Chapter 20
Quinn
When the sign showing it was just 25 more miles until Miami flashed in the headlights of the sedan, I let out a whoop of approval. “Finally! We should have just stayed here in the first place.”
I could feel Torrent’s glower from his tone even if he couldn’t look at me from behind the wheel. “We didn’t know we’d be coming back to Miami then. And we did need to pick up your things from your house.”
I let out a huff, but I couldn’t really complain. He’d been doing all the driving as well as all the preliminary running around. After explaining to Crag in painstaking detail how to drive the boat, he’d slipped away and… I guessed swum? Over to shore a couple of hours ahead of us so he could zip over to Jacksonville and get his hands on those transplant records. He’d re-emerged on the yacht just a few minutes after Crag had brought us to a stop within view of the marina.
It turned out that my donor had lived off the beaten track beyond the outskirts of Miami. A few minutes after we’d spotted the sign, Torrent pulled off onto a smaller highway that would lead us west of the cities that sprawled along the Atlantic coast rather than right into them. He motioned for Crag, who’d taken the front seat this time, to show him the directions he’d written down.
The lights of civilization fell away, leaving us cruising through darkness broken only by occasional lamp posts along the road. The sole sound was a periodic crunching noise as Crag munched on a hunk of quartz he’d grabbed along with our more typical dinner. He’d explained that the minerals helped keep his strength up in physical form.
I couldn’t say listening to a gargoyle literally eating rocks was the most comforting sound. It did give me something else to focus on when one of those flutters whirled between my ribs. I’d had a few stronger ones, the beating-bird-wings type, since I’d woken up.
Beyond the windows, fields gave way to looming trees. In the night, they looked as monstrous as some of the deadly creatures I’d encountered. I restrained a shudder.
“You shouldn’t be scared of the dark after how much fun you’ve had with shadows,” Lance teased from beside me, grazing a claw up my arm.
I made a face at him. “A little fun and a lot of running for my life. I do appreciate the former, but I’m still not super happy about the latter.”
He shrugged. “It’s all an adventure. Skewer a beastie. Romp in bed. Chow down on some breakfast. As long as you don’t die, what’s there to worry about?”
“The fact that I’ve come awfully close to dying at least once,” I said dryly, and gave him a light kick in the shin. “Don’t worry. I don’t mean any criticism of your extensive abilities at adventuring.”
He smirked at me. “I know. That’s your favorite part.”
I couldn’t even argue with him. With another huff, I leaned against the window, hugging the messenger bag I’d brought along on my lap and peering at the silhouetted shapes streaming past the window.
At least the most predictable threat to my life was under control now. I’d restocked my weekly pill case before we disembarked, and there were plenty more in the prescription bottles I’d left behind on the yacht.
With each turn we took, the roads got narrower and bumpier. The trees pulled closer. The chirping of insect life started to penetrate the windows, almost as loud as the racket they’d made in the swamp.
There probably was a swamp around here somewhere. You didn’t get much wilderness in Florida without bog water in the mix.
Torrent pulled over briefly to study his notes and a map on his phone in more detail, and then drove on even slower than before. There was no way we were making it back to the yacht before sunrise, but I guessed it didn’t matter as long as we were on the move one way or another.
Finally, he turned onto a lane so narrow the vegetation hissed over the side of the car in places. I jostled in my seat as we thumped over a pothole. Just a minute or so down it, he parked where the shoulder got wider for a short stretch. Not that blocking the road was likely to have been much of a problem when it didn’t look like people drove down here often… or maybe even ever.
“I’ll take a look on my own from the shadows,” he said. “You two stay with Quinn for now.”
He wavered away before any of us could answer. Lance stretched out his lean legs between the seats and raised his hand to carve a few intersecting lines into the ceiling. I really hoped Goldie wasn’t hoping on getting back the vehicles he’d handed over—or at least not in the same condition they’d been in to start with.
“Why do you do that?” I asked Lance with a sudden itch of curiosity.
He shrugged, adding more details to his abstract design. “Who needs reasons? I like how it looks. It feels good on my claws. Also good practice for the other uses I might put them to—knowing how much pressure gives what results.” He flashed another smile at me.
I tapped him with my foot again. “I hope you’re not planning on carving me up.”
“Only as much as you like it,” he teased.
Crag made a rumbling sound and opened his mouth to speak, but just then Torrent blinked into being in the driver’s seat. He hadn’t usually conducted his investigations that quickly.
As I knit my brow, about to ask what was up, he motioned to the other men. “Come with me. There are no beings around. She’ll be fine for a few minutes.”
His voice was even but terse, what I could see of his expression tense. I leaned forward, going on the alert. “What did you find?”
His gaze flicked toward me for no more than an instant. “Don’t worry about it. Stay here.” Then he and the other two vanished.
