A Shade of Vampire 84 A Memory of Time - Bella Forrest Page 0,89

slippery. The fight was getting worse.

Trev could barely move. Two of the ghouls had fallen, along with a dozen Darklings. But Danika was dangerously close to taking Soul down, and we had to stop her before it was too late. I pulled out one of my knives and threw it at her. Danika heard the whistling of metal in flight and stepped back. My knife got stuck in a wooden pillar, and she set her sights on me once again.

“Amane, get the heart!” Ridan said, veins throbbing in his neck.

“Oh snap,” I managed, realizing what was about to happen. “Kelara! Soul! Trev! Duck!”

Danika gave me a confused look while I listened for a familiar sound of bones snapping and clothes tearing. I’d called it. Ridan went full dragon, and I hit the floor as he expanded into a massive beast with thick dark scales and an amber underbelly. The cabin exploded from within, wood and iron beams and glass and chunks of furniture flying in every direction.

“Holy moly!” I heard Soul exclaim, laughing with delight at what was probably an awe-inducing sight.

Ridan was huge in his dragon form, and he couldn’t exactly control who he stepped on with his massive claws. Several Darklings were crushed, their entrails splattered and spread across the broken floors. The cold air from a suddenly open space seeped into my bones, kicking my blood into motion.

Danika had fallen in the snow, dazed by the sudden appearance of a dragon. She hadn’t seen this coming, and the thought gave me tremendous satisfaction. I scrambled back to my feet and searched for Ramus’s heart in the last place I’d seen it. A place that no longer existed, unfortunately. Ridan couldn’t have anticipated this particular hitch.

“Where the hell is it?” I muttered.

My gaze wandered around, trying to make out the heart in the rest of the debris that littered the thick blanket of snow in this small clearing. Soul and Kelara went after the remaining Darklings. Trev was unconscious and bleeding. His condition wasn’t fatal, but we had to get him out of here as quickly as possible.

Ridan’s spine-tingling roars echoed through the woods, making the trees tremble and shed their snow. The ghouls were foolish enough to take him on in physical form. Ridan spat fire at them—a thick and unforgiving stream that set them alight. He then snapped his jaws around them, tearing limbs and heads off like it was a twisted game. I could almost see the excitement and pleasure in his big, amber-colored reptilian eyes.

But the heart… I couldn’t find it. Meanwhile, Danika was in the process of getting up. I only had seconds to get this done, and my pulse was racing. Eventually, I spotted the lonesome organ under a broken ledge. I made my way through the snow to grab it, but a sudden burst of cold air smacked into me, and I fell.

“Na-ah-ah! That one’s mine, silly,” Danika said, scythe glowing white as she walked toward me. Her smirking satisfaction was short-lived, however, as fire swallowed her whole. The screams tearing from her throat made me quiver.

Ridan had gotten her good. I managed to retrieve Ramus’s heart, then rushed over to Trev’s side and put his arm over my shoulder. Planting my feet firmly into the frozen ground, I helped him up just as Ridan finished scorching the daylight out of Danika.

“We need to go!” Soul cried out. “Something’s happened in Roano!”

Danika screeched as she ran toward a mound of snow, flames dancing on her reddening, melting skin. She screamed from the bottom of her lungs as she struggled to put the fires out, but Ridan gave her another round of dragon breath. Even in such agony, she didn’t let go of the scythe, and I knew that had to be the only thing that kept her from dying.

“Ridan! Retreat! We’ve got the heart!” I shouted, and the dragon turned his attention to me, huffing and puffing as he moved away from Danika. The rest of the Darklings and the ghouls were dead, and we’d gotten what we’d come here for—albeit the hard way.

“Ah. And I thought you might be in need of assistance,” Widow muttered, suddenly appearing to my left. Kailani, Hunter, Nightmare, and Dream were with him, and they looked startled and worried, partially covered in soot and minor scratches.

“What happened to you?” I asked, out of breath.

“It really is a story worth telling another time,” Nightmare said. “Let’s go. Now!”

Before Danika’s fire was completely out, Ridan shifted back