moved with my rhythm.
Thorn, well… Thorn did a very good job with his side-to-side shuffle. He even bobbed his head a little with the bass line. I gave him a thumbs up when I caught his eye, which I figured he deserved for the effort.
Putting in absolutely no effort at all was our defiant hellhound leader. After a few songs, I shimmied on over to where he’d staked out a spot by the wall between the pink-lit bar and the coat check.
“All right,” I declared. “Onto the floor with you. You’ve been around umpteen centuries—you’ve got to have at least a few moves.”
Omen didn’t budge. “It might surprise you to hear this, but the fact that it’s your birthday doesn’t put you any more in charge than you were before.”
“Maybe it does. How would you know? Shadowkind don’t have birthdays, do they? Maybe it’s a rule you just never heard about.” I prodded his arm and then, with a rush of boldness fueled by the synth-pop beat, grabbed the front of his shirt, willing myself not to notice the sculpted muscles of his chest my fingers brushed or just how far I’d stepped into his aura of dominance.
The song playing over the speakers gave me the perfect lyrics to spin to my purpose. “Get up on your feet,” I sang with a teasing edge, giving him a tug. “Yeah, step up, don’t cheat. Boy, what, will you flee?”
Omen’s eyes flashed, whether at being called a “boy,” accused of turning tail, or simply because of the way I was manhandling him, I wasn’t sure. He gave me a little shove backward—but he followed, to the fringes of the crowd.
Content with that victory, I did a spin and sidestep, daring him with a glance to keep up with me. His eyes stayed narrowed, but his body started to sway with the rhythm. When I swung closer to him again, he caught my elbow and added a little heft to my whirl. His touch left a tingling heat coursing over my skin.
This was playing with an entirely different sort of fire, but taunting flames had been one of my favorite pastimes. I sashayed around the hellhound shifter, trailing my fingers across his back, wanting to wake up more of the passion in him. Where he ended up aiming that passion, well, we’d just have to wait and find out, wouldn’t we?
“Like what you see?” I asked with a waggle of my eyebrows, turning so he could check out the whole package. My gaze slid over the crowded floor—and caught on a glint of golden hair with a stutter of my pulse.
The jolt of emotion only gripped me for a second. It wasn’t Snap—how could it have been?—but a young woman with gleaming curls twice as long as those the devourer had sported. But the momentary association had already sent me tumbling back through my memories to the night a few weeks ago when Ruse had set up an impromptu ‘80s dance party in my apartment living room.
Snap had joined us then, with a sinuous, unself-conscious style that had fit his godly beauty perfectly but would have looked awkward on anyone else I could think of. No one around me now could match it, that was for sure.
All these people dancing away with no clue or care what torment was being inflicted on all sorts of beings from beyond this realm…
A ripple of a much sharper emotion raced through me, propelled by my inner blaze. It surged up so suddenly I lost my breath, my skin seemed to crackle—and a couple dancing next to me leapt apart with a gasp and a scream as flames leapt across both their shirts.
My heart lurched, and my arms seared from wrists to elbows. Other dancers spotted the fire with more cries of alarm. As the girl sobbed in pain, Omen grabbed me with a solid arm around my waist.
“Let’s get you cooled off,” he muttered, his breath tickling over my cheek, and hauled me toward the exit.
“But—” I started to protest. It was my fault. I should do something. What, I didn’t have the faintest idea—and one of the bouncers was running over with a fire extinguisher, already taking care of the catastrophe I’d almost sparked. As the hiss of escaping foam melded with the music, Omen dragged me out of the club.
The hellhound shifter didn’t let go of me until he’d yanked me into the alley beside the building. He let me go so abruptly I