Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,40

None of the guys who’d set off my warning bells appeared to have clocked me as a target. As far as I could tell, they were still circulating through the front half of the bar, not yet looking or coming my way. Good.

In my bar-wear, I felt unnervingly vulnerable. The badge pinned to my bra might protect me from shadowkind powers, but it’d do nothing at all against human means of combat. After the mixed martial arts classes Luna had insisted I take in my early teens—Because you never know if you might encounter some enemy that prefers brute force over hocus pocus, she’d said—I could handle myself all right, but four against one wasn’t great odds.

“Oh, girls just wanna have guh-uns,” I sang under my breath as I slipped out into the back alley, not that I knew how to fire a gun anyway.

The alley was dark and dank, and a homeless dude was loitering outside the building next door, swigging from a bottle of vodka I could smell from seven feet away. Thankfully, it’d be just a short jog to the lights of the street. Once I was watching from outside where any searchers wouldn’t expect to find me, I’d be much more in control of the situation.

I hurried toward the sidewalk, that sense of control already settling comfortably in my chest, and uneven footsteps scraped the pavement behind me. The drunk guy was heading this way too. I picked up my pace so I could keep well ahead of both him and his stink—and he lunged at me with a speed I hadn’t expected.

The vodka bottle tumbled to the ground with a crackle of breaking glass. The second the guy’s hand closed around my wrist—firmer and steadier than made any sense given his supposed inebriation—my fighting instincts kicked into gear. My body twisted, and my leg shot up for that most basic of self-defence maneuvers: a knee to the balls.

I’d say one good thing about him: he did have his private parts exactly where I needed them to be. My knee connected with his most sensitive appendage, and the air shot out of him with a pained grunt. He stumbled backward, flailing to keep his balance. A knife flashed through the air in his other hand.

Holy mother of mincemeat, what exactly had he been planning on doing to me with that thing? Drunk homeless dude, my ass. This guy had just put on a front while he waited for a target.

Had he been waiting for me specifically, or had I just gotten extra lucky tonight?

I didn’t have the chance to ask him about it. I shifted my weight back, my fists coming up, ready to give him a lesson in why you don’t attempt to knife random women, and the air between us split with a sizzling sound that raised the hairs on my arms. A huge, brawny form wavered into view in mid punch.

Thorn’s fist slammed into my attacker’s face just as the “drunk” guy had lurched back toward me. His crystalline knuckles raked through the flesh of the guy’s cheek and nose down to a gleam of bone. A cry of pain had just started to break from the asshole’s mouth when the shadowkind warrior literally broke his throat with a slash of his other hand. He gouged straight through the guy’s neck, cutting off the cry into a gurgle and a spray of blood.

My attacker crumpled into a heap, blood puddling around him. Thorn stepped back with a satisfied swipe of his knuckles against his palm, and—holy mother of magnificence.

I stared, briefly distracted from the carnage. Specks of the guy’s blood had spattered across the warrior’s chest… His bare chest, with bulging muscles on full, glorious display. In fact, he was bare all the way down.

When shadowkind moved through their realm or through the shadows in ours, they dropped their physical forms, including any clothes they’d been wearing. It appeared Thorn had been too focused on leaping into the fray to remember to bring into being more than the essentials of his body, modesty be damned. And, wow, the equipment he was packing between his legs definitely lived up to the rest of his impressive form.

I jerked my gaze away after just a moment of gaping, but that was enough for Thorn to notice. He looked down at himself and let out a noise of consternation. At the edge of my gaze, I saw his typical tunic and trousers blink into being, covering all