Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,48

I clung to the handlebars.

I’d stuck the box back on the shelf in the closet. I hadn’t even thought of it, I’d been in such a rush. The fire would have consumed everything in that room, if not the entire apartment. The one gift my parents had left for me was utterly gone, and I had no way of ever replacing it.

My guts felt as if they’d knotted into a solid mass of mourning. I hadn’t been ready, not for any of this. More than a decade in the same city, three years in the same apartment—I’d gotten complacent. So fucking stupid. Luna had taught me better than that.

“Sorsha?” Snap said tentatively. He brushed a gentle hand over my shoulder.

I inhaled sharply and forced myself to straighten up. The ache in my weary legs was nothing compared to the stab of loss in my chest, but these three wouldn’t understand why I cared so much about those things. I’d just have to swallow the grief down like I had Luna’s death and the other losses since…

As I dismounted the bike, Thorn stepped closer. The tear remained in his trousers, but his calf had stopped leaking the smoke of his essence. That seemed like a good sign. Shadowkind did usually heal quickly.

“You should probably hold onto this,” he said, holding out one of his brawny hands. “It seems rather… delicate. It didn’t entirely survive the fighting I’ve already had to do—I apologize.”

He was offering me the box I’d just been mourning. A crack ran through the pearly lid, and one of the corners was chipped, but it was here. Whole and unburned.

I snatched it from him much more hastily than was really polite and popped it open. The letter was still nestled inside, my mother’s spiky handwriting scrawled across the notepaper. I snapped the box shut again with the irrational terror that a sudden wind might steal that treasure from me after all.

A lump filled my throat. I stared up at Thorn’s face. “When did you take this?” And the bigger question: Why?

His rugged features revealed no more than his usual grimness. “I noticed it in your closet as I was coming into the bedroom. It appeared, before, that it was important to you. I thought you would want it saved from the flames.”

I hadn’t realized he’d been paying any attention when I’d talked to Snap about it, let alone that he’d recognized the depth of my connection to what must have looked to him like a fairly mundane object. He’d risked a few seconds in the battle to rescue it for me. That was worth a heck of a lot more than any heads he’d bashed in on my behalf.

“Thank you,” I said, swallowing hard. “I would have hated to lose it. Honestly, I don’t know how to thank you enough.”

As I searched his face for the compassion he must have acted on, his expression tensed under my scrutiny.

“It was nothing,” he said brusquely. “Certainly not compared to the debt I’m still repaying. We shouldn’t linger out here in the open for much longer, should we?”

I winced inwardly at the curt dismissal. Maybe that was all he’d been thinking of—how he owed me for getting him and the others out of those cages. However he felt about me, he obviously didn’t want to waste any time accepting my gratitude.

I slipped the box into a safe compartment of my backpack. “You’re right. We’ve got to hole up somewhere for the night. I’m totally wiped—we can take stock and make bigger plans in the morning.”

Ruse cocked his head toward the apartment buildings beside us. “It looks like we have an extensive spread of possible hideouts. Let’s see which ones we can use.”

17

Sorsha

As we reached the apartment building, I started rummaging through my backpack for my lockpicking tools. Before I’d even set my hands on them, Ruse had slipped through the shadows into that of a potted plant on the other side of the lobby door. He opened it for us with a flourish. “Gentlemen, madam.”

Right. Breaking and entering was a hell of a lot easier when you had supernatural powers on your side. For a second, my skills seemed to pale in comparison.

On the other hand, I couldn’t be defeated by a spotlight and a few pieces of iron and silver, so maybe it was fairest to say we simply had different strengths.

Getting inside the building didn’t solve all our problems. “We can’t waltz into any old apartment,” I whispered. “The current