Twilight Crook Page 25

  A key clicked in the lock. Leland strode in, all puffed up on an endorphin high from the weights he’d have been hefting. As he tossed his gym bag to the side of the hall, his shirt shifted, and I caught a glint of silver at its V neckline. He was wearing his protective badge pinned to an undershirt like I often did. No other metallic gear gleamed on his person.

  That was all I needed to know. I sprang up and leapt across the few feet between us.

  Leland stiffened in surprise—wrong reflex, dude. “Sorsha,” he sputtered, and I was already on him, smacking his defensive hand away with a quick swipe while I yanked on his shirt. With one swift jerk, the badge snapped off the layer of cotton underneath. I flashed it through the air to signal Ruse.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Leland snapped, lunging at me. Too bad he spent all his gym time bulking up and not developing his inner Jack Be Nimble. I darted out of the way just as Ruse materialized in the space between us.

  “Hello, my friend,” the incubus said in his most cajoling tone, so strung through with supernatural power I could feel the vibration of it in the air. “As you can see, we’re all going to get along here. We came out of concern for your well-being—you need to listen to us or you could be in grave danger.”

  Leland swayed on his feet, his boyish face tensing. The voodoo hadn’t totally enraptured him in one go. “You’re one of the shadowkind she’s working with. I don’t think you should be here. Either of you. You—”

  Ruse held up his hands in a placating gesture. “We’ll certainly leave as soon as we’ve settled things with you. You’ve been in contact with very malicious people, and we couldn’t bear to see you get hurt because of that. I know you and Sorsha have had your differences, but can’t you see how much she still cares for you?”

  I fought back the urge to glare at him for that remark and gave Leland the sweetest smile I could summon. Which probably wasn’t very sweet, since I was also inclined to puke on the jerk’s shiny trainers at the idea of caring about him, but it appeared to be enough to smooth Ruse’s spell along.

  “I always knew she must, somewhere in there,” Leland said, peering back at me with his own smile, which was so self-satisfied I nearly did puke.

  Thankfully, Ruse stepped in before any expelling of bodily fluids became necessary. As he nodded, a sly thread crept into his voice. “And you must care about yourself enough to prioritize your safety, no? Look at this magnificent display of your past achievements.” He motioned to the photos on the mantel.

  Leland’s gaze followed the gesture. “We have to celebrate our victories,” he said. “Pep ourselves up to take on even more. Or to step in when other people are going too far.” He glanced back at me, drawing himself up with a pompous air. “You were ruining people’s lives. I couldn’t stand back and let that happen.”

  I bit my tongue to avoid pointing out that he’d potentially ruined dozens of lives by enabling the Company’s attack and preventing us from freeing their captives. As much as he’d pretended to care about defending the shadowkind, their lives clearly didn’t mean all that much to him. Maybe he only saw them as worth protecting when they were small and inept. Maybe it’d always been about gaining a sense of magnanimity and never about kindness at all.

  Ruse grinned. Confident he now had the other guy completely under his sway, he pointed Leland to the photos again. “I need to see just how dedicated you are to yourself before I know how we can help you. Take your favorite image and give yourself a kiss.”

  “Ruse,” I whispered in protest. We had more important things to do here than goof around with my ex on puppet strings.

  The incubus ignored me, and it was kind of satisfying watching Leland rush to grab the photo of himself on the boat deck and give it a hearty smooch. My lips twitched despite myself.

  Ruse applauded. “Perfect. Now, do you think you could show us a headstand? It’s very important for ensuring we give you the most helpful strategies for protecting yourself…”

  Leland was already bending over to set his head on the rug. He braced himself and heaved his bulky legs into the air. They flailed this way and that for a few seconds before he toppled over onto the rug with an audible whoomph. Then he was leaping up again as if ready for another go.

  I elbowed Ruse. As much as I’d like to watch my ex make a fool of himself for hours, we were here on business, not pleasure.

