as languidly sensual as Ruse or as breathtakingly dazzling as Snap. Other than those piercing eyes, he was attractive enough with his tawny, short-cropped hair and sharp features, but hardly otherworldly. I hadn’t determined what monstrous feature he’d been unable to shed in his mostly human form, either. No shadowkind could pass for fully human on close inspection, as Thorn’s crystalline knuckles, Snap’s forked tongue, and the curved horns that poked from Ruse’s hair could attest to.
All the same, Omen radiated power and menace with every movement of his body, every word that fell from those Cupid’s bow lips. When we’d opened his cell last night, he’d lunged out more beast than man—he’d slaughtered two of the guards in a blink. That capacity for violence lurked somewhere beneath the controlled façade he was presenting now. At least with Thorn, who could be monstrously brutal too, the warrior frame and the scars lining his face served as plenty of warning.
Thorn adjusted that frame now, giving Pickle a careful nudge to keep the tiny dragon from tumbling right off him. “We could slip through the shadows right now to survey it. Two of us go and two stay to watch over Sorsha.” He’d already smashed through an apartment building and torn heads from men’s bodies to keep me safe—he took his self-assigned job as my protector even more seriously than he took most other things.
Omen had held up his hand before the warrior had even finished speaking. “No. Whatever we find, we’ll want our devourer testing it to see what he can glean, and he can’t do that while there are human witnesses around.” He glanced at the sky. “It’ll be a little longer before their work day is finished. Since we’ll want a vehicle of our own to rely on as we proceed, we may as well take the opportunity to pick up my car and then return.”
He definitely lived up to the title of boss—as in, bossy. Since we had just met, and I wasn’t confident he didn’t have some supernatural power that would eviscerate me if I pissed him off too much, I meant to keep my mouth shut and go along with his plan. The trouble was, the next words out of his mouth were to me, with a slight sneering edge: “Since you can’t travel through the shadows, I’ll give you the address. You can meet us there.”
I blinked at him. “You’re telling me to head across town on my own?” The other three had refused to let me out of their sight for more than a few minutes since they’d shown up at my apartment, even when I’d wanted them to let me handle one thing or another alone.
Omen gave me a narrow look. “I would have thought a woman of your many supposed talents could manage a simple cab ride.”
“Well, yeah.” But the sword-star crew had a bad habit of showing up unannounced, weapons blazing. I was only alive thanks to the efforts of my trio—my shoulder throbbed dully where I’d taken a bullet yesterday before Thorn had yanked me out of the way of one that would have blasted straight through my heart. It was still daytime, though, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let Bossypants make me look like a weakling.
“Here’s a thought,” Ruse said, smooth as ever. “A cab can whisk any of us across town much faster than we can flit through the shadows. Why don’t I charm a driver into zipping us to our destination as one happy family?” He slung a playful arm over my shoulders and grinned at Omen.
Omen frowned, but even he didn’t have the authority to change the fact that motorized vehicles offered superior speed. “Get on with it then,” he said with a flick of his hand toward the street as if it’d been his idea in the first place, and rattled off the address.
He must have made some other gesture of command, because as Ruse strolled past us, Snap and Thorn faded into the patches of darkness that lined the alley. Omen lingered a moment longer, eyeing me with an intentness that set my nerves twitching, and then vanished as well.
The boss had put Ruse on his team for good reason. It took all of a minute before the incubus had a taxi driver eagerly beckoning us into the back seat of his cab as if we were great friends and letting him give us a ride was a huge favor to