Ruse hit the gas and hauled at the steering wheel. The van screeched around in as tight a U-turn as he could manage, engine sputtering, and roared off down the country road with bits of gravel rattling like machine-gun fire against the undercarriage.
Two more shots rang out behind us. One clipped the side mirror beside my door, and I flinched. But then we skidded around a bend and left our enemies far behind.
“Well,” I said, with as much optimism as I could summon, “we all got out alive. And in one piece… I hope?”
Omen’s cold voice carried darkly from behind me. “All of us except Betsy. Any thoughts on how you’re going to repay that debt, mortal?”
12
Sorsha
“Just keep quiet and let me handle everything,” Omen said as we walked down the street, the others trailing through the shadows around us.
I grimaced at him. “I know, I know. You’ve been telling me how much I should shut up ever since you brought up these friends of yours.”
“They’re not my friends. They owe me a favor. A few favors, really. Which is a good thing for you, considering I’m down one heavily enchanted car.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who must have led them to our hide-out.”
He stopped in his tracks to glare at me. The late morning sun searing off his blue eyes turned them almost as fiery as when they’d been the color of flames last night. My skin itched with the suspicion that if I pushed that line of thought harder, he might transform into his hellhound self so he could literally bite off my head.
“It was your human hacker contact who pointed us in the wrong direction,” he said. “And we wouldn’t have needed a hideout in the first place if your mortal body didn’t require sleep. I don’t think it’s in your best interests if we start tallying up the full score.”
I didn’t see how it was my fault his car had gotten blown up. How the hell had I been supposed to get to it without running toward it? But to be honest, while the shadowkind boss had grumbled plenty about the loss since we’d ditched the Company’s van in the wee hours of the morning, he hadn’t been quite as caustic with me as I’d have expected.
Another suspicion itched at me: something was up. Maybe he was being slightly less awful to me for the time being because he was about to offer me up to his past associates as dinner?
He set off again, walking fast enough that I had to hustle to keep pace. Then I saw the building he was leading us toward, and all other questions fell to the wayside.
“That’s where they run their business?”
The parking lot he’d moved to cut across sprawled outside of a sleek, dusky block of a building with a sign that would have been lit up in neon if it’d been opening hours yet. A sign with a buxom lady in a bikini holding a martini glass, next to the words, Paradise Bar & Dancers. If you looked up “strip club” in an encyclopedia, it’d probably have a picture of this place.
“Quiet,” Omen said in a harsh undertone, and added, equally low. “It’s not for the male members of the gang. They’ve got a succubus in the mix—this allows her easy feeding.”
Right, and I was sure the shadowkind men who ran their criminal syndicate operations out of the place didn’t get so much as a smidgeon of enjoyment out of the boobs and butts on display.
Maybe Ruse would perk up in the presence of another cubi type. He’d seemed a little down this morning, his smirks pale around the edges. Unnerved by the fact that the Company had tracked us down yet again despite all our precautions? Or was whatever had turned him standoffish last night still eating at him?
I did manage to keep my mouth shut as Omen rapped on the glass door. A woman in a dress designed to draw your eyes to exactly the few body parts it covered opened it and waved us in with a bored expression. Omen had called ahead so his friends—excuse me, owers of favors—would be expecting us.
The woman who’d let us in didn’t appear to be the succubus he’d mentioned. She went over to one of the little tables by a platform ringed with soft purple lights. A few other ladies with big hair and bigger cleavage were sitting there, nibbling at a plate of nachos. The tangy scent of the salsa hung in the air alongside sour notes of alcohol. They didn’t go for the bah-dah-boom music during off-hours, though—in weird contrast to the setting, a classical flute piece was lilting from the speakers.
Pickle squirmed in my purse, and I set my hand on it to hide his movement. I didn’t see anything supernatural about the gathered dancers. Omen strode straight past them and the stage to a door at the back of the main room.
Just before he reached it, a man opened it. Or maybe I should say a goliath. The dude filled the entire doorframe, taller even than Thorn’s six-foot-and-quite-a-few-inches and equally muscle-bound.
Not one of the wingéd, though. His skin had a faintly blue-ish cast that I knew from experience meant troll. How he explained that to the mortals he dealt with in his gang’s activities, I didn’t know—but maybe when you were that big and scary, people tended not to hassle you about the exact hue of your skin.
“Omen,” he said in a thick baritone, his narrow gaze jerking from the hellhound shifter to me. “And friends.” He must be referring to the others he could sense in the shadows.
“Good to see you, Laz,” Omen said in his usual cool, even voice. “I appreciate you all making the time at such short notice.”
A sharper male voice with a hint of humor carried from the room behind Laz. “Aw, come off it, Omen. We know as well as you do that there’d be hell to pay if we forgot what we owe you, possibly literally. Get yourselves in here, already. Let’s have a look at this troop you’ve assembled.”
The troll stepped back, and we walked into a back room that disproved Omen’s spiel about the strip club front being all for the woman in the bunch. Pin-up posters hung on the plaster walls, a few of them of hunky dudes showing off the full kit and caboodle, but mostly sprawled women with come-hither eyes.
To avoid having my own eyeballs assaulted by too many pairs of perky nipples, I trained my gaze on the group lounging on the leather sofas that created an L along the far walls.
My nose told me before anything else did that there was a werewolf in the bunch. I’d had dealings with a couple of them before through the Fund’s work, and anyplace they spent much time always took on a distinctive smell, like musk and pine and a hint of wet dog. Soon appearing as a new candle scent, no doubt.
From the look of the three figures on the sofas, Mr. Wolf was the guy with the scruffy brown hair and scruffier beard whose eyes glinted an eerie yellow. At his left sat a slim man with skin so pale it was nearly translucent. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was fae or some related being.
Reclining on the other sofa was the succubus Omen had mentioned, a voluptuous woman in a lacy baby-doll dress who hadn’t bothered to pause in painting her toenails at our entrance. The fall of her wavy honey-blond hair didn’t quite disguise gem-like protrusions twinkling like rubies just behind the corners of her jaw. She must pass those off as some kind of piercing.
The trio shimmered into their physical forms around Omen and me. Snap stuck close to my side, his arm tucked next to mine, and when the succubus finally looked up, Ruse tipped his head to her with a knowing glance. Thorn, who was no longer smoking from various body parts thanks to the shadowkind’s quick recovery time, flexed his shoulders and appeared to size up the troll. The other dude might have a few inches on him, but I’d bet all my worldly goods—limited as those were at the moment—that the wingéd’s fighting skills could overcome that difference no problem.