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  “Talk her out of the attempt for her own good,” he said.

  I ushered Sorsha farther down the laneway to where the others wouldn’t hear what I had to say.

  “You’re not going to talk me out of it,” she said before I could begin my appeal.

  I let out a dismissive grunt. “Do you think after everything I’ve seen of you, I’d be witless enough to even try to? You’ll retrieve that flower pot for Omen, m’lady. I’ll see that you do. You only have to send Ruse and Snap off on some errand first.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Why? What are you talking about?”

  “Omen wanted you to find a way to get to that balcony without entering the building. He didn’t put any other limitations on the task. I can be your way. It would only require a matter of seconds—I’ll fly quickly enough that no mortals catch more than a glimpse they’ll believe they imagined.”

  Sorsha stared at me. “You’re offering to show your true shadowkind form and fly me up to the top of the building, just to get a flower pot?”

  I had impressed on her rather emphatically that I didn’t want her revealing what she’d discovered about my nature to the others. The wingéd—what mortals tended to call “angels”—had a long-tarnished history, one I had no wish to open up to the incubus’s teasing jokes or the devourer’s unbridled curiosity. But I’d allowed my wings to come forth once before in the service of saving our lady’s life. This was no different.

  “It’s more than retrieving a flower pot,” I said. “It’s proving to Omen that you belong with us. You’ve fought too hard by our sides for him to dismiss you now. If I can make the process easier—and less of a threat to your survival—then I won’t hesitate.”

  The thought of the valor she’d shown throughout our time together outshone the irritation I’d once felt at her often flippant attitude. After everything we’d faced together, looking at her stirred a much deeper and more poignant emotion, one so unfamiliar I couldn’t put a name to it. I only knew it would be a near thing not attempting to sever Omen’s head from his body if she died because of his distrust.

  That emotion gripped me even harder when Sorsha offered me her softest smile. A matching tenderness shone in her eyes. “I appreciate that, Thorn. I know you wouldn’t make an offer like that to most people. But I really can handle this myself—and it’ll prove much more to Omen if I do. Are you doubting my strength?”

  She flexed her biceps and didn’t quite conceal a wince. I couldn’t hold back my protest. “You’re wounded.”

  “But feeling better with every passing hour.” She patted her shoulder and then reached up to pat mine as well. Her touch brought back the quiver of sensation that had passed through me when she’d caressed my wings the other night, stirring a much more heated emotion I recognized perfectly well even if it hadn’t come to me often. Ah, yes, that was desire.

  I allowed myself just a fragment of remembering what her lithe body had felt like against mine when I’d captured her mouth so briefly, of imagining what it might feel like if I claimed her completely—and then I yanked myself back to the present.

  “I was listening closely to Omen’s requirements too,” Sorsha continued. “I’ve got this. And on the off-chance I’m wrong, I trust that you’ll catch me.”

  She bobbed up to give me a quick peck on the lips that sent an unreasonably hot flush through the rest of my body and sauntered back to rejoin the others.

  “Just to be clear,” she said to Omen, adjusting the straps of her backpack, “the only rule is that I can’t go inside this building, right?”

  He gave her a narrow look. “And you bring me the pot and flower unbroken. Those are the terms.”

  “Perfect. I accept. Now excuse me. I won’t go in this building, but I am going into that one.”

  A delighted laugh escaped Snap as our lady sashayed over to the office building next door. Omen’s expression turned murderous for an instant before he steadied himself with that nearly impenetrable cool calm he’d held in front of him like a shield since we’d first spoken to him after his escape.

  “It still won’t be easy for her,” he said.

  Ruse leaned back against the wall and tilted his head up to watch the balconies. “Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

  “This wasn’t my idea,” I told our commander. “I didn’t know that’s what she’d planned. She rejected my suggestion entirely.” He didn’t need to know exactly what that suggestion had been.

  Omen eyed me, but he knew I wouldn’t outright lie to him. He let out a huff. “Let’s see what she thinks she can get away with like this, then.”

