Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,88

I should just—” And yet he couldn’t seem to move.

“Don’t think about that other time,” Sorsha suggested. “Think about how it felt when you found Meriden’s name or his house. Imagine how many useful impressions must be attached to him. You could get us so much closer to Omen, to stopping the people who worked in that lab.”

“Yes. Yes.” The devourer gathered himself, determination hardening the graceful lines of his face. He knelt by Meriden’s back and leaned in.

Sorsha hovered over him, poised as if she thought she might need to leap in and steady him again, her lips curved in a gentle but elated smile. The fierceness I’d seen still shone in her eyes. Ruse watched the proceedings with eager anticipation.

The desolation that had come over our group had fallen away, just like that. She had defeated it, even though she’d been more affected by the death than the rest of us.

In that moment, while they all studied the body, I couldn’t tear my gaze away from her—from the magnificent strength I hadn’t completely perceived until just now. And not just strength. Snap might have gone through with this act under my orders out of fear, but she’d seen what he needed well enough to not just convince him but inspire him.

It shouldn’t have been surprising. Our lady might be mortal, true, but she was the sort of mortal who broke into prisons and freed shadowkind from their jailors at risk of her own life and liberty. How could she be anything other than extraordinary? She’d managed to fill the gap left by our loss of Omen so surely and yet subtly it’d nearly escaped my notice.

Silly songs and flashy clothes and all, she brought something essential to our group. Something I suddenly had trouble imagining doing without, even after we had Omen leading the charge again.

But why would she want anything to do with us and the danger we’d thrust into her life once this quest was over?

The earlier twinge turned into a pang. Before I could examine it, determine just what it meant, Snap rocked back on his heels with a shaky gasp. His pupils had dilated, the brilliant green of his eyes in his true physical form glittering around them.

“I saw so much,” he said breathlessly. “So many places. The house and the streets and halls that are bright but cold. Shadowkind in little rooms with locked doors. Shiny tables like in the office we searched, computers with streams of words and numbers and wriggling lines…”

“Where?” Ruse asked. “That’s got to be the place they took Omen to.”

“I don’t… I don’t know. It all came in fragments. It’s hard to piece together.” Snap went still, his forehead furrowing as he must have sorted through the barrage of impressions I had to assume an entire human body would have collected. “There was a place not yet built, all steel beams and walls half attached—maybe that was from farther back. There was another house like his but with a blue door. There was a grocery store, fruit with smooth skin in his hands. A book. A building coming up out of dirt ground, with concrete walls and doors shiny like those lab tables. Music rising from a wooden platform down below where people were sitting in rows with their instruments. And another building—I think it was important—he was nervous when he walked inside.”

Sorsha latched on to that comment, sinking next to him. “When he walked inside where, Snap?”

His tongue flicked again, as if he could draw more certainty out of the air. “Big glass windows. Sale. Bright boxes in the windows with little figures like people and animals and cars. I think I can see the sign.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Fun Station Depot. He went there more than one time—I see it when it’s light and dark and in-between. Worried. He had to tell them something, something about his work, he wasn’t sure they’d be happy enough with it.”

“Did you get much sense of what that work was?” Ruse asked.

“No. Only—shadowkind. Fear and awe of them. Needing to keep them contained.” Another flick. “Walking into that building, the one that made him nervous, he’d be thinking about how the way to get in was iron. I don’t know what that means.”

The devourer’s shoulders sagged with those last words, as if drawing out so many impressions had drawn most of the energy out of his body as well.

Sorsha tapped her lips. “Iron. A key, maybe, to wherever