Chapter 26
Quinn
As I tore along the dock and across the marina grounds beyond it, I didn’t dare shoot so much as a glance over my shoulder. The thumps and grunts suggested some kind of scuffle was taking place, but I had no idea who was on which side and whether it’d turn out in my favor. Or whether any of them winning could be in my favor after what I’d just learned.
My messenger bag thumped against my back, and my feet pounded over the boards and then the pavement. “Hey!” a marina-goer called to me, but I didn’t stop to find out what help they might try to offer.
They couldn’t help me, not when my enemies were shadowkind. Beings they wouldn’t even believe existed. Beings with powers no human could match. Even the sorcerers had failed to defend themselves.
As long as any of those shadowkind knew where I was, I was in danger. That one fact had been drilled into me well over the past several days. Once I was out of their sight, I wasn’t safe, but I was a hell of a lot safer.
I raced around the marina building and spotted a bus just pulling up at a stop a little ways down the nearby street. Hell, yes! The men had talked about hitching rides in the shadows of cars—human vehicles could move faster than shadowkind could travel on their own. Even if one or more of them gave chase and saw where I went, they wouldn’t be able to catch up.
I pushed my legs faster, summoning an extra burst of speed. Just as the last person waiting at the stop stepped on board, I scrambled after her, breathing hard. I fumbled in my bag for my wallet and shoved a five into the fare box, pretty sure I was overpaying but not really caring. It wasn’t like I had time to stop and make change.
It was early afternoon now, well before rush hour, and the bus was only half full. I flopped into a seat partway down, my pulse slowly settling back into a more normal rhythm as the bus pulled away from the curb and sped up heading down the street. I had no idea where it was going, but I didn’t care about that either. I just wanted to be away.
I hugged my messenger bag to my chest and closed my eyes for a moment, my throat tightening. What the hell was I going to do now? Even the men I’d thought had my back had turned out to be villains. All kinds of shadowkind were still hunting me. How was I going to keep ahead of them on my own?
I couldn’t keep moving forever. The jolt of panicked adrenaline during the confrontation with Rollick had driven away my creeping of fatigue, but it would come back. I hadn’t slept since a brief doze in the car early last night.
My hand slid to the pocket that contained my phone. Sorsha had given her number to me as well as Torrent.
But… she was shadowkind. Her men were shadowkind. How could I be sure they had really meant well either? My judgment was obviously off. Torrent had trusted them, and he’d turned out to be the most untrustworthy of all.
I barely knew them. It wasn’t worth the risk of finding myself in an even worse trap than I already had.
The bus rumbled along for a half hour or so before I realized it’d turned in a loop and now was heading back the way we’d come. Back toward the marina. Definitely not where I wanted to be.
I got off at the next stop and took stock. I’d ended up in a pretty ordinary-looking strip of shops and casual restaurants, a little shabby but not horribly rundown. Pedestrians were ambling along, chattering with each other or lost in their own little worlds like mine wasn’t on the verge of ending.
My legs itched with the urge to keep moving. I strode down the street, stopping only long enough to grab a chicken wrap from a café, which I dug into as I kept hustling along. I headed north without much reason other than the map on my phone showed that direction would take me farther from the marina rather than closer.
I left the commercial strip behind for rows of modest houses. What next? Where could I hole up for the night? How long would it take before the shadowkind caught up with me? I couldn’t sleep on a bus the whole night.
Inspiration sparked in my head. Maybe I could—if I could find a cross-country bus. Or a train. Was there a train station in Daytona Beach? There was probably one at least close. That would run up my credit card bill, but hopefully it’d keep me ahead of any creatures wanting to sink claws or fangs into me for a day or two.
I looked up directions, wincing at the sight of how low my phone battery was getting. I hadn’t had a chance to charge it since yesterday, and the flashlight app drained it fast. I memorized the directions and then brought up the Uber app.
Before I could confirm my location, my last few percent vanished. “Shit!” I snapped.
It was okay. I’d just keep walking. Quickly. I knew where I needed to go. If I saw a taxi passing by, I’d flag it down. Once I got on a train, they had outlets, and I could charge it up again.
