chomping and gouging unshielded calves and bellies left and right. I’d barely seen more of Omen than a blur when he’d first barged out of his jail cell, and then he’d been flickering somewhere between his shifted form and his more human appearance, but I knew this had to be him—and now he was all beast.
The enormous, hound-like demon-dog could have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me, and I was no shorty. In place of the icy blue eyes I was used to, its gaze blazed a fiery orange. The same searing glow coursed amid its dark gray fur like rivulets of molten magma across a volcanic plane. Fangs as long as my index finger gleamed with each snap of its jaws. The devilishly pointed tail I remembered lashed through the air, wrenching a knife from one attacker’s hand.
I’d never seen a shadowkind like that before, but Luna had told me stories of some of the more frightening creatures you could encounter, mostly to dissuade me from begging her to find a way to take me into the shadow realm so I could experience it for myself. I was looking at what most mortals would have called a hellhound.
In the midst of the chaos, I was struck by a fleeting eureka moment. So that was the source of Betsy’s smell. Instead of your typical doggy odor, Omen’s presence had marked it with sulfur and hellfire.
The Company’s people clearly hadn’t caught him by as much surprise as during their first ambush, but despite his ferocity and strength alongside Thorn’s, our attackers were closing in on us. They hadn’t skimped on manpower.
One guy sprang at me, and I beat him off with the candle jar, just as another came charging toward me from the other direction with one of the Company’s nets. Did he figure I was a shadowkind, or did they just want to take all of us alive for questioning? My breath hitching in my throat, I lobbed the jar at his face.
He must have been holding a lighter or something that I hadn’t seen. The candle’s entire wick flared to life as the jar’s mouth smacked into him, and hot wax splashed into his eyes. He dropped the net with a howl.
Thorn barreled toward me just as another attacker swerved my way. The warrior pummeled him three feet in the air with one of his mighty fists and spun to shield me. “Take cover—the car!”
Abandoning him to keep fighting on my behalf sent a jab of guilt through my gut, but he wouldn’t leave until I had a safe route out of here. And the station wagon was my only hope of a quick escape.
A figure already sat in the driver’s seat—a blond surfer-looking dude. Confusion washed over me for a second before I realized it was the disguising spell on the windows. The guy inside had to be Ruse, having slipped inside through the shadows now ready to make a getaway.
I was just a few steps from the door when the Company people must have noticed my mad dash. A louder shout rang out, and something shrieked through the air over my head. I had just enough sense left in my spinning head to duck, my good arm coming up over my head.
Whatever explosive our attackers had hurled, it hit the hood of the station wagon—and blasted a burst of flame all across poor Betsy. I hit the ground, my skin stinging from the heat. A lance of pain shot through my injured wrist, a duller throbbing waking up in my bandaged shoulder. I hissed, nicking my lip with my teeth.
Someone grabbed my good arm—Ruse, his cacao smell turned smoky from the wafts of heat streaming off the station wagon. “This way!” He hauled me onto my feet and toward the drive.
I glanced back toward Thorn and Omen. “But—”
“We’re not leaving them behind. I’m a firm believer in back-up plans.”
Snap wavered out of the night up ahead and beckoned us onward. “I found it! There’s only one man there—I think he has the keys—” He gazed past us to the crackling mess that had been our previous method of transportation. “And we need them, don’t we?”
“Lead the way,” Ruse said. “And make it snappy, Snap.”
The devourer had enough sense of humor left to give a flicker of a smile as he whipped back toward the road. “Down the road this way,” he said, pointing.
The gray shape of a large van came into view beyond the trees. Ruse smiled. “Perfect. We’ll