I couldn’t think of any moment when she’d seriously criticized me, let alone made me feel there might be something terribly wrong with me. Maybe she hadn’t been built to fill a parental role, and maybe a fae couldn’t produce the same sort of maternal love a human could, but she’d cherished me beyond all reason. She was the only person in my life that I could really remember who’d never been anything but fully devoted to me.
“The time when I guess my powers had the most reason to come out—but didn’t—was when I was a kid and this shadowkind jerk thought it’d be fun to work his mind control voodoo on me to use me like a puppet.” I’d told Ruse about that incident before, but talking about it out loud made my skin itch. I resisted the urge to hug myself. “Luna told him off and brought me home. She didn’t ask anything about how I was feeling. I mean, it must have been pretty obvious how shaken up I was with the way I was crying, but she didn’t seem concerned that I might lash out. She just grabbed my favorite ice cream for us to eat right out of the carton and put on my favorite movie, even though it bugged her that I liked something modern rather than her ‘classics,’ and sat there with her arm around me petting my hair.”
In spite of the awfulness of my present, a smile crossed my lips at the memory. Auntie Luna might have learned her cues about human behavior from all that ‘80s media she’d consumed, but she’d been able to put them to practice pretty damn well.
Omen was watching me intently. “She was important to you.”
“Of course she was,” I said. “She was my whole world. I didn’t exactly have much time to make friends when we were constantly moving… After a while, it seemed like there was so little point in getting to know people better that I stopped putting in an effort. If I wasn’t doing the essential stuff, I was hanging out with her. She knew how to make even mundane things like buying groceries or dealing with a scraped knee fun. It was a little lonely sometimes, but she did her best by me. I’ve managed to pass for reasonably normal, as humans go.”
A dry chuckle fell from Omen’s mouth. “Only to someone who doesn’t know shadowkind enough to pick up on the influence.” He paused. “I didn’t get any sense of glamoured bits from what you’d said, but I’m not sure I’d pick up on them from general thoughts. And I don’t think we have time for you to recite your entire history if there aren’t any particular incidents that seem connected to your powers.”
“She probably figured it wasn’t any big deal, and if I started showing some, she’d deal with it then. She wasn’t much of a planner either.” I rubbed my mouth, the pang of mourning combining with all the tensions I’d already been feeling in an indigestion stew. Was any of this making Omen more kindly disposed toward me? Maybe I’d be better off reminding him of his past—and the responsibilities that came with it—instead.
“It sounds like this Tempest gal is the total opposite of that,” I went on, picking at my fries. “How long ago was it you thought the Highest had killed her—several centuries, or something like that? All that time, she’s been playing some kind of long game, keeping it all under wraps… Did she ever turn against other shadowkind back when you two hung out together?”
The downward twitch of Omen’s lips told me he didn’t like the change of subject. “Tempest’s main goal was sowing chaos. She mainly did it among the mortals, but she wasn’t above ensnaring weaker shadowkind to add to her amusement. I wouldn’t have expected a scheme on this scale, but…”
“But?”
He was silent for a moment. “I once watched her spend the better part of a week plucking the claws off little beasts like your dragon so that she could then jab them one by one into a mortal who’d offended her until he resembled a pin cushion. A bloody one. If she’s found some way to turn the Company’s operations around on mortals in an epic fashion, it’s not difficult to imagine her going to even more epic lengths at the rest of our expense to get there.”
Ah. So we were dealing with a total psychopath. Not that I’d had much doubt about that after hearing her taunt Omen over the phone, but that little story solidified the impression.
“And you don’t think stopping that kind of epic crazy is a little more important than the slim chance that I’m somehow going to explode like a hundred nuclear bombs in the next few days?” I couldn’t help saying.
“I think I don’t know how slim that chance actually is.”
I couldn’t argue that point very easily. Time to shift the focus back to him. “Why did you go around with a shadowkind like that anyway? Were you that bad back then?” He’d told me that he’d played pranks on mortals—convincing them he was the devil himself had been a favorite—but I hadn’t imagined him that sadistic, especially to other creatures of the shadows.
Something in Omen’s expression shuttered. “I can’t say I was at all considerate of the mortals in my vicinity, but I never harmed any of my own kind purposefully.”
“You just stood by while someone else did it.”
“If you think I never had arguments with Tempest, or that there was any chance she’d change simply because I said—” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I looked the other way too often when it was convenient to my purposes, and I’ve learned to do better than that. I won’t make those same mistakes again. Which is exactly why I’m being much more careful in my associations now.”
The pointed look he gave me made me bristle despite my best intentions. “I’m nothing like her.”
“No, I don’t think you are. The problem is, if the Highest are right, you might be even worse.”
He straightened up, and then he was vanishing into the shadows without another word. I stared at the spot where he’d stood, but he didn’t return.
Had all that talk gotten me anywhere with him, or had I only screwed myself over even more?
4
Sorsha
When I got tired enough that I figured I should try to get some rest, I turned off the electric lantern. I jolted awake sometime later to a room that was as pitch black as my first experience of it. But before Omen even spoke, I could tell from some shift in the air and the prickle of his scorching aura over my skin that I wasn’t alone. Probably his arrival was what had jarred my nerves.
“You managed to sleep,” he said. The lantern flared on to illuminate his well-built form.
I shoved back the sheet and sat up, rubbing the bleariness from my eyes. I hadn’t slept for half as long as it felt as if my body had needed. “It is a physical necessity for some of us.”
Not that I really wanted him thinking about my mortal side. It might be my shadowkind powers that were causing the biggest issue, but I’d bet he’d be much more inclined to believe that I could control those if it weren’t for the weaknesses that came with the human part of me. Although I’d still argue that I didn’t have half as many weaknesses as he liked to claim.
His lips had curled with a familiar hint of disdain, but his pale eyes looked only solemn. My pulse hitched. Had he made up his mind about my fate? If so, I didn’t think I was going to like the outcome.