No big deal. I could handle this.
The shadows were starting to stretch a little longer across the sidewalk. A few cars were pulling up into driveways as people arrived home from early shifts at work. Kids out of school for the summer played in the yards. An uneasy prickle ran down my spine.
What if the shadowkind beasts decided to attack me here even with all these people around? They had to be getting more desperate. Who knew how much sense of caution the lesser beings had to begin with?
I veered through the streets, trying to work my way back to somewhere a little less family-oriented. After several blocks, I found myself passing a big outlet store that looked like it’d been closed for months if not years from the grime on the windows.
No one much was hanging around in that parking lot—or anywhere else nearby. I picked up my pace, my nerves prickling with apprehension that was totally self-preservation now.
I’d made it halfway past the parking lot when the first creature eased out of the shadows.
It was about the size of an alley cat, but hunched and furless, its shoulders jutting high from its wrinkled back. It hissed at me, eyes flashing amber, and I stalled in my tracks.
I’d had to leave the damned dagger behind in Rollick, or I might have been able to tackle this beast. Of course, it wasn’t that big anyway. Maybe I could hit it hard enough to get it to back off even without special weaponry.
I raised my hands in a fighting stance as if it were going to come at me like a boxer. The thing lunged at my legs.
My reflexes had obviously benefitted at least a little from my sparring with Crag and Lance. My foot shot out at just the right angle to punt the creature over the low steel fence around the parking lot. It skidded to a stop on the other side, claws skittering against the asphalt.
A momentary spurt of relieved pride washed through me, and then the wrinkled cat-thing was leaping over the fence again. Two more creatures, these ones closer to the size of Dobermans, slunk out of the patches of darkness to surround me.
Okay, clearly walking hadn’t been moving quickly enough.
I swallowed, finding my mouth dry, and tried a little bravado. There was some kind of wild animal you were supposed to yell at to intimidate it into leaving you alone, right?
“Get out of here!” I shouted, looming as menacingly as I could in one direction and then another. “Beat it! Nothing for you here. I’ll make sure you regret it.”
As the words tumbled inanely from my throat, the bald cat-like creature and another of the things launched themselves at me from opposite sites.
I yelped, dodging and blocking as well as I could. My knuckles smacked into the cat-thing’s head with a solid-sounding smack, but the other creature clamped its jaws into my thigh.
Pain splintered through my leg. I gasped, teetering as I hurled my fists at the thing, and the third creature leapt up to chomp on my elbow.
Panic blared through my mind even louder than when I’d faced Rollick. I flailed around, a desperate scream for help bubbling in my throat even though I didn’t want to subject any other human being to this madness?—
—and a tentacle whipped through the air, smacking one creature’s jaws right off me. A flicker of claws sliced straight through the neck of the thing on my elbow so its body thumped to the ground just seconds before I shook off its detached head.
Smoky blood plumed up toward the sky, and I whirled around in its midst, my heart hammering even harder than before.
Torrent, Lance, and Crag stood around me. Crag looked stern, Lance was grinning as he flexed his claws, and Torrent—the tentacled man’s broken face was as unreadable as ever.
“We have to go,” Crag said gruffly, nodding to the car parked down the street. In my terror, I hadn’t even noticed it pulling over. “There’ll be more coming.”
I hugged myself, conflicting emotions tangling in my chest. “What, so you can drag me back to Rollick?”
“No,” Torrent said, his voice crisp but firm. “So we can keep you away from him and all the other beings that are after you.”
“And why exactly should I believe that? He did send you to collect me for him, didn’t he? Wasn’t that your job?”
Torrent’s expression tightened. At the sound of an approaching car, he sank down to sit on the parking lot’s fence so he could tuck his tentacles out of sight. “Yes. He sent us to keep an eye on you and see if anything unusual happened, to step in if you were in danger. That’s why we were there in the park the night you were attacked.”
Keep an eye on you.“How long were you watching before that happened?” I demanded.
“Three months,” he admitted.
