Chapter 18
Hail
Mortals mill around the latest scene of the rogue shadowkind’s reign of devastation, talking in nervous voices about the car protruding from the storefront.
The pale faces and twitchy hands tell me they’re having trouble processing what sort of mortal being could possibly have caused this damage—or why.
Because it wasn’t mortals at all, even if Rollick insists that we trick them.
Humans keep themselves so ignorant about the world they call their own. The wild animals they don’t consider more than hunting prey and scenery have been aware of the shadow creatures that’ve lurked alongside them for ages.
To avoid causing suspicion now, we’re watching from the shadows rather than interacting with those humans in our physical forms.
Peri, Mirage, and Raze made a few stabs at selling the “terrorist gang” story. After I chilled their overly enthusiastic account with a remark about the horror of the situation that apparently sounded “too sarcastic,” we were shooed to the sidelines.
Jonah—the determiner of excessive sarcasm—and a few of the shadowbloods have been circulating through the crowd, spreading the story as they prefer, checking for additional information, and encouraging people to stay off the streets if they can.
We have to pretend we don’t even exist.
Because if these people got one hint of what we really are, they’d declare us just as much monsters as the being who tossed their cars around. They’d shower us with bullets and slit our throats if that didn’t do the trick.
Who exactly are the terrorists here?
Peri’s nearby presence radiates uneasy impatience through the persistent mark on my chest.
She’s still grousing about her encounter with the warped being. “I tried to tell Viscera it doesn’t have to be this way. That there are shadowkind who’ll welcome her into the community. But she wasn’t interested in making friends.”
I have the impression of Raze drawing closer to her, which sends a jab of ridiculous jealousy right through the glowing spot I can feel even in the shadows.
A quiver runs over my skin at the memory of the emotions I caught from her days ago, that stirred my blood and had my cock straining at my pants until I summoned frigid air all around me.
I’m pretty sure the carnivorous lug was responsible for her heated reactions. But why should I care?
“You did your best,” he says to her. “There’s just something wrong with the beings who stumble through those rifts. We’ve seen it with the lesser creatures too. They come out messed up.”
“And mean!” Mirage pitches in.
I can’t help it—I let a scoffing sound slip.
Peri turns toward me. “You think we’re being absurd. What’s wrong with what any of us said?”
I know from the twinge of emotion that tickles my essence that she’s genuinely curious, not accusing. Somehow that brings my hackles up more than if she was pushing for an argument.
I back away through the patches of darkness, putting the humans’ ugly, panic-blotched faces out of my sight. “Don’t worry about it.”
My “team” follows me around the corner and down a quieter street.
Peri waits until I come to a halt in the patch of shadows by our van before piping up again.
“You can’t tell someone not to worry. Feelings don’t work that way.
We need to know what everyone’s thinking about this problem if we’re going to have the best chance of solving it. ”
She sounds so cheerfully determined that whatever nerves I have in this shadowy state set on edge. I spin toward her, as much as I can face her while we’re ephemeral. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe it’s not really a problem?”
Her frown carries through her voice. “What are you talking about? Viscera is running around destroying parts of the city. She said she wants to crush the whole place. How can that not be a problem?”
Of course the cream puff would never see things my way. Her tender heart aches for every being, mortal or otherwise, in the whole world.
Even me, even after I’ve been cruel to her.
That thought stokes the sparks of my irritation. “Look at what she’s actually wrecking. Cars. Buildings. Lamp posts. Mailboxes. It’s all human-made crap. She isn’t tearing up trees or smashing squirrels.”
“There’s a lot more human stuff in the city than anything else,” Mirage points out, which I’ll grudgingly admit is a pretty logical comment from the fox shifter. “Even if she’s smashing at random, she’s more likely to hit buildings and cars than trees.”
“But she’s here. She doesn’t want to leave the city and go somewhere with fewer people. She wants to ruin what they have.”
If Peri were standing in front of me, I think she’d stick her hands on her hips right now, but her expression would be pained rather than defiant.
