to be.”
“Why did you come out through the back to begin with?” Thorn said. “Did you see a reason to be wary when you were inside?”
Oh, shit. I’d totally forgotten my original goal. “There were four men who came in—not part of Jade’s usual crowd. I got the impression they were searching for someone. Considering what you three have gotten me mixed up in and your idea that we were followed this afternoon, I thought that someone might be me. I was going to double around and keep an eye on them from outside at the window.”
I hesitated with a glance at the body and then hustled the rest of the way to the street. When I reached the front of the bar, I held myself to the side of the window and peeked inside.
I couldn’t make out every corner of the place from here, but it only took a quick skim over the patrons to determine that none of the preppy guys I’d slipped out on were in view. Which meant they probably weren’t in there at all anymore—it wasn’t likely all four of them had squeezed into one of the nooks I couldn’t see. My jaw clenched.
My shadowkind trio had gathered behind me. “It looks like they left while we were busy dealing with the jerk in the alley,” I said. “Now there’s no way of telling what they were up to.” I might have been glad that my uninvited protectors had joined me if Ruse could have taken a read on those dudes. “I’m not sure they were looking for me—it just seemed better to be careful.”
Snap peered past me into the bar. “Yes, that’s why we came. To be careful with your safety.”
It was hard to be mad at him when he put it like that with his sweetly melodic voice.
I headed back toward the alley with a sigh. “All right. We’ll just all be extra careful until we find out how much attention we’ve already drawn. And if we want to make sure we don’t stir up even more trouble, you’d better clean up the mess you left here.” I shot a look at Thorn. “I hope you’re as good at getting rid of dead bodies as you are at creating them.”
15
Sorsha
By the time we made it back to my apartment, it was just shy of midnight. Normally after a night out with Vivi, I’d have returned pleasantly exhausted and ready to crash into bed. After this evening’s events, uneasiness was still jittering through my veins. I couldn’t imagine drifting off into dreamland anytime soon.
The clean-up itself hadn’t been all that horrific. Living mortal beings couldn’t travel into the shadows, but inanimate objects could, and my attacker had definitely been lacking in animation after Thorn’s brutal defense. While the warrior had “given the body to the dark,” whatever exactly that entailed, Ruse and Snap had spirited over a few buckets of water from somewhere or other. Based on the chlorine smell, I suspected it’d been a nearby public pool.
Splashing the water over the pavement had washed the remaining traces of blood down a storm drain. And voila! It was as if the dude had never set foot in the alley, let alone attempted to bring a knife to my throat there.
That didn’t mean I was totally at ease with how callously Thorn had dispatched him in the first place… or with the attack and what had propelled me into the alley beforehand. Either I was simply having a very bad day topped with a sprinkling of some paranoia of my own, or someone had taken notice of the investigating we’d already been doing. I wasn’t sure which was more likely, but the fact that the latter was even a possibility itched at me.
Luna would have said it was time to run. Hell, Luna would have been out the door with emergency bags grabbed the second these three had turned up in the kitchen. She was shadowkind, sure, but that meant her warnings about the rest of her kind had held even more weight. Most of them won’t see you as anything more than an inconvenience or dinner, she’d told me. I don’t trust any of them I don’t already know deserve it, so neither should you.
But as questionable as I might find their methods, I thought the trio had proven that they did care about my well-being… and I didn’t even have an emergency bag anymore. I hadn’t needed one in the past eleven years—hadn’t