  “All right, all right,” the incubus said, and motioned Leland over. “Just one more thing I’d like to check. If you wanted so much for Sorsha to offer you the full girlfriend experience, why didn’t you romance her like a boyfriend would? An honest answer, please.”

  Leland’s expression turned vaguely puzzled, but he was charmed enough to answer without balking. “Why should I have to put in that work first if she didn’t appreciate what she already had? I didn’t hear any complaints about our hook-ups. I’ve got a good job, I work out—I’m a goddamned catch. I’m not going to chase someone who can’t be bothered to give me a foot massage or cook up a meal to pay back what they’re getting out of me. She obviously has delusions about deserving all kinds of fawning. I bet that’s how these creepy shadowkind sucked her in.”

  That time I bit my tongue so hard I winced at the jab of pain. What I’d been getting out of him? Last I’d checked, he’d gotten off at least as much as I had from our hops into bed. Was I supposed to have been so honored that he’d stuck his dick in me that I’d decide to play merry homemaker—and without a single indication he even wanted that until he started sulking that it wasn’t happening?

  Ruse had my back in his own way. “I see,” he said. “You really are a prickish piece of work, aren’t you?”

  Leland faltered. “What? I—”

  The thrum came back into Ruse’s voice. “Say it—that you’re a prickish piece of work. Like you mean it.”

  “I’m a prickish piece of work,” Leland said emphatically.

  “Wonderful! Now let’s get down to work. These people on Wharf Street I assume you contacted—how did you reach out to them? It’ll help us so much to know.”

  Any uncertainty that had crossed Leland’s face with the past instruction faded. “I wasn’t sure I’d get someone in charge if I just called. It seemed like the message should go to someone higher up. So I went right down there.”

  He’d gotten a look at the building? “What did they do when you got there?” I asked.

  “They were pretty tense about the whole thing.” Leland frowned. “I guess it makes sense they would be when I showed up out of nowhere. When I told them I had vital information, a different guy came out to talk to me in the yard.”

  Ruse’s eyes gleamed intently. “You didn’t go inside?”

  “Nope. I told him that I had reason to believe a woman working with some hostile shadowkind was going to attack his operations tonight, and that they definitely knew about the Wharf Street location and a few others—the ones the Fund checked out. Do you think that’s why they’d be out to get me now—because I was involved in doing that research, even though I realized what the right side was?”

  “Could be,” Ruse said sagely. “Although if you went back there now that they’ve foiled the attack and seen you gave them good intel, maybe they’d be more friendly and let you in on their plans.”

  Leland dashed any hopes we’d had of sending him out into the field as an unwitting double-agent with a chuckle. “Oh, they’re not at that place anymore. They were pretty upset about what I told them, and I heard one guy say to another as I was leaving something about having nowhere to move now except Gorge Avenue. But I have no idea where on Gorge Avenue they were going. That wasn’t an address the Fund had.”

  No, it wasn’t. I hadn’t seen or heard anything about Gorge Avenue before—but it sounded like that was where the Company would have taken their prisoners.

  “Did you overhear anything else? Anything at all?” I pressed.

  Leland shook his head. “They shooed me off pretty quickly. Even the guy who made that co
mment shut up really quickly afterward. And now they’re after me? I was only trying to help them. I thought—” His forehead furrowed as he tried to connect what he’d believed before to what Ruse’s charm was forcing him to feel. “Have they actually been hurting people? It wasn’t just Sorsha getting caught up with the wrong sort of shadowkind who wanted her to think that?”

  “Unfortunately for you, these people are the worst of the worst, and it turns out they didn’t appreciate that help,” Ruse said in his most apologetic tone. “But I’ve determined that there’s a simple way you can ensure they don’t interfere with your life one bit.”

  Leland breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you so much. I was trying to take the hassle out of my life by cutting off Sorsha’s false crusade, not add to it. She’d already gotten the Fund too tangled up in all that. I never should have started investigating… Well, I guess if this Company of Light really is part of some kind of conspiracy… But that’s more than I’m prepared to deal with anyway.”

