My appeal went unheeded. The way the two powerful shadowkind were going at each other, I wasn’t sure if Thorn would even hear me if I revealed Omen’s secret—if it would have made a difference at this point anyway.
At this rate, they were going to kill each other. Over me. I valued my life pretty highly, but no part of me wanted to see either of my monstrous lovers end their existence while vying to decide my fate. How much destruction was I going to cause right here without even using my supernatural sparks?
Just thinking that in the midst of the chaos brought a stinging surge of my flames licking up over my chest. As I smacked at them, willing down the fire, Thorn hurled the hellhound against the wall. One of Omen’s paws hit the rough stone with a crunch that turned my stomach, but he flung himself back at the warrior with his fangs flashing.
More heat churned up from the bonfire inside me. This wasn’t how I wanted this catastrophe to end. I was responsible—for myself, for what my powers might do, and for what I allowed to happen here if I stood silent and let these two men tear each other apart.
I’d accomplished a lot of supposedly impossible things in the past month. Maybe it was time to try one more if that meant I didn’t have to watch anyone else die in an attempt to protect me.
“Stop!” I shouted, louder than before, and hopped onto my feet. I stood as tall as I could manage given the length of the chain and waved my free arm frantically. “Stop! I’ll go. I’ll go to the Highest.”
The two shadowkind careened past me in their fight without giving any sign of acknowledgment, so I did what might have been the most foolhardy act of my life so far—which if you’ve been following along, you’ll know is saying a lot. I hurled myself right into the middle of that smoky clash of fists and claws.
Of course, thanks to my close friend Chain, I only made it a couple of feet from the bed, but that was enough to propel my arm between the two fighters.
Thorn heaved himself backward with a startled grunt and wild eyes. Omen, for all he’d threatened to rearrange my face a few minutes ago, recoiled in the opposite direction with just as much force. They both stared at me, Omen panting as he shifted back into human form, Thorn checking me over for damage as if he wasn’t standing there pouring his life essence into the room.
“I’ll go to the Highest,” I said again, now that I was sure I had their attention. The words caught in my throat, but I forced myself to keep going anyway. “You don’t need to fight about it or make any decisions. I’m deciding. They want me, so I’ll go.”
Thorn’s tan face grayed. “M’lady—they mean to destroy you.”
“I know.” I swallowed thickly. “But they haven’t met me yet. I’ve stolen a lot of things in my life—possibly I can manage to steal a little goodwill too.”
When I shifted my gaze to Omen, he looked equally stunned. The fire had gone out of his eyes, and the blue that remained looked more pained than icy. “What are you playing at, Disaster?” he said, but without any of his typical rancor. He sounded almost worried.
About my sanity, possibly. I was questioning that too. But I’d made my decision, and I wasn’t going to go all wishy-washy now.
“You can tell the Highest where I am and fulfill their orders,” I said. “I’m just asking that you also tell them how much good I’ve done trying to help the shadowkind and how much I want the chance to keep doing that. Tell them I’ve been trying to stop the extermination of your kind, and the last thing I want to do is devastate the realms myself. See if there’s any way they’d consider making some kind of deal with me rather than going straight to murder. Please.”
He blinked, his expression still frozen in its state of shock.
“Sorsha,” Thorn rumbled. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do. Because I like the alternatives even less.”
Omen drew himself up straighter abruptly. I didn’t know how to read the brooding look he gave me. Then he motioned to the warrior with a jerk of his hand.
“You heard her. She doesn’t want to be rescued. Let’s go, before you insist on doing it anyway. You can weigh in on where I take things from here—outside, in the fresh air, like comrades.”
Thorn shot me an imploring glance that wrenched at my heart. I nodded encouragingly. “It’ll be okay,” I said, with no idea at all how that could turn out to be true. “Go with him and give him some pointers on how to present my better qualities in a good light.”
The warrior grimaced, but at another beckoning gesture from Omen, his bulky form vanished into the shadows. As Omen dove after him without a backward glance, it occurred to me with a lurch of my gut that this might be the last time I’d ever see them before I faced the direst possible fate I’d ever imagined I might meet.
5
Omen
I nudged Thorn down the dark passage beyond the door of my canyon safe house, out to the narrow ledge of yellow-brown rock where the morning sun shone. He went without protest but with tension still ringing through his presence.
We could have talked in the shadows, but the blurred awareness of the outer world made my thoughts feel muddled. And they’d been muddled enough already after Sorsha had made her offer and her plea just now.
I waited at the mouth of the passage long enough for the cool shade to knit the wounds from our fight to the point that I wasn’t worried about how much smoky essence I was leaking, and then I emerged into the sunlight.
Thorn followed me into physical form but stayed in the passage. There wasn’t really room for him to join me on the ledge, considering it only jutted about a foot from the entrance and a few feet across. Getting to and from this place while carrying Sorsha had required a precarious scramble down the uneven rock face above, which held nothing wide enough to be considered an actual path. No human could have made it here alone without a host of rock-climbing gear.
We were about halfway down the canyon wall. Rocky cliffs stretched out all around us, towering over a valley flecked with green vegetation on either side of its shimmering river. The wind whistled through the crags, dry and fresh with no hint of human occupation.
The grandeur of the landscape before me might have been the closest any place in the mortal world came to matching the sublime if oppressive enormity of the Highest and their vast hollow in the shadow realm. Looking out over it in the flood of warm light from above, it was hard to imagine that Sorsha had volunteered to trade her existence here for the complete and infinite darkness of the death the Highest wished on her. Even harder to imagine that only minutes ago, I’d been wavering on the edge of consigning her to that darkness.
And the first point was exactly why I was now feeling so unsettled about the second.
Thorn had wrapped a strip of cloth around the worst of the slashes my claws had dealt. With another uncomfortable pang, I watched him secure it. I hadn’t enjoyed fighting him any more than I’d enjoyed the idea of subjecting Sorsha to the Highest’s potentially irrational brutality.
“You can’t listen to her,” he said, fixing the full depth of his dark eyes on me. “She was only trying to stop us from hurting each other. She doesn’t want to die. And you know the Highest won’t be moved by any overtures on her behalf. If they’d been willing to believe she might not be such a terrible threat, the twenty-five years in which she failed to incinerate the world while they searched for her should have made them rethink their position.”