The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 25

Crag

“Quinn!” I bellowed as she hurtled away down the dock. I leapt after her, but Rollick flung the dagger she’d stabbed him with into the sea with a hiss and slammed his arms around me.

He’d unleashed his demonic claws from his fingertips. They sank into my flesh with spikes of pain. I spun around, lashing out with one of my thick arms. A prickle of transformation rushed over me, the urge to shift into gargoyle form for this fight, but I yanked myself back with a jolt of fear.

It was broad daylight. There were other mortals around. What were they already thinking of however much of this skirmish they’d witnessed from a distance?

Rollick wouldn’t want to reveal himself either. In a way, it was luckier that we were fighting this way, because while his demonic form could have posed a real challenge, in human shape he was no physical match for me.

I heaved him away from me and tried to run after Quinn again, but he caught my foot and wrenched hard enough that I felt a bone snap. More pain jolted up my leg. I stumbled and flung myself around onto my ass to try to kick him in the face.

Rollick whipped out of the way of my blow, smaller and less powerful but even faster than I was. In that instant, as I stared into the face of the being who’d taken me on decades ago, who’d given me everything I’d ever asked for—as modest as my wants were—in exchange for services I’d found it easy to provide, my stomach sank.

He’d given me a purpose. He’d ensured my happiness. And now I was pummeling him like a brute.

But he’d been going to destroy Quinn’s happiness, purpose, and everything else about her. It’d been obvious from the way he’d spoken. And in the past week, she’d somehow managed to give me something he’d never come close to. Something even I hadn’t fully realized I needed.

It didn’t matter where one piece or another of her had come from or what sort of power it might contain. Quinn wasn’t like the sorcerers. She was the farthest thing from those cruel slavers that I’d ever encountered, soft and kind alongside her strength. Her heart had opened to all of us.

I would not let the demon take her.

As my resolve hardened every inch of muscle on me, Lance leapt in to slash at Rollick’s face with his claws.

“She’s ours,” he snarled, his face contorted, his violet eyes blazing. “Ours. Find yourself your own human.”

Rollick swayed, his shadowy essence streaming from those smaller wounds and billowing from the gouge the sorcerers’ dagger had dealt. In his injured state, even his keen reflexes had difficulty fending off two separate attackers. His own eyes flared, and he swung a fist at Lance that crackled with supernatural power?—

And a tentacle slashed through the air, smacking Rollick in the gut and sending him toppling right off the dock in the gap between two of the boats.

“Come on,” Torrent said in a rasp. “Through the shadows, after her. It won’t take him long to recover.”

Rollick was already groping at the side of the dock, sputtering curses at us. “When I get my claws into you turncoats?—”

I didn’t wait to hear the rest of his threat. All three of us sprang into the patches of darkness along the dock and raced from one to the next in the direction Quinn had fled.

Unfortunately, I’d lost track of her in the skirmish. She must have passed the end of the dock and crossed the open area near the marina buildings. I caught no sign of her on the terrain ahead.

My body ached to launch myself into the sky, but there were no shadows in the open air. I couldn’t fly around all gargoyle-like with so many humans around. A few around the marina were already staring in the direction of our dock.

Lance and Torrent rushed along beside me, vaguely urgent presences in the fragments of gloom. I wasn’t surprised that Lance had joined me, but Torrent…

He’d worked with Rollick even longer than I had. He’d been one of Rollick’s most trusted lieutenants, if not the most trusted. And he hadn’t seemed to warm up to Quinn all that much. I wasn’t even sure I could believe what I thought I’d seen happening between them right before I’d warned him of Rollick’s approach.

Was he really on her side, or did he have some other game plan here? There wasn’t any reason for her to matter more to him than the average mortal did. Maybe he’d just realized that Lance and I could overpower Rollick under the circumstances, and he intended to grab Quinn and present her to the boss on his own, later.

On the other hand, he had been questioning Rollick rather than offering her up right away. He’d sounded like it mattered to him what happened to her.

And his motivations didn’t matter at all if we couldn’t find her.