  Right, because God forbid he experience the slightest discomfort while shadowkind were caged and tortured. He didn’t sound even slightly regretful that he’d turned us in to people I’d warned him repeatedly were up to no good. I glanced at Ruse curiously.

  The incubus rubbed his hands together in a way that would have tipped off anyone not under the spell of his charm that he was up to no good. “It’s very simple. You must fix a pair of your underwear on your head and keep it there like a hat for at least three days. Oh, and only drink coffee that’s as dark as you can brew it with no cream or sugar, left to cool for two hours first. Finally, call in sick from work while you’re undergoing these steps and be sure to tell your boss exactly what you truly think of him.”

  I had to clap a hand over my mouth to hold in a laugh. The puzzled crease returned to Leland’s forehead, but Ruse’s voodoo gripped him tightly enough that he didn’t argue. “Thank you. These people work in strange ways, I guess. I’ll do all of that.”

  “Excellent. Don’t mention we were here or your visit to Wharf Street to anyone. And may you find a romantic partner who’s everything you deserve!”

  The stairs creaked as Leland headed up to his bedroom to obtain the boxers that would serve as a hat. Ruse held in his snicker until we’d reached the back door.

  “I’d have come up with a more public humiliation,” he murmured to me, “but I think it’s best if we don’t call attention to our magical meddling.”

  “You didn’t have to do any of that,” I said. “All we needed was the information.”

  He made a skeptical humming sound. “Just be glad the defending of your honor was done my way and not Thorn’s. I had plenty of my own bones to pick with the jackass at this point, you know.”

  “Fair.” A twinge of affection shot through my chest. “And thank you.”

  “Think nothing of it, Miss Blaze. You’re worth a hundred thousand of that putz.” Ruse looked in the direction we’d left Charlotte. “What do you say we take a detour along Gorge Avenue?”

  “Sounds like the perfect next step.”

  Once we’d reached the outer reaches of the suburbs where Gorge Avenue was located—nowhere near any actual gorges we could toss our enemies into, sadly—it wasn’t long before we realized that Snap had left us with one last gift. The motorcycle crested a low hill, and at the sight of an estate that sprawled across the entirety of the next block, I squeezed Ruse’s arm.

  It was a mansion of gray brick with a turret on the right-hand side, the one Snap’s victim must have guarded in times past. And from what Leland had overheard, the Company had nowhere left to run if we came for them here.

  29

  Omen

  “We’ve got them,” I said, tapping the RV’s tabletop and looking around at my three associates. A sense of triumph rippled through me. “This puts us in an even better position than if we’d taken them on in that factory building by the river. We’ve backed them into a corner, and they’ll have consolidated all their equipment and resources in that one building, ripe for destruction.”

  “They’ll have consolidated all their security there too,” Thorn pointed out, ever the man of practicalities and glasses half empty. “Especially if—you said you think the man who owns the property may be the head of the entire Company of Light?”

  After Ruse had returned from his venture with Sorsha, he and I had driven out to see what further information his hacker dupe could unearth. With her charmed dedication, she’d found enough records to clarify the situation.

  I nodded. “He’s covered his tracks well, but we came across money trails that convince me that this Victor Bane is behind the biggest operations the Company has conducted in this city. Either that, or someone with immense influence over him was pulling his strings, which amounts to the same thing.”

  Restlessness gripped me, and I had to tense my legs to stop myself from pacing. This was only the first glimpse of our real victory. We wouldn’t achieve the rest until we got down to action.

  But Thorn was right. We couldn’t charge in, eyes and fists blazing, like the wild fool I’d once been. I dragged in a breath. “And he’ll have plenty of security, yes. But most of the guards won’t be used to working there. We can still make use of parts of our original plan, like the various diversions to divide and conquer. It may be difficult, with fewer of us…”

  My gaze lifted to the bedroom doorway down the hall. The unicorn had proven herself a fierce fighter—I’d give her credit for that—but even if her body healed, she’d be in no condition to leap back into a battle for several days at a minimum. I wasn’t sure the centaur would join us in venturing that far from her bedside either, even to avenge her injuries.

