Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,9
grabbed my favorite ice cream for us to eat right out of the carton and put on my favorite movie, even though it bugged her that I liked something modern rather than her ‘classics,’ and sat there with her arm around me petting my hair.”
In spite of the awfulness of my present, a smile crossed my lips at the memory. Auntie Luna might have learned her cues about human behavior from all that ‘80s media she’d consumed, but she’d been able to put them to practice pretty damn well.
Omen was watching me intently. “She was important to you.”
“Of course she was,” I said. “She was my whole world. I didn’t exactly have much time to make friends when we were constantly moving… After a while, it seemed like there was so little point in getting to know people better that I stopped putting in an effort. If I wasn’t doing the essential stuff, I was hanging out with her. She knew how to make even mundane things like buying groceries or dealing with a scraped knee fun. It was a little lonely sometimes, but she did her best by me. I’ve managed to pass for reasonably normal, as humans go.”
A dry chuckle fell from Omen’s mouth. “Only to someone who doesn’t know shadowkind enough to pick up on the influence.” He paused. “I didn’t get any sense of glamoured bits from what you’d said, but I’m not sure I’d pick up on them from general thoughts. And I don’t think we have time for you to recite your entire history if there aren’t any particular incidents that seem connected to your powers.”
“She probably figured it wasn’t any big deal, and if I started showing some, she’d deal with it then. She wasn’t much of a planner either.” I rubbed my mouth, the pang of mourning combining with all the tensions I’d already been feeling in an indigestion stew. Was any of this making Omen more kindly disposed toward me? Maybe I’d be better off reminding him of his past—and the responsibilities that came with it—instead.
“It sounds like this Tempest gal is the total opposite of that,” I went on, picking at my fries. “How long ago was it you thought the Highest had killed her—several centuries, or something like that? All that time, she’s been playing some kind of long game, keeping it all under wraps… Did she ever turn against other shadowkind back when you two hung out together?”
The downward twitch of Omen’s lips told me he didn’t like the change of subject. “Tempest’s main goal was sowing chaos. She mainly did it among the mortals, but she wasn’t above ensnaring weaker shadowkind to add to her amusement. I wouldn’t have expected a scheme on this scale, but…”
“But?”
He was silent for a moment. “I once watched her spend the better part of a week plucking the claws off little beasts like your dragon so that she could then jab them one by one into a mortal who’d offended her until he resembled a pin cushion. A bloody one. If she’s found some way to turn the Company’s operations around on mortals in an epic fashion, it’s not difficult to imagine her going to even more epic lengths at the rest of our expense to get there.”
Ah. So we were dealing with a total psychopath. Not that I’d had much doubt about that after hearing her taunt Omen over the phone, but that little story solidified the impression.
“And you don’t think stopping that kind of epic crazy is a little more important than the slim chance that I’m somehow going to explode like a hundred nuclear bombs in the next few days?” I couldn’t help saying.
“I think I don’t know how slim that chance actually is.”
I couldn’t argue that point very easily. Time to shift the focus back to him. “Why did you go around with a shadowkind like that anyway? Were you that bad back then?” He’d told me that he’d played pranks on mortals—convincing them he was the devil himself had been a favorite—but I hadn’t imagined him that sadistic, especially to other creatures of the shadows.
Something in Omen’s expression shuttered. “I can’t say I was at all considerate of the mortals in my vicinity, but I never harmed any of my own kind purposefully.”
“You just stood by while someone else did it.”
“If you think I never had arguments with Tempest, or that there was any chance she’d change simply because I said—” He shook his head. “It