the other side.
Thorn solidified completely just long enough to give me a nod and an encouraging squeeze of my arm. We’ll be right there with you, he’d said when we’d discussed this phase of the mission, and the same sentiment was etched all over his face.
Here I was, the most essential piece in the plan and also the most breakable.
The shadowkind intruders had already gotten to work on clearing my way. I darted past a body slumped against the wall, her gut gouged open beneath her metal vest, and pushed through the doorway ahead of me.
In the first second as the wavering blueish light washed over me, I thought I’d stumbled on a mad scientist’s lab already. Then my eyes adjusted to the dim light—and the stink of chlorine. The bastard had his own indoor pool, for fuck’s sake.
I skirted the still water and the glow of the lights beneath it. I’d made it halfway around the pool when a guard pushed past the far door. From his stern but not frantic expression and the energy to his stride, he was concerned about whatever he’d come down here to investigate but not yet aware it was an all-out invasion.
At least, until he spotted me. “Halt right there!” he shouted, his gun hand jerking up.
He had better instincts than Leland, but not good enough. I’d already grabbed a life preserver that’d been mounted on the wall beside me. I hurled it at him like a massive discus in time to smack his arm to the side.
The good news: I remained bullet-free. The bad news: His finger still squeezed the trigger, sending one of those bullets into the far wall with an unmistakable boom that echoed through the building around us.
There went our advantage of stealth. Our chances of victory were really ticking away now.
I dove at the guard’s legs, aiming to stay out of the line of fire while I knocked him on his ass. Unfortunately, there are rules about running on pool decks for a reason. My feet skidded on a slick patch, and I tumbled over on my ass.
Ruse materialized beside me looking ready to come to my defense however he could, but at the same moment, Bow leapt from the shadows in full centaur form. “I can’t touch your head in that helmet, but the diving board doesn’t have the same problem,” he declared, and spun so he could slam his hind horse legs into the guard’s gut.
The man hurtled across the water. The back of his skull smacked into the edge of the diving board so hard the helmet dented halfway through his head. He dropped like a sack of potatoes into the pool. Bow wiped his hands together with an unusually vicious expression.
Possibly too vicious. “Maybe a little lighter on the hoof power next time?” Ruse said as we dashed to the door the guard had emerged from. “We need at least one of these fools alive—and conscious enough—for me to charm them into leading the way to their prison.”
“Sorry,” Bow said, not looking as if he meant the apology all that much. “I just—I think that’s one of the guys who attacked Gisele.”
“And payback was a bitch. Just remember the best payback will be getting the rest of our kind free before we cave in the rest of their skulls.”
They both slipped back into the darkness. I hustled through a small change room, down a short hall on the other side, and burst through the next doorway into—a personal bowling alley?
Victor Bane must take plenty of time for his recreational pursuits in between attempts to destroy all shadowkind.
Three guards were just charging in from an entrance across the room. I ducked behind one of the bowling ball dispensers by the two lanes, the tang of wood polish saturating my lungs.
Another shot rang out—and then a gasp and a fleshy ripping sound reached my ears. Maybe I should question my life choices when that sound was actually familiar at this point.
I bobbed back up to see Laz twisting the neck of the third of the guards, gripping the man by the jaw so he could wrench his head off without touching the toxic metals of the man’s helmet. Two other headless figures already sprawled on the floor, leaking blood all over the gleaming boards.
The troll, whose skin had deepened to a darker blue and who’d grown at least a foot in both height and width in his full shadowkind form, grinned to reveal two rows of