another tasty mouthful and glanced around, not wanting to exclude the third member of my trio from the meal. “Where’s Thorn?”
The incubus waved his hand dismissively. “He got one of his ‘feelings’ and went off patrolling, as if he doesn’t feel the need to patrol every second hour regardless. They’ve never attacked us by daylight before, but try telling the lunk that.”
I glanced toward the funhouse, where the final member of our larger quartet was looking at something on the cellphone he’d picked up during our recent travels. I didn’t feel particularly inclined to invite Omen over to our impromptu dinner, and anyway, if he’d wanted a piece of it, he’d have marched over and demanded it. Still, as I took in his frown at whatever he was looking at, some of my lingering irritation faded.
He was a hard-ass and a beast—literally—but it was mostly in the service of saving all shadowkind, something most of the rest of his kind weren’t willing to put in any effort to accomplish at all. And… as much as my trio had glommed onto me and become fond of me, none of them had picked up on the hints of powers even I hadn’t been ready to acknowledge. Probably because they couldn’t conceive of a mortal having that kind of power.
Omen had noticed when he’d barely even known who I was. For all his disdain of humankind, he’d been open-minded enough to keep me around and push me—however obnoxiously—toward uncovering those powers further. He’d spent all day doing whatever he could think of to help me control them. It might not have been fun, but I doubted he’d considered it a laugh riot either.
With a little less generosity, he could have written me off as a hopeless mostly-human being. It wasn’t as if the four shadowkind didn’t have plenty of supernatural voodoo between them without me contributing.
Omen raised his head as if sensing me watching him, and I jerked my gaze away—just in time to see Thorn leaping out of the stretching shadow of the camper van.
The warrior strode toward us, his voice ringing out with a force that thrummed through my nerves. “We’ve got to go! There’s a squad coming this way—it looked like they were—”
Before he could finish that thought, something shrieked through the air behind him to crash into a side window of the camper van.
Ka-boom!
An explosion shattered the van’s other windows with a burst of fire that rocked the tires. Another one biting the dust. Sweet scorching salamanders, these people really meant business now.
For a second, I stood frozen, stuck in the uncertainty of where to run when our expected means of escape had just gone up in flames. One frantic thought hit me—Pickle!—but at the same moment, the little dragon brushed against my ankle with a quavering squeak, having followed the pizza brigade over here. Then a volley of shouts and the rattle of gunfire from the direction the missile had flown from spurred me into action.
I scooped Pickle into my purse—which I’d picked up out of habit, thank God—and whirled toward the only other vehicle I’d noticed anywhere nearby: the rusty old truck by the funhouse. My backpack with my cat-burglar equipment was still in the van, but it’d be ashes in another few heartbeats if it wasn’t already. Losing the scorch-blade I’d spent three robberies’ worth of ill-gotten income on hurt, but not as much agony as if one of those missiles hit me going back for it.
My feet pounded across the pavement. Snap vanished into the shadows, as Omen appeared to have too, but Ruse dashed alongside me in physical form so he could speak. “I already checked it—there are no keys. So unless you’re as good at hotwiring as you are at breaking and entering…”
“Nope.” But I did have some idea. My thoughts had slipped back to the winter years ago when Malachi’s car battery had kept dying and we’d gone to a guy down the hall to jump-start it four or five times. I’d watched them hook things up; I had a basic idea of where the power needed to flow. A little jolt was all it needed.
A little jolt like a flash of fire.
I had no idea whether it would work, but jumping on a carousel horse wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I sprinted faster, hoping Snap and Omen would head to the same destination too in their shadowy way.
Just as I reached the truck, Omen appeared in the driver’s seat. He