Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,95

decided to keep me on hold until the end of time.

I shifted my awareness, searching for the lackey that had instructed me to wait here. If I bit that being’s head off, would the Highest decide it was time to turn their attention my way? The lackey didn’t appear to have lingered, though, and neither had the fiercer beings who’d caught me by the gas station and insisted I return with them to the nearest rift at once.

I could have taken down even the four of them if they’d been sent by anyone else. Damn the Highest and their fucking deals.

The call finally came, wordless but insistent, with a constricting tug around my neck. I sprang forward, wanting to shed that sensation as quickly as possible. The less I was reminded of my ties to these bastards, the better.

The deep, dark hollow roiled with an uneasy energy I hadn’t felt there before. The Highest loomed as monumental as always, but the sharpness of their attention now that they had deigned to lower it to me prickled through to my soul.

“Hellhound,” one intoned. “There you are.” As if I hadn’t been waiting on their doorstep for the last decade or so.

“Here I am,” I agreed. “What do you want, oh ancient ones?”

The thicker thrum that echoed through the air suggested the edge that had crept into my tone hadn’t gone unnoticed. The Highest let it slide, though, which should have been all the warning I needed right there.

“We’ve heard reports from your travels,” another said, her voice reverberating through every particle of my being. “More than one shadowkind have claimed you are working with a human woman who can work shadowkind powers.”

Fucking hell, not that complaint again. I’d known as soon as Rex’s crew got a glimpse of Sorsha in action, word would start to get out. The Highest would just love the idea that I might be collaborating with a sorcerer. Those mortal miscreants were little better than the hunters and collectors, the way they used our kind.

It seemed simpler to circumvent the complicated full story and stick to a half-truth. I shook my head, as much as I had one in this space, in feigned exasperation. “You bought into that story? I’d sooner disembowel myself than ally with a sorcerer. No, all of my comrades are shadowkind. One of them made a joke to a few rather dim-witted beings about being human—the humor must have gone over their heads.”

They studied me with more of that prickling intensity. “You’ve had no associations with any humans or being at times presenting themselves as human?”

What was that second bit supposed to mean?

“Not at all,” I said. “Plenty of our own kind to call on as I need to.” Not that many of them had responded to that call, but the Highest didn’t give a rat’s ass how my mission was going, as they’d made very clear during my last visit.

The tug at my throat came again, along with a jab of pain. I didn’t give them the satisfaction of a wince. They could yank my chain all they wanted, but their hold over me couldn’t stop me from lying as seemed necessary. I had at least that much freedom left.

“The reports were somewhat disjointed,” one of the Highest allowed after a moment. “The less experienced shadowkind are not always as astute as would be ideal. No matter. We have another subject to discuss with you.”

Joy of all joys. “Let me have it.” Then I could get back to my crew and leave these giant bastards behind.

“Seeing as you are spending so much time mortal-side as it is, and given your familiarity with that world and your earlier interest, we have decided on the final favor you will carry out for us.”

My spirits leapt with a wash of exhilaration I couldn’t have contained if I’d wanted to.

They could call it a favor all they wanted, but what it really amounted to was slave labor. Ten tasks, anything they demanded, was what I’d agreed to carry out for them in exchange for not ending up a savaged corpse like Tempest. The most generous favor my former partner-in-crime had ever offered me was the lesson of just how badly things could go once the Highest’s wrath came down on you if you didn’t think quickly enough.

Ten tasks, and I’d jumped at the snap of their fingers nine times already—the last more than a century ago. They’d taken a good long while deciding how they could