Dark Champion (Flirting with Monsters #4) - Eva Chase Page 0,100

questioning it, I simply knew that I could follow that trail.

My awareness expanded through the darkened sprawl of the world below. An apartment here. A warehouse there. A blast of flames, and they were nothing but charcoal.

My rage spilled out along lines of communication and connection that shone clearer to my heightened senses with every passing second. It burned through the fraying threads of self-control I’d been holding onto so tightly, but what the hell did I care?

None of these pricks had cared one bit about who they were hurting.

My hellhound shifter, lying dead on the ground below me. Luna, shattering herself apart to avoid their capture. All the scalpel incisions and needle injections, all the slashing knives and suffocating nets, all the crashed cars and battered bodies.

But that was what humans did. One monster did them wrong, scared them, or screwed them over, and they thought that gave them the right to commit genocide on every being remotely like it.

A laboratory in Berlin. A processing office in Madrid. My attention sizzled across the ocean all the way to the shores I’d left behind, the hot spots lighting up like the pins on the map we’d seen in the shoe museum in Chicago.

The fire was gushing out of me in waves now, and I could see it all in my mind’s eye: Good-bye, a few dozen Company employee houses in San Francisco. Sayonara, an entire condo building in Queens.

My reach was infinite, my fire inexhaustible, and every one of them was going to pay.

Burn. Burn. Burn it all down, until there’s nothing left but ashes.

Glaring light dotted my vision. The stench of bubbling tar and frying varnish filled my lungs. Whatever grip I’d had on myself had gone up in smoke. There was nothing in me or around me but my fiery fury, like it was always meant to be.

My skin crackled and blackened; my stomach steamed. That was fine. If I had to burn myself up to take every douchebag who deserved it down with me, so be it.

More and more buildings succumbed to my flames. More and more bodies crumbled into cinders. My soul screamed in vengeful triumph. More, more, burn it all…

The trails I’d traced petered out. Every person who’d contributed to the Company’s horrors, every place where they’d conducted their cruel business, every device that had contained their secrets had been swallowed up in the fire of my fury—but it still wasn’t enough.

An ache consumed me from throat to gut, rage churning through it, roaring to be set free.

Why should the Company be the only ones to take the blame? How about all the other mortals out there who would have attacked the shadowkind if they’d known about them—which was pretty much all humans, wasn’t it?

What about the shadowkind themselves who’d only hurled themselves into the fray not to protect their fellow beings but to destroy me? Who’d slaughtered my parents—ripped my father’s head off and thrown it out a fucking window—for the sole crime of creating me?

Hell, what about the damned Highest who’d send their minions on that wretched quest? Did they think they were so invulnerable, lurking in the depths of the shadow realm?

Ha. With the prickling of the fire through and around me, I could taste how easily I could reach through the rifts and rain my searing fury across the darkness until it barbequed their ancient souls.

They thought I was a force to be extinguished? I’d show them who’d get eviscerated.

The flames were already leaping higher—from the smashed brick building to those neighboring it, across the parking lot below me to smack into one brutal being and another. I sucked in a scalding breath.

I really could do it. I could burn both the realms down and myself with them, and when I emerged from the ashes, maybe it would all be reborn into something better. Seriously, how hard could it be to do better than the shitshow we had now?

I gathered the fire swelling ever wider inside me, ready to spew it as far as I could cast it—and a voice penetrated the warbled blare in my ears. A bright, sweet voice ragged with an emotion that made my chest clench up.

“Sorsha! Sorsha, please, can you hear me?”

Then another voice: a chocolatey baritone that’d turned strained. “You’re not in this alone, Miss Blaze.”

And another: a deep ragged rumble. “We’ll fight whatever battles need fighting, m’lady. Just tell us what you need.”

The flames around me faltered slightly. I sank a few feet with