There—there was the beast I knew was in him. Somehow seeing his cold front fall away dampened the fury in me.
Not so much for Omen. He wrenched himself back a step a moment later, cursing under his breath. His hair had bristled; his chest was heaving. He blinked, but the orange haze wouldn’t quite clear from his eyes.
I let my arms drop to my sides. He leaned in again, his palm against the bricks just inches from my head, his conflicted gaze holding mine.
“What is it about you that you always have to bring out the worst in me?” he asked in a ragged voice.
“I don’t think this is the worst,” I said honestly. “Right now? You feel like you’re being real. I like you angry—way better than I like the ice-cold prick who orders people around from his high goddamned horse, anyway.”
He guffawed, the sound equally raw. “You like me better when I’m on the verge of literally biting your head off.”
I shrugged, my shoulders scraping the wall. I might have liked him better, but I still valued my life too much to try to push past him right now. My anger had dwindled, but fear was alive and well, thrumming through my pulse. “It’s become increasingly clear to me that I have unusual tastes. But yeah, I do. Although I’d also prefer that you didn’t actually bite my head off, if it’s all the same to you.”
Omen’s own head bowed, dipping closer so his forehead almost grazed mine. The heat of his body radiated over me. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, to tell you the truth.
Yep, the poster girl for unusual tastes, right here.
“If you had any idea how hard I’ve worked to get here…” he muttered.
“Get where?” I asked. “The state of being an asshole?”
“See, that— You—” He let out another growl, but it was a subdued one this time. Then he eased back just a little. A flicker of something I hadn’t seen in him before crossed his expression. Was that… concern?
He fingered the side of my shirt, his fingertips brushing my side for the briefest of seconds. “I opened your wound again.”
I glanced down, more surprised than I should have been by the streak of bright red spreading across the center of the bandage. The sight of it brought the sting of the wound into sharper awareness. My mouth twisted. “Well, hey, what’s it matter if another mortal is spouting blood, right?”
Omen’s tone was gruff but firm. “You know you’re more than that.”
I supposed I did. And that was clearly the only reason he cared—because of my superpowers and how they might help his cause. “I’m sure I’ll survive, because or in spite of that.”
“No doubt.” He hesitated, still looming over me by the wall, as if he couldn’t quite tear himself away but also didn’t know what he was doing there. “I was taking out frustrations I shouldn’t have directed at you, at least not entirely. I wish… that I’d been less of an ‘ice-cold prick’ toward Snap lately. Maybe he thought he’d crossed some line I wouldn’t abide by, and I’d made him feel he couldn’t even check with me to see where he stood.”
I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so shocked that Omen was lowering himself to admitting any regrets at all. “You think I haven’t been beating myself up as much as I tried to beat up you? If I’d been more careful what I said around my ex—if I’d paid more attention to the state Snap was in last night—”
Omen interrupted me with a hoarse chuckle. “Suffice to say there’s plenty of blame to go around. Maybe you didn’t send me up in flames, but you put up a pretty good fight.”
I guessed that was a high compliment coming from him. I wasn’t completely comfortable with the flames that had been surging through me just minutes ago, though. If I’d let myself hurl the full force of them at him, just how bad would it have been?
Then he raised his hand to my hair, and those thoughts fell away. My awareness condensed to the warmth of his knuckles grazing my cheek as he fingered a few stray strands—not so different from how Snap had the first morning we’d met.
Omen’s gaze slid from his hand against my face to my eyes. The fiery light had faded from his, but the pale blue didn’t look quite so icy now. I found my hand drifting forward to rest against his chest, taking in the slowing rhythm of his breaths beneath the taut muscles.
What the hell was I doing? I couldn’t tell you. Whatever it was, it seemed to draw Omen nearer. He leaned in, his fingers sliding down to stroke across my chin, and a new pulse of heat flared in my lips. I wet them, my pulse kicking up a notch, not entirely sure what I wanted but wanting it very much at the same time.
His breath tickled over my face. Then he shoved the hand he’d leaned against the wall to push completely away from me, his gaze jerking toward the RV.
“We should get you patched up again before you make any more of a mess of yourself, Disaster,” he said, back to business as usual.
I peeled myself off the wall with only a smidgeon of disappointment. Whatever line we’d come close to crossing just now, I couldn’t help suspecting it might be better if we stayed on this side of it.
“And then back to training?” I suggested.
Omen shook his head. “No. I think we’ve both had enough of pushing you around. I know you’ll fight as well as you can when the need is there.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted by him throwing in the towel. I was trudging after him toward the Everymobile, debating just how suicidal I’d be to put up an argument, when the door flew open and Bow stared out at us.
“Please—Gisele—I think she’s getting worse.”
27
Sorsha
Other than a glimpse as the other shadowkind had hustled her onto the RV, I hadn’t seen Gisele since the start of the battle. At the sight of her lying crumpled in the master bedroom, horror overwhelmed any sense I’d had of my own discomforts.
Her slim, graceful body had deflated, limbs limp and cheeks sunken. What skin I could make out had lost its pearly sheen to a creeping gray undertone, as if her entire being had clouded over. Most of her, though, was covered with rough fabric wrapped tight and dappled with yellow-green smears.
From what the shadowkind had said, those bindings had stabilized her before. Now, thin trails of smoke were seeping through the cloth. Omen took one look at her and made a noise of consternation.
As he grabbed a jar off the bedside table, Bow hovered uneasily nearby. “I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to put on even more…”
“We do this and give her a chance to recover, or she leaks away into nothingness,” Omen said. “It’s not much of a choice.”
I didn’t understand why there was any debate at all until he started slathering the pale green paste from the jar onto the bandages. Gisele’s face remained flaccid, but her arms twitched, her shallow breaths stuttering. Bow winced and turned away as if he couldn’t bear to watch.
“It’s hurting her?” I asked quietly.
“The herbs in the salve are toxic to shadowkind,” the hellhound shifter said without looking up from his task. “Normally we’d avoid them—they’d weaken us. But in a case where someone is already severely weakened and in danger of wasting away, in small amounts they can repel our essence back into the body. The hope is that before too long, that body can heal itself enough to stem the bleeding on its own.”