Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,90

only on a bigger and better scale. Show all the jerks who were too scared to help us that the Company could be decimated without a single drop of blood spilled.

Okay, maybe that was a little too optimistic. We could probably manage it without more than a bucket of blood, though. That’d still be a step up from the torrents the shadowkind had unleashed when we’d stormed Victor Bane’s mansion back home.

I didn’t think Omen would like my continued resistance to carnage at all, but he was welcome to show up any time and tell me about that.

I leaned my elbows onto the table. “We need to figure out who here is running the North American operations of the Company, right? But destroying them isn’t going to fix anything. The real leader is off in Europe somewhere. What if instead of trying to burn everything down, we figure out a way to get to that guy and use him to get to the man in charge overseas.”

Ruse cocked his head. “Interesting. Go on.”

I motioned to him. “You can work your charm over the phone. All we’ve got to do is convince the head guy here to put us in touch with his boss, and then you can bend the ear of the guy who controls everything the Company does. Imagine all the things you could convince him to do.”

A smirk curved the incubus’s lips. “Oh, there are many, many acts I’d like to talk him into committing. But starting with having him destroy the Company from the inside out sounds ideal.”

Thorn frowned where he was still standing over me. “Would that work? Could you maintain enough control over him to compel him to cause that level of destruction?”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “The head honcho wouldn’t need to destroy anything in a physical way. He must have access to all the Company data—we can get him to wipe it off the networks. We can have him call up the regional leaders and disband the branches. Maybe we’d need to force him to act in some crazy way to convince his followers that he’s been wrong all along so they don’t start things up again. I’m sure we can figure out the details once we have a hold on him.”

Antic swung her little fists in the air. “Or we could just go across the sea and give him what-for the traditional way.”

“But that might not work,” Snap said, understanding lighting in his face. “We keep destroying parts of the Company, and more of these people rise up in their place. The fact that we’re destroying them convinces them that they need to keep fighting us.”

I snapped my fingers. “Exactly. Knock off one leader and someone else will step up to take his place. I think it’s over-ambitious to assume we can eradicate the people who hate shadowkind and all the work they’ve done by picking them off bit by bit, and we can’t tackle them all at once. But whoever’s running the show—he can. And if we play this right, he can tie all the loose ends in a bow for us too.”

One by one, the heads around the table nodded. Gloam was the last, caught in despondent hesitation. “It sounds very grand—I don’t see how I could contribute.”

An inkling about that had already started to form in my head. I made a reassuring gesture toward the night elf. “Oh, I’m nothing if not resourceful. I’ll find a way for even you to pitch in; don’t worry.”

Flint stirred in his seat. “This plan sounds worth the attempt. How do we begin?”

I patted my purse. “The one guy who’s on our side in the Fund was able to talk to some of the local members last night. Klaus couldn’t find out a lot, but one of the things he did put together was a probable hunting location where the Company has been collecting shadowkind near one of the rifts. We grab one of those Company hunters, and then we can follow the trail that one gives us to another and another until we get our hands on someone who can point us to the big gun.”

“Of course, we don’t know how often they stake out that spot,” Thorn pointed out.

I smiled at him. “So we’ll just have to make a little mischief there to draw them out.”

25

Sorsha

For once, the Company of Light played right into our hands. Less than an hour after Antic had darted through the park near the rift invisibly,

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