Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,30

the shadow realm was, how could you not miss the place where you came to be?

She would have loved this market. When I was a kid, she’d drag me off to garage sales and church bazaars and the like: anyplace where you never knew what you might stumble on that could be bought for not much money at all—not that she ever used real money when her illusionary magic could transform a few pieces of blank paper into a payment. She might even have gotten her fairy dust shoes at one of those places.

By the time I’d hit my teens, all I’d seen was a bunch of junk. I hadn’t been to a market like this in years. So far, I hadn’t spotted anything to make me think shadowkind other than the three who’d come with me had ever passed through.

Snap’s slim fingers encircled my forearm with a gentle squeeze. “What are those for?” he murmured, his eyes almost round.

He was staring at a rack of bikes and—if you can believe it—unicycles in the corner of the market we’d just reached. The man behind the rack motioned to a kid I figured was his, who hopped up on a small unicycle and showed off her skills pedaling back and forth, her body swaying over the seat. Somehow Snap’s eyes managed to grow even larger.

“Most people don’t use those anymore,” I said. “Not the things with one wheel, anyway. The two-wheeled ones are for getting around, like buses and cars, only they don’t go as fast.”

“Why use them, then?” Snap said as I ushered him onward.

“Well, speed isn’t everything. You don’t need any fuel to make them go, which saves money, and they’re good exercise to keep your body in shape. And you don’t need a license, so there’s a lot less hassle and paperwork.”

“Paperwork.” His puzzled tone had come back.

I elbowed him playfully. “Believe me, you don’t want to get into that. Come on, Thorn and Ruse are leaving us behind.”

The other two had only made it about three booths ahead of us, but Snap took the warning with all seriousness. He darted between the other shoppers to reach them, faster than I could match. Then he stopped in his tracks, faced with a stall offering stacks of gleaming honey jars.

The woman behind the table held out a little plastic spoon. “Want a sample?”

Snap accepted the offering as if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d gotten so lucky. He carefully dipped the spoon into his mouth so his forked tongue could stay hidden. Oh, boy.

If I’d thought I’d seen his face lit up with joy before, it was nothing compared to the expression I saw now. His eyes outright sparkled. He glanced over at me, not just reveling in the sweetness but wanting to share it, and my heart skipped a beat.

Oh, boy, indeed. That sensation wasn’t just the awe I’d felt seeing his full beauty. Nope, the giddy tingle that had shot through me had at least as much carnal desire in it too. What would it be like to taste that honey off those godly lips? To experience his divine eagerness in all sorts of other ways?

I shook the giddiness and the questions off as quickly as they’d come. This wasn’t the time for it. But when I dragged my gaze away from Snap, it caught Ruse’s. He was watching me with a knowing smirk.

I gave him a light punch as I caught up with him. “Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” the incubus said, all innocence other than that damned smirk.

“You were thinking it very loudly.”

Ruse tucked his arm around my waist as if we were some kind of couple. The slide of his hand across my back left me tingling all over again.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said under his breath. “The boy’s got something special. If I swung in that direction, I’d be angling to get him into my bed too.”

I resisted the urge to kick him as a follow-up to the punch. “Did you miss the part about shutting up?” What if Snap overheard? Would he know what the hell we were talking about? I could only imagine trying to deal with those sorts of questions.

As far as I’d been able to determine, sex wasn’t really a thing in the shadow realm. Shadowkind emerged from the ether, or whatever it was, rather than being born. The cubi kind had to venture into the mortal realm to sate their hunger. I’d never seen anything