Thank you. I—I’ll keep that in mind. You get some more rest, okay? We need you better.”
As I lowered the phone, the Finger slid by outside the RV’s windows. I’d just opened my mouth to say we needed to stop and take stock with this new warning when the roar of another engine penetrated the wall across from me.
The RV jolted and lurched to the side with a crunch of steel ramming steel.
24
Sorsha
The crash threw me back into the sofa cushions, my phone spinning from my fingers. I threw my arms over my head just in time to shield it as the entire RV careened over.
I tumbled toward the roof, and the window next to me shattered. Metal screeched as the vehicle skidded on its side across the asphalt.
“It’s them!” I gasped out over the throbbing where my recently healed shoulder had slammed into a ridge in the wall. “The Company. They knew we were coming.”
My shadowkind companions whirled around me, flashing in and out of the patches of darkness. Footsteps were thumping outside. “Can you get up, Sorsha?” Thorn hollered, and I shoved myself onto my feet, snatching up a trembling Pickle as I did. Given the way the Company had blasted our last two vehicles, I had no reason to believe I was safer in here than out there on the street.
Omen had already bashed the door open in what was now the ceiling of the toppled RV. I ran to it, and Thorn heaved me up onto the steel side that still, miraculously, looked like a city bus.
The others had darted outside through the shadows. Maybe it’d be better if they stayed there. Figures in typical Company of Light armor were rushing all around the RV, spilling from the armored truck that must have rammed us. “Get back, get back!” more distant voices were yelling at pedestrians who’d been nearby.
Taking in the chaos in those initial few seconds, my first chilling thought was that the shadowkind should leave me. Get the hell out of here as fast as they could, and let the Company take out their frustrations on the one being who couldn’t slip away through the shadows. There were too many of the mercenaries—they’d caught us too off-guard—
But Thorn leapt out of the RV in his solid form without any hint of considering abandoning me. The swing of his fist gouged out the face of one soldier who’d been springing at me. As another clambered onto the overturned vehicle, he slammed his heel into the back of the man’s head.
On the ground, someone… rode by on horseback? Holy mother of a mongoose, no, that was Bow, charging at our attackers with a battle cry and an actual bow notched with an arrow that seemed to have appeared alongside his full shadowkind form. His human-like torso emerged from the shoulders of a chestnut stallion’s body.
With a scream that was somehow silvery sweet, another horse charged into the soldiers’ midst—a graceful ivory animal with tassels of hair sprouting above her slender hooves and a brilliant horn sparkling where it jutted from her forehead. At least, it sparkled for the instant I saw it before Gisele stabbed her horn into a man’s gut. The equines apparently had no intention of giving up their Everymobile without a fight.
The unicorn jerked back with a squeal of pain as the man’s armor banged her. The twined metals left a black mark just below the slick of blood dripping from the rest of her horn.
“Come.” Thorn hefted me onto his back, presumably to make our escape, but he’d only just jumped to the ground when a barrage of attackers came at him. As he whipped around to fend them off, the jolt of the abrupt motion loosened my grip. I tumbled onto the cobblestones of the courtyard.
I scrambled up, spinning this way and that in search of shelter or, better yet, a clear direction to flee in. As long as I was vulnerable, my companions would make themselves vulnerable protecting me. My gaze caught Snap blinking out of the darkness for just long enough to slap the gun from one soldier’s hands—a gun that had been pointed my way.
Another attacker came at me swinging one of those horrible laser-like whips. I managed to duck under it and hurled myself at the guy’s legs. We toppled together, his helmet falling off with a clang as it hit the ground. Omen hurtled past us in hellhound form with a slash of his claws to open the guy’s throat.
But there were still more—still way too many fucking more of the pricks. I grabbed the dagger my latest attacker had strapped to his hip and pushed away from him just in time to see a clot of the Company soldiers tossing one of those glinting nets around Bow.
The centaur staggered to a halt with a clomping of his massive hooves. His captors closed in around him, and a jolt of horror rang through me. Without hesitating, I sprinted toward them.
The centaur shuddered in the toxic metals’ grasp, and a furious heat surged through my body. I threw myself between two of the men holding the net, grasped one silver-and-iron strand, and propelled the searing sensation out through my hands with all the force I had in me.
The soldiers around the net yelped or barked with pain. Their hands jerked from the bindings, whiffs of burnt flesh reaching my nose. I wrenched at the net and managed to yank it off Bow before they recovered.
The centaur staggered away, shaking himself, and then wheeled with renewed resolve. As a couple of the men whose hands I’d barbequed launched themselves at me, Bow charged between them. One kick of his powerful hind legs shattered a man’s hips. His fists sent the other reeling backward to meet Thorn’s crystalline knuckles.
Was that the wail of a siren somewhere in the distance? The Company of Light couldn’t have stopped every spectator from calling in the crash and the following fight. Once emergency services got here, our attackers would have to skedaddle or start offering explanations I didn’t think they wanted to. If they wouldn’t give us room to make a dash for it, we just had to hold on that long.
