groped along the dash in search of a key, clearly not prepared to rewire the thing either. I turned as I yanked the passenger side door open—and my stomach flipped over with a surge of horror.
Thorn was charging after us across the lot. He’d stayed in his physical form too, no doubt expecting he could fend off any attacks that came his way and shield the rest of us from them at the same time. But the mercenaries who’d just come into view back by the burning van weren’t looking to capture any shadowkind they got their hands on this time. No, from the size of the machine guns they raised, we’d made enough trouble that they were perfectly happy to wipe us all off the face of the earth now, even if it was a waste of experimental subjects.
Thorn hadn’t looked behind them—Thorn didn’t know. If the machine gun bullets were the same silver the guards in the toy store had fired, they’d tear him to pieces.
My heart pounding, I threw myself forward to catch his attention. “Thorn, into the shadows!” The words tore from my throat, and my hand slashed through the air at the same moment in a gesture of pure desperation.
The gunmen had just pressed their triggers. The rat-a-tat of machine gun fire pealed out—and cut off just as abruptly as the van’s flames roared out at them. Fire lashed across the yard in a vast billow. The gunmen scrambled away with cries of pain, a hell of a lot more than their shirt hems on fire.
Thorn had vanished. I had to assume he was on his way to us and not fatally wounded by those first few shots. I leapt into the truck, slammed my palms against the dash without letting myself second-guess or really even think, and pictured another flare of heat setting off a spark deep beneath the hood.
The engine sputtered to life. My chest hitched with it. “We’re all in,” Ruse said from the cramped back bench, and I found just enough wherewithal to tug my door closed as Omen hit the gas.
The truck tore around with a groan and rattled toward the fairgrounds entrance. Snap formed on the seat behind me. “Thorn’s hurt,” he said in a stricken voice, and my pulse lurched all over again.
“I’m fine,” the warrior said gruffly a second later, emerging into being on the back bench so abruptly his massive form shoved Snap and Ruse toward the windows. Which was all well and good for him to claim, but smoke was trailing off his back as if someone had set him on fire. At a jostle of the truck’s rickety undercarriage, he winced.
Oh, hell, no. I grabbed my purse, which did have a few useful bits and bobs in it, set Pickle on the floor, and motioned Thorn back through the door that led to the truck’s cargo area. “You’re not bleeding out—or up, or whatever—on my watch. Get back there where we’ve got more space to work before you keel over.”
“I need directions, stat!” Omen added. As I got up from my seat, Ruse leapt through the shadows to take my place. He snatched up Omen’s phone, and I followed Thorn into the dim cargo area.
The boxy space was swaying so violently that I nearly tripped over my feet. Thorn sank down against one bare wall, and I dropped down next to him with as much grace as I could manage, which wasn’t a whole lot. More shots stuttered behind us, but they sounded farther away now. At least, I hoped I was judging that right.
“Let me have a look,” I said—briskly, to cover up the panicked thumping of my heart. A little light seeped through the small window on the cargo door at the back. The space around us was empty except for a few crumpled cardboard boxes and a couple of canvas sheets that I could cut up into bandages if need be.
“I will be fine,” Thorn insisted as he twisted at the waist to show me his back. “You warned me in time—they only clipped me. And I heal quickly.”
He wasn’t lying. I’d known about shadowkind resilience already, but it was still a little startling to see it in action. I knelt beside him, taking in the tatters of his tunic—and the already closing wounds that dappled the edges of his shoulders and back amid numerous scars of all sorts of shapes and sizes.
The streams of smoke had slowed to a trickle.