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“If you’re only curious, then why don’t you fuck right off?”
He laughed and the sound was so gratingly irritating that it pushed me over the edge. My mask broke, lips twisting into a snarl. I pulled out the long, thin knife I used in fights and jumped toward him. The blade didn’t catch skin. Feathers exploded around me and talons scraped down my arm, the owl flitting off. He didn’t seem like the best fighter — did he have to be, when he could fly away from his opponent?
Unfortunately for him, I could fly too.
An outlet for my rage was a hell of a lot more important to me than tailing Freya at the moment.
“Cowardly little shit,” I muttered under my breath.
The owl was fast and had maneuverability to go places I couldn’t, but he didn’t have a stroke of luck. There was no tiny cracked window or narrow alley where he could evade me. I caught him by the feet as we weaved between dumpsters, using the momentum of my flight to throw him against the ground. Wing bones cracked on impact and he let out a grunt of pain. A second later, there was a man in front of me again, giving me his best attempt to hold his hands up in surrender.
I landed on my feet in the damp alleyway, glaring down at him. He grimaced and scuttled back, crouched with one arm hanging at an odd angle. “Fuck, man, you caught me. Sorry I was talking shit about your girl.”
My chest rumbled with a growl and I stepped forward once, enough for him to know he’d pissed me off. His shifty gaze darted between me and his arm, as if wondering if flying away would give him a better chance. It wouldn’t work in his condition unless he had a partner waiting in the wings for him. No one else was around that I sensed, though.
“What does Jitara want with her?” I asked.
“Look, my job is to find out where she lives. Someone else was going to deal with her after that.”
“Deal with her, how?”
“Get her! For Kylan! It’s not like I know what they’re planning on doing with her once they have her. I’m seriously just the surveillance, only been working on this for a few days.”
He knew nothing. I believed he was telling the truth about that. The man was too much of a weasel to lie to me when faced with the threat of violence. “If you’ve already been working on it for a few days, why don’t you have her address?”
“She’s something else, man. I can’t get the drop on her. All she does is lead me on a wild goose chase around the city if she knows I’m following her. I’m an excellent tracker, but she always knows,” he said.
Freya was more attuned to her surroundings than I’d ever given her credit for. She’d been evading a skilled shifter tracker for days and had probably been in other situations like this one. How was she still alive and unclaimed? She was a force to be reckoned with and I couldn’t imagine she’d never been pursued by a suitor before. Even one who didn’t know her designation. Every time I learned an additional fact about her, she astounded me more. And aroused me. Not that she’d ever done anything else.
“I do always know.”
Her voice came from behind me and I jolted with surprise, spinning toward her. Silver hair was pulled into a ponytail on the top of her head and her iridescent purple eyes glowed with the neon of a sign outside our alleyway. Oh, she was pissed. Furious.
Caspian would come up with some joke or sassy remark at a moment like this, but I only stared. My temporary captive tried to use the distraction to run, but a rope of angelic light had him back on the ground before he made it a step.
“What, you have nothing to say for yourself?” she asked, scoffing. “Why were you fucking following me, Shan?”
“This guy was following you too,” I said dumbly.
“Of course he was. I was handling it.”
She’d been aware of him, sure. But how was she going to handle it? Kylan’s entire organization was after her, and I doubted she would want to kill the tracker. They would only send another, and he might be better at tracking in secret.
“Would you like to take over handling it, then?”
Rolling her eyes, she pulled a wand out of her waistband. “Yes. Leave.”
Freya thought I would leave her alone with a shifty bastard like this? Maybe I hadn’t been clear enough about how devoted I was to protecting her antagonistic ass. “I’ll observe.”
She turned the wand in my direction, drawing the beginnings of a rune in the air. It reminded me of that rune writing pen we’d gotten her to apologize last week. With everything that happened, we’d forgotten to give it to her. Right now, the pen was sitting in my briefcase at the hotel.
“Are you planning on cursing me?”
“I’m really fucking tempted.”
“I’d love to see what you can do.”
That got her to take a deep breath and drop the wand. She didn’t drop the glare, but progress was progress. “You’re insufferable. If you’re going to observe, you might as well deal with him yourself. Do whatever you were going to do before I showed up.”
