The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 21

Quinn

The squeak of a brake filtered through the walls of the sorcerers’ house. My gaze darted around the sort-of shrine room, but it had only a small square window set high in the wall—all I could see through the glass was darkness.

Should we make a run for it? Which way would we go? It didn’t seem likely that shadowkind attackers would have approached in a human vehicle, but then, my shadowkind men clearly didn’t have any trouble using mortal technology when it suited them. Maybe our enemies were upping their game.

“What should we do?” I murmured as quietly as I could manage.

Torrent jerked his hand toward the doorway, and he and Lance immediately vanished. Crag stayed with me, clamping his hand on my shoulder.

“We should move to where we could escape if necessary,” he said brusquely, guiding me toward the hall. He had to duck to avoid braining his forehead on the doorframe. “It might only be mortal business, but they could get upset if they find you here.”

“Whoever came would have seen our car when they squeezed past it on the lane,” I pointed out. “They’ll know someone is here.”

My stomach knotted. What fresh hell were we facing now?

There was an abrupt thump and then a roar from outside. My pulse skittered. I lurched forward instinctively with the vague sense that I should be defending the men who’d gone ahead to defend us.

An oddly cheery female voice rang out, halting me as much as Crag’s hand did. “I think we can resolve this peacefully. Just back off each other, and no one has to get charbroiled. Because if anyone’s getting barbequed here, it’ll definitely be you.”

Crag growled low in his throat. He hesitated for a second, all his muscles tensed, looking torn between springing to his companions’ aid and keeping me as far from the conflict as possible.

I pushed forward, helping him make the decision. As he barged after me, we came into view of one of the living room’s broad windows.

An RV was parked outside the garage. A pretty unusual RV, with streamers dangling from its walls and a propeller spinning idly at its rear. Its headlights were still on, casting a hazy illumination over the figures gathered in the yard between it and the house.

Torrent had brought out two more tentacles—I hadn’t realized he had a collection he was keeping in reserve. Two were bracing him as usual and the other two were waving back and forth like the hands of a kung fu master waiting to strike. He was staring down a man just as massive as Crag, with glowing red eyes and darkly feathered wings that proved he was a shadowkind too.

Lance had shifted into full dragon form, crouched on the ground with tension coiled through his body, ready to spring. His fangs were bared, his talons raking against the earth. Across from him loomed a dark dog-like shape, if dogs loomed as tall as the average human and had rivulets of searing orange winding through their fur.

In the middle of it all stood a woman with bright red hair pulled back in a ponytail, her athletic frame clothed in a black tee and sweats. As far as I could tell at a glance, she looked totally human, but she spoke to the shadowkind as if she saw them more as difficult children than monsters.

“That’s it,” she said in the same upbeat tone, holding out her hands in a peacemaking gesture. “Take a few steps back, put your human-y faces on, and let’s see who we’re dealing with, all right? We don’t want to pulverize you.”

She sounded awfully confident that they could pulverize my men if they changed their minds about wanting to. Her friends hadn’t managed to overpower my protectors in the initial skirmish, though.

Seeing that the others weren’t in immediate danger, Crag stopped where he was, grasping my shoulder again to hold me in place too. But a voice carried from somewhere beyond the view of my window, this one male but nearly as perky as the woman’s.

“The other two from the car are inside, Sorsha—the one that tasted like stone and the human.”

Tasted like stone? When had he tasted Crag? And how could he have known how many of us had been in the car?

The woman—Sorsha?—clapped her hands together and then made a beckoning gesture. “Come on out, whoever’s hiding inside. We know there are four of you. We just want to find out what you’re doing here.”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Torrent said flatly. “What are you doing here?”

Sorsha cast him a baleful glance. “Put away your tentacles, and we’ll talk about it.”

“And we’re supposed to believe that after what happened to the people who lived in there?”

She wrinkled her nose in an expression of such disgust that I believed her next words without hesitation. “What? We didn’t have anything to do with the sorcerers who got slaughtered. It’s good to know that you didn’t either. We’re a little concerned about whoever did. That’s why we’ve had this place monitored.”

It didn’t sound like they were here for me then, or because they’d been planning to ambush us specifically. But I wasn’t sure if my men would stand down of their own accord. They did seem to lean toward violent solutions.

I set my hand over Crag’s to give it a reassuring squeeze and tugged him toward the door. “Come on. I don’t think they’re the enemy. Which means they might be able to help us.”