  Snap headed down the laneway where he could get a slightly closer look at the flower pot in question, and Ruse trailed after him. I glanced at Omen and judged it safe enough to say, keeping my voice low, “I can tell you that she’s as honorable as she is determined. She—It came about that she witnessed my full form. I asked her not to speak of it with the other two, and she’s kept her word.”

  Omen betrayed a hint of surprise at that. He gestured up and down toward my body. “She’s seen you—wings and smoldering eyes and all?”

  “Yes,” I said. And she’d appeared to like what she saw, where most mortals might have screamed. A flicker of the heat she’d provoked raced through me again.

  “Hmm.” Omen went back to watching the upper reaches of the buildings, but I thought with a little less rancor.

  It didn’t take terribly long for Sorsha to emerge. She appeared at the edge of the opposite rooftop, a gleam of sunlight in the red hair she’d pulled into a tight ponytail. After giving us a jaunty wave, she swung a grappling hook she must have been carrying in that pack of hers across the distance.

  It caught on the requested balcony with a clatter. She paused, but no one emerged from the residence. Grasping the rope, she leapt off the roof.

  My breath started to hitch, but before I even had to recover it, she’d already planted her feet on the railing of the balcony below. She climbed the rope in a swift scramble, pausing just briefly with a suppressed wince only my battle-trained eyes might have picked up on, tucked the flower pot under her arm, and tossed the hook back toward the roof she’d descended from.

  Less than five minutes later, Sorsha pranced out of the office building and held out the flower to Omen. “As you ordered. Now are we done with these stupid games or what?”

  Omen glared at her. “For the time being,” he said, as if he wasn’t quite finished with her, and I knew it was too early to be truly relieved. When Omen put his mind to something, he was as unshakeable as—well, as a hound.

  5

  Sorsha

  “Wait,” Vivi said, lowering her half-eaten butterscotch chocolate-chip cookie. “So, this badass shadowkind boss named his station wagon Betsy?” A snicker escaped her. Then she half-choked on the bite she’d just taken and sputtered several coughs, still managing to sound amused.

  I grinned back at her. “That’s right.” Basking in the hot late-afternoon sun across the glass-topped café table from my bestie, I found it easier to let go of the uneasiness Omen had stirred up in me and simply laugh about him. Sweet cinnamon sparkles, had I missed having Vivi here to shoot the breeze with.

  The only thing that might have elevated our reunion more was if we’d felt confident enough to drop in on our favorite dessert place near her parents’ house, which we’d visited nearly every week when I’d stayed with her family in the first year after Luna’s death. But this new spot, where we’d nabbed a table on the sunny back patio, had already more than met my best friend’s approval. After one nibble, she’d declared her cookie was “the cream of the icing on the cake.”

  “And how does Omen feel about you hanging out with me, if he’s so down on mortals in general?” she asked now.

  My spirits sank a little, but I kept my smile. “I convinced him you’d cause way less carnage if I gave you the low-down than if you were running around the city without the full story. He still attempted to burn a hole throug
h my head with his glare.”

  Vivi made a show of checking my face over. “Didn’t work. Not so powerful after all, I guess.” She paused, her own grin fading. “Is that the full story now?”

  “All the important parts. If I went into every detail, we’d be here for a couple of weeks.” And I wasn’t sure I wanted to fill her in on every detail when those details included things like Thorn tearing the heads off of guards to avenge my shoulder wound. It was hard to see moments like that in a positive light if you hadn’t been there.

  I wanted Vivi to keep a positive outlook on my new companions specifically because I’d predicted her next question. She leaned her elbows on the table and gazed at me coyly through her eyelashes. “And when am I going to meet your incredibly hot new boyfriends?”

  I’d skipped most of the details there too, but maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned just how friendly I’d gotten with my trio at all. I popped one last bite of my blueberry pie into my mouth and waggled my fork at Vivi. “They’re not exactly my boyfriends. It’s not as if a mortal could really date a shadowkind guy, let alone three of them.”