I dodged one way and another, yanking off a helmet here, tripping an asshole there. My focus narrowed down to the flurry of combat around me and the thump of my pulse, hard but steady. Skewered lyrics to match its beat trickled through my mind and off my tongue. “Once I ran you through, now to stun some crew…”
The words buoyed my spirits. I tossed out a few more lines with the weaving of my body. An elbow to a nose here, with a satisfying crack. A knee to the balls there with an even more satisfying groan. “…And that’s not nearly a-a-all!”
A mass of movement on the other side of the courtyard’s immense wood-and-metal sculpture caught my eyes. A new wave of attackers was racing toward us from beyond the Finger. The streetlamp light glanced off their armor—and more nets, more knives, more guns. Shit.
My pulse hiccupped. Strength flared inside me. I shoved my arms forward, intending to hurl a tsunami of flames to stop them in their tracks.
What came out wasn’t quite a tidal wave—more like a wavering. And that wavering firelight smacked mostly into the wooden struts of the looming statue rather than the attackers charging around it. Flames leapt up over the boards with a plume of smoke. I’d lit up one of the city’s most beloved landmarks.
Oops.
Before I could attempt to summon any more of my fiery power, the second squad of Company soldiers w
as on us. Thorn, Omen, and Gisele ripped through the front lines, but more converged on us from all around.
Why the hell weren’t those sirens getting louder faster? Couldn’t they see the entire damn Finger was now blazing away, the flames licking higher than the buildings around the square?
Which, yes, was my fault, but do we really need to keep score here?
The shadowkind couldn’t hold the front on all sides. An armored woman barrelled around the toppled RV straight at me. Her pistol shot went wide, but the next instant she was bashing the gun across the side of my head.
I stumbled but managed to punch her hard enough to compel a spurt of blood from her nose. Ruse flashed out of the shadows for long enough to kick her legs out from under her.
Another two attackers were already running at me. I knocked one back with an uppercut, but I wasn’t fast enough to handle both. The second grasped my wrist and heaved me toward the blade he was holding—more silver and iron, it looked like, but those would sever my mortal soul from my body just fine if he filleted me with it.
I yanked away from him. The blade slashed across my chest, slicing through my shirt and drawing a line of blood across my sternum and down my ribs. Pain spiked all across the cut.
I gasped and flailed again, but the man held on tight. My first punch dislodged his helmet, but he evaded my second and flipped the knife in his hand to plunge it straight into my heart.
Snap flickered out of the shadows in a flash of golden curls, his eyes wide and face pale with panic. “No!” He snatched at the blade and hissed through his teeth as it seared his fingers. My attacker landed a kick to the devourer’s belly that sent him slamming into the underside of the Everymobile.
The mercenary spun back toward me. I lashed out with my free hand again, my fingers curled to claw out his eyes if I could, but he jerked me into the swing of his knee. It pummeled my gut so hard the world swam before my eyes. His blade rammed down—
And a sinewy figure loomed over the man with an unearthly shriek.
It was Snap. Even in my momentary daze, the golden curls and heavenly face were unmistakable. But his body had stretched, serpentine, to even greater heights. As I watched, his face stretched too, his chin lengthening to a sharp point. His eyes blazed neon green around the slits of his shadowkind pupils. Long, twig-like fingers clutched my attacker’s shoulders.
Then his mouth yawned wide open, his jaw unhinging and dropping even farther to reveal rows of spindly gleaming fangs. With an audible creak that shivered through my nerves, he snapped them around the man’s skull.
My attacker’s eyes bulged. His own jaw dropped with what looked as if it should have been a scream, but the sound came out so thin and strained it barely split the air. It carried on and on as his face purpled. The scream got even thinner and higher but never ceased, as if the pain of whatever was happening was so great it’d seared through his voice. The hairs all over my body stood on end.
I’d gotten a front-row seat to the showing of why the shadowkind called my sweetly innocent lover a devourer.
25
Snap
The kick to my gut and the slam of my back into the RV sent more shock than pain through my body. I’d kept to the shadows for most of our altercations before—I’d never felt what it was like to be tossed around in the fray.
An instinct shot through me to dodge back into the darkness where our enemies couldn’t reach us. Then my gaze caught on Sorsha buckling at another blow from her attacker, his knife gleaming as he moved to stab it down into her—
No. The protest rang through my entire being. I’d promised to protect her; I’d promised I’d keep her safe. I couldn’t let her loyalty to us bring her death.
She was mine—my peach, my Sorsha—and I refused to lose her.
I flung myself forward on a surge of alarm and defiance. My hands clamped on the man’s shoulders—and a very different instinct kicked in.
The shift into my full shadowkind form raced through me like a rough wind. Rising, lengthening, sharpening... I yanked the man backward into my hold and clamped my gaping jaws around his head.
