Battle Bond: An Urban Fantasy Dragon Series (Death Before Dragons #2) - Lindsay Buroker Page 0,57

had captured her?

Oddly, Dimitri hadn’t responded to my text either. I didn’t want to have a conversation while we were sneaking up on an enemy, but the lack of a prompt reply was puzzling. Maybe that magic I felt was a spell that isolated this fenced compound from the rest of the world. I’d messaged him from outside and then stepped inside.

As I trailed Sindari, the crackling of fire was the only thing I heard. Before entering the gate, I’d been able to hear the freeway traffic a few blocks away and a horn from a train passing through the city. In here, we had quiet isolation.

You sense the magic around this place, right? I asked silently.

Yes. An insulating bubble covering the same area as the fence.

An insulating bubble that would keep anyone from seeing or hearing what’s going on in here? And keep calls from getting through?

That is a possibility. I smell kerosene.

The light of fire bathed the fence ahead and reflected orange on Sindari’s silver-furred head. We were almost to the burning truck.

A gun fired from that direction. From atop the fence, someone returned fire.

Sindari sprang up to the fence and ran along the top. I rushed forward, using the building as cover until I saw Nin’s food truck.

The roof and back side were burning despite the material not looking like it should be flammable. What had been white with cheerful signage was now charred. The back door was open, and someone crouched there with a gun in one hand and a hose in the other. Nin.

Charred boxes had been thrown out onto the pavement, bullets spilled all around them. Because they were ignitable?

A squawk came from atop the fence, the figure obscured by the smoke, followed by a feline roar. Sindari had reached whoever had been firing at Nin.

As I rushed forward, I called her name so she would hear me coming and wouldn’t turn her gun on me.

“Val. Here, take this.” Nin handed me the gun and claimed the hose in both hands, going back to what she must have been doing before her attacker had fired.

Flames burned inside the kitchen, and she sprayed them down, even as she lifted her hand against the heat roiling out of the truck.

“Let me trade you.” I thrust the gun back at her and took the hose. “I’ve got protection from fire. But be careful out here. Sindari is after the shooter, but there are two more people on the other side of the compound.”

“I know. There were three here when I got here. Dimitri’s cactus thorns drove two of them away. I punched that one.” She pointed at an unconscious man slumped against a dumpster. One of those cactus thorns protruded from the fence above him, but he didn’t appear to be perforated himself.

I hadn’t seen him or sensed him as I’d come up. “You punched him? With what, a tire iron? He’s out cold.”

He wasn’t magical, so he wasn’t one of the three I’d been counting.

“I also hit him with a cast-iron frying pan. After he laughed at my punch.”

“That would do it.”

“Then I grabbed one of my newest rifles—the bear grinder—and threatened him with it. He ran backward so fast he tumbled into the dumpster and cracked his head on it.”

“You are a fearsome woman.”

“I am a mad woman. Val, my truck.”

“We’ll get it put out. You’ve got insurance, right?”

I jumped into the middle of the kitchen fire, spraying water on anything that looked like it could be put out that way. Two empty fire extinguishers already lay spent on the floor. The remnants of grease in the bottom of the drained fryer station were burning brightly, but I vaguely remembered that water would only make a grease fire worse. I grabbed towels and aprons to wet down and tried to smother the flames.

“I tried to call nine-one-one, but I have no reception.” Nin crouched outside the truck, watching the wall and shadows in all directions. “I am in the middle of the city. There should be reception.”

“I know.”

I sensed Sindari had knocked the man off the fence and into the street outside and was chasing him down. The two other magical beings were still on the far side of the compound. I couldn’t tell what they were doing, but one of them had to be responsible for the spell blocking our phones. They felt like full-bloods. A shifter, maybe a member of the Northern Pride, and someone else I couldn’t identify from a distance. As