“Why not?”
I went with complete honesty. “My clothes will fall off.”
He burst out laughing. “Gods, Breena, you always manage to catch me off guard.”
I used his distraction to slide off his lap and what was getting seriously hard down there. “I should go. Thanks for . . . helping me. Again.”
He didn’t step toward me. “At some point, we will have to discuss this.”
I didn’t fool myself into thinking he meant something like a blacksmithing training session or another discussion about the house next door and the darkness within it. He’d be there for those things, too, I had no doubt, but he was talking about when I was ready to ride him like a pony into the wee hours of the morning. Maybe several mornings. I swallowed hard. “I’ll keep that in mind . . . should Corb not be available.”
Oh, yeah, I went there. I was trying to push him away, but he was on to me.
He laughed softly. “I doubt he’d be able to keep up with you. There is some supernatural blood in him, but not enough to handle all that you are, Bree.”
“Corb is supernatural? What is he?” Those two questions flew out of my lips, and on the heels of it came a thought I did not like one bit. Was Himself supernatural too? Was that how he’d screwed me over, not because of some connection Corb had accidently given him? No, that couldn’t be it. Corb said he'd introduced Alan to the shadow world.
“That will be his story to tell you,” Crash said. “Not mine.” He stood and turned to the forge, his back muscles pulling on the T-shirt he wore, and the urge to run my hands over him had me clenching my fists.
I forced my feet to move toward the door, barely shuffling because of the waves of desire ripping through my body just from thinking about Crash and everything he’d just offered me. About all that he could be to me if I let myself trust him fully. But I’d been burned badly by Alan, and I wasn’t about to let my hormones be the deciding factor here.
Out of the basement door, I climbed the steps to the backyard and felt the presence of the darkness in the Sorrel-Weed house as keenly as before, cold and dark and ducking ugly. But now I was all jacked up on libido with nowhere to spend that coin. Perfect. The wild sexual frustration protected me from any fear I might have felt.
“I’ll deal with you later, jackass!” I snapped and pointed at the house as I strode by. “You come on my property, though, and I’ll pull all your bits apart and stuff them into the beyond! See how you like them apples, dink face!”
I had no idea how to do any of that, but the darkness seemed to pause, uncertain for a moment, caught in the onslaught of my frustration which spilled out as anger.
That moment of hesitation from whatever was in the house next door was all I needed to get by the critter, out of the backyard, and onto the street. There was still a sensation of eyes on me, but it was far weaker out here, away from the two houses.
“Duck me,” I whispered as I found myself wobbling down the street, a strange mix of hormones, fear, and frustration propelling me forward.
By the time I reached the Marshall House, I’d mostly composed myself. At least I was walking normally, and the libido had faded to a dull thrum. Feish waited for me across the street from the hotel, her hands tucked behind her back.
“Did you pick up something to eat?” I asked.
“Yes, it was good. You want some?” She pulled her hands out from behind her and held out a grease-soaked paper bag.
I took the bag and peeked in. A trio of oily hush puppies waited for me, and I ate them quickly, not caring they were cold. I was hungrier than I’d realized.
“You got to eat better,” Feish said. “Vegetables and fruits, or you be getting red spots all over your face.”
“Then you should have brought me vegetables and fruit,” I mumbled around a mouthful.
“I wanted greasy food,” she mumbled back. “I didn’t think you’d eat the last of them.”
As always with Feish, her reasoning was just a little off kilter. I wiped my fingers on the paper bag and tossed it into the trash.
“Let’s go talk to this goblin. See if we can snag us a job. Should be easy since he’s looking for us.” I jogged across the street, easily dodging the traffic slowly making its way through Savannah’s shopping district, Feish on my heels. The four-story hotel was painted green, and the the window-covered front of the building was inexplicably dark for this time of day. Or maybe it was just me and my overly active imagination. Yes, it could be just me.
As we stepped into the lobby, a noticeable chill slid over my skin.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t just me.
I grabbed Feish and stopped her beside me as the cold wrapped around my wrist and tugged me toward the stairs.
“Feish. A ghost is pulling on me, I think.” Or a ghostly energy anyway. Normally I could see ghosts, but I didn’t see anything of the sort.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out Robert’s finger bone and set it on the ground. A moment later, he materialized at my side, swaying ever so slightly. Feish blinked her bulbous eyes at me, the extra layer of thin transparent skin flicking over her eyeballs.
“You think we need Robert?”
“He’s got an eye for these things, and has saved my bacon more than once,” I said softly as I took a few steps forward. The pull of the strange energy still tugged at me, but something else had caught my attention, holding my feet where they were.
Ahead of me stood a cluster of three men in suits and ties having what looked like an intense discussion. Two were average height, the third barely four feet tall, though he held himself up straight and acted as though he ruled the room. That alone wouldn’t have interested me, but a fourth man strode up to them, shook their hands, and motioned for them to follow him deeper into the hotel.
Seeing that last man set off my Spidey sense. The fourth man was Davin, the only council member I knew. Mid-thirties, he was smarmy, a liar, and I didn’t like him. He’d helped Sarge and Corb go undercover to dig out the poisonous roots of Hattie and her crew’s organization, but from what I could tell, he hadn’t been entirely honest even with them.
“Feish, are those other three guys council members?” I made myself step to the side, tucking us behind a tall plant. Not exactly hiding, but at least we were out of their direct line of sight. Given that the council had summoned me to speak about my involvement in the shadow world—and I’d ignored said summons—I didn’t want to land on their radar again.
Far as I was concerned, the council was full of misogynistic pricks who kept women and others they deemed as “lesser,” like half-breeds or weaker supernaturals, from any position in which they might get a say. Not my kind of people, and I could only imagine the way our conversation would go. Them trying to boss me. Me telling them to duck off. Hardly productive.
Feish peeked around the edge of the plant. “Yes, two of them. Roderick is one. The other is Bruce. Third is a goblin named Derek. They are all going toward the main ballroom.”
From between the plant’s sparse leaves, I watched as they went, taking note of the men, making sure they were completely around the corner before I stepped out from behind our hiding place.
“You think Derek is our guy?” I asked quietly.