Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,38

easily enough.”

“Perhaps. But to have lingered mortal-side in much closer vicinity to the terrain of our shame… I’m not certain what their mindset might be.”

“It can’t hurt to ask, can it?” Snap said brightly, turning from the view. “Bringing more shadowkind on board has only helped us, as Sorsha expected it would.” He leaned in to give me another peck, this time on the temple.

“But those that do not come on board have the potential to cause trouble,” Thorn muttered.

Did he think this wingéd might outright work against us? It was hard to imagine a being with a similar solemn nature to his and Flint’s taking a stance like Tempest’s, but then, there were a lot of ways a powerful warrior could be destructive if he—or she—got the idea to be.

Behind us, Ruse’s dupe let out a loud burst of laughter. I swiveled to watch the incubus’s “interrogation.” The wingéd left off his brooding enough to turn with me at my tug.

Our host chattered away in eager Italian, so fast I didn’t catch a single word I even partly recognized, although my local vocabulary was admittedly mostly limited to “spaghetti” and “fettuccine.” The man’s hands swept through the air with each exclamation. Ruse nodded and retorted something in the same language with a perfectly authentic accent. Apparently languages came to the incubus naturally too.

Watching the mortal guy’s gesticulations, I tried to guess what they might be talking about. The apartment building was growing yet another floor? Pineapple was the best ever pizza topping? We should all hop on a Ferris wheel for a ride?

Ruse’s voice dropped, his demeanor turning more serious. He made several statements with some dramatic gestures of his own. I was pretty sure the jerk of his hand was the shutting—or opening?—of a door. A flap of his hands like wings—indicating some sort of shadowkind creature? From his tone, he was getting down to business.

His dupe’s smile faded too, but he responded with as much emotion as before, just sounding upset instead of excited now. He mimed something that I was going to assume was not icing flowers on a cake, however much it might look that way, and then what might have been an explosion. That didn’t give me the impression of good news. If it’d been an explosion of joy, surely he’d have looked happier about it.

As the incubus and our charmed host continued their urgent discussion, Omen slipped out of the shadows by the bathroom doorway and ambled over to us. He caught Ruse’s eye but didn’t say anything. The incubus acknowledged him with a quick tip of his head.

“Do you understand what they’re saying?” Snap asked him, nuzzling my hair.

“I can pick up a little, but I haven’t spent much time in this country in centuries, and the language has, you might say, evolved.”

“Indeed,” Thorn rumbled. “And not for the better.”

I nudged him gently with my elbow. “Kids these days and their crazy slang, huh?”

The warrior shot me a wounded glance, but the effect was diminished by the hint of amusement that glinted in his eyes. “I seem to manage to keep up with you, m’lady.”

“So you do. In so many wonderful ways.”

Omen cleared his throat in what I took as a shockingly polite way to say, Shut up, but I’d have shut my mouth anyway at the tense expression on Ruse’s face as he rejoined us. His new friend was sitting on one of the chairs, head bowed and shaking in some sort of denial.

“His fiancée hadn’t told him very much,” the incubus said, his voice uncharacteristically grim. “But I was able to draw out a decent amount of information from piecing together what he has heard and seen and unconscious impressions from his mind. The Company definitely has major operations happening here. They’re particularly focused on this disease they hope to spread to the shadowkind. And his woman on the inside has been talking as if they’re just days away from releasing it.”

11

Sorsha

Getting into the Colosseum wasn’t a cakewalk, but I’d slinked through tighter situations before. With an only mildly scraped elbow from one particularly rough bit of stone I’d had to scramble over, I slipped away from the towering walls of the former stands to where Omen was standing in the moonlight on the stretch of smooth flooring at one end of the massive arena.

He had his arms folded over his chest as if he’d been waiting there for a while, but not all of us could dart invisibly through