He made a discontented noise but stalked ahead of me, stepping into the doorway first as a shield. I peeked out through the small gap beside his arm.

“Hi,” I said, figuring it was better if I spoke up rather than him. “I’m all for talking rather than having these guys tear into each other. We were just looking around—we didn’t know what had happened here until we arrived. We thought the people living here had… something we needed.” I didn’t know how else to explain it.

Before anyone could answer, a tremor of the strange energy reverberated through my chest. I clutched Crag’s arm instinctively as three pairs of eyes shot to me—not just the dog-like beast’s and the scary angel’s, but the woman’s as well.

If she’d felt it, then she wasn’t human, was she?

Another figure sprang into existence just a couple of feet from the doorway. The man, tall and slim, peered past Crag at me with wide green eyes beneath a tumble of golden curls. His human-like face was all youthful beauty until his tongue flicked across his lips and I saw it was forked.

“What was that?” he asked with what sounded more like curiosity than apprehension. “You’re human, but there’s something else about you.”

“Um, yeah. That’s kind of why we’re here.”

Sorsha knit her brow. “Interesting. I think you’d better tell us the whole story.”

Crag cleared his throat. “We can’t stay here for long. Other creatures are attracted to her energy. They’ve been tracking her. If they catch up with us, we’ll have a bigger fight.”

“Got it. Well, as long as you promise not to do any maiming, we could take a ride in the Everymobile while we chat.” She jabbed her thumb over her shoulder at the RV.

“And why should we trust you enough to get into enclosed quarters with you?” Torrent asked.

Sorsha rolled her eyes at him. “You’re pretty pathetic shadowkind if you can’t hop out into the shadows whenever you feel like it.”

“Quinn can’t,” Crag growled.

The redhead paused. She swiped her hand across her mouth and then offered us a crooked smile. “I don’t suppose any of you heard about a big to-do about six years ago? A phoenix burning down a whole mass of shadowkind enemies before they could let loose something that would have destroyed both our realms? A whole bunch of other shadowkind rallying in support of her to stop the Highest from imposing sanctions?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but Crag frowned. Torrent folded his arms over his chest, his tentacles still raised for battle. “What about it?”

Sorsha blinked. There was a whoosh of flame, and two fiery wings flared from her back. A wavering light danced in her eyes. “I didn’t save all shadow and mortal kind just to go around incinerating random beings for poking around in strange places. If I wanted your woman dead, she’d be ashes already. So let’s get on with the talking?”

The wings contracted as quickly as she’d extended them, and she looked like a perfectly normal woman again. My breath caught in my throat. Crag had gone totally rigid in front of me, and Torrent…

He lowered his tentacles, staring at Sorsha. “You’re Ruby?”

She let out a huff. “I generally go by Sorsha. Are you coming or what?”

Torrent paused only a moment longer. Then he waved to the rest of us. “I think they’re okay. Let’s hear what they can tell us.”

Sorsha clucked her tongue as she led us over to the RV. “I’m thinking that the bunch of you should probably start this story.”

* * *

Several minutes later, I was perched on the end of a curved, padded bench inside the RV, which somehow looked way more spacious on the inside than my architect brain suspected it logically should.

Crag had insisted on squeezing in between me and our hosts. Next to him was the slim pretty boy with the golden curls and the forked tongue, and directly across from me was Sorsha. Torrent was leaning against the kitchen counter beside the dining area, all but his usual two tentacles tucked away. Lance had vanished into the shadows, but I assumed he was listening from there, like Sorsha’s massive winged friend.

The enormous glowing dog had transformed into a grouchy tawny-haired guy who’d scowled at us before taking the RV’s wheel. A fourth man, one with little horns protruding from his dark brown hair and a perpetual smirk, had propped himself in the little hall between the kitchen/dining area and the driver’s seat, watching the proceedings with apparent amusement.

Sorsha braced her elbows on the table, cocking her head as she took in the explanation we’d stitched together between me, Torrent, and Crag. “So the extra shadowkind activity we’ve been seeing in Florida—that’s been centered on you?” she said, eyeing me. “Because of this odd energy that seems to be coming from inside you.”

I nodded. “We don’t know what that energy is or why it’s happening, though. It doesn’t seem to actually do anything. We thought maybe it was because of my heart transplant”—I motioned to the top of my scar peeking from the neckline of my shirt—“and the records showed that the girl who donated it used to live at that house.”

