“You drive a station wagon?” I said, unable to keep the incredulous note out of my voice.
Omen shot me a frigid glance and patted the boxy brown hood. “Betsy here is as reliable as they come, and when evading one’s enemies, that matters much more than glitz. She’s also got a glamour on her windows that gives a false impression of who’s inside, courtesy of a former fae associate of mine. I do also have a motorcycle, but that’s kept elsewhere.”
And it wouldn’t really lend itself to carting all five of us around town, at least not when the others were in physical form. But seriously—he’d named his car Betsy? I held in a snicker, but the sharpening of his glare suggested he’d noticed the twitch of my lips. I did have to admit that the glamour spell would be awfully useful for keeping the pricks we were up against off our backs.
Thorn peered into the darkness of the storage unit, where wooden crates and metal chests were stacked along the walls around the car. “This space could also serve as a place for Sorsha to sleep—out of the way, and—”
Omen spun to face him, cutting him off with a curt voice. “Don’t be ridiculous. Would you have her lead this group right to my stash? We shouldn’t linger here any longer than we already have.”
Thorn looked so stricken my throat constricted at the sight. It wasn’t an expression that belonged on a man of so much strength. “My apologies,” he said quickly. “I should have thought the matter through more carefully.”
“It seems you haven’t been very careful with your thinking in general these past few months, or I wouldn’t have spent most of those months acting as a lab rat for a coterie of vicious mortals. Why don’t you keep your mouth shut from now on and let me do the thinking?”
I hadn’t realized it was possible for the warrior’s face to fall even more. Bristling on his behalf, I lost control of my tongue.
“You’re the one who got yourself trapped by those mortals,” I said. “You have no idea how much Thorn has been busting his ass trying to get you back. He’s the most dedicated person—being—whatever—I’ve ever met, often to the point of being incredibly irritating about it. So maybe you should shut up about things you apparently know nothing about.”
I could tell Thorn had turned to look at me, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off of Omen to check the warrior’s reaction. I’d given Thorn a hard time about his single-mindedness in the past, but he’d proven he was holding in plenty of real emotion under that strict exterior—and plenty of passion I’d only gotten a taste of so far. He’d beaten himself up enough for failing to prevent Omen’s capture without the very person he’d been obsessively trying to rescue adding to that agony. I wasn’t going to stand around while this jackass laid into him for the one thing he couldn’t possibly be criticized for.
If I’d thought Omen’s gaze was frigid before, now it was cold enough to flay me down to the bones. His carefully slicked-down hair had risen in little tufts as if propelled by a swelling rage. My hands clenched at my sides as I braced myself for an onslaught of anger, but he kept his voice as tartly cool as before.
“If you hadn’t insisted on crashing this party, none of us would need to worry about where you spend the night in the first place. Don’t make yourself too much of a hassle.”
The implied threat sent a shiver down my spine. Why had Omen agreed to keep me around anyway?
It could have been because of the emphatic references I’d gotten from his companions. Snap stepped closer to me, curling his long, slender fingers around my fist in solidarity. “It’s because of Sorsha we managed to find and free you at all. She’s just as important as any of us.”
Pickle let out a chirping sound of what might have been agreement, fluttering his wings anxiously. He lost his hold on Thorn’s tunic and ended up clinging to the warrior’s hair in his panic to hurl himself back onto his perch. Thorn unfastened him with a long-suffering sigh, but a hint of a smile crossed his lips. I hustled over to take my sort-of pet off his hands.
Omen watched all of this with the same detached disdain and then shook his head. “We’ll see,” he said darkly. “For now—all of you, in the car. Let’s discover what’s left of my former prison.”
To my relief, he drove with more care than Ruse did, making it back to the neighborhood of the construction site without prompting a single blared horn. By that time, I’d determined that the middle cushion in the back seat popped out to allow access to the trunk and had let Pickle scuttle through. The little dragon was now soothing himself by constructing a nest out of an old plaid blanket that’d been folded there. I decided I wouldn’t mention to Omen that his beloved Betsy might end up with her felted trunk lining shredded.
The sun had sunk below the roofs of the nearby high-rises, but the summer evening was still warm and relatively bright. Thorn stole through the shadows around the site before giving us the go-ahead: no sign of the sword-star bunch. Around the back of the site, he hefted a section of the barrier wall aside to let me walk in while the others took the shadow route.
The half-finished framework of steel and cinderblocks wasn’t exactly welcoming in the late afternoon light, but it provoked a lot fewer goosebumps than it had in the eerie glow of security lamps through the darkness last night. I suppressed a wince at the creak of the metal beams above in a gust of wind. Then my feet stalled in their tracks as I came into view of the facility we’d stormed last night.
Or rather, didn’t come into view of it—because where the concrete building with its flood lamps had stood less than twenty-four hours ago, there was nothing but bare, packed earth and a shallow pit of rubble.
As I gaped, my shadowkind companions emerged around me. Ruse let out a low whistle.
A disbelieving laugh sputtered out of me. “These people don’t do things by halves, do they?” Just yesterday morning, they’d battered one of their own men beyond identification to cover their tracks. I shouldn’t be surprised.
We ventured closer, Thorn striding ahead to patrol the wreckage, but it didn’t take long to determine that our enemies had left nothing incriminating or useful behind, only smashed concrete. Snap bent over various spots around the pit, flicking his forked tongue into the air just above the chunks to test for impressions that might still be clinging to them, but more hope seeped out of his face with each attempt.
Omen had lingered near me by the edge of the clearing, letting his companions do the work. No trace of emotion showed on his face—not discomfort at returning to the site of his torment, nor satisfaction at seeing the place in pieces, nor frustration at how utterly our enemies had obliterated the evidence of their activities.
There’d been several other shadowkind experimental subjects being held in the facility—beings we hadn’t gotten the chance to free. We hadn’t managed to figure out what exactly their painful experiments were meant to accomplish either.
“We have to find out where they’ve taken the other shadowkind,” I said. “And then shut down the sword-star crew’s operations completely. They can’t keep getting away with this.”
Omen didn’t move. “Obviously.”
That was all he had to say about it? I frowned at the barren stretch of ground. “It was hard enough getting just you out with the four of us working together. There are plenty of shadowkind who come mortal-side regularly or even live in this realm these days. Maybe we could ask around and see if any of them would join—"