“Of course I’m going to worry about it,” I snapped at the shadows they’d disappeared into. “Come back and tell me what’s wrong. We’re supposed to be working on this together.”
No one re-emerged. I didn’t know if they’d even heard me. They’d probably already slunk off to make their own investigations while leaving me in the dark, literally this time.
Apparently I was good enough for hooking up with but not for being let in on our mission to find out why I’d become a monster beacon, even though I was the only one here actually affected by it.
Torrent had said there weren’t any other shadowkind nearby. I hesitated for just a second and then pushed the door open, digging my phone out of my bag and switching on its flashlight. If they weren’t going to explain, then I’d just have to go with them whether they liked it or not.
I marched along the overgrown drive for several minutes. The thin beam of artificial light turned the shadows of the trees into deformed giants. My heart beat faster with each step. Every rustle in the trees made my nerves jump.
When Torrent appeared out of nowhere right in front of me, his tentacles braced beside him, I had to clap my hand over my mouth to stop myself from shrieking.
“What are you doing?” he demanded in a low, curt voice.
“This is my problem,” I shot back in a firm whisper, casting the phone’s beam toward the ground. It lit him with a hazy yellowish glow. “We’re here because of me. You said there’s nothing dangerous. I want to know what you saw that bothered you, that you needed Lance and Crag to check out.”
He scowled at me. “We can check it out a lot faster without you tramping around.”
Something in my chest plummeted at those words. Torrent had rarely been outright friendly with me, but I’d thought we’d at least reached a state of some kind of mutual respect. He’d understood my frustrations enough to bring me my laptop unprompted. He’d been awfully considerate about his examination of me.
But when it came down to the most important thing, the question of what was happening inside my own body that was threatening my life more than my health problems ever had, he didn’t think I had a right to be a part of it.
I sucked in a breath, annoyed by the burn of tears that prickled at the back of my eyes, and kept my voice as steady as I could. “I know I’m not as strong or fast or whatever else as the three of you. I know I’m just some fragile mortal to you. But I’m doing my best. I don’t think I’ve done that badly considering I had no idea beings like you even existed until a week ago.”
“Quinn,” Torrent interrupted with a clench of his jaw, his expression fragmented by shadows.
I didn’t let him stop me. “Look, when you need me out of the way for my own protection, that’s fine. I get it. I just don’t want to be treated like I’m not a part of this situation. The main part. It’s my life, my… specialness. I’m the one those things are trying to kill or kidnap or whatever. I need to know what’s going on—all of it. And if insisting on that is what gets me killed, then oh well. It’ll be my fault.”
I heard Torrent swallow. “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, the apology startling me. “I know you can handle a lot. You might as well come—just be quick about it. It’s about a quarter mile farther. I’ll meet you at the house.”
“Do I have to worry about anyone seeing me?” I asked before he could vanish in the darkness.
He shook his head, his mouth twisting. “There’s no one there.”
What?
He melded with the shadows before I could ask him anything else. I set off at a faster pace, raising my feet high the way I’d learned to when hustling through abandoned buildings and tunnels where I couldn’t be sure what might be strewn across the ground. There wasn’t much on the dirt lane other than twigs and tufts of weeds anyway.
Maybe five minutes later, the trees fell back ahead of me. I emerged into a clearing that held a sprawling bungalow, its walls a mix of wood and stucco. Tall windows glinted with the reflected glow of my light next to the front door; a few tiny ones ran along the side.
Across from the house, there was… a heap of rubble?
It took a few seconds for my mind to process what I was seeing in the eerie darkness. The jumble of wooden chunks, broken shingles, and mangled metal had probably been a garage. A garage that’d been battered nearly beyond recognition, along with one or more vehicles inside. A grimy strip of yellow caution tape lay on the well-trodden earth in front of it, torn from wherever it’d been attached before.
That was one construction failure the multitool in my pocket wasn’t going to fix. Holy shit.
All three of the men materialized around me. “Someone had a big temper tantrum,” Lance remarked, but his lilting tone didn’t sound quite as playful as it usually did.
“What happened?” I spun toward Torrent. “You said no one’s here?”
He motioned for me to follow him.
As we reached the door to the house, I spotted another ragged piece of caution tape that’d stuck to the base of the wall. From its position, I guessed it’d used to be stretched across the door. Whatever had happened here, it looked like the police had investigated it quite a while ago.
Crag pushed the door open and hesitated on the threshold, blocking me. “You might not like this,” he said gruffly.
“I already don’t like it,” I muttered. “But I think I’d better see it all anyway.”
As I stepped inside, I immediately found something else not to like: the smell. A sour, rotten stench hung in the air. Torrent left the door open after we’d all stepped inside, but the sluggish current of the breeze did little to displace the stink.
There was a living room immediately in front of us: sofa and chairs, a shattered coffee table, a framed picture that’d fallen off the wall. Deep gouges marked one of the armchairs, the stuffing spilling out. A chill rippled over my skin.