Sorsha sucked in a breath. “Did you write them a letter? The family of the girl—thanking them?”

My pulse stuttered. “Yeah. How did you know that?”

She sank back against the bench, and the forked-tongue guy, whose name I’d determined was Snap, slipped his arm around her with a concerned look. I didn’t know what kind of monster he was, but I could tell he’d be leaping to defend her the second he felt he needed to.

“We came out to the house back when the murders first happened,” Sorsha said. “It’s kind of our thing—we go around checking out clashes between shadowkind and mortals, intervening in whatever way means the fewest beings get hurt… The sorcerers had an adopted daughter who escaped the attack. She told us that her older sister had saved someone when she died and about the thank you letter. I didn’t realize exactly what she meant by ‘saving’ before.”

My heart really had come from someone in that family of sorcerers, then.

My fingers curled toward my palms beneath the table, and I forced my hands to unclench against my lap. “That shouldn’t matter, though, should it? I mean, I’m not a sorcerer. I have no idea how to work any kind of magic. I didn’t even know magic was real until a week ago! And my donor was just a kid. Would they have put spells on her that’d have affected her heart—that could still be affecting me?”

“It’s probably not quite like that,” said the guy in the hall, who Sorsha had called Ruse, with a languid air. “It seems like sorcery affects the practisers right down to the genetic code.”

Sorsha nodded. “When you get families who keep practicing the magic and marry with other sorcerers, the power gets stronger across generations. And that family was particularly established. The girl would have had a talent for sorcery etched into her DNA—which is in her heart. I don’t know how much it would have passed on to you in any way you could practice it, but it’s obviously expressing itself somehow.”

My hand rose to my chest again. “What can I do about that? It’s not like I can go back to the hospital and return this heart, asking for a new one.”

Torrent spoke up again after his stretch of silence. “Can you think of any reason why shadowkind would be interested in Quinn other than wanting to destroy what feels like a threat? It seemed as if some of the recent bunch were looking to capture her rather than kill her on the spot.”

I managed not to wince at his casual reference to my near-death.

Snap stirred, flicking his tongue with a faint hiss. “Heart,” he said. “The organs.”

Sorsha rubbed her forehead. “Yes, I was just thinking of that.”

“What?” I demanded, urgency overcoming my sense of caution with these relative strangers. “What about the organs?”

The guy in the driver’s seat let out an inarticulate snarl as if the very mention of the subject pissed him off. Ruse shot him a bemused look and turned back to us.

“There’s a rumor that’s gone around for ages that shadowkind can gain extra power by eating the vital organs of sorcerers,” he said dryly. “A lovely delicacy.”

Sorsha glowered at him before returning her attention to me. “What the incubus is inconsiderately trying to say is that when we found the bodies of the family, they’d been cut open. Their major organs were missing. We don’t know whether their killers were just mutilating their bodies or testing that rumor, and if they were testing the rumor, there’s been no evidence that anything came of it. But if they were trying to level up their powers, and they found out there was a heart from a member of that family they hadn’t gotten to yet…”

Crag rumbled threateningly at her implication.

My stomach listed with a surge of nausea. “They don’t just want to kill me—they want to eat my heart.”

Sorsha grimaced sympathetically. “And it was higher shadowkind who carried out the killings. They may have convinced other beings to work for them, to track you down and bring you to them.”

I gestured vaguely in the air. “How would they even have figured out there was another sorcerer heart out there in someone else’s body?”

“Maybe you saw that little shrine in the house? Your letter was on it. But when we got there, the frame had been shattered and the letter was gone. That’s why Ashley told us about it. It had at least your first name on it, right? And presumably you mentioned the transplant.” Sorsha sighed. “I’d guess that they’ve been trying to track you down ever since then. You said you only started getting the sensations recently. That was what helped them locate you.”

Snap tilted his head to the side, studying me. “What would have set off the heart now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing different had happened to me right beforehand.”

Sorsha tapped the tabletop. “It could be a whole bunch of factors converging. These higher shadowkind came to kill the sorcerer. Then they started scouring the area for the heart recipient. They might have called on a bunch of creatures from elsewhere to help them look, and then others started gathering here out of curiosity. The surge in activity is why we drove down here to take a look at the situation. Having more shadowkind around could have triggered your heart, responding to their presence. Which put a bull’s eye on you.”

