Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Petra eased back. It meant he won, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t scared of Shade, not really, but she also didn’t have any particular desire to die by shadow strangulation that night, either. “What? Did you smell it on me?”

“No, I just like the way you smell.” Before she could dwell too deeply on that, he asked, “What’s your name?”

Her mouth went dry. It was useless to lie again, seeing as he somehow knew she’d given him a fake one, but that didn’t mean she had to give him an answer. “I’d rather keep that to myself. You don’t need it to take the job.”

“Need it? ’Course not.” Shade’s attention drifted over her face, down her throat, to examine her jacket and plain blue shirt underneath. “I don’t need anything. I don’t need this job. I don’t need this whiskey. I don’t need your name. I don’t need to see your real face.” His gaze traveled back up to fix her with a look so flat, so bland, it managed to unsettle her more than that violent smile. “But I want it.”

“And I want a man of reasonable skill and a healthy disregard for danger to help me before someone puts a bolt in the back of my head,” she shot back.

Shade had the gall to roll his eyes.

Petra dearly wanted to smash the whiskey glass against one of his horns, but managed to restrain herself. Speaking tightly, she asked, “Do you want the job or not?”

He shrugged. “Y’can’t afford me.”

“You don’t know that.”

It was a smirk that played around the corners of his mouth then. “I do.”

“How?” she demanded. “You can’t just look at a person and know?—”

A claw hooked in the fabric of her shirt, just beneath the collar. Before she could think to fight him, he’d tugged until her ear was level with his lips and she could feel the stale air of the bar against the sweaty skin between her breasts. Her gold necklace, the one she’d been too stupid to take off, dangled between them. She could smell his breath, the tang of whiskey and something uniquely him. He didn’t wear cologne. His scent was subtle, raw. Oddly compelling.

His lips didn’t quite touch the shell of her ear, but she could feel them moving against flyaway strands of her hair when he whispered, “Not even San Francisco’s High Priestess makes enough to afford me.”

A wave of nausea nearly made her sway in her seat. How does he know? She’d fucked up somewhere, somehow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have an inheritance. A very, very large inheritance. I haven’t touched a dime. I swear I can pay you whatever you charge me.” Backed into a corner, she couldn’t help but let a bit of her real desperation into her voice when she added, “You can have all of it.”

He didn’t move. For a long time, his only reply was another deep breath and slow exhale.

“You’re scared.”

“Yes.”

There was no use in denying it. She’d been scared since the day she received the ashes in the mail: a neat little box with a plastic lining and a flimsy plastic plaque glued on the lid.

Maximilian Dooraker, High Priest of Glory’s Temple. Death in dutiful service. - 1856-2044

She wasn’t sure what tipped her off, but something in his demeanor changed. Shade eased back, but he didn’t give her space. Instead, he gripped her jaw with one large, clawed hand and turned her head to better peer into her face.

She jolted at the contact, her skin burning with a sudden defensive flush. The air shimmered again, more violently this time, as her magic screamed outward from the core of her being to press against the surface of skin — begging for release.

“There she is,” he whispered, apparently untroubled by the way the air between them had heated to an almost unbearable degree. She could see him a little better, lit as he was by her own burgeoning glow. Too bad it made him more intimidating, not less.

Shade rubbed his thumb against her jaw as if he wanted to test the texture of her skin, or perhaps in fascination with the way it cast its own weak light. “The goddess’s own flesh,” he said, lips curled in that mocking smile. “Isn’t that what they say in those press releases? The rising star of Glory’s Temple. San Francisco’s personal sunshine. And yet here she is, practically in the lap of a demon. How very scandalous of you, High Priestess. You shouldn’t be here. Don’t you know what kind of monsters play in the dark?”

Petra’s breath sawed in and out of her chest. Despair crashed into anger and then mortification. The urge to cry humiliated her almost as much as his mockery.

She didn’t care what Shade or anyone else thought of her. She didn’t even care about whatever bullshit fluff the Temple’s overzealous PR department put out about her.

All she came for, all she had existed for since the day she received those ashes in the mail was the truth. And she was wasting what little time she had left to get it on a man who had never intended to help her in the first place.

Cautiousness burned away. She slapped his wrist with the back of her hand, dislodging his grip on her jaw. “Let me go.”

“No.”

Petra kept her hands away from the wooden chair, afraid she might accidentally ignite it, but she felt no such compunction in regards to Shade’s suit.