We walked on through a dining room and kitchen, around a corner into a hall—and there, I stalled in my tracks. My flashlight beam caught on dark splotches on the hardwood floor. From the thickened sour smell, it was hard to imagine they were anything other than blood stains.
Bile rose in the back of my throat. I wrapped my free arm around my chest, hugging myself. “What happened here?”
Torrent and Crag exchanged a glance. Lance was swaying from side to side on his feet, clicking his claws together, looking like he was gearing up to shred the whole place to pieces.
“I talked to Goldie today,” Torrent said. “He told me that earlier in the year, some shadowkind slaughtered a family of powerful sorcerers who were living near Miami.” He tipped his head toward pale markings on the floor near one of the bloodstains. “That’s the start of a chalk circle. And in here…”
He led us to a large room down the hall that held a broad wooden desk and shelves full of books and other paraphernalia. My light caught on candlesticks, carved daggers and broaches, sealed jars, and wooden boxes etched with unfamiliar occult-looking symbols. The chill inside me deepened despite the mugginess of the air.
“Sorcerers,” I repeated. “You mentioned those before—that’s humans who’ve learned how to use some kind of magic on shadowkind, right?”
Torrent nodded. “Sorcerers can capture beings already in the mortal realm—or, with enough power, draw them straight from the shadow realm—and force them to do their bidding. So you can understand why we wouldn’t be all that keen on them. Most likely a few beings they enslaved broke free and turned on their attempted masters. I’ve heard of that happening before. There’s a poetic justice to it.”
I walked over to the shelves, giving the items there a closer inspection. “What’s all this for? How does it even work?”
“I don’t know,” Torrent said, his voice sharpening. “They don’t exactly hold public forums on their practices.”
I made a face at him and picked up one of the daggers, wiping away the thin layer of dust. Metal bands inlaid its wooden handle. When I eased it out of the leather sheath, the blade gleamed with a vicious edge. It’d be a step up from my multitool’s knife.
I hesitated, glancing back toward the men, who’d stayed by the doorway. Whoever had owned this was long dead, but no inheritors had come to collect it. These people might have been enemies to the shadowkind, but a whole lot of shadowkind had made themselves my enemies. Torrent’s attempt at keeping me away earlier only proved that I needed to be more resourceful in defending myself. He needed to believe I could stand on my own.
“Is there any reason I shouldn’t take this?” I asked. “It doesn’t have any, like, spells on it or something, does it?”
Lance twitched. “Just don’t stick it into any of us,” he said in that same teasing but strangely tight tone.
“Of course not.”
Crag cleared his throat. “It’d do us more damage than a regular blade. It’s silver and iron. They’re both toxic to shadowkind.”
“Oh!” I stared down at the blade. Then I looked at the three men again. “You didn’t tell me that before. I could have gotten something made out of silver and iron to fend off the creatures that attacked me back at the cabin.”
“Forgive us for not wanting to arm you with a weapon equally deadly against us,” Torrent said tersely. “Go ahead. Take it. It might be useful to you in another attack.” He turned toward the hall.
I shoved the knife into my shorts, thankful that I’d picked all my clothes to have deep pockets for collecting anything of interest during my urban explorations. Only a bit of the hilt protruded by my hip.
Then a wave of bewilderment washed over me. The carnage in the home had distracted me from our original purpose for coming here.
“This was the address listed for my organ donor?” I said. “Was there a mistake? Or these sorcerer people moved in later?” It had been nine years.
“I don’t think so.” Torrent moved across the hall, the other men flanking him, and I hurried after them. I found myself in a small room that held nothing but a mahogany side table with what appeared to be memorabilia placed all across its surface. There was a beaded bracelet, a bronzed baby shoe, a scruffy teddy bear… a framed photo of a girl with long blond hair who looked maybe ten or eleven.
My lungs constricted. It looked like a shrine. Like a memorial to someone who’d passed away. Like a family might make for a child who’d?—
I shied away from finishing that thought, but the implications sank in anyway. I pressed my hand to my chest.
My heart—my borrowed heart—pounded away against my palm.
I swallowed thickly. “My new heart… It came from the sorcerers’ daughter? Is that why the monsters are after me? They don’t want any piece of them left?”
“That seems like a reasonable theory,” Torrent said stiffly.
“But—I’m not—I’m not a sorcerer. I have no idea—” I cut myself off, thinking of the ripples of energy that kept forming in my chest. I had no idea how to wield any supernatural power, but had my new heart come with a magic of its own?
Something that alerted the shadowkind nearby. Something that gave them the impression I was a threat to them. Oh, God.
Crag drew in a rough breath, but before he could say anything, a noise made us all freeze: the thrum of an engine and the rasp of tires over the ground outside.