Dance in Shadow and Whisper (Marionettes of Myth #1)

Chapter Two

Yuuhi, however, was not so pleased. The scowl on his face as he pushed his sunglasses up his nose spoke an entire dissertation about how much he disliked the sun. I watched him simmer and shift uneasily as he cooked. I still found it odd. I guess he didn’t strike me as the type who would let himself become sensitive to the sunlight as he had.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised.

We had taken a seat on opposite benches, facing each other. I asked him, “So, why would you be chosen for a primarily daytime mission if you’ve got such an obvious weakness to sunlight? Why not a more accustomed unfortunate soul?”

His eyebrows lifted above his aviators. “Really? Don’t you all think we’re soulless?”

I slapped down my backpack atop the table and gutted it of my lunch components: an insulated bag, a thermal, many containers, and a fat red apple. He watched me pull out each item, one by one, as I said, “I don’t really know, I don’t really get the chance to ask, ‘Hey, do you think they have souls?’”

“But you think we do?”

I shrugged, fishing for my re-sealable plastic bag of utensils. “I don’t see why you wouldn’t.”

His lips pressed together as I popped off all my lids and upturned the insulated lunch bag. Packets of spinach and baby greens, cucumber and avocado slices, cherry tomatoes, and whole wheat pita bread tumbled out.

I continued with, “I think everyone has a soul, otherwise they’re just an empty vessel. Fae, shifters, weres, mermaids, hunters, you and me. I just think some souls are messed up.”

“Like mine?”

“Well, I don’t know you, do I?” I popped open a container of cold black beans and threw all my salad ingredients inside. “How can I judge whether or not your soul is a blackened pit unless you actually tell me about yourself?”

He stewed with those words, his jaw clenched and his eyes burning through the lenses of his sunglasses as he watched my hands move. “We’re mortal enemies. You know you shouldn’t trust me.”

I pried open the container of hummus, doused with olive oil and spices, for my pita bread. “Have you given me a reason to distrust you?”

“And if I say I have?” He continued to give me a very serious face—or, at least, he continued to give my assembly line of food a very serious face.

After slathering a triangle of flat bread with the hummus, I paused to give him the slightest of coy smiles. “Then I might compare it to this morning, when you said I was trying too hard to threaten you.”

I felt his gaze on me then. For a creature of ice, there was always something burning behind the dark emeralds of his eyes. I didn’t want to call it fire, because I had felt fire in another’s eyes before, and I hadn’t liked it.

This was something else.

I stuffed my mouth with the powdered bread and chickpea paste. As I unscrewed the top of my thermal and the sweet scent of almond milk rolled up to my nose, I said, “You’d better eat something, or else they’re gonna get suspicious about what you actually are.”

He had to contemplate a few seconds into the past, and then he strummed his fingers once against the weather-bleached wooden table. “There’s a movie you should watch. You’ve been reminding me of the main character all day—it’s called ‘Mean Girls’.”

“I’m not allowed to watch the television.”

His fingers splayed against the tabletop. “Why?”