“How is that not a problem? The people who own those buildings and use those cars and everything else still need them in one piece. There must be hundreds of thousands of humans living here who are terrified.”
“You only care about that because you can feel them being terrified. Do you think they give a shit about you?”
“They don’t know me,” Peri says. “I’m sure a lot of them—”
I break in before she can make an absurd claim.
“They wouldn’t care. Most of them would like to see beings like us as battered and broken as that store window, if they knew we were here.
You remember that they call us monsters, right?
Even though hardly any shadowkind actually hurt them?
Some of them go all out with delusions of power like that asshole sorcerer who kept you in a cage, but almost every human would stamp us out if they knew how. ”
Peri’s voice quiets with a pulse of sadness through our connection. “I don’t think that’s true. Humans haven’t had a chance to really understand us, and we haven’t given them one because it’d be too complicated. That doesn’t make them bad.”
Something in me snaps. “It does! Even Rollick thinks so. They don’t want to understand us—they want to hate us and cut us down and destroy us.
So maybe it’s time they got a little payback.
Maybe this Viscera being is giving the humans exactly what they deserve.
Why shouldn’t they have to watch the things they care about get turned into rubble? ”
Raze speaks with a hint of a growl. “None of the people here did anything—”
“You don’t know that,” I retort before he can finish. “You have no idea how awful most of these people probably are to the parts of this world that are actually good—to all the other life that they don’t think is worthy.”
Peri’s distress pulses on, too intense for me to ignore it. “Most of them don’t think that way. Just because they like living in the cities—”
“And how do they treat the other life in these cities? How many of them carve up the trees, take potshots at pigeons, and chain up their dogs like slaves?”
“Lots of them don’t do anything awful. They’re just adjusting the world so it does what they need it to. Shadowkind do the same thing.”
A dark laugh tumbles out of me, propelled by an ache that’s searing through me like it hasn’t in years. “Not like humans do. Not going around ruining life for their own satisfaction. If this new shadowkind has decided to ruin their crap right back at them, then I say good for her.”
A deeper pang of pain hits me from Peri, along with a brief shudder. “You don’t really mean that.” She pauses for a second and then takes a firmer tone. “Something else is bothering you. If there were humans who hurt you, you have to know that doesn’t mean—”
I whirl around, denial screaming through every particle of my ephemeral body. “I don’t have to know anything. You don’t know anything. Some things are awful, and that’s the way they’ll always be. Thinking happy thoughts isn’t going to help.”
As the last words spill out, I shoot off through the shadows as fast as my essence can carry me. Away from Peri and her boundless optimism and compassion. Away from goofy Mirage and glowering Raze.
What do any of them know? They want to close their eyes and pretend human beings aren’t a stain on this world…
I haven’t gone all that far before the first prickling discomfort through the bond draws me to a halt.
If I race off much farther, Peri will collapse. And our connection will rip into me too.
With a gnash of my teeth, I whip around in the shadows. But my fury is already fading, leaving only a dull simmer of anguish in its wake.
Not all of that agony is mine. Even at this distance, Peri’s dismay wafts into me, full of guilt and regret that even I know it isn’t fair for her to feel.
She doesn’t know what I’ve been through or why I can’t see good in human beings. I’ve never given her the chance to know.
How is it fair for me to beat her up over her ignorance when I shut her out in the first place?
For fuck’s sake, why should I even care? I didn’t pick her. I—well, maybe I did want her a little—but I didn’t ask to be tied to her for what might be forever.
I do care, though. A significant part of the pain inside me comes from recognizing how much pain I’ve put Peri through with my arguing. How I’ve disappointed her with my caustic remarks.
How I’ve treated her like she’s pathetic when I know she isn’t at all.
I curl up in a corner of an alley, condensing my presence around the ache inside. None of it’s fair—not to me, not to her.
Maybe not to all the humans out there either, if I let myself think beyond my knee-jerk anger.
Now the rest of my team is going to want me around even less. And I can’t say they’d be wrong to turn their backs on me.