Chapter 10
Crag
“He might not be gone for very long,” I felt the need to point out as the three of us raced up through the shadows toward the hotel’s upper levels.
“We have enough time for a brief talk,” Torrent said. “When Rollick breaks out one of those crystal bottles of cognac, he plans to savor it. We just won’t let ourselves get sidetracked by unnecessary diversions.”
I suspected that last comment was directed mainly at Lance. The dragon shifter was by far the most likely among us to get distracted, and the woman we were hurrying to see had become his favorite diversion. Every time we’d been able to talk amongst ourselves since arriving in L.A., there’d been an irritated edge to his jokes, along with some grumbling about certain demons restricting our access to “our mortal.”
“Gotta take the time we have, or he’ll steal even more from us,” he said now in a jaunty but urgent tone, rushing ahead of the two of us.
“Hold on.” Torrent’s tone was firm enough that Lance slowed. Our squad leader took the lead as we moved through the small opening in the layer of silver and iron. “We need to handle this so that Rollick doesn’t realize we snuck in. He probably has surveillance in his rooms, but I’ve checked over the terrace, and it seems clear. But we’ll need Quinn to come to us.”
“Yes, yes, invite her out to the party.” Lance leapt forward again. “I can be careful.”
He could, or he wouldn’t have been part of the squad to begin with. We were the ones Rollick sent on the secret missions he didn’t want anyone knowing he was invested in. No other shadowkind was even aware that we worked for him.
Which was a good thing now that half of the beings that’d been rampaging around Florida had seen one or all of us, or even this hotel wouldn’t have been safe for Quinn.
When we reached the terrace outside Rollick’s private suite, Torrent emerged by the railing overlooking the ocean. Lance and I followed suit. Our leader was the only one who’d managed to speak to Quinn since Rollick had sent us off a few days ago; he knew how to best handle the situation.
Or, I thought that, anyway. Lance started toward the glass sliding door, and Torrent caught his arm. The dragon shifter let out a soft growl of annoyance, but hung back next to Torrent as the other man extended one of his tentacles to lightly jostle the glass.
I hadn’t spotted Quinn at first. But as I stepped forward to stand beside my companions, I noted a hint of her pale blond hair peeking over the top of the armchair that faced away from us. It didn’t stir.
“You need to smack it harder,” Lance said to Torrent.
Torrent gave the dragon shifter an amicable nudge to the shoulder. “She heard. She’ll know. She’s just being smart and waiting a few minutes so that it won’t be obvious she thinks there was something significant about the noise. Come on, we should stay as far back from the windows as we can.”
He darted through the darkness and reformed in the most shadowy corner of the terrace. Lance and I came after him on foot. It was getting late into the night, stars glinting in the vast sweep of the sky overhead, the ocean not much more than a vague expanse and a rhythmic hiss of waves. I couldn’t make out the thumping bass of the nightclub on the lower floors anymore, but the less aggressive melodies from the rooftop patio filtered down. If it was still open, we weren’t calling on Quinn at an unreasonable hour.
Lance stirred restlessly on his feet, and I tamped down similar impulses inside myself. It’d been too long since I’d been in our woman’s presence. I’d sworn to myself and to her that I’d protect her, I’d done everything in my power… and it hadn’t been enough. She’d had to make this deal to protect me as well as herself. My jaw clenched at the thought of the scars that still ached a bit when I extended my reformed wing, which would never quite be the same.
Quinn didn’t leave us waiting too long. She came out through the bedroom door, closer to our current post. The smile that sprang to her lips at the sight of all three of us was so brilliant it nearly erased all my agony at being apart from her.
She dashed forward, and naturally Lance caught her first, snatching her into an embrace so swift and emphatic it was a miracle he didn’t skewer her with those fatal claws. He spun her around and nuzzled the side of her face with a long inhalation as if drinking in the scent of her hair. “I’ve missed you, baby girl.” Then he kissed her so deeply an approving sound hummed from Quinn’s throat.
“I missed you too,” she said in a choked-sounding voice. “Thank you for the apple.”
Delight sparked in his eyes. “I’ll toss more in whenever I get the chance.”
I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but he didn’t get to soak up all her affection. As soon as she’d eased back from him, I tugged her into an embrace of my own, reveling in the softness of her body against my solid frame—and the strength I could feel emanating from within that softness. “He’s not the only one who missed you,” I said gruffly.
