Shadowglass (15 page)

Swiftly he strips his shirt off in a squelch of clotted blood and wipes the stains from his skin before tossing the sticky fabric after the corpse. Now he’s at least presentable. No point trying to clean the place up. From the state of the dead kid’s hair and clothes, shadow Indigo’s fluids are all over the fucking place.

Indigo’s cock twitches in shady memory. His balls ache like an echo, and his mouth fills with sly, lustful spit.

He slashes a sharp claw across his knuckles, the pain bright and distracting. The evidence doesn’t matter. Banshees turn up in landfills, spriggans wash up rotting on the beach, gangsters and fairies murder each other with abandon in Kane’s black city, and no one tweaks an eyebrow. No one will come looking for him. Not another random fae killer.

Anyway, Indigo’s shadow self is a ghost. Crafty. Brilliant.

—They won’t catch me. They didn’t last night, or the night before.—

“You’re wasting your time.” As if there’s someone Indigo can reason with about this.

He laughs, helplessness bubbling bright. Too late for reason. Only action. Find this mirror. Leave. Keep Ice safe from this ghastly ghost inside him. And then . . . Well, maybe the mirror can cure what it sickened.

—You won’t destroy me.—
The whisper threatens, silky, and sharp metal clangs deafening in Indigo’s head.—
We’ll find this mirror. For her. To keep her safe from your ugly demon woman. And then we’ll do what we must to scratch our itch. Don’t think you can silence me now.—

Indigo’s brain swells, a sharp pain ripping at his skull. His muscles jerk, and he yanks his hair, desperate to get his claws inside his skull and scrape this monster away. “Christ, you make me spew, acting so noble. You’re just another fucking thrill killer.”

Smirk.—
Well, so are you, Indigo. You killed Natasha. Dropped her slender body in a spiky pit. Watched her bleed to death and liked it. Where d’ya think I got the idea?—

Dizzy sickness clamps his guts. His blood lurches, pain shooting through his limbs. The clamor brightens, tearing his ears like thunder, and Indigo bites off a scream and blacks out.

Too easy.

Ebony scrapes a last smear of vampire blood from his hands and flitters away into rising sunlight.

14

Q
uang? You there?” My voice echoed, empty.

I halted at the top of the stairs, wiping damp palms on my skirt. Nearly noon. Normally even Quang was up by now. But I’d found the door handle ripped off, the lock broken, and now I couldn’t see anyone.

The spriggan’s workshop lay deserted. A single bulb burned over the glass counter, dust motes circling. Blaze’s half-mended cracks glittered under sticky tape in a stray ray of sun. A fly buzzed, solitary. Cruel moisture laced the air, prickling my wing membranes with a strange sad smell of loss.

I edged inside, nervousness trickling in my bowels. Shelves loomed, lined with boxes and layered with dust, broken jars and metal fragments, and tangles of wire. The usual. But wrongness prickled my spine like nagging teeth. Something out of place. Something odd.

My flip-flops crunched on broken glass, sharp edges pressing the soles of my feet. “Quang, it’s me. Ice. I wanna talk to you about that round thing you got from us.”

No answer. Maybe at the markets today. His cousin Tran had a stall there, selling dodgy phones and thief tech. But that didn’t explain the broken door.

I delved farther into the gloom, shoving boxes aside with my foot. Dust smeared the counter’s edge, like someone swiped it clear with a shirtsleeve. More flies buzzed, and I caught my first whiff of blood.

Nausea twinged, and I teetered forward on furtive wings to peer over the counter.

A bent red toe, poking out on the floor.

I swallowed. Toe, attached to crusted foot, attached to scrawny spriggan leg, and on the carpet an oily green splash of blood.

Glass tinkled behind me. I whirled, my pulse scuttling for cover. No one. Just a mouse, and the drone of flies.

Cold water slicked my palms, and my wings jerked nervously. I wanted to dive out of here, but if I didn’t find that mirror, I was screwed.

Let him just be hungover, or stoned on too much dodgy weed.

I know he isn’t. But please.

I sidled around the counter. My chin jerked stiffly, reluctant to drop and let me see. I forced my gaze downward, the breath squeezing from my throat.

Ugh. Sticky pool of blood. Red spriggan in Batman boxer shorts, cartoons that read
BAM
! and
BIF
! and
ZOT
! Ragged hole in his throat, eyes wide and vacant. Scrawny limbs twisted rigid, muddy green stain on his chest still sticky.

My nose fizzed hot, and tears misted my vision blue. Worse than I’d hoped. Better than I’d feared. At least they hadn’t torn his hair out or ripped his claws off or cracked his toes apart one by one just for fun. They’d just slashed his throat, and he’d bled to death on stinking carpet like an insect.