  She waved my protest away. “Okay, your new cuddle-buddies. Whatever you want to call them, the question stands. I promise not to try to steal them away from you, but you’ve got to at least share the eye-candy.”

  “We’ll see. I’m not sure I want Omen knowing any more about you than he already does.” And I also wasn’t sure she wouldn’t think I was bonkers once she took in the full reality of the trio. I’d gotten to know them—in ways both literal and biblical—enough that their oddities didn’t faze me, but Vivi had never been all that close with any shadowkind before. I didn’t think she could even totally understand the bond I’d had with Luna.

  For all the polite language they used and all the work they put into protecting shadowkind creatures, most of the Fund members never stopped thinking of those beings as monsters.

  “Fine.” Vivi wrinkled her nose at me and recovered her grin. “You are at least going to let me help out now, right? I need to get in at least one grand adventure before I hit thirty, or what the hell am I doing with my life? I can be very useful, I’ll have you know. Look at me, all professional poise.”

  She gestured to her outfit, which as always was white from neck to toe: an ivory blouse and wide-leg dress pants over strappy sandals with a reserved twinkle of gold at the buckles. Even with the explosion of dark curls that burst at the back of her head from the tight braids along the rest of her scalp, she did exude a certain elegance that I doubted I’d ever pull off. Being raised by a shadowkind left a person a little feral in ways it was difficult to shake.

  “I’ll give you that,” I said. “Let’s see what comes out of the, um, meeting tonight, and I’ll let you know where we need you.”

  She gave me a questioning look at that statement, but I held up my hands in a gesture for mercy. I wasn’t shutting Vivi out this time around, but I sure as sugar wasn’t dragging her off to a direct ambush of the murderous and potentially psychotic sword-star crew. Especially when she still saw this as an adventure, even if she realized it was a dangerous one now.

  I had to get going to prepare for that ambush. As we left the café, I gave Vivi a tight hug, as if I could absorb her cheer into me to bolster me through the battle ahead. We said our “Ditto”s, and I headed for the spot where the quartet was meant to pick me up, singing a little song to inspire myself. “We’ll touch and surround, I’m on the hunt this af-ter-noon.”

  Omen eyed me as I got into the back seat of the station wagon as if checking me over for mortal cootie contamination. I was mature enough at that particular moment not to stick my tongue out at him in return. The other three were sticking to the shadows as they often did in the car, but I took a little comfort in knowing I wasn’t actually alone with the dude.

  “Vivi’s going to be chill,” I told him. “She won’t stick her nose in unless I ask her to—and I’ll only ask her with something really specific that none of us can do.”

  Bossypants let out a grunt that seemed to say he couldn’t imagine there being any task fitting that criteria and switched the car into drive. I drew in another sniff of that odd smell that clung to the vehicle’s interior. Dry, smoky, a little savory, with that trace of minerals… Maybe he crisped chicken wings on a tray of scorching crystals in his spare time? It could be some weird shadowkind hobby no one had bothered to tell me about.

  Ruse’s charmed hacker had dug up the details of the hand-off we were heading to. It was supposedly taking place an hour after sunset in the parking lot of a mini-golf course. Not your typical spot for illicit exchanges of creatures the average mortal didn’t even believe existed, but when we slunk over after leaving Betsy a short distance away, I could see why they’d picked it.

  The course with its candy-bright painted fixtures—a windmill here, a castle there—surrounded the parking lot on two sides and was big enough that no one farther afield would have been able to see what was happening in the lot. A dingy warehouse offered a windowless brick wall on the third side, so no witnesses there. At the road, someone had conveniently left a dumpster full of construction rubble where it blocked most of the view of the span of asphalt, and the nearest streetlamps had burnt out. By a total coincidence, no doubt.

  We’d arrived just as the sun was setting. The shadows of the miniature structures stretched twice as long as the actual fixtures across the patches of green. Ruse slipped through the shadows to unlock the gate so I could follow them in.