Quinn squeezed me back tightly and bobbed up on her toes to press a kiss to my mouth that brought my more heated desires roaring to life. “And I missed you too. All of you.” She glanced around at us, her gaze settling on Torrent, and smiled at him. Then she turned back to me with a flicker of concern in her eyes. “How’s your wing? Has it healed up all right?”
I hadn’t known I could feel fonder of this woman, but a renewed surge of affection rushed through me. I let my wings extend from my back without transforming all the way into my gargoyle body, letting her see the sealed tears with their mottling of scars in the thin flesh. “Almost good as new. If we need to fly, I’m ready.”
“Hopefully that won’t be necessary.” She stepped closer, running her fingers tentatively over the marks, and a shiver of my own delight shot straight to my groin. The flesh there was sensitive both to damage and to a more tender touch. I swept the wing forward, tucking her into an embrace next to me, and she leaned against my arm with a sigh of contentment.
Her gaze slid back to Torrent. “Are we hopping over to the other room again?”
Something about the slight arch of her eyebrows and the unusual warmth to Torrent’s answering smile made me wonder exactly what the two of them had gotten up to when he’d visited alone two nights ago. But then, it wasn’t as if I should resent Torrent for getting to embrace Quinn as intimately as I already had. The three of us were in this together, watching over her together… Showing our adoration in every possible way together.
“I don’t think there’s any point,” Torrent said. “Rollick’s downstairs in the club—I wouldn’t want to risk staying more than half an hour as it is. We can talk just as easily out here.”
Quinn tensed against me. “Are you sure it’s safe for you to have come at all?”
And that was exactly why I knew Rollick had been wrong when he’d suggested Quinn was only using us for a thrill. Her first thought wasn’t to be upset that we couldn’t stay longer and engage in the more thrilling pursuits we’d discovered together—it was to be worried about how our visit might have negative consequences for us. She might be rare among mortals, but there was no denying her commitment to us.
I would have fought to the bitter end to ensure her freedom, but she’d given it up so that I could keep my life. Rollick had no idea what he was talking about.
I was going to prove myself worthy of her devotion. She needed to believe that her imprisonment here was only temporary, that we were making progress toward destroying all her enemies and clearing the path back to her former existence. If I couldn’t accomplish that for her, then she was the one who should have been scorning me, not the other way around.
“I’ll sense if he’s approaching,” I said. The one useful feature of the demon’s immense power from my perspective was that I could sense the vibrations of his presence through my rocky nature at a much farther distance than the average being. I wasn’t aware of him right now through the layer of silver and iron, which was exactly why Rollick had added it to the building—though mainly so he couldn’t be sensed when he was up here, not the other way around. But as soon as he traveled past it, I’d know.
Torrent nodded. “If he comes while we’re still here, we can make ourselves scarce.”
“I still say we slice and dice him,” Lance announced, clicking his claws together. “Too tricksy—so annoying. Keeping us apart from you, giving us all the work.”
Torrent made a dismissive noise. “It’s more than just his ‘tricksy’-ness that’s the problem, as you know. If we don’t have to fight him at all, we’re a lot more likely to come out of this situation still standing. And the work we’ve been doing should eventually help us come up with a feasible plan.”
Quinn hugged herself within the shelter of my wing. “It’s going to be even harder going against him now. He brought my parents here to the hotel—he says it’s for their protection, but our deal doesn’t cover them. Even if I’m technically sticking to the terms, if he isn’t happy with me, he could take it out on them.”
My muscles flexed automatically, my fangs itching at my gums, eager to emerge. “We won’t let him harm them either.”
Torrent frowned. “That does complicate the situation… but really, we need to neutralize the threat of the other shadowkind after you, who don’t seem inclined to make any deals at all, before we worry about Rollick anyway.”
He was right, even if the difficulties with accomplishing that task loomed as large as a mountain in the back of my mind, more daunting than an actual mountain would have been. But we had to find a way. They couldn’t have Quinn. That was all there was to it.
“Have you found out anything else about the beings who are searching for me?” Quinn asked.
