Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,5
now, whether I could see his eyeballs or not.
“The sunglasses,” he said, equally smoothly, “are to ensure I don’t extinguish your life with a glance—unless I absolutely want to. But I can remove them if you’d prefer to play that game of Russian Roulette. With an attitude like that, I don’t think your odds are great.”
Son of a shih tzu. As Thorn stepped closer to me with a threatening flex of his muscles, the details added up in my head, and I almost bit right through my tongue. Luna had told me plenty of stories about her shadowkind brethren over the years. I hadn’t forgotten the tales she’d spun of basilisks, giant lizards that could kill you with a look, although I’d never met one in the flesh before.
Probably best to avoid getting into a pissing contest with one. I gave him a little smile. “My apologies. I wouldn’t want to let any games distract from our very important mission.”
Omen cleared his throat, shooting me a glare he might have wished could kill me. “Maybe you can manage to keep your mouth shut for the next five minutes?” He turned back to Talon. “If you have as much sway over both shadowkind and mortals in this neck of the woods as I hear, I assume you’ll have caught on if there were humans gathering our kind in a far more organized way than the typical hunters.”
The twitchy guy finally gave in to his restlessness and drifted over to the display of weapons. He plucked up a dagger and spun its blade on the tip of his finger. “There’s the type with the nets and the whips. Obsessive bastards.”
Thorn frowned, his muscles appearing to bulge even more. “Those would be the ones we’re after.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve done anything to rid the city of them,” Omen remarked.
Talon shrugged. “They catch little pests that are no concern of mine. The occasional higher being they might sweep up should have been watching its step better. I protect those who seek our protection—what happens between mortals and the rest is their business.”
That was the standard line of mortal-side shadowkind. Why should they think of the greater good—or the good of anyone at all who wasn’t licking their boots?
To be fair, there were an awful lot of humans who approached life that way too.
The tightening of Omen’s jaw was the only sign of his disgust with that kind of self-interest. “Understandable. We need to tangle with them, though. They’ve come into possession of one of our associates, and we intend to get him back.”
“Well, I certainly won’t stop you from tearing a few heads off if that’s what gets you off,” the basilisk said.
No offers to pitch in, not that I’d really expected one. Ruse gave my ponytail a teasing tug and leaned over my shoulder. “I don’t suppose you gents with all your connections could direct us to this group’s center of operations? That would speed along the tearing of heads quite a bit.”
“I suppose that wouldn’t be too much trouble.” Talon turned to his frenetic companion, who was now flipping the dagger from hand to hand. “Jinx, a moment?”
The wiry guy tossed the weapon back at the display—in a perfect arc that sent it dropping right back onto the metal pegs that had cradled it. “What’re you after, boss?”
“See if you can fetch Grit—he’s the one we had keeping an eye on the museum. Maybe he can cough up a few more details for these ‘gents’.”
As Jinx darted into the shadows to follow that order, my ability to keep my mouth shut ran out. “Museum?” I asked. “We’re looking for living shadowkind, not stuffed ones.”
The vampire let out a chuckle almost as dark as his boss’s voice, but he didn’t bother to enlighten me. I got the distinct impression that Talon had rolled his eyes behind those shades.
“Humans work in bizarre ways, as you should know, mortal,” he said. “The museum gives them a front—a large building to work from and presumably a reason for money to change hands. I doubt many of the beasts that go in come out alive, though.”
And I’d bet I’d freed more of the lower beings of his kind than he’d ever lifted a finger for. But with another warning glare from Omen, I managed to keep that thought to myself.
A jitter through the air that made the blades rattle in their holders, and Jinx reappeared. “Grit is stationed down by the lake today. I can take you