Chapter 20
Crag
After an entire night of stalking the city streets and failing to capture another being capable of speech, Quinn slept through most of the day. She only woke up in the apartment Rollick had brought us to when the sky beyond the narrow window was starting to darken with the next evening.
She came into the small living room with her messenger bag. I suspected it was nearly time for her next dose of pills. The sight of the surgery scar poking from the neckline of her top made something inside me clench up.
The new heart had saved her life when she was a child, but it might also have doomed her to a worse fate at the hands of these fiends we were facing off against.
Rollick had returned to the apartment just minutes ago and was pouring himself a sour-smelling drink in the kitchen area. Quinn flopped into the chair next to the window and glanced between me and him. “Any progress?”
“Lance is out having another prowl,” Rollick said. “But we haven’t turned up anything substantial. It’s very clear the vicious duo are in the area, but I haven’t managed to pin down where they’re hiding out. If we knew where they were sending their minions from, that’d make catching those minions easier.”
Quinn pinched the bridge of her nose. “There aren’t any convenient mountain lakes nearby that they’d be using?”
Rollick guffawed. “Believe me, that was the first thing I considered. Maybe they realized after two invasions in a row that they’d become too predictable.” He wrinkled his nose at his drink. “I often appreciate a challenge, but I wish these particular opponents weren’t quite so on the ball.”
Their comments about the mountain lakes stirred a memory in my head. After we’d gotten so focused on what was happening on this side of the ocean, I’d almost forgotten the evidence I’d come across when Torrent and Lance had found me in China.
“I noticed something at the first camp by the lake,” I said, hesitating. Maybe it wouldn’t be meaningful at all. But I should let the others decide how useful the information was. “There were traces of fish—a specific kind of fish I recognized after I did some more searching afterward. It’s a fish from the ocean that must have been brought up into the mountains specially. I’m guessing one of the bosses—probably the leviathan, since he’s the watery one—must like them a lot.”
Rollick’s eyes gleamed with an eager light that gratified me. “Good work! You should have mentioned that before. Do you know exactly what this fish is?”
I frowned. “I don’t know what the humans call them. But I could tell from a picture. They’re silver and about this big.” I spread my hands in front of me. “They like waters near the coast where there aren’t many people around. I first encountered them along the Asian side of this ocean, but I’m guessing they’re on the American side too.”
“It doesn’t seem likely that the leviathan would be importing his fish from a distant continent,” Quinn agreed, and knit her brow. “Unless they were taking them through a rift or something.”
“Let’s see what we can find.” Rollick was already tapping on his phone. “Fairly small, silver, Pacific ocean, coastal… There we go.” He held the device up with the screen facing me, a grid of photographs showing across its glossy surface. “Do any of these look right?”
I spotted the right one immediately, with a flash of memory of its tender flesh in my mouth. “It’s that one,” I said, pointing.
Rollick grinned. “Very good. That’s just the sort of thing we need. I can send some people along the coast and other secluded areas within a reasonable distance from the city and see if they can’t track down a trail of fish bones that’ll point us in the right direction.”
He brought the phone to his ear and breezed out of the room as he started talking to the person on the other end. A smile crossed my lips. My searching when I’d been forced to leave Quinn had been worthwhile after all. Maybe it would get us closer to ending the threat that loomed over her.
I looked at her where she was perched on the armchair. “Are you hungry? I brought back some food.”
Quinn made a face. “Not really. Not yet. I’ll eat later. I feel like my stomach is too full of worries to have room for anything else.”
I couldn’t quite picture that sensation, seeing as I never really felt hungry the same way mortals did, but it made a certain kind of sense. I didn’t like seeing her plagued by those worries. Hoping to offer some kind of reassurance, I walked over to rest my hand on her shoulder—but just as I reached for her, a scream split the air from outside.
Quinn leapt to her feet, fear flashing across her face. “Someone else is being attacked. Shit. Where’s my crossbow?”
She dashed into the bedroom and sprinted out a moment later clutching the weapon. I could have leapt right through the shadows outside the window, but I wasn’t leaving her to rush down into the possible fray alone. I’d already pushed the door open. As she darted past me, I melded with the patches of gloom to follow her where no mortals would see my face with its clearly inhuman jaw.
The apartment was only the second floor of a building with a storefront below, the shop now closed for the night. Quinn raced down the single flight of stairs with thudding feet and burst out into the thickening dusk. Her head whipped around as she tried to locate the source of the scream. “Where did it come from?”
A yelp from around the corner gave us a clue. Quinn ran over, and I hurtled alongside her through the shadows.
Foot traffic was already diminishing in this part of the city, but there were still a decent number of people around. A small crowd had gathered around the mouth of an alley. Quinn rushed over to them, tucking her crossbow close to her body to avoid notice, and bobbed up on her toes to peer at the scene.
I slipped right through the clustered feet and halted. A young man’s body was sprawled in the mouth of the alley, his eyes staring sightlessly, blood saturating his shirt from where his throat and chest had been torn open.
It wasn’t like the sorcerer attacks. None of his organs had been taken, only mangled by vicious claws. I couldn’t sense the creature that’d done it—it must have carved him up with a few brutal strokes and then fled.
Rollick came up beside me through the shadows. I sensed his grimace. “That’s not promising. They’re escalating from injuring to murdering. I’ll tell my people on the hunt that they’d better move fast.”
I shifted my attention back to Quinn. She’d eased back from the crowd, her mouth tight, her knuckles whitening where she was gripping the crossbow. My heart lurched for her, but I couldn’t easily comfort her with all these mortal witnesses around.
