We both tumbled over, my arm flying up and smacking his cap to ensure it detached from his head. Since I wasn’t a total fiend, I jerked my elbow to the side before it would have rammed him in the throat. We hit the ground with a shared grunt.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry, so so sorry,” I babbled, scrambling up. “It’s just—There was—” I gestured wildly toward the direction I’d come from, widening my eyes as far as they would go.
The cop had barely righted himself when the street musician let out the scream I wouldn’t be paying her for, high and shrill—and maybe with a riff on her guitar, but I didn’t think the cop noticed that. He bolted up faster than anything, too alarmed to bother with his cap, and dashed off to see what devious crime was being committed two blocks away.
I swiped the cap off the cobblestones and ambled back to where Omen and the others were waiting. With a bow, I presented the prick with his prize. “Ta da. Please, don’t hold your applause.”
Ruse chuckled and clapped. Omen glared at me. “If you think this will—”
“I think,” I said, already backing away, “that you’ve got nothing to complain about in my performance, and I deserve a little break as my reward. I’ll meet you all back here at five—or I’ll hitchhike my way back to the cabin, if you’d prefer.”
I gave Bossypants a cheeky salute, and then I spun on my heel and hailed a passing cab.
Between his knife trick last night and this round of testing, Omen couldn’t have made it clearer how he felt about my presence. I’d just have to show him what humans were capable of when they had allies of their own kind at their back. I needed a shower and a moment to breathe, and then I was going to steal myself a little mortal support.
Only after I’d already picked the lock to the apartment and snuck inside did it occur to me just how bad my approach to a surprise visit might come across to someone who wasn’t in the habit of breaking and entering on a regular basis.
Ellen and Huyen, the married leaders of the Shadowkind Defense Fund, were film fanatics. They owned a second-run theater just down the street from the apartment, where they usually held the Fund’s meetings to discuss how we could protect the shadowkind creatures in our realm from the humans who preyed on them. So it wasn’t surprising to find their walls adorned with framed vintage movie posters and mounted memorabilia like a Godfather fedora and a license plate from North by Northwest. They even had a literal gun on their mantelpiece.
Based on the movies they’d chosen to display, it looked like suspense flicks and film noir were their favorite genres. Which meant they’d probably watched at least a dozen scenes where a character walked into their darkened home only to find an unexpected intruder waiting, sitting casually in an armchair, perhaps with a dramatic clicking on of a lamp.
I wanted to ask the Fund’s leaders for their help, not give them a heart attack. At least it wasn’t all that dark at three in the afternoon, when I knew they always popped back home for a late lunch break after the first round of matinees. Taking the sneaky route was the only way I could talk to them without any chance someone from the sword-star crew would see me with them and decide to make the two women their next targets.
I might have risked relocking the door and waiting for them in the hall, but before I’d quite decided, their key clicked in the lock. Oh well, I guessed I was stuck doing this the creepy way.
The couple walked in, Ellen in mid-sentence exclaiming about her ideas for new popcorn flavors to inflict on Fund members at upcoming meetings. Seeing me in the living room doorway, they both halted in their tracks. I raised my hand in an apologetic wave of greeting. “Hi?”
Ellen glanced between me and the door and back again, strands of her frizzy, graying hair flying around her face where they’d escaped from her loose bun. “Sorsha, what on earth—How did you—”
I held up both my hands before she could finish that question. “Let’s not worry about that right now. I’m really sorry to surprise you like this. I just didn’t think it’d be safe to talk anywhere else. There’s something big going on—something that’s hurting a whole lot of shadowkind.”
I’d known that fact would override every other aspect of the situation. Ellen and Huyen were as dedicated to their cause as they were to their love of movies; they just couldn’t show off the former anywhere near as openly. Ellen pursed her lips, but she didn’t dial 911 or even tell me to take a hike, like most sane people would have.
“What’s going on?” she asked in her throaty voice.
Might as well serve up the meat of it before they lost their patience. “I’ve found out that there’s a large, well-organized group that’s hunting not just lesser shadowkind but higher as well—capturing them and keeping them to run experiments. I’ve talked to a higher shadowkind who managed to escape”—no reason to mention that I’d orchestrated that escape; one case of breaking and entering would look bad enough—“and he’s said it’s basically torture. We don’t know what they want to accomplish, but this is too huge and horrible to ignore.”
Ellen’s mouth had tightened too, but with obvious distress. “Hunting higher shadowkind—running experiments on them? Who are these people?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “They’re very good at covering their tracks. That’s why I’m hoping the Fund can use our resources to uncover more information and push back. But they—they already know I’m trying to stop them, and they’ve attacked me because of that. I didn’t want to risk them tracing me to the theater. If we’re going to meet to discuss this, it needs to be someplace else, and everyone who comes needs to be careful about it.”
Huyen glanced at her wife, her tan skin graying. “I don’t know. This sounds like it might be too big for us to tackle.”
“Not if we’re smart about it,” I said quickly. “Not if we work fast.”
“What did we even start the Fund for if we’re not going to intervene when there’s a major problem?” Ellen asked.
Huyen didn’t look convinced. I sucked my lower lip under my teeth, my gaze skimming over the posters around us for inspiration.
“If anyone’s prepared to take them on, it’s you.” I motioned to the Hitchcock pictures, to the spy capers and crime dramas. “You can put all the strategies you’ve watched to good use. We’re the underdogs going up against the corrupt conspirators… Don’t turn into one of the complicit wimps who tells the heroes they’re on their own.”
Resolve sparked in Huyen’s dark eyes. “Okay, that’s quite the pitch. I’m not promising anything yet, but why don’t we all sit down, and you can tell us everything you already know.”
4
Thorn
“You went where?” Omen said. His voice had become even flatter and colder than it’d been for most of the past two days, but I’d known him long enough to recognize the crackling undercurrent of heat that ran through it. To say that he and our mortal lady were not getting along would be putting it very mildly.