My throat ached. Poor Quang. I squatted and fingered his eyelids closed one by one, masking his dulled black eyes. I hadn’t known him well. I didn’t buy him drinks or hang out with him or call him my friend. But anger and sorrow still squeezed tight around my heart. Rotten fae-murdering pricks.

I fisted my eyes to dry them. Coulda been rival gangsters, of course. Some DiLuca moron with a grudge. Quang’s attitude pissed people off far and wide, and anyone who collected the sort of money Quang handled from day to day made themselves a target.

All of which made no never mind to the vicious asshole who owned Quang, the ubiquitous Sonny Valenti. If his self-righteous goons showed up and saw me here, my sweet fairy butt would be chewing gum.

And I still hadn’t found the mirror. Here’s hoping whoever killed Quang hadn’t taken it.

Urgency wriggled, slick with slimy guilt. This was all my fault. If I hadn’t brought the squidgy here, Quang might still live.

I straightened, determined, my teary eyes still stinging. Yeah. And if I’d never been born, custard companies would be poorer. There was nothing I could do now except find the damn mirror and get out before Sonny realized Quang wasn’t answering his phone and sent Cousin Fabian here to stuff my wings down my throat.

I dragged my gaze from Quang’s pitiful corpse and surveyed the shadowy shelves with a shaky sigh. “Come out, squidgy, wherever you are. I won’t hurt you.”

But for once, when I needed so much to hear its nasty voice, the horrid metal thing was silent.

My vertebrae crackled, nerves pulling my muscles out of whack.
Typical. Guess I’ll hafta look on my own.

I flexed uneasy wings and knelt on the carpet beside the dark green slime of spriggan lifeblood to sort through the mess.

E
bony crouches panting in the dark and watches Ice rummage through junk, her form partly hidden by the counter. Beside him, Quang’s safe crackles, iron ringing in his metal-sensitive ears. Ebony can’t see inside, not such a small space enclosed by metal. He was about to crack it open when she turned up, and now he can’t move lest she notice him.

But part of him wants her to notice him, to see him and smile, that berry blush staining her cheeks. He watches, strange peace warming his heart. She’s so pretty and innocent. Fruity hair tumbles across her brow, unheeded, tangled ends dragging on her bare shoulders. She’s concentrating, a drop of water hanging from her nose, her pretty silken wings folded back. Hunting for the mirror.

She won’t find it.

Satisfaction tickles his nose, and he suppresses a sneeze, his eyes stinging. He’s already searched through everything, glass and wires and bent metal and pretty things that any other day he might want to keep. The spiteful thing isn’t here, unless it’s in the safe. Indigo teased her desire for him to find it—a cruel and heart-shy beast, that Indigo—nasty Indigo tortured her to find the mirror, and now in a flush of silvery rage Ebony knows why.

Indigo wants Ebony gone.

Wants rid of him, and foolish enough to think the mirror might oblige. Wants everything boring and lifeless, without reckless impulse to light the way. Wants pretty Ice all to himself, wants to trick and tempt and possess her and scrape away with his rough iron will all the chaos that makes her so beautiful.

Wants to leave her lost and shivering, alone in her prison of fear.

Ebony grits metal teeth, disgust sharp on his tongue like poison. If she were his, he’d not ruin her so. He’d keep her, wild and challenged and mirrorcrazy, and if she must bleed to death in his arms to preserve that perfection, then so be it.

Fury boils his blood molten, and he makes up his mind. She’s his, Ebony’s, in all her insane beauty, and Indigo can’t have her. Can’t ruin her. Not ever.

And here she comes. Copper-tainted love swells Ebony’s rusty heart, tempering his anger to sweetness, and he looks down, checking himself for mess. Blood on his shirt again, thick and green and already drying, and awkwardness prickles his palms with sweat. An accident. He didn’t mean it. The spriggan just caught him by surprise. But black is such a lying color. She’ll never see, not if he distracts her properly. He rises, sweaty palms leaving a dark smear on his jeans.

I
whirled, my wings jerking tight, and sighed. “Christ, you scared the piss outta me.”

Indigo wiped dark hands on his jeans, wings glittering in a shaft of golden sun. “Sorry. Didn’t mean it. You okay?”

My pulse didn’t quiet, and I flexed my shoulders, jittery, trying to calm my flight impulse. How long had he been hiding there, watching me? “What you doing here?”

He fiddled with the bangle on his right wrist, rocking on his toes with a silvery flutter. Awkward, like last night. “Same as you. Came for the mirror. Found him.” He nodded at Quang’s body, and guilt sharpened my blood that I hadn’t covered the poor guy up.

Then again, neither had Indigo.

Self-consciousness numbed my skin, and I fingered the pretty diamond bracelet he’d welded for me. “Did you know him?”

“A little bit. Sold him a few trinkets. Peeled his hands off my ass a few times. I’ll miss him.”

