Chapter 4
Lance
The interior walls of the cabin were covered with this smooth wood paneling that gave off a smell more like plastic than trees. I wrinkled my nose at them and then applied my claws. With a few twists and flicks of my fingers, I carved a swirling design into the surface, cutting through the outer coating to the paler grain underneath.
The imagery didn’t mean anything, but it pleased me simply to have bent the place a little to my will. To make it a little less mortal-seeming. It was ours—or our boss’s, anyway—and the place should look like it.
Drawn by a whim, I moved farther along the living room wall. I trailed my claws in ragged lines and then scraped them up and down, enjoying the sound and the vibration through my hand more than the picture I was creating now.
Crag lumbered over from the short hall that held the two bedrooms and the bathroom and eyed me with typical impassiveness. It was hard to tell whether any of my habits annoyed the gargoyle or simply didn’t matter to him at all. You’d have thought his human form was made of stone too.
“She’s still sleeping,” he announced, keeping his deep baritone low as if he were afraid of making that statement untrue.
He wasn’t talking to me. We both knew the man who gave our direct orders was in the room. A second later, Torrent emerged from the shadows by one of the armchairs that stood in a cluster around a rattan coffee table. He sank into the chair immediately but left his usual supporting tentacles out, squeezed against the padded arms. Our commander liked to be ready for any eventuality.
“It isn’t surprising,” he said to Crag. “She was up late and stressed out, and we know she has some issues with her health. She’ll be up soon enough.”
He sounded awfully sure about that. I poked my claws right into the wall, stopping just sort of piercing it all the way through to the damp swampy air outside, and then yanked them out with a push off the wall to flip upside down. Curling my fingers, I avoided stabbing the floorboards. With a swift contortion of my body, I whirled around and over, landing on my feet again just shy of the dining table, grinning with the burst of exhilaration.
No one could ever predict exactly how they’d need to be ready for me.
“Did you talk to the boss?” I asked, without much concern either way. I wouldn’t mind spending a little longer in this place. With no mortals around for miles, I could leap and tumble around the swamp lands in either of my forms without worrying about who might see me. And I hadn’t found myself in a place quite like this before, where the heat was more damp than dry and the air pungent with the scents of vegetation both living and rotting.
The mortal world was bewildering at times, but you could never call it boring.
Torrent frowned and took one of those mortal phones out of his pocket. “I tried. I think one of the creatures we fought off last night must have damaged it. At least a couple of them had some kind of electrical affinity, and Highest only know about the others. All I’m getting is a clicking sound. I sent my message anyway, in case that’s what Rollick intended, and I sent a text as well… If I haven’t gotten a response soon, there are backup methods I can turn to.”
“He wanted us to be very careful about bringing her in,” Crag said, as if we’d have forgotten that heavily emphasized point. Torrent was the one who’d told us that. I rolled my eyes and picked at a bit of fish that’d gotten stuck in my teeth after my early morning hunting.
I could have simply melded into the shadows and reemerged to lose anything I didn’t want to keep on my physical body, but working with my claws was more fun. It’d taken me a while before I could maneuver them nimbly enough to manage something like this without scratching my gums open.
“We have permission to report back in three months anyway,” I said.
Crag’s ample muscles tensed. “We can’t wait that long.”
“Why not? It’s safe enough here.” I waved my hand toward the swamp beyond the windows near the cluster of chairs. “I could feel the silver and iron barrier around the property when I was out earlier. All prickly and shivery. No one’s feeling her out through that.”
Torrent nodded. “The defensive posts should deflect all shadowkind senses. At least, in her current state.” His narrow brow furrowed. “The impression she gives off got a little stronger last night. That’s what drew the attack. I hadn’t even realized how many lesser beings were gathering in the city. They must have picked up the general sense but not exactly where it was coming from—until that moment.”
“Why do they all want to kill her, though?” I asked. “Whatever specialness she’s got, it doesn’t make us want to dice her up. Or not me, anyway.” I considered my colleagues.
Crag grunted. “I don’t feel any urge to harm her.”
