Angel Fever (Immortal Legacy #3) - Ella Summers Page 0,10

do a very permanent job,” Leila commented.

I looked where she was pointing. One of the mammoth dinosaur skeletons was shaking out its legs. The hollow clang of rattling bones echoed off the ruins, growing louder. And louder. And louder.

Another skeleton stomped its feet against the cracked desert floor. A third reared back and paddled its front legs through the air. The fourth opened its bony jaws and let out a shrill shriek.

The skeleton monsters were all moving now. One of them lifted its foot and stomped down on Damiel.

He jumped out of the way. “This is something new.” He looked up, calmly meeting the empty holes where the monster’s eyes should have been.

The monster tried to whack him away with its long, bony tail. I drew my sword and slashed the tail straight off. The moment the tail hit the ground, its bony bits reformed into a new, tiny skeleton monster. It was a perfect copy of the bigger beast—at a fraction of the size.

In the meantime, while I’d been playing whack-the-tail-off-the-skeleton, Leila had used a firebomb spell to blast one of the mammoths to bits. But those bits had already reformed into several new monsters.

“Can these things even be killed?” Leila growled in frustration, her usually sunny disposition turned stormy.

Damiel used his whip to snap a piece of leg off one of the monsters. The broken bone fragments mended and reformed into a new leg right before our eyes. It all happened so fast that the monster didn’t even stagger.

I had never before battled skeletons, and yet there was something very familiar about these monsters. Their movements were too coordinated. They healed too quickly.

“We’re not dealing with many monsters,” I told Damiel and Leila. “It is all the same monster.”

Just like the two monsters who lived in the Adriatic Sea. Each of those water beasts could reassemble its matter into many separate monsters.

“Great,” Damiel said. “So how do we kill it?”

That was the problem. I’d fought the Adriatic monsters many times, but no matter how many times you blew everything to bits, they always reassembled themselves.

“I’m not sure if they can be killed,” I said.

“I studied your reports on the two monsters living in the Adriatic Sea,” Leila said. “I think your problem was you never managed to destroy all the beast bits at once.”

“Everything at once?”

“Maybe not everything. I postulate that we need only destroy at least ninety-five percent of the beast.”

I blasted back a monster who’d gotten too close. “Ninety-five percent. Oh, is that all?”

“I never said it would be easy.”

“A Magitech barrier could vaporize the whole monster at once.” Damiel looked to the north. Somewhere out there, beyond sight, lay a Legion base at the edge of the Magitech wall that protected the Elemental Expanse. “So why hasn’t it affected this monster at all?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “We’ll have to explore that problem later. After we’ve put down the monster trying to kill us. Anyone have any idea how to destroy ninety-five percent of its body—err, bodies?”

“It can be done,” said Damiel.

He reached into the pouches hanging from his belt and pulled out a bunch of little silver discs. Magic explosives. They were like mundane explosives, except with bigger booms.

“Attach these all over the skeletons,” he instructed us. “When the explosives are all in place, we’ll blow them all at once.”

I grabbed a handful of the silver discs, then dashed up the closest skeleton’s swinging tail. Using dabs of gooey potion from a vial I’d brought with me, I stuck explosives all along the monster’s tail, under its belly, on its legs, and up its spine. Then I hopped over to the next skeleton and repeated the process. At the same time, Damiel and Leila set their own explosives. By the time we were done, the skeletons looked like they were covered in shiny silver ornaments.

Then Damiel pressed the big button on his remote. Explosions went off all across the walking skeletons. Fragments flew in every direction, littering the cracked ground. I looked down at the sea of bone slivers, hoping it was enough.

We waited a few moments, but the skeletons did not reassemble.

The dry, patronizing crack of applause broke the silence. I looked around for the source, expecting to find a dark angel.

But it wasn’t a dark angel I saw striding toward us, the bright rays of the rising sun lighting up his silhouette. It was a ghost. Someone who couldn’t be here. It was Colonel Idris Starfire, an angel who’d been dead