“Me, too.” The image of little red Quang grabbing Indigo’s ass—on his tiptoes, presumably—frothed hysterical giggles up in my throat, and I swallowed them before I made an idiot of myself. My wing membranes tingled, and it wasn’t just because Indigo smelled fantastic, that warm mix of skin and iron that never failed to make me ache.

Unease prickled my fingerpads. No doubt he’d gotten his price from Kane. What did Indigo even want the mirror for? He’d hinted last night that he knew something. He wasn’t being honest with me.

Not that I’d come clean about what I wanted it for either. Too embarrassing.

Silence lengthened. I squirmed, not knowing what to say. Warmth had flowered between us last night. Today was a whole new game.

Indigo folded his wings down along his back with a self-conscious shrug. His gaze slid about, not sticking to anything in particular. He wrapped a black lock of hair around one nervous claw, and his wings flitted loose again. “Look. Um. About last night.”

Metal-fragrant breeze ruffled my damp hair. Warm memory whispered in my blood, and again his strange softness cast a seductive velvet spell, tempting me to respond in kind, tell him it was okay he’d lied to me, that he’d used my desire for him to get what he wanted.

But my heart still tripped, my breath too heavy in my lungs to laugh, and I was too angry that he’d caught me off guard yet again to be nice to him. “That is so typical of a boy, you know that? You’ve hardly said a civil word to me for months, and now we’re standing here with a dead body five seconds after you just scared the tripe out of me, and you want to talk about last night?”

He shrugged, weirdly gentle. “Don’t you?”

My cheeks sizzled. No, I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to do it again. Brush my cheek on his and slide my fingers into his hair and pull his mouth down to mine like I should’ve done last night. Stretch my naked body beneath his and purr, like I’d done in my dream, make love to him in the smell of hot metal and sea breeze, a warm updraft caressing my skin, his fingers tangled in my hair. Forget about this damn mirror, and live.

I eyed Quang’s corpse, disquiet rubbery in my belly. “Look, this ain’t the time—”

“I’m sorry, that’s all. About your firefae friend. I shouldn’t have hissed at him. If you two are . . . I mean, I guess it’s probably better . . .”

“I don’t wanna talk about it, okay?” Before he could say,
It’s probably better that nothing happened.
I’d be expected to agree, and then it’d be over between us forever and ever—and I didn’t want that. But I did want it, too. On-again, off-again Indigo wore me out. I couldn’t trust him. I didn’t know what I wanted from him anymore.

“Okay.” He lifted his hands as if to ward me off, and his silvery eyes glimmered golden, so brief, I almost missed it before he looked away.

Dismay crushed my heart tight. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I hurt him.

I shifted, awkward, and searched for something else to talk about. “How come you hid when I came in?”

He blinked at me, confused. He darted his gaze left and right, at the walls, the skylight, the floor, and checked the clock, like he’d forgotten where he was or how long he’d been here. And then he looked at me, curiosity blossoming his pupils black, like he’d forgotten I was there. “Sorry, what?”

I swallowed, my awkwardness swelling to unease. “When I came in. What, you trying to scare me?”

He snorted, and the old bulletproof Indigo was back. “Wouldn’t waste my time. Tried the safe yet?”

Warm dismay flooded my cheeks. A twinge of sympathy, a glimmer of softness so I think I’ve got a chance, and then he smashes me flat again. Conversation over. Inscrutable, infuriating boy. Frustration itched my skin. “What?”

“The safe. I’ve checked the rest. It’s not here.” Slow, simple. Like I was some stupid child.

My wings bristled, and I plonked one hand on my hip, damp hair spilling over my shoulder. “And I should take your word for that why?”

“Think I’d still be standing around in a pool of spriggan blood if I’d found it?”

Good point. I glanced again at Quang’s body and swallowed. “Who d’ya think did it? Gangsters? Boyfriend?”

“Walls of glass, Ice. I’d look a little closer to home if I were you.”

My throat stung. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

An arrogant Indigo shrug, so different from the shy one a minute ago. “Mirror one day, dead the next. Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.”

Guilt razored my skin, and I hugged myself, exposed. “You saying it’s my fault?”

“Are you?” He flicked me a dark question, just long enough to make me squirm before he resumed surveying the room, his stormy gaze sharp and short. “Bit tidy in here, isn’t it?”

Bristle. “Tidy? You kidding? There’s crap everywhere.”

“Yeah, but where Quang left it, last time I looked. If you were hunting something you were desperate enough to kill for . . .”

“I’d make more of a mess.” Curiosity needled my palms. Right, as usual. Nothing overturned, nothing broken. “Maybe it wasn’t thieves after all.”

Indigo squatted by the body, wings folding lengthwise like a locust’s, and fingered Quang’s dead hand, which still sported its flashy golden ring. “Yeah. Or Quang handed it over before they killed him.”

“Or they already knew where to look,” I added, inspired. “Maybe a gang puke, someone who hangs out here.”