We reached the street beyond the marina, the cars roaring past us. Quinn was nowhere to be seen.

Where had she gone? I swiveled, thinking of our car, but Torrent spoke before I could start back to check it.

“I have the keys. She’d have no way of opening it. But that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have gotten into some other vehicle.”

Lance drew up beside me. “I can sense her. The sorcerer energy she gives off. It’s gotten even stronger.” A growl crept into his voice. “That means any other shadowkind around here will be able to pick up on where she is more easily too.”

“That’s probably partly how Rollick managed to find us,” Torrent muttered. “He knew what he’d ordered us to do and what tactics I was likely to turn to. The other shadowkind will have been chasing us around as we moved with her, but he figured out where to lie in wait.” He seemed to shake himself. “So we find her before any other being does. We know her.”

“Do you?” Lance shot back, twisting around me toward Torrent. “It seemed like you were happy to hand her over if he said the right thing. Rollick can’t have her.”

“She doesn’t belong to us,” Torrent said tersely. “We protected her for him. I needed to know why. She’d have been safer with all his resources guarding her rather than just the three of us if he’d actually been willing to guard her.”

“She doesn’t belong to him,” Lance hissed back. “I say she’s mine. And she’s not safe with him if he’s planning on eating her like those other beasties are. He told you he wanted to devour her.”

“I didn’t know if he meant that… like that.”

“How else could he mean it? You just wanted to finish the job and have him pat you on the back.”

“No,” Torrent snapped. He paused to gather himself, his voice coming out more evenly again. “Do you remember how lost you were before our paths crossed? You were roaming all over the shadow realm, pissing off every being in existence. I helped you center yourself. I showed you that you could still have an actual life, no matter what you’d been through.”

“I don’t owe you her in gratitude,” Lance said.

“That’s not my point. The only reason I could help you is because Rollick did the same thing for me. He treated me like more than a fucking cripple. He’s brutal when he needs to be, but I’ve never seen him hurt anyone just for the sake of it. I had to be sure before I went against him. That’s all.”

“Are you sure now?” I had to ask, bracing myself for how I might need to respond to his answer.

Torrent’s frustration resonated through the darkness. “Yes. He dodged the questions. He has a motive to kill her for her heart—he does like amassing power. Maybe I should have been sure sooner…” He trailed off with a harsh sigh. “She’s just a mortal. She might only have a few more years left anyway. But… she’s more than that too, isn’t she.”

It wasn’t a question, but I answered regardless. “Much more. She’s Quinn. She needs us.”

“She was meant for us,” Lance said definitively. “Not to be monster food. She’s got so much more in her than whatever came with that heart, and we’re going to tear apart anyone who tries to say otherwise.”

“All right,” Torrent said. “Then let’s go do that.”

If he’d sounded totally confident, I might not have trusted him. But I could hear how hard it was for him to set aside his loyalty to Rollick. If he’d wanted to trick us, he’d have pretended to be caught up in unwavering devotion, not admitted his doubts.

He hated turning his back on our boss, but he was doing it anyway. For her. That was enough for me.

“This way,” Lance said, and darted onward through the shadows. I could catch a faint quiver of Quinn’s energy in the air, but the dragon shifter appeared to have a sharper awareness of it. Maybe because of past exposure to that kind of magic. If we got close enough, I’d be able to identify the unique vibrations of her movements, but for now I’d trust his sense of direction.

“We don’t just need to find her,” I reminded him and Torrent as we hurried along the streets together. “We need a way to set her free. She can’t keep living with all these beings chasing after her. Even if there’s nothing permanent that can be done, we have to come up with something that’ll at least give her a break from the danger.”

“Yes,” Torrent agreed. “It doesn’t do any good saving her if she’s still trapped by being on the run. But it’s not just the unknown monsters we’re dealing with now—it’s Rollick too. He knows us; he knows most of our resources.”

Lance let out a jagged chuckle. “Then we make him think it isn’t worth messing with her.”

I frowned. Rollick was the most powerful being I’d ever spent much time around. How in the realms were we supposed to do that?