  “Your only job is to hang back until we have our prize,” Omen ordered me. He pointed to the roof of the hut that held the ticket sales booth and equipment. “Thorn will boost you up there. Stay out of view and watch the transaction. I only want to hear or see you if you spot something from up there that the rest of us need to know. Once we’ve trapped one of their number, then you can jump in to remove protective wards as necessary.”

  “And to open the cage to let their shadowkind prisoner out,” Snap piped up.

  “Yes, that too,” Omen muttered as if annoyed at the reminder that I would be useful in more than one way. He fixed his stare on me. “Got it?”

  “Aye, aye, captain,” I said dryly. I suspected he’d have tried to lock me in the car instead of letting me tag along at all if he’d thought there was any chance that car could hold me for more than a minute. But even he couldn’t deny the value of my immunity to the materials that deflected shadowkind powers.

  Just in case I found a good use for it, I picked up one of the mini-golf clubs and swung it experimentally through the air. A little light, but it had decent heft to it. For good measure, I stuffed several of the small but incredibly dense golf balls into the pouches on my belt.

  I’d decked myself out in full cat-burglar gear for this operation. If I didn’t move or speak, I’d be nothing but a shadow on the rooftop, even my red hair hidden under the black knit cap. Thank flaming eels the evening was already starting to cool off, or I’d have been a puddle of sweat in a matter of seconds.

  Thorn gave me a boost to the edge of the roof, and I scrambled across it to duck down behind one of the fake gables. Peeking over the protruding section, I could make out the edge of the golf course and all of the parking lot.

  The shadowkind quartet had discussed their plans in more depth while I’d been chatting with Vivi. As I settled into my position, they vanished into the shadows. From what I’d gathered, they were going to station themselves in a rough circle around the parking lot. The idea was to watch the hand-off long enough to determine the sword-star crew’s usual procedures, and then—unless the squad appeared too well-equipped—charge in, free the shadowkind the collector was selling to them, and snatch one of the sword-star employees for later questioning.

  I shifted my position on the clay tiles a few times, my back getting stiff and my shoulder achy from my hunched posture. Every time a car rumbled by through the deepening evening dark, I froze. Finally, a black van that looked like the sort of vehicle u
sed to transport large livestock pulled into the lot. It parked in the far corner where the golf course rubbed up against the warehouse.

  Only one figure stepped out—the collector, I assumed. At first glance, he could have passed for an evil-genius supervillain from the type of comic books I was guessing our hacker had read too many of. The dome of his bald, bulbous head shone in the faint light from the far-off streetlamps, and he wore a gray suit with its square collar buttoned right up to his chin. I half expected him to produce a monocle from his chest pocket.

  Then I noticed the sheen of perspiration that caught even more of the light than the pale skin of his scalp. The dude might have supervillain fashion aspirations, but super-confident he was not.

  It took another ten minutes before a second vehicle growled into the lot: a white delivery truck with a bakery logo painted on the side. A fake business, or another front like the discount toy store the sword-star crew had run some of their operations out of? I made a mental note of the name in case it was the latter.

  Five figures emerged from the truck. They wore the silver-and-iron helmets and plated vests that we’d seen before. All shadowkind found one if not both of those metals repellent, but they couldn’t block Thorn’s physical strength or whatever concrete tricks Omen had dreamed up.

  One of the figures appeared to have a whip, probably one of those glowing laser-y ones, at his hip, but they weren’t holding any weapons. It looked like they didn’t anticipate dealing with any hostile parties in this transaction.

  Exactly as we’d hoped.

  The sweaty collector opened the back door to his van. Searing light spilled out—he’d have bright lamps set up all around the cage that must be holding the powerful creature to prevent it from slipping away into the shadows. The sword-star bunch wheeled a container like an oversized gym locker out of the back of their truck and set it facing the van. It looked like they meant to transfer the cage from the van into that box, which must have lights of its own.