A harsh voice was rasping by my ear. “Sorsha!” My pulse stuttered, and I thrashed aside the blanket I’d curled up under on one of the camper van’s padded benches.
Omen loomed over me in the thin dawn light, his brimstone scent sharp around us. He hauled at my arm again. “Get up, they’re on us—get out of here unless you want to be barbeque.”
A crash and a metallic crunching reverberated through the air from somewhere beyond the van walls. My blearily sleep—and syrup—deprived mind couldn’t quite process what was going on other than it was something very bad and apparently staying here would make it even worse. I lurched off the bench and dashed out the back of the van with the shadowkind boss.
He leapt up the funhouse’s steps, tugging me with him, and propelled me through the entrance into the darkness. “Go, go, go!”
Go where? I sprinted through the shadowy halls, his urgency spurring me on even though I had no idea why it made any sense to be running away in here. Was this another dream? If so, I really needed to have a chat with my subconscious about appropriate transition points.
A figure sprang out of the darkness, hurtling right toward me. I flung myself to the side—and slammed into the cool glass of a mirror. The figure in front of me heaved sideways and winced too.
Oh, that was my reflection. Not looking so hot on three hours of sleep.
I whirled around in the hall of mirrors, barely able to make out more than blurred impressions of movement in the darkness. Were those shapes all me?
No—that one darted at me with a slash of some glinting blade. I threw myself past it, smacked my hand against a nearby mirror to push myself around a corner, and nearly pinged off another reflective panel.
An explosive sounding boom echoed through the walls, rattling the glass. My heart thudded faster.
As my breath stung in my raw throat, I dashed on. Something thwacked my shoulder. A searing hiss wound through the air from somewhere overhead.
I veered around another corner and pelted at full speed into a room full of hanging punching bags painted with smirking clowns. Welcome to heart-attack land! I pummeled my way through the dangling obstacles, the bags battering me this way and that as they swung back into me.
A metallic screech from behind me made my nerves jump. I bashed my way past the last of the freakish clowns and bolted into the next room, only to find myself swaying back and forth as if I’d careened onto a raft on stormy water.
The floor—the floor itself was warped into weird undulations, bending this way and that under my feet. I teetered to my left and almost fell to my knees.
Omen’s voice rang out from somewhere in the distance. “Sorsha, hurry! Get to the roof!”
Then a distinctive squeal sounded almost directly above me. Panic raced through me with an icy jolt.
Pickle! What were these fuckers doing to my little dragon?
I scrambled onward across the topsy-turvy floor. By the time I reached the far end, I wasn’t just exhausted but woozy too, as if I’d had a couple of shots too many.
There was a stairwell. I pounded up the spiral steps to the second floor, ignored the rest of the wacky gauntlet for the door that must guard the route to the roof, and rammed my heel into the knob. To my momentary relief, the door burst right open.
Another squeal reached my ears, even more terrified than before. I hurtled up the steps to an open doorway where the faint dawn sunlight shone across the staircase. Before I’d even reached the top, the prickly scent of a fire flooded my nose.
I burst from the doorway into the wavering heat on the concrete plane of the roof. Pickle was perched on an overturned plastic bucket several feet away, flames crackling in a ring around him. His clipped wings fluttered in terror.
If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d probably have noticed that it made no sense at all for my shadowkind creature to be here or for a fire to have somehow flared up around him like that. But at that point I was running on pure adrenaline, and all I knew was I had to rescue him.
I raced toward the fire with a swipe of my hand, willing it away from him with all my might.
And just like that, the flames parted. They bowed to either side of a blackened patch they’d marked on the concrete in front of me, and Pickle sprang through the opening into my arms.
As I skidded to a halt, four forms shimmered out of the shadows along the edges of the roof. The nearest one, Omen with his cold blue eyes gleaming bright, slashed a pocket knife across my forearm where I’d wrapped it around the dragon.
I yelped as much from surprise as the shallow sting of pain. As I moved to leap backward, Omen caught my wrist, wrenching me into place and turning the cut to the light in the same motion. My eyes caught on the narrow, red line—and all I could do then was stare.
The line was red with the blood welling up across the wound, but that liquid wasn’t all that was seeping from my skin. A thin but unmistakable trickle of black smoke snaked up from my arm into the air.
Smoke, like shadowkind bled.
My heart had outright stopped for a few beats. It revved up again with a tremor through my veins, but the adrenaline rush was already fading. With fatigue closing in on me again, the smoke dwindled and disappeared, leaving only a streak of proper human blood across my pale skin.
“Well, fuck,” Ruse said from where he was standing by my other side with Snap and Thorn. Even the incubus didn’t seem to know what to say after that.
“We all saw it,” Omen said, his voice taut. “Both the fire and the smoke.”
“But I can’t— It isn’t possible,” I said. My voice sounded hollow. As Pickle clambered onto my shoulder, I brought my arm close to my chest to inspect the cut. My entire abdomen felt hollowed out. “None of you would bleed actual blood like this if you were cut. Shadowkind never do.”
“No human would bleed like smoke, though,” Thorn said, his stern face frozen in an unusually stunned expression.
I guessed he should know from all the epic battles he’d fought long, long ago. I swallowed thickly. “I don’t understand.”
Omen flicked the pocket knife shut and tucked it into his pocket. “Neither do I, but you can’t deny the evidence any longer. There’s something about you that goes beyond normal mortal bounds. I don’t think it’s just a spell laid on you either, with it twined that deeply with your essence. It seems to only come out when you’re particularly worked up. At least, for now. We’ll see if we can work on that.”
My idea of who—and what—I was had just been unavoidably flipped upside down, and he was already making plans for how he’d put me to use? “I don’t—I’ve got to think about this.”
“What’s there to think about?” he demanded. “You have power. We need all the power we can get if we’re going to take down the people intent on ravaging the entire existence of shadowkind. You’ve already wasted enough time with your refusals to admit it.”
“Well, maybe I’d be a little more interested in exploring the possibilities if you had any idea what this means. But you don’t, do you?” I glanced from him to my trio. “None of you knows how the hell this could happen.”
The three pairs of uncertain eyes that gazed back at me held no more answers than Omen had offered.
I let out a ragged breath. “Right. I assume we’re not actually under attack, and this was all just a ploy to freak me out enough to run your little test?”