“No,” Torrent said. “But we did notice that the vibe around her had a vague threatening quality. It heightened with the spike of the energy last night. It’s obvious to us that she doesn’t pose any danger, but lesser beings aren’t exactly known for their wits. They acted on instinct—destroy the threat before it could get strong enough to destroy them.”
“Running into a fight. Silly beasties. And then they die.” I clicked my claws together.
Crag frowned. “It bothered them enough that they didn’t back off even when we were defending her. Usually they have more sense of self-preservation.”
Torrent shrugged. “Maybe her vibe affects lesser beings differently than it does us. We couldn’t even pick up on the energy enough to be sure it was anything that unusual until last night. Rollick wasn’t very clear on her specific qualities of interest. It doesn’t matter anyway. He knows his own plans, and we know our orders.”
His statement was punctuated by a shrill beeping that emanated from the room where we’d left the mortal woman sleeping. Ah, that was how Torrent had known she’d wake up shortly. We’d heard the alarm go off over and over while we’d been keeping an eye on her.
I hadn’t bothered noting the time or whether it was always the same time. The commander was better with details like that.
My keen ears picked up a rustle of fabric and a hitch of breath. The alarm shut off. Then there was a momentary silence. The woman inhaled shakily, followed by some more rustling.
Torrent held up his hand in a gesture for us to stay still and silent. We were all out of view of the end of the hall.
The bedroom door squeaked open, the woman’s feet padded tentatively across to the bathroom, and water warbled through the pipes. Some more rustling. Then she edged toward the living room, coming to a stop on the threshold, still in the same black tank top and flexible jeans as yesterday. One of her pale hands clutched the silly knife she’d wielded yesterday; the other a familiar container of pills.
She peered at us for a long moment as if checking to see whether we’d changed our minds about the whole protecting her thing overnight and might launch ourselves at her with fangs bared. Her long blond hair was rumpled from sleep but tumbled over her toned shoulders to picturesque effect. I had the urge to twine my fingers through it and find out how it’d feel to the touch.
“Is the water here safe to drink?” she asked after she appeared to decide that speaking wouldn’t provoke us into a murderous rage. “My bottle is empty, and I need—I need to take my pills.”
Torrent motioned toward the kitchen area at the far end of the main living space. “It’s all up to mortal standards.”
She strode over to the sink with the swift, powerful stride I’d observed in her before. She couldn’t use her body as deftly as I did mine, but then, few shadowkind even could.
From what I’d seen of humans, she was impressively nimble. We’d followed her up and through all sorts of buildings in the last three months. She seemed to take particular interest in any place that other mortals avoided out of caution. An interesting approach—one I completely approved of.
As she filled a glass with water and gulped down her pills, I stalked closer. She turned when I was just a few feet away with a swish of her hair and an abrupt widening of her bright blue eyes. Her pupils dilated, and she wet her lips with a little flick of her tongue that brought a grin to my face. A faint pinkish tone colored her cheeks.
She was scared… but she also liked what she saw. I’d observed this kind of reaction to me before. Something in my human form was particularly appealing to a large number of mortals. It’d come to my advantage once—at a time I’d rather not think about.
Her, I didn’t need to worry about. She hadn’t even been able to fend off the little beasties on her own.
“What are those for?” I asked her, tipping my head toward the pill container. She swallowed down an awful lot of them day by day. We hadn’t observed any other signs of sickness in her.
Her hand tightened around the container. She grasped the high neckline of her tank top with the fingers still gripping her knife and tugged it low enough to reveal a thin line that was a darker pink than the rest of her skin, slicing from just below the level of her collarbone in a straight line down the middle of her chest. It disappeared into the shadows of her cleavage.
She let the thin fabric spring back into place. “When I was a kid, I got sick with a virus that ended up wrecking my heart. The only way I made it through was a transplant. If I don’t take the pills at the right times every day, my body could reject the transplanted heart. Or do a heck of a lot of other bad things.”
I blinked. She’d gotten a whole new heart? What kind of magic was that?