Three months? All that time, everything I’d been doing, they’d been spying on me?—
Then understanding struck me so hard my eyes widened.
I jabbed my finger at him. “It’s your fault. You were hanging around near me for months—you set off whatever this stupid power is in my heart. Maybe I wouldn’t have been attacked at all otherwise.”
“It would have happened, moody one,” Lance said, his gaze sliding away from me across the lot. “There was already a vibe to you when we showed up. Only a little one, but it was there.”
He leapt abruptly and landed on a creature in the shadows that he forced into physical being with his pounce. The iguana-like thing let out a brief squeal before the dragon shifter’s claws severed its life from its body.
“We might have sped things along,” Torrent acknowledged. “But it’s better that it happened when we were here. Otherwise you wouldn’t have survived at all.”
“I also wouldn’t have had you stalking me, scheming about how to offer me up to your boss for dinner,” I shot back.
“He’s not having you for anything,” Crag growled.
“Why not? What changed? Why should I believe you?”
Torrent shifted on his awkward perch. His voice came out low with a bit of a rasp. “Because you made us believe. We believe that you should get all the life you’ve been making the most of, as much as that heart will allow you. I’ve never?—”
He cut himself off for a second, glancing away with a grimace, and then yanked his gaze back to me. “Mortals were playthings to me once, and since then they’ve become obstacles or beings of no consequence. But you aren’t like any other I’ve met. You’ve woken something up in me, something that can’t bear to see you gone, and I don’t know how to turn it off. So you can come with us or you can run away, but either way I’m going to be right there with you fighting to keep you in this world.”
My throat choked up abruptly at his declaration. He wasn’t saying that he’s suddenly realized the value of all human life or anything like that. He was still a monster, still a being that’d watched millions of us come and go in our relatively brief lives, seeing us the way the average human probably looked at ants swarming on the sidewalk.
But somehow I’d earned that kind of devotion from him anyway. He was willing to be monstrous on my behalf rather than Rollick’s—rather than a fellow shadowkind he’d apparently served for a long time.
Even so… “You lied to me all this time.”
“I know,” he said. “I thought I had to. I thought it didn’t matter.”
“He was wrong,” Lance piped up.
Torrent glowered at the other man but didn’t correct him. “I see things differently now. Rollick… Rollick doesn’t know you. He didn’t give us a chance to make a case. I thought he’d be better than that, but obviously I was wrong about him too.”
He exhaled sharply. “These two have been shifting their allegiances since well before I have. You shouldn’t doubt their commitment to the cause of keeping you alive. What else do you need from me? Ask whatever questions you want.”
“Maybe in the car away from the creeping beasties?” Lance suggested. His expression clouded when he considered the wounds on my thigh and arm, where blood was seeping alongside the stinging in my flesh. “I don’t want them ripping you up any more, baby girl. I can close up those cuts for you.”
I didn’t know how to deny the affection in his voice, or the protective ferocity that emanated off Crag in the instant before he smashed another creature out of the shadows to its smoky death. How many more beasts were dashing toward us even now?
Even if trusting these men again was the wrong decision… making any other choice was still basically suicide, wasn’t it? I’d tried to make it on my own, and within a few hours, I’d nearly become monster chow.
Bringing my gaze back to Torrent, I still had to ask, “Where do we go from here? How do we stop them all—the beings who killed my donor’s family, Rollick, all the lesser creatures…?”
A faint smile touched his lips, and somehow that was what convinced me. That he could smile at me at all while still looking pained, as if it mattered more to him to try to offer me a tiny bit of comfort than to focus on his own discomforts.
“We don’t have a full solution yet,” he said. “But we’ve been hashing out a lot of ideas while we searched for you, and I think we’ve come up with one strategy that will buy you some time. I suspect we’ll need your design expertise to take it all the way to reality. If you’ll come with us, we can get started.”
He didn’t stand, just sat there waiting for my response, braced for more questions or accusations.
I reached out and found Crag’s hand with mine. He squeezed my fingers immediately with the rock-solid gasp that could become so gentle when he touched me.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s hear how you’re really going to save me this time.”