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I blink down at the snake, at its red eyes and the forked tongue that darts out to taste the air around me, which I think means it’s actually tasting me. That’s a thing that snakes do, right? I lift my hand slowly, carefully. “It won’t hurt you, wildcard,” Cohen assures me, seeing my trepidation. “It’s a part of me, and I would never hurt you.”
Hardin makes a scoffing noise, and the snake turns toward him fast as a whip and hisses, large fangs protruding from its mouth, dripping some kind of venom. I have no interest in figuring out what exactly that venom does.
The snake hovers with its head poised over Hardin in warning and then slowly drifts back to me, its fangs retracting like a vampire or something. It stares at me with its red eyes waiting.
“Sweeney,” Fielder warns, but I ignore it. I trust Cohen. At least in this, he won’t attack me here with the four of them surrounding me. I brush my fingers over the snake’s head and it makes what I hope is a pleased hissing noise.
It feels cool, and partially solid, like the surface of a swimming pool, like if I pressed hard enough, I might break the seal and have my hand pass right through it. But when the snake pushes into my palm further, almost like a cat, it remains solid.
I let out a breath and pet my hand over it, before looking up at Cohen, who’s watching with a pleased little smile on his face. “How come you have a shadow in a form and mine was just… a big blob of black?”
“You called it, but didn’t shape it. So it came in its instinctual mass.” Then he pushes to his feet and approaches. All four of my men stiffen, but he doesn’t look away from me. His shadow slithers out of the way as he crouches in the small space between us. He motions at my arm, covered by the sweatshirt I’d hurriedly grabbed when he’d come knocking. “May I?”
“Whoa, whoa.” Hardin leans forward, placing one hand firmly on Cohen’s chest. “Back the fuck up. You aren’t touching her.”
I roll my eyes and start rolling up the sleeve of my shirt myself, while the five men in the room have the glare off to end all glare offs. Holy penguins, trying to get them to all work together is going to be impossible. They already distrust one another to the point of hatred.
If they ever find out what Cohen and I did earlier today, I have no doubt that hate will solidify into something hard and immovable. We can’t afford that. Not right now. Probably not ever.
Maybe sometime in the future-
“What the hell is that?” My voice shrieks out and all five sets of eyes return to me. Or at least I think they must, but I’m too busy staring at my arm in abject horror to notice. There, on the previously unmarred skin of my left forearm, is a big black… mass. It’s the only way I can describe it. It almost looks like a storm cloud roiling and clashing across my skin.
It’s big, or at least it feels big, taking up all the space under my elbow and disappearing under the fabric of my shirt.
Ezra strokes a finger over it, and it just feels like he’s touching my skin, like I now have a moving tattoo. Cohen seems completely unsurprised by this turn of events and leans forward to brush his own hand over the black mass.
“This, wildcard,” he says softly. “Is an umbra demon.”
Chapter 6
The only sound in the room for almost a full two minutes is that of Cohen’s snake slithering around, checking out its new habitat, I guess. I sit there blinking at Cohen, not entirely sure what exactly he means.
I’m not the only one, because Gideon growls out. “An umbra demon?”
Cohen nods, his fingers still running up and down the length of my forearm. “It literally translates to ‘shadow demon’. It can take any form you want, and once you pick one that feels right to you, that’s the form it’ll take on your skin.”
“What do you mean, any form?” Fielder asks, also staring at my forearm.
Cohen doesn’t verbally answer, instead his jaw clenches and the snake that had curled into a ball of coils near the fire place changes, shifts, grows until it’s no longer an eight-foot python, but instead something closer to an anaconda or a basilisk, twenty feet long with a body the width of my torso. Then it shifts again and changes from a snake shape into a lion, a tiger, a bear.
“Oh my,” Cohen smirks. The asshole is enjoying this. He loves knowing all this stuff that they don’t know. He’s loving pointing out that they are, in fact, limited, like he’s been saying.
I resist the urge to hit him, but only because his smirk is tight, and he has sweat on his forehead. Doing this is draining him. He’s leaving himself open and vulnerable in a room full of his enemies in order to show us all what it means to have a shadow. In order to showmewhat it means to have a shadow.
The shadow shrinks again into a much smaller snake than it had been, and Cohen lets out a breath as it slithers back over to him, up his arm, dips under the sleeve of his sweatshirt and then settles back into his skin.
He sags against the coffee table, then snatches up a bag of peanut butter M&Ms and tears into the bag, dumping half of it into his mouth all at once.
“Why wouldn’t you warn us she would have a demon attached to her?” Ezra asks, and although his grip on me is soft, his tone of voice is not.
Cohen doesn’t answer, just rolls his eyes in a way that clearly says,fuck off.So I hurry to fill in the blanks. “When would he have mentioned that, Ez? When you were all attacking him?”
“He could have told you when you were in the caves with him,” Hardin offers. “You know warned you that if you called a shadow, you’d be binding a demon to you?”
I arch a brow. “You don’t know that he didn’t.”
“He didn’t,” Fielder says, watching as Cohen rips open a bag of sour candy. He apparently needs a lot more sugar to recover than I do. “You’re as surprised as the rest of us at this,” he motions at my arm. “Development.”