“Great.” My shoulders sagged against the bench, a wave of hopelessness washing over me. I glanced at Torrent, hoping he’d have some useful insight, but his face tightened and turned a sallower shade than usual, as if what we’d just heard had nauseated him too.

I looked back at Sorsha. “Do you have any idea what I can do about it?”

“We’ll destroy the beings that want her,” Crag growled before she could answer.

Sorsha arched her eyebrows at him. “That’s the general idea—if we can’t convince them to back down, which is generally my preference. But I’ll admit it doesn’t always work, and these ones have already shown they’re murderously inclined. The trouble might be finding the masterminds behind the attacks. We haven’t been able to determine which shadowkind were responsible for the initial sorcerer killings—not even what kind of beings they were.”

“Whichever one renovated the garage was very large,” Ruse put in, not particularly helpfully.

I remembered the ruined building and shuddered. Would that have been a shadowkind even bigger and stronger than Crag? Could my protectors “destroy” these fiends, no matter how much they wanted to?

It didn’t matter. We had to try, right?

I pulled myself together as well as I could. “Then our first step is that we need to figure out who’s calling the shots.”

“Exactly.” Sorsha snapped her fingers. “Unfortunately, we haven’t made much progress at that. But we were already planning on being in Florida for at least a couple of days longer. Give us your number, and we’ll give you a heads up if we find out anything useful. And if you find them, shout for us and we’ll jump in to help any way we can. I’d offer to stick with you in the meantime, but it sounds like you’ve got a pretty solid strategy worked out for avoiding the beasties, and we’ll be more likely to find answers if we’re pursuing different leads.”

Torrent stepped forward with a heave of one tentacle, pulling out his phone. “I’ll take your contact info and give you mine. And then we’ll need you to cycle back around to the sorcerers’ house. There’s someone local I know who might be able to lend some insight. He crosses paths with a lot of the higher shadowkind who come through this area.”

“Sounds good.” Sorsha exchanged phones with him and tapped her number into his contacts. After she handed it back, she stood up. “Now that we understand each other better, I’d like to have a little chat with Quinn one-on-one.” She met my eyes. “If you’re okay with that.”

I had no idea what the phoenix would want to say to me in private, but I didn’t have any fears about her hurting me now. “Sure,” I said.

Crag shifted as if he wanted to protest, but he obviously couldn’t think of a good reason. Sorsha led me to the back of the RV and into a bedroom with an impressively sparkly purple duvet.

“The guest bedroom,” she said with a laugh, sitting on the edge of the bed, and patted the space next to her. I sank down at the opposite end, still not sure what this was about. She eyed me for a long stretch before saying, “Are you okay?”

That was so not what I’d been expecting from her that it took me a moment to find my words. “I mean, no, not really. I haven’t been okay since the attack in the park. I can’t go home, I can’t do any of the things I’ve wanted to do. And now it turns out a whole bunch of shadowkind don’t just want to kill me, they want to tear me open and eat me? And I’ve got some superpowered heart that’s not powerful in any way I can actually use.”

Sorsha let out a light chuckle. “Yeah. It’s a lot.”

I looked down at my hands. “I’ll keep going, like I have been. I’m not the kind of person who gives up. I’m just being honest.”

“I appreciate that.” Sorsha was quiet for another moment, her gaze going distant. “I have some idea what it’s like—realizing there’s more to you that you never suspected. Having powers inside you that you can’t control and that are making your life more difficult rather than easier. It’s not a ball.”

I blinked in surprise. I’d assumed all shadowkind knew what they were and what they could do when they came into existence. It seemed rude to ask her why she hadn’t.

“How did you handle it?” I asked instead.

“Depends on who you ask. Omen would say disastrously.” Her lips quirked up as if at a joke. “It was a lot easier after I stopped trying to deny it and started seeing how it could work for me. Not that you’d want to use any kind of sorcerer power. Their entire thing is turning shadowkind into slaves. But if you could tap into the energies inside you a little more, maybe you’d be able to turn down the volume or something. Or turn the vibe off completely.”

The thought sent a wash of relief through me. “That would be amazing. Do you really think it’s possible?”

“It can’t hurt to try.” She gave me a hopeful smile. “While we’re on the road, why don’t I take you through a few of the exercises that helped me focus and improve my control? Maybe they’ll work for you too.”

“Sure,” I said, because really, what did I have to lose?

If I couldn’t get this sorcerer energy inside me to chill the fuck out, sooner or later one of the shadowkind beasts was going to come carve it right out of me.