Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,4
symbols on either side of the door and threads of pale gray that crept across the darkness like a massive spider web. They hadn’t bothered with a sign or any other pretense of this being a regular place of business.
I stepped inside half-expecting a collection of Halloween store paraphernalia, but what I got wasn’t much better. The walls of the small front room were painted the same black as the outside. No spider webbing here, but the single lightbulb overhead cast a red glow over the room’s limited furniture, which included a metal desk that had rust creeping along the corners, a matching bench sporting spikes on its supposed arm rests, and a display rack of ornate swords and daggers that looked much more authentic than anything our superhero hacker associate back home had owned.
A sour, slightly metallic scent lingered in the air, as if the room had recently hosted a blood bath. Not exactly a place of friendly welcomes.
Omen didn’t look concerned, though. He stalked into the middle of the room and stood there, his eyes narrowing. He’d told us the shadowkind who operated this syndicate would be expecting us, and I could tell he wouldn’t be happy if they kept us waiting long.
Before it got to the point of his hellhound fangs coming out, three figures wavered out of the shadows to meet us.
The one in the middle was obviously the leader, nearly as tall and broad-shouldered as Thorn, though packed with leaner muscles. The speckling of pale stubble on his scalp gleamed in the crimson light, and a patch of scales glinted on the backs of his hands just below the cuffs of his suit jacket. Reptilian in nature, presumably.
He was flanked by two other men. The slender, sallow one on the left I immediately pegged as a vampire—which wasn’t hard when his lips had curled back to bare his fangs in implicit threat. That explained the painted-over window and the weird lighting. The guy on the right was trickier to pin down—literally. His eyes darted this way and that, his wiry body never quite settling from its twitching and fidgeting even while he stood in place next to his boss.
When his gaze did come to rest in one spot for a couple of seconds here and there, it was on me. The vampire was ogling me too. Possibly Boss Man was as well, but it was impossible to tell thanks to the thick sunglasses that hid all hint of his eyes. I was pretty sure Omen would have given this bunch a heads up about the mortal he was working with, but I was used to the extra scrutiny my presence provoked. You didn’t see shadowkind and humans getting chummy all that often—if you could call my relationship with Omen anything as warm as “chummy.”
Omen was sizing up the syndicate guys in turn. “You’d be Talon?” he said with a nod to the boss and a razor-edged tone that suggested the dude had better be or there’d be hell to pay.
“As you requested,” Boss Man replied in a liquid voice so dark it seemed to blot out the dim glow of the bulb overhead. “What brings us to the attention of a hellhound and his cohorts? We don’t have much time for entertaining unexpected visitors.”
Despite myself, a shiver shot down my spine. Unlike the other gang leader we’d dealt with, this one didn’t speak with any noticeable deference to Omen. For him to have agreed to his impromptu meeting in the first place, Talon must have recognized the hellhound shifter as a larger power, but he wasn’t offering much in the way of respect besides that.
As happened sometimes, being intimidated annoyed me, and when pissed off, I didn’t always make the choices most likely to keep my innards intact. I’m sure you have your flaws too.
I waved to the closed door behind the syndicate dudes. “What, have you got a full schedule of polishing torture devices and laying down a few more coats of black paint? You know, putting so much effort into showing how badass you are only makes it look like you’re trying to distract anyone from actually measuring your dicks. Maybe if you cared a little more about what’s happening out there and not how cool you look wearing sunglasses in a room that’s barely lit, we wouldn’t have needed to interrupt your busy day in the first place.”
The boss’s head turned in a smooth, serpentine motion. He was definitely looking at me