The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 18

Torrent

When we returned to the marina in Daytona Beach, the sun was just starting to peek over the horizon, sending golden glimmers across the expanse of water. How pretty.

A century ago I’d have wanted to pop a hallucinogenic mushroom or smoke a joint while appreciating the view. That’d been the old me. Not a care in the world until my carelessness had sent me up shit creek.

The thought made me glare at the ocean as I slipped through the shrinking patches of gloom to the yacht’s helm. Lance and Crag made quick work of the moorings without being asked. As I started the engine, they vanished again, wary of watching mortal eyes while we were this close to civilization. Our one acceptable mortal, Quinn, hunkered down in the small lounge area on the bow and immediately pulled out her laptop.

Amazing that she could still be thinking about her schoolwork despite everything else that was going on around her. I didn’t think I’d ever met another mortal so dogged in her goals. I checked the controls and ensured the wifi was on, for however long we’d have service as we headed out to sea.

I raised my voice to call through the window. “Don’t tell anyone where you are.”

Quinn waved her hand in a gesture that seemed to say, “I’m not stupid, don’t worry about it.” Which I could picture her saying with her mouth just as easily.

It wasn’t her wisdom I was worried about. As I guided the yacht out of the marina and left the city behind for open water, an unfamiliar sense of uncertainty itched at me more insistently than the dull ache in my legs. The pain had expanded during the drive, even though I’d used my good foot to manipulate the pedals, but I was used to it. My lack of clear direction was much less familiar.

I’d sent another message to Rollick shortly before the attack on the cabin—a longstanding method I hadn’t needed to turn to often, placing a classified ad in a newspaper he checked every morning. In it, I’d indicated that we had the “prize,” but at the time I hadn’t known that we’d be making a hasty break for it and leaving any property where he’d think of looking for us behind.

He’d be aware that I was trying to reach out to him now and that the original method had failed. I could leave another phone message giving him the details of our current whereabouts. But something in me had balked ever since we’d left the cabin.

Crag had insisted that we should find out exactly what our mortal companion’s significance was. Crag, who barely ever spoke up about anything, least of all to go against established orders. If he felt that strongly about Quinn, maybe I should give the matter more consideration.

And investigating her power benefitted Rollick as well. We didn’t really understand the situation, and he hadn’t seemed to be sure of what was special about this woman either. What if she was dangerous to our boss in some way? What if there was some factor he hadn’t realized that would affect his next steps?

I was merely doing my due diligence as his loyal lieutenant.

With the land slipping out of view behind us, my shadowkind companions blinked into view around Quinn, Lance dangling a bag of breakfast food he’d grabbed on our way back. Quinn set aside her computer to dig in with the two of them. She smiled at Crag and laughed at some antic of Lance’s, and her blue eyes glittered almost as bright as the sunlight in her pale hair.

She raised her arms over her head to stretch them, and her breasts lifted beneath the thin fabric of her tank top. My cock twitched for an instant before I jerked my gaze away.

I focused on the navigational console in front of me. Yes, this woman was resilient and clever and bold, and someone more inclined to poetry might claim she was as pretty as the sunrise dancing on the sea. She was also human, and therefore as ephemeral as that light. Mortals bent to our whims—when we could act on them—not us to theirs. One rare example who was offered something unexpected didn’t change the way our worlds worked.

None of us should be spending more than the bare minimum of time admiring her assets. Any of them.

We needed to make more progress in our search. The past day had turned up nothing productive except the stiffening of my groin while I’d examined Quinn’s lithe body with my tentacle yesterday. The sooner we knew the full picture, the sooner I’d be ready to hand her over to the boss.

Then it wouldn’t matter how smart or considerate or pretty she was. The increasingly loud internal voice that wanted to debate my decisions could shut up, and everything could go back to how I knew it actually was.

Quinn and the others headed up to the rooftop deck. As their muffled voices faded away completely, I pulled out my phone and dialed Goldie’s number.

“Twice in as many days,” my old friend teased when he picked up. “Lucky me. I trust both vehicles met your specifications.”

“They’re perfect,” I said. “Thank you. I knew I could count on you. There’s one more thing I need, but it’ll only take a little of your time, nothing else. I can always add to your stash of gold if you want me to.”

Goldie scoffed. “I’m not going to nickel and dime someone I go so far back with, Torrent. Repay me by not being so much of a stranger from now on. What is it?”

