Chapter 24
Quinn
Pain blazed all through my mid-section. I sucked in a breath, my eyelids fluttering, and winced at a sensation that felt like several shards of glass poking deeper into my belly.
Crag’s rumble of a voice came from somewhere over me. “Quinn? Lie still—you need more time to recover.” He raised his voice slightly to call to someone farther away. “She’s waking up!”
The gargoyle’s broad hand came to rest on my shoulder. As the shock of the pain ebbed, I became more aware of the other sensations outside my body: soft blades of grass covering a lumpy stretch of earth beneath me, hazy morning light seeping into my eyes, a rush of warm breeze carrying the scent of wildflowers and not a trace of salt.
I blinked, focusing my vision. I was lying on my side in a small clearing sheltered by looming trees. Pale clouds still covered most of the sky; the sun hadn’t yet risen above the level of the treetops. Crag was crouched behind me. As I parted my lips, attempting to work sound from my parched mouth, my other three shadowkind men materialized around me.
“Bring her water bottle,” Rollick ordered, coolly and briskly but with a waver of worry that passed from him into me. “She needs hydration after the blood she lost.”
Torrent snatched the bottle from my bag and brought it to me with a tentacle. His expression was tight, his sea-green eyes stormy. “Don’t move,” he told me.
Lance leapt in to open the bottle and hold it to my lips. With Crag supporting my head, I raised it a little to sip the water. The liquid had warmed in the few hours since I’d refilled the container, but right then I wasn’t feeling picky. It slid down my throat like some kind of elixir. My belly twinged, but the discomforts beyond my wound retreated.
“What happened?” I asked with a rasp. I couldn’t feel any blood where my arm was leaning against my belly, although my shirt clung to me here and there with damp splotches. “Am I going to be okay?”
“We’ll have to keep a close eye on you,” Rollick said grimly. “But I think Lance managed to seal your wound all right once he didn’t have those creatures swarming him. It’ll take a while before the flesh all knits together properly—a lot of it will be scar tissue right now. I’ll get you some painkillers when we’re back in the city.”
“Okay.” Lance had patched me up enough times that I trusted his dragon fire to have seared away any chance of infection. I let my head droop back against the grass. “How did we end up getting attacked? What were all those creatures doing there to begin with?”
Torrent sank down next to me and stroked a careful hand over my hair. “It looks like they set a trap for us. Someone must have spotted Rollick’s spies and reported that the site had been compromised. Instead of moving elsewhere, they prepared an ambush assuming we’d come investigate ourselves.”
The thought of our enemies following our moves that closely made my pulse stutter. I shifted slightly, feeling the press of the silver and iron beads across my chest—but not as far down as the strands used to fall. “The one that got me broke my vest. If they track me down again?—”
“It still seems to be offering enough protection to mostly disguise your sorcerer energy,” Rollick cut in. “I can catch a little of it from here, but at the far side of the clearing, I couldn’t pick it up at all. That should be enough protection until we can arrange something else. I’ve already had a few of my contacts working on putting together a few items with silver thread woven in like I talked about before. As soon as one is done, you can try it out instead.”
I sighed and slowly rolled onto my back. This movement only set off the impression of a couple of shards of glass digging into me instead of a whole bunch like before.
I touched my belly tentatively and found the skin there was dry but rippled with the scar tissue Rollick had mentioned. Even the swipe of Lance’s tongue with its special saliva hadn’t been able to smooth this spot out completely.
Oh, well. I wasn’t any stranger to scars.
“So, what now?” I asked the group around me. “What else can we do to find out what they’re doing—to stop them?”
Lance let out a little growl. “You need to rest and get better. No more fighting. If they’d hurt you any more…” His face darkened with a haunted expression that looked totally wrong there. My dragon shifter was meant to be smiling and laughing.
“They know for sure that we’re in the area now,” Crag said. “We should leave, go somewhere they won’t think to look for Quinn.”
“No,” I protested. “We can’t—that’ll give them even more time to prepare whatever it is they’re working toward. And we know they’re out to hurt people however they can. If we back down now, we might not get another chance.”
Torrent’s mouth twisted. “I don’t know how much of a chance we have even now.”
“That being you snapped out of their sorcery, she said they’re out to kill you now, not just capture you,” Lance reminded me, slinging a possessive arm over my legs.
The memory of her words left me cold, but I couldn’t let that shake my resolve. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be in danger no matter where we go and what we do. I’ll be in more danger if these monsters gather more power than they already have. We have to… Maybe we should stop trying to figure out what they’re doing and why, and just go straight to shutting them down.”
Rollick let out a dark chuckle. “If accomplishing that was as easy as saying it, we’d already have done it.”
“There has to be a way…” My mind drifted through the events of the past few weeks. “I’m a sorcerer. Sorcerers have ways of controlling shadowkind. That’s why they want me dead, isn’t it? They don’t think there’s any chance they could really use me now, but they’re afraid I might be able to control them. They can’t control me themselves, right? The sorcery they’ve absorbed only works on other shadowkind.”
“We can’t count on you being able to overpower them,” Torrent said.
“No, but… what if we used more sorcerer strategies in general? They have all kinds of ways of manipulating shadowkind. They kill them to bring out their own powers. They know how to weaken them and threaten them…”
The image swam up from my memory of the cages where the enclave had held the creatures for the rites—and who knew what other purposes. Made out of silver and iron, yes, but also with those blades ready to spear right into the beings if need be.
“We could set a trap for them,” I said slowly. But how the hell would we get one of those immense beings into any kind of cage? Even making a cage big enough seemed like a monumental task—and neither my men nor Rollick’s other shadowkind allies could construct anything made out of the toxic metals.
