Page 9 of Stubborn as a Shadow

“It’s Venus.” The sylph had reached out to me when she’d first started at the SC because her shifted form was even moreinteresting to the SC than mine. Our magics weren’t exactly the same, but they were close.

Unlike me, though, when Venus shifted, she was pure air, and that came at a cost. Unlike every other supe I knew who could shift into another form and have their clothes disappear or reappear with the magic of their change, her clothes didn’t stay with her. Venus had told me once that researchers thought it was because there was nothing left in her shifted form to hold the memory of an object she tried to carry.

Her kind, like mine, was rare, so the SC had wiped away their collective drool at the idea of having her join their ranks and then promptly offered her the moon. She’d sought me out because she wanted to talk to someone like her, who’d already navigated how to manage SC expectations and set boundaries.

Our magic could be dangerous, which made people fear us.

My father had reveled in that danger and fear. He’d regaled me with tales of shadow assassins and burglars and spies. He always skipped the part where the people who hired us for jobs turned on us after we were done because they understood they would always be vulnerable to us. That’s what happened to my father and most of his family.

Now, most of our kind knew enough to keep their mouths shut about their abilities. Except for me. And Venus.

I’d had Gage to protect me though, and I tried to give the same protection to Venus. Saying no to unethical jobs, even ones requested by the SC, was key to our survival. More than most supes at the SC, we needed to do everything by the book. We couldn’t take short cuts. We couldn’t give in to any felonious impulses. Even when we thought we could get away with it.

Because if one of us got caught, all of us suffered.

“Is something wrong?” I straightened. “What did they ask you to do?”

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

“Are you sure?”

She snorted. “They always try; you know that. But I’m getting the hang of steering them around to my way of thinking.”

“Have you been assigned to a team yet?”

“I’m between teams at the moment.” There was a story there, but I understood from her voice that she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. “I’m calling you about something else.”

“Oh?”

“I heard you’ve been going to black magic markets.”

My fingers tightened around my phone. Was the SC watching me?

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Venus said when I didn’t respond right away. “We’re running surveillance on the markets, not on you.”

I grunted. That wasn’t surprising, but shadows never wanted to be noticed. The idea of showing up on SC surveillance logs made the back of my neck itch.

“And I don’t think anyone else spotted you,” she said quietly. “But people like us, we notice things differently, don’t we?”

That helped ease my discomfort a little, but I still didn’t like that I’d been caught, even by her. “What’s going on?”

“Are you in a location where you can speak?”

No one had followed me outside—not that I’d expected anyone to. The already frosty evening was getting colder by the minute. No one would be eager to linger outside for long.

“I can talk,” I said.

“Good. We have intel about a black magic market taking place on the new moon.”

That was only a few days away. “There’s nothing special about markets like that. My team and I chased down dozens of events like that over the summer.”

“Not like this one,” she said. “It’s supposed to be very elite. Very exclusive.”

I leaned against the cold brick wall again. “Will the SC be there too?”

“We’ll have cameras there, but we doubt they’ll give us much. Most of the time our surveillance operations get blocked or shut down before anything interesting happens.”

I wasn’t surprised. The market organizers probably had an air mage on their payroll. Those bastards could interfere with communications and transmissions. “Why are you telling me this?”