“Come.” Thorn hefted me onto his back, presumably to make our escape, but he’d only just jumped to the ground when a barrage of attackers came at him. As he whipped around to fend them off, the jolt of the abrupt motion loosened my grip. I tumbled onto the cobblestones of the courtyard.
I scrambled up, spinning this way and that in search of shelter or, better yet, a clear direction to flee in. As long as I was vulnerable, my companions would make themselves vulnerable protecting me. My gaze caught Snap blinking out of the darkness for just long enough to slap the gun from one soldier’s hands—a gun that had been pointed my way.
Another attacker came at me swinging one of those horrible laser-like whips. I managed to duck under it and hurled myself at the guy’s legs. We toppled together, his helmet falling off with a clang as it hit the ground. Omen hurtled past us in hellhound form with a slash of his claws to open the guy’s throat.
But there were still more—still way too many fucking more of the pricks. I grabbed the dagger my latest attacker had strapped to his hip and pushed away from him just in time to see a clot of the Company soldiers tossing one of those glinting nets around Bow.
The centaur staggered to a halt with a clomping of his massive hooves. His captors closed in around him, and a jolt of horror rang through me. Without hesitating, I sprinted toward them.
The centaur shuddered in the toxic metals’ grasp, and a furious heat surged through my body. I threw myself between two of the men holding the net, grasped one silver-and-iron strand, and propelled the searing sensation out through my hands with all the force I had in me.
The soldiers around the net yelped or barked with pain. Their hands jerked from the bindings, whiffs of burnt flesh reaching my nose. I wrenched at the net and managed to yank it off Bow before they recovered.
The centaur staggered away, shaking himself, and then wheeled with renewed resolve. As a couple of the men whose hands I’d barbequed launched themselves at me, Bow charged between them. One kick of his powerful hind legs shattered a man’s hips. His fists sent the other reeling backward to meet Thorn’s crystalline knuckles.
Was that the wail of a siren somewhere in the distance? The Company of Light couldn’t have stopped every spectator from calling in the crash and the following fight. Once emergency services got here, our attackers would have to skedaddle or start offering explanations I didn’t think they wanted to. If they wouldn’t give us room to make a dash for it, we just had to hold on that long.
I dodged one way and another, yanking off a helmet here, tripping an asshole there. My focus narrowed down to the flurry of combat around me and the thump of my pulse, hard but steady. Skewered lyrics to match its beat trickled through my mind and off my tongue. “Once I ran you through, now to stun some crew…”
The words buoyed my spirits. I tossed out a few more lines with the weaving of my body. An elbow to a nose here, with a satisfying crack. A knee to the balls there with an even more satisfying groan. “…And that’s not nearly a-a-all!”
A mass of movement on the other side of the courtyard’s immense wood-and-metal sculpture caught my eyes. A new wave of attackers was racing toward us from beyond the Finger. The streetlamp light glanced off their armor—and more nets, more knives, more guns. Shit.
My pulse hiccupped. Strength flared inside me. I shoved my arms forward, intending to hurl a tsunami of flames to stop them in their tracks.
What came out wasn’t quite a tidal wave—more like a wavering. And that wavering firelight smacked mostly into the wooden struts of the looming statue rather than the attackers charging around it. Flames leapt up over the boards with a plume of smoke. I’d lit up one of the city’s most beloved landmarks.
Oops.
Before I could attempt to summon any more of my fiery power, the second squad of Company soldiers was on us. Thorn, Omen, and Gisele ripped through the front lines, but more converged on us from all around.
Why the hell weren’t those sirens getting louder faster? Couldn’t they see the entire damn Finger was now blazing away, the flames licking higher than the buildings around the square?
Which, yes, was my fault, but do we really need to keep score here?
The shadowkind couldn’t hold the front on all sides. An armored woman barrelled around the toppled RV straight at me. Her pistol shot went wide, but the next instant she was bashing the gun across the side of my head.
I stumbled but managed to punch her hard enough to compel a spurt of blood from her nose. Ruse flashed out of the shadows for long enough to kick her legs out from under her.
Another two attackers were already running at me. I knocked one back with an uppercut, but I wasn’t fast enough to handle both. The second grasped my wrist and heaved me toward the blade he was holding—more silver and iron, it looked like, but those would sever my mortal soul from my body just fine if he filleted me with it.
I yanked away from him. The blade slashed across my chest, slicing through my shirt and drawing a line of blood across my sternum and down my ribs. Pain spiked all across the cut.
I gasped and flailed again, but the man held on tight. My first punch dislodged his helmet, but he evaded my second and flipped the knife in his hand to plunge it straight into my heart.
Snap flickered out of the shadows in a flash of golden curls, his eyes wide and face pale with panic. “No!” He snatched at the blade and hissed through his teeth as it seared his fingers. My attacker landed a kick to the devourer’s belly that sent him slamming into the underside of the Everymobile.
The mercenary spun back toward me. I lashed out with my free hand again, my fingers curled to claw out his eyes if I could, but he jerked me into the swing of his knee. It pummeled my gut so hard the world swam before my eyes. His blade rammed down—
And a sinewy figure loomed over the man with an unearthly shriek.
It was Snap. Even in my momentary daze, the golden curls and heavenly face were unmistakable. But his body had stretched, serpentine, to even greater heights. As I watched, his face stretched too, his chin lengthening to a sharp point. His eyes blazed neon green around the slits of his shadowkind pupils. Long, twig-like fingers clutched my attacker’s shoulders.
Then his mouth yawned wide open, his jaw unhinging and dropping even farther to reveal rows of spindly gleaming fangs. With an audible creak that shivered through my nerves, he snapped them around the man’s skull.
My attacker’s eyes bulged. His own jaw dropped with what looked as if it should have been a scream, but the sound came out so thin and strained it barely split the air. It carried on and on as his face purpled. The scream got even thinner and higher but never ceased, as if the pain of whatever was happening was so great it’d seared through his voice. The hairs all over my body stood on end.
I’d gotten a front-row seat to the showing of why the shadowkind called my sweetly innocent lover a devourer.
25
Snap
The kick to my gut and the slam of my back into the RV sent more shock than pain through my body. I’d kept to the shadows for most of our altercations before—I’d never felt what it was like to be tossed around in the fray.
An instinct shot through me to dodge back into the darkness where our enemies couldn’t reach us. Then my gaze caught on Sorsha buckling at another blow from her attacker, his knife gleaming as he moved to stab it down into her—