Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,100

of my neck, and closed my eyes. Despite the intermittent twinges of pain, I must have dozed at least a little. One second my mind was drifting through a highlights reel of the past week, and the next all three of my shadowkind companions had burst into my room, talking at the same time.

I sat up, blinking and swiping at my eyes. A glance at the bedside clock told me it was now nearly two in the morning.

We were running out of time.

I held up my hands. “Hold on, hold on. What’s going on? What did you find out? Start from the beginning—just one of you.”

Ruse came to a stop beside the bed and caught one of my hands in his. His smirk radiated victory.

“The hacker you found cracked all the codes, and we hit pay dirt. We know exactly where Omen is down to the cell number—we’ve even seen the blueprints to know how to get to it once we’re there.”

Snap was practically bouncing on his feet with eager energy. “At least, we think it’s him. They’re all called ‘subjects’ in the files. But ‘Subject 26’ was the only one brought in around the time he was captured, and some of the other details sounded like him.”

“He’s alive,” Thorn said with undisguised relief.

“We found the building,” Snap went on. “It was one of the other impressions I got from Meriden. Two of them together, actually. There’s a big construction site”—he glanced at Ruse as if to confirm he’d gotten the term right—“and in the middle where you can’t see unless you go right through, there’s the building I saw with the concrete walls and shiny doors.”

A secret facility hidden within a construction site? With all the building projects that went up around the city and then took forever to complete, I had to give the conspirators kudos. That was pretty brilliant.

“You saw the place?” I said as everything he’d said sunk in. A quiver of nerves raced through me even though the two of them had clearly returned unharmed. “You went in?”

“Not all the way in,” Ruse said. “On the way back here, we swung by the address we got to scope things out so we could make more definite plans. We couldn’t easily get into the actual building, though. They’ve got flood lamps all around the place so we can’t get close enough to jump to any entry point through the shadows, and obviously we weren’t going to stroll over and knock.”

“Lots of guards too.” Snap made a face. “Some of them standing around, some of them patrolling, with silver and iron protections and those weapons they used before.”

“I can smash through their puny equipment,” Thorn rumbled.

“Not with this many, even with these guns.” Ruse punched him lightly in the arm. “We’re going to need a better strategy than ‘Charge straight in and hope for the best.’”

I thought of the construction of the toy shop office. “What about the building itself? Is there any silver or iron worked into it?”

Ruse hesitated. “We didn’t pick up on anything from outside. The blueprints indicate there were special materials used in the cells, which makes sense. The rest of the building looked clear.”

But of course we couldn’t know for sure if they’d added more since then.

If the shadowkind couldn’t simply slip inside unseen, then getting in would require my expertise. My first impulse was to tell them to lay out the route for me, and I’d get to Omen and release him myself. No need for any of them to risk the same assholes catching and caging them, especially when we didn’t know how going into the building might affect them.

But as I looked around at the three men—and perhaps monsters—who’d crashed into my life uninvited days ago, the bizarre fondness that swelled in my chest was tainted with a pinch of shame.

I’d nearly gotten myself killed earlier tonight by insisting I go into the store alone. Shutting Vivi out had made more problems for us than it could solve. The idea of seeing anyone that I, yeah, cared about under threat still made every particle in my body balk. It made me think of my parents’ cries and of Luna shattering into mere particles of the woman who’d raised me.

My lungs constricted with the memories. People around me, people who were trying to look after me—they died.

But these three knew the risk they were taking. How could I tell them it wasn’t their choice to make—or try to take the