He let her grab his lapel, playful interest glittering in his lambent eyes. It smoldered under her palm. When thin tendrils of smoke began to mix with the clouds of cigarette smoke in the air, she bit out, “Let me go.”

“Are you going to burn me alive, little goddess?”

“Yes. If I have to.” Petra tugged him close to whisper in a clipped, flat voice, “It’s not like I haven’t done it before.”

It had been a long time, but she knew how to defend herself. Pushed to it, Petra could be a monster all on her own.

She was quickly learning that Shade didn’t disguise his thoughts behind a mask. His expressions were mercurial, the variations of his smile endless. When he looked at her then, it was with a grin that was positively wolfish. “It won’t look very good to your adoring worshippers to see their favorite priestess running away from the scene of a crime, would it?”

“They wouldn’t know it was me.”

“They wouldn’t?” He lifted his glass to his lips again and took a long sip. “You’re awfully recognizable.”

“No, I’m not—” The words died on her tongue.

There, hanging on either side of their faces, was her curtain of blonde hair.

Petra released him with a hard shove, but he didn’t do more than a slight rocking back on his haunches. His laughter grated against her pride like broken glass.

She hadn’t even felt the glamour’s release. Too late she recalled the way he’d rubbed her skin — no doubt wiping away the carefully concealed, skin-tone sigilwork she’d painted there to anchor the spell.

Petra stood quickly enough to send her chair back into the wall with a dull thunk.

A burning desire to say something, anything, to wipe that smug look off of his pretty face ate away at her gut, but she’d already wasted too much time and effort on him.

Casting the demon a scathing look, she made to step around him, toward the small door that led to the staff area.

Except she couldn’t move.

Shadows coiled around her legs, holding fast, as Shade took a leisurely stroll around her. He leaned against the pool table, drink in hand, and gave her another knife-like grin.

“Tell me your name.”

Already caught and too angry to care, Petra blazed bright in the artificial darkness he’d summoned. “Fuck you.”

He clicked his tongue. “Stubborn. I like that. Can cause some trouble, though. I like that, too.”

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to hit him and hit him and hit him until she couldn’t lift her arm anymore. “If you were never going to take the job, then why are you even here? Why are you doing this?”

“I never said I wasn’t gonna take the job,” he replied, “only that you can’t afford my fee. Even if you think you can, I don’t want your money.”

All at once, the wildfire inside her went up in smoke. “What do you want?”

“Tell me why you’re so scared and maybe I’ll share.”

The urge to hit him came back with a vengeance. Speaking through her teeth, she explained the situation a bit like she was speaking to an unruly five year old. “The man I need information on is powerful within the Gloriae.”

He almost looked disappointed. “So you’re worried about losing your cushy job.”

That almost startled a laugh out of her. Worried about my job? Gods, she never even wanted it in the first place. The only reason she joined the Temple was because of Max and the only reason she became San Francisco’s High Priestess was to discover what happened to him.

Despite what everyone around her thought, Petra Zaskodna wasn’t ambitious. She was a survivor so exhausted by treading water she’d resigned herself to drowning. A rat who’d chosen to get on a sinking ship.

All at once, the fight bled out of her. Petra closed her eyes, her glow dimming until it vanished completely, like a candle snuffed by the darkness that held her. “Can you do it or not?”

He frowned, eyes narrowing. “’Course I can.” The bastard didn’t even give her time to feel relief before he added, “But I want something more valuable than money in return.”

Dread trickled, drop by drop, into her veins. “What?”

The demon swirled his drink, mostly melted ice now. All the while, she could feel his shadows creeping up her legs, the ghost of a touch, until they’d wrapped around her waist. She forced herself to keep still, not to panic at the feeling of delicate constriction. “I’ve heard rumors that you have connections to a certain Sovereign’s Consort.”

She didn’t need to think about it. “Absolutely not.”

“You don’t even know what I want from her,” he protested without heat, as if he knew she’d react vehemently and thought it was awfully funny.

“I don’t care what it is, you aren’t getting to Margot or the sovereign through me.”

She might’ve been a liar. She might have conned her way into being San Francisco’s High Priestess. She might have forged a relationship with Margot Goode on a pretense, to dig for information on the Elvish Protectorate’s involvement in Max’s death.

But she was damn loyal to the people who earned it.

Margot considered her a friend. They were both new to the city, and though they were witches with vastly different backgrounds, there was a connection between them that had blossomed into a friendship. Constrained by her quest and the lies it forced her to tell, Petra hadn’t been able to give that relationship the amount of herself it deserved, but that didn’t mean she would throw Margot under the bus.

