Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,78

holds this asshole’s eyelids open, we can’t make him focus on the words.”

“Try this.” Omen tossed a piece of paper and a pen onto the table. “Your handwriting might contain more power than words typed on some mortal device.”

“If he’ll read that.” Sorsha leaned over the incubus’s shoulder. “Write the letters really big so he can’t help seeing them.”

Ruse chuckled to himself. “Like I’m trying to teach a child how to read.” But he scrawled across the sheet of paper in as broad strokes as it would fit. KEEP READING WHAT I WRITE. “Might as well cover that hurdle first.”

Thorn gripped the man’s head to turn it toward the table, and Ruse brandished his message like a flag. The man appeared to glance at it, but all he did was screw up his face into an expression so sour it made my tongue curl up. He whipped his hands through the air in more of those gestures that were his own way of speaking. I didn’t understand the physical language, but I got the distinct impression he’d told Ruse to shove his paper—and possibly other things—up his anus.

If the incubus’s charm was having any effect, it definitely wasn’t making the man any friendlier. I bent over the table, flicking out my tongue to capture more definite impressions. Perhaps we didn’t need this fellow’s help. I might be able to glean something useful about his investigations for Tempest without him offering any cooperation at all.

The man didn’t seem to have used the table for his work. I caught wisps of fingers closing around a hot mug with a whiff of coffee smell, laying out a knife and fork for a simple meal of grilled meat, and resting a book against it as he contemplated a story of men on horseback shooting at each other while wearing large hats.

Moving away from the table, I tested the cupboard beside it, the narrow bed with its scratchy blanket, and finally circled around Omen to check the kitchen. With each flicker of sensation that rose up, the fragments I’d gathered formed a patchy picture of the man’s life here—not vivid or comprehensive, but something.

“He’s been here for a while,” I reported, taking a taste of the walls between comments. “Long enough that he’s gotten bored with it. He imagines a woman who lives in some other place—she smiles a lot, and he thinks she is very pretty. He gets annoyed when he sees her with a man that puts his arm around her.”

I frowned, sorting through the emotions I’d picked up from our captive’s reminiscing. “I think maybe she is mates with someone else, but he wants her to be his. He keeps working because somehow he believes the sphinx will help that happen.”

Sorsha wrinkled her nose and aimed a glare at the man. “He’s helping Tempest so he can force some woman to hook up with him? What a catch. And the Company calls you all ‘monsters’.”

Those impressions left me uncomfortable too. They didn’t help us defeat Tempest, though. “I can’t get much sense of his work. He leaves early and comes back late, tired. Walking a lot, and digging. Maybe he’s been looking for something?”

I knelt by a wicker basket in the corner where a rumpled shirt slumped over the rim. My tongue darted through the air above it, and a tingle of past excitement raced through me, spurring my own. “He found it. I can’t tell what it was, but he was eager to tell Tempest about it so he could finally leave.”

Omen’s head jerked around. “Has he already told her?”

“I think he’s told her some things, but he still had to go back and uncover more of whatever it was.” I tipped my head to the side as if that would knock the jumbled impressions into a more coherent story. It didn’t work.

At the table, Ruse had flipped the paper over and pushed it and the pen toward the man. He gestured to them emphatically. The man’s lip curled. He snatched the paper up, crumpled it with a few twists of his fingers, and hurled it at the incubus’s face.

“All right,” Ruse said, standing up. “I think we’ve determined that my charm doesn’t extend to the written word or pantomiming. What now?”

Perhaps if I tried the clothes the man was wearing right now? I edged over beside Thorn and bent my head. A ripple of the deeper, chilling hunger nibbled at my gut. I closed my mind to it and inhaled