Shadow Thief - Eva Chase Page 0,97

blabbing your secrets—it’s a deal.”

I offered my hand to shake on it, and Thorn accepted the gesture with a twitch of his mouth that could have been amusement or irritation or maybe a little of both. His solid fingers engulfed mine in their firm grasp. Then he stepped back from the bed to give himself more room.

Unlike Ruse, he didn’t need even the concentration of closing his eyes. The edges of his body flickered, and all at once he loomed half a foot taller, his frame filling out with even more of that sculpted brawn. The smoldering red consumed his eyes. Where his hands had dropped to his sides, his knuckles glinted with their crystalline surface protruding farther and sharper, and the hardened lines of his scarred face caught the light with a diamond-like quality I hadn’t seen in the darkness of the parking lot.

And those wings. He kept them partly folded, and still the arc of their dark sweep grazed the ceiling. The feathered tips might have stretched all the way from one end of the room to the other if he’d extended them.

I hadn’t seen those wrong. My breath caught. I knew I was staring, but really, if there was ever an excuse to, this was it.

A wave of giddiness propelled my next words. “You’re an angel.”

Thorn’s mouth tensed. “That word belongs to mortals. None of the trappings they add to it have any basis in reality. We prefer ‘the wingéd.’”

He placed an archaic emphasis on the end of the word, saying it “wing-ed” rather than “wing’d.” His voice resonated with the reverb quality I also hadn’t imagined. It sent a tingle over my skin.

I hadn’t had any reason to believe in a literal heaven even before he’d made his comment about trappings, but if anyone had ever sounded as if they came from on high, it was him.

“I didn’t know there were any of you left,” I said. “I heard… there was a war?”

The information the shadowkind passed on between each other and to the mortals they interacted with was limited, and where it did exist, the details were sketchy and probably skewed by myth and faulty perception. The little bit I’d gathered was that sometime several centuries ago, there’d been a brief but epic battle of some sort in which angels—okay, the wingéd—had fought in unison with the human factions… on both sides. The clash of uber-powerful beings had left most but clearly not quite all of them dead. No one who’d referenced it had any idea what they’d been fighting about.

If Thorn was a typical representation of his kind, I was going to guess the disagreement had been more serious than which way you hung a toilet paper roll.

He didn’t add to my understanding. “Most slaughtered each other. I survived. It’s not a time I care to talk about at any length, m’lady.”

Fair enough. “And the others really don’t know?”

He shook his head. “Not the incubus or the devourer. Omen knows. He was there.”

My eyes widened. “Is he an ang—er, wingéd—too?”

Thorn chuckled—a sound I’d never heard from him before, thrumming from his throat with heavenly resonance. “No. He’s— You’ll see, if he wants to show you.”

Someone had mentioned the man having claws at one point, hadn’t they? I might have prodded the warrior further, but his good humor faded with the last few words. There was more he could have said but didn’t need to.

If we ever do find him.

I didn’t want Thorn dwelling on that right now. With a twinge from my shoulder, I pushed myself to my feet so I could step closer.

Thorn’s stance tensed at my approach, but he didn’t disguise his true form. As I reached with my good arm to trace my fingers over the slope of one wing where it left his back, he held himself perfectly still.

The surface of the black feathers was unexpectedly silky, only coarse along the edges, and the ridge of flesh beneath them emanated warmth. I couldn’t resist the urge to stroke them more firmly. Was that a slight hitch in his chest, as if that spot might be particularly sensitive to the touch?

When was the last time he’d been close enough to anyone to let them offer this kind of caress, if ever?

“They’re magnificent.” I glanced up, my pulse stuttering at finding myself so close to that impenetrable face. “You’re magnificent.”

He peered down at me with those smoldering eyes. “Mortals usually flee in terror at this sight.”

I grinned. My heart was still thumping