“You’re the one who got yourself trapped by those mortals,” I said. “You have no idea how much Thorn has been busting his ass trying to get you back. He’s the most dedicated person—being—whatever—I’ve ever met, often to the point of being incredibly irritating about it. So maybe you should shut up about things you apparently know nothing about.”
I could tell Thorn had turned to look at me, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off of Omen to check the warrior’s reaction. I’d given Thorn a hard time about his single-mindedness in the past, but he’d proven he was holding in plenty of real emotion under that strict exterior—and plenty of passion I’d only gotten a taste of so far. He’d beaten himself up enough for failing to prevent Omen’s capture without the very person he’d been obsessively trying to rescue adding to that agony. I wasn’t going to stand around while this jackass laid into him for the one thing he couldn’t possibly be criticized for.
If I’d thought Omen’s gaze was frigid before, now it was cold enough to flay me down to the bones. His carefully slicked-down hair had risen in little tufts as if propelled by a swelling rage. My hands clenched at my sides as I braced myself for an onslaught of anger, but he kept his voice as tartly cool as before.
“If you hadn’t insisted on crashing this party, none of us would need to worry about where you spend the night in the first place. Don’t make yourself too much of a hassle.”
The implied threat sent a shiver down my spine. Why had Omen agreed to keep me around anyway?
It could have been because of the emphatic references I’d gotten from his companions. Snap stepped closer to me, curling his long, slender fingers around my fist in solidarity. “It’s because of Sorsha we managed to find and free you at all. She’s just as important as any of us.”
Pickle let out a chirping sound of what might have been agreement, fluttering his wings anxiously. He lost his hold on Thorn’s tunic and ended up clinging to the warrior’s hair in his panic to hurl himself back onto his perch. Thorn unfastened him with a long-suffering sigh, but a hint of a smile crossed his lips. I hustled over to take my sort-of pet off his hands.
Omen watched all of this with the same detached disdain and then shook his head. “We’ll see,” he said darkly. “For now—all of you, in the car. Let’s discover what’s left of my former prison.”
To my relief, he drove with more care than Ruse did, making it back to the neighborhood of the construction site without prompting a single blared horn. By that time, I’d determined that the middle cushion in the back seat popped out to allow access to the trunk and had let Pickle scuttle through. The little dragon was now soothing himself by constructing a nest out of an old plaid blanket that’d been folded there. I decided I wouldn’t mention to Omen that his beloved Betsy might end up with her felted trunk lining shredded.
The sun had sunk below the roofs of the nearby high-rises, but the summer evening was still warm and relatively bright. Thorn stole through the shadows around the site before giving us the go-ahead: no sign of the sword-star bunch. Around the back of the site, he hefted a section of the barrier wall aside to let me walk in while the others took the shadow route.
The half-finished framework of steel and cinderblocks wasn’t exactly welcoming in the late afternoon light, but it provoked a lot fewer goosebumps than it had in the eerie glow of security lamps through the darkness last night. I suppressed a wince at the creak of the metal beams above in a gust of wind. Then my feet stalled in their tracks as I came into view of the facility we’d stormed last night.
Or rather, didn’t come into view of it—because where the concrete building with its flood lamps had stood less than twenty-four hours ago, there was nothing but bare, packed earth and a shallow pit of rubble.
As I gaped, my shadowkind companions emerged around me. Ruse let out a low whistle.
A disbelieving laugh sputtered out of me. “These people don’t do things by halves, do they?” Just yesterday morning, they’d battered one of their own men beyond identification to cover their tracks. I shouldn’t be surprised.
We ventured closer, Thorn striding ahead to patrol