Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,58

dinner. I plopped myself down at the kitchen island and let out a cry of victory. “We’ve got it!”

Thorn, who’d been skulking by the kitchen doorway in his usual glum way, stepped only a little closer, as if it would pain him to show any more enthusiasm than that. Snap, who last I’d seen had been sprawled on the master bedroom floor tipping the lava lamp this way and that with pure joy, came gliding over a second later.

“You have the information that’ll tell us where to find Omen?” he asked, his eyes bright.

“Maybe,” I cautioned. Pickle hopped onto my lap from where he’d been sitting on the other chair and peeked over the top of the island. I gave his chin a scratch as I considered the screen. “Jade said that someone’s put a call out for ‘potent’ shadowkind, and that sounds like the M.O. of the bunch that ambushed him. Our contacts on the dark web are pretty good at digging up useful communications that were meant to be private.”

Hunters and collectors had their own areas of the internet’s black market where they operated, of course. As secure as they tried to keep those channels, the cabal of hackers who worked for the Fund for pay managed to crack their codes on a regular basis. Usually they could trace the usernames to the actual people behind the sales, purchases, and other posts.

As I opened the file my contact had sent me, Ruse slunk into the room too. He leaned against the counter at the farthest point in the kitchen from me, his stance casual but careful.

He was giving me distance for my sake, not his, I knew. Now and then he’d tossed out a joke or teasing comment, watching my reaction intently as if a laugh would tell him he was forgiven. If he thought he was going to win me over a second time that easily, he was kidding himself.

My hand rose to my chest of its own accord, taking a momentary comfort from brushing my fingertips over the edges of the new silver-and-iron badge pinned under my blouse. I leaned closer to the screen. My other forefinger skimmed over the touchpad as I scanned the list of names and summaries of what the hacker had found.

I almost scrolled right past it. My eyes slid over the letters, continued another half a screen down, and then recognition pinged in my head. Wait a second. I leapt back to that previous entry.

Looking at it, a chuckle slipped from my mouth. Son of a biscuit eater. We’d been barking up the altogether wrong tree, but I could see how the mistake had happened.

I pointed at the name that had caught my eye. “It’s not Merry Den we’re looking for, and it’s not a place. It’s a person. John Meriden. He’s behind one of the aliases that’s posted at least a couple of messages over the last few months, looking to confer with collectors about their shadowkind.”

Snap’s spirits visibly deflated. “I told you the wrong information.”

I patted his arm reassuringly. Oh, the guy did pack plenty of compact muscle onto those slender limbs.

Focus, Sorsha.

“It was an easy mistake to make,” I said. “You picked up on the sounds in a way that formed words you know. It could have happened to any of us. And hey, it still helped us find our man in the end.”

Thorn loomed over me, scowling at the computer as if preparing to reach into the screen and grab our target by the throat through cyberspace. “Where is this ‘John Meriden’?”

“Let’s see what my contact found…” As I read through the entry, my own spirits sank a little. “He only made a small slip that allowed the hackers to find his real name, they don’t say what exactly—probably logging in somewhere he shouldn’t have with the same IP address. But the address itself was some kind of front. They couldn’t trace it back to an actual location that connects to the guy.”

“With his name, it shouldn’t be difficult to track down more details, should it?” Ruse put in. Pickle let out a chirp as if agreeing with the incubus.

“Yeah, I can ask them to investigate more about him specifically. They wouldn’t have gone on a full-blown search for any of the names yet—this is more a summary…” I paused. “Except if he’s connected to the same people who barged into my apartment last night, who knows how closely they’re keeping an eye on anyone poking around