Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,87

people as long as I’ve known you. I’ll trust that you’ll continue to do so.”

The imp had lowered her hands. Snap glanced over his shoulder toward the window. “The shadowkind we’re going to see—they’re another ‘wingéd’ like you?”

I nodded. “The only one I’ve come close enough to recognize in well over a century. Let us hope time has mellowed him as it has me.”

Ruse muffled what might have been a snort of disagreement with his hand, but he returned to the wheel. “Direct away, oh angelic one.”

There. It was done, and the world hadn’t crumbled apart around me. Relief washed through me so abruptly I had to pause to catch my breath. With a tug of my will, I pulled my features back in to leave only my mortal-appearing form on display.

“Drive onward,” I said. “I’ll inform you when we need to deviate from that course.”

The pang in my chest grew stronger with each mile that passed beneath the wheels. When a dirt road even more desolate than the one we were on veered off to the left, I directed Ruse down it. Finally, a shack that looked as if it had been put together out of discarded, beaten-up planks of wood came into view in the midst of a plain that was otherwise all hard-baked earth and tufts of yellow grass.

No road or even pathway led from the one we were on to that building. Ruse parked, and we studied the shack through the windows.

“I think you’d all best stay here—as much as you might enjoy spectating,” I said, adding the last piece when Ruse started to open his mouth with what I suspected would be a protest. “No one lives so far away from civilization because they enjoy company.”

“Fair enough,” the incubus said with an air of resignation. “But I’m certainly going to watch as much of the show as I can from in here.” He plopped himself down at Sorsha’s other side and promptly twined his fingers with hers.

I caught our mortal’s gaze for a brief moment, hoping I could convey with mine my thanks for her faith in me—in this and so many other things. Then I moved through the shadows onto the barren plain and strode toward the shack.

My fellow wingéd would have been able to sense my approach as well as I’d sensed what I was approaching. A small part of me worried that I might find the place abandoned and feel the presence dashing away from this intrusion, but our kind didn’t tend toward fleeing. The sense of his presence remained steady until I was only a few feet from the shack’s crooked door. Then a figure formed out of the patch of shadows there.

As was to be expected, the wingéd who emerged before me matched me in stature: tall and broad with much muscle filling out his powerful frame. His knuckles were similarly hardened, but with ridges of a ruddy hue that looked more like copper than crystal. His eyes gleamed the same metallic shade beneath straggling gray hair that fell past his shoulders and shadowed his brow.

“What business do you have here?” he demanded. “I have no interest in reuniting with the remnants of our kind.”

“Only one remnant at the moment,” I said. “My companions are… various other sorts. And this isn’t about reunification.” I studied him and the shack. “You’ve lived a long time in this part of the mortal realm.”

“So that I could remain undisturbed. In the emptiness, I can meditate on the failings that led me to continue to be in existence at all.”

My companions might rib me about my severity at times, but I didn’t believe I’d ever put forth attitudes quite that grim. If I had, it was a wonder none of them had shoved me back through a rift. Although I supposed my stature might have had something to do with that as well.

As somber as the disgraced warrior was being, however, I did at least understand the sentiment he was expressing. It was only a darker shade of the guilt and regret I’d recently begun to shed.

“What if I could offer you something better than that?” I asked.

He scowled at me. “That you would even think any of us deserve better—”

I held up my hand to stop him. “Not in that way. In the way that you might be able to make amends for the errors of the past by contributing to a new struggle with even greater stakes. We’re in dire need of