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.