Lance raked his claws through the air and then slung his arm around her waist to pull her away from me to nuzzle her again. “They like to slice and dice. No deals. No negotiations. Anything in their way, they pulverize it.”
Like the crumpled garage at the sorcerers’ home, an image that made me wince inwardly. I prided myself on my strength, but strength might not be enough against these brutes.
Torrent was nodding. “They seem to be pretty… old-school in their approach. All overt violence, turning to aggression to handle any problem—earning the ‘monster’ label very thoroughly. The two or more beings in charge have stayed in the background letting their followers handle most of the work, so we’re not sure of their exact powers yet, but they’re clearly not afraid of other shadowkind noticing their activities.”
“Like Rollick is,” Quinn said. “I mean, he’s been very careful to make sure no one finds out he’s at all interested in me and my powers, right? He sent you out in secret. Does that mean these beings are even more powerful than he is?” Her mouth twisted.
“Not necessarily,” Torrent said. “Rollick’s mostly concerned with running his businesses and enjoying the fruits of his labors. He wouldn’t get anything out of all-out war. So it suits him to avoid it, whereas these other shadowkind seem to welcome that kind of conflict. Maybe they’re out to prove themselves the top dogs around. Maybe they’ve got a specific agenda.” He let out a frustrated huff. “We’re still not sure what their end goal is.”
“They’ve been killing other sorcerers.” Quinn motioned vaguely to the world beyond the hotel. “At least a couple of other families since we arrived here.”
“Good riddance,” I said automatically, and regretted the words at the tensing of Quinn’s stance. I wasn’t going to wish for the safety of the malicious humans who enslaved shadowkind, but I had to remember they were closer to her own kind than we were. And she didn’t seem to like to see any sort of being suffer.
“Serves them right, but it’s no good for shadowkind to grab those powers,” Lance said with a snarl for emphasis. “They should be better than that.”
“I might not be safe even with Rollick protecting me then,” Quinn said. “If these monsters are close to as powerful as he is and more willing to fight…”
Torrent extended a tentacle to give her forearm a reassuring squeeze. “Oh, he’ll fight if he needs to. He just prefers to choose his battles wisely. He obviously thinks defying these fiends is important, or he wouldn’t have involved himself to begin with.”
“What does he want with Quinn?” the dragon shifter murmured, pressing a kiss to the back of her head. “Other than her loveliness. That’s enough for me, but I don’t think so for him.”
“No,” Quinn agreed, her expression clouding.
I pictured what a battle like that might look like, shadowkind assaulting the hotel, Rollick hitting back with his demonic powers and the allies he could call on. The whole place might end up rubble by the time both sides had finished battering each other…
The thought brought a spark of inspiration into my mind, a sensation I wasn’t all that familiar with. It took me a moment before I felt confident enough to voice it.
“What if… what if we let them deal with each other?”
Torrent cocked his head, studying me but with interest rather than the skepticism I’d been afraid of. “What do you mean?”
“If we made it so the other shadowkind found out that Rollick was keeping Quinn here,” I said, “they’d attack, and he’d have to fight back. They’d take out a bunch of each other’s forces, maybe even take each other out and leave no one in any shape to continue chasing after her. We’d have to make sure she was safely away before the fighting started, of course, but…” I glanced between the others’ faces, hoping my explanation hadn’t sounded completely absurd.
Quinn nodded slowly. “That makes sense. Let them exhaust themselves against each other… Even if neither side is totally destroyed, they should both end up a lot weaker than they are now.”
Lance grinned. “Very tricksy. We can play that game too.”
Torrent rubbed his chin. “There could be something to that. We’d need to set it up very carefully—if Rollick got wind that our enemies were coming much in advance, he’d take off with Quinn and leave them nothing to find. And even if they take him by surprise, if she turns out not to be here, that could diffuse the conflict and simply leave him very pissed off at us.”
“We have time to think through the possibilities,” Quinn pointed out. “The deal holds for at least another six days. The more we know about who we’re up against and why they’re doing this—on both sides—the better. At least now we have the start of an approach that could work.” She aimed one of her bright smiles at me. “It’s a really smart plan, Crag. Better than anything I’ve been able to think of.”
I couldn’t help beaming back, as strange as the expression felt on my face. She was impressed by an idea I’d come up with. And if we needed to, we’d see it through, whether Rollick liked it or not.