“I’d like to know if you’ve noticed or heard about any unusual surges in shadowkind activity in Florida. Or any unusual incidents in the area involving shadowkind.”

The leprechaun hummed to himself. I didn’t figure he’d have heard anything from Jacksonville, considering there wouldn’t have been much in the way of witnesses to any of the attacks there or in the area, but who knew what else Quinn’s predators had been getting up to.

“There has been a sort of uneasy vibe in the local community lately,” he said. “I couldn’t point to any specific source, just a feeling that I get of beings on edge or stirred up. And come to think of it, I’ve noticed more activity than usual at the local rifts—not a lot more, but definitely a higher influx than I’d typically see around here.”

“More beings arriving from the shadow realm?” I clarified.

“Yeah. Not sure what that’s about, though, so sorry I can’t help more. As for incidents, I don’t think— Hmm. How far back do you mean by recently?”

“What’s the most recent incident you can think of?” I said dryly.

Goldie drew in a breath with a slight hiss through his teeth. “Well, it was a few months ago… Four or five. There was a bit of a commotion in the community about a major sorcerer family that got murdered by shadowkind just outside of Miami. No one was totally sure who did it, only that it’d been some very badass mofos. Before it happened, I hadn’t even known the sorcerers were there, so I couldn’t tell you more than that.”

“Good riddance,” I muttered automatically, but the information didn’t help me all that much. Sorcerers enslaved shadowkind and bent them to their will—as much as the limited human magic they were able to tap into allowed—so I was never going to be sad to hear any of them had left this world. But I didn’t see how that attack could relate to the ones on Quinn.

She obviously had no associations with sorcery or others who practiced it. She hadn’t even known shadowkind existed until the other night. We’d seen no signs of anything remotely resembling magical practice while we’d watched her for the three months before we’d had to reveal ourselves.

At most, there could be a tenuous connection in that shadowkind might have started roaming the state more freely once that family was out of the picture, meaning more potential attackers had been around when they’d noticed Quinn’s odd aura.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“That’s all I can think of,” Goldie replied. “But you know me. I mostly deal in concrete goods, not information. If I can’t test my teeth on it, it’s not worth much to me.” He guffawed.

“I appreciate it all the same,” I said. “And I’m sorry for the long silence. I got wrapped up in some things that took me pretty far from my usual habits.”

Goldie snorted. “Tell me about it. And really, tell me about it. What in the realms have you been up to all this time, man? It’s been, what, seven decades? Eight?”

Seventy-three years, to be exact, but I didn’t want him to know how closely I kept track. “Something like that. It’s complicated and boring—believe me, nothing you could sink your teeth into.”

“Oh, come on. I know you’ve got to have a few stories in you. I can’t believe Mr. Party Hard lost his wild side completely.”

No, I hadn’t lost it. You could more say it’d been torn from me against my will.

Goldie went on before I could answer. “Remember that party out in Boston at the turn of the century? You were so high you went through five girls without breaking a sweat. I was so high I dropped all the trinkets I’d lifted from the mortal crowd off the fucking pier. But then I managed to convince a mermaid to take me for a very enjoyable swim, so it all worked out. Man, I haven’t had a time like that in a while.”

I did remember that party, vaguely and with an uncomfortable prickling over my skin at how blurred the memory was… like so many of my memories from the first several centuries of my life. “It was quite a night.”

“Aw, come on, Torrent. That’s the best you can say about it?” The leprechaun clucked his tongue. “I’m starting to think someone gave you a personality transplant. Who’m I really talking to here, and what have you done with my real friend?”

“Hey,” I said. “It’s been a long time. I found new pastimes to enjoy. But if you hear about another party like that one, drop me a line and we’ll recreate a little history.”

I didn’t actually mean that—I just wanted to stop his line of conversation. But as his words sank in, the wheels in my head started spinning.

Goldie laughed and said he’d be in touch, and I barely paid attention to my parting remarks. I set down the phone, checked that there weren’t any obstacles in sight, and engaged the autopilot. Then I headed up to the rooftop deck.

It would have been easier to climb the stairs if I’d traveled through the shadows, but something about Goldie’s remarks had woken up a renewed stubbornness inside me. I gritted my teeth, gripped the railing beside the steps, and forced my damaged legs to carry me up as my tentacles braced my weight. The ache throbbed deeper, but I endured it.

