Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,109

a new one I couldn’t wrap my head around: Ruby.

My mouth opened and closed and opened again. “I—But—The note wasn’t for me?”

Omen gave me a penetrating look. “Of course it’s for you. Your parents didn’t name you Sorsha. You are Ruby. I’d imagine your fae guardian must have worked some awfully complex glamour repressing all memory of that name from your mind, woven into your thoughts so thoroughly so long ago I couldn’t have picked up on the magic.”

Thorn shifted his weight behind me. “How can this be? Not even Sorsha was aware of her powers until recently. She was a small child the last time she was in Austin. How could she have done something to cause such a hunt from the Highest?”

Very good questions, and I was glad he’d asked, since I was still having trouble formulating full sentences.

Omen grimaced. “The Highest didn’t want people to know what exactly they were looking for or why. Ruby hadn’t done anything except come into existence—and escape their attempt to end that existence.”

He paused and met my eyes again. There might have been something a little sad behind the ice now. “It wasn’t hunters who killed your parents. It was shadowkind. The Highest sent their warrior minions to slaughter the three of you. The fae woman got you out of there and was clever enough to ensure they never caught wind of your location again.”

My parents… had been killed by shadowkind? Shadowkind who’d meant to kill three-year-old me as well? Just when I thought I was starting to get a grip on his revelations, another one threw me for a loop.

I curled my fingers around the edge of the table to hold myself steady. “Why? I mean, I know a mortal and a shadowkind managing to have a kid is pretty much unheard of, but—is it really such a horrible thing, enough that they’d want us all dead?”

“As far as I could tell, it’s about the most horrible thing the Highest can conceive of.”

“Why should it be?” Snap spoke up, unusually fierce. “If that was what Sorsha’s parents wanted—no harm came out of it—”

“That’s where you might be wrong,” Omen said. His voice had gone taut. “The Highest believe that a union between a mortal and a shadowkind would create a being of incredibly destructive power—enough power to ruin both this world and ours.” He studied me. “You’ve felt it. I didn’t believe you when you told me, but it seems you might have been right to be wary of what lurks inside you.”

The fire I’d managed to control so well just hours ago? It flared in my chest now, prickling hot and jittering, but I willed it down, swallowing hard. “I just—I just need to practice more, to get a total handle on it, like you’ve always said. I haven’t done anything that awful with it.”

“Not yet. They think you will if you’re allowed to live long enough.” He tucked the notepaper back into the trinket box and set the box down on the table. “Whatever exactly you are, the most ancient and powerful beings among all the shadowkind are absolutely terrified of you.”

The absurdity of that statement left me lost for words again. Pickle crept over and nuzzled my hand, but I couldn’t take a whole lot of comfort from his gesture of solidarity in the face of this discovery. All of the celebratory joy had drained out of me.

The Highest shadowkind wanted me dead. I might contain some kind of world-shattering power. How was I supposed to respond to that? What were we going to do about it?

I might have asked one or both of those things, except before I could recover my voice, Omen’s phone rang.

His head jerked down, and he frowned at his pocket for a second before reaching to answer it. Obviously he hadn’t been expecting a call. Did shadowkind have to deal with spammy telemarketers just like the rest of us? This one couldn’t have had worse timing.

Omen’s frown deepened as he took in the screen. I was standing close enough to him to see no number or name was showing up on the display, not even a note of Unknown Caller—it was totally blank. But his ringtone sounded again.

Cautiously, he hit the answer button and lifted the phone. “Hello? Who is this?”

A sharp laugh pealed from the speaker, so loudly that the hellhound shifter yanked the phone away from his ear. “Omen,” an equally sharp female voice said, as clearly as if he’d