Chapter 27
Rollick
For the first several seconds, if I hadn’t known exactly where Quinn and therefore the three men who’d dedicated themselves to her cause must be, I’d have thought I was talking to thin air. The cliff above me was a mass of shadow-swathed rock.
I kept my arms folded loosely over my chest, my stance casual. No outward sign of the emotions roiling inside me. No indication of the wounds now sealed but still faintly throbbing on my back and thigh. You didn’t get very far in our world if you couldn’t disguise your weaknesses.
Sometimes even from yourself. I’d thought I’d known approximately how this reunion of sorts would go, but I was unprepared for the jolt of relief that hit me when Quinn’s pale form eased into partial sight overhead. She was standing on two feet, both arms appearing to be attached—whatever carnage the fiends who’d reached this spot before me had carried out, she’d escaped it.
She was whole and well, and it was hard to say which of my conflicting impulses was stronger. Definitely the two strongest were the one to yank her into my arms as if I could hold her together longer that way and the one to tear her apart myself for the havoc she’d created back at my primary home, as much as they clashed with each other.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded in a voice that only wavered a little, still mostly cloaked in darkness. “What do you want?”
“Strange questions from a woman who just this morning agreed that we’d be meeting up again as soon as I took care of the little problem at the hotel,” I said. “Well, I’m not waiting for an engraved invitation.”
“You—”
Before she could say anything else, I stepped into the shadows and rushed up through them to the outcropping where she was standing. Before I’d even emerged back into physical form there, I could sense the long stretch of gloom in the cave where they’d taken shelter and the impressions of my three unreliable employees, although Lance’s presence felt unusually subdued. Had he been injured?
Then I pulled my human guise together and looked Quinn straight in the face from just a few feet away, and every thought and emotion burned away in a blaze of fury that I hadn’t been any more prepared for than I had the relief.
This anger wasn’t directed at her. Her upper lip was split on the left side, blood marking it and the skin above it, where a bruise was also blooming across her cheek. My claws poked from my fingertips unbidden. I caught myself an inch from spitting out my conjured veneers and snapping my true, fanged teeth.
My voice came out in a rough hiss. “What wretched being did that to your face? Because when I get my claws into him?—”
Crag pushed into view, strangely halting with an arm’s length of distance between him and the mortal he so exalted—or maybe not strangely given what he said next.
“It was me,” he said in a raw rumble. “I—I was trying to keep her out of the way?—”
Quinn whipped toward him. “It wasn’t your fault. You were protecting me as well as you could with so much going on.”
She took a step toward him, reaching out, and froze when he jerked himself farther away. The gargoyle closed his hands into fists and stared down at them before taking in her injuries again.
Even if I’d still wanted to flay the perpetrator alive after finding out the circumstances, I couldn’t imagine any punishment I could have visited on Crag that’d hit him harder than the guilt he was already clearly flagellating himself with. My own hands clenched. Seeing her lovely face marred still made me want to hit something.
Why should it? I should be furious with her. It was her own fucking fault. Her fault my hotel had been stormed. Her fault the four of them weren’t securely tucked away in my safe house.
I was furious about that too. My jaw clenched against the acidic words I wanted to toss at all of them. But damn it if there hadn’t been a swell of awe mixed with that searing rage from the very first moment the invaders of my hotel had snatched a sketch from beneath the mattress in my suite’s bedroom.
She’d played me. This mortal woman who was barely even an adult by human standards had played me, a being who’d roved this realm for thousands of years. It was ridiculous and awful and impressive all at once.
She was lucky that I had been around long enough to see plenty of businesses rise and fall and to know how easily I could rebuild from the rubble, or I’d have been a lot more pissed off about the fact that the Sunshine Sin Hotel might never re-open. I certainly couldn’t go back there for as long as these assholes were continuing their rampage.
And she hadn’t even done all that just to get away from me. She wasn’t sticking her head in the sand and hoping she could play house with my traitorous employees while the rest of the world went to hell around her. The very same day she’d escaped me, she’d come here searching for answers.
It was just too bad our enemies had arrived with bloodier interests at the same time.
Of course, she hadn’t been clever enough to completely foil me. I wasn’t an idiot; I’d known she might fly the coop like she’d taken off on me once already. I’d also noticed how closely she guarded the messenger bag she kept her most essential possessions in. It hadn’t been any trouble at all to sew a GPS tracker into the lining where she’d never notice it.
Not that I was going to tell her how I’d found her so easily. Let her believe it was my amazing powers of perception or some supernatural skill I’d worked that she could never avoid.
Another figure stirred deeper within the cave. Torrent. “He’s waking up,” he called to Crag, and I knew immediately he was talking about the dragon shifter. My once-loyal lieutenant glanced at me from where he was crouched, his tentacles oddly stretched across a limp form I realized was covered in green scales. It looked as if he were… holding Lance down.
A hint of my confusion must have made it onto my face, because Quinn spoke quietly in explanation. “One of the beings that’s been taking in the sorcerer powers was leading the attack. He must have gotten Lance under his control. He made him attack us.”
My body tensed, a jab of worry lancing through my gut. Our enemies had gotten awfully far with the hearts and livers and so on that they’d already devoured, then. To sway a shadowkind as sharp as Lance, even if he’d been prey to sorcerers before… And that’d been before this being had gulped down the innards of the dozen or so magically inclined humans living here. How much might the idiot be capable of now?