Lance had opened the awning that shaded most of the deck and was leaping back and forth between it and the railings, showing off his much more impressive balance. Because of course he was. Crag hadn’t allowed himself the luxury of the padded lounge chairs, instead sitting poised on one of the storage compartments, scanning the horizon for trouble as always. He gave me a quick nod when I reached the deck and went back to his surveying.

Quinn was typing something on her laptop, sprawled on one of the loungers. As I sat down on the chair next to her, the pain easing again with my weight off my legs, she clicked a button that created the whooshing sound of a sent email and glanced over at me.

“What’s next?” she asked before I even had to bring up the subject. “I know the idea is that we rest during the day out here on the water where it’s safer, but what are we going to do tonight?”

She wanted answers just as much as we did—maybe even more. I couldn’t suppress the flicker of admiration that passed through my chest as I looked back into her bright but determined gaze.

She was mortal, but I could admit I hadn’t met any quite like her before. Had Rollick meant he literally wanted to devour her? It seemed like a waste.

But why should I pity some random mortal woman I hadn’t known just a few months ago? I’d survived this long despite my infirmities because I looked out for myself first, the small number of other beings I trusted a distant second, and everyone else not at all. I was done with chasing fleeting highs and bodily indulgences that could distract you into your doom.

Most of the time, I didn’t even miss them. At least not enough that I allowed myself to notice.

“I had a new idea about that,” I said, adjusting my tentacles around my frame. “There’s one major factor we haven’t investigated yet—the origins of your borrowed heart.”

I motioned to her chest, and her eyebrows rose. That factor should have occurred to me earlier, but the idea of transplanting a significant piece of one body into another was so foreign to shadowkind practices that the full nuances of the scenario, the fact that a key part of her had once belonged to an entirely separate human being, hadn’t really sunk in until Goldie had made his wheedling remarks.

“You think my new heart has something to do with it?” Quinn said. “You didn’t mention sensing anything about it in particular yesterday.”

“I didn’t, but it would fit with the impressions I did get—the energy concentrated in your chest but spread through your body, which could be via your blood. There’s no reason to assume it’s definitely related to your ‘specialness,’ though, other than the fact that none of the other possibilities we’ve checked out have gotten us anywhere.”

She smiled at me with a warm familiarity that sent an unwanted hitch through my pulse. “And you believe in considering every possibility.”

My lips started to curl in a responding smile before I caught them. I dropped my gaze and then forced it to meet hers again—but it was already too late. Her face had fallen slightly with a shadow of concern. She’d picked up on my discomfort even if I didn’t think she could possibly guess at its source.

Although, she had figured out an awful lot about me that I hadn’t anticipated already, hadn’t she?

That was what made part of me shout so loudly to stand between her and anyone who came at her, regardless of my loyalties. She wasn’t just a superficial indulgence, a morsel that would evaporate the moment I partook. With every conversation we had, I couldn’t shake the growing sense that she saw me. Saw things about me I’d kept tightly under wraps. Things no other being around me had been able to recognize.

It unnerved me, but at the same time, the urge gripped me to let more spill out. To solidify the connection. To revel in the poignant ache that suggested I wasn’t cut off from the life I’d have wanted after all.

That maybe I didn’t have to be alone in every way that really mattered.

I clenched my jaw, shoving the errant longing down as far as I could. Who was I kidding? I knew my place in this world and how I’d gotten here, and imagining anything else was pointless.

My voice came out curter than I’d intended. “Do you know anything about the other human your heart came from?”

Quinn didn’t react to my tone. She sat up straighter, tucking her legs in front of her on the lounger. Her expression turned pensive.

“I do, actually. It was a girl around the same age as me—she had some kind of fatal accident. I wrote a letter to the family a little while after the transplant, thanking them for letting her heart be donated. You want us to go visit them?”

“We can at least take a look around and see if there’s anything unusual about their situation. If you mailed a letter to them, I assume you know where they live?”

“They’re in Florida,” she said. “I’m not sure how close to Jacksonville. I sent it through the hospital—privacy reasons and stuff. But the hospital will have the family’s name and the address somewhere in their records, I’m sure.”

I allowed a smile then, somehow feeling my heart lift with relief even as my stomach sank with a vague sense of dread, both at the knowledge that we might be reaching the end of our journey. “All right. Then tonight I’ll sneak back into the hospital and find out where we’re off to next.”