But mortals—mortals could handle silver and iron without any trouble. I glanced at Rollick. “You have contacts who are human—the ones who’re working on my new protective gear. The ones who set up the protections around your properties and inside the hotel. If we gave them a design, they could build whatever you asked, couldn’t they?”
Rollick raised an eyebrow. ”I suppose I could pull together the manpower and resources to construct just about anything, given enough time. What are you scheming now?”
All at once, my fingers were itching for a pencil and sketch pad. An image of the trap I wanted to design was unfolding in my mind, a larger and more concealed version of the vicious cages from the enclave.
”I think I could make plans for a structure we could use to... to kill the behemoth and the leviathan,” I said. ”I might need someone with more advanced engineering knowledge to adjust the mechanical parts, but I”m almost sure it should be doable. We could take a similar approach to something I saw the sorcerers in the enclave using.”
Lance shuddered. ”Nothing they do is good.”
His response sent an ache through my chest that had nothing to do with my injury. I reached out to squeeze his forearm. ”I know. They”re horrible to the shadowkind. But now we”re dealing with shadowkind who are horrible too. The sorcerers have spent their entire existence honing their ability to control beings like that—and destroy them if they feel they need to. We”re running out of time. We have to make use of every advantage we can.”
”She”s right,” Crag rumbled. ”Whatever it takes. They”ve done too much damage already.”
Torrent nodded. ”I”m on board. Our usual tactics haven”t gotten us far enough.”
Lance grimaced but then dipped down to kiss my hip. ”I don”t want them or their beasties getting any more claws into our woman. If we need to act like sorcerers to do that, then fine.”
Rollick folded his arms over his chest with a contemplative air. ”I think we”re forgetting one thing. We can make a trap, sure. But how are we going to get these menaces to stroll on into it?”
”They came to the camp in Oregon when we compelled one of their lackeys to say I”d show up,” I said.
”Yes, but they”re not likely to fall for the same trick twice. And I”d already used similar tactics to redirect their attention before, so I think using you as bait in any way is all tapped out.”
I stared up at the drifting clouds, considering the situation. When the idea came to me, my stomach twisted, but I couldn”t think of anything better to suggest.
”What if we don”t present me as willing bait? What if we make them think I”m an even bigger threat than they already believe, and they”ve got to hunt me down and ensure I”m destroyed if they want to go through with their plan?”
Lance”s growl revealed exactly what he thought of that plan. Crag let out a similar ragged huff. ”I”d rather you weren”t in their sights at all, Softness.”
”But I am anyway,” I pointed out. ”We might as well use that fact. We can make our trap in a building, and let word get out that I”m gathering an army of my own there. Subtly, so they think we”re trying to hide the information from them. I can... I can enslave at least a few shadowkind, make sure other minions of theirs are nearby to witness it. I can break the duo’s sorcery. They won”t like that.”
”I don”t know if that will be enough,” Rollick said with obvious reluctance. I got the sense he didn”t particularly care for this strategy either.
I bit my lip. ”What if we also—we could reach out to whatever sorcerer families you”re aware of that they haven”t already attacked. Send a message asking them to come ally with me. Make sure at least one of those messages gets intercepted, so our enemies know we”re gathering those sorts of forces too.”
”Bring the actual sorcerers in?” Lance said with a hiss of breath through his teeth. ”They”ll try to capture us.”
”We won”t let them. And they probably won”t even come. It”ll look like a trap to them. We just want to make the big bosses worried that they might come. And if they do show up... then that”ll just be extra bait.”
My gut knotted just for a second at the thought of luring fellow humans into my scenario. Only for a second, because then I thought of all the ways these humans had manipulated shadowkind over the years.
Did it make me a monster that I was willing to risk sacrificing them to take down an even greater evil?
A few weeks ago, I”d have shied away from that thought. Now, it settled inside me next to my resolve, not a blessing or a curse, just the way things were.
I”d do whatever it took to protect the people who deserved it—and there were a heck of a lot more of them than there were innocent sorcerers.
”What if the fiends send a bunch of beasties in again and don”t come themselves?” Lance asked. “Like they did at Rollick’s hotel.”
I”d already pondered that point. ”Rollick has made buildings where most shadowkind can”t get past the silver-and-iron barriers without a special access point, right? In the hotel, he’d let them in to try to prove his innocence. We could set up this entire building like that—and obviously we wouldn’t let the less powerful beings in. It”d make the story that I”m gathering my forces to take down the big baddies more plausible too. We”d make the protections strong enough to ward off all but particularly powerful shadowkind. If they wanted to get at me, they”d have to come themselves.”
Crag frowned. ”That’ll make it hard for all of us to protect you in there.”
“If the trap works the way it’s supposed to, I won’t need anyone protecting me. As soon as they come into the building, we can activate it, and it’ll kill them all on its own.”
Talking so casually about slaughtering another living being—even mostly immortal beings like the shadowkind—sent another jab of nausea through me. But then I thought of the man we’d found dead in the alley, of the toddler slaughtered in that sorcerer house near Boston, of the being last night who’d thanked me for freeing her from them.
These two monsters were threatening all of us. Something had to be done about them. And if we were in the best position to do it, then it was up to us not to let the rest of the world down.
“It sounds like you have your mind made up,” Rollick said in a ghost of his usual breezy tone. “And you figure you’re going to set all this up while recovering from a near-fatal disembowelling?”
I glowered at him. “Get me back to your apartment, bring me a sketchpad and my laptop—you can keep the wifi password to yourself, I don’t need the internet—and I’ll have a blueprint worked out within twenty-four hours.” I paused. “And then most of the rest will be up to the four of you.”
“Until you have to go into the trap to lure them after you,” Lance said discontentedly.
I set my jaw. “Yes. Until then.”