“Why—” I started, and Torrent cleared his throat.
“Lance, don’t badger her with questions.”
I smirked at him. “I’m curious.”
“You’re always curious,” he retorted. “That’s not her problem.” He turned to the woman. “Shadowkind don’t get sick, so we don’t have the same concept of these things. Even if there was a germ in this realm that could affect us, it’d vanish the second we slipped back into the shadows.”
“Oh. That’s… handy.” She appeared to rally herself, drawing her chin higher. “Actually, I’ve got some questions I’d like to ask all of you. You said you’d try to answer them.”
Torrent’s mouth formed a thin smile of his own. “I did.” The end of one of his tentacles swung in a slow arch where it dangled over the arm of the chair.
“Last night,” she said. “How did you know to be there? It seemed like you were ready when the other… shadowkind attacked.”
“The same aspect of your presence that caught their notice alerted us as well,” Torrent said smoothly. “When we saw what was happening, it became clear you needed protection from our… less considerate kin.”
A wider smirk stretched across my face. He wasn’t even lying. He was just leaving out the fact that we’d been watching for the beasties to catch notice for months beforehand. He’d mentioned to me earlier that she wouldn’t take well to the idea that we’d been spying on her.
The woman arched an eyebrow. “You just happened to be in the park?”
“It has the most shadows,” Crag put in with standard gruffness.
“But what were you doing in Jacksonville at all? Is it some kind of major monster tourist hotspot?”
Torrent gazed back at her evenly. “We ‘monsters’ have abilities of perception beyond what mortals are used to. We had the sense that something important was going to happen.”
I managed to hold in a snicker, knowing Torrent wouldn’t like me sounding as if I were mocking his answer. In this case, our special “ability of perception” had been named Rollick.
His answers seemed to diffuse the worst of the woman’s anxieties. Her shoulders came down, her stance relaxing a little. She studied each of us again, her eyes lingering just a little longer on my face than the others. Oh, yes, there was a spark of interest there, a heat fascinatingly different from the fire I could draw up my throat.
“You look different,” she said, and then, to Torrent, “Well, not you. I don’t think. But… Crag? He had wings. He flew me here! And I think he was bigger too. And… Lance?” She said my name as if testing the flavor. “When I first saw you—or what I think was you—you didn’t seem human at all.”
“Shadowkind have two physical forms,” Torrent said. “Our more natural one that’d get us called monsters, and one that’s mostly human-like, other than we all have one or another aspect that we can’t help carrying over.”
“We assumed you’d prefer the human-like guises,” I said, prowling close enough that I could have touched her if I’d reached out. “We could switch to the beasts if you’d like.” I grinned with a flash of my square teeth which could shift into fangs in a matter of seconds.
Her pupils dilated all over again, her breath quickening in a way that stirred my own blood. “No, that’s all right,” she said hastily. “I think this way is better. Easier.”
I did reach out then, grazing the back of my fingers down her bare arm and enjoying the deeper flush that spread across her face. It hadn’t felt like a reward to get this kind of response while I’d been bound to someone else’s whims. But every time I’d seen similar reactions from mortals since, I had to wonder what it might be like to let them act on it. To meet them halfway and see what those sparks could erupt into when fanned.
“I make a pretty monster too,” I teased with another grin.
The woman’s blush spread down her neck. She backed up a step. “I, um—” Her forehead creased as if she was thinking of more questions to ask us.
Torrent interrupted before she could form any of them. “I think our mortal had better get some breakfast into her. We don’t want her starving to death after we’ve gone to the trouble of saving her life.”
“Of course we don’t,” I said with a chuckle, and snatched an orange out of the fruit bowl we’d stocked overnight, along with the fridge and the cupboards. With a whisk of my claws, I’d severed it into eight perfectly even slices. She normally had an orange with the breakfasts we’d observed, if not quite so expertly cut. “If you want some fruit?”
Quinn gaped at the orange, my claws, and then me with a flare of something in her eyes that made me sure I was going to like having her around very much indeed.