Shade rolled his eyes again. “I don’t want her liver. I just want access to the m-generator.” He paused. “Or its blueprints. Either one.”

Petra only vaguely understood what he was talking about. A week or so prior, the media had been set aflame by the news that there’d been a breakthrough in the field of m-energy — the study of magic and its use as a clean energy source.

People had been trying to figure out a way to capture magic from the atmosphere for at least a thousand years, so it was big news when an unknown witch announced that she and her research partner — another Goode, surprise, surprise — had solved the problem with a state-of-the-art generator.

There’d been some hubbub about the EVP volunteering to completely fund the first prototype right there in San Francisco, as it was a city that had historically suffered due to the destructive nature of atmospheric magic. At that point, Petra had stopped paying attention.

Even so, she knew enough to understand that there was no way on Burden’s green Earth she would be able to get Shade anywhere near that prototype.

“I can’t do that,” she sighed, more exhausted with every second that passed. “I really can’t. Even if I would ever put Margot in the same room as you, it still wouldn’t work. That generator will be the single most intensely guarded thing on the entire continent.”

Although Margot might be a close second. She shuddered to imagine what the sovereign would do if he found out she’d allowed a man like Shade anywhere near her. She had a teeny-tiny soft spot for elves, but that didn’t mean she was stupid. The sovereign could pop her head off her shoulders as easily as a kid’s fist crushes a to-go yogurt.

Shade made a sucking sound with his teeth. “Ah, it was worth a try. Good thing I want something else, then.”

Pushing back on the pool table, he stood up straight and closed the distance between them. Shadows crawled up his legs, too, but they didn’t stop at his waist. Instead, the tendrils slithered up his arms and around his chest to consume his whole body up to the neck. There they stayed, moving restlessly along the base of his throat, as if they had a mind of their own.

“Tell me your name.” This time there was no playful note in his drawl.

“Why? You know it.”

He blinked slowly, once, but his expression didn’t change. He was very still. “I want you to give it to me.”

She could only stare at him. This meant something. The entire conversation had been an assessment of her, and now she felt like she was being tested on a subject she didn’t even know if she’d studied.

“Petra,” she rasped, at a loss. “My name is Petra.”

And there was that slow, violent smile again. Her heart beat faster at the sight of it. She couldn’t tell if her body wanted her to run away from it or, for reasons she couldn’t possibly comprehend, run toward it.

The shadows curled around her right hand. She watched, disconcerted, as they lifted it up just in time to accept his nearly empty drink.

Using two fingers, Shade guided the glass to her mouth. It rested there, cool and wet from his lips, when he murmured, “There’s a good girl. Now drink.”

For the life of her, Petra couldn’t understand why she did it, but she did.

There was hardly any alcohol left. It was the aftertaste of whiskey that touched her tongue, carried by a sip of cool water. Whiskey and something like… him.

Shade’s gaze lingered on her for a moment, the look in his eyes completely inscrutable, before he stuffed his hands in his pockets and stepped around her. Had she passed the test or failed?

She had no idea, but something told her he’d won.

The shadows followed him, drawn like the ends of a cloak toward his body and away from her in a slow, steady drag. Something deep and neglected in her stirred at the sensation even as her arm, bereft of his support, fell limp by her side. The cool glass dangled from numb fingers.

“You’re leaving?” she croaked.

“Sure am.” He passed her. On his way, he pulled one hand out of his pocket to flick her hair off her shoulder.

Petra whirled around. “But you didn’t say what you wanted?”

He gave her a pitying look, like he thought she was a little slow on the uptake. “Didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Hm.” He kept walking. Shadows pulled away from the walls, the table, the floor. Like miles of black gossamer, they folded and draped and slithered back to him.

Petra watched with wide eyes. She’d met demons before, but never one who could manipulate shadows like that.

“Wait,” she gasped, lunging for his arm. “Are you going to help me or not?”

Shade patted her hand once before he pried her fingers off of him, one by one. “I’ll help you, but right now I’m leavin’.”

“How can I get a hold of you?”

“You don’t.”

She was very, very close to stomping her snakeskin boot. Or crying. Either one. Maybe both. “How is this supposed to work?”

Shade cast her a boyish smile over his shoulder. “You don’t get a hold of me and you don’t do the work. That’s my job. Don’t worry, little goddess, I’ll find you.”

Petra could only watch, helpless and confused, as those long legs took him out of the bar. Behind her, the lamp flickered back to life.