Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,53
that up. Because, yeah, it was possible the majority of humans would wish to see beings like my monstrous lovers slaughtered if they found out shadowkind existed. I didn’t want to lie to him. But the hurt in his eyes and the gloom creeping into his words made my heart ache.
The Company hadn’t killed Snap while they’d held him captive, but how much was he really Snap if they destroyed his sense of wonder?
A spurt of flame lanced through my insides. I coughed and barely managed to swallow it down so it seared nothing but my stomach. For my devourer’s sake and my own, I groped for a lyric to spin this conversation in a lighter direction.
“Come on. We’ve still got to find some shadowkind to make our appeal to.” I tugged on Snap’s elbow and sang, “And if I only could, I’d make an eel maraud, and I’d bet him with all our aces.”
“I don’t think an eel would be very helpful against Tempest,” Snap said, but it was with a smile to show he hadn’t really taken me seriously. Good. Between two wingéd with maybe a couple more on their way, Omen dealing with a very solid specter from his awful past, and me burning innocents left and right, we had enough sombreness hanging over our group already.
Perking Snap up didn’t help us find any new allies, though. We returned to the Everymobile just shy of midnight. Omen emerged from the shadows before we’d quite reached the doorway and motioned Snap inside. “I need to speak with our mortal,” he said, without even bothering to ask how our quest had gone. I guessed our failure was obvious enough.
Snap bristled with a brief flare of neon green in his eyes, but his loyalty to the shadowkind who’d called him to this cause was clearly at war with his devotion to me. He paused and then said, in a careful but firm voice, “What do you want with her now?”
Omen sighed. “I’m just going to talk to her, honestly. If anyone’s going to haul her off to some dire end, it won’t be me. Aren’t you convinced of that yet?”
The devourer looked chagrined, but only slightly. “I didn’t think you’d do it in the first place,” he informed the hellhound shifter, but after one more caress of my arm, he vanished into the RV.
The early autumn night was warm enough, but Omen’s solemn expression sent an icy quiver through my gut. “What’s the big secret?”
He guided me off to the side of the RV. Not all of Rome was so scenic—the rundown suburb where we were hiding out smelled like tar rather than gelato, and a loose door somewhere in the distance was creaking on its hinges in the breeze. The Everymobile added to the atmosphere with the rotating hubcaps it’d recently produced, which rattled like hamster wheels as they spun endlessly on.
“It’s not a secret,” Omen said. “I just thought I should tell you first so there’s no time for misunderstandings. I’ve decided I’m going to approach the Highest again.”
Even after what he’d just said to Snap and everything he’d said to me in the past few days, my pulse stuttered. Before I could say anything, he held up his hands. “I won’t even mention you. I’m going to tell them what I’ve found out about Tempest and see if they’ll change my final order to taking her down rather than finding ‘Ruby’. And whether they will or not, they might lend some brawn to our cause. They did want to destroy her enough to sic a whole bunch of their lackeys on her before.”
It made sense—enough sense that Omen obviously hadn’t been able to talk himself out of doing it, as much as I could tell he disliked the idea of chatting with the beings that had put him in their leash.
“That would certainly be helpful,” I said. “It’s about time they pitched in rather than pitching fits.”
The corner of Omen’s mouth quirked upward. “We’ll see. In any case, nothing ventured, nothing gained. They should have no way of discerning that I’ve had contact with the mortal-shadowkind hybrid they’ve been searching for. I didn’t want you spending any time worrying about that, even if it was only the time it took to answer half a dozen questions from our companions.”
I set my hands on my hips. “Me, worry?” I teased. “Do you know me at all?” But the truth was, he did know me. Enough that I had