“Not since the wars way back when. Until now.” I grimaced and, to distract myself from morbid thoughts, teased my fingers up to his neck and along his jaw where even more pale nicks and notches told the story of his valor. As hard as his features looked, his skin was warm and smooth, only lightly textured by the scars. I let my hand venture farther, into the thick fall of his hair.
Thorn made a rumbling sound from deep in his chest. His voice came out even lower than usual. “When you touch me like that, I’m glad for your body’s softness.”
My pulse kicked up a notch, but there was nothing fearful about its pounding now. My skin warmed where his arm still held me close. Gazing into his near-black eyes, I found I couldn’t come up with anything cleverer to say than, “You’d better be.” Then he was drawing me to him, his mouth claiming my lips before anything more inane could fall from them.
In that moment, the shudder of the truck’s walls and the battle we were fleeing fell away. I gave myself over to the firm heat of his mouth and the stroke of his hand along my abdomen. It rose until his thumb skimmed the curve of my breast. Need condensed, sharp and hungry, between my legs, even though this wasn’t the ideal place to indulge that desire.
“For the record,” I said, my lips grazing his, “I think you’re good at a few things other than fighting. And I’m very glad about that.”
“Is that so?” Thorn said, and tugged me back to him with a kiss so demanding that glad wasn’t the half of it.
At the screech of the tires and the jolt of the truck stopping, we pulled apart from each other. Thorn glanced toward the door that led to the front of the truck with a regretful air. “I suppose we’d best see where we’ve found ourselves—and where we’re going from here.”
“Yep.” I heaved myself to my feet, but as he stood up beside me, I couldn’t resist giving his cheek one last caress and saying, “To be continued. So please do your best not to get shot any more before I can make good on that promise.”
18
Ruse
I might not have shared Omen’s contempt for most things mortal, but the community center where Sorsha’s Fund had gathered for their current meeting definitely wasn’t the highlight of this realm. The stale sweat smell reached my senses even in the shadows, and the pounding of the basketballs in the gym next door filtered through the conversation so loudly I couldn’t make out some of the words.
It did beat the smell of burning camper-van upholstery and the blare of machine-gun fire we’d left behind at the fairgrounds yesterday—I’d give it that.
One thing was clear without hearing any of the words: most of the members weren’t happy. The leader with the black hair and sharp eyes had her hands on her hips as she spoke to Sorsha. “That was your apartment, wasn’t it—that building that caught fire, where they found those dead bodies? And the victims found by that mini golf—they were smashed up the same way…”
Her wife and co-leader with the frizzy hair grimaced. “I saw the photos. Those injuries look like they were caused by shadowkind strength. What are these beings you’ve gotten yourself involved with?”
Sorsha was standing on the other side of the room’s long table, only her friend Vivi next to her while they faced off against not just the group’s leaders but the several other members who’d shown up and appeared equally disturbed. Clearly those people had no appreciation for Thorn’s skill with his fists. What was he supposed to have done—tied up our attackers with a silk ribbon and asked the police to pretty please toss them in the clinker?
Our mortal—or whatever exactly she was, unexpected powers taken into consideration—looked as stubbornly stunning as ever, even though she’d had to rush off here with barely any notice. Her hands had clenched where she’d rested them against the table.
“We’ve been attacked,” she said, dodging the question. “Repeatedly and violently. The people the Company of Light has sent after us have practically killed me at least half a dozen times at this point. Anything you’ve seen in those reports was self defense.”
The ones that hadn’t been strictly necessary, like the dope Omen had asked Thorn to off after we’d questioned him, we’d been able to dispose of more carefully since we hadn’t been fleeing for our lives at the same moment. I could tell from the tension in Sorsha’s jaw that she hadn’t forgotten those deaths, even if she wasn’t going to mention them to her fellow Fund members.
The Company assholes would have seen all shadowkind tarred, feathered, boiled in oil, and hung for good measure if they’d gotten the chance. Why should any of us be wracked with guilt over their loss of life? Mortals and their tender hearts.
Not that I minded Sorsha’s. She had plenty of steel in there too… and if that heart hadn’t been at least a little tender, she’d never have forgiven me for my broken promise.
“We’ve only got your word on that,” one of the other members said. “None of us has seen any evidence that this ‘Company’ is doing anything at all to shadowkind.”
“I saw what they did to one of their own guys,” Vivi piped up. She might have screwed us over a little with her initial nosiness, but the flash in her dark eyes as she defended Sorsha earned her plenty of points. “They killed him and mutilated the body—these aren’t anyone you’d want to make friends with.”
“Do you even know for sure it was mortals who killed that guy?” asked the stout young man with the soft, gloomy face. “Or did you need Sorsha to tell you that too?”
He was the one Sorsha had once had some brief dalliance with. Not the massive asshole who’d vanished on her with a brief note about her vague inadequacies, whom I’d have liked to tar and feather myself, but the almost-as-massive asshole whose emotions churned with resentment and indignation—but not a hint of regret about his own behavior, funnily enough—whenever he’d looked at her. Leland something-or-other.
It’d been a pleasure to trip him in the movie theater where the group had met a couple of weeks ago. I slunk closer in case I got another chance to poke a foot from the shadows and knock him face-first onto the floor.
Vivi gave him a look as if she were contemplating doing the same thing. “Are you suggesting that Sorsha—the Sorsha who’s worked with the Fund for more than a decade without getting into trouble—is suddenly orchestrating some kind of huge conspiracy that includes murdering random men, all to take down a bunch of people who’ve actually done nothing wrong?”
Leland shrugged, his expression turning even more sour. “She might not know either. The shadowkind can be manipulative.”
Oh, I’d show him manipulative. I’d like to see him licking his own ass after I’d had a little charmed chat with him. From the emotions clouding his mind now, I didn’t think he was even considering that Sorsha’s story about the Company might be true. As far as he was concerned, she’d snubbed him and that meant she must be misguided in all things—just a dupe of vicious shadowkind.
He’d gotten to share all those bodily intimacies with her, but he didn’t know her at all.