Dusk Avenger (Flirting with Monsters #3) - Eva Chase Page 0,98

find anything either, it wouldn’t mean much. Her parents might never have registered her, given their situation. But if I did…

The office was closed for the night. I slipped beneath the door and found a computer that booted up without any special commands.

We’d celebrated her birthday only a little more than a week ago. I knew what date it was supposed to be.

The names rippled by, none of them familiar. Then a tickle of sensation passed over my eyes. I paused, studying the screen.

A fae glamour was embedded in the data, just as it’d been in Sorsha’s memories.

With my stomach clenching, I willed a bolt of my power at the illusion. The magic crackled and fell away. And there, glowing before my eyes, were the damning words.

Twenty-eight years ago on September 4th, Philip Woodsen had registered the birth of his daughter, Ruby.

27

Sorsha

The spoils our guard handed over after his shift in the penthouse didn’t look like much of a bounty. He’d gathered them in a shopping bag so that his body wouldn’t tarnish the impressions on the objects with his own thoughts and feelings, and it held only a crumpled, ketchup-stained paper napkin, a dried-up pen that was slightly gnawed at the end, and the severed plastic packaging from a… Tibetan singing bowl set?

I guessed we could hope the big boss had been meditating on his sins.

“Sorry,” the charmed young man said. “That was all he had in the garbage can by the end of my shift. I had to knock over his wine carafe just to fill up the bin so I’d have an excuse to take out the trash.”

“That’s okay,” I said, deftly picking out a few spare shards of glass that clung to the packaging. We’d specifically instructed him to stick to the garbage so that there’d be no thefts to alert his boss to our scheme. “If we can’t get anything out of this, we’ll just try again. He didn’t seem at all suspicious about the accident?”

The guard shook his head. “He really had left the carafe too close to the edge of the counter. I made sure he was watching so he’d see all I did was walk by it.”

Ruse patted him on the shoulder. “You’ve done excellent work. I’ll see that you’re properly rewarded when all this is over.”

Snap was waiting for us back in the RV. He sat up straighter on the sofa at the sight of the bag. “Those are the head man’s things?”

The incubus tossed the bag onto the table. “Yep. Ripe for the tasting. See what you can slurp out of them.”

As Snap eased open the bag, our other companions emerged from the shadows to observe more directly. The Everymobile’s living area was becoming a tight fit, especially with the second hulking wingéd in the mix… even without Omen here.

That thought twisted my stomach. Shoving down my uneasiness about our own boss’s continued absence, I squeezed over to the sofa and sat down there. Pickle scuttled beneath the table, hopped up beside me—and for the first time in days, scrambled right onto my lap. A little of my apprehension melted as I tickled his chin.

If my dragon could get over my failings and come back to me, then surely everything else could turn out all right too.

“The pen might provide the most information,” Thorn suggested, peering at the small collection of items. “The other objects would have been used much more temporarily, would they not?”

Antic bobbed on her feet, only able to make out the surface of the table when her heels left the ground. “Yes! The pen first.” With her last bounce, she sprang right onto the edge of the table but kept swaying there, adrift on waves of excitement.

Snap took the pen in his slender hands and brought it to his face. His forked tongue flicked out, skimming through the air just above its surface.

I’d seen him work his subtler devourer magic plenty of times, but the distance that came into his expression as he sorted through the impressions he’d gleaned from the past still sent a tiny shiver up my spine. To be able to know so much about a person just by testing something they’d touched… Say whatever you wanted about the whole soul-devouring thing, this was damned amazing.

His tongue flicked out a few more times, but the pen didn’t have much surface area to test. As his eyes refocused on us, his mouth settled into a frown. “I’m not sure anything I sensed will give