Page 50 of The Shade of Things
“Come on.” The golem spread his hands wide. “It’s like Dorothy and her friends seeing the Emerald City in the distance. There’s even four of us.” He pointed at himself. “I’m Dorothy, Eli’s the Tin Man, and you’re the Scarecrow.”
“I’m not sure which of us got the better end of that,” Eli said.
“That makes you…” The golem turned to Laurent with a look of unholy glee. “The Cowardly Lion.”
The wolf growled at him.
I clamped my lips together willing myself not to laugh.
“You’re the only one with fur,” Emmett said. “Don’t hate me. Hate empirical truth.” He patted Laurent on the head and strode off, whistling jauntily.
Eli made a strangled sound and jogged up ahead.
Laurent redirected his snarl at me, a flash of something clouding his eyes.
My amusement died and I reached for him. “Emmett didn’t mean—”
The wolf stiffened and swung his head toward the office towers. Then he bolted off, almost knocking Emmett and Eli over as he passed them.
“What’s up with him?” Emmett said.
Eli broke into a run, his gun drawn, while I sent Delilah up ahead to scout while I followed as quickly as I could on wobbly legs. Damn it! I was the Scarecrow.
My animated shadow ended up between Eli and Laurent as the wolf veered sharply into the darkness along the side of the road on the outskirts of the city.
Delilah kept pace, but before my brain could process what my shadow was seeing, my palm tingled under the weight of the scythe in her hand.
Adrenaline kicked in, giving me the second necessary to brave the darkness and plunge in after them.
“Wait for me.” Emmett was so close behind that he almost knocked into me.
The darkness formed only a foot-deep barrier, and once inside, moonlight clearly illuminated a desolate forest. The dark area between the bridge and the houses had been a blank terrain. I crunched over some pine needles. If those were places they conserved magic, why create these woods?
By the time Emmett and I caught up to the group, Delilah had decapitated one of the vamps and Laurent had dispatched the other, the wolf already racing for Eli, who moved warily from tree to tree.
Eli caught my sleeve, pointing out drips of blood.
The more I followed the trail—a bloody smear against a low-hanging branch, a long splatter along a pile of dried leaves—the more I worried about whether the injured party still lived.
Giving a soft yip, Laurent snagged Eli’s pant leg, pinning him in place. Eli nodded and stayed put while Laurent veered right through a gap in the trees.
Eli beckoned me and Emmett over. “Cloak us,” he whispered.
Invisible, the three of us carefully made our way after the wolf.
Up in the distance two eagles were dive-bombing the high branches of a tree, attempting to get close to… I squinted. A small waving ball of fire?
Laurent rose on his hind legs, scrabbling at the tree trunk and growling. The eagles emitted a series of screeching cries, like they were turning things over to the next shift, and flew off.
A female was huddled up high in the branches. Her lit branch became too short to hold on to and she dropped it down to the forest floor.
Laurent scuffed dirt on it to fully extinguish the flame.
I couldn’t see the young woman’s expression as we crept closer, but her body language suggested she was barely hanging on. Those birds could have easily knocked her out of the tree, but they hadn’t. How come? Were they under orders not to kill her or a directive to prolong her suffering as much as possible?
How had the Sapien even gotten up there? The bottom half of the trunk was branch free and it was too wide to put her arms and legs around to climb it, especially if she was injured.
I eyed the eagle shifters flying away.
