freed him. The Omen who’d asked me to help with his quest, the one who’d guided me through our first few ventures into the mortal world, hadn’t exactly been cheerful, but he’d smiled with warmth. Made jokes now and then. Laughed at Ruse’s jokes at least as often as he’d glared. He was angry because of what the other mortals had put him through, this Company of Light, and that made sense, but still, I didn’t like it.
And also… “I don’t know what that means.”
He sighed and pushed himself off the car to straighten up. “Of course you don’t. Never mind. The point is, you’re awfully attached to this woman, aren’t you?”
Did he simply know what we’d been doing last night, or had he managed to overhear some of the things I’d said to her as well? I wouldn’t take any of them back.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” I asked. “You haven’t given her a chance—you weren’t there to see how much she did for us, how incredible she’s proven herself to be. Weren’t your tests enough? Or how she helped us in the ambush last night?”
“That’s not the point. She could deliver us the elixir of life and she’d still be a mortal. No good has ever come of a shadowkind getting hung up on one of them. We’re not the same sort of being—we don’t mix well. It’s a losing game.”
My hackles rose. “It isn’t a game. I care about her.”
He waved a finger at me. “That’s exactly the problem. Caring tangles your fate up with hers. You haven’t been on this side enough to know—mortals are fragile, Snap. Damned fragile. Why do you think they’re always coming up with new ways to try to screw us over?”
“Because they think we’re monsters?” I ventured.
“That’s just the name they invented to justify how they feel. And how they feel is fucking terrified of us.” He scoffed. “They’re afraid of so much, and they want to destroy whatever scares them.”
I paused, remembering a different sort of terror I’d sensed before we’d gotten Omen back. One he might have experienced as much as the creatures who’d left those impressions had. Was that what had changed him?
“I know what they did,” I said quietly. “The Company, in their experiments—not every aspect of it or any hint of why, but we investigated one of their labs. I tasted… over and over again, so much agony to so many shadowkind. It was horrible.”
“You don’t need to tell me that,” Omen growled.
“But I do need to tell you—Sorsha isn’t like that, not at all. She hates the people who did that as much as we do.”
“It doesn’t matter. Even the ones who aren’t outright hostile end up making more trouble than it’s ever worth. The only thing it’s worth doing with mortals is killing the ones out to harm us and giving all the others a wide berth. I guarantee you, she’ll make you regret doing anything else.”
“You don’t know her. She isn’t fragile.” I couldn’t imagine that word ever properly describing Sorsha. The power she wielded wasn’t anything like Thorn’s or Omen’s—or any other shadowkind—but it was still power. I could recognize the determination and resilience in her as surely as I could glean impressions of the past from any objects in my grasp.
Omen had tried to hurt her or to put her into situations where she’d be hurt, but she’d overcome his challenges. Why couldn’t he see?
“She is fragile,” he insisted. “You just don’t understand yet. It always comes out at the worst time. We’ve got too much at stake to risk it.”
“We’d risk a lot more if we stopped her from helping us. And I might not be very familiar with the mortal realm yet, but I know enough to recognize that.”
“Fine. She’s helping us. I haven’t sent her away, have I? Just have a little self-respect and stay out of her bed if you know what’s good for you.” He grimaced and stalked away.
A jittery sensation ran through my body in the wake of his words. The thought of Sorsha becoming fragile, of her breaking in some way, set all my nerves on edge.
I made myself investigate the car as I’d planned to. After a minute, I came up with a gas station store bag still holding some sort of chocolate cake-like confection that I expected would serve well enough, but I couldn’t rouse much sense of victory. I flitted back into the cabin and set the food down on the little