Her gaze darted around the darkening street. Then she turned and marched swiftly back to the apartment.
I decided it was safe enough to emerge in the stairwell, since it didn’t lead to anything other than Rollick’s apartment. I leapt into physical being on the steps ahead of her, and Quinn kept moving forward, right into my arms.
I hugged her tightly as she let out a choked sound. She pressed her face against my chest. Her voice came out muffled.
“We weren’t fast enough. He wouldn’t have had any idea what the thing that attacked him even was. Why are they killing random people who never did anything to them?”
I didn’t have any answers for her. My throat constricted. I held her close, abruptly aware again of the strength in my arms, the grip that could turn crushing if I let it.
I was like the thing that had killed that man. It would be so easy for me to hurt her—I’d done it before without intending to. How could I?—
Closing my eyes, I shoved those thoughts away. They were what had wrenched us apart in the first place. I would never harm her like that. I’d protected her so many times. I had to focus on what I’d accomplished and not the rare mistakes.
Or I might lose her in a totally different way.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to keep my voice from sounding too gruff. “They want to cause pain—they’re more monstrous than most of us.”
“I wish I knew how to stop them.”
“We’ll find a way. They can’t get away with this forever.” I let my determination color my tone. I wasn’t going to let them get away with it, no matter what it took.
“They might hurt you too,” she said.
They probably would. I didn’t say that out loud. “Then I’ll be hurt, and I’ll recover, like I have many times before. You know I’m made of tough stuff.”
But saying that didn’t feel like enough. She’d spent the last few weeks running from catastrophe to catastrophe—and I’d contributed to those disasters. If I could just take her away from all the horrors for a little while, remind her of all the goodness that was still left, give her a glimpse of the peaceful future I wanted so badly to share with her…
An idea sparked in my head. I scooped her right off the steps and carried her upward.
“Where are we going?” Quinn mumbled.
“You’ve asked before what I love about being in the mortal realm. I’m going to show you one of the things around here that I love most.”
She lifted her head. “What? Crag, don’t you think we should?—”
“I think right now you need to get away from all the awfulness we can’t tackle yet,” I interrupted. ”I”m not taking no for an answer.”
Quinn raised an eyebrow at me. “When did you get so bossy?”
I glanced down at her. “When I saw what happens when I let our problems tear us apart instead of bringing us together.”
A hint of tears shimmered in her eyes. She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around my neck without any further protest. A faint prickle of discomfort spread through my skin at the sense of the metal vest beneath her shirt, but her embrace gave me more pleasure than that minor irritation could ever dislodge.
I’d noticed when we’d arrived at the apartment that there was a set of maintenance steps leading up to a small landing above the level of Rollick’s apartment. After popping into the apartment so Quinn could leave the crossbow there, I busted the lock on the maintenance door open and stepped out into the warm night air at the edge of the roof.
Streetlamps still glowed below us and artificial light streaked the wisps of cloud and smog overhead, but it was dark enough that I didn’t hesitate. I let loose my gargoyle form, my wings unfurling from my back, and pushed off toward the sky.
I didn’t throw caution completely to the wind. I shot straight upward with swift flaps until I was sure no one would be able to make me out against the deep indigo of the sky. Only then did I turn and soar toward the spot I wanted to show the woman I?—
The woman I loved.
The realization hit me so hard my wings stuttered in mid-flap. Quinn tensed in my arms with obvious concern, and I picked up my rhythm again even as my mind reeled.
She’d told me that she loved me when she’d said the same to the others, right before she sent us away. I hadn’t really thought about the exact nature of my feelings toward her, because they had nothing to do with thinking, they simply were, as if they’d always been a part of me. But that was the word for it, wasn’t it—this all-encompassing desire to see her safe and happy? Love.
And somehow she felt the same incredible emotion toward me.
I’d flown out over the ocean. I swiveled around and kept my wings sweeping up and down to bring us in a slow circle, adjusting Quinn’s position in my grasp so she could take in the view with me.
“You asked me before where I like to fly, what sights I’ve enjoyed taking in,” I said. “While I was working with Rollick mostly in this area of the world, I often came out here at night to enjoy the view. And do a little night fishing, but we’ll skip that part while you’re with me.”
“Maybe another time,” Quinn teased, but awe wound through her words. “It’s beautiful. That’s the highway?”
“Yes.” A glowing golden line wove along the coast, undulating with the curves of the green-dotted hills. Starker lights glided along it as cars cruised by. The glow mingled with the moonlight to catch on the foam of the waves below, bringing out hints of lavender and turquoise against the blackness of the night.
It was amazing how humans had taken a landscape that was already striking by daylight and used their inventions to transform it into something eerily gorgeous after sunset.
“No matter what the fiends do, this view will be here,” I said. “Mortals will survive and bring their light. And even if we can’t do it perfectly, we are helping to protect that light. Together.”
“Together,” Quinn murmured, looping her arm around my bicep and squeezing. “Even if we get hurt.”
“Even if we hurt each other accidentally.” I kissed the back of her head. “I love you, Quinn.”
She craned her neck to meet my eyes, a smile lighting her face so it shone as stunningly as the landscape before us. “I love you too. Thank you for this. I think I needed it. I?—”
Her gaze slipped past me for a second, and her forehead furrowed. “What’s that?”
I spun in the air just in time to see the starry sky before us ripple as if it were a pond someone had thrown a pebble into. My body tensed.
“That’s a rift,” I said. “And someone’s messing with it.”