The second my teeth pricked his scalp, a wallop of sensation drowned out the rest of the battle. I gulped flickers of memories full of color and sound and here and there a smell or taste: grass baking in the sun in a park, a scramble up the stinging surface of a slide, a party full of other children with flames dancing over a cake, a flush of shame as a presence—Mommy—snapped angry words.
Each shred flowed into me with an underlying quiver of resistance and agony as my jaws sheared the mortal’s soul away bit by bit. That silent wail of pain was the seasoning on the feast, turning every moment I devoured more poignant. I drank it in with an answering clang of satisfaction all through my limbs.
It’d been too long. Years and years since I’d indulged like this that one time. How had I ever given it up?
More and more impressions flitted through me, now with little spasms of anguish through the man’s body. I wrenched more and more from him, tearing away at his being particle by particle, swallowing it all down. A spilling of notes from a long, thin instrument under a spotlight on a stage. A kiss and a hot fumbling in a darkened parking lot. A lacing of heavy boots while a curt voice barked commands. All mine now—mine, mine, mine.
Slivers reached me of how he must have come to stand with the Company in their silver-and-iron armor. He’d brushed up against some sort of shadowkind creature—a man had spoken to him of a grave threat in tones that both soothed and terrified him. The promise of destroying the things he thought of as monsters pealed through him like joy until I tore it away.
I ripped more and more from him as if peeling off his skin in curls. The pain that mixed with the cocktail flooded faster in turn. That was mine too. None of it belonged to him any longer, not now that I had him in my grip. I would ravage him until nothing remained but a black hole of emptiness and the vast well inside me overflowed.
His soul was dwindling. The impressions had a tang of recency to them now, a little clearer and more vivid. Standing in a room with several humans who awed him—a sense of elation as someone said, We’ll hollow them out. Hollow the danger out of those beasts and make them ours— the perfect sweetness of a summer plum, its juice dribbling down his throat—It’ll spread and claim them all. There’ll be no stopping it once we have it right—a looming mansion of gray brick with a turret rising from the righthand side, a place he was honored to protect—wind whipping past him as his legs pumped a bicycle—fading, fading, into a spiral of searing torment.
The torment I was causing. As the flow of sensations ebbed, more of my broader awareness crept back in. The physical stomach I’d nearly forgotten I had turned with a fit of nausea.
All the agony and horror reverberating through the final moments of this being’s existence—I’d brought that on him. I’d wrung it through his entire existence, from his very first memories onward, as I’d savaged my way through them.
Even then, I couldn’t will my jaws to open. I couldn’t let go of that delectable thread until it petered out completely, leaving my prey nothing but a husk.
My jaws unlocked. The man collapsed as if boneless. I contracted back into the human form that fit this world better and found myself staring at Sorsha… who was staring back at me.
She’d fallen to the ground when I’d pulled her attacker off her. Her hands had tensed where she’d braced them against the pavement, the knuckles white. There was so much white in her eyes too, gleaming starkly. Her throat worked with a thick swallow.
Any pleasure I’d gotten from the devouring shattered into a thousand icy shards. Oh, no. That wasn’t—I’d sworn I’d never again—
And yet underneath the chill, a tiny part of me wondered what it would be like to consume her existence too, every morsel that made her the fascinating woman I’d only barely scraped the surface of. The keening hunger pealed through me. I felt my tongue flick against my sharpened teeth before I could catch it. Yes.
My gut lurched, and the impulse vanished under a fresh wave of horror. A shout reached my ears alongside a blare of sirens—flashing lights at the other end of the courtyard.
The men in their poisonous armor were racing back to their truck and wherever else they’d come from. Thorn charged past me with a bellow to Omen. “Help me push!” He glanced at us. “Snap, Sorsha, get out of the way!”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I scrambled in the other direction. Sorsha heaved herself to her feet and followed, her gaze sliding away from me. But I could still see her expression in my mind’s eye: the shimmer of the whites of her eyes, the stiffness of her features.
She’d been looking at me as if I were a monster.
With a creaking and a thud, the RV righted itself. Or rather, Thorn must have pushed it upright with Omen’s help. Ruse appeared at the window by the driver’s seat. The engine growled, and he flashed a grin, but it faltered when he glanced outside.
Thorn and Omen had dashed back around the RV. As they rushed across the cobblestones, ignoring the hollers of the uniformed workers streaming out of the flashing vehicles beyond the blazing statue, Sorsha sprinted over to join them.
Bow was swaying toward us, smoke streaming from his injuries—but even more billowing from the crumpled form he held in his broad arms. Gisele lay limp, her shadowkind essence draining away into the night air in great gusts that showed no sign of slowing.
I leapt forward and then hesitated, torn about which direction it’d help more for me to go in. Omen solved that problem an instant later by waving me toward the RV. “Get on. We’ve got to take off, now.”
I darted through the shadows to the living area, which had become a jumble of shattered window glass, leaves from the cupboards, and takeout cartons. Pickle huddled in one corner, shivering. When Sorsha dashed on board, she spotted him immediately and scooped him up. As she cuddled him against her, the others materialized on board.