Chapter 1
Quinn
Monsters surrounded me. In the faint glow cast by the distant streetlamps along the edge of the mostly vacant parking lot, their claws, spines, and searing eyes glinted eerily. The massive beast crouched on the hood of our sedan leered at us through the windshield as if the tint in the glass didn’t obscure his vision at all.
After being swarmed by hordes of shadowy creatures multiple times in the past, maybe I should have been getting used to this scenario. No such luck. My heart hammered in my chest, my fingers curling against my palms tightly enough to dig my fingernails into my skin. I jerked my arm through the strap of my messenger bag automatically—it held my medication and other essentials—but my whirling mind couldn’t see any way of escaping this time.
Dozens of the creatures prowled around the car on all sides. The leprechaun who’d apparently led them here, the man one of my protectors had considered a friend, was still staring at Torrent with a tight, pained smile.
Our luck had run out. Our one sort-of ally had turned on us. The vest of silver and iron beads I’d commissioned to stop the shadowkind creatures from tracking me down didn’t do me any good when they already knew exactly where I was.
Where the hell did we go from here?
Torrent turned his head toward Crag. Whatever communication passed between the tentacled man and the gargoyle was totally silent. Beside me, Lance hopped up nimbly into a crouch on the seat, flexing his vicious dragon-shifter claws.
The huge fiend on the hood raised a fist to smash right through the windshield, and the men around me sprang into motion in an instant.
Torrent hit the button to activate the car alarm. The sudden blare echoed through the vacant lot, startling the beast on the hood in mid-punch. Creatures all through the horde surrounding us flinched, heads jerking toward the nearest buildings in an instinctive fear of discovery.
At the same moment, Crag dove into the shadows of the car and re-materialized practically on top of me in full gargoyle form. His bulging arms yanked me against his immense chest. He grunted as my vest smacked against his stony skin, and I realized that coming into close contact with the metals toxic to shadowkind must be hurting him, but he didn’t hesitate. Without missing a beat, he threw himself into the door shoulder first.
The car door burst right off its hinges. We hurtled out into the night, the flap of Crag’s wings sweeping us up over the heads of most of the throng. I shifted in his embrace, hugging my messenger bag and adjusting my position so as little of my vest was outright touching him as possible. I had to make myself as easy a burden as I could.
But our enemies had come prepared this time. They’d seen how the gargoyle had carried me to safety before. Several winged bodies launched themselves after us, most of them smaller, but a couple were nearly human-sized and one was almost as large as Crag’s gigantic form. My pulse stuttered.
The wind warbled past us as Crag soared higher. My pale hair whipped around my face. Hisses and shrieks rose up from below, where the car alarm had cut off. Torrent and Lance would be fighting for their lives—they couldn’t just leap into the air and take off. Would they be able to escape all those attackers?
My chest ached at the thought of abandoning them, but our own escape was looking more precarious by the second. The effects of the silver and iron in my vest must have been tiring Crag, because the other flying beasts were catching up. A rasp had crept into his breath. I wanted to fling the vest right off me, but I didn’t have the room to maneuver without risking his hold on me.
A creature that looked like a barracuda melded with a bat shot toward us. Crag clutched me firmly with one arm and swung his other fist at the thing. With a crunch of fracturing bone, it tumbled down through the air, the smoky substance shadowkind had for blood pluming up in its wake.
Three more of the smaller shadowkind lunged at us from different sides. Crag’s wings whooshed as he spun and flipped, dizzying me. His heel shattered one thing’s skull, his thick fingers snapping another’s spine. The third flitted past him, aiming its curved talons straight at me.
I didn’t have time to think, only to react—but I knew what the most powerful weapon I had on me was. I managed to fling out my arm, snatching the creature’s wing and yanking it even faster so that it slammed right into my vest.
The thing’s skin outright sizzled with the contact with the noxious metals. It screeched and shoved away, and Crag bashed its head into a pulpy mess.
He was still breathing hard—and the larger creatures had almost caught up. He pushed his wings faster, careening over the tops of the Jacksonville buildings with the city lights glinting through the darkness from below us, but the monstrous forms tore after us just as quickly. One of them made a low, guttural sound it took me a second to recognize as a chuckle.
“Stay still,” Crag muttered, the only warning I got before he plunged into a dive. He shot between two high rises and swerved around a condo building. If anyone was up at this way-too-early hour of the morning and looking out their window, they’d have gotten quite a view.
I craned my neck and spotted two of the monstrous figures still on our tail. My throat constricted.
“You could land and put me down,” I said over the rush of the wind. “You’d be able to fight better if?—”
“No,” Crag said gruffly. “That would give them the chance to snatch you. They’re not getting you, Softness.”
His emphatic insistence and the affectionate nickname sent a bittersweet pang through my chest. The three shadowkind men who’d rescued me from more murderous examples of their kind a week ago had already been through the wringer to protect me. They’d fought battles, gone on the run, even defied the boss they’d all spent decades working for.
They’d dedicated themselves that much to me… but what if the decision ruined them?
Yes, they were monsters too, but in the past week I’d discovered that they were so much more than that. The thought of Crag with his brutal protectiveness—or Lance and his playful wildness, or Torrent and his curt determination—being cut down on my behalf wrenched at me.