This was not good at all.
The scaled body shifted, and a thin whine seeped from its mouth. Then the serpentine figure seemed to crumple inward into the smaller, human-like form that would allow Lance to actually speak. He coughed. “Torrent? I—they—sorcerous shadowkind?—”
The last words cut off with a snarl and a gnash of his teeth. Torrent eased back his tentacles. “They’re gone. It looks like their influence has left you too. They didn’t try to bring you totally under their control—small mercies.”
“They came up on me so fast. I didn’t even know they were there before that one caught me up…” Lance swayed into a sitting position, hanging his head. “I—I’m sorry. I would never—I tried so hard to stop it?—”
“It’s not your fault,” Quinn said emphatically, hurrying over as if she had no further concerns about my arrival. “We know you didn’t want to hurt us.”
His gaze darted up, and his stance went rigid. “You’re bleeding. I could have—” A low, ragged groan rippled out of him.
Quinn’s face twisted as if she were just as agonized as he sounded. She dropped to her knees in front of him and gripped his arms. “I’m okay. You can—you can heal it up, and I’ll be good as new.”
The dragon shifter eyed her with an air of bewilderment as if he couldn’t totally believe she meant it—that she’d trust him to take care of her. But when she turned her head to offer the cut on her lip to him, he leaned forward and exhaled a flicker of his fiery breath over that patch of flesh.
Watching him flick his tongue over the spot afterward, almost a kiss, made my hands clench all over again in a way that didn’t make any particular sense. I’d already observed her with all three of these men getting far more intimate than that gesture, after all.
The second he’d treated her wound, Lance swiveled away. He tipped over, slumping and stretching at the same time into his dragon form, his head swerving away from the rest of us to press against the rocky wall.
Quinn hesitated and then set her hand on his scaly shoulder. When he didn’t shake her off, she leaned in, wrapping her arms right around his sinewy frame and resting her cheek against his scaled neck. She’d been the one who’d nearly died, and there she was offering him all the comfort she could, even while he looked as far from human as he could get.
She really didn’t mind, did she? It wasn’t just getting off on an unusual situation or exotic anatomy. It wasn’t imagining away the full extent of their monstrousness. She saw him as being as much of a person as anyone else she might have cared about regardless of how inhuman he appeared in that moment.
Suddenly I wanted to rip him apart, which wasn’t a reasonable reaction either. I spun on my heel with a brisk gesture toward Torrent for him to join me.
As I stared out over the darkness now blanketing the valley, he came up beside me at the mouth of the cave. He’d retracted all but his usual two supporting tentacles now.
“So,” I said, “should I even bother asking what you’re doing out here rather than at the meeting spot we agreed on?”
I wasn’t going to admit that I’d realized they’d betrayed me to a far worse extent than that. I still needed Quinn—needed her on my side more than ever, if what had happened here today was any indication—and for now that meant I needed these unreliable underlings too.
My lieutenant lowered his head. “You knew how to contact me,” he said with typical terseness. “We thought we’d have the chance to find out something useful about her powers while the other fiends were distracted. You want her to get a better handle on her sorcery, don’t you?”
Oh, he figured he could turn this around and make it sound as if it’d been a favor to me, did he?
I held in a snort. “I would have preferred it if that training didn’t come with a heaping side of bloodshed, FYI.”
“We got her out of the way as quickly as we could—and it doesn’t look like the other shadowkind even realized she was here.”
“Dumb luck.” I exhaled sharply and turned to him, just as he adjusted his arm at his side, and the remark I’d meant to make next fled my mind. I stared at his mangled hand—if it could even be called a hand now. Different words tumbled out. “Some part of you didn’t get out of the way fast enough.”
If he hadn’t made it clear his loyalties lay elsewhere, I’d have winced a little at the insensitivity of that spontaneous comment. I knew how tormented he was by the infirmities he’d already had when he came to me. But maybe he deserved having the results of this misadventure rubbed in a little—just how badly his choices had gone for him.
It seemed my mutinous followers had gotten punished quite thoroughly before I’d even arrived.
Torrent tucked the damaged hand under his uninjured arm, his voice dropping. “Lance. When I was trying to keep him off Quinn. You know how fierce a fighter he can be.”
I did. I hadn’t expected him to ever turn those talents against his own squad, though. Fucking sorcerer-scheming shadowkind and their new brainwashing abilities.
I couldn’t ignore the opening, though. “It doesn’t seem to be working out so well for you—this whole playing guardian angel to the mortal thing. How many losses are you willing to take before you decide it’s time to cut out?”
Torrent answered without missing a beat. “I knew there were risks in this line of work, and I knew there were risks in taking her side. I have no regrets. Not like I would have if she’d ended up in those assholes’ hands.”
I’d thought he’d been that unshakably committed to me. If he was even more devoted to her…
I glanced back at where Quinn was still snuggled up to Lance and caught her watching us in the fading twilight, her gaze lingering on Torrent’s back, her expression strained. Her eyes darted away at the turn of my head, but I recognized the horror I’d seen written there. And suddenly I understood where I’d gone wrong.
This wasn’t the right direction. There were fault lines in the unusual relationship my trio had formed with the budding sorcerer, but if I wanted to crack their unified front, I needed to push from the other end.
And the catastrophe they’d brought on themselves had given me my perfect point of leverage.