Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,20

not to draw too much attention on their own. Having his hands even slightly confined appeared to irritate him.

“Omen had noticed something unusual in this area. There’s a rift between the realms not far from here, so shadowkind often pass through this area. We were… patrolling, searching for evidence. He told us to always remain in the shadows unless we needed to physically interact with an item. He slipped out for a moment just under the bridge—and they came at him from all sides in an instant.”

“You hadn’t noticed they were there?”

Ruse gestured to the trees on either side of the path. He was sporting a baseball cap to hide his horns, but somehow the sporty headwear didn’t diminish his roguish good looks in the slightest. “We were farther back, spread out away from the path,” he said. “I didn’t even see what was happening until they were already on him. I’d guess they were waiting on top of the bridge, ducked down behind the wall.”

Snap paused, his stance tensing as he eyed the structure. He’d seemed to take joy in just about everything he’d encountered in the mortal realm, but the attack here must have really shaken him.

“I could test the bridge,” he said, his voice more subdued than usual too. “Over and under. Even with the time passed, if I’m thorough I might be able to taste something about them.”

He walked on down the slope without waiting for our agreement. I glanced at Ruse. “Taste something?”

The incubus shot me a grin that set off a flicker of heat in my loins despite the situation. He’d disguised any weakness he’d been suffering from before well, but I’d definitely noticed more spring in his step since our encounter last night.

“You’ll see,” he said. “Come on. We did rush in after we heard the attack—let’s see how much of the scene we can reconstruct.”

“If we’d intervened in that first moment instead of holding back…” Thorn rumbled as the three of us followed Snap.

“We’ve been over this,” Ruse said. “Even you held back because Omen specifically ordered us not to fight any battles we weren’t sure we could win, and you could see that our chances were slim. Those jackasses were clearly prepared to fight—and capture—shadowkind, and there were at least twice as many of them as of us. They’d have taken us all, maybe to a worse fate than those ridiculous cages.”

Thorn grimaced. “More than twice. There were ten. But in days past, I could have taken that many on my own. Perhaps I could have still. That’s why Omen brought me on.”

“You saw how quickly their methods subdued Omen—and he can put up a good fight when he needs to. I remind you again, you were following his orders.” Ruse flashed another grin, this one at his beefier companion. “So really, if it’s anyone’s fault Omen got captured, it’s his own.”

Thorn made an inarticulate sound of derision, but he stopped arguing. Before he could grouse about anything else, I waved my hand toward the arch of the bridge. “What exactly did you see when you made it over here?”

Thorn tilted his head to the side as he considered the scene. His eyes, so dark I could barely make out the pupils within the irises, went distant as he drew up the memories. The breeze stirred his moonlight-pale hair.

When he wasn’t talking or outright scowling, he really was something to look at. The scars that mottled his tan skin—one slicing across the bridge of his nose, another bisecting one of those hard cheekbones, various nicks dappling his brow and the edges of his jaw—only added to the valiant warrior vibe.

“There were the ten of them,” he said. “All wearing a sort of plating of silver and iron over their entire torsos and like helmets on their heads. When Omen lashed out at them, it burned him. He still managed to take one down—slashed through his throat just under his chin—there.” He pointed to a spot just beside the base of the bridge. No trace remained of the skirmish that I could see, but it’d been weeks, maybe months, and these people were obviously skilled at removing evidence.

“They didn’t have just armor,” Ruse put in. “Weapons too. Nets—not the dinky ones they use on the lesser creatures but like they were meant to haul in a boatload of fish, with silver and iron barbs all over. And these sort of whips that swung streams of light. I hadn’t seen those before. They