The slightly smaller of our two foes, a beast that looked like a winged, scaly jaguar, hurled itself the last short distance toward Crag. Its claws raked across Crag’s shoulder as the gargoyle swiveled. Smoky blood streamed from the gashes.
Crag lashed out with his own clawed hand. He shredded the edge of the creature’s wing, but the thing only bobbed before regaining its balance. The other flying fiend had almost reached us.
Crag pushed away with a heave of his wings and kicked out with both of his powerful legs. He caught the scaly beast in the face with one foot, cracking open its snout. It still managed to snarl through the gush of smoke, but the pain turned it wilder—and more reckless. It sped at Crag, who whacked it to the side and crushed its neck between his heels.
By then, the largest creature was on us. It sprang too quickly for Crag to reorient himself in time, and the sound of ripping flesh made me flinch. The gargoyle listed to the side with a snarl resonating through his clenched teeth. My stomach lurched.
This creature was way too big for me to help in the battle, though. I couldn’t hope that contact with my vest would do more than briefly irritate it, and trying to strike out at it myself would only put my limbs in Crag’s way. As he whipped around in the air, I held myself as still and small as I could, my pulse thundering through my head.
Our last opponent didn’t let up for a second. It swung a fist here and swept out a taloned leg there, its sinewy body contorting this way and that to evade Crag’s blows. He dipped lower, still favoring one side, and a deeper terror gripped me.
The beast had injured his wing. He was having trouble just keeping us in the air. Maybe he’d have to come down to earth.
I wasn’t totally sure that was a bad thing, but Crag seemed determined to hold us aloft as long as he could. He struck out at the creature with his legs and the arm that wasn’t holding me tight against him, even battering the thing across its oddly pointed head with his good wing.
The fiend just gave another of those low, unnerving chuckles as if this was all a game to it. As if it wasn’t the slightest bit worried about the outcome of the battle.
A chill coursed through my veins. Crag spun, and the creature leapt in the opposite direction. With another tearing sound, Crag grunted and dropped even farther. Smoky blood hissed from his wounds.
He beat the creature off as well as he could, but it wasn’t a fair fight while he was clutching me, dealing with the pain of my vest and his failing wing. The beast landed a strike to his head, scraping its claws right through one of the pointed gargoyle ears Crag had told me were a vulnerable spot and slamming its spiked tail against his side. More smoke streamed up, and almost all of it was Crag’s.
Tension wound through my torso alongside a prickling sensation that spread out across the rest of my body. No. I couldn’t let this happen. I had to do something to save the man who’d given so much to protect me.
If I didn’t, we were both going to die.
A now-familiar fluttery wobble of energy ran through my chest. It seemed to cast a bubble into the base of my throat. My heart thumped, propelling a quiver through my blood that I could almost taste, like something electric crackling all through my flesh.
The thing lunged at us again, and my mouth popped open. I expected to scream or cry out.
Instead, a shout burst from my lips: a string of syllables that meant nothing to me but that rang from my mouth with a sense of urgency and purpose I couldn’t explain. The electric energy surged out of me with that sound.
The fiend jerked backward as if I’d slapped it. It shook its head, its muscles tensing, but its wings were already whirling it around. It took off in the opposite direction like a shot.
As Crag plummeted into an alley even darker than the quiet street beyond, I stared after our attacker. The gargoyle didn’t say anything about the weirdness of what had just happened, but he didn’t have to. Nausea coiled around my gut.
Did I really need to wonder what had happened? The heart now beating fast but more steadily in my chest, the one that’d been transplanted into me nine years ago after a childhood virus had ruined the one I’d been born with, had come from a sorcerer’s daughter. We’d already suspected that some of the magic those rare mortals could use to control the shadowkind had carried over to me with it.
And I’d just drawn on that power without even understanding what I was doing. In whatever language had come to me instinctively, I’d ordered the fiend to leave… and it had.
Maybe I should have felt triumphant, but I couldn’t summon excitement from beneath the sick feeling in my gut. That power might have saved us just now, but technically it made me an enemy not just to the monsters that wanted to capture me but to the men who’d protected me as well.
Crag’s feet hit the ground in a landing much less graceful than usual. He was still streaming smoke from multiple wounds. The second his grip on me loosened, I dropped to the pavement and swiveled toward him, groping at my bag. Was there anything in my first aid kit that could help a being made of stone and shadow?
“I’ll heal,” the gargoyle said in his gruff way, but he couldn’t hide the thread of pain in his voice. In the thin light that seeped from the street, I made out the imprint the beads on my vest had burned into his muscular chest, turning the gray flesh nearly black. A fresh wave of nausea swept through me.
Then the little bit of illumination we had dimmed even further. A sedan had pulled up to the curb just outside the alley—but not ours. The black one we’d used for the past few days was ruined now anyway. This one was silver.
As I braced myself to run and Crag grasped my shoulder, a figure wavered into being next to the car, having skipped the need to open the door. Crag’s former boss, Rollick—the one hostile shadowkind I’d thought we no longer needed to worry about—rolled his shoulders and aimed a knowing grin our way.