  And Snap… The day had crept into evening and then dusk with full night looming over us, and our devourer hadn’t reappeared.

  When I’d asked him to enlist in my team, I’d known that he had lingering reservations about the most potent part of his nature, but I’d thought his eagerness to help save our kind would override that if he ended up needing to use his greater power. Evidently he’d been more fragile—or the Company’s hunters swifter—than I’d anticipated.

  “We’ll make the best of what we have,” I went on, and then, as I drew in my next breath, a knock sounded on the RV’s door.

  Both Thorn and Sorsha sprang up, but their demeanors couldn’t have been more different. Thorn’s muscles flexed, his body braced to meet an attack—as if our enemies would have knocked before attempting to blow us to smithereens.

  As Sorsha obviously realized. Her face had lit up with hesitant but obvious hope. In that moment, I didn’t see any of the mouthy mortal who pushed me to the limits of my temper or the cocky thief who laughed at deadly threats, only a woman whose heart was leaping at the possibility that our missing companion had come back to us unharmed.

  The sight wrenched at me more than I’d have liked. When had I ever seen a mortal that earnestly dedicated to any of the shadowkind? But I didn’t think it was Snap out there—I doubted it would have occurred to the devourer to knock with his return either. And perhaps there was also an incredibly small yet niggling sensation with the knowledge that she’d have looked nowhere near that enthusiastic if I’d been the one who’d vanished.

  You didn’t win wars by courting affection. My job was to kick her ass into getting those powers up to speed—a job I might already have backed off on more than I should have today.

  I strode to the door and yanked it open, my other hand balled at my side ready to launch my claws. With my first glance outside, my stance relaxed, but only slightly. “What are you doing here?”

  Rex was standing just outside the RV’s door, his arms folded over his chest and a particularly wolfish gleam in his keen eyes. “You put out a plea for help, didn’t you, Omen? Are you going to let us answer it or not?”

  As he said “us,” he stepped close enough for his companions to converge around him. By brimstone and hellfire, it looked as if he’d brought his entire ou
tfit along for the ride. The inner circle stood at his flanks—Birch the dryad, Lazuli the troll, and Tassel the succubus—and at least half a dozen of the gang’s lower underlings encircled them.

  “I remember reaching out to see if Birch would lend his healing abilities,” I said. “Are the rest of you along to provide him with moral support?”

  The werewolf rolled his eyes. “Why don’t we discuss all this inside before some country-dwelling mortal drives by and wonders what’s going on with the party at the school bus?”

  He had a point, but my hackles rose instinctively at the thought of letting so many powerful and self-interested shadowkind onto the vehicle I was starting to consider mine. Of course, technically it belonged to the tourists in the back, and power was relative. In the grand scheme of shadowkind existences, Rex with his century or so of experience was still a gangling teen, and he was the most established of the bunch. Thorn and I would have stood a decent chance at decimating this pack between the two of us.

  That was an evaluation the werewolf could likely make for himself with the experience he did have and his knowledge of me. And I had asked for at least one of them to make an appearance. I restrained my inner hound and stepped back to let them in.

  The inner circle kept their physical forms, coming to join the four of us by the sofa. At Rex’s gesture, the underlings flitted into the shadows as they followed. I could still sense their presence lurking around us, but at least we weren’t being squashed into the space like sardines in a tin.

  Both Thorn and Sorsha stayed on their feet. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that even faced with several shadowkind she barely knew, our mortal was the one to push them into action.

  “You should take a look at Gisele right away,” she said, motioning to Birch. “They hurt her really badly. Omen and Thorn patched her up as well as they could, but…”

  Her voice faded as she led him to the master bedroom. Rex glanced at me with a slight arch of his eyebrows as if amused that I’d let the human call any of the shots, but he didn’t remark on it.