Chapter 2
Quinn
At my statement, Lance spun all the way toward me with a snarl as if he thought he could intimidate my transplanted organ into behaving itself. He stared at my chest and then at my face, his eyes wild. “What can we do? We need to fix it!”
Crag had come right around the sofa, his wings unfurling. “She would need a hospital, wouldn’t she? I can get her to one quickly.”
One of Torrent’s tentacles curled around my wrist protectively as he glanced around the room. “Where’s your medicine? Did you miss a dose?”
“She didn’t,” Rollick said before I could answer, with a firm certainty that sent a more welcome twinge through my chest. I knew immediately from the way he said it that he’d been keeping track, monitoring to make sure I was as safe as possible. As much as the demon liked to pretend he didn’t care all that much about anything, he hid an awful lot of compassion.
He crouched down next to the looming gargoyle so his face was level with mine and held my gaze, all serious intensity. “You know your specific condition better than any of us could, Quinn. What do you need?”
The flurry of concern and affection around me had me choking up. It took a second before I could speak.
“I don’t think we can really do anything right now. My medical team is back in Jacksonville.”
“Then we go back to Florida,” Lance broke in before I could go on, leaping to his feet.
I shook my head. “I need to be here, dealing with the leviathan. We might all be dead if he goes through with whatever he’s planning, no matter what happens with my heart.”
I tested my body, shifting my arms, and found the pain had almost completely dissipated other than a faint pressure in my chest that I only noticed when I focused on it. Maybe it was all nerves now.
“It was just a brief spell,” I said. “Usually these things don’t happen in an instant. That’s just an initial warning sign. I probably have months before my heart is weak enough to give out completely.” As long as nothing sped along the process.
Torrent was frowning, his whole body tensed. “I thought you should have at least a few more years before that happened.”
I offered a tight smile. “So did I. I don’t know—maybe using the sorcerer magic that came with this heart is putting a strain on it that’s worn it out faster. Maybe it wasn’t the strongest heart to begin with. The estimate they give you is just an average. Some people get more… and some people get less. And I could be wrong. Maybe it was just the stress getting to me and my heart’s fine.”
My men didn’t look convinced, and to be fair, I wasn’t really either. Rollick stood again, folding his arms over his chest. “There are medications to help sustain the transplant in a situation like this, aren’t there? I can bring in a doctor. We’ll do what we can without drawing attention to you. If you went back to your team in Jacksonville, there’s a possibility the leviathan has minions keeping an eye on the hospitals there.”
I hadn’t even thought about that. I nodded, hating how weak I felt, worn out by the brief but intense burst of symptoms.
I had the impression that Rollick meant to summon up a doctor from someplace or other right away, but before he could so much as reach for his phone, Crag stiffened. The gargoyle jerked around, his gaze skimming the room as his muscles flexed.
The other men braced themselves too, knowing Crag was the most sensitive to the presence of other shadowkind out of all of them. I pushed myself to my feet, relieved to find that my legs only wobbled a little, and grabbed my trusty crossbow off the coffee table. I kept it loaded with the three silver-and-iron bolts it could hold at all times, just in case.
“Please don’t hurt me,” a squeaky little voice said from the vicinity of the window. A small form moved in the shadows beneath the ledge. “I wanted—I wanted to say thank you.”
My men formed a barricade in front of me, even though the creature that’d arrived hardly seemed like much of a threat. One of them could probably have stomped on it without breaking a sweat.
“Show yourself,” Rollick said in a voice that was both smooth and ominous.
A miniature human form eased into the glow of the overhead lights, only tall enough to reach my knee, with spiky blue hair poking up over her pinched face and iridescent bug-like wings fluttering at her back. She cringed looking up at the much larger shadowkind, but she held her ground.
“Pixie,” Crag muttered. “What are you doing here?”
She quivered before she spoke. “The behemoth had my mind. I saw you all leaving after the sorcerer killed him and freed us. So I followed you. I—I’m so grateful that you stopped him from using us any more, but I’m so scared—the being he was working with—the leviathan…” Her words seemed to dry up as her whole body shook.
“So you came here looking for protection?” Torrent said dryly.
“Not just that,” the pixie insisted with a sharper squeak to the words. She sought out my gaze where I was peeking from between the men. “I’ll help any way I can. Whatever you’re going to do next. Whatever you need. I know you’re not like the usual sorcerers.” Her gaze flicked over my companions. “You obviously know that too. And there are others—lots of the beings who broke free from the behemoth’s sorcery would help too. They’re waiting nearby. I said I’d talk to you first.”
They’d realized that a whole horde of them invading the apartment at once probably wouldn’t have gotten them the result they were looking for, no doubt. I took a step forward, but Lance caught my arm.
“We don’t know if she’s being honest or tricksy,” he said. “That little friend of Torrent’s turned on us before.”
Goldie the leprechaun. Torrent grimaced at the memory, but Lance did have a point. Rollick cocked his head, with another tic of his muscles that I only noticed because I was standing so close. What was up with him?
“You could be under the leviathan’s compulsion right now,” he said to the pixie.
She held up her hands. “No, I swear, everything I said was true. Please—if you don’t want my help, I’ll leave. It’s enough just to say thank you. But I don’t like what they’ve been doing. It feels wrong. And I don’t know what it’ll take to stop the leviathan now.”
