my left and almost fell to my knees.
Omen’s voice rang out from somewhere in the distance. “Sorsha, hurry! Get to the roof!”
Then a distinctive squeal sounded almost directly above me. Panic raced through me with an icy jolt.
Pickle! What were these fuckers doing to my little dragon?
I scrambled onward across the topsy-turvy floor. By the time I reached the far end, I wasn’t just exhausted but woozy too, as if I’d had a couple of shots too many.
There was a stairwell. I pounded up the spiral steps to the second floor, ignored the rest of the wacky gauntlet for the door that must guard the route to the roof, and rammed my heel into the knob. To my momentary relief, the door burst right open.
Another squeal reached my ears, even more terrified than before. I hurtled up the steps to an open doorway where the faint dawn sunlight shone across the staircase. Before I’d even reached the top, the prickly scent of a fire flooded my nose.
I burst from the doorway into the wavering heat on the concrete plane of the roof. Pickle was perched on an overturned plastic bucket several feet away, flames crackling in a ring around him. His clipped wings fluttered in terror.
If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d probably have noticed that it made no sense at all for my shadowkind creature to be here or for a fire to have somehow flared up around him like that. But at that point I was running on pure adrenaline, and all I knew was I had to rescue him.
I raced toward the fire with a swipe of my hand, willing it away from him with all my might.
And just like that, the flames parted. They bowed to either side of a blackened patch they’d marked on the concrete in front of me, and Pickle sprang through the opening into my arms.
As I skidded to a halt, four forms shimmered out of the shadows along the edges of the roof. The nearest one, Omen with his cold blue eyes gleaming bright, slashed a pocket knife across my forearm where I’d wrapped it around the dragon.
I yelped as much from surprise as the shallow sting of pain. As I moved to leap backward, Omen caught my wrist, wrenching me into place and turning the cut to the light in the same motion. My eyes caught on the narrow, red line—and all I could do then was stare.
The line was red with the blood welling up across the wound, but that liquid wasn’t all that was seeping from my skin. A thin but unmistakable trickle of black smoke snaked up from my arm into the air.
Smoke, like shadowkind bled.
My heart had outright stopped for a few beats. It revved up again with a tremor through my veins, but the adrenaline rush was already fading. With fatigue closing in on me again, the smoke dwindled and disappeared, leaving only a streak of proper human blood across my pale skin.
“Well, fuck,” Ruse said from where he was standing by my other side with Snap and Thorn. Even the incubus didn’t seem to know what to say after that.
“We all saw it,” Omen said, his voice taut. “Both the fire and the smoke.”
“But I can’t— It isn’t possible,” I said. My voice sounded hollow. As Pickle clambered onto my shoulder, I brought my arm close to my chest to inspect the cut. My entire abdomen felt hollowed out. “None of you would bleed actual blood like this if you were cut. Shadowkind never do.”
“No human would bleed like smoke, though,” Thorn said, his stern face frozen in an unusually stunned expression.
I guessed he should know from all the epic battles he’d fought long, long ago. I swallowed thickly. “I don’t understand.”
Omen flicked the pocket knife shut and tucked it into his pocket. “Neither do I, but you can’t deny the evidence any longer. There’s something about you that goes beyond normal mortal bounds. I don’t think it’s just a spell laid on you either, with it twined that deeply with your essence. It seems to only come out when you’re particularly worked up. At least, for now. We’ll see if we can work on that.”
My idea of who—and what—I was had just been unavoidably flipped upside down, and he was already making plans for how he’d put me to use? “I don’t—I’ve got to think about this.”
“What’s there to think about?” he demanded. “You have power. We need all the power we can get