“Do you know anything about their plans?” I asked. “What they were trying to do?”
She shook her head with a miserable expression. “They didn’t tell us very much. But they were killing other shadowkind by a rift near here. They were making some attack the mortals when they didn’t want to. And now, bursting into that building in front of the whole city… I have a very bad feeling.”
As did we. I hesitated, and then the most obvious solution came to me. “I can use my sorcery on her—to confirm that she isn’t under anyone else’s sway and make sure she’s answering us honestly.”
Lance spun to face me. “You can’t work more magic. It could make your heart worse.”
I squared my shoulders. “It’s the one way I can contribute. It’s the whole reason I’m in this mess to begin with. We probably won’t get out of this mess if I back down. Anyway, it shouldn’t take much just to ask a few questions.” I yanked my attention back to the pixie. “If you’re okay with it.”
I didn’t want to use my powers on an ally without their permission—that was one line I hoped I’d never feel the need to cross again.
The pixie raised her chin without hesitation. “I have nothing to hide.”
I couldn’t help admiring her spirit despite her small stature and the four deadly, not particularly friendly beings she was facing off against. My men watched me warily as I stepped to the front of the group.
“If you feel at all out of sorts,” Rollick started.
I glanced back at him. “I know. I like defying death, not running headlong into it.”
The demon gave me a crooked smile. “From what I’ve seen, you’re not always clear on the difference. But go ahead.”
I glowered at him half-heartedly and then focused on the pixie. The energy inside me had faded with my earlier efforts, but enough of a tingling remained in my chest that I should be able to pull off a little sorcery.
I willed the magic up into the back of my mouth. The words in the odd language sorcery almost always seemed to come out in spilled over my tongue. You will answer my questions truthfully.
The energy leapt out of me and sank into the pixie without any sign of other sorcery blocking my command. “She isn’t under anyone else’s control,” I announced quickly, keeping my gaze on her. That fact didn’t guarantee that she was trustworthy. “Why are you here? Tell me the truth, like I instructed you.”
The pixie’s voice came out fierce. “I want to stop the leviathan from enslaving me and other beings like me the way the behemoth did. You brought down the behemoth, so you seem like the best person to turn to. And I at least wanted to say thank you for breaking me from that spell.”
“Do you intend any harm at all toward me or these beings?” I asked, gesturing to the men around me.
She shook her head. “I only want to help. I don’t want to see anyone else get hurt.”
I couldn’t sense any reason to doubt her in her words or her body language. I glanced around at my men. “Is that enough to convince you?”
“Well, she isn’t some kind of traitor, anyway,” Torrent said, still looking skeptical. I guessed it was kind of hard to figure just how much help the pixie would actually be.
She didn’t appear to be affected by his tone. She jerked straighter as if standing at attention and beamed at me. “Thank you for giving me a chance! Can I bring the others who’d like to offer their gratitude and support too?”
Rollick hummed to himself, the sound casual but the ripple of emotion I caught from him unsettled. “We should probably test all of them to be sure of their intentions. I’m not sure our lovely sorcerer is quite up to that at the moment. How many beings are we talking about?”
The pixie bobbed eagerly on her feet. “Oh, at least a hundred when I left them to come to you. More might have gathered since then. A lot of them are lesser creatures who probably don’t totally understand what’s going on, but they want to put an end to all this trouble too. I think there were a couple dozen higher beings like me or, well, bigger.” She let out a little giggle.
I blinked, having trouble wrapping my head around what she’d just said. Rollick had been working on building his connections up into some kind of shadowkind army, but he hadn’t made a whole lot of progress from what I’d gathered. Shadowkind didn’t tend to band together for larger causes—they liked to look out for themselves.
Now we had a couple dozen higher beings and over a hundred shadowkind altogether ready to push back against the leviathan’s attacks? A shiver of exhilaration ran through me that lifted me above the melancholy of my uncertain health.
Maybe we really could do this. Defeating the leviathan, enhanced powers or not, no longer felt like quite such a huge hurdle to conquer.
Rollick’s expression had turned unusually grim, though. He narrowed his eyes at the pixie. “And how close is this swarm that’s waiting for you? They followed you most of the way to the apartment?”
She nodded. “I told them to stay a little ways off—they don’t know exactly where you are. I understand you’re being cautious.”
“Not cautious enough.” Rollick snapped his fingers at the rest of us. “Grab your things. We’re going to regroup elsewhere. A flood of shadowkind in the neighborhood will almost definitely have caught the attention of other beings we don’t want finding us. The leviathan’s minions have been spread out all over this city.”
My pulse stuttered. I whirled to grab my shoulder bag and backpack, keeping my crossbow close by as I stuffed the smaller bag into the larger and swung the pack over my shoulders.
Rollick had turned to the pixie. “Tell the bunch waiting for you to head to the grotto near the southeast rift and wait there for further instructions. You can come with us for now, but not the rest of them—not until we’ve had a chance?—”
The rest of the orders he would have given were cut off by the crash of heavy bodies through the two windows, the glass panes shattering. Several more forms sprang from the shadows beneath the door. I yelped and snatched up my crossbow as the first of the new arrivals lunged at me.
It was too late. Our enemies had already found us.